Mar 08 2008
How Bad Off Is The GOP This Year? We will Learn A Lot Today
Final Update: It seems there may be more at play in this special election than one of my readers first indicated (and then denied – the comments are there for folks to parse). Another reader, WWS, notes this factor:
Foster’s ads reminded voters that Oberweis — who campaigned on a very hard line against illegal immigrants — was found to have two working for a subcontractor at one of his ice cream shops.
…
Oberweis has lost three statewide campaigns for U.S. Senate and governor, taking heat each time for controversial statements and ads, including one in which he hovered in a helicopter above Soldier Field, complaining that 10,000 illegal aliens enter the country every day, enough to fill Soldier Field every week. Experts disputed his numbers.
I was not following this race at all (in fact did not know it was happening until last night) so I was not aware Oberweis was an Immigration Hypochondriac (which I thought made one a ‘true conservative’ if you listen to talk radio). It was a close race, so I suggest the GOP find another contender – one that doesn’t repulse conservatives in a district that has been deep red for two decades.
Updates Below
There is special election today in Illinois to replace Denny Hastert, former GOP Speaker of the House. The election will be a signal as to how the GOP is doing this year, and so far it has looked bleak as a very conservative district has turned very competitive:
Democrat Bill Foster and Republican Jim Oberweis are virtually deadlocked in what should be a solidly Republican district in the northern Illinois exurbs, according to polls and political observers.
In the past few days, two independent political handicappers, Charlie Cook and Stuart Rothenberg, each have reassessed the contest as a toss-up instead of one that leans in favor of Oberweis. At least one poll has shown Foster with a slim lead in the final days of the campaign.
Democrats are salivating over the possibility of picking up not just a Republican-held district but the one that had been the official seat of House GOP power for the eight years before Democrats’ takeover in 2006.
The Dems in Congress have performed less than stellar, and they actually rank below Bush in terms of popular support. The fact this race is even in doubt is an illustration of how badly the GOP has self destructed. Hopefully its image is on the mend with things looking up in Iraq and all the Dems predictions of failure there have been proven totally wrong. We will know soon enough.
Booman Tribune has a good map of the district IL-14, and here is a link to the results. So far nothing (8:53 PM Eastern).
8:58 PM Eastern: 12% reporting in and the dem is winning 55%-45%. Probably too early but not a good sign from what was a deep red district.
10:10 PM Eastern: Dems win. Reader Vince tells me frustrated ‘true conservatives didn’t get their person so they stayed home and helped elect a Democrat. And people wonder why ‘true conservatives’ are not considered reliable, credible or honorable political allies? So the purists will risk everything to get their way. OK – as long they are in the minority and without a voice at the table they can pretend that plan is working to their hearts content.
LOL!
Whippet1 it is pretty simple. If conservatives can’t entice me to join them they have no prayer of being in the majority.
And I stay away from parties because of the mandate for party-think. Purity in any form is a fool’s errand.
And it was the drive for ‘true conservatives’ and attacks on ‘RINOs’ which told me those forces on the right are just as bad as the group thinkers on the left.
And yes, I am very satisfied to comment on both left and right. Unlike those who sit home waiting for their perfect candidate I am not so naive. I know in America no candidate will meet all my desires but I vote anyway – warts and all. Staying home waiting for perfection is a foolishness that just indicates democracy is not what people want.
They want obedience!
Oh i guess it’s ok for him to withdraw from a party, but if anyone else does it , they’re a “purist”
Vince, I think the Oberlein situation, in a roundabout kind of way, displays one of the biggest flaws with campaign finance laws today. (And Yes, BCRA aka McCain-Feingold only made things worse, and this is something I disagree with McCain about even though I support his candidacy, because everyone else is worse)
In a nutshell, campaign finance laws restrict the money that can be given directly to a candidate. However, the Supreme Court has ruled that no law can restrict the amount of money a candidate can spend on himself. This gives a huge advantage to millionaires who want to run for office, and gives a huge incentive to parties to recruit millionaires for local races so that they can conserve scarce contributions for national reaces. This is what is driving the rise of millionaires to office holders in both parties. (e.g., see Jon Corzine who bought the governor’s office in N.J. because he was bored with life on Wall Street)
The Supreme Court is not going to change it’s position – so the only answer is to lift the restrictions on contributions and repeal most existing campaign finance law. Either that or get used to both parties recruiting local millionaires who want to bolster their egos no matter what kind of arseholes they are. (which frankly is where we’ve been for several years now)
I know, I know, I wish McCain got this. But I can’t think of anyone who ran for pres this year who did.
LOL! Vince,
I don’t stay home and pout when I don’t get my way. I am supporting conservatives and GOP with all their flaws. And I don’t tell anyone think the way I do or else.
And that is what sets us apart my friend!
I know “plenty” of very, very conservative people who feel personally and utterly betrayed by the party as well as the people they trusted and helped put into office. It has NOTHING to do with what democrats do or don’t do and it never did.
DNC has never held themselves to such standards. Nor are they ones claiming the moral high ground on such issues. Barney Frank got elected as a homosexual man—faults and all. The republicans…shake their finger at people like him…then help build a bridge to nowhere while they secret off to a bathroom or chat room to chase young page boys around. The Democrats didn’t make them do that.
The people who elected these ass clowns feel betrayed by them…as well as by the party. And they are very, very angry.
The RNC is going to have to regroup and come up with a new message to win them back (other than we are better than you are—cause you’re not).
What kind of candidate is Foster, the democrat. Remember, the democrats won the 2006 elections by running new candidates further right than their kook base. Is Foster a die-hard, run-of-the-mill, moonbat liberal? Because if he isn’t, that is how he won. The latest scam from the left is to push candidates as moderate or center and that is how they suck people like AJ in. He’s convinced the country wants to move to the center away from both ends when in fact, they want to move away from the left. A true conservative would have rallied the country against these nutbags on the left. Why do you think the media wanted McCain so badly? Because they knew any wishy-washy republicans would bite at the bait.
You are right, Vince.
If AJ and the other mods think it’s more important to defeat HillBama than to have the candidate they feel best with, why wouldn’t they also be as motivated to vote for a conservative to beat them? Would the mods and indies on the right not support a conservative so we would all be united? No, they alienated conservatives instead and now our party is twisting in the wind with a lame candidate who regardless of he wins, won’t be giving us any conservative principles anyway! Woopty doo, and AJ wants us on board. Perhaps he should have got on board with us and we’d all be eating filet in Washington. But no, they went with what they think is the “safe” play and now that he’s questionable, and under constant assault from the media who put him there, they are second guessing their gameplan…and blaming the conservatives. Well done, pseudo republicans, well done. You’ve got what you want…a candidate you fiercely defend who the conservatives aren’t even sure is a republican.
DC,
You are correct, the Democrats have never held themselves to such standards but they will be the first to “out” anyone on the other side who has and then shows to be corrupt. Just as hypocritical as a Republican who campaigns against corruption while being corrupt.
But of course you missed my point..The Republicans maintain their standards by forcing out those who show themselves to be corrupt. That shows their commitment to their standards even when the loss of one of their own can be disasterous.
As for the Dems, I’m starting to think corruption is the main qualification for holding office.
Dc, that new message the RNC needs is an old one; Conservatism. It never fails. Reagan showed us the way and the republican party is still rejecting it.
Vince, my hats off to you in Chicago. That’s TRULY disenfranchised!
AJ,
Wow, that comment oozes elitism. You probably think that’s a compliment. Trust me…it’s not.
And now the whole party is purist. Hmmm. That’s very telling…
And anyone who doesn’t think there are forces in both parties, and among moderates and independents I might add, who want group speak are just naive. Of course there are, but it doesn’t mean that every member of that party believes in group speak…that’s why the people you critisize are speaking up. So which is it AJ? Group speak or not? So are Rush, Malkin and Ingraham obedient or not, AJ? Obviously not, so you should be singing their praises according to your comment. You can’t have it both ways.
The majority of the country is smart enough to realize that there is no perfect candidate, just the one that is perfect enough for them, flaws and all. For you to assume that conservatives are all looking for that perfection just shows your lack of knowledge of conservatives in general. Are some, I’m sure. Are most, No. And if it were true, the very people you criticize would not have supported some of the people they have.
Keep up the good work !
Left by 75,
That “old message” was the very one that the RNC rank and file betrayed!! Line by line. THAT is why they are out on their keesters.
The problem they face “now” is that they did not recognize this as a wake up call, and continued on as business as usual trying to ignore the indcitments, etc., along the way. They have no one left that can carry that message. And they chose to go down with the ship rather than right the ship and put new people in charge of it.
So be it.
McCain has stood on more conservative principals than many of his accusers have. He can’t even get your righteous “conservatives” to sign off on a no-pork deal. They can’t stop spending money, they can’t stop making backroom deals (many of the illegal that will end in jail time if they get caught), they can’t stop plooking little boys…and yet its McCain who’s the enemy. It’s McCain who’s not conservative enough or somehow doesn’t stand on conservative princpals?? Bah!
And it has been this very attitude that has destroyed the RNC and torn it apart and is now going to see it ridden assunder with the corrupt and hipocrits charting it’s course to the bottom. There will not be a democrat in site to blame when you get there. And beyond that, what chance you ever had to show the world the same about the democrats is long gone…..nobody wants to hear about it from those guilty of the same thing.
What we are all doing, in that regard, is simply standing at the shore watching you sink. You’ve pushed away the life boats, thrown away the resuce ropes and drifted out to deeper water.
Where you are “right” is that “conservatism” is not dead and will be reborn within the RNC long after this mess is at the bottom with Davey Jones. Where you misunderstand is ..that is going to take different people. People who actually live by the principals they expouse and not just use them to make backroom deals, take money for votes, or gain power or to run their own harrem of young boy pages.
Ronnie was “nothing” like the current gaurd of hipocrits who are runnign the RNC into the ground.
Hint for Dc: McCain is no conservative
Hint for Left,
He’s more of a conservative than most of the asswipes that helped destroy the current RNC with their overspending, etc., etc.
AJ, I’m as conservative as they come, but when it comes to Illinois politics from my area I have to be realistic. There is a knack to be elected and re-elected out here.
I used to be a campaign coordinator for Don Manzullo, was proud to be involved in his campaigns because he is a decent conservative and because of that is re-elected with no problems. Even though his area is also suffering from much of the same as Hastert’s district, he is fair and even and recognized as such across the political divide.
He will not run negative ads, he campaigns on his accomplishments and the future . He expects his workers to show respect to his opponents or leave, that’s the inside stuff about Congressman Don.
That’s not what has been going on with the Repubs that have been trying to win in Northern IL lately. Yes Oberweis was/is a tired candidate and is also nasty. Wouldn’t want to lend him a hand and wouldn’t be proud of my vote. Fortunately, I didn’t have to vote for him, probably would have, but just think of all the folks out there that had to make that decision, I can understand why the turn out was low.
Cold hard facts, even though he is a conservative Repub, what went out over the air wasn’t about his policies, it was negative ads against Foster. Didn’t do much to convince the new suburbanites to swing his way.
Dc, none of the asswipes are running for president.
You mean..none of the asswipes got nominated to run for president.
Beyond that, the Exec/POTUS is not a “party” position.
Dc, I’ll have to take your word for it…having no experience around such people.
This from Brent Bozell today:
From the Right, He Looks Too Blue
Think real conservatives will vote for John McCain? Don’t count on it.
By L. Brent Bozell
Sunday, March 9, 2008; Page B01
The conservative talk-show community? Don’t mind them — they’re irrelevant.
This message from John McCain surrogates and other members of the political class is filling the airwaves and op-ed pages. In the Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes recently wrote that McCain needn’t worry that conservatives are uncomfortable with his candidacy, because “while they love to grumble and grouse, conservatives tend to be loyal Republicans who wind up voting for their party’s candidate.”
In the same pages, novelist Mark Helprin, a former adviser to Robert J. Dole’s presidential campaign, savaged conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin for daring to speak out against McCain. “Rather than playing recklessly with electoral politics by sabotaging their own party,” he wrote, “each of these compulsive talkers might be a tad less self-righteous, look to the long run, discipline himself, suck it up, and be a man.”
I know the conservative movement. I’ve been in the trenches fighting for an alphabet soup of conservative causes for 30 years. I’ve raised hundreds of millions of dollars for it. And I earnestly hope that McCain isn’t listening to the advice he’s getting from these folks. Their thinking betrays a fundamental misreading of the conservative pulse in America today.
Conservative leaders, particularly those in talk radio, cannot and will not be silent. They will not betray their principles and their audiences. Tens of millions of activists turn to them for guidance. These activists could be, and need to be, McCain’s ground troops, but unless and until conservatives believe him — and believe in him — they will not work for his election. McCain may have the Beltway crowd in his corner, but grass-roots conservatives aren’t sold.
Yet through his surrogates, McCain is attacking these leaders. This is beyond folly. It is political suicide.
For 20 years, the moderate establishment of the Republican Party has told conservatives to sit down, shut up and do as we’re told. History shows that sometimes we bite the bullet. But not always. I absolutely guarantee that this year we cannot be taken for granted. This is a movement fed up with betrayals, and they’ve come one after the other.
Think back to 1988. Plenty of qualified conservatives — Pete du Pont, Rep. Jack Kemp and Sen. Paul Laxalt, Pat Robertson (for evangelicals, anyway) — were prepared to succeed President Ronald Reagan, but the GOP establishment, along with the professional political class, rallied around Vice President George H.W. Bush, an unthinkable proposition for conservatives just eight years earlier. After a listless campaign start, Bush finally energized the conservative base with his “No new taxes!” pledge at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans. We carried him to victory that November.
Within two years, he’d broken his promise and delivered one of the largest tax increases in history. His 1991 nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, which pleased conservatives, had been preemptively neutralized by his selection of the liberal David H. Souter in 1990. After brilliantly executing the 1991 Persian Gulf War, he squandered a 91 percent approval rating. He did nothing to advance the conservative cause. He did not cut taxes. He did not rein in federal spending and regulation. He did nothing for social and cultural issues.
By 1992, we who had dined at the table of Ronald Reagan had been banished to the GOP kitchen. As the National Review editorialized at the time, establishment Republicans “took conservative support for granted, reasoning from the dogma of the two-party system that disaffected conservatives had ‘nowhere else to go.’ ” They were wrong. Some of us turned to Pat Buchanan, who disrupted the primary season. Others turned to independent candidate H. Ross Perot, who led the field until he imploded. Still others simply stayed home, and that November, Bush was soundly defeated by Bill Clinton.
Two years later, the “Contract With America” reversed the GOP’s fortunes. With a reignited conservative base, Republicans captured both houses of Congress. But in the face of a liberal counterattack led by the national news media — Time magazine’s cover on Dec. 19, 1994, portrayed a snarling Newt Gingrich as Uncle Scrooge, and the cover of Newsweek’s year-end double issue depicted a Dr. Seuss-esque cartoon of the House speaker smiling devilishly beside the headline “How the Gingrich Stole Christmas” — Republican resistance crumbled. The Contract was abandoned, and overnight the Gingrich revolution was finished. We watched Republican “leaders” flee into the tall grass, whence they’ve never emerged.
In 1996, a new crop of conservative leaders presented themselves as presidential candidates, but again the party establishment would have none of Buchanan, Steve Forbes, Phil Gramm or Dan Quayle. Instead, they pooled their resources behind Dole, who offered nothing to energize the conservative base while the professional class confidently clucked that conservatives had “nowhere else to go.” Again we stayed home. There was no enthusiasm for volunteer action. Again the moderate candidate was routed.
How disgruntled was the conservative base? Two years later, the GOP lost five seats in the House, the first time since 1822 that a party not in control of the White House had failed to gain seats in the midterm election of a president’s second term.
But after eight years of Clinton’s corruption, and facing the prospect of at least four more years with Al Gore at the helm, conservatives threw our support behind George W. Bush in 2000. He initially delivered by leading the charge in cutting taxes, and his political stature further increased when the nation rallied behind its commander in chief after Sept. 11, 2001. He won reelection in 2004 because conservatives stayed with him, delivering millions of volunteers committed to the defeat of Sen. John F. Kerry.
But any hopes that Bush would deliver on a conservative agenda in his second term evaporated almost immediately. We watched with growing fury as he and the GOP leadership promoted one liberal initiative after another. Finally, we openly rebelled, turning on the GOP over the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, amnesty for illegal immigrants and the Republicans’ shameless abandonment of fiscal discipline. What was once a powerful alliance between the Republican Party and grass-roots conservatives had become a political bridge to nowhere. With the GOP facing the loss of Congress in 2006, we shrugged in indifference. The movement that had “nowhere else to go” had gone.
And it has not returned.
How important are conservatives to the GOP? This year’s Republican primary debate was dominated by one question: Which candidate was most qualified to carry the flag of Ronald Reagan?
Ironically, the man who survived this intramural scrum is the one who arguably least qualifies as a Reagan conservative. He claims to be a champion of freedom but gave us McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform — which, by limiting free speech during elections, is perhaps the greatest infringement ever on the First Amendment. He claims to be a champion of U.S. sovereignty but offered us the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform bill that would give millions of illegal immigrants the chance to become citizens; that’s amnesty, no matter how much he denies it. He claims to be a champion of the unborn but has waffled in the past, supporting federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research. This year, he won the endorsement of Republicans for Choice. He claims to be a fiscal conservative who will make the Bush tax cuts permanent, but he also voted against them. These are serious issues.
What should McCain do? Saying he’s not Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama will not be enough — not this time. Repudiating positions that are anathema to conservatism won’t be enough, either. The liberal base of the Democratic Party is on fire; he must bring an equal passion to the table with his conservative base. It is time for McCain to be Reagan.
This is what conservatives call on him to do:
McCain must present a strategy to defeat the threat of radical Islam. He needs to call on the United States to rebuild its military infrastructure, so devastated by the Clinton administration. He should secure our borders by a date certain. In every great struggle, the citizenry — everyone, not just the country’s military — has been challenged to participate. McCain could make this the clarion call for volunteerism, for national service.
If McCain believes in freedom, he should promise to take the yoke off the American taxpayer. He has embraced making the Bush tax cuts permanent. Good. Now he should pledge to end the estate tax and lower the corporate tax rate to 25 percent. In fact, he should call for an overhaul of the tax system. The flat tax or the fair tax — either is preferable to the monstrosity that is the Internal Revenue Service.
The federal government is out of control. Conservatives don’t want to hear talk about “reining in the growth of government.” Those are empty words. McCain needs to call for the elimination of entire sectors of the federal leviathan. He should pledge to turn back to the states that which is their responsibility and which comes under their authority. We want to see how he will deregulate the private sector and how he will once again unleash the economic might of the United States. He should champion private retirement accounts and health savings accounts.
McCain should place the left on notice — now — that if elected, he will not tolerate congressional obstructionism of his nominations to the federal judiciary.
Our culture is decaying from within, and most Republicans have been shamefully AWOL on this issue. McCain could begin a national conversation about parents, not the state, taking responsibility for their children and their communities. He should call on the entertainment industry to stop polluting America’s youth with its videos and its music and on the Internet. We wait to hear him call for the United States to honor the sanctity of life, the sanctity of marriage and family, and to return God to the public square.
If McCain offers this kind of vision, Washington elitists will scoff. But he should remember that they also scoffed and dismissed Ronald Reagan, all the way to his election. And his reelection.
bbozell@mediaresearch.org