The Next Right

Jobs Jobs Jobs Jobs Jobs Jobs

Brian Donahue — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:10:59 +0000

Stories and reports continue to break about the stimulus bill that was rushed through congress earlier this year and the fact that it has not succeeded in creating more jobs for Americans.

Still, there doesn't appear to be any leadership or a unified voice raising the tenor of outrage about this massive failure by the Democratic leaders in Congress and the Administration. The more people scratch the surface of the stimulus reports, the more they discover a government boondoggle - with non-existent congressional districts, counting jobs that were created without stimulus funding, double-counting of jobs, and unclear entities that have been credited with creating new jobs.

All the while, unemployment has reached an unbelievable 10.2%

This upcoming election cycle is about jobs and the economy - plain and simple. Every poll since September 2008 has shown that the number one concern of voters is jobs and the economy.

Voters are watching family members, neighbors and friends cope with layoffs, and many have lost their own jobs. People are surviving on smaller paychecks. Many Americans know someone who has lost their home to a foreclosure and ever increasing numbers believe the stimulus is having no effect on the economy. There is a sweeping sentiment among voters that the government is getting too large and is not responsive to the people.

Without mincing words, the trillion dollar stimulus the Washington Democrats shoved down America's throat is a debacle and is the clearest example of how they are fundamentally failing the American people in regards to jobs and the economy.

In fact, David Obey, Chairman of the Appropriations Committee and father of the stimulus bill, is now placing blame on the Administration for lack of oversight of his own bill. Even he is running scared from the mess that is the stimulus bill.

This can not be emphasized enough.

Health care reform is important and must debated and a government-run plan should be fought aggressively. However, it appears that while we focus on that, the opposition is getting a free pass on this. In reality, the healthcare legislation is a distraction to what is most important - the Democratic leadership's big government approach to jobs and the economy has failed...and this is the strongest reason why a big government approach to healthcare is wrong.

Republicans need to begin calling for accountability on this failed stimulus bill that is wrought with inconsistencies and bad numbers...and drumbeat the looming question, "Where are the jobs?"

I point you to a piece by Mike Flynn, editor of BigGovernment.com. Mike wrote a post today, Obama Stimulus Numbers: The Return of Enron-Style Accounting, comparing the reporting of the stimulus bill to Enron's reporting of it's financial reports. He's starting to see where this is heading.

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X-Sen. Harry Reid

Conn Carroll — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:38:41 +0000

I don't know much about Danny Tarkanian other than the fact that his dad coached some exciting basketball teams, but if the rest of his campaign is as funny and on target as this ad, then Harry Reid in a world of trouble:

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The problem with Recovery.gov isn't the data, it is the politics

Soren Dayton — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:12:13 +0000

The White House has gotten a black eye for two key problems with the Recovery.gov stimulus database. The first problem was that the numbers of jobs were bogus. The Washington Examiner has concluded that at least 10% of the jobs were fabrications. The second problem was that the data about congressional districts were clearly garbage.

But I am not here to rehash this. There is a legitimate problem with the data. But the data wouldn't be such a big deal if the White House hadn't tried to politicize the data and claim victory.

Recovery.gov is a tremendous success for the transparency movement. Politicians lie. A key goal of the transparency movement is to give the people the power to keep the politicians accountable. And that's what this has done.

Here's what happened: The White House shared the data and lied about what it showed. And the data has been used to hang them.

First, let's go to the stimulus bill itself. Congress demanded that the White House report jobs created or saved numbers:

(8) The website shall provide a link to estimates of the jobs sustained or created by the Act.

But that legislative langauge says that "[t]he website shall provide a link to estimates" ... "by the Act". The bill doesn't require a per-contract or a per-district accounting of jobs.

So what's happening? The White House quickly learned that the stimulus bill was going to be a hot potato. So they started to use Recovery.gov to give them (and their Democratic allies in Congress -- recall no Republicans voted for this) cover.

Let's be clear what happened here: the White House politicized this data. And now they are getting hung with the politicization of it (not the bad data).

And this goes to the deeper point. Check out this story from the Washington Post from October 30th, the weekend before election day:

Reports to be released Friday on the government Web site Recovery.gov are expected to show that the $150 billion in grants and loans made so far under the economic stimulus package have created or saved about 650,000 jobs, White House officials said Friday morning.
White House officials said the reports -- which were filed by state and city governments and other recipients of stimulus grants and loans -- will confirm their recent estimates that the $787 billion package passed in February has so far saved or created about a million jobs, putting it on track to match their estimates of 3.5 million jobs created or saved over the three-year span of the stimulus. That calculation is based on the fact that today's reports do not include much of the package's spending -- tax cuts, safety net spending and fiscal aid to strapped states, which injected tens of billions more into the economy and, in the case of the state aid, forestalled layoffs of state workers.

The White House clearly leaked this information the weekend before election day to claim victory based on garbage data. Furthermore, they claimed that Recovery.gov confirmed their previous assessments, and didn't come to any new conclusions based on data.

Fifteen days earlier, based on partial data, the White House also claimed victory based on incomplete data, using the same number. From the Hill's Walter Alarkon:

"All signs -- from private estimates to this fragmentary data -- point to the conclusion that the Recovery Act did indeed create or save about 1 million jobs in its first seven months, a much needed lift in a very difficult period for our economy," said Jared Bernstein, the chief economist for Vice President Joe Biden.

That same 1m had been their talking point for a while. In September the White House said:

This analysis indicates that the ARRA and other policy actions caused employment in August to be slightly more than 1 million jobs higher than it otherwise would have been.

In May, they said:

Our finding was that the ARRA would increase employment relative to the baseline in this quarter by approximately 3.5 million

Six months later, the White House was repeating these same numbers even though they had data to prove it false. That's the problem.

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How candidates can pick up support from the Tea Party and libertarian crowd

Stephen Gordon — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:47:39 +0000

On November 10th, the Rainy Day Patriots (the group organized in conjunction with Birmingham Tea Parties) and Campaign for Liberty hosted a gubernatorial debate in Springville, Alabama. All of the announced candidates were invited, four committed to the event, and three actually showed. The debate was moderated by local talk show host Matt Murphy and a representative from each of the sponsoring organizations.

During the debate, Robert Bentley, Tim James and Bill Johnson all presented themselves as fiscal conservatives. However, one of these candidates decisively won the straw poll following the debate. Here is how the votes broke down:

Johnson 6%
Byrne 4%
Bentley 12%
James 72%

While the cast of players has significantly changed, I still stand by my earlier statement that Tim James is the guy to watch because he IS a fiscal conservative and not just another Republican trying to sound like one in order to pick up votes from Tea Party folks, libertarians, fiscally conservative independents, Reagan Democrats and Ron Paul supporters.

In my opinion, the key reason James dominated the straw poll results is because he mentioned the Federal Reserve and Keynesian economics in his opening statement, which I clipped for your viewing pleasure. The entire debate is available on video here.

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Government Health Care: Who's being naive?

Jon Henke — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:36:11 +0000

More than a few people have accurately observed that politics invariably turns into a a protection racket. Note: None have made the point more enjoyably than the brilliant Mary Katharine Ham in this video.

In the Washington Examiner, Dr. Paul Hsieh (of Geekpress) points out that, even if they only intend to give people lower costs and more access, government tends to make offers that you can't refuse. We already see this happening in health care, and more intervention will only exacerbate it - especially as the budget crunch becomes more a more immediate problem.

Suppose the mafia came to your town and forced everyone to purchase all their meals at mob-approved restaurants. The mafia would also select the menu items. [...]

Under any system of mandatory insurance, the government must necessarily determine what constitutes an "acceptable" plan. Hence, this creates a magnet for special interests seeking to include their pet benefits on the required insurance menu.

Massachusetts residents must purchase numerous benefits that they may neither need nor want, such as in vitro fertilization, drug abuse therapy and chiropractor services. If you'd rather purchase low-cost catastrophic-only insurance without those options, tough luck. Mandatory insurance thus violates the individual's right to spend his own money for his benefit according to his best judgment. [...]

Like the mafia, Congress wants to make you an offer you can't refuse. At least the mafia doesn't pretend that it's acting for your own good.

There is no doubt that our current health care system is deeply flawed, and I accept that health care presents a genuinely wicked problem for both markets and democracies. However, the more complex the attempted "solution", the more room there is for errors, unintended consequences, protectionism and rent-seeking. We have already seen the administration try to buy off doctors, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and hospitals with legislative favors and protection. That's not an unusual error. That is how legislation works.

Current legislation may be a problem, but the biggest problems lay over the horizon where deficits and debt will force compromises and mandates driven more by public choice theory than public interest.

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GOP Revival: There's An App for That

Patrick Ruffini — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:30 +0000

What Ramesh Ponnuru has written about Tuesday's wins is right in so many ways:

More important, a few Republican candidates have demonstrated that it is possible to transcend the party's conservative-moderate divide. In Virginia, Robert McDonnell won a landslide — the first Republican win in a governor's race there in 12 years — by running as a problem solver. Social conservatives know he is one of them. But independent voters strongly backed him too. Voters as a whole trusted him more than his Democratic opponent on everything from fixing the roads to strengthening the economy. Once he had that trust, Democrats were unable to get voters to see him as frighteningly conservative, although they tried to make hay out of a hard-right master's thesis McDonnell wrote in 1989.

[Disclosure: I consulted for the McDonnell campaign, and these are my personal views on why he won.]

In the wake of McDonnell's landslide, many observers have pointed to his brand of "pragmatism" to make the case that McDonnell -- and not Hoffman in NY-23 -- is the way forward for conservatives in 2010.

But to point to McDonnell as a subrosa moderate profoundly misses the point. McDonnell is a strong conservative who early in the campaign put Deeds on the defensive by running against Obama and Pelosi's policies, most notably card check and cap-and-trade. There was never any doubt as to McDonnell's conservative bona fides.

But even though McDonnell was in fact a true conservative, there was no need to make the election about those credentials. McDonnell's conservatism spoke for itself.

What the campaign keyed in on very early is that most voters aren't ideological. In a time of crisis, they first and foremost want problems solved -- and specifically, the problems created by too much government meddling and taxes to go away.

Wait, not ideological? So Ruffini's saying we need to run moderates? No. That is precisely the opposite of what I am saying.

Because very few independents care about ideological name-checks, they won't be swayed by scare tactics trying to persuade them that Candidate X is the ideological second-coming of Attila the Hun. We saw this with the thesis attacks. Candidates have wide latitude to run as who they actually are, so long as they can persuade voters they'll deal with the bread and butter issues (which was McDonnell's calling card).

In a purple state like Virginia, you can win by running as a liberal and a problem-solver (Kaine), as a moderate and a problem-solver (Warner), and as a strong conservative and a problem-solver (McDonnell).

Faced with that choice, why wouldn't we choose to run the conservative every time? A non-ideological electorate gives us more leeway to run conservatives in blueish/purple states, not less. To get a flavor of this in action, just look at the closing slide of McDonnell's ads:

The ubiquitous "Jobs Governor" branding and the spinning icons highlighting different issues is evocative of the desire for practical, clickable solutions to everyday problems shown in another recent marketing campaign.

Fixing Northern Virginia traffic? There's an app for that.

Jobs? There's an app for that.

Education? There's an app for that.

Essentially, whatever the issue was, Bob McDonnell wanted you he had the proverbial "app for that" -- a set of practical solutions not overtly branded as left, center, or right.

Considering the issue void that was the Creigh Deeds campaign, it was just what the doctor ordered.

Republicans in Virginia have struggled to make their prescriptions relevant to swing voters. Our issues in local elections have traditionally been issues like taxes and immigration that don't always lend themselves to policy heft. And a lack of policy heft has translated into an intangible sense that there's not enough "there there."

This was the central challenge facing the McDonnell campaign at its outset, and so it systematically sought to dismantle this critique by branding McDonnell as a practical problem solver without compromising his conservative principles.

Republicans can be specific, detailed, and confident in putting forward solutions relevant to the middle class, while also being more conservative than we have been in recent years (especially with the Bush era spending binge). There's not an either/or tradeoff between conservatism and a policy focus, something the McDonnell campaign proved in Virginia this year.

The lesson of the McDonnell campaign: Maintain your conservative principles, but make the election about policy. And whatever the issue, make sure you've got an app for that.

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The Youth Vote and the 2009 Elections

Aaron Marks — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:51:14 +0000

Sarah Burris of Future Majority beats me to the punch in rebutting a blog post about a “Rising Tide of the GOP Youth,” as described by The Weekly Standard’s Rachel Hoff. Burris writes:

First, while Rachel is right to congratulate McDonnell for his campaign’s youth outreach, I hardly think it has anything to do with young voters having gone to the GOP…

This doesn’t mean young voters have gone GOP, it means that when you put forth the effort to get young voters, you speak to their issues, and you get out the vote you get a good result.

I wish I felt comfortable celebrating the fact that the 2009 elections meant young voters were turning toward the GOP, but unfortunately I just don’t buy it. Hoff suggests that “18-29 year olds in Virginia voted for Bob McDonnell over the Democrat 54% to 44%” could indicate a new trend, but as Burris notes, in Virginia there was not a “strong Democrat at the top of the ticket but…[there was] a strong Republican.” The unfortunate fact is that one Republican candidate’s successful effort in winning the youth vote does not indicate any sort of trend for future elections (for a counterargument, just look to New Jersey, where 57% of young voters voted for Corzine).

And while Hoff notes that “turnout among 18-29 year olds was 19% in New Jersey and only 17% in Virginia,” an “alarmingly low” turnout, it would be a huge mistake for the GOP to write off the youth vote based upon these numbers. As I have written previously, what’s at stake here is that the Republican Party stands to lose a generation of voters to the Democratic Party, potentially for life. Although Chairman Steele has taken some major efforts to reform the Republican National Committee, such as a huge push to modernize the RNC’s new media efforts, there still has not been a substantial push by Steele’s RNC to win over young voters.

In the end, both Burris and Hoff agree that making a real, authentic effort to earn the votes of young voters will result in young voter turnout. The Republican Party still has time left to turn the tide and prevent many of today’s young voters from becoming lifelong Democrats; however, the clock is ticking and time is running out. Major congratulations are due to the McDonnell campaign and their young voter outreach, but there is no time to pat ourselves on the back. Both the RNC and Republican candidates must follow Bob McDonnell’s lead and find unique new ways to reach out to and ultimately win over young voters.

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The Left Is In Full Retreat

Conn Carroll — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:35:54 +0000

Did conservatives or progressives win on Tuesday? Don't listen to what they say, pay attention to what they do.

Politico reports "Climate change on the back burner?"

Climate change has slipped so far down on the agenda that at least one key committee chairman has suggested it might have to wait until after the 2010 elections.

A number of factors are conspiring against the Senate version of the bill: a Republican boycott on the Environment and Public Works Committee, a new EPA analysis that could take at least five weeks and wide-ranging disagreements among six competing Senate committee leaders who have jurisdiction.

“Some people are talking about not doing it until after the 2010 election,” Commerce Committee Chairman John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said Tuesday.

ABC News reports Top Dems: Obama Won't Get Health Care Bill in 2009

Senior Congressional Democrats told ABC News today it is highly unlikely that a health care reform bill will be completed this year, just a week after President Barack Obama declared he was "absolutely confident" he'll be able to sign one by then.

"Getting this done by the by the end of the year is a no-go," a senior Democratic leadership aide told ABC News. Two other key Congressional Democrats also told ABC News the same thing.

The Senate is not going to vote on health care till January 2010. The Senate is not going to vote on cap and trade till after November 2010. The left is scared and on the run. We have the initiative. We need to press them on jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs.

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What Did NY-23 Mean?

Jon Henke — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:56:06 +0000

[Disclosure: I worked with the Doug Hoffman campaign. However, the views here are my own. I have not discussed this at all with the Hoffman campaign.]

The bottom line on NY-23:

Doug Hoffman just won the Republican Primary. The general election is next year.

There are two broken, corrupt, arrogant political parties we need to defeat. We beat the Republican establishment in 2009. We'll beat the Democratic Party in 2010.

NY-23 is not really about Conservatives VS Moderates. It is about the Establishment VS the Movement.

What happened in NY-23:

For years, the conventional wisdom has been that blue state Republicans had to nominate a "not too hot, not too cold" candidate - what my friend Max Borders called a Keynesian political strategy of tweaking the policy variables until you get a candidate whose positions seem most appealing to the most people. Like Keynesian economic tinkering, it all works very well....until some fundamental shift reveals the underlying artificiality, and it all falls apart.

Political parties gain power by standing for something appealing. But when a party gains power, it loses definition. Rather than standing for something appealing and well-defined, they try to stand for anything appealing enough to win. But you can only tinker so much before you destroy the brand that people had elected, and then you become the minority again.

The minority is where Parties and movements go to be reborn. There, they have to figure out who they are, and what their mission is. You can't storm the castle until you're all facing the same direction and focused on the same goals. Sometimes - as in NY-23 - that involves telling the establishment "Thank you, but our mission is in another castle" (If I might borrow political wisdom from Super Mario Bros).

The establishment GOP - the NY GOP, the NRCC, the RNC and a few prominent Republicans - got behind another establishment GOP type in Dede Scozzafava. In any other recent year, she would have sailed through. Not in 2009.

The public - including moderates, libertarians and alienated Republicans - has grown much more nervous about Democratic governance. The Tea Party movement is just one manifestation of the sparks that are flying, but it goes far deeper than that, and the establishment GOP has been oblivious to, or dismissive of, these sparks. With Dede Scozzafava, the establishment Republican Party threw gasoline on top of the sparks and a brushfire erupted. The result was the quintessential "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" campaign of Doug Hoffman.

What NY-23 Is About

The story of NY-23 is not "conservatives beat moderates" or "conservative loses to Democrat".

The story of NY-23 is "the Right starts dismantling the Republican establishment." This is about how the Republican Party is defined and who defines it.

Right now, the movement wants the Republican Party to be defined by opposition to big government. Gradually, as new leaders arise, we will demand that the Republican Party be defined by its own solutions, as well, but rebuilding is an incremental process. We can hammer out the policy agenda and the boundaries of the coalition later.

For now, our job is to disrupt the establishment GOP. If we beat Democrats while we're at it, great. But the first priority is to fix the Drunk Party - the Living Dead establishment Republicans. They're history. They just don't know it yet.

NY-23 was the first shot in that war. It was a direct hit. Next year, we start storming the castle.

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Using Web 2.0 to Fight Voter Fraud, 4 easy ways

david kralik — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:02:24 +0000

Its been said that Democrats have two growing electoral bases: trial lawyers and voter fraud.

Republican candidates who get screwed in elections by Democrat / Leftist / ACORN voter fraud is so common that its deserving of its own Wylie Coyote routine.

This year, its time we stand up and fight.

We can send Jon Corzine packing this year if we prevent him & the New Jersey political machine from stealing yet another election.

The same goes for a myriad of other races today.

So, today we fight back.

And we fight back with Web 2.0.

Here are four simple ways to report voter fraud:

Twitter | use #votefraud hashtag

YouTube | visit http://www.youtube.com/group/votefraud09

Flickr | visit: http://www.flickr.com/groups/votefraud

Facebook | visit: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=214486540096

[UPDATE: 3:23 PST 11/3/09]: John Henke requested that we add links to "prove" that vote fraud was occurring. Or had occurred.

I can't speak for this year's election (yet). Hopefully as a result of Web 2.0, we won't have to.

But as for past instances of vote fraud, my definition of vote fraud INCLUDES vote registration fraud (some people differ). Check these links out. Also, John Fund has an excellent book that i highly recommend reading.

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