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Karl Rove says the GOP can find its way out of the wilderness.
Yes, we lost the election. But in a year when all currents were running against Republicans and our campaign was lackluster and erratic, Barack Obama received only 3.1 points more than Al Gore in 2000 and only 4.6 points more than John Kerry in 2004. The Democratic victory becomes durable only if Republicans make it so with the wrong moves.
Losing the election has led to a debate about whether the GOP should return to its Reaganite tradition or embark on a new reform course. This pundit-driven shoutfest presents a sterile, unnecessary choice. The party should embrace both tradition and reform; grass-roots Republicans want to apply timeless conservative principles to the new circumstances facing America.
In the coming year, we will be defined more by what we oppose than what we are for; the president-elect and the Democrats in Congress will control the agenda. We must pick fights carefully and center them around principle. The goal is to have the sharp differences that emerge make the GOP look like the more reasonable, hopeful and inviting party—which is easier said than done. A road map:
1. Avoid mindless opposition. We should support President Obama when he is right (Afghanistan), persuade him when his mind appears open (trade) and oppose him when he is wrong (taxes). It is the Republican Party’s job to hold him accountable on the merits only.
2. Be as comfortable talking about health care and education as national security and taxes. Republican health-care proposals are strong; they can trump the Democrats’ big-government ideas, but only if we advocate them with clarity, passion and conviction. …
American.com looks for good news for the GOP.
Barack Obama may have run one of the most successful presidential campaigns in American history, but the exit poll data suggest that he did not achieve the overwhelming election victory that many had predicted.
Increased Democratic Party identification, dismally low approval ratings for President Bush, and widespread anxiety over the economy and the financial crisis should have guaranteed Obama a huge win. Yet he garnered only 52 percent of the popular vote, one percentage point higher than George W. Bush’s popular vote total in 2004 and one point lower than that of George H.W. Bush in 1988. At a recent American Enterprise Institute conference, AEI scholar Michael Barone argued that such results make Obama’s triumph “overdetermined and underdelivered.” …
Noemie Emery traces the improbable story of Hillary at State.
Campaign 2008, which went on for four years, if not for four centuries, was rich in dramatic personae with strange tales — candidates from Alaska, the Canal Zone, and Hawaii; mavericks, moose-hunters, and multi-racial messiahs — but none has been so bizarre as the story of Hillary Clinton, who began her career as the wife of a liberal president, who entered the race eons ago as the liberal hope to become the first woman president, and who may end it weeks after the fact as the third female secretary of state in our history, the first ex-First Lady to become a top diplomat, to the relief and delight of many conservatives. How did the feminist wife of Bill Clinton, demonized as a fiend during much of his tenure, end up as the Great Right Hope of the party they bested? The race changed her, and it, beyond all expectations. It was all the campaign.
Candidates of course plan their campaigns, but they are defined more than they anticipate by their opponents, to whom they are forced to react. In 1992, Bill Clinton, an interesting and effective middle-way reform governor, planned to run against liberal Mario Cuomo who would have the support of his party’s establishment. To his surprise, Cuomo bowed out, and he became by default the establishment candidate. In 2000, George W. Bush, an interesting and effective reform governor, planned to run against fiscal or social conservatives as an inventive and maverick figure. He ran instead against John McCain, the maverick’s maverick, and became in his turn the establishment figure, as the fiscal and social conservatives flocked to his side by default. …
David Harsanyi thinks the idea is nutty.
… Now, I can’t think of a better person to send abroad to chastise foreign leaders into complete submission than Hillary Clinton. But Obama’s rise to national prominence is often traced to his public opposition to the invasion of Iraq on the very day President George Bush and Congress agreed on the joint resolution authorizing the war. This bold narrative pits a brave young politico against the crushing forces of political expediency.
Forces like Hillary Clinton.
“When it came to making the most important decision of our generation, Senator Clinton got it wrong,” Obama once hyperbolically claimed. In tapping Clinton, is Obama admitting that her more “realist” neoconny approach to the war on terror, Iraq and other issues is acceptable? Or is it Clinton admitting she was completely wrong?
If Clinton genuinely flunked “the most important vote of a generation,” how would Obama justify tendering her, arguably, the highest- ranking Cabinet position in the nation? And how does Clinton rationalize working for someone she so heartily attacked as immature and unfit for command? …
Mark Steyn with a pirate post.
… It’s the scale of these operations that impresses. In the quarter ending September 30th, Somali pirates hijacked 26 vessels and kidnapped 537 crew members. According to Chatham House, their booty in ransoms so far this year may be as high as $30 million. That makes piracy about the most attractive profession in Somalia.
This is a glimpse of tomorrow. Half a century ago, Somaliland was a couple of sleepy colonies, British and Italian. Now the husk of a nation state is a convenient squat from which to make mischief. And, when freelance raiders are already seizing vessels the size of aircraft carriers, their capability in the future will be constrained only by their ambition.
London Times says the pirates have snagged another big boat.
Somali pirates struck again yesterday, seizing an Iranian cargo ship holding 30,000 tonnes of grain, as the world’s governments and navies pronounced themselves powerless against this new threat to global trade. …
The pick of Power Line’s pirate posts.
A CNN story on the use of rubber ducks in Greenland glacier research project.
… In the name of climate change science, researchers at NASA have dropped 90 rubber ducks into holes of Greenland’s fastest moving glacier: the Jakobshavn Glacier in Baffin Bay.
Scientists remain unsure as to why glaciers speed up their movement in the summer months and it is hoped that the rubber ducks — labeled with the words “science experiment” and “reward” in three languages, along with an email address — will shed some light on the phenomenon. …