NYT: "Scott Walker’s Electoral Record Is Less Impressive Than It Looks."

The headline for this Nate Cohn column at the NYT intriguingly assumes we're already seeing something about Scott Walker, but I think the basis for the debunking is that Walker himself keeps pointing out that a blue state, Wisconsin, has elected him governor 3 times in 4 years.

Cohn has a chart comparing Walker to other candidates for governor in 2010 and 2014, the years of Walker's regular elections. (Walker also had to win in June 2012, midway through his first term, because there was a recall election.)

In neighboring and politically similar Iowa, the Republican Terry Branstad won election and re-election by a far wider margin than Mr. Walker.

To the east, in neighboring Michigan, Gov. Rick Snyder won by a similar margin in a more Democratic state, even though he also picked a fight with labor.

To the south, a Republican candidate for governor won the dark-blue state of Illinois.

Farther away, Republicans won Ohio by a huge margin and carried states more Democratic than Wisconsin, like New Mexico, Maryland, Maine and Massachusetts.

That is, it might not be anything so special about Walker. People in blue states might just have been hankering for Republican governance in 2010 and 2014.

Cohn branches out to senatorial preferences:

There’s even a case that Mr. Walker didn’t have the best Republican performance in Wisconsin. Ron Johnson, a self-funded political novice, managed to defeat an incumbent, Russ Feingold, by a five-point margin in 2010. Despite that showing, some analysts believe Mr. Johnson is the single most vulnerable senator of the 2016 cycle.

That is, people were really leaning Republican in 2010, and you can't predict that 2016 will be another election year like that. What was going on with that 2010 senatorial election in Wisconsin? Why did Ron Johnson have "the best Republican performance in Wisconsin"? I think that was "a vote against what the Democrats have done with Congress," which is what I said on Election Day 2010. I guess in 2016, Feingold will have a "miss me yet?" argument against what the Republicans have done with Congress. But 2016, unlike 2010, is a presidential election, and our fixation on the presidency will keep us from thinking too much about Congress.

Which brings us back to Cohn. He observes that all 3 of Walker's victories came in non-presidential years, where Republicans get the advantage of lower turnout from the younger people who tend more toward Democrats. That is, Wisconsin is and remains a blue state, where Walker should lose, but elections are skewed in the off years.

Let's get jacked up over jacking up taxes on "nonparents."

I'm just going to link to Instapundit, who links to Reihan Salam at Slate, where there are over 1,000 comments, evincing what an Instapundit commenter calls "horrifying Deep Fever Swamp Leftism."

I don't want to get too deeply into fever swamps on the left or the right. I just want to say:

1. The phrase "jacking up" normally goes with opposition to taxes, so it's a humorous flip to use it when you're actually in favor of more taxes. I'll never forget the time, back in 2010, when we watched the Obama rally from the TV set up on the Union Terrace, in a big enthusiastic crowd of mostly students. I wished I'd caught this one guy on video. Upon some mention of taxes, he stood up facing the crowd and yelled "Taxes?! I say jack 'em up!!!" He did this with a big, clownish, full-body gesture that ended with arms aloft and thumbs up. Meade and I have been imitating that guy for years. For the drunk-on-beer/drunk-on-Obama Terrace crowd, maybe it all seemed like a dream or a joke. Need money? Get money! Jack 'em up!

2. But Salam is doing the humorous flip in the humble-altruistic form that says: Jack up my taxes. I deserve it.  Except he's not just talking about himself. He's talking about a lot of other people too. He's saying people like me need to be punished/penalized/tapped. That gives some creditability to the demand, but only to a point. Years ago I got into a disturbing conversation with someone who became so impassioned over how evil human beings are that he declared that the nuclear holocaust — which he was certain was coming — ought to come soon because we deserved it! His presence in the category of those declared to deserve it did not do much to bolster his authority.

3. Who are "nonparents"? Some "nonparents" are people who don't want children and are relying on others to do the work of making the new generations that will carry on civilization and serve us and benefit and keep us company as the years pass. But some "nonparents" are people who don't have children yet, perhaps because they are careful and conservative controllers of reproduction. I was one of those people in my teens and twenties. I waited until I had reached a level of financial stability before I had my first child at the age of 30. If I had never reached that level, maybe I would never have had any children. Jacking up taxes on the childless would function as a way to shift childbearing to those who don't worry so much about home economics. Eventually these new generations will take over government power, and what economic policies will seem like a good idea to them? I picture a horde of millions making a big, clownish, full-body gesture and yelling "Taxes?! I say jack 'em up!!!"

The NYT takes aim at the Republican Governors — including Scott Walker — who are running for re-election in 2014.

"Mr. Walker is one of eight Republican governors facing re-election who swept into office in 2010 in states that President Obama won two years earlier, driven by the Tea Party at the height of its influence. Mr. Obama clawed back in 2012 to win each state again."

Mr. Walker argues that Wisconsin offers a lesson to his party nationally. “The perception of many across America is Republicans in Washington are the party of ‘no,’ they’re just against things,” he said in an interview. “We shouldn’t be about austerity. We should be about reform. We should spell out a clear message about how we’re going to reform things. I think what voters are hungry for in battleground states is leadership.”...

If the other Republicans in the Rust Belt are trying to moderate their message, Mr. Walker in Wisconsin argues that independent voters do not want Republicans to move to the center....

“I argue the way you win the center, which is key to winning battleground states, is not to run to the center; it’s to lead, it’s to be bold,” he said.

"The left is too silent on the clunking fist of state power."

A headline at The Guardian, linked to this morning by Instapundit, which called this image to my mind:

"It is almost impossible to find an establishment Republican in town who’s not downright morose about the 2013 that has been and is about to be."

"Most dance around it in public, but they see this year as a disaster in the making, even if most elected Republicans don’t know it or admit it."

Who are these morose, ineffectual, in-town, establishment characters?

Christine O'Donnell gets message from Treasury agent: "your personal federal tax info may have been compromised and may have been misused by an individual."

O'Donnell — the 2010 Tea Party GOP candidate for the Senate in Delaware — received that phone call earlier this year, but the breach occurred the day she announced her run for office:

[That very day] a tax lien was placed on a house purported to be hers and publicized. 

She didn't still own that house, so we didn't get to see how far the persecution of the woman — also taunted as a "witch" — might have gone.

The IRS eventually blamed the lien on a computer glitch and withdrew it.

Now Mr. Martel, a criminal investigator for the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, was telling her that an official in Delaware state government had improperly accessed her records on that very same day.

State government accessing IRS records the day the campaign is announced and acting instantly to break her financially.



"As she was considering a Senate run, Ms. O'Donnell said she was told by a prominent political figure in Delaware that if she challenged [mainstream Republican Michael] Castle, the IRS and others would 'F with her head.'"

How pathetically little investigative journalism we've had on the IRS scandal and the effort to crush the Tea Party!

Obama imposes huge tax on the American middle class.

That's the story, right? That's the spin for Romney. What's the spin for Obama?

UPDATE: Drudge points to Obama's assertion, back in September 2009 that the mandate is not a tax.

STEPHANOPOULOS: [I]t's still a tax increase.

OBAMA: No. That's not true, George. The — for us to say that you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it's saying is, is that we're not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore than the fact that right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase. People say to themselves, that is a fair way to make sure that if you hit my car, that I'm not covering all the costs.

I have said repeatedly that Obama would be worse off if Obamacare were upheld, but what I'm really seeing is how bad it is for him with the mandate declared a tax.

Remember the Democrats got the statute passed by insisting it was not a tax. Now, we learn it is only constitutional because it is a tax. That's got to hurt politically.

ADDED: Romney has at least 3 big arguments:

1. Obama imposed a huge new tax on working people.

2. Obama deceived the American people by saying it was not a tax, when it was.

3. The law made it look like money would go to insurance companies — in the form of new premiums — that would keep premiums low as the companies were required to take on people with pre-existing conditions, but now we find out that the money is really going to go to the federal government. [ADDED: So get ready for your premiums to spiral up and/or for insurance companies to be ruined.]

"Seldom has there been as clear a winner" as Mitt Romney at last night's debate.

Asserts Fred Barnes.

Scott Walker rescinds layoff notices for 1,500 state workers...

... now that the legislature has cut collective bargaining rights.

“From a policy perspective, this is terrible,” said Mike Tate, the leader of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.

“But from a political perspective, he could not have handed us a bigger gift,” Mr. Tate said of the governor.

In the last 24 hours, he added, the state party had received $360,000 in contributions and volunteers have streamed into offices where signatures were being collected for recall bids.

Yeah, they are making phone calls. I got one yesterday. I played "ordinary voter" and said: "Why shouldn't I just wait until the next election? I mean, there was an election last fall. Shouldn't the people who won their terms finish their terms and just have a normal election?" Blah, blah, blah, from the caller.

Me: "But it seems like a weird thing to do to keep having more and more and more elections. I mean, people get all excited over the elections in the fall and then, you know, to just have new elections in the spring, I mean, that's really confusing for people. And it seems expensive too. Should we really be doing stuff like that?"

The caller starts telling me that it's legal. It was very hard for me to maintain my Ordinary Voter persona after she tried to go legal on me. I had to say: "Yeah, but people don't do everything they have a legal right to do." And then I couldn't resist saying: "What about the Democratic Senators who went to Illinois? Should they be recalled?" So then she sniffed me out as a nonsupporter and brought the conversation in for a landing, but not before I gave my parting shot: "I think it's a terrible idea and I hope you lose."

"At some point these acts of brazen viciousness are going to lead to a renewed philosophical interest in the question of when acts of political violence are morally justified."

How quickly the lefty mind turns toward violence! That's the lofty law-and-philosophy professor Brian Leiter. Here, I'll help you get your fancy-schmancy, high-tone philosophy seminar started: Acts of political violence are justified to get what you want.

Via Instapundit, who says: "This whole 'new civility' business just isn’t working out as promised. On the other hand, it is working out pretty much as expected...."

My tag for the "new civility" has always been "civility bullshit." It was always, obviously, a strategy to control conservatives (while liberals regrouped after the drubbing in the 2010 elections). Now that the Wisconsin protesters have gone so far beyond anything that could be attributed to Tea Partiers or to Sarah Palin maps-with-crosshairs, I suppose the MSM will act as if there never was a new civility movement at all. Suddenly, virulent dissent will be portrayed as noble.

And let me drag Ron Schiller — the punked NPR exec — into this. One of the things he said to the fake would-be donors was: "In my personal opinion, liberals today might be more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives." I loathe this kind of self-flattery. Everyone thinks his own ideas are good. That's why they're your ideas. But to layer in this self-love: I'm smarter. This is what Leiter is doing too. He's inclined to approve of the impulse toward violence on the left and willing to mobilize the discipline of philosophy to generate rhetoric to support its political goals. It's quite disgusting.

Meanwhile, Schiller sneered at the dummies who aren't liberal: "I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white, middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it’s scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people." Is Schiller smart? He thinks he is. But that statement reeks of stupidity. It's not articulate. "Sort of white." Just say they're white if that's your point. Are they "racist" as a result of a lack of education? Here's a clue: It doesn't take education to see that racism is wrong. If anything, it takes education to get to the point where you make subtle distinctions approving of some racial things but not others.

For the ordinary people Schiller has contempt for, it's not a sophisticated intellectual matter to reject racism. And for the ordinary people outside of the circle of Leiter's respect, it's a simple matter to reject violence.

The NYT strains to find a "victory" for the Wisconsin demonstrators.

Its story today begins:

In a victory — at least a symbolic one — for Wisconsin’s public employee unions, the Capitol authorities announced on Sunday that demonstrators could continue their all-night sleepovers in the building and would not be forcibly ejected or arrested.

Well, yes. A decision was made that it wasn't worth the drama to oust these people who've been clean and orderly enough. Plus, the police are — it seems to me — sympathetic to the protest. As for the GOP politicians who dominate the state government: Why would they want to make martyrs out of the folks who've worked so long and hard to demonstrate how strongly they care? They've been hanging out in the Capitol, enduring the cacophony of their own drumming and chanting and sleeping on the hard stone floor for 10+ days. They're punishing themselves. Why not let them suffer, unmolested, and continue to generate images that disturb the Wisconsinites who voted the Republicans into office 3 months ago?

Obama orders Justice Department to drop its defense of the Defense of Marriage Act.

Politico reports:

“After careful consideration, including a review of my recommendation, the president has concluded that given a number of factors, including a documented history of discrimination, classifications based on sexual orientation should be subject to a more heightened standard of scrutiny,” [Attorney General Eric] Holder said in a statement.

“The president has also concluded that Section 3 of DOMA, as applied to legally married same-sex couples, fails to meet that standard and is therefore unconstitutional. Given that conclusion, the president has instructed the department not to defend the statute in such cases. I fully concur with the president’s determination.”

(Last fall, I was very critical of Obama's willingness to defend DOMA in the courts.)

ADDED: Watch me — last October — criticize Obama for fighting against gay rights in the courts:



Hmmm. October... Had to win some votes back then.

"The US secretly agreed to give the Russians sensitive information on Britain’s nuclear deterrent to persuade them to sign a key treaty."

Says the UK Telegraph, relying on Wikileaks:

A series of classified messages sent to Washington by US negotiators show how information on Britain’s nuclear capability was crucial to securing Russia’s support for the “New START” deal.

Oh, but don't be upset! The START treaty was Obama's chosen post-elections showdown with GOP last fall:

Just two weeks after an election that left him struggling to find his way forward, President Obama has decided to confront Senate Republicans in a make-or-break battle over arms control that could be an early test of his mettle heading into the final two years of his term.

Obama proved his mettle! What's more important? Our relationship with the UK or proof of Obama's mettle after the crushing 2010 elections?

"Right now, each side in that debate passionately believes that the other side is wrong."

"And it’s all right for them to say that. What’s not acceptable is the kind of violence and eliminationist rhetoric encouraging violence that has become all too common these past two years."

Writes Paul Krugman, manufacturing a phony problem.

It’s not enough to appeal to the better angels of our nature. We need to have leaders of both parties — or Mr. Obama alone if necessary — declare that both violence and any language hinting at the acceptability of violence are out of bounds. We all want reconciliation, but the road to that goal begins with an agreement that our differences will be settled by the rule of law.

If Krugman had a sharper, fairer eye for what is really needed, he would have walked back his last column — the one where he attributed the Tucson massacre to "toxic rhetoric" on the right.

As Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff responsible for dealing with the Arizona shootings, put it, it’s “the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business.” The vast majority of those who listen to that toxic rhetoric stop short of actual violence, but some, inevitably, cross that line....

So will the Arizona massacre make our discourse less toxic? It’s really up to G.O.P. leaders. Will they accept the reality of what’s happening to America, and take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric? Or will they try to dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual, and go on as before?

Advocating violence is terrible, but it is also terrible to try to delegitimize vibrant criticism of the government, to have a biased view of where the least valuable speech is coming from, and to connect speech to violence when there is no connection. The truth is we should dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual and go on as before. Why should we change because a madman shot people?

Ironically, saying that a massacre can change the course of American politics encourages massacres! Why would you put such a thought into the heads of madmen? Hell, sane men might put the pieces together and plan a massacre to disrupt the work of the politicians who won the last elections. We need to turn away from the bloody slaughter and go on as before.

The "risk in over-learning" the lesson that Presidents can win reelection after getting slammed in the midterms.

Nate Silver writes:

Mr. Clinton and Mr. Reagan, though they are two recent examples, are nevertheless just two examples, and they were both once-in-a-generation political talents.

Reagan was in the "greatest generation" and Bill Clinton is a Baby Boomer. This makes me want to dredge up the old question whether Obama is a Baby Boomer. Taking Silver's assertion seriously, if Bill is the "once-in-a-generation" talent, then Obama's not at the Clinton level. But I'll just link back to that time I assumed Obama was not a Baby Boomer and you readers argued with me about it. Well, maybe you've changed your mind. I haven't.

[Would Obama] win re-election if an election were held tomorrow[?] His approval ratings right now are quite similar to where George W. Bush’s were at the end of 2004. Mr. Bush won re-election, albeit very narrowly and against a relatively weak Democratic nominee.

Then again, the set of prospective Republican nominees is also perhaps rather weak.... [I]f an election were held tomorrow, Mr. Obama would be a clear favorite against Ms. Palin, and probably about even money (although perhaps a very slight favorite) against a less divisive Republican nominee....

[But] an election won’t be held tomorrow. Do we have any inkling yet about whether Mr. Obama’s standing with the public is likely to improve or decline by 2012?

There's the economy, which might improve. And there's the post-election flurry of activity by the doomed Democratic majority in Congress, and then, whatever will happen with the Republicans in the next session.

Mr. Obama will be fighting from a defensive posture on health care, which remains unpopular with the public....

Ultimately, however, Mr. Obama is more popular than the Republican Congress — an advantage that Bill Clinton did not have after 1994, nor Ronald Reagan after 1982. With the equally unpopular Democratic Congress largely being marginalized, that may work to his advantage....

Until we get a better sense for how the dynamics between Mr. Obama and the Republicans will play out — or in which direction the economy is headed — I would be skeptical of analyses that seem to express a significant amount of confidence on either side of that figure.

It seems to me that people generally tend to hate Congress, so it will help the President to have an oppositional Congress.

Who are you?

We're the best/worst political videos of 2010.

A 1933 Washington Post headline: "Present Lame Duck Session Will Be Last."

David A. Fahrenthoid explains the 20th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

The trouble with lame-duck sessions began in 1801, when the outgoing Federalists used their last days in power to help appoint a bunch of judges. It flared up again in 1922, when President Warren Harding and the lame-duck Republicans tried to ram through unpopular legislation after their defeats.

Opponents said this was un-democratic: These sessions seemed to violate the ever-popular Washington rule that "elections have consequences." Finally, Congress passed - and the states ratified - the 20th Amendment.

Historians say lawmakers thought they were ending lame-duck Congresses forever.

"This amendment will free Congress of the dead hand of the so-called 'lame duck,' " Rep. Wilburn Cartwright (D-Okla.) said as it was debated in 1932.

But Congress follows the letter of the law, and the amendment only changed the date of the end of congressional terms. It's a lot earlier than it was under the original Constitution, but it's still far enough from the elections to give a modern Congress plenty of time to work its will on the American people who may have just decisively rejected them.

With a devastating electoral loss behind them and a 13% approval rating, Congress flouts the intent of the framers and ratifiers of the 20th Amendment.

"Does that not just sound like an NPR report, to do an in-depth report on the word of the year, 'no.'"

Says Rush Limbaugh, about this NPR segment, which I tried to listen to. Man, NPR is slow. Unless you're driving in traffic trying to create the illusion that you are going quickly, I don't see how you can listen to that. But there's a transcript at the link, and you can read it so much faster than the 5 minutes it takes for Geoffrey Nunberg to perform the text on the audio. When he finally gets to the point that the word of the year is "no," he says:

That word usually gets a bad rap in public life; it's never a compliment to call somebody a naysayer. So Democrats obviously meant to put Republicans on the defensive when they began to call them "the party of no" for opposing the stimulus bill in early 2009. As The New York Times' Ben Zimmer pointed out, that phrase has often been used by the party in power to label the opposition as obstructionist. Ronald Reagan branded Democrats as the "party of no" in 1988, Bill Clinton did the same thing to Republicans in 1994, and Tom Delay turned the phrase back on Democrats in 2005.

Here's the part Rush played:

What was different this time is that after some early defensiveness, a lot of Republicans embraced the label and even ratcheted it up a notch. "We're not just the party of no," Rush Limbaugh said, "We're the party of hell, no!" — and Republican leaders quickly adopted the line. That extra word shifted the meaning of the phrase — it no longer suggested just opposition to particular bills and programs but unapologetic and resolute defiance.

That stance clearly resonated with a lot of voters.

Rush stopped his playing of the clip there, but it continued like this:

"No" has a great power to bring people together, precisely because it doesn't have to be pinned down. A child has a much harder time mastering "yes," which is always the response to a specific prospect — "Do you need to go potty?" Whereas the child's first "no" comes earlier, as a pure eruption of willful refusal. And the word retains that capacity, even as we learn to intone it to convey despair, anger, defiance, fear, astonishment, disappointment or resignation.

And that's how NPR sees you voters: You're children. You're resisting potty training. Your Tea Potty Party is mindless emotionalism. You're — as Andrew Sullivan would put it — intellectually inert brats.

That's what makes these choruses of negativity so hard to read, whether they're coming from unhappy voters or tired preschoolers in full shutdown. Everybody is sounding the same plaintive note, but it isn't as if there's any single juice flavor that will make them all happy again.

Hard to read?! Is conservatism a foreign language to Nunberg and the NPR slow-listeners stuck in traffic? Juice flavor? It would be a punch line for me to call that a punch line — juice ≈ punch — but why is that a punch line? Maybe Nunberg plied his intellectually inert brats with juice — I'll get grape, because grape is a little more favorite — but what does that mean about what he (and NPR) think government is supposed to do? It's supposed to give us yummy things to make us feel good (and compliant). No wonder he can't read these choruses of negativity.

"In this anti-establishment year, Ron Johnson is perhaps the only member of his freshman Republican Senate class who can truly lay claim to the Washington outsider label."

"Wisconsin’s newly elected senator has never served in public office. He didn’t benefit from family political connections, as did Rand Paul of Kentucky or Mike Lee of Utah. He funded most of his campaign with his personal fortune, keeping special interests at bay."

A worthy successor to our much-loved Senator Feingold.

"President Barack Obama took steps on Wednesday to force a Senate vote on legislation that would begin to dismantle the military's 'don't ask, don't tell' policy..."

"... banning openly gay service members during the ongoing lame-duck legislative session, hosting a second White House strategy session with gay rights advocates and personally lobbying a key lawmaker who favors repeal of the ban."

I been worrying about the mischief the Democrats might make in the lame-duck session, but if this is the one they choose, I will be happy.