Tag: 2012 election

#rsrh And so begins the 2012 Congressional cycle…

…I’m starting to get the first calls from campaigns looking for RedState phone interviews. We had a pretty good run, last cycle: I think that the tally is something like at least five sitting governors, six sitting Senators, and twenty-six sitting Congressmen were interviewed by RedState since 2009.  Given that I’ll probably doing a lot of the non-Presidential ones, I figure that putting up the ground rules here and RedHotting it will give the right balance of access and shameless self-promotion.

Basically, the rules are these: I’ll be happy to interview people running as Republicans (I’m not interested in third-party candidates, sorry); I will interview people running against a Republican incumbent; but I am not interested in Red-on-Red Congressional dirt-spreading (I’m having enough headaches from the Republican Presidential primaries already).  Simply put, if you want your candidate to have a shot at telling me and RedState’s readers how awesome s/he is, great; if you want to instead take ten minutes telling me about how awful your Republican* opponent is… yeah, this is probably not going to go well.

Contact form is here; alternatively, anybody reading this with access to a RedState Director can use that email.  It’ll get to me pretty quickly.

Moe Lane

*Candidates can always tell me about how awful their Democratic opponent is, though.  That’s perfectly spiffy.

#rsrh Joe Biden Opens His Mouth, 2012 election edition.

Before you watch this clip (via Jim Geraghty), I want you to understand something: this is Joe Biden, Vice President of the United States of America. This is the guy hand-picked by then-Senator Barack Obama to be his wingman. This is the guy that was to have Obama’s back; the person that Obama would trust with the keys; the man who the President could rely on, no matter what. And not just from the point of view of the Presidency: with this pick Barack Obama made it clear that, in his judgment, Joe Biden was the best, most reliable choice out there for the Democratic party.

Got that?

Good. Now watch: Continue reading #rsrh Joe Biden Opens His Mouth, 2012 election edition.

#rsrh Kirsten Gillibrand to NOT run for NY-SEN in 2012?

There’s a rumor going around that she’s being tapped to replace Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket (no link, sorry: I’m getting this one via email).  Supposedly it’s at the point where certain NY Republicans are quietly exploring the possibility of doing a run for the seat, after all; I’ve heard that at least one downstate Republican elected official is seriously considering going for it.

I’m not all that convinced that this rumor is credible, but I have to admit that my reasons for discounting it are as follows:

  • It’s a bad idea for New York Democrats (win or lose, they’ll be removing a potential candidate for Governor down the line);
  • It’s a bad idea for national Democrats (they can ill-afford to put yet another Senate seat in play for 2012);
  • It’s an embarrassment for everybody who dutifully insisted that Biden would be a net positive for the Obama administration.

Which is to say, none of the reasons would have any effect on Barack Obama – even the last one; he can always claim that choosing Biden wasn’t really entirely voluntary on his part* – and God knows that the man is narcissistic enough to think that he could get away with it.

So, there’s that.

Moe Lane

*It’d be easy, really.  Party leadership wanting to add the voice of experience to the ticket, blah blah, no wish to hurt the party further after the primary, yadda yadda, Obama now realizes that he should have trusted his own judgement more, etc, etc, etc…

#rsrh QotD, From The Mouth of Bai Edition.

Matt Bai probably didn’t mean this the way it came out.

If administrations are to be judged solely on results, rather than in the context of the times, then Mr. Obama can’t possibly make a compelling argument for his own re-election — not when unemployment refuses to fall below 9 percent.

Particularly since Bai probably doesn’t want you to consider that “context of the times” includes “the country elected an untested and unskilled Messianic figure who literally promised that his election would result in the seas receding.” Or “the country gave said secular Messiah one of the most lopsided Congressional majorities in living memory, and he urinated it away on health care rationing and a stimulus that didn’t work.”  Or even “You know, when George W Bush was President gas prices AND unemployment were about half what they are now.”

So… are you better off than you were three years ago?  How about two years? Shoot, how’s this fiscal quarter shaping up for you, in comparison to the last one?

Moe Lane

Gov. Bob McDonnell (R, VA) on short list for VP?

That’s one potential conclusion that you can draw from today’s and yesterday’s Quinnipiac polls looking at Virginia political conditions.  Admittedly, they’re just one firm’s polls; also admittedly, anyone likely to be reading this is a hardcore political junky anyway, so we might as well take a look.

Yesterday’s Q-poll looked at Governor McDonnell’s popularity rating*, which is – to be modest about it – practically off of the charts at 61/21.  Those numbers represent a 67/17 favorable rating with independents, a barely underwater 39/40 among Democrats… and a 46/32 favorable rating with African-American voters, which presumably should have people perking up at this point – not that it would last long in a hypothetical 2012 Presidential election contest against Obama, of course.  Still, ablative armor is still armor, and the unique nature of Virginia’s gubernatorial situation applies here.  Bob McDonnell can’t run again for Governor in 2013 any which way anyway; and even an unsuccessful Vice Presidential run would not necessarily stop him from running for Senate in 2014, should Mark Warner (who is also very popular in Virginia) decide that he’d rather run for Governor again in 2013.  Or even if Senator Warner decides to stay in the Senate, for that matter. Continue reading Gov. Bob McDonnell (R, VA) on short list for VP?

Time for some Democratic third-party panic!

Karl over at Hot Air analyzes this WSJ article by Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen about as I would, but I have a couple of things to add.

  • Executive summary of the Caddell/Schoen article: a third party is really, really likely next year!  And it’d be good to have!
  • Executive summary of the Hot Air article: no, it’s not really likely.  Here, have some links to all those examples and historical data that Caddell/Schoen referenced, but inexplicably declined to link to*, and you’ll see why.
  • Executive summary of my reaction: what Karl said.  Besides, when Democrats start talking about how spiffy third-parties would be in a given race, it’s typically code for “Oh, God, we are so hosed next year if we run the current candidate.”

No, really.  The thing about the way that third parties are talked about by the media is that people only bring them up when they want to make it look like Generic Election X is going to be another Bush/Clinton/Perot ’92.  The problem is, our current political system is designed to bring about results that are more like Christie/Corzine/Daggett ’09**: two ‘real’ parties, with the rest acting as minor spoilers at best.  Which means that results like Hickenlooper/Maes/Tancredo ’10 are widely – and properly – seen as places where the system broke down, rather than a goal to aspire to. Continue reading Time for some Democratic third-party panic!

#rsrh Democrats cannot hope for Obama primary challenge.

That’s what Jay Cost thinks, and he’s got five good reasons why he thinks that: Obama’s access to money, the White House, Democratic client groups, African-American voters, and the Democratic party establishment.  Whether this is ‘fortunate’ or not depends on whether you’re looking forward to either having to defend Democratic policies since 2007, or whether you’re gleefully anticipating rolling those policies into a nice, thick roll and using them to beat at the heads and shoulders of Democratic politicians, all the way down to the county commissioner level.

Guess which camp I’m in.

More seriously, if the Democrats want this guy gone then they’re going to have to convince President Obama that he needs to be the first President since LBJ to not run for re-election.  And the odds of that happening are are just short of nil, of course – so I don’t know what the netroots’/progressives’ Plan C is going to be, here.  Complain, whine, and get entertainingly cross and querulous about having to live with the consequences of their actions, I guess.  They seem to default to that anyway.

Moe Lane

#rsrh I wonder if Ruy Teixeira…

…felt physical pain at having to write this:

Reagan’s base was so enthusiastic in 1984 not just because he did and said conservative things but because he was riding a wave of growth and jobs into that election. They could look at their candidate and say: “See, his policies work; screw you, you dumb liberals.” Obama supporters can make no such claim.

One hopes.

Moe Lane

PS: The rest of the article can be summed up in one sentence: If the President doesn’t get unemployment down and the economy back up and running, he’s [expletive deleted]. Blind squirrel, nut, and so forth.

 

Barack Obama’s disappointing 2Q?

Possibly the Obama campaign wants me to have that reaction, which was based on the news that they’ve released the total number of donors to date (just under 500,000) rather than the total amount collected in the second quarter.  The campaign did so enjoy playing the expectations game in 2008.  But what the heck: if it’s a trap, let me charge forward and trigger it anyway. Continue reading Barack Obama’s disappointing 2Q?