Politics & Culture

Vote Nov. 3 — And Write Me In, If You Live in Grand Rapids!

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Greetings, friends.

So picture it — a few months or so ago, the local newspaper noted that the filing deadline had passed for two open seats on the Grand Rapids Public Library’s Board of Library Commissioners, yet only one candidate had filed. And in addition, a vacancy had opened, leaving potentially two unclaimed seats.

I filed the form necessary to seek appointment, but the GRPL team suggested submitting the paperwork to earn a write-in seat in the Nov. 3 election. So I hoofed it to the city clerk’s office and filled out the necessary forms to be a lawfully recognized write-in candidate. And I also filed, later, appropriate forms with the county clerk’s office for the Citizens for Jason Gillikin campaign committee. (We have a $0 budget, as it happens.)

I believe GRPL can do more to grow the local writing culture. If you vote for me, you’ll see a stronger push for programming that supports G.R.-based writers and more ties to the programming offered by Kent District Library.

So on Nov. 3, if you reside in the City of Grand Rapids, don’t overlook those municipal races. Instead, search for the section for the Board of Library Commissioners and write “Jason Gillikin” on a blank line, with a filled-in oval.

Thanks for your support!

 

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Post-Election Reflection: 10 Ideas for Conservative Renewal

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Another election, another set of mixed messages from the electorate at large. And another round of self-flagellation by the Conservative Commentariat coupled with ill-advised gloating from the Left.

Core message: No cause for alarm, but there’s clearly opportunity to ponder course corrections and work on infrastructure. We need to get past the “America’s a center-right Reaganesque country” wishful thinking and take seriously the challenges presented by contemporary progressive ideology. We also must heed John Paul II’s sage counsel at his own election: Be not afraid. For with John Boehner in the House, the relative risk of untrammeled liberalism remains low. We didn’t get the win we wanted, but we did get status quo.

The comments that follow are shaped, in large part, from reading the last few days’ commentary from sources as diverse as FireDogLake, NRO, RedState, Salon, Talking Points Memo and Weekly Standard. The two Jays — Cost and Nordlinger — and The Three Wise Elders of Moe Lane, Peggy Noonan and George Will have contributed disproportionately to the analysis that follows.

  1. Don’t blame Romney.  Mitt Romney wasn’t a bad candidate. He ran a decent campaign. Some on the Right didn’t like him — such is an inevitability — but his campaign wasn’t a disaster. So don’t blame the Romney/Ryan ticket for losing. They ran a solid and honorable race. The GOP cannot move forward if scapegoating the nominee substitutes for genuine soul-searching.
  2. State-level organizations need fresh blood and a healthy dose of pragmatism. The GOP’s U.S. Senate holding in 2013 will consist of 45 seats. Conventional wisdom is that had Lugar not been successfully primaried by Mourdock, Indiana would have been a safe Republican seat. Had Akin not put his foot in his mouth, he probably would have easily trumped McCaskill. In 2010, the GOP put forth exceptionally weak candidates in Sharron Angle, Ken Buck and Christine O’Donnell. With better candidates, the GOP could easily have tied or even eked out a slender majority in the Senate by this point. The problem in these races isn’t the alleged “Establishment Republicans” intervening but rather of weak conveyors of candidates at the state level. For every satisfactory challenger to the status quo like Marco Rubio, you get the self-proclaimed witch that’s Christine O’Donnell. Worse, there’s every sign that that Tea Party has simply tried to insert itself into local politics at the precinct level, working their folks into the GOP’s base, so the GOP will continue to field subpar candidates as long as seasoned veterans and neophyte firebrands continue to battle in a way that leaves the Buckley Rule in tatters. State leadership really needs to recruit strong candidates and get them on a pathway to nomination victory early. Internecine warfare at the state level gives us a candidate-selection system that’s basically a giant Roulette wheel: You might get good, you might get bad, but no one knows until the primary’s over. (And like any game of Roulette, the House — the DNC — has an edge.)
  3. Nurture local volunteers. GOP efforts on election day, frankly, sucked — for the second presidential cycle in a row. The GOTV effort was dwarfed by the Obama campaign. This problem starts at the precinct and county levels. Too many Republicans prefer faux grassroots office over actually doing the hard work of building coalitions. When my own county GOP organization refuses to return phone calls and emails, and campaigns that do call (thank you, Pete Hoekstra) nevertheless don’t seem to align skills/experience with the nature of their requests, the question is: WTF? Maybe it’s a West Michigan thing, but it really seems like we have a substantial barrier at the grassroots level, with local GOP potentates acting complacent in their self-importance while the Dems run organizational circles around them. Case in point: My paperwork to be a precinct delegate this year “didn’t get filed” because I’m in the same precinct as the county chairman and he wanted to cast a ballot for his wife for some nominated office or something. But in our precinct, there was no effective GOP presence. No flyers, no door-to-door, no one to challenge Democrat yard signs in public easements. You’d think the precinct with the county chair could at least maintain a degree of visibility despite our overwhelming +D territory.
  4. The consultants deserve the boot. The scandal over Project ORCA and dumbfounded reaction of the RNC and the Romney campaign over actual voting results — when the Dems were basically dead-on accurate — suggests that the Republicans need to set aside the self-proclaimed smarter-than-thou campaign consultants and assemble leadership teams more nimble and less prone to score-settling. The performance of folks like Rick Beeson and Zach Moffatt this cycle, and Rick Davis and John Weaver for McCain, is beyond shameful. We don’t need consultants, we need candidates who know what it takes to win.
  5. The GOP needs better data scientists.  I pity Neil Newhouse, the veteran GOP pollster; he seems like a sharp fellow but he hasn’t kept up with the times. Polling science isn’t what it used to be, and the GOP has clearly fallen far behind — they can’t even gauge the nature of the electorate, let alone its behavior. Mike Flynn argues that the institutional blindness of the Romney campaign came from its focus on metrics irrespective of the world behind those numbers. I find his point persuasive. Team Obama put its data scientists at the heart of the campaign and built everything else around them; Team Romney put the consultants at the heart and they cherry-picked the polls to meet their metrics and in so doing, lost sight of the real dynamic within the campaign.
  6. Conservatism needs to move beyond binary policy preferences. The very chaos of the Democratic coalition is, in a sense, also its biggest strength: You can deviate more from the party platform and still be a “good Democrat” to much greater degree than within the GOP. Nowhere is this trend more obvious than on gay marriage: The Dems favor it, by and large, but opposition isn’t a disqualifier (q.v., black preachers); on the GOP side, vocal opposition seems to be something of a litmus test, especially among the cultural conservatives. What galls about this is that “strengthening marriage” as a campaign slogan is exclusively about gay marriage — whereas in truth, the problems with marriage as a sociocultural institution run far deeper than that and are rooted in shifting norms among heterosexual youth such that gay marriage isn’t even a dot on the radar screen. Or take environmentalism: Many like to dismiss global warming as a “hoax” but why bother picking a fight about science when you could follow Roger Scruton’s brilliant advice about promoting conservation rooted in loving where you live? If the GOP adopted Scruton’s advice wholesale, we’d probably neutralize “environment” as a political issue within a fortnight. Policy positions should not be distilled into a false binary-choice slogan about about some isolated aspect of a larger and more complex issue.
  7. Think carefully about turnout in light of state and local ballot proposals.  People who are less inclined to vote for individual politicians may nevertheless be induced to vote because of specific ballot initiatives and referenda. In Michigan, for example, we had six significant proposals that drew voters, and Grand Rapids — the state’s second-largest city — included a controversial marijuana-decriminalization proposal that ended up passing. Gay marriage won at the ballot in four states. Guess who showed up to vote? Republicans really need to get ahead of ballot initiatives.
  8. Articulate a coherent, positive message. It feels like the GOP is the party of “no” — no new ideas, no bold policy innovations, no willingness to work for the best interest of the common treasury. Conservatism in the Goldwater-Reagan era, bolstered by National Review and Firing Line, rose to the defense of a conservative movement that articulated bold visions and the polices to execute them: Defeat the Soviet Union, lower taxes from 70-percent highs, deregulate massive investments like telecoms and the airlines. Yay for us, we did it: The Soviet Union has been consigned to the ash heap of history, many industries have deregulated and tax rates are relatively low. So what’s next? No one knows. A vision that’s “smaller and smarter” doesn’t actually mean anything in the real world. A vision to defeat America’s enemies abroad in 2012 doesn’t mean staring down Brezhnev, it means fighting dozens of terrorist movements across the globe, but no one wants to do the work that such an effort would entail. Lowering taxes incessantly does have a minimal ceiling given that we can’t effect a zero-percent rate. So, what’s the vision? What’s the reason to vote for Republican’s that isn’t, fundamentally, a reaction against a progressive initiative? When will Republicans define their own platform instead of defining it against the opposition? The GOP can’t win when it’s presenting to the electorate nothing more than a referendum on progressivism without any real, substantive, positive alternative.
  9. Evacuate the bubble. Having despaired of the left-leaning influence of major cultural institutions like the mainstream media and Hollywood and the Ivory Tower, conservatives opted to erect something of an opposite number. Instead of moderating the left-wing pull of these institutions, we built our own in opposition. Thus, instead of pulling the major news networks and newspapers more toward the center, we relied on Fox News and The Washington Times and the WSJ editorial board to serve as balance. Instead of fighting for conservatism within the classroom, we built Ave Maria University and Liberty University. Instead of mainstreaming Republican sensibilities within Hollywood, we get 2016: Obama’s America. The inevitable outcome is that too many conservatives don’t need to fight for their beliefs anymore — they can just sit in the echo chamber. Of course, the rest of the country still gets left-leaning content, so we really haven’t solved the problem. I’d rather see MSNBC and Fox News both go away if it meant that the mainstream press operated from a more fundamentally balanced perspective.
  10. Stop giving shade to irrational policy preferences under the Tree of Conservatism. I’m still at a loss to understand why some particular policy preferences are considered conservative. It seems like certain groups — like evangelicals — have had their beliefs canonized, despite the very legitimate problems that these beliefs incur vis-a-vis pure conservative principles. For example, it’s more conservative to reform the institution of marriage (possibly, to include same-sex marriage) than to hold to a sectarian vision from the Eisenhower years that clearly doesn’t hold any longer. It’s more conservative to focus on fair-use conservation than to reject all environmental policy. It’s more conservative to tax at the “right” rates than to play a screwy game of tax tiers and sundry credits and deductions. It’s more conservative to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit of immigration through smart regulation than to demonize “illegals” with a broad brush. It’s more conservative to bolster federalism and local control than to consent to the federalization of policies that some conservatives favor. The GOP, as the conservative party, must elevate conservative principles — but those principles shouldn’t be retrofitted to legitimize policy preferences that aren’t authentically conservative just because coalition members favor them for non-ideological reasons.

Ten theses. Ten ideas for course correction for the GOP and the conservative movement. I make no claim to being a Wise Guy who knows what’s best. I do pay attention to many different sources and see too much sophomoric reasoning substituting for informed policy-making and too much inside-the-bubble wishful thinking substitute for honest analysis.

I don’t think the GOP is in decline. I don’t think the Dems are on a long upswing. I think right now, the GOP has ample opportunity to fine-tune its operations and re-think some pernicious policy preferences that don’t really belong to conservatism.

More than anything, I think John Paul the Great was right: Be not afraid.

Personal, Politics & Culture, Writing, Editing & Journalism

Assorted Reflections and Updates

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Today’s excursion into pithy commentary:

  1. National Novel Writing Month has commenced. I’m stretching my legs a bit to write a sci-fi story. My goal is to have the science be accurate but in the background; I’m really aiming for a commentary on human social evolution that just happens to bet set forward in a non-archetypal future. NaNo requires 50k words. I’m aiming for 90k, because I’d like to brush up the first draft and possibly shop for an agent or publisher. High goals, but hey. Defecate or get off the pot; I’ve been meaning to write a novel for years so why not now?
  2. To that end, I’m not only participating in local write-ins this November, but I’m also hosting one. On Saturdays at the food court at 35 Michigan. We had the first one yesterday and a baker’s dozen attended. It was great. The Starbucks baristas were friendly, too.
  3. So just about every female I’ve seen under the age of 30 seems to be wearing skin-tight clothes (including, most frequently, black leggings) paired with boots that frequently rise above mid-calf. Fashion is one thing; lemming-like wardrobes is another. At least the cellulite brigade hasn’t hopped on the bandwagon yet.
  4. Many of the regular patrons at my local cigar shop are Freemasons. They’re a cheerful, civil lot. Apparently they’re barred from asking people to join up, but they’ve hinted that perhaps I could ask questions about joining up. Alas, the Catholic Church still considers Freemasonry a grave sin. I chatted up another regular about it — a local priest, as it happens — who was quite happy to share his (utterly orthodox) knowledge of the Vatican’s perspective, with an added challenge to “return the favor” by encouraging the masons to consider membership instead in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Hmm.
  5. I refreshed my HP TouchPad to the latest release of CM9. Much improved over the version I had installed earlier this year. I also downloaded a desktop-sharing app that works flawlessly with my Win8 PC at home. Meaning, I can keep working on my novel in Scrivener on my tablet without any loss of data or continuity.
  6. Halloween was somewhat underwhelming. My office door was decorated on my behalf. I ended up doing last-minute NaNo planning with Brittany, Steve and PJ at Wealthy Street Bakery. Very helpful.
  7. The election looms. I’m planning on watching the returns with Tony in (of all places!) Southfield. He needs to fly to California early the next morning from DTW, so we’re going to watch early returns at Churchills’ cigar shop there and enjoy a fine dram of Scotch or two.  I’m cautiously optimistic that Romney will eke out a win, and I may be working Tuesday morning as a poll challenger at one of the most heavily Democratic precincts in West Michigan. Hmm.
  8. Speaking of the election, there’s been a lot of background noise about Nate Silver, the NYT blogger/prognosticator who’s been consistently “predicting” an Obama win. The whole situation annoys me. Look, as a full-fledged member of the American Statistical Association, I can say for certainty I know what Silver’s doing — he’s assessing the probability of a binary outcome, based on various undisclosed polls as inputs into his model. That’s fine. As a full-fledged member of the Society of Professional Journalists, I can say for certainty that if journalists could do stats American reporting would be of uniformly higher quality. That said, the fundamental problem with Silver’s analysis is that he’s basically got a garbage-in/garbage-out thing going. I don’t question what I understand his methodology to be; I do question the radical differences in polling that feeds his model. Polling in this cycle is all over the map. Throw crap in, you’ll get crap out, no matter how carefully you run your probability estimates. So a pox on everyone’s houses.
  9. Oh, and on top of it, American politics isn’t accustomed to a binary probability estimate for presidential elections. So moving in that direction, given that the inputs are more volatile than people give them credit for, seems like a misapplication of models. But hey, if Silver wants his 15 minutes of fame, he’s certainly earned it.
  10. I swapped out the stereo on my Jimmy a few weeks ago. The operation took longer than it should have — I needed to buy a wire harness — but I managed to get the job done without damaging anything. Yay, me.
  11. Tony I went on a brief casino trip a few weeks ago to Harrah’s Joliet and met Mark and Keren of the 360 Vegas podcast. An uproariously good time was had by all.
  12. Life at the hospital continues to pay lip service to the Chinese maxim about interesting times. I’m now officially a business analytics analyst in the Information Services team. The transition continues to unfold, so stay tuned.

November, already. Ugh. But hey — the holiday season’s a-comin’. Be glad, and rejoice.

Politics & Culture

You Go To The Polls With the Candidates You Have

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Don Rumsfeld: “You go to war with the army you have.” Alas, the GOP will go to the polls with the candidates it has — but the Party of Lincoln seems to have opted to bring knives to a tank fight.

On a federal level, the nomination battles continue, although the Keystone Kops routine of these incessant televised debates benefits no one as strongly as Barack Obama. Where else can he get hundreds of hours of sound bites of various Republicans drawing blood from whoever will be the eventual nominee?

Depending on the day of the week, phase of the moon and polling outfit under contract, Mitt Romney is either the obvious front-runner or a distant second behind Newt Gingrich. Ron Paul, the Republican version of Crazy Uncle Lester, won’t go away no matter how plain the writing on the wall. Rick Santorum heckles from the wings, having performed well in Iowa but without any sort of dollars or infrastructure to perform well anywhere else in the country. Newt Gingrich seems to be in full-frontal Looney Tunes mode; one day he attacks, the next day he retracts, the day after he’s boldly reorganizing the floor plan of the House chamber to accommodate the new Congressmen from America’s pending lunar state.

Meanwhile, the pundits wage a battle for the soul of the conservative movement. Some — most prominently Erick Erickson of RedState — define conservatism as being whatever Mitt Romney’s not, irrespective of what Romney’s for. The Majarushie, Rush Limbaugh, seems almost as scattershot about the candidates as a Rick Perry debate answer. Mark Steyn is so consumed by the debt bomb that he may not have noticed that New Hampshire had a primary. George Will, Charles Krauthammer and Peggy Noonan speak as voices of reason, but in a season when National Review and The Weekly Standard are reviled as centrist organs of some nefarious “Republican Establishment,” it’s not clear that what passes for reason nowadays even deserves a voice — let alone three. Ask any two prominent public conservatives for an opinion and you’ll wind up with seven conflicting answers.

The real lesson here is that there’s a dangerously wide gulf between boots-on-the-ground activists (often, prominent bloggers) and elected officials. The former often insist on purity at all costs. The latter, frequently demonized as “establishment types,” worry more about electability and skill at governance even if you have to suck up a bad logroll at times. Conservatives used to grudgingly obey the WFB dictum that you support the most conservative candidate electable. Today, the rabid wing of the conservative movement values symbolic purity over substantive success. Look no further than the way groups like RedState and Heritage Action have targeted U.S. Rep. Fred Upton for extinction. Upton is a genuinely decent and honorable man (I met him several times while an officer in the College Republicans at Western Michigan University) who has assembled a solid career of center-right policy wins. But because he didn’t pinky swear to someone’s pledge or have a hissy fit about light bulbs, he’s persona non grata. Never mind that if Upton were to be successfully primaried, the seat would likely fall into the Democratic column. Kalamazoo and its environs aren’t exactly staunch Republican territory (MI-06 went +8 for Obama). But hey, apparently it’s better to purge the kulaks even if it kicks the GOP back into minority status.

Speaking of Michigan — Pete Hoekstra still appears to be the leading nominee to challenge Sen. Debbie Stabbenow, although the powers-that-be that usually meddle in state Republican politics have resurrected an old ally to oppose the Holland-area native. Why? Probably because Hoekstra, when he first won his seat in Congress, launched a surprise and successful primary challenge against an obviously corrupt but very well-connected Congressman, and that man’s allies still bear a grudge. Hoekstra would make an outstanding addition to the U.S. Senate — his even-handedness as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee remains particularly laudable.

“Tis the silly season of national politics. Everyone’s jockeying for influence, and the knives of partisanship slice with ruthless abandon. This year, the conservative movement seems fractured in ways I don’t recall in my lifetime. The basic problem remains the question of ideological purity, and the degree to which we’ll accept a strong and electable candidate (for any race, in any jurisdiction) in the face of a less-qualified but more ideologically driven competitor.

The stakes are high. Let’s hope that in the end, the GOP can rally around its troops and win the battle instead of fracking each other and leaving no one left to man the barricades against the Obama blitz.

Politics & Culture

Quick Thoughts re: Last Night’s GOP Candidate Debate

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Last night, six of the GOP candidates (from stage left: Santorum, Perry, Romney, Gingrich, Paul, Bachmann) for the presidential nomination met on stage in Iowa for a televised debate hosted by ABC News correspondents Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos. The event lasted nearly two hours. Impressions:

  • Sawyer and Stephanopoulos did a good job at moderating. They tended to be warmer than other moderators, and less critical of the candidates. They seemed to view their job as being facilitators rather than dictators, being much less aggressive about timekeeping than, say, Scott Pelley was, and more celebratory of the human side of campaigning. Although Sawyer’s delivery tended to ramble a bit, the questions themselves were fair game and delivered in fair manner. The pair made for the best debate moderators I’ve seen yet this cycle.
  • Maybe it was the more relaxed timekeeping, or that there were fewer candidates on stage (Cain backed out and Huntsman and Johnson weren’t present), but it seemed like the candidates had more time for crossfire and to express themselves in a reasonable amount of time. No one was really cut off the entire night. Everyone on stage had plenty of time to talk — no “Siberia” in the corners, as it were.
  • Santorum performed well. His answers were generally good, and delivered strongly, although he felt too nervously earnest. Like the popular high school jock running for class president, and you know in 10 years he’ll be selling used cars and be overweight with three kids and a minivan. Unfair, I know. I just wish he seemed warmer and less uptight. He could try smiling and even crack a joke every now and then.
  • Perry had a good night — he rarely stumbled and had some fairly decent answers, although it’s not clear he helped himself by appearing unable to count to three. He has a maddening habit of giving a cursory answer to the question presented to him and then using the rest of his time to answer someone else’s questions — the net effect is to suggest that he can’t answer on the fly and instead needs to think about what the last guy said and then try to one-up it.
  • Romney was Romney — generally polished, with good answers and an easy grace. He took more of a beating than Gingrich (unfairly, I think, from Bachmann) but handled it OK. The ABC News commentators argued that Romneys’ “$10,000 bet” to Perry about the contents of Romney’s book hurt him in Iowa, because Iowans don’t bet $10k even on sure things. Not sure I believe that — it was a gimmick, but it pushed Perry on defense. I wasn’t a huge fan of Romney’s answer about Gingrich’s “Palestinians are an invented people” claim: The former governor seemed to suggest that the President of the United States needs the approval of the Prime Minister of Israel before opening his mouth about Middle East affairs, an absurd claim if ever there was one. Yes, Gingrich’s comment was ill-timed. But it wasn’t wrong, and to suggest publicly that making statements of that sort requires pre-clearance by the Israeli government transmits a sense of American weakness I think it’s best to avoid. Romney seems to defer to the side of caution. This may be admirable in a POTUS but as a candidate being blunt about being cautious sends the wrong signals.
  • Gingrich was Gingrich. The Speaker did well, giving generally good answers. Sometimes he seemed a bit too impressed by his own cleverness, but again — Gingrich was Gingrich. He handled the marital-fidelity question with grace. Newt is a polished extemporaneous speaker. The ABC News commentators suggested that by this point, it’s Gingrich instead of Romney who’s the apparent nominee. I wouldn’t be upset by a Gingrich candidacy, but it’ll take a lot of discipline to get through the primaries then the general election, and Newt’s lack of discipline is … well, legendary.
  • Paul remains the GOP’s irascible old curmudgeon of an uncle. He provides color, and a welcome diversity to the ideological spectrum on the stage, but his policy proscriptions are so off-kilter that it’s good for America he’s polling so poorly.
  • Bachmann enjoyed a very strong night. She spoke frequently, and forcefully, on many issues. Although her performance was solid and likely helped her in Iowa, her bulldog-like attacks on Gingrich and Romney seemed contrived and desperate (and were successfully rebuffed by both men simultaneously heaping scorn on her for the comparison) and when she gets on a roll, her eyes glaze over and she doesn’t blink or shift her gaze. Minor point, but it kinda creeps me out. And she needs to stop worshipping Herman Cain.

In all, the debate left me heartened about the overall quality of the Republican field. Any of the people on stage — even Paul, and even the candidates who weren’t there — would make a far better president than the incumbent.

The current horse race puts it as a two-way competition between Romney and Gingrich. I’m OK with either candidate. I think Romney would perform better with independents in the general election, but Gingrich may inspire more conservatives to turn out. And although Obama is currently weak, the Democrat’s chances could improve, and the eventual GOP nominee may well suffer from self-inflicted danger.

The long series of debates had a real impact on the nomination process. Painful as it sometimes was, the system did its job of helping Republican voters better understand who their nominees really are. For that, and for the quality of Republican candidates in this cycle, every conservative ought to be relieved.

Politics & Culture

Quick Thoughts re: Last Night's GOP Candidate Debate

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Last night, six of the GOP candidates (from stage left: Santorum, Perry, Romney, Gingrich, Paul, Bachmann) for the presidential nomination met on stage in Iowa for a televised debate hosted by ABC News correspondents Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos. The event lasted nearly two hours. Impressions:

  • Sawyer and Stephanopoulos did a good job at moderating. They tended to be warmer than other moderators, and less critical of the candidates. They seemed to view their job as being facilitators rather than dictators, being much less aggressive about timekeeping than, say, Scott Pelley was, and more celebratory of the human side of campaigning. Although Sawyer’s delivery tended to ramble a bit, the questions themselves were fair game and delivered in fair manner. The pair made for the best debate moderators I’ve seen yet this cycle.
  • Maybe it was the more relaxed timekeeping, or that there were fewer candidates on stage (Cain backed out and Huntsman and Johnson weren’t present), but it seemed like the candidates had more time for crossfire and to express themselves in a reasonable amount of time. No one was really cut off the entire night. Everyone on stage had plenty of time to talk — no “Siberia” in the corners, as it were.
  • Santorum performed well. His answers were generally good, and delivered strongly, although he felt too nervously earnest. Like the popular high school jock running for class president, and you know in 10 years he’ll be selling used cars and be overweight with three kids and a minivan. Unfair, I know. I just wish he seemed warmer and less uptight. He could try smiling and even crack a joke every now and then.
  • Perry had a good night — he rarely stumbled and had some fairly decent answers, although it’s not clear he helped himself by appearing unable to count to three. He has a maddening habit of giving a cursory answer to the question presented to him and then using the rest of his time to answer someone else’s questions — the net effect is to suggest that he can’t answer on the fly and instead needs to think about what the last guy said and then try to one-up it.
  • Romney was Romney — generally polished, with good answers and an easy grace. He took more of a beating than Gingrich (unfairly, I think, from Bachmann) but handled it OK. The ABC News commentators argued that Romneys’ “$10,000 bet” to Perry about the contents of Romney’s book hurt him in Iowa, because Iowans don’t bet $10k even on sure things. Not sure I believe that — it was a gimmick, but it pushed Perry on defense. I wasn’t a huge fan of Romney’s answer about Gingrich’s “Palestinians are an invented people” claim: The former governor seemed to suggest that the President of the United States needs the approval of the Prime Minister of Israel before opening his mouth about Middle East affairs, an absurd claim if ever there was one. Yes, Gingrich’s comment was ill-timed. But it wasn’t wrong, and to suggest publicly that making statements of that sort requires pre-clearance by the Israeli government transmits a sense of American weakness I think it’s best to avoid. Romney seems to defer to the side of caution. This may be admirable in a POTUS but as a candidate being blunt about being cautious sends the wrong signals.
  • Gingrich was Gingrich. The Speaker did well, giving generally good answers. Sometimes he seemed a bit too impressed by his own cleverness, but again — Gingrich was Gingrich. He handled the marital-fidelity question with grace. Newt is a polished extemporaneous speaker. The ABC News commentators suggested that by this point, it’s Gingrich instead of Romney who’s the apparent nominee. I wouldn’t be upset by a Gingrich candidacy, but it’ll take a lot of discipline to get through the primaries then the general election, and Newt’s lack of discipline is … well, legendary.
  • Paul remains the GOP’s irascible old curmudgeon of an uncle. He provides color, and a welcome diversity to the ideological spectrum on the stage, but his policy proscriptions are so off-kilter that it’s good for America he’s polling so poorly.
  • Bachmann enjoyed a very strong night. She spoke frequently, and forcefully, on many issues. Although her performance was solid and likely helped her in Iowa, her bulldog-like attacks on Gingrich and Romney seemed contrived and desperate (and were successfully rebuffed by both men simultaneously heaping scorn on her for the comparison) and when she gets on a roll, her eyes glaze over and she doesn’t blink or shift her gaze. Minor point, but it kinda creeps me out. And she needs to stop worshipping Herman Cain.

In all, the debate left me heartened about the overall quality of the Republican field. Any of the people on stage — even Paul, and even the candidates who weren’t there — would make a far better president than the incumbent.
The current horse race puts it as a two-way competition between Romney and Gingrich. I’m OK with either candidate. I think Romney would perform better with independents in the general election, but Gingrich may inspire more conservatives to turn out. And although Obama is currently weak, the Democrat’s chances could improve, and the eventual GOP nominee may well suffer from self-inflicted danger.
The long series of debates had a real impact on the nomination process. Painful as it sometimes was, the system did its job of helping Republican voters better understand who their nominees really are. For that, and for the quality of Republican candidates in this cycle, every conservative ought to be relieved.

Politics & Culture

Election Review: We Remembered November, Now What?

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The Republican Governors Association encouraged us to remember November. We listened; after the midterm elections, the GOP picked up more than 60 seats in the House of Representatives, six seats in the U.S. Senate, a majority of governorships, a majority of statehouses, and — for the first time since the 1920s — an absolute majority of state legislators.

In Michigan, the GOP kept the offices of Attorney General and Secretary of State and, in a landslide, our “tough nerd” Rick Snyder reclaimed the Governor’s mansion for the first time since John Engler. In addition, Republicans took the state House, picked up two U.S. House seats, and earned a majority-conservative state Supreme Court. The Republicans have a solid lock on all three branches of state government and a majority of the state’s Congressmen (nine of 16). The lone ranking Democrats are the state’s two U.S. Senators, Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow. And lest we forget, Michigan had a Republican Senator as recently as 2000, when Spencer Abraham — a good Senator but weak campaigner — lost his re-election bid to “Liberal Debbie.”

So now what?

On a national level, the House Republicans are sounding the best possible note. No triumphalism. No gloating. No elephants parading down Pennsylvania Avenue. Instead, John Boehner is making all the right moves, opening the door to compromise but making it clear that the major mandate the GOP possesses is to fix the problems that originated in Democratic profligacy. Marco Rubio’s victory speech was dead on — the GOP didn’t get a resounding endorsement, it got probation. The next two years will decide whether this probation is eligible for early termination or whether the Elephant goes back into solitary confinement.

On a state level, I sincerely hope that Rick Snyder’s election signifies a change of tone within the state GOP. Michigan is an easy win for Republicans who carry the Reagan Democrat banner, so the state party’s decade-long push for hardcore conservative candidates has been simply wrong-headed, and prior election results proved it. Don’t misunderstand; I want a solid conservative victory. But when the state still has strong UAW membership, conservatism must be taught, not imposed by fiat. The Michigan Republicans have not been up to the educational task these last few years. Ron Weiser’s tenure as chairman has been better, but the whole enterprise still feels a bit inbred and tone-deaf.

Nowhere does the dysfunction of Michigan Republicans play out more clearly than in Kent County. Access is circumscribed unless you have a membership to an Ada country club, or so it seems. There is something significant that this cycle, my three phone calls and emails to the county GOP never merited even a form response, yet both Hoekstra’s primary and Snyder’s gubernatorial campaigns eagerly contacted me to help. This is a sharp contrast to my experiences in Kalamazoo County, where a friend and I were eagerly welcomed into the Executive Committee during our undergrad days as officers at the WMU College Republicans, and my brief stay in Ottawa County, where the chairman asked me to coordinate youth activities for the county party. There are too many big-name, big-dollar fish in Kent County to turn it into anything other than an exclusive club, and that’s a damned shame. As long as the Kent County GOP remains the preserve of the elite, opportunities to expand the Republican message will surely be missed.

Of course, navel gazing gets us only so far. The midterm results suggest a few points worth considering:

  1. Republicans should keep in mind that this election was a referendum on Democratic incompetence and over-reach, and not a rousing endorsement of  a specifically Republican platform. Rubio is right: The GOP is on probation, and public-opinion polling supports this perspective.
  2. America is a center-right country. The ideals of the Tea Party resonate strongly with a disaffected mass in the center and right. Republicans should take care to incorporate Tea Party ideas — which, in fairness, are overwhelmingly conservative principles — into the GOP governing paradigm. Why? To avoid a third-party challenge in 2012 that would almost certainly restore the Democrats to power. We cannot risk a second Obama term because we couldn’t stop the next Ross Perot from grabbing a chunk of the disaffected electorate.
  3. The GOP owns Michigan. We must not fail in effecting the transition from a manufacturing economy. Snyder is saying the right things about innovation. We must work very hard to deliver on his promises if we want Michigan’s electoral votes credit the GOP presidential nominee in 2012. In particular, we need a new message to help bring rank-and-file union members back into the GOP.
  4. Republicans across the board need to do a much better job at candidate recruiting, starting at the local level. Justin Amash, the newly elected Congressman from the 3rd District, is a great example of the worst possible candidate earning the nomination. State Sen. Bill Hardiman and Kent County leader Steve Heacock split the “adult” vote in the primary, leaving Amash — a 30-something bomb-thrower who had his state House seat purchased for him by his parents — grabbing the nomination. But Amash, besides his lack of qualification, doesn’t speak to the tenor of Kent County. Amash would fit better in a solidly Republican district; I fear that in coming years, this seat will become vulnerable to takeover by a center-right (instead of far-right) candidate. I hope the Congressman-Elect will pay careful attention to why Ehlers, Henry and Ford did so well here, and why Kent County is not a solidly red county. And don’t get me started on Christine O’Donnell, Joe Miller and Sharron Angle.
  5. Republicans at all level, while retaining their humility about their probationary status, must also govern like conservatives. Center-left candidates were tossed out on their asses all across America. Although some compromise will doubtless be necessary from a purely political standpoint, Republicans simply cannot tax, spend and lobby their way to indolence like they did earlier this decade.

The next two years will be interesting.

Politics & Culture

Michigan Politics: Post-Primary Edition

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The results of Michigan’s August primary are in, and the situation is … interesting.

Governor

The results from the AP:

Republican primary
5,715 of 5,732 precincts – 99 percent

Rick Snyder 379,245 – 36 percent ¶
Pete Hoekstra 278,584 – 27 percent ¶
Mike Cox 238,858 – 23 percent ¶
Mike Bouchard 126,807 – 12 percent ¶
Tom George 16,911 – 2 percent ¶

For the governor’s race, businessman and political neophyte Rick Snyder handily trounced the rest of the pack. Snyder’s candidacy is a curious one: A self-described “one tough nerd,” he was the president and COO of Gateway Computers and enjoys an admirable record as a business leader. Arguably, Snyder won because Hoekstra and Cox split the dedicated conservative/establishment vote. Regardless, the nerd gets his chance to pick up the party mantle.

From a purely political perspective, Snyder’s election is thrilling. He is not a hard-right Republican, and this is a good thing. I firmly believe that one of the most significant handicaps for the Michigan GOP is its slavish devotion to its country-club grandees — folks like the DeVos and Yob families, whose pocketbooks ensure compliance but whose social sensibilities are out-of-touch with a state that cares more about economic performance than contrived social mores. The Michigan GOP, like the Kent County GOP, is heavily influenced by the Ada-style country-club elitism that, despite its charms, is simply inconsistent with the culture of a state that remains “Reagan Democrat.” Perhaps Snyder’s candidacy will break open the state party to diverse voices and new faces.

Policy-wise, Snyder is growing on me. I had been an early Hoekstra supporter, and since I discounted Snyder’s potential, I paid him less heed than I should have. Snyder presents a solid pro-business plan for the state. He advocates policies that advance economic growth and more efficient state governance. You see much less by way of unnecessary grandstanding over touchstone cultural-conservative issues from him, and this is good. With Obama-style progressive Virg Bernero — darling of organized labor — as the Democratic nominee, keeping the argument solidly economic in this climate will likely work to Snyder’s benefit.

I dived a bit deeper into just one of Snyder’s points in his 10-point plan, giving a thorough reading into his healthcare white paper. I must admit — Snyder gets it right. Promoting medical homes for high-risk patients, emphasizing lifestyle modification to reduce the long-term cost of chronic illness, and managing Medicaid reimbursement rates will go a long way to fixing what ails Michigan’s creaky health care system. If Snyder can get MDCH to stop doing stupid things like simultaneously replacing both of its Medicaid eligibility systems with software solutions proven to fail in other states, we might be on to something.

Net result: I can stand up for Rick Snyder.

Congressional Races

CD2: Bill Huizenga barely squeaked out a primary win against Jay Riemersma. This is the seat vacated this cycle by U.S. Rep. Peter Hoekstra, who stepped down to run for governor. Although this is a deep-red district, and Huizenga is running as a red-meat Republican, the primary race was surprisingly competitive.

CD3: Justin Amash, a 30-year-old state legislator, took this race with 40 percent of the vote. Amash beat veteran county lawmaker Steve Heacock and state Sen. Bill Hardiman, who took 28 and 26 percent, respectively. The seat is vacant this cycle because U.S. Rep. Vern Ehlers is retiring. Amash benefited from the grown-up candidates splitting the serious vote, while the enthusiastic youngsters who listened to the vague promises and ultra-hard-right nostrums from the Amash campaign carried the day. Of course, it helps when the DeVos family bankrolls his federal race just as his parents bankrolled his state race. Among dedicated watchers of West Michigan politics, informal consensus is that Amash is something of a blank slate, like a Manchurian candidate sponsored by the Club for Growth; he is vague on specific policy and remains relatively unpolished, echoing hard-right pieties but lacking in the gravitas to be a major player in Washington. This fall will be fun: Amash will stand against Democrat Pat Miles. Miles, a local lawyer, is a bit more of a practical, middle-of-the-road Dem. In a district long-held by quiet moderates like Ehlers, Paul Henry, and Jerry Ford, it is an open question whether a firebrand conservative with relatively limited experience can persuasively carry the district. Conventional wisdom is that he wins in 2010 but will be vulnerable as his district trends slowly leftward thanks to changing demographics.

CD6: U.S. Rep. Fred Upton beat back a primary challenger, but the margin was surprisingly narrow; he won 57-43 despite his incumbency and absurd spending gap over his competitor.

CD7: Former U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg gets a rematch against the Democrat who displaced him in 2008, current U.S. Rep. Mark Schauer.

Analysis

The 2010 election cycle will be one for the history books — the spotlight will be on Congressional races, where the results will be largely viewed as a referendum on the Obama presidency and the stewardship of the Pelosi/Reid Congress. Pundits will therefore look to various competitive House and Senate races to the exclusion of most other campaigns — even to governorships, which are crucial this cycle because of decennial redistricting.

If the election were held today, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball suggests the GOP picks up 7 Senate seats, 32 House seats, and 6-7 governorships.

However, the real question for the GOP isn’t whether the House or Senate will be retaken or how many governorships it possesses. Rather, the party must focus on its message and its candidates. For every solid conservative with good credentials and a coherent program, there are candidates who have won primary challenges based solely on a populist message. These candidates may not be the best choice for the job — see “Amash,” above — but they won either because better candidates split the serious vote, or because voter anger propelled the “fresh voice” to victory.

For West Michigan, the election season will be competitive even though the certain races are foregone conclusions. We will see Huizenga and Amash in Congress, most likely. And barring poor performance or suprises this autumn, Rick Snyder will probably move into the governor’s mansion.

So yes, let’s focus on the elections. But the elections are going to change our political culture in ways it hasn’t been touched in a very long time, and this is the part of the equation that is the most interesting of all.

Let the election season begin!

Politics & Culture

Vote Hoekstra, Vote Early, Vote Often

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As the political campaign season heats up, Michigan prepares for its primary election. The major race to watch, state-wide, is for the governorship, which is due this cycle. Democrat Jennifer Granholm is term-limited out, and Lt. Gov. John Cherry declined to run. Front-runners are emerging in both parties; Lansing mayor Virg Bernero and Speaker of the House Andy Dillon lead the Democratic ballot. On the Republican side, there are five credible candidates: Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard, Attorney General Mike Cox, state Sen. Tom George, U.S. Rep. Peter Hoekstra, and Gateway mogul Rick Snyder.

So far this race, on the GOP side, looks like a close fight between Cox and Hoekstra. Cox has been aiming for the gubernatorial nod since his run for A.G. — and some of his practices (e.g., adding me to his political email list when I signed up through the state for his official AG email alerts) seem shady in the typical office-seeking vein. Word on the street, among Lansing veterans, is that Cox is ambitious, foul-mouthed and thin-skinned. He suffered a recent high-profile setback when he tried to join the state lawsuits against Obamacare only to be publicly slapped down by Granholm (herself, a two-term state A.G.).

The other candidates have their sundry charms. George is a solid guy but he has relatively limited name recognition and access to funds. Bouchard peaked early; he tapped Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land to serve as his No. 2, although doing so raised the usual Detroit/Outstate argument that still rankles the typical Grand Rapids sense of importance, and the Land selection proved to be not quite as powerful as Bouchard may have hoped. And Snyder? He is effectively painting himself as the candidate of the small-business outsider, and he has money, but not a lot of political experience. That may work for him in this anti-incumbent year — but maybe not, with the GOP grassroots that turns out for the primaries and the Tea Party trying to form its own recognized party organization.

I think the best choice for Michigan this year is Pete Hoekstra. The congressman has held powerful leadership roles in Washington, including most notably as a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and he has been a reliably conservative voice that is rare for being sane and restrained as well as thoughtful. His emphasis on job creation, in particular, deserves careful consideration.

The proof of any candidate’s mettle is in the quality of his support staff. Hoekstra’s campaign is one of the few where I volunteered to help and actually got a real, non-form-generated response from someone who paid attention to what I wrote in my introductory email. Contrast that to the default response of Kent County Republicans, who won’t answer no matter what you do.

Elections matter. The current state of the political climate in Washington is proof of that. This August, Michigan Republicans have a choice — we can support a neophyte businessman, a too-eager attorney general, a sheriff, a little-known state senator, or … Pete Hoekstra.

Join me in supporting Michigan families and Michigan jobs by supporting Pete Hoekstra for governor!