Optimism is in short supply these days when it comes to anticipating a beneficial outcome from our corrupt political theater in D.C.I'll just come out and say what I've told family members and friends for months: As it stands right now, Hillary will unfortunately be our next president. It's not something I take any pleasure in thinking about. Quite the contrary. It will just mean moving further away from America's foundation. But I digress. Wouldn't you know it, this week Glenn Beck elaborated on that chilling notion which is rapidly heading towards reality as long as the Republican Party continues down its rudderless path away from any principled stands, much less re-embracing conservatism...
HotAir: We can debate how pessimistic we should be about the outcome but everything he says here about 2016 strategy is sound, including and especially the GOP’s focus on what Beck terms “technicalities.” That’s the wrong word, as it diminishes the gravity of the Benghazi and IRS scandals — they’re both legitimate grievances, as Beck notes — but he’s right that they’ll be seen as “technicalities” by the media, and he’s also right that they’ll be no match for a Clinton “back to the future” campaign trumpeting 1990s prosperity. ...Surveying the landscape and sticking a proverbial finger in the wind, I suppose there's still some validity to last year's prediction that the next president could also be a black Democrat, but all indications point to Hillary's turn this time.
Hillary’s greatest strength as a would-be nominee isn’t her name recognition or her trailblazing appeal as the first woman president or her many, many, many Washington contacts. It’s the fact that, uniquely among Democrats, she can run on the record of a more successful Democratic president than Obama. No matter how bad things get for O over the next two years, Hillary has Bill’s economic record available to distance her from all of it. In fact, within limits, the worse things get for Obama, the better it is for Hillary since it’ll make the Clinton years look that much rosier by comparison. ... After eight dismal years of Obama’s amateurism, it’d be natural for the opposition party to nominate an experienced pol who’ll sell himself as someone who knows how to make Washington work. In reality, the GOP’s more likely to nominate an Obamaesque newbie like Rubio or Rand Paul, with Hillary filling the steady-hand-on-the-wheel “experience” niche. Republicans’ best, and maybe only, hope is that public disgust at D.C. is so deep that anyone like Hillary who’s spent many years there will be DOA electorally. How lucky do you feel?
And don't you know we can depend on the arKitect to screw up more elections with the GOP establishment in tow all along the way to 2016. C. Edmund Wright explains why Rove & Co. are destined to lose again...
Wright goes on to explain that self-evident history and common sense escape Rove and the Republican consultant class because of the isolated D.C. bubble and the focus group mentality that breaks down somewhere between tactics and strategy.AmericanThinker: Karl Rove is at it once again. The so-called “strategist” is again confusing strategy with tactics, and is about to blow easy Senate pickups in Arkansas and North Carolina. This is not merely snatching defeat from the jaws of victory -- this is snatching defeat from the bowels of victory -- in astonishing tone-deaf fashion.
So how is the one-time “boy genius” doing this? By running ads attacking Senators Mark Pryor and Kay Hagan from the left. Yes, you heard that right. Rove’s Crossroads GPS PAC is insisting in their latest ads in both states that Republican candidates Tom Cotton and Thom Tillis are better liberals than Pryor and Hagan...
So let’s somehow miss that Obama and Harry Reid are toxic associations in red states. Forget that ObamaCare is showing how big government liberalism is an abject failure. Forget that the VA scandal is showing the same thing. Forget that workforce participation is the lowest in history. Forget that the hated IRS has been outed as an arm of the Democrat party. Forget that deficits are at a record. Forget that the entire country is starting to recognize that our national nausea is almost always being caused by too much nanny-state liberalism.
Rove and the GOP elite need to put down their pizzas and get out of the focus-group lab and into the real world a little bit. If they did, it might dawn on them to run a campaign of big ideas and overarching themes. You know, to tap into that anti-liberal anti-big government/nanny state mood? (No, that can’t work. I mean, those unapologetic big picture conservative campaigns fail every time -- you know, like in 1980, 84, 94, and 2010. And of course, the moderate fake right, go left, niche-by-niche strategies tried in 96, 98, 2006, 2008 and 2012 worked so well, right?)
But in the end, whether Rove and the consultant class win or lose, they're still the real Profiteers of this political chicanery (just ask John McLaughlin about Eric Cantor's loss).
Even pantywaist liberal Republicans who repeat the 'We-just-have-to-win-X-number-of-seats' mantra ad nauseam are starting to recognize the decay of either party in the minds of the American public...
Not hard to imagine why so many sat out 2012. They lost faith in the ability of a political party, much less a system, to work for their benefit. And with an opposition that's racking up a level of corruption rivaling the best of the Democratic centuries, who could blame them? Here's just the most recent list of offenders:CookPoliticalReport: Despite dismal numbers for President Obama, a public deeply pessimistic about the direction of the country, and a Senate battleground based almost solely in red states, Republicans aren’t running up the score in Senate races, even in deep red states. ...
Since very early this cycle, both sides have conceded that 2014 will not be a “wave” election like we saw in 2006, 2008, or 2010. Voters gave Democrats the benefit of the doubt in 2006 and 2008 only to be disappointed by the overreach of Democrats on everything from Obamacare to the environment. In 2010, they gave Republicans a chance to right the ship of state. Today, they have found that the GOP is as inept as the party they threw out of power four years ago. This is an electorate that sees nothing but disappointment when it looks at either party.
So, while President Obama’s no-good-very-bad summer has kept his approval ratings low, the GOP has done nothing to repair its tarnished brand either. ...
- As for the House Majority Leadership, out with Eric Cantor (Cantor joins Wall Street bank), and in with Kevin McCarthy (K Street gets sneak peek of House agenda). Both make out like bandits.
- As does former Sen. Trent Lott (Russian bank hires two former U.S. senators).
- Karl Rove's latest hits from that AmericanThinker piece above.
- Tom Donohue & the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- the supposed Republican funders, who are pushing Republicans toward amnesty -- have just endorsed Democrats in key House races! As if the Chamber of Crony Capitalism was ever loyal...the parties are beholden to the money.
Related link: Recent Hires Land Rick Perry In Hot Water With Conservatives #RememberMississippi, Governor?
Then there's the Senate's permanent-minority leadership of Mitch McConnell. His merry band of GOP leaders have squelched the opportunity offered by the Tea Party...
While the response to the arrival of these concerned citizens by the media was comical...NRO: Mitch McConnell is a man of his word. He said that he would crush the Tea Party, and he did. He not only got himself renominated in Kentucky, but he helped renominate fellow GOP senators who, like him, had been primaried by tea-party opponents: Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Pat Roberts (Kan.), John Cornyn (Texas), Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), and Thad Cochran (Miss.). Those could turn out to be expensive victories.
For the national media, the concept of American citizens assembling freely to exercise their constitutional rights was beyond their ken. These citizens were off the media grid, every bit as invisible as those born-again Christians 40 years earlier. And so, as we have seen over the past few years, the national political press, its analytical powers exhausted, slipped into default mode. These concerned citizens, whoever they were, must be . . . racists. The ones, that is, who weren’t homophobes or domestic terrorists....the response by the Republican Party was not...
Imagine if you would a prayer breakfast in Washington attended by the leadership of the GOP — Messrs. Boehner, McConnell, Priebus, and their associates. They drop to their knees, bow their heads, and invoke divine intercession in the country’s troubled affairs, and in the party’s parlous condition. Would it be too much to ask Him to deliver unto them a mass political movement, self-financed and benignly led, God-fearing and well-mannered, almost all of whose members believed in the literal version of the Republican platform and almost none of whose members wanted anything from the federal government but constitutional restraint?But Neal Freeman says that though he "wouldn't bet the rent money on us," it’s not too late to get it right. He suggests to divide the labor and begin to engage NOW!
Yes, it would have been too much to ask, but, yes, it has been given unto them, anyway. The Tea Party arrived in vast, friendly numbers and said to the GOP, “We’re not from the federal government and we’re here to help.”
What happened next was not pretty. Or smart. The GOP brass responded with insults, attack ads, collaborative media trashing, and, finally, over the past six months, the charge of McConnell’s geezer brigade seeking to “crush” the Tea Party. And here we thought congressional Republicans were too prone to compromise, too quick to split the difference.
Sound ideas...if the party can rein in itself against itself. Otherwise, we're heading towards another loss...even if there are wins along the way.To our friends at the Republican National Committee and its affiliates: You’ve told us that you have closed the digital deficit (by which you mean the technical capabilities to identify potential supporters, micro-target messages to them, and deliver them to the polls). You’ve told us that you have learned how to poll effectively in a wireless world. You’ve told us that you will eliminate the fundraising gap between the parties. Effective November 5, please commission an outside, independent audit of your performance in these three program areas.
To our friends at National Review: Please develop and promote a fusionist foreign policy. All we have now is Rand Paul’s demobilization, Marco Rubio’s interventionism, and the vast chasm between them. What we need is a policy that will a) serve national purpose, b) abjure ideological abstraction, and c) command majority right-center support.
You have done it before. Former NR editor Willmoore Kendall once memorably said: “An emergency phone call between [Frank] Meyer and [Brent] Bozell is one that interrupts the regular call between Meyer and Bozell.” The product of that endless phone call — a fusionist conservatism that conjoined Meyer’s freedom and Bozell’s virtue — was so compelling that William F. Buckley Jr. signed on for life.
To our friends at AEI, Cato, and Heritage: Please develop and promote a pedal-to-the-metal program for economic growth. No meliorism, thank you. And we are looking for some pride of co-authorship.
To our friends on Capitol Hill: The Obama administration reports that fewer of its senior appointees have come from private industry than in any previous administration. Please confront this managerial solecism. A good place to start would be to call up, at least monthly, Obama’s new and astonishing choice to head the Veterans Administration — Robert McDonald, a West Point graduate and former CEO of Procter & Gamble.
Mr. Speaker, please don’t pummel McDonald with sound bites. Work with him, encourage him, wrap him up in a big, teary, bipartisan hug. The mistreatment of veterans is both a national disgrace and an egregious management failure. Seize it as a teachable moment, Mr. Speaker, an occasion to remind every government executive that the essence of the job is to allocate limited resources.
And to our friends in the GOP: Make nice, Mitch. Nobody likes a sore winner.
Related links: The Obama agenda never sleeps...so where's the Republican alternative?
A quisling GOP incumbent class won't save America in November either
