Tories Advance in Brit Local Elections

Britain’s Conservative Party oustripped forecasts of 600-700 by gaining over 875 seats in the British local council elections.  As the BBC put it: 

It may not have been the surge many had been hoping for, but Mr Cameron has always stressed the party has an electoral mountain to climb if it is to win the next general election and, with around 800 seats gained, it outstripped its forecasts.

But the goal of the Tories was to make real improvement in the North (wiped out in the 1997 general election) and to chip away at the Liberal Democrats (many disaffected Conservative voters have been sojourning with the LibDems).

And that is exactly what the Tories achieved.  They had some notable successes in the north of England, and in their 875+ gain they took almost 500 seats from Labour and almost 150 seats from the LibDems.

The centerpiece of the Cameron strategy is to appeal to centrists with themes like work/life balance and global warming.  Those centrists are the LibDem voters that the Conservatives must attract if they are to win the next general election.

After the Debate: Romney

You could say that the reason I’m a Romney guy is because of the unrelenting Romney-boosting on the Hugh Hewitt radio show.  Hugh has his book A Mormon in the White House to promote shamelessly and so it’s been Romney, Romney, Romney now for weeks.

Still I couldn’t help but notice the centerpiece of Mitt’s campaign.  In China they would call it the Three Strongs. 

• Strengthen America’s Military
• Strengthen America’s Economy
• Strengthen America’s Families

He got in his licks on the Three Strongs on the Tonight Show on Wednesday here.

Then he got it in on the debate in Simi Valley on Thursday evening here.

We’ll probably get sick of it before we’re done.  But of course it exactly fits the center-right agenda.

Notice how it also dovetails with the women’s agenda as expressed by 18 Doughty Street Brit Iain Dale:

They want to feel secure in their family, in their home and in their community.

There is also this important plug on Romney from Hugh Hewitt.  It has to do with Romney’s media presence.  Romney, he writes, is a candidate

who has had a graduate school education in hadling the MSM, broadcast and print variety... Watching the second President Bush debate was perhaps the greatest trial GOP activists had to endure in the campaigns of 2000 and 2004.

I’ll say.  Expecially if you happened to be watching him with a Democrat.

But Romney excels in debate and on TV.  Imagine him easily trading one liners with Jay Leno. Imagine being relaxed every time your candidate comes up to bat, and expecting him to deliver a solid base hit every time he’s at bat.

And imagine a candidate who, every so often, lofts the ball over the fences.

The Heart of the Education Problem

In Britland they have recently discovered that social mobility is going down not up.  As Anne McElvoy writes in The Spectator:

[Children] born in 1970 are more likely to have ended up poor themselves than the children born in 1958. There is no sign that the trend has changed.

So guess what: more central government education programs are needed.

You see, back in 2002 the London School of Economics published a study:

comparing able children from a disadvantaged background [Group A] with less able children from middle-class homes [Group B]. The two lines on the graph cross over shockingly early. Group A’s progress falls off sharply at the age of four or five. At the same point Group B begins to race ahead. The poor-but-bright child all too easily falls by the wayside in this race[.]

The solution is obvious, apparently.

I would certainly argue for pupils to be taught in ability groups when they reach secondary level... We still need to do much more to encourage autonomous new providers of schools within the state sector who come in to do things better, and force existing schools to emulate their achievements.

Notice that McElvoy takes for granted the essential assumption of welfare state politics.  The disadvantaged are helpless.  Everything is to be done for them by the experts.  Ability groups are to be instituted, new providers encouraged, existing schools are to be forced to emulate.

Here’s a concept.  What do the disadvantaged actually want for their children?  Do they want them to get an education?  If so, what are they prepared to do to bring that about?

I recently listened to Ruth Messinger, CEO of American Jewish World Service, tell a fundraiser that in their microloan program in the Third World, the women recipients immediately apply their earnings to the education and the health care of their children.

You mean to say that in the Third World the poor actually spend their own money on their children to improve their life chances?

Then why are the poor in the First World considered to be helpless to seek the welfare of their children, requiring 24/7 supervision by the academic middle class?

"Make No Mistake"

After President Bush vetoed the Democrats’ emergency war funding bill everyone got together at the White House to discuss what to next, reports the Chicago Tribune:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the meeting “positive.” held in “good faith.” Her Republican counterpart, Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio, called it “very productive,” reporting no tense moments.

But they hardly decided what the outlines of a new bill would look like.

“Make no mistake,” Pelosi said, “Democrats are committed to ending this war.”

If Democratic leaders had their druthers it would probably be for President Bush to withdraw from Iraq before the 2008 election.  Then any subsequent problems would be Bush’s fault.

But President Bush has probably no intention of allowing such an outcome.  Let the Democrats withdraw from Iraq in 2009.  Then any subsequent problems would be the Democrats’ fault.

Don’t like it?  You think that politicians should just do the right thing, irrespective of partisan advantage? 

GM to Advertise on Limbaugh Show

This year on August 1 talk radio will be 19 years old.  It started with Rush Limbaugh and the end of the old FCC Fairness Doctrine that mandated “balance” in political opinion on the airwaves.

Tomorrow, Rush Limbaugh announced on his show today, he will not be performing his assigned host duties flawlessly.  He will not be performing them at all.  Instead he will be in Detroit talking to his new sponsor General Motors.

Conservatives will understand that this is an epic event.  Let us spell it out.

Beginning in the spring of 2007 General Motors Corporation will be advertising on the Rush Limbaugh Program.

Up till now the national consumer brands have been reluctant to advertise on controversial conservative talk radio.  That is odd, when you consider that talk radio enjoys huge national audiences.  But we know why.

The big consumer corporations are afraid.  They are afraid of being mau-maued by liberal interest groups.  There is even the possibility of a boycott.

If you doubt that read the comments about General Motors’ decision to hire conservative host Sean Hannity as “lead spokesman for a car giveaway campaign called ‘You’re a Great American.’”  Lots of people would like to punish General Motors for using Hannity as a spokesman.

I wonder if General Motors knows what it is getting into.  I’d say that if a Democrat gets into the White House in 2008 then congressional Democrats will want to punish GM for advertising on conservative talk radio.

In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if such an effort begins by the summer.

Romney: You Make the Call

The AP recently reported that Mitt Romney didn’t think it was that important to go after Osama bin Laden.  Here’s the quote from the AP article by Liz Sidoti:

[Romney] said the country would be safer by only "a small percentage" and would see "a very insignificant increase in safety" if al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was caught because another terrorist would rise to power. "It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person," Romney said. Instead, he said he supports a broader strategy to defeat the Islamic jihad movement.

John McCain and conservative opinion journalists jumped on him.

Good job as usual, MSM, in burying the lede says blogger Dean Barnett.  Romney’s remarks were part of an interview in which, beyond the tactical question of bin Laden, he said the following about the war on terror: 

Global Jihad is not an effort that is being populated by a handful or even a football stadium full of people. It is — it involves millions of people and is going to require a far more comprehensive strategy than a targeted approach for bin laden or a few of his associates.

 So Romney is taking the strategic view, which is that the US and the west are in a long term conflct with the forces of Islamic Jihad.  He judges that this movement does not depend on a single leader, so that decapitation is not worth spending vast amounts of money.

As I watch the Republican presidential contest unfold I confess that I am getting more and more impressed by Romney.  You get the feeling that he has sat down for months with staff and advisers and really thought about the strategic issues to be faced, domestically and in foreign policy.

Either he has thought about the issues or he is doing a superb job of making it look like he has.

How will we tell?  A guy who has done his strategy right will usually have his forces in the right place at the right time.

The classic case of strategy beating tactics was the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.  Many of the battles were inconclusive and many over-eager Prussian commanders made tactical mistakes.  But the Prussian armies were almost always in the right place, and the French armies were almost always in the wrong place.

There’s a reason why we call the activities of politicians prior to an election a “campaign.” 

"Eurostar Generation" Threatens Euro Social Model

They call them the “Eurostar Generation.”  They are the young French professionals who have bought one-way tickets on the Eurostar train from Paris to London. 

And when they get to London they are often amazed at how quickly they can find jobs.

Politicians are noticing, as Anne Applebaum reports.  The highlight of the current French presidential election has to have been the election rally of candidate Nicolas Sarkozy in London to a crowd of 2,500 French expats.

He called London “one of the great French cities,” and with 300,000 French living and working in London, he may be right.

The French ex-pats, along with the notorious “Polish plumbers,” are wrecking the social welfare state that the left has tried to mandate in Europe.

For the past decade, French, German and other European leaders have tried to unify European tax laws and regulations, the better to "even out the playing field" — or (depending on your point of view) to make life equally difficult everywhere.

 But humans are a wandering species, and they naturally migrate abroad to find greener pastures, whatever the dictates of the rich and the powerful.

Up to now, the new Europe has lacked a European “idea,” according to Applebaum.

Almost by accident, the European Union may have created a new kind of European citizen instead: mobile, English-speaking, Internet-using, perhaps with the same nostalgia for Krakow or Dijon that first-generation New Yorkers feel for Missouri or Mississippi but nevertheless willing to live pretty much anywhere.

And that could be the way that Europe shakes off its lassitude and finds a new cultural and economic vigor.