Politics Blog

Political Wire’s Taegan Goddard says Howard Dean is more Carter than McGovern or Mondale:

Democrats wondering if they are on the verge of nominating another George McGovern; a candidate out-of-touch with the American mainstream. Naturally, supporters say the better comparison is Jimmy Carter, the small state governor who came out of nowhere to defeat an incumbent president.

Recent emails from readers, and an excellent essay by Tom Gallagher, convince me the evidence plays more to the Carter comparison

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It’s still many months before Democrats settle on a nominee and President Bush’s $200 million war chest will be more than enough to define Dean (or any nominee) before most Americans tune into the presidential race. Nonetheless, most polls suggest the country is still split as it was in 2000. And with Iraq a mess and the economy sluggish, any decent Democrat has a chance to beat Bush.

Goddard’s clearly been spending too much time in the liberal media cocoon. Dean is no Carter. And besides, Carter barely managed to defeat the country’s first unelected appointed president by a razor-thin margin in the wake of the biggest scandal in US history. Carter is hardly an electoral giant for others to emulate.

Dean is McGovern + Mondale because he can easily be caricatured as a pro-tax anti-defense Democrat. Imagine the attack ads: “Howard Dean wants to raise the average American family’s taxes by over $1,000 a year! He wants to reduce the Child Tax Credit, reinstitute the Marriage Penalty and bring back the Death Tax!”

Despite what Goddard claims, Iraq is not “a mess.” The Iraqi governing council will set out a timetable for self-rule by December 15 and you can expect elections or, at the least, an Iraqi Constitution to be ready sometime next year.

And, despite what Goddard claims, the economy is not “sluggish.” Third-quarter GDP numbers will be released Thursday and will blow that theory out of the water. Expect GDP to grow by a stunning 6 percent or more, matching the performance of the economy at the height of the Clinton bubble. Similar, or slightly lower, rates of growth will prevail through 2004, creating millions, or at least hundreds of thousands, of jobs.

The Democratic presidential pack is a “sorry group,” as Barbara Bush put it. They’re so full of negativity and have been moved so far left by Dean’s ascendancy that they’ve provided more juicy sound bites than the Republicans could possibly use against them. Whoever emerges as the nominee, especially if it’s Dean, will likely be crushed by a GOP tidal wave in 2004.

Now, I admit that unforeseen circumstances may get in the way. Osama Bin Laden, who’s been reduced to making anonymous audio tapes from a cave, may yet figure out how to kill a few dozen Americans on US soil. Or the incompetent terrorists in Iraq may figure out how to kill three dozen Americans instead of three dozen Iraqis. Or there may be another Enron. Or some huge Bush-Cheney scandal concocted by the lying liberal media. But, barring such an unforeseen circumstance, the Democrats are headed towards becoming a permanent minority party in 2004.

-- PoliPundit

Matthew Continetti rounds up some of Weasel Clark’s weaselling on Iraq.

-- PoliPundit

Many analysts have been making a big deal of a recent Harvard University poll showing that conservatives and Republicans aren’t extinct on college campuses.

I’ve refrained from commenting on this poll because I thought the numbers were just plain wrong. However, given the number of people who’re trumpeting its findings, I’m going to have to pour some cold water on them.

Let’s start with the bottom line numbers:

A nationwide poll conducted in April for Harvard University’s Institute of Politics found that college undergraduates are almost evenly split ideologically. While 36 percent described themselves as liberal, 32 percent called themselves conservative and 29 percent said they’re politically moderate. On economic issues, they’re slightly more conservative; on social issues, slightly more liberal.

In terms of party affiliation, the poll found that the Democratic lead among college students has been shrinking since 2000 – to only 3 percentage points, within the poll’s margin of error. Both parties trail the number of students who call themselves independents – 41 percent of those polled.

Asked whether they would vote next year for President Bush or his Democratic challenger, the students favored Bush 34 percent to 32 percent.

Now here’s why those numbers don’t mean much:

• Liberals and conservatives seem almost evenly divided on campuses at 36-32 percent. That’s amazing, right? Not so. In the general population, the number of people self-identifying as conservative is consistently twice as much as the number self-identifying as liberal. College students are still far more liberal than the general population.
• Democrats lead Republicans for party affiliation by just 3 percent. That’s great, right? Not when you consider the number of undecideds, who’ll probably break heavily Democratic.
• Bush leads an unnamed Democrat 34-32 among college students. That’s great, right? Not so. When was the last time a poll of the general population showed such a large number of undecideds? Most of those undecideds will plump for Democrats or Green Party candidates simply because of peer pressure. There goes the Bush margin.

And now for one final set of numbers from the poll that illustrate that it is utterly bogus:

The poll found that 72 percent of them [college students] are registered voters; 82 percent hope to vote in the 2004 presidential election and 80 percent believe their vote “will make a difference” in the election. Eight of 10 know the location of their polling place.

If you believe those numbers you’re smoking something stronger than they have on college campuses.

So why is it that exit polls consistently show that Republicans do very well among voters aged 18-29? Three reasons:

• Among the voters aged 18-29 are many people who’ve graduated college, gotten a job and/or a family and realize how horribly the government persecutes honest hard-working Americans. The 18-22 age group would be more representative of college students.
• If you’re a conservative on campus, you’re probably much more likely to vote than your liberal counterparts, who busy themselves “Marching Against The War.”
• The 18-29 age group includes a majority who never went to college and therefore missed out entirely on the indoctrination by commie professors.

Understand that I’m not saying that groups like the College Republicans are irrelevant. Quite the contrary, they’re vibrant organizations that are growing rapidly. However, let’s not lose our heads and assume that the great mass of spoiled-rich-kid liberals on college campuses have suddenly seen the light.

-- PoliPundit

When Weasel Clark got into the presidential race, I wrote:

Clark is a relative political novice. Having been tossed into the pool with nine sharks circling around him, I think he’ll find it exceedingly difficult to learn to swim. Unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger, who’s running a two-month campaign, Clark will have to go the distance for several months and, if he ends up with the nomination, will be looking at a year-long campaign against an incumbent president. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he were to self-destruct long before that.

Now Clark’s wildly inept campaign has led to his dropping from first to second place in the national polls. A CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll shows Clark dropping from 21 percent to 15 percent among registered Democrats in just one month. Also, Clark is but a blip in the polls in the early primary states of Iowa (which he’s given up on) and New Hampshire.

-- PoliPundit

In must-read piece on the rise of conservative media, Brian C. Anderson says we’re winning the culture wars.

-- PoliPundit

PoliticsLA.com’s Jeff Sadow on the inroads conservative Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Jindal is making into the blackvote in Louisiana:

The New Orleans black political group BOLD sent a shot heard around the state last week by its gubernatorial endorsement of Bobby Jindal over [Democratic candidate] Kathleen Blanco, in a vote described by its president as not close. (Which caused some consternation for one of its top officers, state Rep. Karen Carter, also a state Democrat official.)

Had this occurred in isolation, perhaps Democrats and black elected officials could have written it off as a fluke, maybe an idiosyncratic incident over a group

Right Wing News hosted a blogger symposium on the 2004 presidential race. The consensus seems to be that it’ll likely be a Bush-Dean race, with Bush walloping Dean.

I agree with that assessment. It’s what I’ve been saying as far back as February. And in June I actually urged readers to donate to Dean’s campaign.

-- PoliPundit

A few weeks ago, I noted the stupidity with which the terrorists in Iraq seemed to be choosing their targets:

It’s hard to imagine a more politically inept bunch of people than the ones opposing us in Iraq today. First they bomb the UN. Then they bomb a “moderate” Shiite cleric in a holy mosque in a holy city.

President Bush couldn’t have written a better script if he’d tried. The deadenders are doing everything they can to alienate Iraqis, Arabs and the world community. If they keep up this pattern, they’ll be bombing Sunni mosques next.

The terrorists are proving to be even more inept than I expected. They’ve since bombed the Jordanian embassy, the Turkish embassy and now the International Red Cross! Give them enough time and they’ll get around to the Sunni mosques.

-- PoliPundit

There’s some new polling in the three gubernatorial races this year. I don’t place much stock in these polls. All three races are too close to call and the GOP has a partisan edge in all three.

However, my readers seem to like these poll results; so here they are:

• In Kentucky, Republican Ernie Fletcher leads Democrat Ben Chandler by 48-39 or 52-43, depending on the poll. This race has been billed as a referendum on the “Bush-Fletcher economy” by Democrats. President Bush will help make it so by stopping by on Saturday. If Fletcher wins, he’ll be the state’s first Republican governor in 32 years and Democrats will have decisively lost their referendum on the “Bush-Fletcher economy.”
• In Louisiana, Republican Bobby Jindal is trailing Democrat Kathleen Blanco 41-43, a statistical dead heat. The poll was taken before Jindal got the endorsement of prominent African-American groups. Also, it estimates black turnout at the high end of the range. Still, anything could happen in this race.
• In Mississippi, Republican Haley Barbour leads incumbent Democrat Ronnie Musgrove 50-45, which is within the margin of error. This is a nasty campaign, with both candidates running large amounts of negative advertising accusing each other of lying and poisoning children. President Bush will be stopping by in Mississippi to help Barbour.

So there you have it. Democrats need to hold on to all three of these seats in order to avoid a net loss of governorships this year. Whether you believe these polls or not, it’s clear that they’ll be hard-pressed to make a clean sweep of all three races.

-- PoliPundit

Bob Novak says the GOP is planning an escalating fight on judicial nominations, climaxing with a “nuclear option” in the middle ofnext year:

Majority Leader Bill Frist, frustrated by the audacious campaign of Democrats blocking judicial confirmations, begins a counter-offensive this week. He will start by returning to one of President Bush’s nominees generally given up for dead. The effort will accelerate throughout this congressional session into mid-November, with one roll-call vote after another.

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All this refocusing is intended to set the scene for a bitter battle in next year’s session of Congress. At that time, an effort may be made to rule out of order a filibuster against judicial nominations – the “so-called” nuclear solution.

I suggested a slightly different “nuclear option” a few months ago:

So far, Republicans have handled the filibusters poorly. They’ve made a lot of noise, but the vast majority of voters are blissfully unaware of what’s going on. This is particularly true in Southern states. Pro-life Louisiana and Arkansas each have two Democratic senators who claim to be “moderate” “pro-life” senators. They’re all participating in filibusters. Louisiana is a largely catholic state. Many, if not all, of the nominees who are being/will be filibustered are catholics. These political facts cry out to be exploited.

Here’s my suggestion: President Bush should not withdraw any judicial nominee filibustered by Democrats. Rather, he should keep their nominations on the back burner until the last few weeks before election day 2004, when they can be used as a campaign issue against Democratic senators from Bush states.

After labor day 2004, Bill Frist should bring up the judicial nominees to the exclusion of everything else. He should make the Democrats filibuster the nominees. And not the sissy filibuster that allows senators to filibuster without actually having to speechify. Frist should force the Democrats to filibuster the nominees on the Senate floor, on National TV. This should go on day after day, week after week, leading up to election day. In Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Indiana and South Dakota, Republicans should run relentless attack ads against Democratic Senators in the weeks leading up to election day. The scripts will practically write themselves. They’ll be simple and to the point, since most voters will be aware, thanks to national TV coverage in the weeks leading up to the election, that the president’s judicial nominees are being filibustered by the Democrats.

-- PoliPundit