Politics 2010 Archives

Meet John Smith. John is a surfer by trade. He dreams of competitive surfing; his walls are decorated with posters of famous surfers. But he has just one problem: here in his home town of Dubuque, Iowa, he can only surf small streams and brooks. "Sometimes, I just stand there on my board, waiting and waiting for some kid to throw a rock so I can have a ripple to surf on," says Smith, a vacant, far-away look coming into his grey eyes. "I bring a book with me to kill time. It's sad and frustrating. We don't have access to high-speed, high-volume waves here in Dubuque. My kids ask me when we're going to get them. I tell them, I just don't know."

But help is on the way: the Obama Administration promises to use billions of dollars in stimulus funds to build professional-quality wave machines in every zip code by 2014, to help connect surfers like John Smith to the world wide wave culture.

Seriously, this CNN sob story about lack of high-speed internet access in some markets is not much better. We'd all like to see more high-speed broadband, but since when is it a right guaranteed by the federal government? And is Uncle Sam really not spending enough money already on things we might want but don't need?

Good friend and RedState colleague Neil Stevens has launched Unlikely Voter, a new poll-analysis site. Go check it ouand get in on the ground floor of what is sure to be a busy site this election season. The initial explanatory post looks at the Specter/Sestak Senate primary race in Pennsylvania.

Neil is RS' resident tech/math guy, and aims to provide some mathematical rigor to the space already inhabited by RealClearPolitics' multi-poll averaging and Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight.com; while both of those sites are useful, RCP is an apples-and-oranges snapshot rather than an analysis site, and Silver's site, while superficially impressive, is too often driven by advocacy and in some cases apparent vendettas against particular polling firms, and tends at times to overstate the degree of certainty in its models, which tend to assume that all trends will continue indefinitely (like when Silver constructed a polling model predicting approval of same-sex marriage in 2009 by the following states: Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Nevada, Washington, Alaska, New York, Oregon) or tend to predict things like legislative votes that can't reliably be predicted with mathematical models.

We really have never had a satisfactory replacement in this space for Gerry Daly's site, and hopefully Neil will fill that gap.

Krugman couldn't have walked into this one any worse if he tried.

So, with the ethically-challenged tax-evading Charles Rangel temporarily stepping down from running the House's tax-writing committee (Ways and Means; this as opposed to the tax-evading Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, who's in charge of enforcing the tax code, and the head of the Senate's tax-writing commitee, Max Baucus, who for variety's sake had a sex scandal involving a staffer/girlfriend he tried to get appointed US Attorney), the Democrats have turned to the next in line by seniority, 79-year-old San Francisco paleoliberal Fortney "Pete" Stark. What could possibly go wrong? Brian Faughnan collects some of the greatest hits of the craziest man in Congress here; I've looked previousy at Stark's lunacy here; Moe Lane asks whether Stark's memory problems are the result of lack of integrity, generalized confusion or something genuinely wrong with him here.

Should President Obama politicize the Federal Reserve? If so, what would he accomplish? Ezra Klein of the Washington Post seems to think he should, and that this would somehow magically create jobs - but you would look long and hard for an explanation of how this would work.

For those of you unfamiliar with his work, Klein is the Washington Post's resident left-wing blogger (as opposed to its resident left-wing activist, Greg Sargent, or its resident right-wing bloggers or activists...of which it employs none) and one of the prime examples of a paid, professional left-wing blogger who has never held a job besides blogger/pundit. Klein is well-read, wonkish and earnest to a fault - he's perhaps the last man in Washington who takes government financial projections at face value - but often comically insulated from how the world works, and why. I follow his Twitter feed in large part for the entertainment value of watching him attempt to navigate the most mundane daily tasks - he gives off the impression of a man who can't brush his teeth in the morning without a position paper telling him how. I suppose in some ways I was like that myself once, but then I went to law school, got married, got a job, kids, a house, a mortgage...the sort of things that force you to engage the world at a level other than theory.

Anyway, Klein posted yesterday on his enthusiasm for a piece by Neil Irwin, also in the WaPo, on the opening of a third vacancy at the Fed and what it could mean for monetary policy going forward. Klein writes:

When people talk about the need for Democrats and the administration to focus on jobs, nothing they could get through Congress could plausibly be half as important as maximizing their long-term impact on the composition of the Federal Reserve....

Kohn's resignation is the fifth possible opening on the Federal Reserve Board. Two other possible slots were filled: The first went to Daniel Tarrulo, a banking expert who advised the campaign and is now overseeing banking regulation at the Fed. The second was Ben Bernanke's renomination, and whatever you think of the merits of reappointing Bernanke, it certainly did not represent the administration's decision to try to leave their imprint on the Federal Reserve.

Every smart economic observer I know is baffled by the administration's failure to nominate anyone for the two slots that have been empty for months. Those are votes and arguments that the administration could have put at the Fed's table and has simply chosen not to...I'm not versed enough in this stuff to have any candidates in mind. But the critique of the administration's strategy on jobs that I find compelling is that they've not had any coordinated strategy when it comes to the Federal Reserve.

Klein further enthused on Twitter that his post was "something major the Obama administration actually could do about the jobs situation, but hasn't." Except, nowhere does he actually get around to explaining how the Obama Administration putting its "imprint" or "impact" or "arguments" on the Federal Reserve Board would change Fed policy, let alone create jobs where none exist today. It's Underpants Gnomes logic: Step one: appoint left-wingers to the Fed. Step two: ??? Step three: Profit!

To get even a vague idea of how Klein expects this to work, you have to dig into the 18th through 21st paragraphs of Irwin's story:

At the moment, Fed officials are unified behind a policy of ultra-low interest rates to support the economy. But as the economy improves, some officials, especially presidents of regional Fed banks, are likely to be more eager than Bernanke to raise interest rates and drain the money supply, even at the risk of slowing the recovery. There are early signs of those pressures emerging, including a decision by Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig to dissent at the last policymaking meeting, preferring not to promise to leave rates low for an "extended period."

New Obama appointees could push the center of gravity of the committee in the president's preferred direction. Fed watchers generally expect the president to favor appointees who would be in line with Bernanke's thinking or perhaps even more tilted toward worrying about unemployment as opposed to inflation.

Some liberal economists argue that the president should quickly appoint Fed governors who would be inclined to leave rates low for longer to try to get growth going again, even if it comes at the cost of mild inflation.

At the same time, an appointee who is viewed as too soft on inflation or too close to the administration could cause problems. If financial markets doubt the Fed's willingness to combat inflation, either because of appointees' economic views or because of a perception that they want to boost growth in the run-up to the presidential election, interest rates could rise. That would slow the economy.

You see here a glimmer of why Klein is hesitant to come right out and say what he thinks. First, we have the already unsavory suggestion that the Fed should be treated as just another bureaucracy to be captured by the Left through the appointment of ideologues to supposedly non-partisan "career" positions. Klein doesn't seem to know what a central bank is. The Fed can act rapidly and in incredible size during a crisis, and without checks and balances (aka, Republicans). At a time when the Left feels hemmed in by the traditional political process at every step, the Fed looks like the one institution that can be the archetypical "man of action." The Fed needs that independence - it's core to the mission of an inflation-fighting central bank - but it's also the reason Congress allowed the Fed to be formed only with great trepidation and after 100 years of bitter debate, why its long, staggered terms tend to resist partisan Fed-packing, and why it's emergency powers should be narrowly circumscribed and not extended into an ongoing, wholesale economic-emergency state that supplants political decisionmaking by the elected branches rather than a traditional central bank focused laser-like on a stable currency.

On the merits, Klein's invocation of Irwin's piece is even more menacing. The unnamed "liberal economists" mentioned here are essentially arguing for an inflationary policy of keeping interest rates artificially low, rather than focusing on keeping the currency stable, which is supposed to be what central bankers' job is. While economic observers are divided on the importance of various contributing factors to the recent financial crisis, many smart observers argue that the Fed made the problem worse by keeping interest rates artificially low for too long, thus artificially reducing the cost of borrowing to invest in real estate, thus artificially inflating the asset bubble in real estate (at a minimum, the Fed did nothing to prevent the dynamics of an asset bubble from playing out the way asset bubbles do). The policy that Irwin describes with some skepticism, but which Klein apparently views as a godsend, runs the risk of repeating the exact same mistake and reinflating the same bubble. There are signs that we already have that problem; whether that worries you or not, we shouldn't be advocating putting people on the Fed with an ideological agenda of exacerbating that process.

That's the optimistic scenario. As Irwin notes, the pessimistic scenario is based on the fact that banks that lend at low rates get blindsided when inflation devalues their returns on those loans - thus, while easy money can cause inflation, fears of easy money causing inflation can simultaneously drive up interest rates and stifle job growth. That's called stagflation - inflation plus high interest rates and high unemployment - and while Ezra Klein isn't old enough to remember it from the Jimmy Carter era, in which interest rates cracked 20%, those of us who are do not want a Fed that thinks it's an acceptable risk to run. (Indeed, it was the Fed under Paul Volcker that played a crucial role, along with the Reagan Administration, in breaking the back of stagflation and setting the stage for the booms of the 1980s and 1990s, even at the short-term cost of making the recession even worse).

Some degree of politics in Fed appointments is inevitable, and moreso given the vast powers the Fed has accrued in recent years. But Obama's reappointment of Ben Bernanke, the Fed chair appointed by George W. Bush, and his grudgingly bipartisan confirmation by the Senate, is a reminder that even in the hyper-partisan Obama Era, there are some parts of the government in which nearly everyone recognizes that it's still dangerous to put ideology and partisan self-interest above predictability and stability. Klein's suggestion that Obama tilt the Fed towards the abyss of asset bubbles or stagflation is a reminder that a lack of common sense and experience can be a dangerous thing.

Let's talk just a little about the 2012 presidential election. I'd like to make three related points:

(1) Nobody should be touting Scott Brown as a 2012 presidential candidate.

(2) The GOP is going to be picking from a bench that is short on candidates with the experience we need.

(3) It's a good thing that Ron Paul won the "straw poll" of 2012 candidates at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last week.

Now, as a general rule, it's not a great time for Republicans and conservatives to be talking about the 2012 election. We have more than enough on our plates fighting the policy battles (Obamacare and otherwise) that will dominate the rest of the year, as well as the numerous elections to be contested in 2010. In fact, the Right has benefitted - much as the Left did in 2005-06 - from its lack of a single, identifiable leader; as hard as the Obama White House has tried to personalize attacks on its critics, the absence of a single leader to pick on means that voters' attention has remained fixed on Obama's own failures (and rightly so, given the overwhelming majorities he has in both Houses of Congress). But sometimes it's necessary to head off problems before they develop.

Scott Brown For ... Senator

Since Scott Brown's stunning victory in the special Senate election in Massachusetts in January, he's been the man in demand for Republicans everywhere who are looking to rub off some of the magic that allowed him to win the first GOP Senate seat in the Bay State in decades. Inevitably, there have been rumblings here and there about running Brown for president in 2012 against Obama - hey, he can win in Massachusetts, why not?

Hold on there, tiger.

First of all, analysis by following the latest shift in the wind is the worst kind of punditry. A good number of the people touting Brown, a fairly liberal but populist New England Republican, were touting conservative (and also newly-elected) Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell back in November, in both cases because of the whole "shiny new toy" factor. A new candidate who hasn't had time to accumulate baggage, make compromises and make enemies always looks appealing, because you can wishcast all sorts of things onto them. But that's a lousy way to pick a potential president or a potential national candidate.

McDonnell, at least, is a plausible national figure, if you add in some experience and he compiles a successful track record in office - he's already been the state Attorney General, and is embarking on a term as the state's chief executive, the closest thing our political system offers (in some ways even moreso than the Vice Presidency) to good training to be President. And running and hopefully governing as a conservative in a "purple" state, McDonnell could conceivably build a record that makes him appealing both to Republican primary voters and the voters of his own state.

Not so for Scott Brown. One can hope that Brown's populist campaign stands as a reminder to him, as he serves, that there are some conservative principles that are enduringly popular even in Massachusetts. But the simple reality is that the voters in Brown's state won't re-elect him in 2012 if he starts acting like a guy who's thinking as a Republican presidential candidate, and Republican primary voters won't warm to him if he votes as a Massachusetts Republican. We saw how well it worked out in 2008 for Mitt Romney, who bailed out on running for re-election in 2006 only to be rejected by GOP presidential primary voters in 2008. The most conspicuous issue on which this is the case is abortion, the subject of some of Romney's most glaring flip-flops and a significant Achilles heel as well for serious GOP candidates like Rudy Giuliani; Brown is something of a moderate on the issue, but remains essentially pro-choice, and while there's plenty of room in the tent for guys like that, it would be a non-starter for someone running to lead a basically pro-life party (the failure of Rudy's campaign has largely convinced me that this is a circle that may just be impossible to square because it leaves the candidate with too little margin for error in other ways). You could pick more examples down the line of less-prominent issues.

Brown, to his credit, has mostly laughed at the idea, but for his own good, he'd be better served if he closed the door on it entirely and emphatically, and moreover resisted the temptation to let other Republican candidates drag him all over the map to campaign for them. Presidential daydreams are bad for the longeitvity of politicians who depend on their regular-guy image, and national Republican politics is hazardous to anybody who wants to get re-elected in Massachusetts.

There's a more fundamental problem with the talkof running Brown in 2012: it suggests that some pundits and activists haven't learned anything from Barack Obama. Brown is a legislator. He's served a couple terms in the State Senate, and being in the minority doesn't have a lot of accomplishments. He's held down a part-time law practice. He's won precisely one statewide election, and has yet to make any mark in Washington. In other words, his resume is just about exactly the same as Barack Obama's in 2008.

We've seen in practice the many ways in which Obama's total lack of any of the traditional types of experience we look for in a president - executive experience, national security experience, political and political leadership experience, military combat service, or private sector business experience - has caught up with him. He's made one rookie mistake after another, and even his defenders at this point have to acknowledge that his struggles, especially in managing his legislative agenda, have derived from a fair number of unforced strategic errors borne of a misunderstanding of how to run a presidency - overreaching, trying to do too many things at once, ceding too much authority to Congress, promising things he couldn't deliver. Having never run anything before, he accentuated his own weaknesses by selecting a Vice President, Cabinet and White House staff heavy on generalist legislators and Chicagoans, light on executives and people with useful specialized expertise, and almost barren of people familiar with the private sector. This, in turn, had secondary consequences (legislators and bureaucrats are more apt than your typical businessman to not bother paying their taxes). Nor is this the first time the Democrats have made this particular mistake - in 2004, they had as their Vice Presidential nominee John Edwards, whose only tenure in public office was a single term as a Senator, to which he had no realistic chance of being re-elected, prior to which he had run a small (though profitable) personal injury law practice. Like Obama, Edwards had no executive experience, no real legislative accomplishments, no experience with national security issues, no experience working in any other sort of private business and no military service record.

Republicans are supposed to know better. The absolute last thing the GOP should be doing in 2012 is letting Obama off the hook - or running the risk of electing a candidate who puts America through the same thing - by nominating somebody who suffers the same weaknesses, however good a Senate candidate he may be or however good a Senator he may become.

A Time For Leadership

I have not picked a horse yet for 2012, and would caution anyone against doing so before the 2010 elections are over. That being said, I do know what I want: I want a candidate who can bring the kind of proven leadership experience to the table that we lack in our current president, ideally over some length of time. I want a candidate who has some record of having and standing for principles against adversity. And in light of the ugly record of the McCain, Dole, Kerry, McGovern and Goldwater campaigns, among others, I'd really rather not run a Senator, or someone else whose public career is largely or wholly as a legislator. The presidency is still an executive job, after all.

I'm realistic that we may have less than ideal choices - every presidential election season requires settling for the best of what you have in front of you, and even the best candidates have their drawbacks. As of now, we appear to have only two candidates (Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney) who seem certain to run, though many others are possibles. A number of members of the Senate and House are reportedly thinking of running, several of whom are smart, principled people, excellent at the jobs they now do. Two of our potentially leading contenders (Romney and Sarah Palin) are one-term Governors, in Palin's case a term she resigned before completing. Both are undoubtedly more experienced than Obama - besides being state-level chief executives, Romney had a long and successful career as a business executive, Palin spent the better part of 17 years in a variety of offices including being a mayor and heading the state oil and gas commission, and both had already accomplished more by 2008 than Obama ever had - but are nonetheless a good deal lighter on experience than I'd like to see. (Long-time readers know my issues with Romney; I haven't ruled out supporting Palin in the primaries but really will take a long look at the alternatives first). Several of the party's possible brightest stars in the Governor's mansions - Bobby Jindal, McDonnell, Chris Christie - will not be scheduled to complete their first terms until 2011 or 2013.

Part of the problem is the shortage of GOP Governors elected or re-elected in 2006 or re-elected in 2008, the cycles when you'd look to be getting people ready to make the next step. There are at present only 15 sitting GOP Governors who have been re-elected at least once, and that’s the pool you would ordinarily look to; there's only a few others up to be elected for a second time in 2010. One of the 15 is Arnold Schwarzenegger, who's legally ineligible for the presidency. One is Mark Sanford, who took himself out of the running with personal scandal. Others are plainly too liberal to run as GOP standard-bearers: Linda Lingle, Jodi Rell, Jim Douglas. Jon Hoeven is running for the Senate, as is Charlie Crist, who'd otherwise be up for re-election in 2010. Jon Hunstmann left office to pursue an ambassadorship to China. That leaves an eight-man bench:

Bob Riley-AL
Sonny Perdue-GA
Mitch Daniels-IN
Tim Pawlenty-MN
Haley Barbour-MS
Dave Heineman-NE
Mike Rounds-SD
Rick Perry-TX

You can add Mike Huckabee as a guy with a decade's experience as a governor who may run. We'll leave the pros and cons of this group - Pawlenty's running, and Daniels, Barbour and Perry all might - for another day. Because before we get too comfortable with any one candidate, we come to my third point.

CPAC Chooses None of the Above

The media has tried out various angles on the news that Ron Paul won the 2012 straw poll at this year's CPAC, winning around 740 votes out of the 2,395 people who voted in the poll, itself a subset of the 10,000+ attendees. Some might take it as a sign of some vitality for Paul-ism, or whatever. To me, what it says is this: yes, Ron Paul's people remain organized and energized in their own way, but the real story is that (1) nobody else has either a naturally strong enough constituency among conservative activists to beat Paul without trying (and straw polls are all about trying) and (2) nobody else was willing to put resources into winning a poll of this nature before the 2010 elections.

That's good news all around. Good news for the candidates because people like Romney, Pawlenty, Palin, Mike Huckabee and others are still prioritizing the 2010 races and policy battles, trying to get other Republicans elected and defeat bad legislation. That's a lesson we Republicans and conservatives want them all to get. And good news for the movement that people are willing to send those candidates, and any other prospective 2012 aspirants, a message: you still have a lot to prove to us. For a movement that has regained its momentum mostly from the ground up over the past year, and that faces lingering doubts as to how well its current and future leaders have learned the lessons of past mistakes, that's maybe the best news of all.

I know I linked to him once already today, but Francis Cianfrocca's column on Medicare Advantage - which is very much worth reading in full - neatly summarizes, in response to criticism from Obama and Pelosi, why it is necessary for businesses with shareholders to make a profit:

Everyone gets that you have to pay salaries to the people who do the work for you. But you also have to pay the people who provide the capital to start and grow the business (and create the jobs) in the first place. That obligation never goes away. Even though Nancy Pelosi has recently been howling about the fact that insurance companies make billions in profits, she never stops to think that: A) we wouldn't have large, efficient insurance providers without capital; and B) the health insurance sector provides terrible returns to investors relative to other sectors because it's already over-regulated; and C) most of those profits are used by pension funds to write monthly checks to retirees.

*The NY Times finally releases its expose on David Paterson, which has been relentlessly hyped by leaks, perhaps driven by the Andrew Cuomo camp (Cuomo undoubtedly wants to avoid another racially divisive primary; certainly Rick Lazio thinks the Times is flacking for Cuomo). The story is decidedly underwhelming if you're looking for sexy details, but fairly damning nonetheless in its portrayal of a governor who's just not that on top of things. It's impossible to avoid the fact that being functionally illiterate (Paterson, who of course is blind, does not read Braille) is a serious impairment for a governor.

*Mickey Kaus explains through the example of the weatherization program how the political power of unions - specifically the Davis-Bacon Act - has crippled even the best-intentioned plans to use stimulus money to put people immediately to work.

On a related note, Francis Cianfrocca notes the New York Times' compliants about job-creation programs that are aimed at private sector jobs rather than the public sector. Robert Gibbs, at Wednesday's press briefing, implicitly admitted the same thing - the main benefit of the stimulus has gone to government workers (this is aside from the fact that in many cases, governments just gave raises to existing workers rather than hiring new ones):

Q Robert, following on that, one of the criticisms Republicans keep harping on is that the President promised that the jobs that would be saved or created would be about 90 percent private sector, and Republicans keep pointing out that it's woefully inadequate in that department; it's mostly been government-related jobs, public sector jobs, not private sector jobs. And it's important obviously to save public sector jobs as well. It's nowhere near what the President promised. How do you account for that?

MR. GIBBS: Well, look, I don't have the latest figures in front of me. Obviously a big chunk of jobs that did result in unemployment last year -- the biggest chunk was teachers, which, regardless of what category you put that in, I think there are very few parents in this country that don't value a good teacher.

+++

Q On the stimulus, I want to give you a chance to respond to something that Michael Steele, the RNC chairman, said this morning about the Recovery Act, and I'm quoting him directly here now: "The other fiction we need to dispense with is this 'saved and created' nonsense." I'm still quoting: "I don't know what that is. I don't know what that looks like. And if I can't put my fingers on it, if I can't touch it, and if I can't get up at 6:00 in the morning and go to work there, then it's not happening. And that's the reality of a lot of people right now."

MR. GIBBS: Well, I can find a school that Chairman Steele can go to at 6:00 a.m. and put his fingers on -- (laughter) -- an elementary school teacher who -- (laughter) -- no, no, no, hold on, come on. A little bit of decorum -- that he can look at as somebody who, as a result of the economic downturn did not lose their job as a result of the recovery plan.

That's your Obama Administration economic growth strategy, folks. And yes, it ties into the repeated remarks over the years by President and Mrs. Obama denigrating private sector employment and bemoaning that more people don't go to work in "public service" jobs (whose salaries must be funded by private sector workers), and into Obama's proposal to forgive student loan debt for public service workers, giving yet another leg up to public sector employment. That's why what Chris Christie is doing in New Jersey in standing up to the public sector's 'government of the government, by the government, for the government' mindset is so important. Christie's a great spokesman on this issue because he worked as a government lawyer - and lawyers are the one profession in which government workers make only a fraction of the salaries they could earn in private practice.

*Weather is not Climate. Michael Fumento and James Taranto have some fun at the expense of those on the Left who have ignored that point in the past and now have to face public mockery from those parts of the country experiencing an unseasonably cold or snowy winter. Of course, the Anthropogenic Global Warming crowd stubbornly clings to the argument that any weather - warmer, colder, stormier, less stormy - is proof of the theory, but he who lives by the anecdote dies by it as well.

I've suspected for some time now that the California Senate race against Barbara Boxer was basically the high-watermark Senate race for the GOP - that is, the toughest race that has a non-trivial chance to be winnable if everything breaks just right. But the recent withdrawal of Evan Bayh from his own re-election race in Indiana (not as "safe" a seat as Boxer's, given Indiana's natural Republican tilt, but an entrenched incumbent with a $13 million warchest) is a reminder, as was Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts, that you really never know where your opportunities are until you press them.

The GOP in New York is already stretched fairly thin trying to fight a two-front war against what should be vulnerable candidates, Gov. David Paterson (who is basically doomed, but likely will be replaced as the Democratic nominee by the more formidable Attorney General Andrew Cuomo) and his Senate appointee, Kirsten Gillibrand (who should emerge successful from what nonetheless promises to be a vigorous challenge from former Tennessee Congressman Harold Ford). Former Long Island Congressman Rick Lazio is the leading contender to be Republican nominee in the Governor's race, while the Senate field lacks even a candidate as mildly well-known as Lazio, assuming George Pataki resists entreaties to run.

Now, with polls showing the generally invulnerable-seeming Chuck Schumer bleeding popularity, Republicans may open a third front if they can talk longtime CNBC/National Review economics commentator Larry Kudlow into running. Kudlow was previously mentioned as a possible Senate contender against Chris Dodd before the field lined up in Connecticut, but New Yorkers aren't generally that picky about that sort of thing, at least in Senate races. Kudlow would lock up the Conservative Party nod, which always helps.

As the Daily News warns:

Schumer is a formidable opponent. While Wall Street might not be as happy with him as it once was, he still has managed to amass a whopping $19.3 million worth of campaign cash.

Also, the polls have been mixed on New Yorkers' opinion of Schumer. A recent Q poll put his job approval rating at 58-30, while a Marist poll put him at just 47 percent - his lowest rating since April 2001.

Schumer is a relentless campaigner and, with the likely departure of Harry Reid, may end up running to be the leader of the Senate Democrats next spring. I can't say I see a realistic path to beat him, from where we stand today, and Kudlow's a political novice. That said, you gotta be in it to win it, as the saying goes; if something else comes out to drive Schumer down, you'd hate to not have a horse in the race. And even if Schumer does end up winning handily, if he's forced to devote his time and money to running his own race instead of propping up Gillibrand and other Democrats around the country, Kudlow will have accomplished something.

I have not previously followed the work of San Francisco political reporter Benjamin Wachs of SF Weekly; apparently he's an increasingly cynical and disenchanted liberal following the ever-appalling doings of San Francisco city government. Thanks to the heads-up from Josh Trevino, it's worth taking a little time to look over Wachs' uproariously acid farewell to his beat, which practically defines "going out in a blaze of glory." Seriously, read the whole thing.

The real meat, though, is in a lengthier article by Wachs and Joe Eskenazi from December on how San Francisco is, in their view, "The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S.":

It's time to face facts: San Francisco is spectacularly mismanaged and arguably the worst-run big city in America. This year's city budget is an astonishing $6.6 billion - more than twice the budget for the entire state of Idaho - for roughly 800,000 residents. Yet despite that stratospheric amount, San Francisco can't point to progress on many of the social issues it spends liberally to tackle - and no one is made to answer when the city comes up short.

The article is a long one, and filled with horrifying detail of the city's incompetence and dysfunction, like this one, which manages to combine reckless overspending, bait-and-switches with the voters, and head-poundingly foolish naivete in dealing with dangerous and violent people:

Back in 1999, San Francisco voters were pitched a $299 million bond to "save" Laguna Honda Hospital as a 1,200-bed facility for the city's frail, elderly population. Who doesn't want to help the frail and elderly? A decade later, the Department of Public Works project is still incomplete, its price tag has swelled by nearly $200 million, and the hospital is slated to hold only 780 beds - so the city is going massively overbudget to construct a hospital only 65 percent as large as promised, which is four years behind schedule.

Amazingly, this gets worse. After securing the bond funding to save Laguna Honda as a hospital for the elderly, the Department of Public Health began transferring younger, often dangerous and mentally ill patients there and mixing them among the old people. This went about as well as you'd think: A 2006 state and federal licensing survey noted numerous instances of elder abuse, staff abuse, and patients toting drugs, alcohol, and even loaded weapons. One patient was assaulted four times in four months; to address this problem, staff erected signs reading "No Hitting." (That didn't work.) To cap it off, elder activists now worry that a 2009 Department of Public Health-commissioned report will pave the way for even more relatively young, mentally ill patients heading to Laguna Honda. The massively overbudget, behind-schedule hospital may not even end up primarily serving the elderly population that voters were promised it would.

The accounts of shreiking outrage from nonprofits and unions at the idea of measuring results or holding people accountable are equally familiar. For all of liberalism's pretensions to being "reality-based," the recipients of its largesse are remarkably shy about letting anybody test whether any of their ideas actually work. All of this supports a conclusion that is wearyingly familiar to any observer of American big-city liberalism in action:

The intrusion of politics into government pushes the city to enter long-term labor contracts it obviously can't afford, and no one is held accountable. A belief that good intentions matter more than results leads to inordinate amounts of government responsibility being shunted to nonprofits whose only documented achievement is to lobby the city for money. Meanwhile, piles of reports on how to remedy these problems go unread. There's no outrage, and nobody is disciplined, so things don't get fixed.

Ask residents of Detroit, or Oakland, or Washington DC, or Memphis, or Baltimore, or pre-Giuliani New York, or pre-Katrina New Orleans, or any number of other big American cities, and you'll hear a similar refrain; San Francisco may well be the worst, but it's hardly alone. And as Wachs and Eskenazi note, San Francisco can in some ways get away with things other cities with fewer natural advantages can't (see: Detroit). That said, Wachs and Eskenazi have produced an unusually detailed and comprehensive indictment of their city's one-party government. Read it and pass it on to anyone you know who hasn't yet digested why the rest of the country traditionally mistrusts giving more money and power to big-city liberals.

America's 42nd president, Bill Clinton, was reportedly hospitalized with chest pains this afternoon in New York. Hopefully he'll be fine, but naturally any threat to his health puts one in mind of the man's legacy as a two-term president.

What struck me is this: when he was president, there was endless debate about Bill Clinton. Was he a liberal at heart who tacked to the center for pragmatic reasons, or was he essentially a moderate? Was he wasting his prodigious political talents, or was campaigning all he really knew to do well anyway? Did he revive liberalism from its decline, or validate the Reagan Revolution?

But nine years after he left office, as his presidency begins to recede into history and his party has passed to new leadership, this much is clear: it doesn't matter anymore what Clinton's intentions were, or what his talents were, or what he believed in. It doesn't matter anymore who was up or who was down in his Administration, or who leaked what to which newspaper, or how he went about making decisions. It doesn't matter who the public blamed or what the polls said. It doesn't matter what Clinton said, either - we remember a few stock phrases (other than the embarrassing ones about his various scandals, probably his most enduring line was his campaign's standing reminder to then-candidate Clinton that "It's the economy, stupid").

What matters from the Clinton Administration is what the president and his Administration did, and what it failed to do. Thus, for example, Clinton's fiscal and economic legacy was not Hillarycare or the BTU tax, which went nowhere, nor was it the Contract with America, but rather an essentially centrist set of compromises with the GOP that yielded income tax hikes, capital gains tax cuts, welfare reform, fits of spending restraint but few spending cuts, major free trade agreements like NAFTA and GATT, and a series of both regulatory and deregulatory bills on the workplace, private securities litigation, and the financial markets. The book isn't closed yet on the ripples from that era, but the decisions made, the bills passed, the judges appointed, the wars fought and unfought, etc., are done, and as historians debate President Clinton's legacy, that is what they will examine. The same will be true of George W. Bush.

And the same will be true of Barack Obama. Obama is known for his eloquence, but little he says is remembered the next day, and still less will live on after him. Obama spends much of his days pointing fingers of blame - at the Bush Administration, at Congressional Republicans - but blame is not a legacy. Obama's true intentions are subject to as much debate as Clinton's or George W. Bush's, or for that matter FDR's or Lincoln's, but only his record will really matter.

Which ought to give him pause. Obama entered office with an unprecedented base of support in Congress - even FDR didn't have a filibuster-proof majority in his first year in office - and yet it is hard to think of a modern two-term president who accomplished less, either legislatively or in international affairs, than Obama in his first year. Even Clinton, for all the frustrations of his first year in office, got his tax hike package passed.

Unlike Clinton or Bush, Obama's political obituary is far from written. But we should not lose sight of the fact that when it is, all the rhetoric and the news cycles will pale in comparison to that awful question: what did you do with the time that was given to you?

All presidential Administrations talk down their predecessors, both to lay blame for problems inherited and - it's usually helpful if you have this part too - to show forward progress by contrast to what came before. But never in my lifetime have I seen a president so fixated on his predecessor as Barack Obama. Megan McArdle, who has been given more than enough reason by now to regret voting for the man, asks in the context of the massive expansion of the budget deficit when enough is enough:

[A]t some point, Obama has to take responsibility. Listening to his defenders reminds me of those people who sit around whining about how their Dad was really distant and critical . . . I mean, fine, you apparently had a rotten childhood, but Dad can't get come and get you off the couch and find you a girlfriend and a better job. Girls and employers get really creeped out if they try.

Whatever George W. Bush did or did not do, he's no longer in office, and doesn't have the power to do a damn thing about the budget. Obama is the one who is president with the really humongous deficits. Deficits of the size Bush ran are basically sustainable indefinitely; deficits of the size that Obama is apparently planning to run, aren't. If he doesn't change those plans, he will be the one who led the government into fiscal crisis, even if changing them would be [sob!] politically difficult.

Via Pejman, who looks at other examples of the man's elegant argument style, a brilliantly simple distillation by Milton Friedman of the core of the case for free markets and free enterprise:

One and a half cheers to the NY Times for the article "Skeptics Find Fault With U.N. Climate Panel," which admits to some of the scientific and ethical problems facing the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri. But the Times being the Times, while it lays out some of the damning facts, it omits key damaging details (especially regarding the egregiously amateurish nature of the IPCC's errors regarding the Himalayan glaciers) and otherwise spends the rest of the article trying to explain away Dr. Pachauri's problems, with hilarious results.

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In recent weeks we have been deluged by hand-wringing columns from "progressive" pundits bemoaning the filibuster rules in the Senate - which allow a determined and unified minority to block legislation that has fewer than 60 votes - and essentially declaring the filibuster to be proof that American democracy doesn't work and should change the way it does business. (See Brian Darling's discussion of one recent example of the genre from Paul Krugman declaring the filibuster to be the "downfall" of American greatness, and here for Ezra Klein declaring that "The Senate's problem is not disagreement. It's elections."). The immediate cause of the shrieking is the inability to pass Obamacare through the Senate in the form in which it passed the House, which the progressives decry as proof that America can't be governed, ignoring the alternative possibility that there are better approaches to health care that do not involve an Obamacare-style comprehensive bill at all. For some liberal critics, like Vice President Joe Biden (a man who participated in countless filibusters in 36 years in the Senate) or the New York Times editorial board, this is a posture of pure opportunism diametrically opposed to how they viewed the value of the legislative filibuster during the Bush presidency, while others, like Mickey Kaus, have long argued that the legislative filibuster* should go because of its role in obstructing progressive legislation.

Regardless of their motives, however, the progressive critics are wrong. The legislative filibuster is an essential, traditional check on a particular weakness of democracy - the very weakness the progressives seek to exploit by passing Obamacare before the 2010 elections.

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The important practical question following the death today of Congressman John Murtha is what happens to the House seat he held on behalf of the people of Pennsylvania's 12th District. The good news, so far as I can tell from early reports, is that Ed Rendell won't get to appoint an interim replacement, but rather the voters will have to choose one in a special election. As the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza reports:

According to state law, the governor has ten days once the vacancy is officially declared to decide on the date for the special election, which can come no sooner than 60 days following that proclamation.

That likely means the special election will be held on May 18, which is the date already set for federal primaries around the state. (Special elections costs the state huge sums of money and it's likely that Gov. Ed Rendell will choose to go with an already established election day to save some cash.)

This is yet another critical election; recall that Obamacare passed the House with a 3-vote margin of victory, and any effort to run it back through the House with the watered-down Senate langauge on abortion will cost at least two of those votes (Bart Stupak and Joseph Cao), while now two others (Robert Wexler and Murtha) have left the House since the vote was cast. Mike Memoli at RCP notes the continuing flux with special elections already coming up to replace Wexler and the yet-to-resign Neil Abercrombie in Hawaii:

Democrats have won every [House] special election in this Congress, including one pick-up from the GOP in New York 23. Another is set in the Florida 19th on April 13, with yet another seat opening soon when Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI) steps down to run for governor.

In other words, there will be a couple more opportunities for voters to affect the composition of a House already narrowly divided on President Obama's signature issue, and for now, at least, there are no longer the votes to pass anything unless and until Nancy Pelosi turns some "no" votes into "yes" votes without losing more of the original "yes" votes.

PA-12 has trended Republican in recent years - Cillizza notes that it was the only district carried by John Kerry in 2004 to flip to McCain in 2008 - although it's hard to tell how much of that is due to Murtha-specific issues and to the hangover from Obama's ham-handed comments during the Pennsylvania primaries. My best advice to the PA GOP is to study carefully the mess made in NY-23 (the behind-closed-doors selection of a thin-skinned and too-liberal member of the dysfunctional, corrupt and discredited state legislature) before a candidate is chosen for this special election.

If you thought Alexi Giannoulias, running in the shadow of Rod Blagojevich and Roland Burris, wasn't enough corruption and scandal for the Illinois Democrats in one election cycle, you were right. Meet the winner of the Democratic primary for Lieutenant Governor:

What Chicago election is complete without elements of domestic violence, prostitution and tax evasion?

A Chicago pawnbroker who financed his campaign with nearly $2 million of his own wealth, Scott Lee Cohen Tuesday won the Democratic Party's nomination for Lieutenant Governor. But with new details of Cohen's sordid past emerging today, Democratic primary voters will soon be wishing they had given his five rivals a second look.

Cohen allegedly held a knife to his then-girlfriend's in October 2005. Charges were later dropped after the woman, once convicted of prostitution, failed to appear in court to testify against Cohen.

A police report of obtained by the Chicago Sun Times said the woman had scar[r]ing and defensive wounds on her hands "from trying to defend herself against the arrestee swinging the knife at her." Additionally, Cohen "pushed [the] complainant's head against [a] wall, causing a bump on the back of her head."

Read the whole tawdry thing.

UPDATES: Pat Quinn, still carrying the baggage of his running mate in the last election, thinks his current running mate should and will have to drop out.

Ace notes the first Rasmussen poll showing Kirk leading Giannoulias by 6 points and has a chuckle and a caution about the whole situation:

It's a one-time gift by Democrats that they've nominated these guys with absolutely no regard to how they would fare in the general. They assumed that, as usual, the general would be a cakewalk, and so they could nominate whatever corrupt/crazy/socialist idiot they liked in the primary.

Conservatives have been having a heated argument about just this -- how far can we go? It seems the Democratic Party hasn't had this argument at all in blue states.

They're going to pay for that.

Alas, they will not be this stupid for too much longer.

And Moe Lane notes that the GOP candidate in Illinois' 11th Congressional District has the opposite record from Cohen as far as people attacking women with knives.

Democrats trying to defend their flailing healthcare bills have tried, repeatedly, a two-pronged attack on the mostly united Republican opposition to the various plans floated by the Senate and House Democrats and the Obama White House. One is to suggest that Republicans are criticizing the proposed Democratic solutions without having any of their own - implying that there really is no other choice but to pass a Democratic bill and that Republican opposition is irresponsible. The other and related contention is to argue that Republicans have a responsibility to cooperate in bipartisan fashion on the bills currently under consideration, rather than seek those bills' defeat.

These arguments are useful as political spin, but they are wrong. Moreover, they ignore the fact that the GOP has opposed the healthcare bills with much the same strategy employed by the Democrats against George W. Bush's effort to reform Social Security - which almost certainly resulted in the destruction of any chance in the foreseeable future to fix Social Security's fiscal problems or even prevent them from getting worse - as well as by forces both Right and Left against the Bush-McCain-Kennedy comprehensive immigration bill.

For the uninitiated, here's a sampling of what conservatives and Republicans do think about health care. I can't speak for everybody, but I think I can explain in general what the majority of the Right thinks and wants on this isue, and why it precludes most if not all elected Republicans from supporting any comprehensive healthcare bill built along the lines of those floated over the past year:

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Truly, we live in a golden age of political advertising unseen since Ralph Nader told his parrot he wanted to dress up in costume and get jiggy with a panda.

First up is an NRSC ad that concisely sets forth why Republicans everywhere rejoiced at yesterday's Illinois Senate primary win for Obama crony Alexi Giannoulias and his, er, baggage train:

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The Lancet, a once-respectable scientific journal, has conceded and retracted a now-discredited 1998 study claiming to show a link between vaccines and autism. Of course, the genie loosed by that piece of junk science can't be so easily put back in its bottle, but score another one for science and a defeat for its left-wing enemies.

On a similar note, yet another scandal involving hackery posing as climate science at the IPCC.

Benjamin Kerstein has an excellent and serious essay at TNL looking at the recently deceased Howard Zinn, the historian of choice for people who didn't like U.S. history and wanted a new one. As he and others have noted, in the final analysis Zinn wasn't even a good Marxist, given his fatalism and view of the conspiracy of the elite as an essentially static and permanent phenomenon.

As to the other and even older writer who died this week, JD Salinger (he was 91; Zinn was 87), I have nothing to say about him personally, but his name and obituaries bring back bad memories. I hated Catcher in the Rye when it was assigned to me in high school; it struck me at the time as the kind of thing adults think teenagers would like to read, but neither its turgid prose nor its whining narrator offered much in the way of entertainment or even a good topic to write a five-paragraph essay about. I suppose the book's durable success suggests that somebody actually liked it as a teen, or at least saw value in claiming to, but not me.

Literature was never my thing - I always preferred history - but I did have a few assignments I liked. The easy one was when my sophmore English teacher gave us a list of possible book report topics, and being a Red Sox fan he included Peter Gammons' book Beyond the Sixth Game. But that's cheating. I loved Julius Ceasar, and enjoyed The Crucible, Macbeth, Hamlet, Bartleby the Scrivener, and Animal Farm (we did that one in seventh grade). Besides Catcher in the Rye, I hated Steinbeck (we read tons of Steinbeck, even his dreary take on King Arthur), A Separate Peace (did that one twice), The Old Man and the Sea, Dubliners, and pretty much anything else that had no likeable characters, no action, no humor and no political intrigue. I managed to avoid taking any English classes in college (thank you, AP exam), but got assigned a bunch of Orwell in my British Empire class, and loved all of it - my Orwell Reader is dog-eared, and I still mean sometime soon to go back and read Down and Out in Paris and London in its entirety (I'd read only a lengthy excerpt focusing on Orwell's time in a Paris restaurant).

Caleb Howe has some fun at the expense of MSNBC's David Shuster - which is admittedly like hunting cows - over Shuster's haste to make partisan hay over the arrest of James O'Keefe at the offices of Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu, contrasted with Shuster's muted, caution-filled response to Nidal Hasan's mass shooting at Fort Hood.

If you've been fortunate enough to miss the O'Keefe story, he's one of the college-age right-wing gonzo-journalist types who busted ACORN with a string of undercover videos in which he dressed up as a cartoonish pimp and got various ACORN employees to counsel him on things such as how to safely employ underage hookers who were in the country illegally. Anyway, O'Keefe and three accomplices were busted yesterday by federal authorities at one of Senator Landrieu's district offices in Louisiana - two of the others were posing as telephone repairmen and O'Keefe was apparently videotaping them with his cell phone. Left-wingers like Shuster, desperately starved for some good news, went nuts on the story (the media reacted far, far faster to this than they did to the original ACORN story - a response that may be the privilege of advocates on one side or the other, but speaks quite ill of anybody pretending to be an objective mainstream news agency), blaring that this was a conspiracy to plant illegal wiretaps on Senator Landrieu's phones.

If so, that was wrong, illegal and colossally stupid on the part of O'Keefe and his henchmen, ad the potential charges under federal wiretapping statutes are steep, whereas the returns on tapping the main phone line at a Senator's local district office are likely to be slim pickings indeed. The Louisiana Democratic Party was calling this "Louisiana's Watergate," as if Watergate would even have made a list of the top 50 scandals ever to hit the Louisiana Democratic Party, but then the LDP has never been short on chutzpah; liberals were likewise quick to forget their own side's ugly history in this area, ranging from Congressman James McDermott being successfully sued for distributing an illegally intercepted cell phone conversation by GOP leadership, to Sarah Palin's emails being hacked by the son of a prominent Tennessee Democrat, to John Kerry's campaign manager in his first Congressional race (his brother, who still gets jobs from the Democrats) being busted for breaking into an opponent's headquarters.

But unlike the Fort Hood shooting or, say, the recent arrest of former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter on yet another charge of soliciting underage sex, in this case waiting to see what the facts are may actually provide something of a different story. Maybe O'Keefe really is a knucklehead, but Patterico looks more carefully at the arrest affidavit and notes the absence of any allegation that O'Keefe or his accomplices had any bugs or other listening devices on them when they were arrested (although there was a reference to an unspecified listening device in one of their cars several blocks away) - that hasn't stopped major media from headlining the claim that they were caught planting bugs, but then O'Keefe (unlike Hasan) is not the kind of figure who gets "alleged" put in front of charges of his misdeeds. And Patterico at least suggests a possible alternative explanation: that O'Keefe's group may have been trying to get to the bottom of media reports that Sen. Landrieu's phone lines have been too jammed to receive calls from constituents opposed to the health care bill.

Anyway, wait and see. The odds are that O'Keefe's brief career is over and he's headed to jail - which does not a whit to change what he exposed about ACORN, but nonetheless would get him out of the business of running future exposes - but even so, we may yet find out that not all is as initially reported.

UPDATE: Fox News says that O'Keefe's story is that this didn't involve wiretapping, but - prudently, if I'm his lawyer - he's not offering much else in the way of detail.

SECOND UPDATE: Good Lt. at the Jawa Report elaborates on Patterico's theory and how it may fit with the affidavit. MSNBC has a similar take from law enforcement sources that makes it sound like they were definitely vandalizing the phones:

[T]he men, led by conservative videomaker James O'Keefe, wanted to see how her local office staff would respond if the phones were inoperative. They were apparently motivated, the official says, by criticism that when Sen. Landrieu became a big player in the health care debate, people in Louisiana were having a hard time getting through on the phones to register their views.

That is, the official says, what led the four men to pull this stunt -- to see how the local staffers would react if the phones went out. Would the staff just laugh it off, or would they express great concern that local folks couldn't get through?

No, kids should not be gardening in school either:

Imagine that as a young and desperately poor Mexican man, you had made the dangerous and illegal journey to California to work in the fields with other migrants. There, you performed stoop labor, picking lettuce and bell peppers and table grapes; what made such an existence bearable was the dream of a better life. You met a woman and had a child with her, and because that child was born in the U.S., he was made a citizen of this great country. He will lead a life entirely different from yours; he will be educated. Now that child is about to begin middle school in the American city whose name is synonymous with higher learning, as it is the home of one of the greatest universities in the world: Berkeley. On the first day of sixth grade, the boy walks though the imposing double doors of his new school, stows his backpack, and then heads out to the field, where he stoops under a hot sun and begins to pick lettuce.

On this dolorous anniversary of Roe v. Wade, there can be no stranger bedfellows for pro-life conservative Republicans than the hard-line pro-abortion group the National Organization for Women (NOW). But as the last Democratic hopes fade for passing Obamacare on a party-line vote by ramming the Senate bill through the House unchanged - the only way, short of rewriting Senate procedures, to avoid another Senate vote that would fail the 60-vote threshold - the Senate bill is coming under withering fire in the House from both sides on abortion, and in a delicious irony, NOW may end up delivering the coup de grace.

Already, pro-lifers are a problem; the House bill passed only with a 3-vote margin for error, down to 2 with the resignation of Robert Wexler, and the watering-down of the pro-life Stupak Amendment in the Senate bill has lost the vote of Bart Stupak and most likely the bill's lone Republican vote, pro-lifer Joseph Cao. Passage in the House would only be possible if some "no" votes turn to "yes," and Nancy Pelosi sure doesn't sound as if she has the votes in the face of the voter unrest that sent Scott Brown to the Senate.

But even the watered-down Senate provisions on abortion are enough for NOW to vow not only to kill the bill but excommunicate anyone who supports it:

[T]he nation's leading womens' rights group blasted the legislation as "beyond outrageous."

The National Organization for Women (NOW) harbors deep concerns with the Senate health legislation, and exclaims that "women will be better off with no bill whatsoever."

"The Senate bill contains such fierce anti-abortion language, and there are other problems from the point of view of women," NOW's President Terry O'Neill told Raw Story in an interview.

O'Neill said NOW "will not support candidates in 2010 if they vote for it."

If that wasn't harsh enough, O'Neill went after the integrity of the process:

O'Neill ripped the "the closed door negotiations" that many believe took place in the shaping of the bill, saying that "people want transparency."

She said the Democratic leadership's actions on health care have been similar to the Bush administration's tendency to write legislation secretively and "jam it down the throats of Congress."

Oh, and the long knives of identity politics are out for Ben Nelson and Bart Stupak:

The NOW president said the "male-dominated Democratic Party" is not doing women any favors by bringing in anti-abortion zealots," slamming Nelson and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), who amendment to restrict abortion coverage in the House health bill passed minutes before the final vote.

"Women are clearly harmed" by these lawmakers, O'Neill said. "Shame on the male-dominated Democratic Party for supporting them. They hold themselves out as the party that is women-friendly; well they're not acting like it."

Never thought I'd say this on a 22nd of January: welcome aboard, NOW.

Pass the popcorn.

You can't throw a rock in the blogosphere without hitting a postmortem on Scott Brown's decisive defeat of Martha Coakley for the Massachusetts Senate seat formerly infested by Ted Kennedy and, before him, JFK himself. I may as well add my own. Here are seven lessons to be drawn:

1. Defeat Has Many Fathers: There's an awful temptation to spin the vote for Brown as the result of this cause or that - Coakley was a terrible, gaffe-prone candidate, Brown was a good one, glamourous and hard-working, Democrats were caught napping, voters were upset about Obamacare, voters were spooked by the Underwear Bomber, the special election was strangely timed, the enthusiasm gap, the poor track record of female candidates in Massachusetts, etc. But the fact is, it had to be all of them.

Look: In the past three decades, Republicans have won zero Senate races in Massachusetts but have won the Governorship four times with three different candidates. Bill Weld got 50.19% of the vote when he was elected in 1990, Paul Cellucci 50.81% in 1998, and Mitt Romney 49.77% in 2002. (Weld got over 70% of the vote when he was re-elected in 1994). Brown beat Coakley 52-47, meaning that he had the best showing by a non-incumbent top-level statewide Republican in decades. For contrast, in 2006, Deval Patrick carried Massachusetts 56-35, a 21-point margin. In 2008, Barack Obama carried Massachusetts 62-36, a 26-point margin. In other words, the electorate swung 26 points from the 2006 Governor's race and 31 points from the 2008 presidential race. To illustrate:

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A hot issue today in education is the usefulness of computers in the classroom. Some people - President Obama among them - argue that increasing resources should be spent to bring more computers and more internet access into schools and integrate them into education. The controversy, whether at the federal level or the local school board level, is usually over whether this is worth the expense. But the reality is that what our kids need most of all from schools - and libraries - is a respite from technology and time to give sustained, uninterrupted attention to learning the academic basics that they can then apply to any technological platform - just like the people who created those platforms in the first place. What we should be demanding from our schools is a computer- and internet-free zone.

The NY Times reports on a study showing that kids age 8-18 spend an average of 7 1/2 hours a day using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device. "And because so many of them are multitasking - say, surfing the Internet while listening to music - they pack on average nearly 11 hours of media content into that seven and a half hours."

The study then turned to the possible impact of all that time consuming electronic media:

Contrary to popular wisdom, the heaviest media users reported spending a similar amount of time exercising as the light media users. Nonetheless, other studies have established a link between screen time and obesity.

While most of the young people in the study got good grades, 47 percent of the heaviest media users - those who consumed at least 16 hours a day - had mostly C's or lower, compared with 23 percent of those who typically consumed media three hours a day or less. The heaviest media users were also more likely than the lightest users to report that they were bored or sad, or that they got into trouble, did not get along well with their parents and were not happy at school.

The study could not say whether the media use causes problems, or, rather, whether troubled youths turn to heavy media use.

Certainly the latter is a significant possibility - that computers and TV are more readily adopted by preteens and teens who aren't playing sports or socializing or wooing the opposite sex. But the broader point remains: schools should not be gateways to the internet, an adult medium if ever there was one. They should be a place to ensure that kids learn different skills than the ones they get from playing video games. If kids need to learn to work with computers as a trade, they can do that no sooner than junior/senior year of high school, the same way they would take a shop class. But otherwise, they are mostly being given a crutch that either short-circuits their learning process or the teacher's teaching process - and reinforces as well the mental habits of overuse of technology.

I'm not one to argue that TV or computers are all bad for kids, although parents have to exercise some responsibility for placing outer limits on time spent on those media and supervise the content kids are exposed to. But school is supposed to ensure that kids get grounded in the basics. Unplugging them for the duration of the school day is the best way to ensure that happens.

It's worth recalling, as the Massachusetts Senate election approaches, that Martha Coakley is not just some bland Democratic machine apparatchik. She's a bland Democratic machine apparatchik with a long record as a prosecutor that includes some very ugly things.

Exhibit A is the notorious case, familiar to readers of the Wall Street Journal over the past three decades, of Gerald Amirault. The case, discussed in summary here, was a terrible miscarriage of justice involving fantastical accounts of sex abuse of children, exposed by Journal reporter Dorothy Rabinowitz; it was originally prosecuted by another politically ambitious Democrat, Scott Harshbarger. And then:

When Martha Coakley became district attorney of Middlesex County in 1999, the Amiraults were still in the news. But by this time hardly anyone believed they were guilty of the horrendous crimes they were alleged to have committed. In fact there was no evidence that anyone had abused any children in the Fells Acres Day Care.

But what did Martha Coakley do when the Parole Board voted unanimously (5-0) to pardon Gerald Amirault? She did everything in her power to see that he stayed in prison, including sending an assistant DA to oppose his release at the hearing. Coakley also went on talk shows to spout her views about his guilt. (Read about Martha Coakley's involvement in Cheryl Amirault's Plea Bargain also).

That alone should disqualify Coakley as a candidate for higher office. But there's more. Such overzealousness is why criminal-defense-minded writers like Radley Balko and Jeralyn Merritt - neither of them exactly a right-wing Republican - are opposed to Coakley. Both cite other examples as well (Balko notes that Coakley first came to prominence in the notorious "shaken-baby" case against British nanny Louise Woodward, in which Woodward's murder conviction was reduced to manslaughter by the judge).

But overzealousness in questionable (or worse) cases isn't Coakley's problem. There's also the opposite, her lenient treatment of a Somerville cop who raped his 23-month-old niece - yes, a toddler - with a hot curling iron. Coakley's office let him out without bail pending trial; only under her successor was he convicted and sentenced to two life terms in jail.

It starts to be apparent that the persistent incompetence and tone-deafness of Coakley's campaign may not be a new thing for her.

UPDATE: Bigjournalism.com takes a similarly harsh look at Coakley's role in letting notorious pedophile Father John Geoghan off the hook in 1995.

SECOND UPDATE: But she is tough on ladies' gardening clubs.

THIRD UPDATE: Rabinowitz lays into Coakley.

Given the serial fiascoes of the Martha Coakley for Senate campaign, you would think, five days before Election Day, that the second coming of Shannon O'Brien has run out of ways to hand Scott Brown an upset victory in the race for what was for decades Ted Kennedy's Senate seat (but, as Brown has reminded us, remains the people's seat to do with as they wish).

But no! Coakley has managed, at this late hour, to diss New England's most hallowed site - Fenway Park itself. And, for bonus points, to do so in the course of explaining why she's above standing outside in cold weather (as if this is an unusual hardship for New Englanders) to ask for votes, when she could be getting to know connected people who know other connected people. As the Boston Globe reports:

There is a subdued, almost dispassionate quality to her public appearances, which are surprisingly few. Her voice is not hoarse from late-night rallies. Even yesterday, the day after a hard-hitting debate, she had no public campaign appearances in the state.

Coakley bristles at the suggestion that, with so little time left, in an election with such high stakes, she is being too passive.

"As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?" she fires back, in an apparent reference to a Brown online video of him doing just that. "This is a special election. And I know that I have the support of Kim Driscoll. And I now know the members of the [Salem] School Committee, who know far more people than I could ever meet."

Brown supporter and Red Sox icon Curt Schilling is apoplectic, and I'll let him do the honors:

[This statement] shows her elitism and arrogance unbelievably. Aside from the apparent feeling that the seat belongs to her just by virtue of her party, she just admitted that she doesn't need to bother meeting with constituents because she's meeting people like Kim Driscoll, and political leaders, and Democrat activists. I guess they're the ones that matter, huh? I know it's a "special election" and all, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't need to fight for this seat. Prancing around with this mindset of "Oh, I'm a Democrat, therefore Ted Kennedy's seat just automatically belongs to me regardless of what the people think," is idiotic. Acting as if she doesn't need to give her constituents the time of day is ludicrous. She can make all the snide remarks about Scott Brown shaking hands with people in the cold that she wants, but that's what you’re supposed to do when you're trying to get elected. She seems to have forgotten that she's trying to get elected in Massachusetts, and not in Washington D.C. - if she remembered that, maybe she'd spend more time trying to impress Massachusetts voters and less time rubbing elbows with the Democrat establishment, Big Pharmacy lobbyists, and union leaders. Most normal politicians, Republican or Democrat, do go shake hands with voters. Even if it means standing in the cold outside of Fenway Park.

Maybe Coakley should come back when she has a little blood on her sock.

*Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson looks at the declining quality of President Obama's rhetoric, while, Michael Barone and Noemie Emery look at the contrast between Obama's reputation for erudition and the extent to which the Tea Party movement has proven much more focused and energized on substantive issues than Obama's own supporters. The common thread here is that because Obama's rhetoric and appeal have always been more about him personally than about a coherent set of policy proposals, he was able to extend his original support far beyond the people who were signing on to any such agenda - and thus he's found himself with broad but shallow support that can dry up at any moment because it's not really a stable coalition built on common support for his agenda. Relatedly, and on Gerson's point about Obama's "cool," one thing I've noticed is that Obama has fairly limited range as a communicator - he's great at a few limited types of speeches, but but there are just too many types of things he can't do.

*David Dayen at the far-left blog Firedoglake, which has been crusading belatedly against the Obamacare bill since it dropped the public option, counts the noses and sees that the Democrats are probably already one vote short in the House (where the original bill passed by a 3-vote margin, one of whom has since left office). Meanwhile, the site's proprietor, Jane Hamsher, attacks the White House and its allies among the pundit and blogger class for failing to disclose that a key academic supporter of the bill was actually on the Administration's payroll. At this point, even Obama has to concede that "That's what's been lost this year...that whole sense of changing how Washington works." Yet Obama's camp still finds time to accuse the insurance industry of lobbying queitly against the bill - as if (a) anyone expected them not to lobby and (b) there weren't also a truckload of people lobbying for the bill and donating to Democrats.

*Pat Robertson's repetition with the Haiti earthquake of his God-blames-the-victims comments from the aftermath of 9/11 and Katrina shows that he really didn't get the message of Luke 13:1-5, let alone any common sense. Joe Scarborough, on Twitter, argues that Robertson should be given credit for his deeds, not his words - his organization did great work in the aftermath of Katrina, for example - but at this point, it's Robertson's own fault and he just needs to shut his trap permanently. He's said this stuff too many times to be an accident.

That said, you can bet that Robertson's remarks will get much wider play than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. blaming Haley Barbour for bringing down Hurricane Katrina on Mississippi.

*Martha Coakley may not succeed in losing the Massachusetts Senate race - while she's down by more than 40 points among independents in some polls, Massachusetts still has a colossal registration advantage for Democrats - it won't be for lack of trying. Don't have all the links handy here, but her campaign has veered from gaffe (her claim that there are no terrorists in Afghanistan) to comedy (misspelling her own state's name in an attack ad) to ham-handedness (a staffer barrelling over a Weekly Standard reporter trying to ask about the Afghanistan gaffe) to outright panic in her communications with national Democrats, who are now tapping into their House campaign fund to prop her up. It's been an appallingly poorly-run campaign against a savvy opponent. I can predict that Scott Brown will run a close race next Tuesday, but whether the energy and indignation of the Brown voters will outnumber the Democratic machine remains anyone's guess.

*Former Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler is back, as Chris Christie's education chief. Schundler was a failure as a statewide candidate but remains a hero to conservatives for his advocacy of school choice and his diligent if predictably futile efforts to win over inner-city African-American voters.

A big part of Christie's victory was in convincing New Jersey voters to move beyond cultural issues (guns, abortion) over which the state government has comparatively little power or is unlikely to do anything and focus on the things that are actually a major part of the job at the state level and the Democrats' catastrophic failure to accomplish them. But Christie also came to office with a fairly vague mandate beyond his platform of opposing tax hikes and fighting corruption. Schundler could give Christie a chance to make lasting and meaningful reform in the state and not just coast in the job - but not having run a campaign heavy on the school choice issue, Christie will have to commit some serious political capital to make the sale to voters.

By now most of you have seen Harry Reid's reported remarks, from a book on the 2008 election, enthusing that Barack Obama could be a successful presidential candidate because he was "light-skinned" and "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." The real story here is the Left's hypocrisy: Reid has committed a sin that would be unpardonable by anyone but a Democratic politician.

Much of the "Negro-gate" flap over Reid's comments has focused on whether, parsing them closely, they can or can't be compared to the 2002 comments by Trent Lott that got Lott ousted as Senate Majority Leader. As a matter of pure politics, that seems unlikely to happen to Reid - where Lott came under early and intense fire from bloggers and pundits on the Right, eventually making him radioactive to fellow GOP politicians, the Left (with only a few exceptions) has circled the wagons around Reid. On the other hand, Reid faces his own doom, as this adds to an already uphill battle Reid faces for re-election. But in any event, the better analogy is to George Allen, Jimmy the Greek, Al Campanis, James Watt, and others who lost their jobs due to comments that were not so much racist per se, but rather racially insensitive. That's what Reid's comments were - he was basically giving Obama a stamp of approval for not being one of those black people, with their "Negro dialect" and black skin - and even if he meant it more as an insult aimed at the tolerance of white voters, it's still not something you or I would be crass enough to say in a forum where it could ever be repeated to African-American friends. (Perhaps more damning to Obama is Reid's implication that Obama would put on a "Negro dialect" when it suited his purposes).

Reid's not the only one even this week - the same book quotes Bill Clinton saying that a few years ago, Obama would have been getting him coffee, while Rod Blagojevich, the twice-Obama-endorsed gift that keeps on giving, tells Esquire Magazine:

I'm blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five-room apartment. My father had a little laundromat in a black community not far from where we lived.

He's black because he shined shoes?

Nor is this Reid's first offense. Among Reid's long laundry list of petty personal insults aimed at distinguished public servants - notably excluding former KKK member Robert Byrd, whom Reid called an "unusually brilliant man" - Reid said of Clarence Thomas:

I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written. I just don't think that he's done a good job as a Supreme Court justice.

Reid contrasted Justice Thomas to Justice Scalia: "I cannot dispute the fact, as I have said, that this is one smart guy." But what made Reid assume that Thomas was a lesser intellect or a bad writer? He was never able to identify any Thomas opinions he'd read that gave him that idea. It was just a stereotype.

Racial insensitivity, intended or not, has become a frequent firing offense for government officials and other public figures at the insistence of the Left, aided and actively encouraged time and again by the leading lights of the Democratic Party. It is not Republicans or conservatives who frequently bathe themselves in sanctimony on this issue or treat it as an unforgivable offense. When a Republican is caught in a sex scandal, pretty much regardless of his actual record, the air is filled with calls for him to be held to a higher standard than Democrats because of conservatives' belief (not universally shared) that marital infidelity and other sexual misconduct is a bad thing. Yet, when a Democrat is caught making racially insensitive remarks, the very same pundits on the Left argue that rather than hold their side to the higher standard they demand of others, there should be a lower standard for Democrats precisely because of their public positions. Heads we win, tails you lose!

My own oft-stated view on Republicans and sex scandals, see here, here, here and here, is that the problem with hypocrtical Republicans is not their public defenses of virtue but their private sins, which may reflect badly enough on them in some cases (e.g., Mark Sanford) to doom them politically, but don't necessarily detract from their advocacy of what is right and good. But by giving Reid a pass, as with giving Clinton a pass for sexual harrassment, Democrats are showing that they believe the opposite: that they are willing to forgive violations of their own supposed principles in order to hold on to political power because those principles were never really that important to them in the first place - just a handy club to beat opponents.

Who's the real hypocrite in that picture?

UPDATE: Reports seem to be casting some doubt on the Clinton quote, among others in the book. Reid's office, however, has confirmed that Reid himself was the source for the Reid quotes and doesn't contest their authenticity.

Two lines of the day:

Jonah Goldberg: "the GOP's troubles over the last decade have a lot to do with the fact that Americans didn't stop liking what the Republican Party is supposed to deliver. They stopped liking what the GOP actually delivered." Also: "For too long Republicans confused supporting big business with supporting free markets, when big business is often the biggest impediment to fair competition."

Steven Green: "A man does not set fire to his penis for a job he expects to botch."

Finally, this chart from Paul Krugman is interesting and noteworthy (Krugman can occasionally be sane and not wholly dishonest when he sticks to his knitting and writes straight economics rather than partisan politics). I don't buy entirely his conclusion that "the CRE bubble ... gives the lie both to those who blame Fannie/Freddie/Community Reinvestment for the housing bubble, and those who blame predatory lending" - as some of his commenters properly note, the chart reinforces the argument that commercial real estate values are driven at least in part by residential real estate values, even in communities where relatively hard zoning laws make the two types of land non-fungible - but it's an important point nonetheless to understand that the housing bubble was not solely about housing markets and housing-credit policy.

Erick Erickson's post at RedState advocating a challenge to Senator Bob Bennett is a pretty good example of a couple of things. One, of course, is the combination of Erick's growing influence and the increasing activist focus of the site. I've always been more punditry/advocacy-oriented than into activism, but Erick's a natural fit for it and I'm definitely on board with the direction the site has taken; it's been a necessary evolution in today's climate.

A second is the true degree of tension between movement conservatism and the party. Bennett's mostly an obscure party man in a safe seat, so he'd seem like a low-priority person to attack, unlike Senators who are either (1) obvious electoral liabilities or (2) frequently high-profile dissenters on prominent votes. But the issue with Bennett is more his influence around the edges. Much of the tension right now is over a sense that while the House and Senate GOP leadership have done a fine job of keeping their caucus united, too many of the same people who led the party through the disasters of 2006 and 2008 are still in charge and don't seem to have really absorbed why anger at the Democrats hasn't translated into trust for the GOP as opposed to trust for populist outlets like Glenn Beck and the tea party movement.

A third is the distinction between inside and outside punditry/activism. I personally have no knowledge of anything Bennett's done in public to warrant this - but Erick is relying on people with inside knowledge of how the GOP caucus works.

Anyway, go read the post for Erick's reasoning, which turns in part on the fact that (1) it's cheap and easy to mount a challenge under the Utah GOP's convention system and (2) it's as safe a GOP seat as there is. My general philosophy is that it's good to have primary challenges but rarely more than 1 or 2 a cycle in the Senate, just enough to make people not want to have their name at the top of that list. As it happens, we have a bunch of hot primary fights for seats with no GOP incumbent (e.g., Florida, California, Ohio), but with Arlen Specter's departure there aren't many GOP incumbents facing a serious challenge (I'm not sure yet how serious JD Hayworth's primary challenge to McCain is). I definitely wouldn't bother with primarying Bennett if he wasn't representing such a safe seat, but conservatives unhappy with his performance at least have reason to expect that if there's anywhere we should be entitled to demand faithful representation, it's Utah.

If it's true that being tall is a major advantage in politics, former Nets, Knicks and Trailblazers center Chris Dudley, at 6'11", will be a man to watch as a contender for the GOP nomination for Governor of Oregon in 2010. The Yale-educated Dudley seems to fit the bill of novice citizen-politicians for good and for ill - he's voted only sporadically in past elections, but is off to an outstanding start raising money - and is aiming to take on the likely Democratic candidate, former Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber.

Dudley had some of his best basketball seasons with the Blazers and has recently been working in Oregon as a financial adviser. You can check out his campaign site here. A quick look suggests that at least on fiscal issues, Dudley will be running on a straightforward GOP platform of cutting taxes and spending:

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I missed this one in my post the other day on Rubio and Crist - watch this clip of Marco Rubio in action and you can see why people have been excited about him for some time. Note - as becomes obvious when he pulls out a crumpled roll of paper to read the Kennedy quote - the absence of a TelePrompter.

H/T. John McCormack offers some samples of Crist speaking for contrast. Crist's not terrible, and of course he's won a couple of statewide races as Governor and AG, but he's a pretty unexciting politician with no identifiable principles. I'm guessing he'll focus on ignoring Rubio as hard as he can.

The reasons for wanting Chris Dodd gone from the Senate are too numerous to recount here; briefly speaking, Dodd has been wrong on basically every national security issue for the past three decades, he's got ethical problems out the wazoo, and while he was in bed with anyone and everyone connected with the financial crisis, he spent a year living in Iowa on a delusional presidential campaign instead of doing his job overseeing the Senate Banking Commitee. Rob Simmons, a moderate former GOP Congressman, is the leading candidate to replace Dodd, and is doing a drive to get past 400 online donations (he's pretty close already) by close of business today. So, I'll do my part here:

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Republicans are going to have a lot of challenges and a lot of opportunities in the 2010 elections. One thing the party needs to do is get our best candidates into races we can win; another is to make sure we hold the easy races and avoid bloody and ideologically divisive primaries in the tough ones; a third is to make sure we can raise adequate funds to support all the races we need to contest; and a fourth is to promote the young stars of the party who will represent its future.

Charlie Crist disregarded all of that when he announced that he was dropping out of the race for re-election as Governor of Florida to enter the primary to replace retiring Republican Senator Mel Martinez. And NRSC Chairman John Cornyn, by immediately endorsing Crist, signalled that he encouraged this sort of behavior. Shame on both of them for putting Crist's personal ambitions above the good of the party. Let us count the ways in which Crist's decision is bad for the Florida GOP and the national party:

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Gov. Palin draws a challenger. I'm sure he'll have basically a license to print money in national fundraising from left-wing blogs (assuming he's the Democratic nominee).

I am torn on the issue of Caroline Kennedy being appointed to the U.S. Senate to fill out Hillary Clinton's term. On the one hand, as a New Yorker, I'm appalled. On the other hand, as a Republican, this is the best thing that could possibly happen short of Gov. Paterson deciding he likes the ring of "Senator Spitzer."

Kennedy is one of scores of wealthy Democrats in this state who have never held public office or accomplished really all that much in the public or private sector; all she has is her family name. That the Democrats are even considering her tells me that they've basically fallen into one of two dangerous delusions:

(1) That it's the 1930s again and all you need is a D next to your name to win;
(2) That Obama's victory proves that glamor and celebrity are more important than experience, accomplishments or a substantive platform.

I don't think much of David Paterson, but I'd have thought he has more backbone and independence than to let Kennedy's base (the media and the Obama camp) bully him into choosing such a poor candidate rather than the other available options, all of whom have more political experience and, frankly, all of whom would pay more (public) political dividends to Paterson, himself an accidental Governor who has yet to receive a mandate from the public.

Now, it is far too late in the game for either party to object on principle to political dynasties, given the scores of political families in this country (few states are without at least one major one). Nor is it wholly a bad thing - we accept politics as a family business for the same reason why we accept Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey jr., Jakob Dylan, Ben Stiller, Kate Hudson...every business is a family business, and the children of the pros do often learn things early. But of course, legacy politics has also given us more than its share of brain-dead empty suits like Bob Casey and Linc Chaffee who could never, ever have gotten elected to public office on their own. And this is still a democracy; even if we're willing to vote for second or third generation politicos, they still need to prove that they can run the gauntlet of seeking public approval first (George W. Bush, for example, cut his teeth working for his dad's campaigns but had no public office until he was elected to one by the people of Texas). The idea of just handing office to a 51-year-old who has never, so far as I can tell, accomplished anything in the practice of law or in politics simply because of her famous name is repugnant.

On the other hand, the GOP actually has a pretty strong candidate in Pete King, and Kennedy is about the worst possible matchup to a pugnacious Long Island Irishman with a blue-collar edge. She has no separate and distinct geographic or ethnic base, other than perhaps her gender, and it's sad that modern feminism's political icons seem to be women who only got jobs because of who their husbands or fathers are. She can't match King's long record in office and his many years sparring on the political talkers, nor his common touch. Kennedy would start out with pole position against King purely on party identification, but from there that's all she has - her nomination would be the ultimate example of what we have seen a lot of the last month, the hubris of Democrats who think they can never lose what they only just won.