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Karl Rove looks forward to 2010.
… In a sign Mr. Obama’s victory may have been more personal than partisan or philosophical, Democrats picked up just 10 state senate seats (out of 1,971) and 94 state house seats (out of 5,411). By comparison, when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980, Republicans picked up 112 state senate seats (out of 1,981) and 190 state house seats (out of 5,501).
In the states this year, five chambers shifted from Republican to Democrats, while four shifted from either tied or Democratic control to Republican control. In the South, Mr. Obama had “reverse coattails.” Republicans gained legislative seats across the region. In Tennessee both the house and senate now have GOP majorities for the first time since the Civil War.
This matters because the 2010 Census could allocate as many as four additional congressional districts to Texas, two each to Arizona and Florida, and one district to each of a number of (mostly) red-leaning states, while subtracting seats from (mostly) blue-leaning states like Michigan, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania and, for the first time, California. Redistricting and reapportionment could help tilt the playing field back to the GOP in Congress and the race for the White House by moving seven House seats (and electoral votes) from mostly blue to mostly red states. …
David Harsanyi on coming out of the GOP coma.
The Republican National Committee recently launched a website to give “users the opportunity to discuss their reasons for being a member of the Grand Old Party and what being a Republican means to them.”
It means having their butts kicked — big time. The rest, I assure you, is a profound mystery.
So the battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party is on. Then again, many Democrats probably contest the notion that Republicans own a heart or a soul. On the latter, they may have a point.
The prominent conservative columnist David Brooks recently declared the coming Republican war would pit traditionalists (conservatives who believe Republicans have strayed too far from Reaganism) against reformers, who, he argues, want to modernize, moderate and expand the party.
Traditionalists vs. reformers. If only it were that clinical.
For the past eight years, we have had a Republican Party that was neither excessively conservative nor too moderate, but a party that employed no principles to speak of — unless securing power for power’s sake is now a creed. …
Ann Coulter notes the NY Times had a bigger decline than the GOP.
For the first time in 32 years, Democrats got more than 50 percent of the country to vote for their candidate in a national election, and now they want to lecture the Republican Party on how to win elections. Liberal Republicans have joined them, both groups hoping no one will notice that we just lost this election by running the candidate they chose for us.
For years, New York Times columnist David Brooks has been writing mash notes to John McCain. In November 2007, he quoted an allegedly “smart-alecky” political consultant who exclaimed, in private, “You know, there’s really only one great man running for president this year, and that’s McCain.”
“My friend’s remark,” Brooks somberly intoned, “had the added weight of truth.”
Brooks gushed, “I can tell you there is nobody in politics remotely like him,” and even threw down the gauntlet, saying: “You will never persuade me that he is not among the finest of men.”
That took guts at the Times, where McCain is constantly praised by the op-ed columnists and was endorsed by the paper in the Republican primary. Even Frank Rich has hailed McCain as the “most experienced and principled” of the Republicans and said no one in either party “has more experience in matters of war than the Arizona senator” — the biggest rave issued by Rich since “Rent” opened on Broadway.
They adored McCain at the Times! Does anyone here not see a cluster of bright red flags?
In January this year, Brooks boasted of McCain’s ability to attract “independents.”
And then Election Day arrived, and all the liberals who had spent years praising McCain all voted for Obama. Independents voted for Palin or voted against Obama. No one outside of McCain’s immediate family was specifically voting for McCain.
But now Brooks presumes to lecture Republicans about what to do next time. How about: “Don’t take David Brooks’ advice”? …
Speaking of the NY Times, they report on the Palin/Africa hoax that fooled FOX and MSNBC.
It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.
Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.
Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.
And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by an Eisenstadt hoax, including The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.
Now a pair of obscure filmmakers say they created Martin Eisenstadt to help them pitch a TV show based on the character. But under the circumstances, why should anyone believe a word they say? ..
Walter Williams on the Obama win.
Despite the fact that President-elect Barack Obama’s vision for our nation leaves a lot to be desired, the fact that he was elected represents a remarkable national achievement. When the War of 1861 ended, neither a former slave nor slave owner would have believed it possible for a black to be elected president in a mere century and a half, if ever. I’m sure that my grandparents, born in the 1880s, or my parents, born in the 1910s, would not have believed it possible for a black to be president and neither did I for most of my 72 years.
That’s not the only progress. If one totaled black earnings, and consider blacks a separate nation, he would have found that in 2005 black Americans earned $644 billion, making them the world’s 16th richest nation. That’s just behind Australia but ahead of Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland. Black Americans have been chief executives of some of the world’s largest and richest cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Gen. Colin Powell, appointed Joint Chief of Staff in October 1989, headed the world’s mightiest military and later became U.S. Secretary of State, and was succeeded by Condoleezza Rice, another black. A few black Americans are among the world’s richest people and many are some of the world’s most famous personalities. These gains, over many difficult hurdles, speak well not only of the intestinal fortitude of a people but of a nation in which these gains were possible. They could not have been achieved anywhere else. …
As if we don’t have enough to worry about, Robert Samuelson raises the spector of deflation.
Until recently, the idea that deflation — the decline of most prices — was possible, let alone a potential economic danger, seemed outlandish. If anything, inflation was the threat. Led by rising oil and food prices, it was increasing in most countries. But in the past two months, deflation has suddenly become conceivable, and, though still a long shot, it’s much more menacing than most people realize. The most urgent economic task for Barack Obama and other world leaders is to prevent the long shot from happening.
A mild deflation — like a mild inflation — would be barely noticeable, and even pleasurable. Who doesn’t like lower prices? But beyond a few percentage points, deflation can create economic havoc by forcing debtors to repay loans in more expensive money and causing consumers to postpone purchases. In the Great Depression, deflation reigned. Consumer prices fell about a quarter from 1929 to 1933. Spending collapsed. Supply swamped demand, driving prices down. By 1933, manufacturing output had dropped 39 percent and joblessness had reached 25 percent.
It’s this history that makes deflation terrifying. Obama and his fellow leaders should worry. Since mid-September, economic conditions have deteriorated badly. …
However, Carpe Diem has a point about the media’s unemployment hyperbole.
… So before we make exaggerated comparisons to the 1930s when the unemployment rate peaked at 25.6%, maybe we should more realistically be making comparisons to the more recent double-digit jobless rates of the 1980s and the 7.8% rate in 1992. And we’re not even close to those rates yet. …
John Tierney posts on Michael Crichton’s question.
In memory of Michael Crichton, who died Tuesday, let us consider a question that preocuppied him: How do we separate science from religion in environmentalism? As a spinner of sci-fi horror stories himself, he had a finely honed skepticism for the apocalyptic scenarios presented by environmentalists. In a speech in 2003, he argued that environmentalism was a modern remapping of Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths:
There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe. …
Q and O has details on the cash collapse at the New York Times.