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At the Campaign Spot at NRO, Jim Geraghty blogs about a speech he gave about the change that is coming.
From the Jolt . . . where if you subscribed, I wouldn’t have to tease you with an excerpt each morning:
Jim’s Rant at AU
The following is more or less the chat I gave at American University last night, with our old friend Byron York and a name you’ve seen in these parts regularly, Patrick Ruffini.
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So what’s going to happen on Election Day?
Usually when you’re talking about wave elections, you compare it to some massive natural disaster. It’s a landslide. It’s a tsunami. It’s a political earthquake.
We’re now in the territory where we need some new terms. Perhaps we can call it ‘Political Climate Change.’ “Mass Extinction Event” seems to cover it. For a lot of Democrats opening the ballot box is going to feel like opening the Ark of the Covenant, complete with heads exploding and faces melting. Instead of provoking the Wrath of God, they’ve provoked the Wrath of the Electorate.
Start with the Gallup generic ballot numbers. As Republicans, we’re used to rooting for a tie. Usually, if Republicans are down by 3 or less, they feel pretty good. If it’s a tie, Republicans feel like they’re set to have a really good year. “Ahead by 17” isn’t really on the usual scale. You’re left tapping the screen and asking if it could possibly be right. …
Tony Blankley comments that recent White House staff replacements signal the president is going to double down on stupid..
…Based on the recent appointments of the two most powerful staff positions in the White House, it appears that the White House is descending deeper into the bunker in anticipation of the expected shift in congressional majorities next year. The selection of Pete Rouse for chief of staff and Tom Donilon for national security adviser are both in-house promotions. Moving deputies up to principal rank is more typically seen in the seventh and eighth years of a White House administration – when an administration often has lost its instinct for innovation and creative responses to changing events. Moreover, in each case, a senior figure is being replaced with a staffer. Rahm Emanuel was a congressman who was in the senior leadership of the Democratic House when he became chief of staff. Gen. James L. Jones had been supreme allied commander in Europe and four-star commandant of the Marine Corps before he became national security adviser last year.
Mr. Donilon and Mr. Rouse – both with good careers as staffers – have never held a principal position. They may well rise to the occasion – even as Gen. Jones seemed to descend at his White House occasion – but they start in the hole as major political forces in their own rights. Worse, they both are known as political Mr. Fixits rather than serious policy players, being more suited for executing presidential orders than helping the president see and move toward different strategic visions of his presidency.
Evidence of this emerging bunker mentality was compounded when the president said on a radio show last week that if the GOP wins in November, it will be hand-to-hand combat next year.
…As Politico reported over the weekend: “No matter how bad things get, Rouse and Obama have no plans to break up the small group of campaign veterans who surround the president – nor are they likely to bring in the outsiders many Democrats think the White House sorely needs.” …
In the Telegraph, UK, Toby Harnden follows up on the Clinton rumors.
…Bill’s energetic reappearance on the campaign trail comes just as rumours, some of them eagerly fuelled by the Clinton camp, swirl that Hillary might replace the hapless Joe Biden as Obama’s vice-presidential running mate in 2012 or even challenge the President for the Democratic nomination if his popularity continues to slide.
Neither option makes much sense for Hillary, whose performance as Secretary of State, in which she has been supportive of the US military and sought to stiffen Obama’s spine in Afghanistan, has won admirers even on the Right.
Becoming vice-president would tie her to Obama on domestic policy. Through political good fortune (not to mention calculation), she has been out of that arena for the past two years, meaning that there are no Clinton fingerprints on unpopular health care, bail-out or stimulus legislation. …
In Popular Mechanics, Erin McCarthy interviews C.J. Shivers about his new book, The Gun: The AK-47 and the Evolution of War.
…Why did the Soviet Union think a lightweight, automatic rifle was needed?
The Soviet military had faced the world’s first mass-produced assault rifle—the German sturmgewehr, or storm rifle—in battles on the Eastern Front in World War II. It was impressed and wanted its own version. The AK-47 was fundamentally a conceptual copy of the German weapon. The Soviet Union was exceptionally skilled at copying its enemies’ ideas and was proud of its espionage and intelligence successes in obtaining enemy equipment and grasping the significance and utility of its opponents’ gear. In this case, it wanted an equivalent: a compact rifle, with modest recoil and weight, that could be fired on automatic or semiautomatic and that used smaller ammunition than the rifles of its time. Some people think of the Kalashnikov as revolutionary in design and idea, but it was evolutionary. In hindsight, it marked a natural step in a progression that had been under way for decades—a weapon midway between the large rifles and small submachine guns of the era, the ultimate compromise arm. This had many benefits, including that because the weapon used lighter, lower-powered ammunition, it would be less expensive to manufacture and supply and less burdensome, and each soldier could carry more cartridges per combat load. It all made military sense, and the Soviet arms-design community understood this immediately and went to work on its conceptual knockoff of the pre-existing German arm. …
…How did the AK become so widely disseminated, and what about it made it such a ripe candidate for dissemination?
One common misperception is that the AK-47 is reliable and effective, therefore it is abundant. This is not really the case. The weapon’s superabundance, its near ubiquity, is related less to its performance than to the facts of its manufacture. Once it was designated a standard Eastern Bloc arm, it was assembled and stockpiled in planned economies whether anyone paid for or wanted the rifles or not. This led to an uncountable accumulation of the weapons. And once the weapons existed, they moved. Had the weapon not been hooked up to the unending output of the planned economy, it would have been a much less significant device. If it had been invented in Liechtenstein, you might have never even heard of it. …
Marty Peretz tells Carter to get a life.
I remember Ted Kennedy announcing his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president in 1980. It was an unusual candidacy because there was already a Democrat in the White House and he intended to run for a second a term. That president was Jimmy Carter, poor man. Poor haughty man.
…Now, the then incumbent president Carter has written another apologia, mawkish and arrogant at once. It is called White House Diary, and it has received near zero currency. But it puts the blame for his loss on Teddy. Not only that: Jimmy puts the blame for the defeat of his health care legislation on Teddy, too.
…Carter lost because inflation was above 10%, and unemployment was close to 7.5%, and you couldn’t get gasoline at the gas station. Moreover, our diplomatic personnel were still in captivity after a year in Tehran. And Carter himself had declared the country in spiritual crisis…and it was, because of him.
…And I? For whom did I vote. Ronald Reagan. Anybody was better than Carter. And anybody still is.