Three Legs Good, Six Legs Better

Ken Blackwell reminds us that the conservative coalition is not a just the three-legged stool of the Reagan Coalition but something bigger.

Here’s his enumeration of the honored members of the conservative coalition and their number one issues.

1. Social conservatives — judges
2. Christian conservatives — judges, religious freedom, home schooling
3. Second Amendment conservatives — judges
4. Economic conservatives — taxes and spending
5. Philosophical conservatives — limited government
6. National Security conservatives — terrorism

I don’t know what you call that, but it ain’t a three-legged stool. You could call it a big tent. Or you could call it six-pointed star, Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, begging American Jews to come on in.

Here at the Road to the Middle Class we count ourselves as libertarian conservatives, but we respect and honor all the other members of the coalition. We say: Your issues are our issues.

Now. How many of the six points of the conservative Star do you think that John McCain respects and honors?

Against McCain

As he campaigns for the nomination of the Republican Party Senator John McCain certainly does a good job of infuriating the conservative base of the party.

For instance, you’d think, crafty politician that he is, that he’d have learned how not to talk like a Democrat, playing the class warfare card, and all.

But no. Last night at the Republican California debate at the Reagan presidential library, he did a good job running as John Kerry against Mitt Romney.

I know how to lead.


I led the largest squadron in the United States Navy. And I did it out of patriotism, not for profit.

Oh, I see. So Mitt Romney’s career, including a long stint at Bain Capital creating jobs and wealth, just doesn’t measure up?

Then there’s the Wall Street bashing bit, getting a late hit in on the mortgage meltdown.

I think that there’s some greedy people on Wall Street that perhaps need to be punished.

Actually, I think there are some people on Capitol Hill who need to be punished. Who is it that passes laws to keep sluicing money and subsidies at the housing market? Who is it that has been bullying the lending institutions for decades to lend money to minorities? Who is it who cranked interest rates down to one percent in the early 2000s? And who is it who was carrying water for politically-connected S&L magnate Charles Keating back in the 1980s? And what was Senator McCain doing two or three years ago when it was obvious that the real-estate boom was getting out of hand?

It fascinating how pols like Senator McCain go for Wall Street all the time. It’s all smoke and mirrors, of course. Wall Street runs the government bond market, the market that floats the government’s paper out to the world. Wall Street is the most important thing in the world for the government and for the Senators that slosh the feed into the government’s trough.

I’d say that if there’s someone that’s really greedy and really needing to be punished it is the pols that vote to run big deficits, and get Wall Street to push Treasury Bills and Treasury Notes and Treasury Bonds out into the world to fund the deficits. And then with the other hand they sit around doing nothing while the Federal Reserve lets the dollar decline so that bond holders are left holding dollar-denominated bonds worth a lot less today than they were a few yers ago.

Heck of a deal for the US government and its senatorial functionaries. Heck of a deal for Wall Street. But not so good for the folks that bought the bonds.

Who’s the greedy one there, Senator?

Seriously, do we really want this guy in the White House where he can govern like a Democrat and have the Republicans take the fall for more bloated government and more attacks on the First Amendment?

Florida: McCain over Romney

It seems incredible that the “maverick” Senator John McCain is the Republican frontrunner. How could this moderate senator from Arizona be leading the the fight for the nomination in the conservative Republican Party?

The answer, I think, came in South Carolina when non-activist conservatives seemed to be going for McCain out of buyer’s remorse. Voters were wondering if they were really right to choose George W. Bush back in 2000. The sensible thing to do seemed to be to vote for McCain.

Anyway, write Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, McCain can win and Romney can’t.

McCain has a much better chance of winning the election than does former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R).

And they are probably right. Conservatives may think of President Bush as a not very conservative president, but the American people think of him as conservative, right-wing, and Republican. After all the ups and downs of the past seven years, they think it is time for a change, and they are right.

So it is time to think strategically. If, as seems likely, the Republican candidate loses in November, would it be better to lose with a full-spectrum candidate like Romney or a maverick, media favorite like McCain?

In my view, the voters need a dose of Democrat. Republicans aren’t going to get a chance to do real conservative reform until the current promise of “Change” has passed its sell-by date.

Democrats don’t stand for Change. They stand for more government, more bureaucracy, more subsidies, more waste. In another four years voters will have been robustly reminded of this.

Fox Focus Group Response to SOTU

In his last State of the Union speech President Bush seemed to be a confident man, hardly the broken, failed president that he critics imagine.

And you could tell that from the reactions of the focus group assembled by Frank Luntz for Fox News.  Few in the focus group had a positive opinion of the president coming into the speech, but nearly all had a good impression after the speech.  Now how could that be? 

Could it be that the media (including the presidential candidates) combine to render a negative verdict on the president?

Luntz highlighted the group reaction to two presidential proposals.  Everyone in his group approved when the president proposed to end 151 failing and wasteful federal programs.  But when the president proposed to make his tax cuts permanent only the Republican-leaning participants strongly approved.  The Democrat-leaning participants strongly disapproved.

There’s a lesson in that.

Throw Money at Higher Ed?

Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano want to spend more money on higher education according to Matthew Ladner from the Arizona based Goldwater Institute.

“We must recognize that higher education is something that all Arizona children will need to succeed,” stated Governor Napolitano.

The governor wants to increase funding to double the number of college graduates in Arizona by 2020.  But others think that the supposed “dire need for an ever increasing number of college graduates is a myth.”

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, only 29 percent of all jobs actually required a degree in 2004. The Bureau projects that of the top ten occupations with the largest growth from 2004 to 2014, seventy percent won’t require a college education.

Already 40 percent of people get a two or four-year college degree.  So we are already graduating more college graduates than we need.

Of course, Arizona’s university system performance isn’t exactly something to write home about.  According to Ladner:

The National Center for Education Statistics lists Arizona State’s four year graduation rate as 28 percent, the University of Arizona at 30 and Northern Arizona University at 27. The six year graduation rates for these three schools stand at 56%, 56% and 47% respectively.

How about improving the current performance of the under-performing Arizona university system?  One way of doing that would be by giving college student higher education vouchers so that the state university system would have to compete for student dollars.  Arizona already has such a program.

Because no good deed goes unpunished, Governor Napolitano recommended that the Arizona legislature cut funding for the voucher program.

Governor Napolitano is a Democrat.

"Mansfield Park" Mis-Priced

Enough of politics and race cards. Let’s talk about real issues, like a disastrous TV production of Mansfield Park.

In the golden age of Hollywood the culture snobs like you and I would always sneer at the costume dramas: Marie Antoinette, Queen of France presented with a hairstyle and small talk right out of 1930s popular culture.

There was one comfort.  The BBC would never stoop to that sort of thing.  Nor would Masterpiece Theater.  At least, not when dramatizing Jane Austen.

But as my sister and I watched the one episode production of Mansfield Park last night on PBS we felt that we were watching a Hollywood costume drama.

Of course, it is ridiculous to attempt a vast novel like Mansfield Park in one episode.  A novel of relationships cannot be crammed into two hours like an action drama.  Still, it doesn’t hurt to try.

But to make the prim Fanny Price into a bit of a pouting slut with flashing eyes, when the whole point of Fanny is that, as the poor relation, she cannot afford even one lapse from irreproachable behavior; to make Lady Bertram, the indolent and self absorbed mother of four wayward rich kids easily tempted by the false intimacies of a rashly conceived project of amateur theatricals, into something of a shrewd judge of character who knew all along that Fanny was in love with her cousin Edmund; to show the characters of a comedy of manners cavorting around an English country house without manners and without decorum; this is to miss the whole point of Jane Austen.

Fortunately, there is still the book.  And there is also the 1983 BBC production available on DVD, “faithful to the novel and soooooo booooooring,” thank goodness.

Party Splitting Time

Everyone is accusing everyone else of splitting the party. On the Republican side it started with Mike Huckabee, who seemed to be splitting the evangelicals off from the economic and national-security conservatives. Then it was John McCain splitting national-security conservatives off and seeming to diss the economic conservatives and the social conservatives.

Then the Clinton tag team started playing gender cards and race cards within the Democratic Party by ridiculing and then polarizing Barack Obama.

Then the great Rush Limbaugh said that he might sit the election out if certain candidates won the Republican nomination. They know who they are.

Now Peggy Noonan says it’s all Bush’s fault. It was he that split the Republican Party.

George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.

Look fellas, let’s cool it a little. This is primary season. This is the time when the parties are supposed to tear themselves apart. This is when the candidates try to get the 51 percent of the party that they need to win the nomination. This is beneficial. We get to find out what the party factions really think and what they are ready to vote for—or more likely vote against.

But we won’t really know if permanent damage was done until after the general election.

If the Democratic Party splits over Clinton v. Obama we’ll know about it in November. If the Republican Party splits over McCain, we’ll know it in November.

Things change. Great political coalitions form and then they break up. I’d say that, if anything, we are overdue for a major party split. And like earthquakes, you expect a big one when things have been quiet for too long.

I’d say that the Democrats are more vulnerable to a split. The fact is that blacks and Latinos don’t like each other. Something’s got to give as the animosity between blacks and Latinos starts to bite.

But what do I know?