Canadian Cincinnatus

What the GOP should do about the black and Hispanic vote

In the last election, Mitt Romney got less than 5% of the African American vote and less than 30% of the Hispanic vote. If I was the GOP Presidential candidate in 2016, here is what I would do to improve that:

I would circulate aggressive ads describing the economic plight of black Americans in the black neighbourhoods, explaining how poverty rates have grown and unemployment has skyrocketed under President Obama. These ads will explain how poorly blacks have fared under one-party Democrat ruled cities. Here is the tough part of the ads: they will also tell African Americans that affirmative action has done nothing to lower the black unemployment, that if anything, it has exacerbated it; and that welfare has only kept blacks poor and ghettoized, while destroying the African American family unit. The overall theme of these ads would be that America works best when all Americans are treated as Americans and not as members of a minority group.

In the Hispanic community, I would run similar ads, telling them that illegal immigration is undercutting the wages of legal Hispanics, and that the only practical effect of education in Spanish is to ghettoize Hispanics.

The concurrent message for general voters would be that the United States treats people as individuals first and foremost; that treating citizens differently with affirmative action; or importing a separate class of helots with no legal rights, in order to provide cheap labour; fundamentally corrupts the American ideal.

Given the uproar such ads would create, why would I run them? Good question. Here’s why:

In spite of the controversy, there have very little downside. In the black and Hispanic communities, the Republican brand is already bottomed out. The few blacks and Hispanics who vote Republican today do so because he they already believe in the traditional American ideal. Everybody else just hears the worst caricatures of Republicans. And with no GOP rebuttal, they believe it. 

Second, the truth, particularly the unvarnished truth, is very easy to defend. Politicians tend to forget this because they so rarely champion the unvarnished truth.

Third, the real prize here are the white voters, who make up over 70% of the electorate. The problem with appealing to them directly with issues like immigration reform, border enforcement, anti-bilingualism and ending affirmative action is that they feel that they don’t like being singled out and pandered to. 

Pandering to whites doesn’t work because white Americans, unlike all other racial sub-group in America, deny they belong to an ethnic group. In fact, they resent being placed into an ethnic category at all. Rather, they identify with America as a whole. (This is true - for now; but after another 20 or 30 years of mass immigration and race-based demagoguery, it may be back to blood, as Tom Wolfe suggests.)

But if you target the ethnic voters first, and whites only hear the Republican message via the Democrat and MSM and black community leader reaction to it, well that sure doesn’t look like white pandering. If anything, it looks like somebody has the guts to tell people the truth, and they will respect us for it.

The purpose of this strategy is not just to make it morally acceptable for white Americans to vote for necessary reforms but to permanently change the racial status quo. For this reason, it would be a mistake to sugarcoat the message or to present it only to the margins of these groups (say, to the black middle class). For maximum effect, the message must run in the heart of the black and Hispanic ghettos, and the message must be blunt, strong and uncompromising.

Premier Dad, the deadbeat dad

When people leave high office, it is customary to say nice things about them after they are safely gone. Criticism is considered bad taste at that point in time. But former Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s reign has been so dismal that it seems to me that sugar coating his career would be a crime. Aspiring leaders need to learn important lessons from his miserable example to avoid repeating his mistakes.

On the positive side, while I can freely call Barack Obama a hard-left socialist, who is far more left-wing than most people acknowledge, this is not the case for McGuinty. He is a much more benign political archetype. He is a classic nanny state’er. His nickname even acknowledges that: Premier Dad.

Which brings me to his first failings: nanny state-ism. I suppose this is his one ‘failure’ where reasonable people can disagree on whether it is a failure or not. Lowering the allowable blood alcohol limit for drivers, banning pesticides and numerous other pesky safety laws, all of these things probably incrementally increased the safety factor for the already unprecedented safe lives of Ontarians. But to me, these things are a lot of PII (Preoccupation with Inconsequential Increments). They also enervate and enfeeble the soul. I’m with Helen Keller when she said, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature…. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” Past a certain point, after our basic safety standards have been met, more safety only stifles our freedom and saps our vitality, as the law of diminishing returns ramps up and hysterical cowardice is allowed to flourish.

One thing that reasonable people shouldn’t be able to disagree on though is his incompetent management of the provincial government. E-health, the Ornge air ambulance scandal, the costly cancellation of the gas generator plants, and a huge sole-source wind generator contract to Samsung - a company that never produced a wind turbine before: all these fiascos happened on his watch. In a sense, they give McGuinty his one positive achievement, if we may call it that: he single-handedly discredited the notion that big government is caring, compassionate and helps the needy. Dalton McGuinty has taught us by example that a large government is merely an incompetent, blundering, wasteful and corrupt behemoth.

I think though that his biggest sin is that he consciously and deliberately tapped into democracy’s greatest vice: that people can vote themselves more of their own money. McGuinty’s political strategy was simple. He bought labour peace by giving the provincial labour unions whatever they wanted, while also buying off every special interest group that crossed his path. And he was successful - for a while. But as Margaret Thatcher so memorably put it, “the trouble with socialism is that you run out of other people’s money.” And so he did. Staring at a $13 billion deficit, he could no longer satisfy the demands of the teachers, the shock troops in his initial 2003 victory over the hapless red Tory, Ernie Eves. When the teachers turned on him, he had no plan B. He simply called it a career, comfortable in letting others clean up his mess - and take the blame for all the pain that this will necessarily cause.

Basically, Premier Dad got likkered up and blew Junior’s college fund at the track.

Businessmen-politicians neglect the moral aspect of politics

There is an emotional, moral element to politics that ideologues grasp but which most businessmen don’t have a clue about. In using the term ‘moral’ I don’t mean in the Judeo-Christian sense of the word, but more the military sense, as in Napoleon’s dictum, “The moral is to the physical as three is to one.” What he didn’t mean by that was that the side who most acted like choirboys would win, but that the side with the greater will to win - the greater morale - had a decisive advantage.

The best example comes from naval warfare. In the Napoleonic Wars, it was customary in the Royal Navy to court-martial ships’ captains for cowardice (and hang them) if they showed insufficient zeal in attacking. The result was that the British lost a few ships in reckless, doomed attacks, but they won the moral aspect of the naval war. British captains were always on the lookout for French ships to attack, and French ships were always looking over the shoulder for crazy British ships about to attack them. This gave the British a great moral advantage: they were aggressive, the French were cowering. Aggression leads to expectation of victory, cowering leads to expectations of defeat. After a while, these expectations are self-fulfilling. 

A little example from politics. About 20 years ago, I attended York University. At that time, the campus left were hell bent on getting OSSPIG approved on campus. This was a mandatory $10 annual levy on every student, in order to fund a left-wing slush fund (controlled, I discovered later, by Ralph Nader). The trouble was that student elections usually have a 10% student participation rate while 20% constituted a quorum for propositions of this sort. The left wanted quorum to be reduced to 10% but the Board of Trustees wouldn’t budge. Their solution? Infiltrate a big trustee dinner with anarchists and start a food fight among the VIP’s. After that, the trustees were so shocked that the caved in. That’s how you achieve a moral victory! No businessman-politician thinks like that. That’s why they are so often outmaneuvered by Alinskyite community organizers.

While the left often overreaches with such tactics - as it did with OWS – the right has the opposite problem: we don’t understand the character of the fight at all. Andrew Breitbart did, as does his protégé, James O’Keefe, but they are the rare exception.

In contrast, conservatives often, in a misbegotten way to score points for being ‘reasonable’, concede legitimacy to the other side’s arguments. They think, by, in effect, apologizing for their positions, it makes them look centrist. In reality, it makes them look weak. It also makes them look evil because they are conceding the other side’s point that they are evil. Weak and evil, the perfect foil. Who doesn’t want to be on the side that’s weak and evil?

Mayor Rob Ford wins and Toronto’s anti-democracy left loses

It was a good day for Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and a bad day for former Mayor David Miller’s claque. They tried to overturn a duly run election through legal trickery of the most specious kind, and they failed.

One thing that can be said about this whole fiasco is that it has exposed City Hall leftists for the brutal Alinskyite street fighters that they are, who don’t let democracy get in the way of their agenda. They use any means necessary. Why do I say this? Because the root issue in the Ford case - Rob Ford soliciting $3K for his football charity using city stationary - is so absurdly trivial, it is hard to believe that even Clayton Ruby is able to keep a straight fact when talking about his case to the press.

But as I have said before, now that the City Hall left is exposed to all concerned for what it is, we need to begin fighting back using the same methods. Every time a left-wing councillor slips on a legal banana peel, we need to declare legal warfare on him in the same way.

Political overreach: Dianne Feinstein edition

The nice thing about Dianne Feinstein’s proposal to ban up to 150 named firearms, hi-cap mags, etc. is that it isn’t going anywhere. Not even in the Democrat-controlled Senate. The Dem’s control it 55 to 45, but there are seven Democrat senators from red states, which Romney won by large margin, who are up for reelection next year. Not only that, but the Senate is controlled by NRA A-rated Harry Reid, who as I have already mentioned, didn’t get his A-rating because his constituents like gun control. He might cave. But it will be painful for him. On a side note, Harry Reid just announced that he is not prepared to get rid of the 60-vote filibuster rule. And then there is the House…

If Feinstein were smart, which she isn’t, she would have come up with a more modest proposal, one that would have been unpalatable for the pro-freedom crowd, but which wouldn’t have raised such a clamor, and would therefore have been more difficult for pro-gun Congressmen to oppose.

The problem for her is that the current hoo-ha is based on the Newtown massacre, where an AR-15 clone was used. So, the logical thing would be to ban AR’s, except that the AR-15 and its clones are now the most popular rifle in America. Therefore, it is hard for Feinstein to divide and conquer. 

The other thing is that, since the 90’s, the world has changed. The popularity of gun control is much lower today than in the past. This is largely because of the success of the concealed carry movement, whose principal political side effect was to make a completely new segment of the American populace see firearms as tools for self-defense. 

Another thing that changed is that the political class (of the left and right) have a more realistic appreciation of the importance of Second Amendment rights among the voters. For years, Bill Clinton has been counseling Democrats to beware of the gun control issue, that the House takeover of 94 was largely driven by the pro-freedom crowd (OK, he didn’t quite use that terminology). At the time, this fact was unappreciated by even the conservative intelligentsia. In the 90’s, I subscribed to National Review. In their post-mortem to the 94 midterms, they posited many reasons for conservative success. Rarely was gun control mentioned, even though it was a much more important motive force than all the other causes that they did recognized.

I have also been predicting since Obama’s reelection that his second term will fail largely because, in his arrogance, he will overreach. It is now becoming clear that gun control is the issue that will precipitate his downfall.

Rob Long: “Stop Connecting” or why the British Empire was so efficient

Last week Rob Long wrote a Ricochet post quoting a Bain Consulting study that concluded that corporate managers are spending too much time ‘connecting’. Rob said:

“I've often wondered how much better some meetings would be if every laptop was shut and every phone switched off.”

This article triggered an idea that I have had for a while, that is best introduced by answering this question: why was the British Empire so efficient? For there is no doubt about it, it was. A mere thousand bureaucrats in the Colonial Office managed an empire so large that the sun never set on it, an empire that included a subcontinent. How was this possible?

One reason, I think, is that the colonies weren’t informatically connected. No phones, no text messages, no Skype, no e-mail, no conference calls, no webinars, no meetings. Therefore, no micromanagement. For reasons of necessity, all decisions had to be pushed down to the lowest possible levels. This not only had the effect of minimizing bureaucracy but it also meant that the character of the Empire’s decision makers was more solid.

Consider, say, the Governor of Tasmania. Halfway around the world, if there was a sudden insurrection or unexpected invasion, it would take two weeks for your urgent request for help reach Whitehall. That means that the soonest help could arrive is a month, assuming the government sends off reinforcements within a day, which it wouldn’t. So who would apply for such a job? Not a bureaucratic manager, content to transport papers from the inbox to the outbox and breath heavily at conference calls all day. But a bold leader, a man of action, might. Somebody, for whom, the lack of connections to the home country would be liberating not enervating.

The result was an efficient, adaptable and decisively run empire.

 

UPDATE: Thank's for the Instalanch Glenn!

For those of you who have been directed to this post for the first time by Glenn Reynolds, feel free to look around. And don't let the name fool you. I do talk a lot about American politics.

 

 

A case study in media bias: Oprah and Lance Armstrong vs. Algeria

Many people erroneously believe that the lion’s share of media bias comes from opinionated editorializing, say, from Keith Olbermann and Rush Limbaugh. But they are wrong. Opinionating is merely obvious and honest bias. A more insidious form of bias manifests itself in the choices news organizations make in the stories they emphasize and those they bury. This type of bias is much less obvious but more dishonest, prevalent and harder to spot. A particularly flagrant case occurred last week.

Consider this contrast: the media went all OJ covering Lance Armstrong’s confession to Oprah about his past steroid use. Yet they were uncharacteristically demure over the Algerian hostage crisis. Were they right to emphasize the first story and pooh-pooh the second? Let’s compare the two:

With regard to Lance’s confession, is there a person alive to whom Armstrong’s steroid use constitutes news? And is there a person naïve enough to think that these steroids gave him an unfair advantage over his competitors. Earth to naïfs: Every Tour de France cyclist is juiced. OK, maybe not everybody. The guys who came in last may not have been. But certainly the participants who have now been retroactively declared winners were. Armstrong beat them merely because he had more natural talent than them. The steroid banners always prattle on about level playing fields, but the fact is, the playing field is level. It’s just not at the advertised height above sea level. So let me summarize: Lance Armstrong used steroids in the Tour de France, the last one of which he won seven years ago. Who cares? In unrelated news, I hear a cat got killed in Thorold.

Now for the Algerian crisis: On January 16, 32 Islamist terrorists attacked an Algerian gas field, taking about 150 foreign workers (and almost 700 Algerians) hostage. The foreigners included an undetermined number of Americans. The hostage-takers’ demands? Release the Blind Sheik (the man responsible for the first World Trade Center bombing) or all the hostages die. The Algerian military attacked several times, from Jan 17 to Jan 19. The result of the incompetently run commando operation was a bloodbath. As I write this, the details remain murky but almost fifty hostages are thought to have been killed, with the fate of some still uncertain. High drama with all kinds of geopolitical connotations: the war in Mali; and by extension Libya; and, in turn, by extension Benghazi; as well as the War on Terror in general, and Barack Obama’s conduct of it in particular. Lots of interesting angles, or so you would think. The sound you hear is crickets chirping. The media, who seemingly can’t avoid sensationalizing every story that crosses its path, was curiously muted.

Is there any doubt that if George W. Bush were still President, Algeria would have been front and center all last week? With yesterday’s cycling legend forgotten. And they would have been right in that choice of emphasis. 

But you see, the whoop-dee-doo in Algeria might negatively affect Obama’s poll numbers on terrorism. And we can’t have that, now can we?

Earth to Republicans: your glass is half full

Yes, Barack Obama won re-election. And the Democrats gained two seats in the Senate. All in a dismal economy where, by rights, they should have been shellacked. But you know what? As bad as those defeats are – and they are bad, that’s all they won. 

To see the rosy side of the news, you have to look even beyond the fact that the GOP retained control of the House – with a near historic majority. Look downticket at the states. There are a historic number of Republican governors: 30 out of 50. Even more than that, as Michael Barone relates:

“But in most of the 50 states, American voters seem to have opted for something very much like one-party government. 

Starting next month, Americans in 25 states will have Republican governors and Republicans in control of both houses of the state legislatures. They aren’t all small states, either. They include about 53 percent of the nation’s population.” 

“According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Republicans will have more than 60 percent of the members of both legislative houses in 17 states (Nebraska has a single nonpartisan legislature). And in nine more states, they’ll have 60 percent of the members of one house plus a majority in the other and the governorship.”

So how about swing states like Ohio and Florida – that Romney lost?

“The Ohio senate will be 23–10 Republican, the Florida house 74–46 Republican.”

Hmm…, both have Republican governors as well. I thought that the GOP was toast is these places. Well, at least, that is what the MSM narrative has been saying.

OK, how are the Democrats doing?

“At the same time, Americans in 15 states will have Democratic governors and Democrats in control of both houses of the state legislatures. They include about 37 percent of the nation’s population.”

“Democrats will have 60 percent plus of both houses in eleven states, and in two more they will have 60 percent in one house, a majority in the other, plus the governorship.”

And how are the red states doing vis a vis the blue states? According to Conn Carroll, of the Washington Examiner, the blue states aren’t faring that well:

“But while the fiscal condition of the Democratically controlled federal government is still atrocious, Republican controlled states are now swimming in surpluses.”

The ever insightful Walter Russell Mead calls this the “death of the blue state model”.

“But even as the red-blue division grows more entrenched and bitter, it is becoming less relevant. The blue model is breaking down so fast and so far that not even its supporters can ignore the disintegration and disaster it now presages. Liberal Democrats in states like Rhode Island and cities like Chicago are cutting pensions and benefits and laying off workers out of financial necessity rather than ideological zeal. The blue model can no longer pay its bills, and not even its friends can keep it alive.”

So, all you Republicans out there: cheer up. The great advantage of the Age of Obama is clarity. Things are coming to a head in the states – what the progressive Justice, Louis Brandeis, called the “laboratory of democracy’ - and the fundamentals for early 20^th century progressivism don’t look good in the 21^st century.

Washington Post’s resident conservative, Marc Thiessen: “Republicans should start acting like Obama”

I’m no fan of President Obama but Thiessen is exactly right:

“I wish more Republicans were like Barack Obama.

Really. Give the president his due: he fights for what he believes in.

In his first year in office, Obama faced a popular backlash against his stimulus spending bill and saw a Republican elected to Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in a referendum on Obamacare. Yet despite these and other setbacks, the president declared he had no intention of moderating his approach. “The one thing I’m really clear about is that I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” Obama said in a January 2010 interview.

That attitude is precisely why Obama is a now a two-term president.”

“Obama fought for what he believed in, never backed down, absorbed the political blowback — and won.

Why can’t Republicans do that?”

Bingo. And this:

“Obama strong-armed the GOP by making clear he was ready to take the country over the fiscal cliff and allow taxes to rise on every single American. He was willing to let the country go into recession if he did not get his way. He knew he had political leverage, and he used it without hesitation — forcing his political opposition to bend to his will.  

Why can’t Republicans do that?"

“Instead of using Obama’s Chicago-style, brass-knuckle approach, too many Republicans are wringing their hands today, looking for ways to moderate their approach in response to Obama’s victories.

Here is a better idea: Republicans should take a page from Obama’s playbook, do what they think is right, use all the leverage at their disposal and stop worrying about the electoral consequences. If they learn anything from Obama’s victories, it should be this: Voters reward conviction politicians who fight for what they believe in — even when they disagree with them. Pandering does not work.”

This dovetails neatly into a persistent theme that I have been harping on for a while: the voting block most often referred to as ‘moderates’ and ‘centrists’ and ‘independents’ don’t respond to policy shifts. They don’t care about policy at all. Right-wing, left-wing, it’s all boooring to them. They are more properly called “low information voters.” 

What they respond to is leadership. And they respond to charisma. What’s charisma? Passion, commitment to ideals, fearlessness, a will to fight to the end for principles. Do those things and you will be a rock star to the “low information” crowd.

Moderate your message to make yourself ‘less extreme’ and you will just come across as weak and uncertain (cf Ernie Eves and John Tory). Yuck. Who likes people like that?

Thiessen has some advice to the Republican congresscritters on upcoming debt limit showdown:

“Republicans should emulate Obama and use their leverage without hesitation — demanding deep spending cuts and structural reforms to entitlements as the price for any increase in borrowing authority.

Make no mistake: If the roles were reversed, Obama would not hesitate to use the threat of default to break his political opposition. He didn’t flinch from using the threat of a recession to force Republicans to break their no-tax pledge. He didn’t hesitate to use arcane parliamentary strong-arm tactics to pass Obamacare. Obama uses every ounce of political power at his disposal to get what he wants. It’s admirable, really. He has core beliefs and is willing to put everything on the line for them.”

Want an example of a current Republican who has “core beliefs and is willing to put everything on the line for them”?

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

He had a clear goal, didn’t back down an inch from it, didn’t compromise any of it away, and won everything. After they threw everything they had at him - including the kitchen sink. In a (now formerly) progressive state.

There is a school of thought that says politics is the art of compromise, of politicians like John Boehner and Bill Clinton getting together to find a pragmatic answer that isn’t everybody’s ideal choice but allows society to muddle on through. And many times it is like that.

But a lot of the time it isn’t. In these times, you either win everything or you lose everything. And to the winner go the ‘moderates.’

Let Obama ban guns by executive order and see what happens

According to the Weekly Standard:

"The president is going to act," said Biden, giving some comments to the press before a meeting with victims of gun violence. "There are executive orders, there's executive action that can be taken. We haven't decided what that is yet. But we're compiling it all with the help of the attorney general and the rest of the cabinet members as well as legislative action that we believe is required."

You know what? The freedom activist in me is actually looking forward to this.

I have been arguing since the election that Obama will fail by overreaching. Any move that affects people on such a personal level, so widely, that has to be enacted by executive order because it can’t get through Congress will end up being a big Charlie Foxtrot.

It will stink of illegitimacy; it will inspire civil disobedience on a large scale; it will create a firestorm of legal challenges; and it will put Obama’s red state congressional allies in a very difficult spot (and this includes NRA A-rated Senate majority leader Harry Reid). Long after the Newtown massacre recedes into history as another heinous criminal act in a long line of heinous criminal acts, the furor such an action will inspire will be going strong.

So go ahead Barack, make my day.