My adopted home commonwealth of Massachusetts voted to keep their state income tax.
They also voted to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana – which answers the question, “What were they smoking?”
The Road Ahead
It doesn’t feel like a great morning to be a Republican. But in reality, last night might have been the best thing to happen to Republicans – and, more importantly, for the conservative base of the Republican party.
Is the GOP too conservative? The left-leaning pundits like to say so, because it tacitly paints their victorious candidate as a centrist. He isn’t – Barack Obama simply ran a campaign that painted liberal ideas like government-orchestrated health care and wealth distribution as “common sense.”
But the problem for the Republican presidential candidates this time around was that they tried too hard to identify as conservative in their tight primary battles by using the word “conservative” and constantly quoting Ronald Reagan – despite the fact that every candidate had glaring non-conservative credentials. This was not only an insult to the intelligence of Republican voters, but to those waiting for the general election GOP debates were stages full of buzzword-bandying empty suits.
As a colleague of mine said the other day, Ronald Reagan didn’t call himself the “next Barry Goldwater” when he ran for president in 1980. He didn’t need to claim the conservative mantle because he had been banging the drum for decades. He had walked the walk, so he didn’t need to talk the talk. That is why conservatives worship Ronald Reagan, but today’s Republican candidates simply don’t understand Reagan’s governing philosophy – at least, not enough to break it down like Reagan did when he said famously called government the cause of, rather than a solution to, America’s problems.
It’s not time to panic yet. Four years ago, pundits were asking if the Democratic party was dead – they were painted as a party devoid of ideas that could only react to their opponents. Two years after John Kerry’s failed presidential bid, the donkey-shaped tombstone had been chiseled, the Democrats were in power and driving the agenda. So the pendulum will swing, and it can happen sooner than expected. But depsite cries about the political environment being one way or another, a saying by my old boss Morton Blackwell rings true: in politics, nothing moves unless it’s pushed.
Now is the time to push – and it isn’t going to happen in smoke-filled backrooms and it’s not going to come from political celebrities who will deliver a new platform from on high. It’s up to us, to the grassroots, to make conservative ideas mainstream again. And given the challenge of a dynamic and charismatic champion of liberalism on the national scene, the right has no choice but to elevate our game – and not wait for national GOP leaders to do so.
Reagan would be the first to say that relying on big, national institutions for change is a mistake. The online media environment today gives us our window: never have such institutions (party leadership, national media) been less relevant. But to paraphrase fellow UMass alum and former Boston Celtics coach Rick Pitino, Ronald Reagan ain’t walking through that door.
We have our work cut out for us, but this should be fun.
Predictions
Since my office constantly looks for opportunities to gamble, we have a small pool about the electoral college results. Just for fun, here’s my best guess on how tonight is going to go:
Electoral tally: Obama 349, McCain 189, with Virginia, Ohio, and Florida the most notable states going from red to blue.
Senate: Look for the Democrats to pick up at least eight seats – Alaska, Colorado, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, and Virginia.
House: The Democrats will gain as many as 20 seats, but look for an all-politics-is-local moment in Pennsylvania’s 11th District, where Paul Kanjorski will fall to Hazleton Mayor Louis Barletta, largely over Barletta’s reputation for standing firm on illegal immigration.
Get out and vote, if you feel like it
Your vote probably won’t make a difference today.
That’s obviously not very politically correct to say, but it’s true. It was first pointed out to me by one of my favorite professors at UMass, Vincent Moscardelli, in fall 2000. (The traitorous Moscardelli now teaches at UConn.)
In one of the three classes I took with him, Moscardelli confounded us once by asking, “Why should you vote?” He pointed out that elections were rarely won or lost by one vote, and that our vote for President in Massachusetts was moot since Al Gore would carry the state easily. What was the point?
He grinned as he shot down every argument we made – which were really just arguments we were parroting from feel-good public service announcements about civic engagement. When our faith in democracy was sufficiently shaken, he broke his point down for us: voting was a collective, not an individual action – like cheering at a ballgame. If you see a game at a stadium of 45,000, and a few people aren’t cheering, no one really notices. But if the entire stadium isn’t cheering, then it is very noticeable.
After that discussion, I never again thought of voting as a “civic obligation.” I cast a ballot in 2000 because it was the first Presidential election in which I was eligible, and also because I was able to vote against Ted Kennedy. Neither race was close, but both votes were personally important to me – just like cheering for the Yankees is important to me when I see them play. Voting is a personal choice.
This is a fact that has seemed to escape organizations like Rock the Vote or the now-defunct Youth Vote Coalition – nominally non-ideological organizations that try to encourage voter engagement. For a citizen to actually go to the polls, they must feel like their vote is important – not just to drive up turnout numbers, but based on a genuine enthusiasm and understanding of their candidate.
Tonight, with Virginia apparently close, I’ll brave the long lines and cast a vote – because it’s important to me.
Beat the lines – vote late
CNN has set up a voter hotline so folks can report problems at polling stations. I’ll go out on a limb and say things won’t be perfect – not because of any kind of dirty tricks or ACORN coming up with a Halloween-themed recently deceased GOTV program, but because tomorrow we will have more than just a Presidential election going on.
Your high school civics teacher may have told you that we actually have 51 separate elections for President. But consider all the various counties and elections districts within each state, and the reality is that there will but hundreds (if not thousands) of essentially separate elections going on tomorrow. And considering that many of the folks orchestrating this ballet of democracy are volunteers or very low-paid people with nothing better to do… well, if I heard that there were no irregularities, then I’d be a little suspicious.
As for CNN’s Crumbling Democracy Hotline, many of the calls have been from people complaining about waiting in line too long. Given past attempts to disenfranchise voters through poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright violence, this is probably a good sign.
Beat the lines – vote late
CNN has set up a voter hotline so folks can report problems at polling stations. I’ll go out on a limb and say things won’t be perfect – not because of any kind of dirty tricks or ACORN coming up with a Halloween-themed recently deceased GOTV program, but because tomorrow we will have more than just a Presidential election going on.
Your high school civics teacher may have told you that we actually have 51 separate elections for President. But consider all the various counties and elections districts within each state, and the reality is that there will but hundreds (if not thousands) of essentially separate elections going on tomorrow. And considering that many of the folks orchestrating this ballet of democracy are volunteers or very low-paid people with nothing better to do… well, if I heard that there were no irregularities, then I’d be a little suspicious.
As for CNN’s Crumbling Democracy Hotline, many of the calls have been from people complaining about waiting in line too long. Given past attempts to disenfranchise voters through poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright violence, this is probably a good sign.
Alternative effigy
A West Hollywood man has been allowed to keep an effigy of Sarah Palin hanging from a noose in his front yard as part of a Halloween display – which is the right call, because he has the right to free speech and no one in their right mind thinks he is making an actual threat.
You may be asking yourself, what if it was another candidate – say, maybe, Barack Obama? Well, that gets the offending party arrested.
Paranoia may destroy ya, but McCain’s health care plan won’t
I have seen tons of Barack Obama commercials plugging his health care plan and telling me that John McCain’s plan will tax my health benefits. Predictably, it’s not true; what is true is that McCain’s plan would shift ownership of health care coverage to me and away from my employer – so if I change jobs, my health coverage comes with me. (It’s a concept that was championed by Thomas Friedman in his best-selling book, The World Is Flat.) Barack Obama cribbed the major pillars of his program from Mitt Romney, who instituted it in my adopted homeland of Massachusetts.
Is it part of a disturbing pattern? Another Obama commercial quotes a Heritage Foundation policy expert – and by “quotes” I mean “flat out lies about” the expert opinion. Despite the lead, Obama is demonstrating an almost paranoid urgency. McCain HQ may want to double check their phone lines.
Give credit where credit is YEEEAAAHHHHHGGHH!!!
CNN.com contributor Roland Martin reminds us that before Obama put Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana, and other formerly deep red states in play, Howard Dean boldly forged a “50-state Strategy” as chair of the DNC. The then-controversial plan was simple: Democrats would work to rebuild their party in every single state. Martin recalls that many influential Democrats feared the strategy spread resources too thin and would cost the Democrats their change to win a Congressional majority in 2006.
It obviously didn’t, and the statement was clear: Dean felt his liberal policies would improve the life of every American, so he would ask every American for their vote.
In the six years since Republicans staged historic gains in the 2002 elections, some conservatives have gotten sloppy when talking about the red state/blue state divide, assuming that “elitist” urban areas wouldn’t support conservative policies instead of finding a way to sell conservatism to those areas. We built a base of support in rural and suburban areas, but never made the case of why conservatives could run cities better than liberals.
The pendulum will shift, and in a few years Republicans will likely be in a stronger position than they are today. But to really rise from the ashes, we need to take new ground – rather than simply reclaim what we had.
Rebuilding around Palin
The New York Times and CNN both ran stories this morning about Sarah Palin being the standard bearer of the Republican Party over the next four years, and possibly longer. (The Times piece includes a quote from my former boss, Morton Blackwell, positively giddy about getting within four feet of Palin at a fundraiser.)
It’s true that Palin’s ascension to the VP spot on the ticket was a symptom of the GOP’s short bench – but no more than John McCain’s ascension to the top of the ticket. But she was also the best pick – a true small government conservative – and moving forward, she has the potential to give a credible voice to the Party from well outside the Beltway.
And though her support outside her conservative base has suffered from a harsh campaign, her wounds may not be fatal. Even Linda Bloodworth-Thomas – the television producer who used an entire episode of Designing Women to bash Clarence Thomas (no relation) – said she was fed up with the “demonizing” of Palin and red-staters.
It’s not hard to get sick of the treatment she has received, including the attacks on her experience (from the campaign of a guy who only has a Senate seat because Mike Ditka allowed it) and a silly RNC clothing budget controversy – which is a top story for all our major news outlets because everything else in the country is apparently going pretty well.
Jim Eltringham 
