From the diaries, by Erick

There are some lessons to be learned from NY-23 regarding third party efforts and why limited government conservatives need to play within a two party system. Even in New York, one of only five states to embrace fusion politics (allowing a candidate to run on one ballot as the candidate of multiple parties and combine his total vote between the parties), , Doug Hoffman was unable to win on the Conservative Party ticket. Arguably, the RNC and NRCC botched everything so badly in the race that Hoffman might have won as the Conservative Party candidate if the Republicans had not spent over a million in muddling things up. Even had he won, it’s hardly an argument that the entire approach would work nationally. In fact, I would argue that those who advocating for and working in third parties are empowering everything and everyone that is wrong with the political system as it now stands.

American politics always has been, and for the foreseeable future, will be, a two party system. I’ve heard arguments that the current two party system is a creation of the early 20^th century progressives. It’s not. When political parties started in America, really around the 1800 election, there were the Democrat-Republican Party and the Federalist Party, and it has always been that way: two major, dominant political parties have controlled American politics. Some will point out that the Whig party used to exist as a major party and gave way to the Republican Party, as though somehow that’s an argument for third parties being effective. It’s not. It wasn’t like there were then three major political parties in America. The Whig Party vacated the political stage and the Republican Party entered stage left, leaving . . . two major political parties.

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In April I blogged about Larry Sabato’s statement that, in the wake of the much-vaunted 2008 Obama realignment, “we’re on our way from being a two-party system to being a party-and-a-half system. And the Republicans are the half a party.”  Sabato was all over the tube last night and today, but I didn’t hear any mea culpas from him about what now seems like a ridiculous prediction.  Nor did I hear any apologies from the many other pundits who made similar predictions.

Obama’s 2008 victory in Virginia was the crown jewel of the supposed realignment.  Now it’s a glaring example of how silly virtually every declaration of realignment turns out to be.  As I said in April, such declarations “are appealing in their simplicity and particularly persuasive in the aftermath of a one-sided election.  But, like all analyses based on sample sizes of one or two elections, they’re essentially worthless.”

This is very well done. The South Carolina Republican Party has put together the video below. It launches tomorrow throughout the state.

I know a lot of you have all sorts of ideas for advertising for the GOP. I know because many of you email these things to me. It looks like the South Carolina Republican Party has been getting the same stuff, because this ad campaign is right in line with what a lot of you send me.

The cool thing is that this will only be the start. They are going to roll out some serious new technological tools, harness the internet, and work like crazy to grow the party. It is well done and I wish them luck.

To find out more, go to SCGOP.com. Of course, you might wait till tomorrow, because the video below is part of a roll out that starts tomorrow. But we’re RedState, so we have it for you today.

I’m a Republican from SCGOP on Vimeo.

…when it takes me less than ten minutes to track down his Congressional District (VA-10, Frank Wolf) or his local party apparatus (Fairfax County GOP).  Neither of which is particularly mentioned in his bio page, although a link to his book slamming President Bush is.  Prominently.  Where it’s the first thing that you can see, really.

This is fronted (via Instapundit) because this is the problem: we have lists and lists of people who want some nebulous Little Red Hen to fix their pet problem with the GOP.  Fixing the problems themselves?  Not so much.

Moe Lane

PS: Sure, you can join next year, Bartlett. Just don’t expect to be given a task more involved than “make a sign to bring”…wow.  Can you even imagine Bruce Bartlett standing on a street corner, waving a homemade sign around and encouraging people to honk if they’re tired of the government spending too much of their money?  No, neither can I.

Which is more or less my point.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

The daughters of two famous Republican politicians have been getting some serious face time in the media lately. Meghan McCain has a head start, thanks to her blog, her father’s campaign for the presidency last year and a set of beliefs which the Obama-loving drive-by media finds very close to their own. So she has been given a wealth of video footage and column inches to get out her message that even her father’s GOP is still not sufficiently Democrat Lite to successfully suck up to the generation she assumes to speak for.

McCain The Daughter has gotten so much media exposure that she’s starting to wear thin, even on the mellow nerves of crunchy cons, conservatives who are okay with some of the ways of liberalism. Meghan’s ways, especially her attitudes about sex, are not those aspects of liberalism that the crunchies are comfortable with. Rod Dreher, in his latest BeliefNet post, calls her “moronic” and “a useful idiot for the media left.”

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New Jersey GOP gubernatorial candidate Christopher Christie appeared on Hannity alongside former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a possible candidate for Governor of New York himself, and pledged to lead a resurgence of the Republican Party in the northeast.  His prescription is an approach that emphasizes traditional conservative ideas of low taxes and spending cuts.

We’ve got to get back to basics as a party.  [When] we put good candidates up to talk about our core principles…that’s a winning argument.  And especially in a place like New Jersey where people are suffocating.  There suffocating from the taxation.”

Giuliani agreed, saying that Christie’s core conservative message, coupled with a strong effort in the Virginia governor’s race, will set the table for a Republican comeback in the 2010 Congressional elections.  “We did it in 1994.  This is how a political party comes back, with good candidates that can win.”  Christie seems to be making good on that promise.  The most recent polling shows him maintaining a nine point advantage over incumbent Governor Jon Corzine (D).

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[UPDATE]: Here are couple more links for you:
Rebuilding the GOP: The Committeeman Project
Get Your STORC On

I am not ordering anybody to follow this checklist.  I’m not even going to nag about it.  I am merely suggesting that you consider answering the questions on them before you go off on how the party isn’t listening to you.

• What is the name of your local GOP group, on the county / district level?
• Who is the chair?
• When do they meet?
• What was discussed at the last meeting?
• What happened at that meeting that you disagreed with the most?
• How did they address your concerns?
• When does the group or sub-group that would best resolve your concerns meet?
• Who else in that group or sub-group would you say is your best ally in resolving that concern?
• Who in your area is running for state, county, and local office?
• What did they say that they needed the most help with?
• Who is the greatest obstructionist in your group, and how do you get around him or her?

I’ll keep saying it until it sinks in: there’s no cavalry coming to save us, ladies and gentlemen.  That’s because we’re the cavalry.

And we are perfectly capable of saving ourselves.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Thanks to my chairmanship of the Executive Roundtable for the Republican Governor’s Association, I have had the privilege of knowing some of the party’s most influential leaders. This, plus concerns on the current Administration’s direction (think assault on free enterprise and march toward socialism) have led me to some early thoughts on who might both lead our party back and who might be our nominee in 2012.

So, for better, or for worse, based on my personal experiences, here are my top ten who are leading the debate today, some of whom we should be looking to for 2012. Given that I believe the solutions to most of our country’s problems aren’t found in Washington, you will find few on my list who serve in Congress.

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It is with great regret that this is the second time in less than a week that I am sharing my thoughts with you about a recently departed friend.  That said, this one is much different and far more heart-wrenching than the first.

I have been a Jack Kemp Republican my entire life. His message of hope and compassion mixed with fiscal conservatism, lower taxes, less government, and individual empowerment have guided me throughout my years in both business and politics. I always thought Jack was the true heir to Ronald Reagan and he was an incredible inspiration to so many of us.

His influence on Republican policy can hardly be measured. Jack was one of the earliest to recognize the importance of Arthur Laffer’s supply-side theories. He was instrumental in putting tax cuts at the top of Ronald Reagan’s agenda, and the Kemp-Roth tax cuts are among the most important economic policies of the 20th century.  Without them, it’s impossible to say whether President Bush would have taken the same course twenty years later.  And thanks to his past as a championship-winning quarterback with the AFL Buffalo Bills, Jack understood minorities and others outside of the usual, traditional Republican constituencies better than most of us.  For decades he urged us to go outside of our electoral comfort zone and reach out to African-Americans and Latinos because he believed they shared our values and that by sharing the power of our ideas with more people we could help lift millions out of poverty and into the “opportunity society,” as he aptly called it.  We are not all the way there yet, but when we arrive, Jack will deserve a big share of the credit.

Jack was also a great personal friend.  For years we traveled together, Marlene and I stayed with the Kemps at their home in Colorado to celebrate his 70th, and they visited often with us at our home as well.

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Arlen Specter told David Gregory on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday Morning that the GOP has become too conservative:

“The Republican Party has gone far to the right since I joined it under Reagan’s big tent.”

Meghan Mccain says the GOP needs to become more moderate:

“I just wish that moderates like myself — more moderate Republicans and more socially liberal Republicans — weren’t looked at as, ‘Get rid of the dirty moderates. Get rid of them.’”

We hear similar statements from Kathleen Parker, David Brooks, Peggy Noonan and David Frum. I must have missed something here. In what way exactly has the Republican Party moved to the right since Ronald Reagan’s presidency?

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I have known and been friends with Arlen over 36 years and have always supported his important role as a moderate in our party.

He will continue to be a friend.

But leaving the party because you’re facing a tough electoral challenge doesn’t seem consistent with his record of courage and principle.

I have given to every one of Arlen’s statewide campaigns. While the passion with which I supported him may have been magnified by our friendship, the fact of my support was a consequence of our shared political values of limited government and strong national defense. In our country, parties are necessarily big, to accommodate a range of views and geographies. I have always viewed the GOP as a Big Tent Party, and appreciate the inclusion of moderates like Arlen.

However, in leaving the Republican Party, Arlen has abandoned people who have been his allies for another team. He has thrown in with people who have a fundamentally different vision for America, and one that I profoundly disagree with.

Why did he do this? It seems as if Arlen took the path of least resistance. He knew that his primary fight would be difficult. Arlen has never stepped down from a fight, but he did this time. Undoubtedly his Democratic primary campaign will be safe. Ed Rendell, Arlen’s former boss at the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, will get his former Deputy Mayor out of the race now. So after a career of fighting for what he believed in, Arlen took the easy way out to keep his job.

So that’s why I will be supporting Pat Toomey for US Senate against my friend Arlen Specter. Right now, Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are taking America in the wrong direction. And we need a strong voice in the Senate fighting for our party’s perspective against them.

Since November, I’ve become accustomed to predictions that the Republican Party is on its way to irrelevance.  Nonetheless, I was disappointed to hear that sentiment voiced by University of Virginia professor and pundit Larry Sabato, who generally tries to provide a relatively objective analysis.  On MSNBC’s Hardball today, Sabato opined that “we’re on our way from being a two-party system to being a party-and-a-half system. And the Republicans are the half a party.”  Here’s Sabato’s analysis followed by my thoughts on why such predictions are silly.

Essentially, it boils down to this. Minorities are going to be the majority by 2042. It could even be by the 2030s. Young people 18 to 29, they voted more than two to one for Obama, and their turnout is going to go up with each additional year as they age. The same with people with graduate degrees, who used to vote Republican on fiscal issues. Now they’re so turned off to Republicans because of [conservative rhetoric] and the social issues, they turned Democratic. Hey, you can`t just win with white male voters in the South, and that’s what the Republicans have left.

This sort of analysis sounds quite logical but is reminiscent of what the pundits said following the re-election of both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.  After the 1984 election, expert after expert explained why the shift of population and thus electoral votes to the Sun Belt had given the Republicans a “lock on the Electoral College.”  Despite my youthful eagerness for a GOP presidential monopoly, this electoral analysis struck me as too sweeping and simplistic to be correct.  Unfortunately, I was right.

Following the 2004 election, the message from the experts was the same, though the explanation had changed.  Now the Democrats had little chance of winning presidential elections because they were only competing in states that accounted for barely half of the 538 electoral votes.  It was a seductive argument, but again it was too simplistic and backward-looking to be true.

Predictions of electoral locks are appealing in their simplicity and particularly persuasive in the aftermath of a one-sided election.  But, like all analyses based on sample sizes of one or two elections, they’re essentially worthless, if only because the news headlines and candidates that await us are unknowable  Although it’s much less fun and won’t get you a guest appearance on MSNBC or FOX, the only honest analysis is admitting that you haven’t got a clue about what’s going to happen in future elections.

It was 1856. Fifty-five months before the civil war ripped the nation apart. Abraham Lincoln was on stage speaking to Republicans in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Ten thousand people showed up to hear the lanky lawyer from Illinois.

Lincoln was a gifted speaker, but he was awkward. He stood out in a crowd. Lincoln opened his mouth. His speech was no Gettysburg address. But a nation already grappling with the idea of a manifest destiny understood his message.

“We are eighty years old,” he started. “We stand at once the wonder and admiration of the whole world, and we must enquire what it is that has given us so much prosperity. This cause is that every man can make himself.”

Every man can make himself.

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