Hank Kalet

McCain’s McGovern moment

This is from Truthdig, which links to a story from the New York Post:

Rush Limbaugh’s said it, and now Charles Hurt from Rupert Murdoch’s Big Apple tabloid, the New York Post, is joining in the chorus of conservatives who worry that Sen. John McCain would betray the GOP’s core right-wing base if he inches any closer to the White House.

The Post story — more of an analysis column — raises echoes of the 1972 election, when the Democratic establishment decided that it would be better to fracture the party than turn it over to McGovern and the antiwar crowd. That decision — at a time when the party already was losing steam and the conservative movement was beginning its ascendance, has proven to have a longterm impact as the right continued to grow in strength.

Now, the conservative establishment is in decline and its leaders — and media mouthpieces — are taking aim at McCain, an apostate conservative in their eyes (never mind that most of his positions are indistinguishable from those held by President George W. Bush).

Hurt quotes Limbaugh:

If the Republican Party expands “because we have a candidate who’s going out trying to attract liberals by being like them, then the party’s going to be around but you won’t recognize it,” thundered radio king Rush Limbaugh.

The Republican Party will “be over as it exists now,” he warns.

Hurt then makes the McGovern comparison more explicit (though he doesn’t acknowledge it):

Still, McCain has so radicalized key conservatives that some have vowed to turn themselves into suicide voters next November by pulling the lever for Hillary Rodham Clinton over him.

This last-minute blitz against McCain by Limbaugh and others, however, comes far too late.

But if those conservatives sit out the general election, they will help Democrats make history by electing either the first black president or the first female president next November.

I doubt we will see a full-out assault on the presumptive Republican nominee, as we did in 1972 when the Democratic establishment pulled out the stops in an effort to nominate anybody buy McGovern, a campaign that sucked the wind from McGovern’s sails (he had faced a steep uphill climb against a sitting president with decent approval ratings already) — and fractured the party at a time when it already had become dangerously fragile.

What followed was the moderately paced erosion of the Democratic Party, both institutionally and philosophically. The Clinton presidency, in some ways, was a blip caused by the first George Bush’s disastrous handling of a recession, a blip that obscured the fact that the 1990s ended with Republican control of the House of Representatives, the election of George W. Bush and the further movement of our national government to the right.

The conditions on the right and in the Republican Party are similar, to some degree, to those faced in 1972 by the Democrats. Perhaps, Limbaugh is right (yes, I did just write that). Perhaps, McCain will lead the national GOP into the wilderness, after all, which would not be such a bad thing for the future of the country.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
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Home field advantage

All five of the remaining six candidates in this year’s presidential race who ran in their home-state primaries yesterday managed to win and win big.

But two of the Republican nominees — John McCain and Mitt Romney — failed to win as big as some might have expected.

Consider the numbers: Both Democrats managed to tally huge victories at home, with Barack Obama taking nearly two thirds of the vote in Illinois and Hillary Clinton winning 57 percent. In addition, Mike Huckabee took 60 percent in Arkansas. But Mitt Romney pulled in just 51 percent in Massachussets, with John McCain nabbing 40 percent, while McCain garnered an unimpressive 47 percent in Arizona (Romney finished with 34 percent).

In each case, the favorite-son/daughter candidate managed a double-digit win. But in considering McCain’s win in Arizona, I have to wonder why more isn’t being made of the fact that more people voted against McCain than actually voted for him.

This story, in the Arizona Republic on Saturday, speculates on whether a McCain nomination would carry coattails, potentially swinging down-ballot races to the GOP. The assumption is that McCain carries Arizona, which seems likely, though I think the Arizona primary results at least raise some doubts.

Those doubts are made clearer by this on exit polling from The Arizona Daily Star:

Still, exit polls in Arizona Tuesday night illustrated McCain still has work to do in shoring up support from conservatives. Though McCain won the state, Romney had strong support from Republicans who described themselves as conservative and those who believe illegal immigrants should be deported. Romney had 47 percent ofthe vote from those who describe themselves as conservatives, compared to McCain’s 36 percent, according to CNN.

What helped McCain was overwhelming support from Republicans who called themselves liberals, and he was also favored by moderates.

Whether this weakness among conservatives will hurt him in the general election remains an open question, as is whether his current strength among liberals and moderates will carry over when he has to face a more liberal Democrat.

The Los Angeles Times also alludes to the same questions, well down in a Page 1 analysis story:

The Republicans’ divide was ideological — and familiar. It was the same division between moderates, most of whom favor McCain, and conservatives, most of whom don’t, that marked the results in earlier primaries from New Hampshire to South Carolina.

Across the nation, McCain led among Republicans who identified themselves as moderates or liberals, but Romney led among the larger group who called themselves conservatives, according to exit poll results published by the Associated Press.

In California, McCain won only a third of the vote among conservatives, who made up most of the Republican electorate; Romney won a plurality of conservatives’ votes. That result was repeated in most other states; even in Arizona, where McCain won overall, he lost among conservatives.

That suggested that the Arizona senator has not yet won over substantial numbers of his party’s most loyal supporters, despite weeks of effort on his part to show that he is as conservative as his rivals.

“McCain wanted to use Super Tuesday to silence his critics and become the consensus nominee, but he fell a little short,” said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster. “McCain moved the ball forward, but he didn’t score a touchdown. It’s not a bad showing, but it’s not especially strong.”

How these questions play out as we move toward November will depend on the final lineup — not only the presidential candidates, but the vice presidential candidates — and could be influenced by any number of circumstances. McCain’s win in Arizona shows some cracks that could keep him from bringing his party togethe, which is the only hope he has come November.

Then again, I would never rule him out.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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No surprises — or not many

For the most part, the night has gone as originally expect — Democrats split, with Clinton taking New Jersey and Obama taking some of the midwestern states; Republicans backing McCain.

And then there’s Mike. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has won several Southern contests, with John McCain winning but not winning big across the board. This raises the question of whether the social conservatives are holding out on the Arizona senator and whether this portends problems for the fragmenting conservative coalition.

Another thing to watch, as the numbers continue to come in from Arizona, is how big McCain wins in his home state. Clinton, Obama, Romney and Huckabee all won big at home, and McCain’s lead is rather large in Arizona. But as I write this, he’s failed to cross the majority threshold, pulling in 49 percent of the vote there with 31 percent of the precincts reporting. That means that 51 percent of Arizona Republicans voted for someone other than their own sitting senator. Not sure if this means anything, but it does raise some interesting questions.

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Bush’s legacy budget

President George W. Bush’s final federal budget can be viewed as a parting gift from an administration that has inflicted more damage on the nation than just about any other in the history of the republic.

The $3.1 trillion budget proposal calls for a $400 billion deficits in each of the next two budget years, created primarily by the tax rebates proposed as a tepid $146 billion economic stimulus and a plan and a boost in funding for defense (about $38.4 billion). The budget also calls for spending freezes and cuts in domestic programs, many of which are incredibly popular, especially among traditionally Democratic constituencies.

The budget also “calls for making permanent Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, which have been widely criticized as skewed to the rich and which would begin expiring next year,” the LA Times said.

Doing so would cost Washington more than a half-trillion dollars in forgone revenue over the next five years and more than $2 trillion over the next decade, but the president has argued that they play an important role in stimulating economic growth.

USA Today put it this way:

Winners in the budget include the Pentagon, which would get nearly 8% more, and border security, up nearly 20%. Losers: Medicare and Medicaid, and domestic programs not related to national security.

And, as The Washington Post notes, the

plan omits several costly features, including tens of billions of dollars of the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that could drive the deficit even higher than the president’s estimates. That would effectively delay until 2009 decisions on how to cope with short- and long-term financial problems, lawmakers and others said.

The Washington Post quotes one economist, an adviser to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama:

“A whole bunch of things they were putting off and hiding under the rug all these years are starting to pop back up,” said Austan Goolsbee, an economist at the University of Chicago and chief economic adviser to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). “It’s clear they’re trying to shove as much of this as possible on to the next guy.”

President Bush is projecting a surplus, but as the Post points out in today’s editorial, but that projection is based on creative accounting.

Yesterday’s promise of a small surplus by 2012 is once again premised on omitting likely costs (zero is budgeted for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan) and by assuming cuts to domestic spending that are unachievable politically and, in large part, unwise as a matter of policy.

Budgets are itemized lists of priorities. The Bush budget — like all of his previous budgets — demonstrates the president’s antipathy toward the people who actually live in this country. His fealty is to the corporate order and the markets that that he and his cronies view with a religious ardor.

President Bush, as The New York Times points out in today’s editorial, has crafted a budget that is “a grim guided tour through his misplaced priorities, failed fiscal policies and the disastrous legacy that he will leave for the next president.”

Much of the budget plan is likely to be excised — the various dailies are reporting that even Republicans are a bit gunshy about moving ahead with a plan that exempts high earners from the kind of sacrifices the rest of us are being asked to make.

But the budget, as the Times points out, will have a lasting legacy:

What will definitely outlast Mr. Bush for years to come are big deficits, a military so battered by the Iraq war that it will take hundreds of billions of dollars to repair it and stunted social programs that have been squeezed to pay for Mr. Bush’s misguided military adventure and his misguided tax cuts for the wealthy.

This brings me back to the USA Today description of this budget as one of winners and lowers. The winners, to put it bluntly, are the people with the cash, the people who control the corporations, who have seen their portfolios increase in value and their peronal bottom lines grow.

The loser? Just about everyone else.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
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Science fiction comes to life

Does anyone else find this scary? The FBI wants to create what CNN is calling a “massive computer database of people’s physical characteristics” designed to help the bureau better track “criminals and terrorists.”

The program will include “palm prints, scars and tattoos, iris eye patterns, and facial shapes.”

The idea is to combine various pieces of biometric information to positively identify a potential suspect.

The problem, as the ACLU told CNN, is that the program is not likely to be limited to nefarious elements. The technology too easily can be used for other means, including employment background checks and the like.

“It’s the beginning of the surveillance society where you can be tracked anywhere, any time and all your movements, and eventually all your activities will be tracked and noted and correlated,” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Technology and Liberty Project.

The Washington Post reports that the program is designed to bring together information from a variety of agencies, which law enforcement says will bring “together information from a wide variety of sources and making it available to multiple agencies increases the chances to catch criminals.”

This has the Electronic Privacy Information Center a bit concerned, Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told the Post.

“You’re giving the federal government access to an extraordinary amount of information linked to biometric identifiers that is becoming increasingly inaccurate,” he said.

And as Steinhardt told CNN, this will affect all of us.

“This had started out being a program to track or identify criminals,” he said. “Now we’re talking about large swaths of the population — workers, volunteers in youth programs. Eventually, it’s going to be everybody.”

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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