My Daily Domestic Diigolet 11/06/2008

• Obama: Brothers Should Pull Up Their Pants | PoliticususaWell what do ya know. I finally found an area of agreement with President election Obama!tags: obama
  • He also said that people should show some respect, “Having said that, brothers should pull up their pants. You are walking by your mother, your grandmother, your underwear is showing. What’s wrong with that? Come on. There are some issues that we face, that you don’t have to pass a law, but that doesn’t mean folks can’t have some sense and some respect for other people and, you know, some people might not want to see your underwear — I’m one of them.”
• Barack Obama, Fabian Socialist – Forbes.comtags: no_tag
  • He’s telling the truth when he says that he doesn’t agree with Bill Ayers’ violent bombing tactics, but it’s a tactical disagreement. Why use dynamite when mass media and community organizing work so much better? Who needs Molotov when you’ve got Saul Alinski?
  • So here is the playbook: The left will identify, freeze, personalize and polarize an industry, probably health care. It will attempt to nationalize one-fifth of the U.S. economy through legislative action. They will focus, as Lenin did, on the “commanding heights” of the economy, not the little guy.
  • As Obama said, “the smallest” businesses will be exempt from fines for not “doing the right thing” in offering employer-based health care coverage. Health will not be nationalized in one fell swoop; they have been studying the failures of Hillary Care. Instead, a parallel system will be created, funded by surcharges on business payroll, which will be superior to many private plans.
    The old system will be forced to subsidize the new system and there will be a gradual shift from the former to the latter. The only coercion will be the fines, not the participation. A middle-class entitlement will have been created.
    It may not be health care first; it might be energy, though I suspect that energy will be nationalized much more gradually. The offshore drilling ban that was allowed to lapse legislatively will be reinstated through executive means. It may be an executive order, but might just as well be a permit reviewing system that theoretically allows drilling but with endless levels of objection and appeal from anti-growth groups. Wind and solar, on the other hand, will have no permitting problems at all, and a heavy taxpayer subsidy at their backs.
• The Campaign Spot on National Review Onlinetags: politics, Palin
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    – White women voted McCain/Palin 53-46. That’s more or less the same as the Bush/Cheney score with this group in 2004 (55-44).

     

    – White independents voted McCain/Palin 49-47. There are no comparable data on this group for 2004, but we do know that independents went for Kerry 49-48 in 2004, and 52-44 for Obama this year. It’s safe to conclude that the swing to Obama in this category was caused by non-white independents voting overwhelmingly for the Democratic ticket. 

     

    – White evangelical/born again christians voted McCain/Palin 74-24 in 2008, which is slightly lower than the 78-21 breakdown in 2004. But their share of the total vote was larger this time than last time (26 percent in 2008 versus 23 percent in 2004), so on balance the white evangelical/born again contribution to the Republican vote was probably about the same size as it was in 2004.

     

    – Gun owners votied for McCain/Palin in the same numbers they voted for Bush/Cheney last time round: 62-37 in 2008 versus 63-36 in 204

     

    Conclusion: on her four main target groups, Palin delivered the goods for the McCain campaign. In all four categories, the McCain/Palin share of the vote was virtually identical to the Bush/Cheney share in 2004.
• Why McCain Lost « FOX Forum « FOXNews.comtags: politics
  • John McCain could never decide if he wanted to be a winner—or a martyr.   He took arbitrary stands (he would prefer, of course, the adjective “principled”) on issues that cut against the grain of his party, as well as undercut his potential victory coalition, which always had to include populist Reagan/Hillary Democrats.  He opposed drilling for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and denounced those who mentioned Reverend Wright or Barack Obama’s middle name.  And he supported “comprehensive immigration reform” and “cap and trade” on global warming—liberal positions which were anathema to the GOP faithful, as well as turnoffs to moderate-conservative Democrats.  All of these “high-minded” stances garnered McCain favor from newspaper editorial boards and self-declared establishment thought-leaders, but all taken as insults to the Republican base.
  • With apologies to Frank Sinatra, McCain ran the campaign “his way”–and just like the narrator in that famous song, he paid a steep price.  Maybe that’s what McCain wanted all along.  It sure seems like it.

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