“Liberalism“, writes Roger Simon today, “as an ideology is in its death throes. Only the power trip remains.”  Maybe that explains why the president is having trouble coming up with an agenda for his second term.

Roger reached his conclusion, in part, by observing the reluctance to all too many liberals to engage in serious debate:

Given that their ideology is dying, no wonder liberals no longer want to debate the issues.  They avoid serious discussion at every possible juncture, changing the conversation to putative racism, sexism, classism — anything but the proverbial elephant in the room, economic demise.

Read the whole thing.  Something to ponder.

Is Roger right to ask if liberalism is dead?

Earlier this week at the LA Weekly, Patrick Range McDonald blogged about Tuesday’s celebration of “Harvey Milk Day in honor of the slain San Francisco supervisor who was one of the first gay elected officials in the United States”:

Milk was assassinated by former San Francisco supervisor Dan White in 1978. A few months before his death, he gave a stirring speech at the Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco.

Emphasis added.  Gay Freedom Day?  Freedom?  You mean, back then the watchword wasn’t equality?  Wonder when it changed — and why.

Freedom means the state leaves us alone to live our lives as we choose.  All too often, equality, under its current connotation, means the state attempts to equalize the results.  Modern conservatives much prefer the former notion.

Perhaps, the early gay movement had more in common with the conservative movement than today’s gay activists care to acknowledge.

Given the small size of CNN’s primetime audience, I wondered last week whether we should fret too much about the “news” network’s bias.  Still, it does make good sport to take note of their bias.

Last night and again this afternoon, while catching CNN during the cardio portion of my workout, I once again found the network exploring an issue raised by the Obama campaign (though, this time, with surprising even-handedness).  Still, they were covering the specific topic the Democrats wanted to discuss, Mitt Romney’s record at Bain, rather than the broader inquiry we should be making — into Obama’s record in Washington.

Last week, I recall seeing lengthy discussion at CNN of Mitt Romney’s adolescent antics.  And that week, the Romney campaign wanted to talk about the debt the federal government has racked up since Obama took office.  Did CNN cover that story with any depth?

This got me wondering whether or not CNN chooses (more readily) to cover those issues the Obama campaign wishes to discuss and downplay those issues pushed by his likely Republican opponent.

I will not have time today to investigate this hypothesis as I’m about to rush out to hear one of the few grownups in Washington speak at the sacred shrine of freedom in Simi Valley.  As time allows this week, I will try to check the CNN website to see if their programs tend to follow Obama administration talking points.

“In an interview during his Senate race” in 2004, reported Lois Romano of the Washington Post in 2007, “Obama said he admitted using drugs because he thought it was important for ‘young people who are already in circumstances that are far more difficult than mine to know that you can make mistakes and still recover.’”

Now, to be sure, Mitt Romney grew up under far more fortunate circumstances than Mr. Obama, but one wonders that if the legacy media had investigated something troubling in that latter’s past, they would have spun it as the Democrat spun his cocaine use.

Mitt Romney may or may not have given his high school classmate a haircut (in a bullying manner).  He has long since stopped pulling adolescent pranks.  Given his stable marriage and an adulthood filled with abundant acts of kindness for individual in need, Mitt Romney has quite obviously become a better person these past 47 years.  So too has Barack Obama since his high school years.

Had the Washington Post bothered to report Mr. Obama’s adolescent antics, one wonders if they would have covered it as they covered his cocaine use, stressing his ability to recover from mistakes — and casting his process of maturing as an example for young people to follow.

Please note that I include this post in random thoughts because I am not entirely sure how answer to the question I pose in the title.  Until last night, I thought that Obama’s recent shift on gay marriage wouldn’t make any difference in the fall, save to increase his fundraising. Then, I got a link to this video last night in my e-mail, watched it and wondered:

Victor Davis Hanson’s read on the president’s supposed shift also caused me to question my initial interpretation:

The flip-flop on gay marriage, of course, did not win Obama a single vote, just plenty of one-percenters’ money. More injurious to his cause was his idiotic refrain about his “evolving” views. No one believed that yarn: fifteen years ago he was for gay marriage when it was smart politically for him to be so, and then he revolved to “no” when it was not. All that happened this week was that clueless Joe Biden jumped the gun. Obama with a wink and nod had privately assured rich gays, as he had Putin, that after his reelection he would give them what was wanted, but could not quite yet, given his need to hoodwink the clingers to get reelected. I think most voters understood that con as emblematic of this presidency.

Via Instapundit.  Where it hurts the most is not the merits of the issue, but that people will see the re-positioning as patently political.  Not just that, he looks out of touch, having announced his shift the day after North Carolina voters overwhelmingly rejected state recognition of same-sex marriage.  It’s almost as if he were thumbing his nose at the citizens in a state that he won in 2008–and is trying to hold again this year.

Now, I wish that gay marriage were not, to borrow Mitt Romney’s expression, “a hot political issue dividing our nation.”  And wish support of state recognition of same-sex unions would not hurt a candidate at the polls.  And maybe, under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t. (more…)

Surveying the returns on North Carolina’s Amendment One, William Kristol finds that the measure was soundly defeated in two counties with large universities by margins of “5 to 1 and 5 to 2, respectively”, yet passed by margins of 2 to 1 in neighboring “counties like Alamance, Person, and Granville”.

This causes him to “bet there’s more tolerance in Alamance, Person and Granville for those who are proponents of gay marriage than there is at Duke or UNC-Chapel Hill for the opponents.”

I’d made the same wager.  Here’s one piece of evidence that suggests the odds on this wager are better than even.

. . .  some folks respond by attacking Republicans instead of defending Obama*.

*or his policies.

FROM THE COMMENTS: Budding Economist and I have had similar experiences as indicated when he asks, “The second question is, why are we accused of being political for merely offering a rebuttal of the original, political comment?”

I have decided to avoid posting political pieces on Facebook, but have chosen to respond to friends’ political Facebook posts and sometimes get skewered not for the comment of my response, but for politicizing things. . . .

MORE FROM THE COMMENTS:  dot has also had similar experiences:

What bugs me is that if you make a polite rebuttal to whatever lib talking point they have posted, then are hit with a personal character attack instead of a response to your rebuttal. It’s just really annoying.

Bugs me too.

May build on this post later.  Was just at a brunch where a very intelligent man refused to accept that Sarah Palin had a record of accomplishment as Governor of Alaska.  Why is it that some Democrats (and a few Republicans) refuse to acknowledge — or even familiarize themselves with this woman’s record?

Is it because she is a woman?

I mean, when John McCain tapped her as his running mate, she enjoyed a 75% approval rating . . . among Alaska Democrats.  When Katie Couric interviewed the then-Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, the CBS News anchor didn’t once ask her interlocutor about her record.  Or what she had done to win support among Democrats as well as Republicans.

Do these folks just assume that a woman can’t stand up to a corrupt political establishment and effect real reforms?

In most, but fortunately not all coverage of what John Podhoretz dubbed L’Affaire Grenell, various pundits and pontificators have attempted to discern some anti-gay prejudice or crass pusillanimity within the Republican Party in general and the Romney campaign in particular.

In doing so, most lose sight of the basic facts of the situation which, Jennifer Rubin who first broke the story, reported in her last update to her post on the matter:

Right Turn has learned from multiple sources that the senior officials from the Romney campaign and respected Republicans not on the campaign contacted Ric Grenell over the weekend in an attempt to persuade him not to leave the campaign. Those were unsuccessful.

Despite social conservatives’ criticism of the appointment, the Romney team wanted to keep Grenell on board.

It seems that the real reason Grenell stepped down was the one he articulated in his statement:

While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign.

Emphasis added.  As Podhoretz put it, the former John Bolton aide “was evidently rattled by attacks from the Right on his fitness for his post.”  And not just the right.  Scanning the Facebook comments of my liberal friends who posted on the matter, it seems he experienced attacks from the left as well for his choice words mocking leading liberals.

Grenell, Podhoretz suggests, “decided he didn’t need the grief”.  One wonders if he, used to flacking for others, was just not comfortable — or not prepared — to become the story himself.

And that rather than being a story with large implications, this may simply be the story of a man who wants his private life to remain private.

More on this anon.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Replying to this comment, “Romney WANTED / NEEDED a token gay person in his campaign”, Rattlesnake quips, “Or, maybe he just hired him for his qualifications.”

One of the great gifts of blogging is the civil feedback and criticism I receive in e-mails from our readers.  On numerous occasions, they have alerted me to flaws in my arguments or pointed out a wrinkle in an issue I cover in a post.  Such was the case yesterday when a gay reader somewhat sympathetic to social conservatives sent me a message, linking an article about l’affiare Grenell and indicating, among his concerns about the erstwhile almost Romney foreign policy spokesman, objections to his tweets attacking conservative women:

Please remember that Grenell had to delete 800 (yes 800) tweets that trashed female conservative women. Many of those tweets are publicized online in a simple google search. He claimed they were tongue and cheek, but the sheer number in a short period of time alarmed me, and many of these tweets were directed at conservatives such as Newt & Callista Gingrich.

Indeed, I had heard these criticisms before. But, Grenell did, as McKay Coppins BuzzFeed reports, apologize for those tweets. Coppins mused that “If the campaign was slow to come to Grenell’s public defense over his sexuality, his embarrassing Tweets may have had something to do with it.”

Do wonder if the criticism of Grenell would have gained any traction had he chosen to mince his words about his fellow Republicans.

His outspoken advocacy of gay marriage may also have hurt him.  Byron York reports that he criticized. . .

Jonathan Capehart, an opinion writer for the Washington Post who is gay, for attending a state dinner at the Obama White House but not using the opportunity to confront President Obama over Obama’s opposition to gay marriage. (more…)

As I was reading Timothy Carney’s critique of Newt Gingrich’s bid for the White House, caught something about the man who billed himself the “Last Conservative Standing” in the contest:

He was speaker of the House until he resigned from Congress, stayed inside the Beltway, and began working as a lobbyist and consultant for the most entrenched industries while living in McLean. Even so, he said he was running as the “conservative” against “the Beltway establishment.”

Rick Santorum, the other choice of Republicans eager to repudiate the establishment, also remained in the Washington, D.C. area after leaving Congress.

Not sure I agree with Carney’s conclusion about the damage Newt has done to GOP; it all depends on how he exits the race next week.

A comment from a reader caught in our spam filter reminded me of a post I had written nearly three years ago when I noted that sometimes my titles don’t quite fit the posts to which I attach them:

. . . many of my titles don’t perfectly fit the post to which they’re attached (and then sometimes our critics respond to the title and not the post).  Or don’t get at the essence of the idea I’m trying to express.  Other times, however, the title comes with the post idea and on occasion has preceded it.  More often than not, as last night, I’m just eager to find something that will work so I can get the post up and get on with my day (or move on to another post).

Yesterday, in the title to a post, I asked whether class warfare rhetoric ever won an (American) election. In the comments, a(n apparently) new reader (at least a new commenter) offered:

Now, if the question is, “Has there ever been a time when a legitimately lower class presidential candidate has defeated a legitimately upper class candidate by employing class warfare rhetoric?” than I’m sure I have no idea, but that’s different enough from what you actually asked. . . .

He’s partially right.  The issue I raised in the text of the post related not so much to class warfare rhetoric per se, but to Democrats making an issue of the presumptive Republican nominee’s wealth.  A more accurate (yet less mellifluous) title would read:  ”Has attacking a candidate’s wealth ever won an (American election?”

The irony in all this is that, in most cases, I attach the title last (after having written the post) and you see it first (before reading the post).  And sometimes I give the title less thought than I do the post, more eager to find something (hopefully catchy and which fits on one line) so I can complete the post.

And sometimes, as in this case, the title of the post doesn’t accurately reflect its content.

Last night when I “rescued” a comment caught in our spam filter, I wondered why this critic was so convinced that class warfare rhetoric would propel his candidate back into the Oval Office.  Weighing in on my piece about Ann Romney, Joseph wrote:

And it’s a little disingenuous to say that the work of a wealthy SAHM [Stay-at-Home Mom] who never has to worry about health insurance and has to instead manage an army of support staff and decide which Escalade to bring down in the garage elevator… is in ANY way equivalent to that of an uninsured mother who has to worry about where her kids’ next meal might come from and MUST therefore work outside the home.

In response, I made a request of our critic, a request I repeat this morning:  ”please tell me elections where class warfare has made a difference in favor of those waging the battle.”

Our reader is not the only one to (attempt to) use Mitt Romney’s wealth as a wedge issue against the presumptive Republican nominee.  Last week, instead of discussing the images in photos the Romney family released over Easter weekend, the folks at CNN used them to talk about the family’s wealth, asking  the photos were “much ado about nothing” or  ”an example of a candidate who might be tone-deaf to how most of the public actually lives.”  Seems the Obama campaign and their allies in the media are the only ones asking those questions.

Democratic strategist Paul Begala echoes this talking point, comparing Romney to Thurston Howell III of Gilligan’s island (dubbing Obama the Professor–a comparison which falls apart when we recall just how resourceful was that usually nameless academic).  (Via HotAir headlines.)

And it doesn’t appear than attacking a candidate’s wealth (even if inherited) has been particularly effective in presidential elections.

At perhaps the darkest moment in American economic history, during the Great Depression, Americans elected and embraced a man far more akin to the fictional tycoon than Mr. Romney.  FDR lived on a spacious estate on the Hudson, having inherited rather than earned his wealth. (more…)

Last July, I questioned Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod’s ability to run an effective political campaign if his candidate were not a blank slate:

Axelrod did run a pretty impressive presidential campaign in 2008, but then his candidate was pretty much a blank slate — and the mainstream media amazingly uninterested in Barack Obama’s record.  He could thus get away with promising vast new federal programs to appease his party’s liberal base while assuring independent voters he supported a “net spending cut.”

As 2012 approaches, with his candidate no longer a blank slate, with Americans now familiar with Obama’s record in office, will Axelrod be able to craft a winning campaign?

Would Axelrod had run as effective a campaign had the media scrutinized Obama’s record as they had Sarah Palin’s?  (And had the market not melted down right barely six weeks before the fall election?)  Yesterday, it seemed David Axelrod seemed to be acting as if it were still 2008 and he was still running the campaign of an amorphous outsider against a entrenched incumbent:

In an interview on Fox News Sunday this morning, David Axelrod said the 2012 election will come down to a choice: Do Americans want “an economy that produces a growing middle class and gives people a chance to get ahead and their kids a chance to get ahead?” Or do they want to continue down “the road we’re on”?

Continue down the road we’re on?  Um, isn’t his candidate the one who has taken us on that journey?

“Axelrod,” Jennifer Rubin quips, “seems almost at a loss to respond once the talking points are challenged.”

He seems to be Davey One-Note, campaigning with an amorphous candidate with a feel-good message of a better America with a thriving middle class against those who would establish policies entrenching the rich and well-connected.

Will he land a blow on an opponent who has learned to punch back?

UPDATE:  ”This kind of message“, writes Conn Carroll commenting on Axelrod’s remarks, “worked great when Obama was an insurgent candidate running against eight years of President Bush, but now Obama has to defend four years of his own administration.”

UP-UPDATE: In a similar vein, John Podhoretz offers, “Axelrod knows how to run Obama as the candidate of change. His words suggest he doesn’t know how to run Obama as the candidate of the status quo.“

When, in January, I endorsed Jon Huntsman for President, I did so with reservations, pointing out that his “record has been far from perfect.  And, in the course of this campaign, he seems to have a predilection to attack his fellow Republicans — and mock conservatives.”

In her column this weekend, Peggy Noonan offered a similar perspective on his failure to gain traction among Republican voters:

Jon Huntsman was hobbled because he didn’t seem to identify on any level with Republicans on the ground, or particularly like them. Voters don’t take to you when they know you don’t take to them. Sarcastic tweets about global warming were not the beginning of his campaign, but the end.

(Read the whole thing, in large measure to why she contends the “The GOP should go back to being John Wayne.”)

It is passing strange that the Republican candidate with perhaps the most consistently conservative economic plan and a conservative record in office (as well as executive experience) would act as if he were running against the citizens whose votes he most needed to win — and whose political views mostly closely coincided with his own.

I’m not sure Peggy is right when she says that Huntsman didn’t particularly like Republicans, but he certainly didn’t campaign like he did.  And that’s one reason he never emerged as the leading “non-Romney” even if he did have an economic plan which embraced Tea Party principles and which had the potential to resonate with rank-and-file conservative voters.

I’ve been spending part of this most productive day puzzling over how I have gotten so much accomplished so far when so many little things have been going wrong.  Yesterday, I experienced the same sort of thing, waking before the alarm, bad to mediocre coffee, noise of yard work in the dwellings around me, etc. etc.  And yet yesterday, the little things accumulated in such a manner that I (felt I) couldn’t get anything done.  You’ll note that after my the pieces I posted before I headed to bed (three hours earlier here in California than GayPatriot blog time), I failed to post anything at all yesterday.

Today, however, the coffee was still bad (soon to retire that failed new coffee maker), but I got everything done I had needed to get done in the morning — and even managed to put up an unplanned post.

Perhaps, it was that I had cleaned off my desk before bed so had a much tidier work space when I sat down to work this morning — or that I had slept in a newly-made bed with clean sheets.  Or that when I woke before the alarm, I got out of bed — and got on with my day.

This afternoon, the opening verses of a Paul Simon song (on a theme entirely different from this post’s) come to mind, “The problem is all inside your head/She said to me“.  Sometimes the straw doesn’t break the camel’s back.  Perhaps that’s because something in his head tells him that he is strong enough to bear the weight.

. . . is a battle being waged exclusively in the minds of individuals who hate Republicans.

He gets Catholics upset. Now, we learn this (check out the last headline):

Must be part of the Democrats’ plan.

Remember when our hand-wringing friends in the legacy media as well as in the Democratic Party faulted Republican presidential candidates for not condemning a man who booed a gay solider?  Well, now we have someone booing a U.S. Senator and calling him “the devil.”   By Democratic logic then, every Democratic present at this event must condemn the boor lest they be considered to support his antics:

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) raised eyebrows Monday evening when he was unceremoniously booed during an appearance at the Kennedy Center’s D.C. CAP-ital Stars Gala.

The Senator raised eyebrows!?!?  Interesting way to put it.  ”Midway through the Kennedy Center event to benefit the D.C. College Access Program,” Jenny Rogers reports, Blunt

. . . was honored by the board for his support of education in the Senate. While Blunt was being introduced, an audience member shouted, “Blunt is the devil.” A tense moment passed without comment before the ceremony continued. As Blunt took the stage, the heckler loudly booed.

Look, there are boors are both sides of the political aisle. No Democrat needs distinguish himself for this individual’s antic unless said partisan holds to the notion that Republicans must “differentiate themselves” from the angry rhetoric of the extremists on the right side of the political aisle.

A couple times in the past few weeks, I thought that perhaps I had finally been contacted for a poll of national consequence. Now, to be sure, I had been surveyed on issues of local import, that is, West Hollywood ballot initiatives, but this morning I received a call from the 307-area code (i.e., from the Cowboy State), asking me to participate in a brief 30-second inquiry into my political opinions.

Cool, I thought for a second, I was going to participate in a poll.  Then, the female voice told me that if I did I’d be eligible for a two-day cruise.  Or did she tell me that if I did answer the questions, I’d get to go on said cruise?  I never found out; the offer of the cruise made the call seem suspect. I hung up.  As I did, I remembered receiving a similar offer a few weeks ago.  Exact same voice.  Exact same offer.

Perhaps, I should have stayed on the line to see what she was offering.

Or maybe this was a sincere survey?  Has anyone else received similar phone calls?