[Posted by Karl]

The latest WaPo/ABC News poll showing Rick Perry slumping and Herman Cain booming while Mitt Romney’s standing does not move tells the overall story.  But the internals of that polling and statewide polls from PPP showing a Cain lead highlight how the Romney vs Not Romney dynamic plays out in the historical context of GOP politics.

On paper, Rick Perry would be the likely GOP nominee, by the combination of resume, regionalism and ideology.  However, the WaPo poll reveals that Cain’s gain comes at Perry’s expense in the South, while Romney dominates outside the South.  Perry’s slump is also steep among those aligned with the tea party movement.  Finding Cain leading in North Carolina, Nebraska, and West Virginia, PPP’s Tom Jensen observes:

The thing fueling Cain’s lead in all of these states is strong support from the furthest right segment of the Republican electorate.  Cain is at 35% with ‘very conservative’ voters and has a 14 point lead over Perry with them in North Carolina. In Nebraska he’s at 36% with them, putting him up 22 points over Gingrich and Perry.  And in West Virginia he gets 25% with them, giving him a 9 point edge on Gingrich and Perry.

Although the conventional wisdom is to attribute Perry’s slide to his debate performances, these polls should suggest his problem runs deeper than that.  I would suggest it is not performance, but content that is driving Southerners and conservatives away from Perry.  The debates are just one avenue through which these groups are learning that Perry is perhaps not as conservative as they thought on some issues, and has defended his position on those issues in ways that insult conservatives.  Thus, the base of the base is now gravitating toward Cain.

However, Jensen also has the broader context:

This most conservative group of Republican voters has been shopping for a candidate all year.  They’ve gone from Huckabee to Trump back to Huckabee to Bachmann to Perry and now to Cain. I would expect their support for Cain to be pretty temporary. One thing that’s been very clear through all these twists and turns though- they’re not going to support Romney.

How well Cain holds up to the level of scrutiny given to a top-tier candidate remains to be seen.  I would still say the same about Perry, who has been getting that scrutiny with much less time in the race than Cain.  Unsurprisingly, Allahpundit is pessimistic about both leading flavors of Not Romney:

Cain doesn’t have the cash or the name recognition to go the distance with Romney. All the good news for him lately will help solve the latter problem, but probably not the former. Perry has the money and the high profile needed, but I can’t tell right now if voters who have soured on him will give him a second chance.

You know who doesn’t have to worry about money? Mitt Romney, who will be picking up a bunch of Gov. Chris Christie’s rejected suitors, including Republican uber-fund-raiser (not to mention part-time Joan Rivers impersonator) Georgette Mosbacher and billionaire John Catsimatidis.  Not Romney will need a big wallet.

As for whether voters will give Perry a second look, no one can say for sure.  If Cain holds up under the usual vetting, Perry may not get the opportunity.  But the WaPo poll notes that 37% definitely would not vote for Romney now, down from 57% four years ago — which suggests many voters do not write candidates off entirely.  Moreover, Romney is still attacking Perry, which may tell you he thinks Perry remains a viable Not Romney threat.  Mitt watched John McCain go from next-in-line to dragging his own luggage through the airport to beating Romney in 2008, so who can blame him for being thorough?

Instant update: I think Allahpundit, writing about the new CBS poll, has a sharp take on Perry’s position. Also, pollster Mark Blumenthal notes that in the CBS poll, only 19% have made up their mind on which candidate to support.

–Karl

[Posted by Karl]

Shocka:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will announce on Tuesday afternoon that he will not run for president, ending weeks of intense speculation about his future, a Republican source confirmed to National Journal. His decision means that the Republican presidential field is now all but set.

***

A source close to Christie said that the governor will cite the limited time frame he would have to mount a presidential campaign and say his focus has always been on governing his state. He will also offer some criticism of President Obama’s leadership, according to the source.

It’s not just National Journal reporting it, it’s MSNBC, NRO’s Robert Costa, Politico’s Ben Smith, ABC News, the WaPo, and so on.

A fair number of people kept comparing Christie to the college football coach who denies he’s leaving for a new school until he scuttles out the back door.  Running for President of the United States is a bit more complicated and involves a lot more in the way of staff and logistics.  Plus, as Ed Morrissey notes, the latest poll shows “only moderate enthusiasm (pun intended) for a Christie candidacy at 42/34.”

I wish Gov. Christie well in his efforts in the Garden State and presume his efforts will be an asset to the GOP in the general election.  I also hope he has additional security assigned to him, given that establishment media’s Cult of Christie is likely unhinged this morning.  Jennifer Rubin could be on him like Princess Leia on Jabba the Hutt in mere seconds.  Stay safe, guv.

–Karl

[Posted by Karl]

A slice of the establishment media is increasingly taken with comparing Occupy Wall Street — the two-week old protest against “banksters” and corporate tycoons — with the revolutionary protests of the “Arab Spring.”  James Joyner correctly observes what an insult that is to the protesters who (however problematic some of them may be) risked death to overturn repressive dictatorships.  Indeed, the comparison is doubly insulting to the intelligence of the reader, given that those making it generally support Team Obama, which is run and funded by said banksters and would be the dictatorship in this scenario.  The people floating the metaphor do not expect or hope for a revolution.  And the metaphor crumbles even further on close examination.

Nicholas Kristof explains the metaphor:

I tweeted that the protest reminded me a bit of Tahrir Square in Cairo, and that raised eyebrows. True, no bullets are whizzing around, and the movement won’t unseat any dictators. But there is the same cohort of alienated young people, and the same savvy use of Twitter and other social media to recruit more participants. Most of all, there’s a similar tide of youthful frustration with a political and economic system that protesters regard as broken, corrupt, unresponsive and unaccountable.

However, there is no tide — at least not one unique to American youths.  To be sure, the youth vote continues to lean left in general, but Democrats have lost about half their edge with young voters to the GOP since 2008.  Indeed, the GOP now has an advantage with white youths, suggesting that the youth vote is following the same trends we see in the electorate as a whole.  Moreover, the most recent dKos/SEIU poll — which ought to harbor no bias against the left — asked, “Which of the following statements best describes your opinion on the United States’ current economic situation: corporate greed helped lead to the current crisis and these practices need to be reined in to fix our economy, OR now is not the time to constrict corporations while we are trying to get our economy back on track?”  The overall split was 57/37; the split for 18-29 year olds was 52/42.

In short, Occupy Wall Street does not appear to reflect any particular revolutionary sentiment among the American youth vote.  As for the segment of the youth vote attracted to the protests, what are they going to do?  Vote for Obama, as Kristof and his fellow travelers in the media almost certainly will?  The hipster demographic is already disillusioned with The One.  Write in someone like Ralph Nader or Bernie Sanders?  Stay home with their bongs?  The left-leaning media is having its fantasy moment here, but the primary beneficiary of Occupy Wall Street is probably the GOP.

–Karl

[Posted by Karl]

Over the weekend Rep. Paul Ryan reviewed The Price of Civilization, the new book from Jeffrey Sachs, which apparently argues that America needs to adopt Euro-socialist policies, rather than learn from the misery inflicted by the worst of democratic socialism there.  Rather than rehash that debate, I want to focus on the totalitarian and liberal fascist aspects of the book Ryan mentions. 

According to Ryan: “The Constitution imposes too many restrictions on government interference for Mr. Sachs, and we’d be better served if we moved toward a ‘French-style’ constitution that consolidated the executive and legislative branches and empowered experts to help us manage the ‘complexity of our economy.’ “  Ryan also notes that Sachs echoes the arguments of French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham.  Ryan does not mention that Rousseau’s theory of the general will is the forerunner of modern totalitarianism and Bentham’s idea of Utopia was a prison under his total control.

It is worth noting that Sachs is not considered a fringe character.  He has been named one of TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” twice and Vanity Fair magazine put him on its list of 100 members of the New Establishment.  Moreover, Sachs is hardly alone in indulging these sorts of thoughts on the left. 

Ed Driscoll collects a few examples.  Gov. Bev Purdue (D-NC) recently suggested “we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won’t hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover.”  Former Obama budget director Peter Orszag wrote a piece for TNR arguing “we need to jettison the Civics 101 fairy tale about pure representative democracy and instead begin to build a new set of rules and institutions that would make legislative inertia less detrimental to our nation’s long-term health.”  (Ezra Klein’s defense of Orszag shows the disdain for bicameralism or checks and balances you would expect from someone who finds the Constitution too old and confusing to be anything more than a political football.)  Lastly, Driscoll recalls NYT columnist Thomas Friedman’s desire that we be China for a day (a proposal that would likely ensure that we were China for a very long time).  Although Driscoll also found a tantalizing video of Pres. Obama finding tempting the idea of acting on his own, you have to read the NYT to find Obama complaining that it would be so much easier to be the president of China.

But wait… there’s more.  US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) delivers a harangue that could have been titled, “All Your Wealth Are Belong To Us,” and the video goes viral.  The left lapped up a relatively unvarnished argument that the people are slaves to the state.  When Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) was asked “Of every dollar that I earn, how much do you think I deserve to keep?”, there is a reason she did not have an answer.  When Fareed Zakaria pines for the US to adopt a parliamentary system, he is in tune not only with Sachs, but also Woodrow Wilson, who was not a big fan of separated powers or checks and balances.  When a legion of lefty pundits argue that Republican “obstruction” of Obama’s agenda shows that “the system is broken,” they reveal an Orwellian contempt for the system of separated powers our Founders envisioned (and argued for in no less than five of the Federalist Papers) for the protection of our liberties.

This Fall, it seems that liberal fascism is the new black — and it likely will remain in style for the foreseeable future.  After all, progressives think they are losing and black is the color for mourning clothes.

–Karl

[Posted by Karl]

Megan McArdle, explaining why the federal loan guarantee to the now-bankrupt solar company Solyndra is more venture socialism than venture capitalism, concluded:

[T]his isn’t much like a VC. Or anything else that makes financial sense in the private sector. It’s like… the government giving money to companies that sound whizzy.

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds added: “A more cynical explanation is that the ‘sound whizzy’ is just meant to be a distraction from what’s really no more than a payoff to political supporters.”  When the history of the Solydra debacle is fully written, Prof. Reynolds may well be correct about the political payoff angle.  However, our sprawling federal government offer myriad opportunities for political payoffs, so it’s worth examining why the Obama administration would throw hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars at things that “sound whizzy.”  To invoke a Beltway cliche, a scandal may be what is legal more than what is illegal.  The Solyndra case sheds light on the larger Scandal of Tomorrowland.

Before Solyndra went bust, solar industry leaders would frankly admit to friendly media that “the growth of their US operations is vitally dependent upon a fragile matrix of government support — state renewable portfolio standards and federal tax credits, grants and construction loan guarantees.” (There are echoes of Obamacare here, with government mandates and government subsidies propping up a Potemkin marketplace.)  There are at least three major reasons solar fails as a feasible alternate energy source – diffuseness, cost and unreliability – and little progress has been made in addressing them.  For example, regarding diffuseness, environmentalists have already opposed efforts to build large solar plants in the Mojave desert.  On the issue of cost:

Energy Secretary Steven Chu says that the billions of dollars in federal stimulus money directed toward solar-power will cut solar power costs in half by 2015. It’s a grand sounding prediction, but his own Energy Information Agency projects that electricity from solar cells will cost nearly five times as much as electricity from natural-gas-fired power plants. And that’s without any adjustment for the unreliable nature of solar power or for the additional transmission costs.

On the issue of reliability, if you pore over the International Energy Agency’s “roadmap” for photovoltaic solar energy (.pdf), looking behind the grandiose predictions, you will find much more diktat than detail, with storage and transmission issues punted to “emerging” technologies.  People used to the lights going on when they flip the switch and not freezing to death during long winter nights will come away unimpressed.

In short, the solar outlook is not sunny, which is why lefties like Ezra Klein and Dave Johnsen are reduced to defending the energy welfare state with assertions like: “If our success rate is too high, it means government is making bad investments,” and “the purpose of our government’s involvement in this is to help trigger an ecosystem around which a green-energy industry can grow.”  Pouring money we don’t have down a rat hole only triggers an ecosystem for rats, which would tend to bolster the Instapundit’s point.  And yet, I still think there is more to it than that.

Part of it is the left’s belief in the coming global warming apocalypse.  It is a crisis the left does not want to go to waste, given the massive statism that would be involved in forcing the world off fossil fuels by federal fiat.  The most feasible alt-energy remains nuclear, but American greens are bitterly divided on nuclear power, leaving them with solar and wind (which should embarrass on both counts those claiming to be the Party of Science).  The hardest of hardcore greens will admit they want humanity to make do with less; the rest dress up this political poison in fuzzy notions of “sustainability.”  Pretending that solar and wind are the near-future allows progressives to avoid the appearance of luddism and pose as leaning forward, rather than the movement of 20th century nostalgia they really are.  It is not unlike the way Walt Disney’s original vision of Tomorrowland in his theme parks has morphed into a quaint retro-futurism that never was and never will be.  That is the larger scandal behind giving money to companies that sound whizzy.

–Karl

You know it worries them because of the timing:

Late Friday, the White House turned over new documents in the Congressional investigation into the ATF “Fast and Furious” gunwalking scandal.

The documents show extensive communications between then-ATF Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix office Bill Newell – who led Fast and Furious – and then-White House National Security Staffer Kevin O’Reilly. Emails indicate the two also spoke on the phone. Such detailed, direct communications between a local ATF manager in Phoenix and a White House national security staffer has raised interest among Congressional investigators looking into Fast and Furious. Newell has said he and O’Reilly are long time friends.

Keep up the pressure.

[Posted by Karl]

Michael Kazin is both a professor of history at Georgetown and a co-editor of Dissent; in asking “Whatever Happened to the American Left?”, he lets the second get in the way of the first:

After years of preparation, welfare-state liberalism had finally become a mainstream faith. In 1939, John L. Lewis, the pugnacious labor leader, declared, “The millions of organized workers banded together in the C.I.O. are the main driving force of the progressive movement of workers, farmers, professional and small business people and of all other liberal elements in the community.” With such forces on his side, the politically adept F.D.R. became a great president.

But the meaning of liberalism gradually changed. The quarter century of growth and low unemployment that followed World War II understandably muted appeals for class justice on the left. Liberals focused on rights for minority groups and women more than addressing continuing inequalities of wealth. Meanwhile, conservatives began to build their own movement based on a loathing of “creeping socialism” and a growing perception that the federal government was oblivious or hostile to the interests and values of middle-class whites.

Kazin’s argument has at least two major flaws.  First, being a committed leftist, Kazin mentions that these movements were “backed up by powerful social forces” only in passing, although those forces are as important, if not moreso, than the activists on each side.  Second, while writing “the left should stop mourning its recent past,” being a committed leftist himself, Kazin could not bring himself to look too closely at the era he thinks should inspire today’s left. (more…)

[Posted by Karl]

That’s an inaccurate headline at today’s New York Times:

With his support among blue-collar white voters far weaker than among white-collar independents, President Obama is charting an alternative course to re-election should he be unable to win Ohio and other industrial states traditionally essential to Democratic presidential victories.

Without conceding ground anywhere, Mr. Obama is fighting hard for Southern and Rocky Mountain states he won in 2008, and some he did not, in calculating how to assemble the necessary 270 electoral votes. He is seeking to prove that those victories on formerly Republican turf were not flukes but the start of a trend that will make Democrats competitive there for years.

***

While Mr. Obama’s approval ratings have slid across the board as unemployment remains high, what buoys Democrats are the changing demographics of formerly Republican states like Colorado, where Democrats won a close Senate race in 2010, as well as Virginia and North Carolina.

There’s nothing new about this. The left eyed the Mountain West and Southwest as fertile ground for its Emerging Democratic Majority in 2008 (and well before that, really).

However, if you look at the latest Purple Poll (or .pdf) from the new, bi-partisan Purple Strategies, the head-to-head numbers for Obama against Romney or Perry in the “Wild West” (Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada) and “Southern Swing” states (Virginia, North Carolina and Florida) are both within the margin of error of the numbers in the “Rust Belt” of Ohio and Pennsylvania.  That’s why TNR’s William Galston does not think Obama should be focusing on the electoral map:

The last Democrat to win the White House without carrying Ohio was John F. Kennedy, who pulled off the feat with 73 electoral votes from south of the Mason-Dixon line and another 26 from the border states of West Virginia, Missouri, and Arkansas. Obama’s likely haul from that territory: zero. And as Seib points out, the president is facing an uphill climb in much of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic region—including Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, all of which went his way by larger margins than did Ohio. (For more evidence, see the latest Pennsylvania survey, which finds that 54 percent of registered voters disapprove of Obama’s performance and 51 percent don’t think he deserves reelection, while it has him running even with Romney in a state he carried by 10.3 points in 2008.) In short, the president won’t have the luxury of building his campaign on a solid-blue foundation of 242 electoral votes in 2012.

So what does this all mean? Barring unlikely circumstances, the core challenge facing the Obama campaign is not to execute a thread-the-needle Electoral College strategy. It is rather to spend the next thirteen and a half months giving the people credible reasons to believe that the economy will fare better in a second Obama term than it did in the first. (Emphasis added.)

Of course, that is why Camp Obama is spending time with the maps.

–Karl

We need a hard-bitten tough guy like Barack to pull us through, is what we need:

Granted, we don’t have the full context here, so I don’t know quite what to make of it. But it’s just so funny!

Thanks to AZBob.

That appears to be the latest Fast and Furious revelation: rather than simply having gun owners sell guns to straw buyers for the cartels, the feds were actually selling guns to them, and then losing track of the guns.

Has anyone fully looked into the Laredo office? Just curious . . .