Friend of RP Kristen Soltis made her debut last week as a guest on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.” Check it out here:
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Contributing RP Artur Davis was Wolf Blitzer’s guest this week in CNN’s “The Situation Room,” discussing his switch to the Republican Party. Watch the clip below:
Fascinating stuff. Of course, it’s a message some conservatives will blanche at for the simple reason that a recall is an extremely unprecedented gesture—three governors in our history have fallen victim—while the 2010 off year races were obviously a regularly scheduled democratic exercise. But Douthat surely has the ultimate conclusion right: both sides have gotten well schooled in the gymnastics of cut and slash opposition; it’s just that Republicans are getting the better of it. And as Douthat allows, the outcome in a bluish state that Democrats are still favored to carry underscores the political pull of reeling in outsized spending and the relative weakness of the liberal alternative, when both are put to the test.
I would even go one major step further: in the post LBJ era, the public has arguably never validated a specific, identifiable liberal agenda at the ballot box. The winning Democrats in that time frame—Carter, Clinton and Obama—have won on a tightly crafted appeal that stressed economic anxiety and blurred ideological content. Even the one congressional landslide for Democrats in memory, the 2006 midterms, were linked primarily to fatigue with Iraq and Republican overreach on Social Security. If one reads the post Reagan era as a closely matched siege over time, the left owes its victories to negative referenda on incumbents and a couple of superstar performers. In other words, liberals have been cursed to plot a course identical to the one they dismissively suggested accounted for Ronald Reagan. Read the rest of…
It is biased – like everyone else trying to survive and thrive – in favor of page views. And I can pretty much guarantee that Mitt’s shearing of the gay classmate gets a hell of a lot more of them than the rollout of his Middle East policy. Now that technology has enabled the media to get this down to a science and shift the placement of pieces online from minute-to-minute, the media, more than ever – to paraphrase Republican ingenue Christine O’Donnell – “is you.” (Cross-posted, with permission of the author, from Politico’s Arena) The Washington Post covered the recent announcement by contributing RP Artur Davis that he was defecting to the Republican party:
Click here to read the full article.
Whatever we may think of the Edwards trial, one thing is certain: the prosecution was a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money on a non-crime. Who cares if a billionaire wants to give a multimillionaire some money to hide his mistress (who pays taxes on the gift)? The prosecution of Edwards was never so much about Edwards as it was about George Holding. Wait — who is George Holding? And why should we care?
Maybe Holding understood the weakness of the case, which rested upon Edwards’ failure to report the money billionaire heiress Bunny Mellon and another wealthy donor gave to him to help hide his mistress. The problem is that if Edwards had reported contributions and then used them for personal expenses, he would have been guilty of a crime, since the Federal Election Commission bars spending official campaign funds on personal expenses. Therefore, according to Holding, Edwards was damned if he did, and damned if he didn’t.
Read the rest of… Opines Rabbi Jonathan Miller, Birmingham, AL:
Says Linda Curry, Harrods Creek, KY:
[Click here to follow the entire RP Debate] Jeff Smith’s response to my position is a thoughtful clarification. It deserves the following clarification on my part: first, I do think there is room to criticize the termination of Grenell as a needless concession to anti-gay sentiment on the right; there is also as much room to view it as a legitimate reflex in a campaign that has had a consistent issue with staffers who draw too much attention to themselves (remember the debate coach who was sacked last fall after talking out of school about his role in Romney’s debate prep?). My point is simply that it is a fit subject for debate and not a closed, easy case, and I should have expended the time in making that clear.
Second, on the much broader observation that Jeff makes, I actually agree with his point that those of us who aren’t there on gay marriage have an obligation to ground those criticisms in themes that resonate beyond the evangelical community, and that don’t just reflect animus against one class of citizens. I have made that point in a posting on my own blog,officialarturdavis.com last week. I quote part of my observations below:
While I don’t couch it as a character defect, just a blown tactical opoortunity, Romney did miss a moment last week to make the kind of statement of purpose that Jeff alludes to here, and that I touched on last week, but not in the context of the Washington Post’s hit job. He could have used his speech at a relligious college last weekend to make the point that principled Americans can differ on the definition of marriage; that his reading of the Constitution and his preference for states to decide their own social cultures leads him another way, but that he respects the voices of those who think the issue is a clear-cut matter of justice. He also might have added that conservatives should take comfort from the fact that after decades of marriage attracting some cultural derision in smart, chic circles, its a good thing that the institution is being embraced by a cultural left that was skeptical to say the least in the seventies, when Gallup showed all time lows in faithfulness and expectations of monogamy. Had Romney gone that route, he would have been criticized on the left and the right for trimming on a moral point. But he would have evoked the tones around a lot of dinner tables last week, and he would have sounded like a leader whom the people at those dinner tables could get used to seeing on their screens for four years.
Artur writes that “if one’s perspective is that Mitt Romney’s opposition to gay marriage and his parting of ways with a staffer whose public position was at odds with his own both amount to homophobia or bigotry,” then there is no room left for civil debate.
A bit of sophistry there. I never said that Romney’s position or his pushing out of Grenell amounted to homophobia and bigotry. I said that it amounted to a weakness of character. While out, loud, and proud, Grenell worked for eight years for George W. Bush, serving as spokesman to Ambassadors Bolton and Negroponte, as well as John Danforth and Zalmay Khalilzad. Bush, of course, also strongly opposed gay marriage and pushed a constitutional amendment to ban it. The point is that Grenell was at odds with Bush too but Bush understood that not every member of your administration will agree with every single one of the administration’s positions; it is, however, critical that employees agree with those positions in the realm in which they work. But as Jonah Goldberg from Artur’s own NRO writes, Romney should understand that if you’re going to oppose gay marriage, you will have zero chance of convincing anyone your position isn’t driven by anti-gay animus if you’re also opposed to gays working in policy areas that have nothing to do with gay marriage.
I truly hope discussion about the Post piece doesn’t turn into debate about its timing versus substance. Reporters are digging into Romney’s post, just as they dug into Obama’s (Rev. Wright, etc). In doing the digging, they came upon the recollections of grown, prosperous men about a bullying incident that haunted them through the years. A peer at their school was harassed, held down and sheared. The prosperous son of a Governor/Big 3 CEO committed the act. That’s pretty damn mean. What concerns me all the more is that Romney seems to acknowledge the incident, though with faint memory. I think a human being should remember something like that–that is, unless they are wired differently. Of course, this wouldn’t be as relevant if Romney’s policy positions didn’t reveal callous attitudes towards the GLBT community. Physically restraining a “different” student is one things; policy prescriptions that restrain an entire population from military service, the right to marriage or even civil unions, brings such dehumanization to scale. |
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