Even if you're not generally a fan of the winning-by-losing theory, Republicans and conservatives really should be glad that conservative Doug Hoffman chased liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava from the field in New York's 23rd congressional district. Why's that?And just for those recently tuning in, I should point out that Democrat Bill Owens did win (the first Dem to hold this congressional seat since The Civil War, by the way).
First, Scozzafava couldn't have won in a two-way race anyway. She was a terrible candidate and more liberal than the Democrat. She would have depressed Republican turnout, and Owens would have won.
And Scozzafava “couldn’t have won in a two-way race anyway?” That’s interesting, because this post from The Albany Project shows the results of a poll in September that had Scozzafava leading both Owens AND Hoffman in a three-way race (30 percent, 20 percent and 19 percent, respectively; of course, that was before “Sarah Barracuda” and The Club for Growth did what they do best, and that is to involve themselves in elections to the ultimate detriment of Republicans).
Back to McCormack…
Second, Doug Hoffman's getting 45 percent of the vote while buried on the conservative party line of the ballot shows that Republicans could have won this race had the county chairs selected anyone--Hoffman included--who's acceptable to the Republican mainstream. Hoffman and the independent conservative groups backing him ran a good campaign to go from nothing to nearly winning. Hoffman still could have won this race on the conservative line had Scozzafava not endorsed Owens.All together now – WAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!
So thank Doug Hoffman for showing the GOP establishment that a conservative can win in upstate New York and for saving us from the disaster of Dede Scozzafava.OK, now I think it’s time for us to all hear from actual grownups, and when it comes to electoral number-crunching, I always turn to Nate Silver at “Five Thirty Eight,” from which we learn the following from the comments here…
Another factor that may come in to play here is resentment from upstate NY Republicans at the national party and at all the right wing pundits inserting themselves into (and apparently taking control of) local party matters. I suspect this is reflected in Hoffman's high unfavorable numbers among Scozzafava supporters.Just keep pushing the “pedal to the metal,” Repugs. When it comes to achieving national party prominence again, the only direction that will lead for you is straight off the electoral cliff (and isn’t this precious).
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I live in this district and I think that people are discounting the common view that Hoffman is an outsider. He showed that he really doesn't understand northern New York concerns. Bringing in a rich, outside to represent relatively poor northern New York is fairly offensive to many.
Also, I am a teacher and the very, very liberal teachers' union endorsed Dede, that tells you something of her liberal views. If conservatives have already fled to Hoffman, I think we know who was left supporting Dede, she had a huge amount of union support and those supporters *will not* be voting for Hoffman.
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The angle that is being forgotten is that Hoffman is not local and flubbed questions about local issues.
He is being pushed by outsiders (including Palin) and that can be very offensive to many voters - they know they are being manipulated by people who want this to be a litmus test for national politics but do not actual care about the people in the district and their concerns.
Hoffman's negatives are likely to go up, and that generally more voters who stay home on election day.
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I can't see how it's good for a political party if they're willing to throw their own party members under the bus like this, especially for a carpetbagger who has nothing to offer but ideological purity. If there's too much of it, you end up with a substantial shard of the Republican caucus that is ultimately not going to be accountable to party leadership. If the GOP somehow go the way of the Whigs, I could see it starting out looking like this.
Of course, if Owens wins and the narrative coming out of the race was that the far right overplayed their hand, etc. then that will be less good for the Republicans in the immediate future (as they'll be in a slightly less good position for 2010, as if they have a chance of recapturing the House), but it will be much better for them going forward.
How bizarre that the GOP seems willing to grind up the party itself for immediate petty gain. If the GOP does in fact become obsolete over the next few decades, this race will get its own chapter in the history books.
One of the few people who actually made sense, though, was Dean Baker, who said the following…
The message is that it is still the economy, stupid. People are hurting and they blame the party in power. While this meant the Dems took a hit in New Jersey and Virginia, the New York mayoral race was ridiculously close given Bloomberg's advantage as the incumbent and his enormous lead in campaign spending.And as a follow-up to that, this AP story tells us that “the increase in French jobless lines has been somewhat tempered by short-work arrangements and government incentives such as exempting payroll taxes for some workers,” though unemployment is still expected to hit 10 percent by the end of the year.
If the Democrats don't produce jobs by November 2010, they will pay a price in the off-year elections. No one other than the Washington Post and a few elite pundits give damn about the budget deficit. In fact, almost no one even has a clear as to how large it is. If it doubled or were cut in half almost no one would even notice — it would still be a really large number. If the Democrats want to win they have to ignore the pundits (remember, pundits don't get their jobs by being competent and don't lose them by being incompetent) and figure out a way to generate jobs it's that simple.
Germany has managed to keep its unemployment rate at 7.6 percent. That did it through a policy of work-sharing, the government effectively uses unemployment benefits to keep people employed working short-hours at pretty much the same pay, instead of paying people to be unemployed.
I don't think Germans are that much smarter than we are. We can learn from this policy and get unemployment back to more normal levels quickly. If the Democrats don't move on this quickly, they will suffer next fall.
Continuing...
In Mexico, “the jobless rate among the country’s roughly 45 million workers was up (to 6.28 percent in August ‘09) from 4.2 percent in August 2008. President Felipe Calderon has announced reforms to ease red tape and lower costs for investors in public works projects to foster job growth. The government also started paying one-third of the salaries of automotive workers to curb layoffs at the plants.”And I had to laugh when I read this in particular…
In Japan, “(that country’s) unemployment rate actually dipped to 5.5 percent in August after reaching 5.7 percent in July, the highest level in Japan’s post-World War II era, amid mounting job and wage cuts. Still, the total number of jobless in August rose 32.7 percent from a year earlier to 3.61 million.”
In China, “the official urban unemployment rate was 4.3 percent for the three months ended June 30 but the actual level could be more than double that because the government system ignores millions of migrant workers and employees who are furloughed by state companies but not recorded as laid off.”
“The picture is even less clear in India where the government does an official employment survey only about once every five years. Ninety percent of the work force is in the so-called informal sector.”The country that is turning into the call center for the entire world only tracks employment “about once every five years.” Feel free to draw your own conclusions.
I must admit that I don’t have anything particularly brilliant to add here, but I still thought it was interesting to see what the rest of the world is dealing with concerning the economy and how they’re responding to it (or not responding, in some cases).
Finally, in the course of trying to find information to post about on this subject, I came across the following from here about a certain 39th President of the United States, James Earl Carter by name (in response to this idiocy)…
From January 1977 to July (1980), the civilian labor force grew from 88.7 million to 97 million workers – a gain of 8.3 million jobs, or nearly 10 percent. That’s by far the fastest growth in employment during recent economic recoveries.(And by contrast, Dubya produced about 3 million over eight years, all of which have since disappeared.)
And speaking of unemployment, this tells us that an extension of jobless benefits was finally passed by the Senate after a month’s worth of procedural games by the Repugs after the House passed its own extension (the vote was 97-1; I figured the “1” was Tom Coburn, but I was wrong, though close – it was Jim DeMint).
Update 11/5/09: Uh, CNN? The benefit extension wasn't held up by weeks of "partisan debate." It was held up by Republican obstruction. And as noted above, the vote was 97-1, not 98-0.
We'll have to "leave it there."
Thirty years ago today, November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian “students” shouting “death to America” stormed the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, Iran and took 66 Americans hostage. Though fourteen of the hostages were soon freed, the remaining 52 were held for 444 days. For the American people, it was our introduction to militant Islam. For the Carter administration, intent on “engaging” the regime that replaced Shah Reza Pahlavi, it was a disaster.This Wikipedia article tells us all about the Iran-Contra scandal, in which...
...“Oliver North, a military aide to the United States National Security Council (NSC), proposed a…plan for selling arms to Iran, which included two major adjustments (to a previous plan): instead of selling arms through Israel, the sale was to be direct, and a portion of the proceeds would go to Contras, or Nicaraguan guerilla fighters opposed to communism, at a markup. North proposed a $15 million markup, while contracted arms broker (Manucher) Ghorbanifar added a 41% markup of his own.[30] Other members of the NSC were in favor of North's plan; with large support, (National Security Advisor John) Poindexter authorized it without notifying President Reagan, and it went into effect.[31] At first, the Iranians refused to buy the arms at the inflated price because of the excessive markup imposed by North and Ghorbanifar. They eventually relented, and in February 1986, 1,000 TOW missiles were shipped to the country.[31] From May to November 1986, there were additional shipments of miscellaneous weapons and parts.[31]And all of this violated the Boland Amendment, which made direct funding of the Reagan administration-sponsored Nicaraguan rebels (also known as the “Contras”) illegal.
So North basically knew what Iran was, but that didn’t prevent him from doing business with them anyway, and breaking the law in the process (as noted here, North was convicted of accepting an illegal gratuity, aiding and abetting in the obstruction of a congressional inquiry, and destruction of documents, though the conviction was overturned on a technicality involving immunized testimony).
As Ollie himself might put it, not everyone is as “clueless” about this country’s history as he thinks they are.
