Canadian Cincinnatus

Steve Schmidt: the reason John McCain lost

One of the reasons I had so many reservations about Mitt Romney is that I feared, being an establishment moderate, he would run the kind of gentlemanly loser campaign that John McCain ran in 2008. With the exception of picking Sarah Palin as the running mate, McCain’s campaign did everything wrong. And it even managed to mismanage that one success: after Palin’s firebrand acceptance speech - the one that propelled McCain ahead of Obama in the polls (for the first time in months) - the McCain campaign hid her away but did nothing to prepare her while she was sequestered. The architect of that defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory debacle was the bullet-headed Steve Schmidt.

For this reason, I was much interested in this expose article on Schmidt at Big Journalism. A very informative article that deserves to be read in its entirety.

For some background information, check out Schmidt’s wikipedia entry. This is what it says about his early campaigns:

In 1995, Steve Schmidt managed the unsuccessful campaign for Kentucky Attorney General of Will T. Scott, who is now Deputy Chief Justice of the Kentucky Supreme Court [in other words Scott was good, his 1995 campaign run by Schmidt just sucked]. This Kentucky campaign's advertising strategy was featured in the second edition of George Magazine. In 1998, Schmidt ran California State Senator Tim Leslie's unsuccessful race for Lt. Governor of California. Also that year, he was the Communications Director for California State Treasurer Matt Fong's unsuccessful campaign to unseat U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer [I remember this campaign; Fong was widely viewed as having a credible shot at unseating Boxer]. In 1999, he was the Communications Director for Lamar Alexander's presidential run, leaving in June when the campaign reduced its senior staff.

You will notice that the two things common with each campaign: Steve Schmidt, and the fact that his employer lost. While it is true that he led Arnold’s 2006 successful gubernatorial campaign, this was accomplished when Arnold was at the apogee of his popularity. As far as I am able to determine, this has been Schmidt’s only campaign victory - ever.

I agree with Moe Lane, who said:

The faction of Team McCain represented by Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace should not be allowed anywhere NEAR a Republican Presidential campaign for the rest of their lives.

Hear, hear. Steve Schmidt is the John Tory of American politics.

Obama’s elitist war on stay-at-home moms

At this point in the US Presidential campaign, the Team Obama strategy is coming into clear focus: create a series of divisive crises to drive a wedge between the proletariat masses and the governing elites. Many conservative commentators attributed this to Obama’s desire to avoid his own record. As the legal saying goes, if your case is strong on facts, argue the facts; if your case is strong on the law, argue the law; and if your case is strong on neither, attack the witnesses.

I think they are only partly right. Stanley Kurtz predicted in his book, Radical in Chief, that Obama would do this and his book appeared before the 2010 midterms. Kurtz based his prediction on the fact that this is the classic community organizer strategy and Barack Obama is a community organizer. This is what community organizers do; it’s straight out of the Saul Alinsky playbook. 

The contraception mandate (clearly designed to antagonize the Catholic Church), the Sandra Fluke-Rush Limbaugh dustup, the Travyon Martin-George Zimmerman-O J Simpson fiasco and now the attack on Ann Romney because she is a stay-at-home mother are all media events that Team Obama has either manufactured, amplified or latched on to. Unfortunately for Obama, in driving a wedge between one group of Americans and another, he invariably ends up lumping himself with the minority.

The Hilary Rosen affair is very instructive. As many readers doubtlessly already know, last Wednesday, Obama surrogate Hilary Rosen opined on CNN that Ann Romney is out of touch with average America because she “has never worked a day in her life”. The Drudge Report promptly posted a picture of Mitt and Ann sitting with their brood five boys. How out of touch do you have to be to think it is a good idea to get an elitist Washington lawyer to criticize the institution of motherhood. Could you imagine Bill Clinton making such a mistake?

(Of course, to be fair, disavowals from key Team Obama players like David Axelrod came quickly. Still, who was the twit that green-lighted Rosen in the first place?)

This kind of mistake happens because Barack Obama is too self-unaware to appreciate his utter disconnect with mainstream America. It is not that he is a rich elitist like Mitt Romney. It is worse than that because I think the average American can identify with Romney’s life a lot easier than Obama’s. Obama’s life isn’t so much privileged, as it is weird. He has been a lifelong intellectual ideologue and therefore understands people only in terms of Marxist class-structure. In contrast, Bill Clinton understands people as they really are.

So keep at Barack! By the time you are finished with him, Mitt Romney will come across like the reincarnation of Tom Joad.

 

Mitt Romney can’t close the deal, but here's how he could

Try as he might Mitt Romney can’t seem to convince conservatives that he is one of them, and he appears to be at a loss as what to do about it. His recent defeats in the Alabama and Mississippi primaries is a testament to that.

Of course, skepticism about Romney originates from the fact that his deepest convictions have tended to align with those of the voters he needs to convince at the moment. This coincidence leads people to believe that he is just shining then when he agrees with them. As Dick Morris said in The New Prince: 

 “When a candidate takes an issue position in the thick of controversy, voters feel that is the most reliable indicator they have of his true essence. Voters know he has chosen sides. They know the controversial position will make him enemies and alienate interest groups. The issue position becomes a form of symbolic speech, telling us what the candidate is all about. (p. 33)”

Suffice it to say, Mitt Romney has never done this, which leads many to doubt that he will dismantle Romneycare like he says he will. Romneycare, ooops! I mean Obamacare.

On Wednesday’s lunchtime video, Dick Morris explained how Romney could earn their trust. He advised Romney to stop nitpicking Rick Santorum and start going after Obama on the issues of the day. After all, Santorum isn’t their bogeyman, Obama is.

He gave a number of examples of current events that would make perfect subjects for Romney’s speeches. To name two: Obama is planning on giving US anti-missile secrets to the Russians, and the CBO just announced that the projected cost of Obamacare will be double what Obama said it was. One item I add to the list was a headline on Drudge Report on Tuesday: US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta required, on his recent visit to Afghanistan, that US forces be disarmed in his presence when he spoke to them. The US Secretary of Defense is afraid of his own soldiers! Why isn’t Romney - and indeed every other Republican – making hay of this?

And what about misogynist Bill Maher donating $1 million to Obama’s super-PAC? Why isn’t Romney on the air every day demanding Obama return his money? I don’t think he mentioned it at all. That this outrage is an issue is only thanks to the alternate media, who are doing Romney’s work for him.

There is a steady of stream of such stories and they are waiting for somebody, anybody, to use them. 

How to squelch Obama’s pulpit socialism

Last Thursday, President Barack Obama attended the National Prayer Breakfast. At that event, Obama opined that the teachings of Jesus justify many of his soak-the-rich policies.  For instance, he said:

"But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus' teaching that, for unto whom much is given, much shall be required."

"It's not just about strengthening alliances or promoting democratic values or projecting American leadership around the world, although it does all those things and it will make us safer and more secure," it's also about the biblical call to care for the least of these, for the poor, for those at the margins of our society; to answer the responsibility we're given in Proverbs to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute."

He went on to explain how his understanding of Christianity guided him into banning the practice of denying health insurance for pre-existing conditions, as well as to support Dodd-Frank and set up the Consumer Protection Agency.

The way to counter this kind of thing is to ask him, so who did you learn this interpretation of Christianity from - the Rev. Jeremiah Wright? And if not from him, then where? What other church, besides Rev. Wright’s Trinity United – that you belonged to for almost 20 years - have you been a been a member of?

By explicitly mixing religion with politics, President Obama has also provided a great excuse for rerunning attack ads depicting Rev. Wright’s “God damn America” sermon. Hey, if you want to inject religion into the Presidential debate, we are happy to cooperate.

Or we would be, if the GOP weren’t the stupid party.

 

Strategist Bill McGurn on Mitt Romney’s cheap Florida win

Normally I consider Bill McGurn to be the kind of establishment, RINO political strategist who I instinctively distrust, but Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal he hit the nail right on the head:

“Even before the voting has begun in Tuesday's primary, polls show Mitt Romney with a comfortable lead. If the former Massachusetts governor wins by a respectable margin, it would be completely understandable to take it as confirmation that he needs to stick with his campaign strategy.

It would also be a colossal mistake.

At least since South Carolina, Mr. Romney has been laboring under the assumption that his most serious challenge is to defeat Newt Gingrich. It's not. Mr. Gingrich's viability after months of also-ran status owes itself almost entirely to Mr. Romney's glaring weaknesses. The governor's challenge is not merely to best Mr. Gingrich but to do so in a way that addresses those weaknesses.”

“Even before the voting has begun in Tuesday's primary, polls show Mitt Romney with a comfortable lead. If the former Massachusetts governor wins by a respectable margin, it would be completely understandable to take it as confirmation that he needs to stick with his campaign strategy.”

“At least since South Carolina, Mr. Romney has been laboring under the assumption that his most serious challenge is to defeat Newt Gingrich. It's not. ... The governor's challenge is not merely to best Mr. Gingrich but to do so in a way that addresses those weaknesses.

Ronald Reagan always understood that ideas were more potent than invective. Nor was he above looking to others for those ideas. The across-the-board tax cut he made the heart of his 1980 campaign was largely the work of a then-obscure congressman from upstate New York named Jack Kemp.”

There is only so much that one can accomplish with negative attack ads. While they certainly have their place in scaring the undecided voters into your column at the last minute, all truly successful campaigns begin with a strong, compelling positive message. 

This is because a completely negative campaign will repel voters from you as well as your opponent. The reason the Florida primary had a low turnout was because a pure negative campaign is a negative sum game. Dick Morris has made much the same point.

When going up against Obama in the general election, negative ads will work a bit - to bring items like Solyndra and Fast and Furious to the attention of the disengaged voter who has been kept in the dark by the main-stream media. But if negative ads are allowed to dominate the way they did in Florida, the Republican nominee will be making a big mistake. Obama has inherited a lot of good will from the American people by virtue of being the first black President. The American people want the first black president to succeed. They feel it is their patriotic duty to help him succeed. This is what is holding up his polling numbers in such a dismal economy. If all he does is slime President Obama, the GOP candidate will be working against this dynamic – and making himself a hated figure.

 

Canada’s Lesson for the Republican Party

Here is an interesting article about the collapse of the Progressive Conservative party and the rise of the Reform Party in Canada. The author, Neil Flagg, hits the nail right on the head. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had a so-where-can-they-go? attitude with regard to his party’s right-wing. Well, in 1993, he got his answer. They formed a dynamic new party that energetically courted the hearts and minds of conservative Canadians. The ensuing vote splitting in ridings all across the country ensured that Mulroney’s party went from 169 seats in Parliament to two, while the upstart Reform Party went from one seat to 54.

A result like that can’t be blamed on Mulroney’s hasty replacement, Kim Campbell. (Like a rat, Mulroney had deserted his sinking ship barely four months before the election). She was little more than a populariser of dumb blonde jokes, but one hapless boob can’t construct an electoral catastrophe that complete in such a short time period. For that to occur, the rot had be deep.

While this resulted in “13 years of corrupt and aimless Liberal Party rule” (as Flagg says), I think it can also be said that the result was worth the cost; the old Progressive Conservative party had to be destroyed in order to be saved. The 1993 federal election was the first time that I, and many other Canadian conservatives, voted for somebody. 

To be sure, the Republican Party of 2012 is in far healthier ideological shape than the Progressive Conservative Party was in 1993, but GOP big-wigs are making a big mistake if they think there the old Progressive Conservative Party’s fate contains no lessons for them.

The most important lesson being: don’t take your core supporters for granted. Not ever.

GOP should not ignore Ron Paul voters

It is easy for conservatives to dismiss Ron Paul. He holds a number of positions that are well outside of the conservative mainstream: isolationism, drug legalization, and a general anti-government stance that is too pure to be sellable to the electorate at large. So therefore the Republican nabobs think: he’s a nut, his people are mindless zombies, he’s got a low glass ceiling in the primaries, let’s forget about him. Big mistake!

As Dick Morris points out in this lunch-time video, the Reagan coalition is a three-legged stool: national security hawks, social conservatives and fiscal conservatives/libertarians; each faction is important because you need all three to achieve a majority. Right now, Ron Paul is the only Presidential candidate who actively courts the last leg of the stool: the libertarians. In the past 15 years, this group has been largely taken for granted by GOP Presidential candidates: by Bob Dole, by George W Bush, by John McCain and potentially now by Mitt Romney.

That so many Republican voters rally behind somebody who believes America was responsible for 9/11, and whose past views have bordered on the anti-Semitic conspiracy kook fringe, shows how this faction of the electorate is sick and tired of being taken for granted and is eager to find somebody – anybody - to represent them.

Ron Paul’s strong second place in the Republican race is a wake up call for the Republicans. If the GOP ignores the libertarian wing much longer it will face of a third party challenger from the right, if not from Paul then from somebody else.

To beat Obama in 2012, the Republicans must take a page from former Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s fourth electoral triumph in 2004. His National/Liberal coalition gained substantially in the popular vote even though the popular vote of his Labour Party rivals did not decline much. Where did the votes come from, if not from Labour? From the minor single-issue conservative parties. He adopted enough of their issues (like immigration restrictionism), that those who had drifted away from the Liberal Party over the years came back home. Had he continued to ignore these voters, saying in effect “where can they go?” those third parties would have continued to grow at Howard’s expense.

To win, Romney or whoever beats Romney for the nomination must provide the voters with enough libertarian policies so that the small-government people feel welcome again in the Republican Party.

Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry are shooting themselves in the foot with attacks on Bain Capital

As Dick Morris has pointed out, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Rick Santorum are vying to win the conservative semifinal round – the winner of which gets the privilege of going up against the establishment candidate, Mitt Romney, in the GOP finals. This means that their voters are, by definition, conservative. Their strategy is - or should be - to prove to the conservative primary voter that they are the ‘real conservative’ in this race.

So what do they do instead? They attack Mitt Romney for actions he took while working for Bain Capital. Basically, for those who don’t know, Bain Capital is a company that buys companies that are poorly managed or that are on the verge of bankruptcy and either turn them around, by getting rid of their deadwood (i.e. by firing people), or liquidate their assets.

There is nothing wrong with this. It is an entirely salutary exercise that saves (some) jobs while preventing precious capital from being spent to unproductive uses. In other words, outfits like Bain Capital are required for the efficient functioning of our economy. The problem for Gingrich and Perry is that the conservative voter understands this. Left-wing populist attacks on capitalism (which the anti-Romney ads are) are the kind of thing that conservative voters hate. Conservatives expect nonsense like this to come from left-wing politicians like Barack Obama (Bain Capital will be a problem for Romney in the general election), but not from anybody courting them.

In their strategic stupidity, what Gingrich and Perry have in effect done is to transform Mitt Romney from the establishment candidate to the conservative candidate. Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh spent considerable on-air time defending Bain Capital (even though he doesn’t like Romney) while heaping blame on Gingrich and Perry for their anti-business rhetoric. So if Romney is now the ‘conservative’ candidate, where does that leave Perry and Gingrich? 

Answer: the unwanted, loozer candidates.

P.S. If they have any sense, Gingrich and Perry will fire their idiotic campaign strategists. Another case of playing checkers when you should be playing chess.

Mitt Romney underperforms yet again

In yesterday’s Iowa caucus Mitt Romney beats Rick Santorum by a whopping 8 vote margin. He spent $10 million, campaigned 4 years and was unable to crack the 25% mark. Meanwhile Rick Santorum, the man who was polling in the low single digits barely a month ago and who only spent $500K in Iowa, pulled off a photo finish. Tell me again money matters in politics.

And tell me again that Mitt Romney should be the Republican nominee because he is the most ‘electable’ candidate.  Electable – based on what? It was the same story in Iowa back in 2008. He spent almost 4 years, $10 million and all he managed to do was to increase his popular support from 22% to 25%. He likes to tell Newt Gingrich that, unlike Newt, he isn’t a career politician. What he doesn’t say is that he is not a career politician for lack of trying. He has been trying to get elected to something since 1994 when he lost a senate race to Ted Kennedy. All he has to show for his effort was one term as governor of Massachusetts. When he left he was the 48^th most popular governor in the nation. Admittedly, Massachusetts is a tough state for Republicans, but still, where’s the proof he’s electable?

Furthermore, there is a huge peril in being the ‘inevitable’ candidate. The problem is that if that is all you are, and your inevitability gets pricked by an unexpected loss or even a Pyrrhic victory, all of a sudden you have nothing. The emperor has no clothes on. If you don’t believe me, look at Prime Minister Paul Martin. Less than a decade ago he bestrode the Canadian political landscape like a colossus, but after Stephen Harper held him to a minority, the Martin balloon quickly deflated. Behind the inevitability myth, the Paul Martin phenomenon was just hype. And Paul Martin came with a serious achievement under his belt – balancing the federal budget. What corresponding political achievement does Mitt Romney have? Romneycare?

Aside from the Romneycare millstone around his neck, I think it is the reputation for being a flip-flopper that cause so many people to mistrust Mitt Romney. The reason Mitt can’t shake the charge is that it is true. In deep blue Massachusetts he had to say and do many things that are heresy to the conservative voters he is now wooing. Fine. You have to do what you have to do. But now, when it is most expedient for him to be a born-again conservative, that’s exactly what he is. So do you believe him? Me neither. How will he do when he is President and the really hard spending decisions must be made to balance the budget? Don’t hold your breath.

Conventional wisdom says that his flip-flopping is only a liability in the GOP primaries, but that if he gets the nomination, his moderation will make him an easier sell to the general electorate. Wrong! This is a complete misunderstanding of the moderate voter. As I have pointed out in the past (here, here, here, here and here), we political junkies completely misread the motivations of the people who inhabit the mushy middle: we ascribe our value system to them and this is false. We appraise candidates by examining where they stand on the issues and assume the non-political voter does the same. Jettison a few ‘extreme’ issues and move towards the ‘center’ if you want the independents. Big mistake. Because the moderate non-political voter doesn’t think like that. He doesn’t care about issues. At all. To the extent that he thinks about politics, he cares about personality and leadership. And when he sees a flip-flopper like Romney, he doesn’t see a ‘moderate’ who isn’t ‘extreme’, a guy like him; he sees weakness. He sees a lack of leadership. And when he sees him failing to inspire his own side - the people who know him the best and who make up his team – all he sees is more weakness. This is why it is often the case that politicians who are either on the right end of the acceptable political spectrum or the left end of the acceptable political spectrum are the most successful with the non-political ‘middle’ voters.

For an example look at Ronald Reagan, a man well to the right of the average American voter - and considered eminently electable by them. And for an example from the left, look no further than Barack Obama. He was far to the left of the average American voter in 2008 but he was charismatic and he had his base fired up into a state of religious rapture. As a result, the non-political people wanted to follow Obama, not John McCain, who was 2008’s GOP cod liver oil candidate (“hold you nose and vote for him, it will be good for you”). The non-political independent voter wants a strong leader, not a wishy-washy ‘moderate’ like himself.

Another example of an electable GOP moderate loser? Take Thomas Dewey. Read Zachary Karabell’s Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election. Dewey comes across like 1948 version of Mitt Romney. And like Romney, his primary virtue was considered to be his inevitability. And famous headlines aside, we know how that turned out.

 

Why the left is out to get Herman Cain

The first and foremost reason is that having a black opponent will upset Barack Obama’s reelection strategy, which is to promiscuously play the race card against the Republican nominee: every time the GOP contender criticizes Obama, it can only be because he is raciiist. They can’t do that if Cain were the nominee. Or rather, they can and they will, but every time a white MSM reporter/Obama water carrier calls Herman Cain an anti-black racist, he look like an idiot.

The second, and more revealing, reason is that the existence of Herman Cain offends them - offends them personally. To many liberals, they measure their own virtue by how much they care about various designated victim groups, groups such as blacks, women, homosexuals, etc. So every time a member of one of these groups plays the victim card, it affirms their own saintliness: “See, look how bad society treats [member of victim group]. Good thing there are people like me to show compassion to the less fortunate.” And since compassion doesn’t require any effort on their part, the whole racket is very convenient.

But what if a member of a designated victim group refuses to play ball? Even worse, what if a victim group member tells the white liberals to stick their condescending paternalism where the sun don’t shine because it actually damages the interests of individual members of those groups? Now, a monkey wrench is thrown into the whole works. Their – their own personal – goodness is called into question. How dare they! 

That’s what conservative like Herman Cain and Allen West do to white liberals. And for that matter, what Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin do to feminists. For our emotionally crippled elites, it's personal regarding people like Herman Cain.