Right Opinion
The best of conservative opinion and commentary, updated daily.
Friday, November 5, 2010
A Return to the Norm
WASHINGTON -- For all the turmoil, the spectacle, the churning -- for all the old bulls slain and fuzzy-cheeked freshmen born -- the great Republican wave of 2010 is simply a return to the norm. The tide had gone out; the tide came back. A center-right country restores the normal congressional map: a sea of interior red, bordered by blue coasts and dotted by blue islands of ethnic/urban density.
Losing Your Head at the Supreme Court
On Election Day, the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case Schwarzenegger vs. Entertainment Merchants Association. The irony of this case name was obvious: The celebrated violent-action-hero governor of California had signed a bill into law in 2005 forbidding the sale of ultraviolent video games to minors, a law that lower federal courts prevented from ever going into effect.
Defeat, Then Denial
In 2007, when police busted Rep. Barney Frank's partner for illegally growing pot, Frank waved away the controversy by saying he hadn't noticed since he's "not a great outdoorsman" and has trouble recognizing any plants. Twenty years earlier, Frank endured another controversy when his one-time partner, personal aide and roommate was revealed to be running a prostitution service out of Frank's home. The Massachusetts congressmen insisted he hadn't noticed anything amiss until informed by his landlord.
Impressions From a Historic Election
It's an occupational hazard of pundits to see what they want to see in election returns. After the Democrats' 2008 sweep, any number of liberal commentators (and even some conservatives) consigned the Republican Party to Whig status (the Whigs ended with a whimper in 1856). Some were unwise enough to enshrine their predictions in book titles. In 2009, James Carville published "40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation," and Sam Tanenhaus authored "The Death of Conservatism." Some conservatives despaired that Republicans had lost women, young people, the cities, New England!
Thursday, November 4, 2010
After the Fall
The cynic in me says that Democrats will learn nothing from the midterm election. They not only took a bath, they were effectively water-boarded by voters. Democrats lost the House by a margin not seen since 1948. They lost 10 governorships while retaining two -- New York and California. Both states are insolvent and can be expected to ask for bailouts from the federal government, something a Republican House is unlikely to grant. Republicans will get to re-district most states in ways favorable to them for at least the next decade. Nancy Pelosi will step down as speaker, though Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid managed to survive a nose-holding election in Nevada.
Voters Reject Obama's Big-Government Ambitions
Uncharted territory. Historic upheaval. The tallies are not all in as this is written. But it seems that the 2010 elections have produced results that are unprecedented in the lifetimes of most readers. Some numbers are clear. In nine of the 10 congressional election cycles between 1986 and 2004, no party gained or lost more than 10 seats in the House of Representatives, the one exception being 1994, when Republicans gained 54. Otherwise, the numbers were pretty static.
President Obama Still Doesn't Get It
Those who've followed this column over the years know that when President Obama was first elected, I tried valiantly to give him the benefit of the doubt. I believed for the best that his promise of "change" would be an exercise in moderation and sound judgment. But that didn't happen, and this past week's elections were a comprehensive rebuke of the first two years of his presidency. What amazed me most was his press conference following the elections. The White House press corps finally found the courage to ask some tough questions. And the president? He seemed not to comprehend -- or at least not to acknowledge -- the message the American people had just sent him, courtesy of a resounding electoral defeat for Democrats nationwide.
November 3 Contract With America
On Nov. 2, 2010, the Republican Party recaptured the majority in the House. In the Senate, Republicans now possess numbers sufficient to sustain a filibuster and stop objectionable legislation from getting to the floor. Obamalism has now been arrested. Voters rose to say no to the two-year gusher of spending and the staggering increases in the annual deficit and the national debt. Under Obama and the Democratic congressional majority, the national debt, as a percentage of GDP, jumped from 69 percent to a projected 94 percent. Voters said, "Enough!"
The Bully Bullied
The best idea some public officials ever have is to resign, effective immediately. See Richard Nixon, 1974. Resignation remains the sincerest form of apology. You don't have to be president of the United States to realize it. Resignation can even become a member of a city council. Or of a school board.
Incoming
Liberals are having a difficult time explaining what happened to them Election Day. Actually, it appears that many of them do not know what happened to them. They are in denial.
America Just Checked Into Rehab
On Tuesday voters rejected President Obama's attempt to remake America in the image of an imploding Europe -- not just by overwhelmingly electing Republican candidates in the House, but by preferring dozens of maverick conservatives who ran against establishment Washington.
Repeal It Now!
Our country was founded on a revolutionary concept -- a new kind of government both empowered and controlled by its citizens. This idea, the very foundation of our great experiment in democracy, was betrayed with enactment of the new healthcare act. Every poll showed that a majority of Americans rejected this legislation and yet Congress ran right over the majority will of the American people and enacted it into law.
We're all Bigots Now!
After Tuesday's election, the fresh new faces of the Democratic Party are ... Harry Reid and Jerry Brown! (Who had the worst election night? Chuck Schumer, who's been waiting in the wings to replace Reid as Senate majority leader. Who had the second worst election night? The people who live below Barney Frank's apartment.)
No Profile in Courage at UN
Ted Sorenson passed away this week. He was the famed JFK aide who helped the then-senator from Massachusetts with the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage. He served John F. Kennedy loyally and well. We saw no profile in courage on the world stage this week. The Secretary General of the UN, South Korean diplomat, Ban Ki-moon, traveled to China. He met in Beijing with Chinese Peoples Republic President Hu Jintao.
Is America Growing Up?
If the 2008 presidential elections marked the apex of America's political adolescence, the 2010 midterm election represented the first glimmers of political maturation.
Brown Won -- and Whitman Lost Big
At his post-victory news conference Wednesday morning, Governor elect Jerry Brown showed why he won the election with a million votes to spare. He's steeped in the issues, he listens to what is happening on the ground, and he's not afraid to mix it up.
Liberals, Take Note
WASHINGTON -- Unwilling to delay until tomorrow mistakes that could be made immediately, Democrats used 2010 to begin losing 2012. Trying to pre-emptively drain the election of its dangerous (to Democrats) meaning, all autumn Democrats described the electorate as suffering a brain cramp, an apoplexy of fear, rage, paranoia, cupidity -- something. Any explanation would suffice as long as it cast what voters were about to say as perhaps contemptible and certainly too trivial to be taken seriously by the serious.
Debt Solution Lies in Success of Europe
More stimulus, anyone? Should Washington order another hefty round of Keynesian deficit spending in order to spur the limping US economy? Absolutely, say many prominent economists. Peter Diamond, a 2010 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics, argues in favor of "pursuing valuable expenditures now," by subsidizing state and local government payrolls and pouring money into "a vast amount" of construction projects.
Stopping the Bad Stuff Is a Plus
Momentous events this week -- the Republican House sweep and the Fed's QE2 -- moved the stock market needle only a little over Tuesday and Wednesday, although the net impact was a gain of about 90 points. Obamanomics was repudiated at the polls, and the Republicans inflicted a crushing defeat on the Democrats in the House. Tea partiers disappointed in several Senate elections, however, leaving Harry Reid and Co. in charge of the upper chamber.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Demography Isn't Political Destiny
After Barack Obama's election in 2008, the phrase was on the lips of progressive prognosticators everywhere. A permanent alignment had arrived. The growing ranks of Latinos, the reliably liberal voting patterns of blacks, the Republican Party's longstanding problem with single women, plus the fact that surveys found young people -- aka millennials -- to be the most liberal generation in decades all proved that the aging, white GOP was destined for near-eternal rump status. In a Time magazine cover story featuring Obama as a Photoshopped FDR, Peter Beinart wrote that the "coalition that carried Obama to victory is every bit as sturdy as America's last two dominant political coalitions: the ones that elected Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan."