Which Democrat Will Lose to McCain?

The last four weeks have produced a pretty amazing turn of events in Presidential politics. Four weeks ago, the Democrats seemed poise to quickly nominate Barack Obama after his Iowa victory and phantom national momentum while divided Republicans were looking to have a brokered convention, unable to settle upon a gaggle of unacceptable candidates. That was then....now the Democrats are polarized between two artificially strong candidates while Republicans seem all but certain to nominate their strongest potential candidate, a guy would be tough to beat even if the Democrats nominated a challenger with as formidable of persona as John McCain possesses.

It's been a particularly tough week, watching Willard Romney losing the Florida primary on Tuesday and essentially taking himself out of the running as a serious challenge to McCain's inevitability, and then watching two candidates drop out on Wednesday....Rudy Giuliani, the candidate whose base was closest to McCain and whose absence stands to benefit McCain almost exclusively, and John Edwards, arguably the most electable of three electability-challenged Democratic frontrunners. And Edwards' departure really leaves his vote up-for-grabs, but polls suggest his supporters are now leaning to Hillary, inexiplicably, by a 40-27 margin.

I have had long-standing doubts about the prospect of America electing a black President, and those doubts have been deepened seeing how his candidacy is proving so racially polarizing even among the Democratic base. If Obama can't convince white and Latino Democrats to vote for him over the noxious Hillary Clinton, how on Earth will he convince independents to vote for him over their golden child John McCain?

Don't get me wrong. I'm an Obama supporter as of yesterday, but out of default. Much as I like the guy, it's just hard to imagine that the canyon's gap of experience between him and McCain won't prove devastating in a war time election should he get the nomination. Nonetheless, the "ceiling" of support for Obama is substantial, especially in a year where voters seem to be in a Democratic mood. But the odds of Obama being able to navigate his way through the dual minefields of experience and race and sustain it for a nine-month general election campaign against the most popular national Republican strike me as microscopic.

As for Hillary, even most partisan Democrats I know here in the Midwest either mildly dislike her or outright detest her....and her negatives have gone up even more now that she and "America's first black President" have slimed Obama so gratuitously. I often tell people that it'll take every wisp of energy in my soul to drag myself to the polls on November 4 if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee (but I will nonetheless do it since it would put people who I agree with on most issues in positions of power as opposed to Grover Norquist and Karl Rove). I'm thinking there are a whole lot of Democrats who feel the same way I do.

I'd give McCain 5-1 odds against Hillary in a national election.....and I'd give McCain 2-1 odds against Obama. I'm reasonably convinced the Republicans are gonna hold the White House next November. The only difference is that an Obama nomination would most likely not cost us the House. A Hillary Clinton nomination just might.

We Had to Hire 100,000 New Police For This?

It's January in America. You know what that means. The busybodies are back!!!! State legislatures across America are reconvening and dreaming up amazing new ways to hijack the personal freedoms of those whose freedoms they swore to uphold. One can almost imagine lawmakers breathlessly scurrying around the floors of their respective state Capitols to the sounds of Eduard Strauss' "Bahn Frei Polka" doing everything they can to regulate more people's lives as quickly as possible. And lest anyone think there is a line of invasiveness that our elected officials dare not cross at the risk of triggering a backlash, new legislation emerges that lays waste to that premise. Several states are currently debating expanding smoking bans to the automobile in 2008, but the otherwise pro-tobacco state of South Carolina appears to be among the closest to creating a whole new reason for law enforcement officers to be too distracted to go after actual criminals....http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080116/sc_xgr_assailing_cigarettes.html?.v=1

Working in state government, I'm getting a first-hand vantage point of the mountains of legislation proposed to keep the peasantry in its place in the name of the "common good", or even more frequently and disingenuously, "for the children" as is the prevailing talking point for this specific legislation. California has already led the way, as it usually does, in sacrificing liberty for security, with enforcement for the automobile smoking ban set to take effect on July 1 I believe. Some counties in West Virginia are already enforcing a localized ban.

As always, there will be energetic defenders of this latest self-righteous assault on the rights on smokers, a favorite target of the very people who most depend on tobacco revenues to finance the growth of government. On the surface, it's not easy to defend parents who smoke in front of their kids, but at least for me, it's much harder justifying public dollars and the resources of law enforcement to advance the deeply troubling trend of criminalizing bad habits. Most sadly, Democrats are the overwhelming supporters of turning their own working class base (those disproportionately most likely to smoke and partake in other "bad habits") into criminals.

First of all, I don't accept the magnitude of the threat level regarding "secondhand smoke", just as I don't accept it when it comes the forced prohibition of smoking in privately owned restaurants and bars. While one is certainly better off not being in such an atmosphere, most of us here are old enough to be of the generation where we wallowed in the stench of our parents', friends', and relatives' secondhand cigarette smoke with far greater frequency than nearly anyone is today. And the consequence of this exposure is a generation of Americans living longer lives than any previous generation, so long in fact that we're being warned of the pending bankruptcy of retirement entitlements brought on by the rapidly aging population. Is this "epidemic of secondhand smoke" really worthy of perennial revisiting and perpetually creeping invasiveness?

Even for those convinced that secondhand smoke is as deadly as paid antismoking ideologues tell us it is, isn't there a convincing case to be made that law enforcement resources be directed elsewhere? If parents smoking in their car with their own children is going to be within the state's domain to regulate, will we next accept "the smoking patrol" busting down front doors with battering rams and extracting the children of "suspected smokers"? Is no personal liberty sacred in the name of carrying insurance industry water by way of "endorsing healthy lifestyles", literally through the barrel of law enforcement's gun?

As the title of this diary suggested, I couldn't help but remember President Clinton's insistence on the need to hire 100,000 new police officers back in 1993, presumably to control crime. From what I've seen, however, the addition of these new police officers to the government payroll has all too often become an exercise of government existing to finance itself and stealing our freedom and privacy in the process. When we hired 100,000 new police officers (or whatever the total number ended up being), were supposed to foresee that in 15 years, all these police officers would have nothing better to do than pulling over cigarette-smoking soccer moms? If so, we were sold a very costly bill of goods with seemingly endless repercussions.

With all due respect to our blue-uniformed civil servants in South Carolina, California, and all across the country, if all you have to is finance your department with tickets raised by people smoking cigarettes in their car, we need 100,000 FEWER police on America's streets.

Economic Stimulus Package: Good or Bad Idea?

Given that it's an election year and all the warning signs are flashing that an economic recession is on the horizon, there appears to be a bipartisan consensus in Washington for an "economic stimulus package" to pass Congress as quickly as possible. I'm not an economist, but I'm skeptical about the usefulness of injecting $150 billion worth of artificial stimulus into an economy valued at nearly $20 trillion.

We finally have the deficit down to a manageable level, so it's disheartening to see the nation pushing to reverse that trend on a taxpayer giveaway that is uncertain to produce any real dividend. A federal outlay of $150 billion is a serious chunk of change when Congress concedes it does not intend to pay for the expenditure and instead reverting to its default position of tacking on another mortgage. If a serious recession is indeed on the horizon, revenues will flow in with diminishing returns anyway, meaning our road to fiscal purgatory is already being paved.

The idea of "economic stimulus" generated by the federal government is far-fetched on its face. The nature of the economy is to rise and fall during the peaks and valleys of the business cycle. The specific nuances of our economy has been transformed wholesale over the course of generations, but the basic curve of the business cycle does not. The Federal Reserve has been more aggressive with monetary policy in the last quarter century and it has helped iron out the previously jagged rises and falls of the business cycle, but it's not possible to completely do away with it....and $150 billion in "economic stimulus" from Congress certainly isn't enough to render the cycle null and void.

So let's say the $150 billion stimulus comes in the form of $100 rebate checks for every American taxpayer to spend and thus pump into the economy. In an economy as driven by consumerism as ours, is that microscopic increase in per person purchasing power gonna have any measurable effect? I can't say yes or no with certainty, but I'm skeptical, and ask myself why a $150 billion federal investment in, for instance, highway improvements, wouldn't be just as useful in promoting economic stimulus since those improvements would involve the consumption of goods and services that stimulate growth just as much as the new DVD player that Uncle Bob buys with his rebate check.

And of course, the supply-siders are repeating their tedious mantra of economic stimulus through tax cuts for corporations or the wealthy, alleging that the money will be invested in the American economy and produce more long-term dividend that any rebate check ever would. That's a fuzzy thesis even in a closed economy, but in an economy as globalized as ours, it's far more likely the taxpayer-financed "investments" would help finish off construction of the next batch of smokestacks in industrial China than it would be to producing new manufacturing jobs in Detroit. Even with Bush still behind the wheel, I think the populist political climate of today will make it politically difficult for him to shower his corporate benefactors with yet another round of deficit-financed tax cuts in the name of an "economic stimulus package".

I'm leaning towards the idea that we'd be better off to hunker down and save our $150 billion to finance the pending costs of government in the event of a likely recession than attempting to reshuffle the deck chairs on the Titanic with a hurried "economic stimulus package" in the months ahead. I could be proven wrong on this, but it would seem to me the costs outweigh the likely benefits.

Computer Down

My recent extended absence was the result of the hard drive on my computer going awry on New Year's Eve. It's fixed now, but of course now I face an even bigger headache with my car having serious engine problems likely to cost four-figures to fix.

Yeah, 2008 is shaping up to be a REAL good year....

State of the Presidential Race

Who can even guess what's gonna happen next at this point? Last week at this time, the Republican race still looked volatile, but it seemed all but certain that Barack Obama's surge of momentum who help him put away the Democratic nomination in short order. Think again. In a political turn of events that hearkens back thoughts of "Dewey Defeats Truman", Hillary Clinton defied everybody's expectations and won the New Hampshire primary last Tuesday. This changes everything in so many ways. Is Obama's momentum finished? Will black voters in South Carolina (and elsewhere) revert to their original belief that Obama can't be elected by whites and thus go back to the Hillary camp? It's all up in the air and anybody's guess is as good as mine, but it seems far more likely that the race will be a dogfight at this point.

Whichever Democrat wins the nomination, I have a hard time imagining them winning a national election. Whatever buzz the charismatic Obama generates, he can't go eight months running a campaign of mostly feel-good platitudes without being called on it. And he has to deliver with due gravitas when the time comes. Beyond that, the media and many supporters are going to frame every aspect of the campaign, good or bad, within the context of race. It's already happening. When Bill Clinton said Obama's long-standing opposition to the war in Iraq was "the biggest fairy tale he's ever seen", it's absurdly being spun as a slam against the electability of a black man. The surprise poll results in New Hampshire are now being sold as stealth white racism, with New Hampshire Dems being unable to pull the lever for a black man once they get into the voting booth, despite what they may have said to pollsters.

This is exactly the sort of thing I feared regarding Obama. Americans are not gonna be willing to be called racist pigs by the media every day for nine months without generating an anti-Obama backlash. And we all know the huge liabilities Hillary Clinton brings to this race. The Democratic voters who are so "happy with their choices" this year are almost certain to feel an anguished buyer's remorse this summer when they realize that both of these candidates have incredibly long odds to win an election.

The Republican side is more up in the air than the Democrats, but unfortunately it now appears that the two frontrunners are the very Republican candidates I recognized a year ago as the most difficult adversaries to defeat next November, John McCain and Mike Huckabee. If Willard doesn't win Michigan on Tuesday, he's almost certainly finished, and his prospects are dim even if he does win since the map doesn't work in his favor in the weeks ahead. Fred Thompson could conceivably be a player if he wins South Carolina, since so many of the Super Tuesday states the following week are in the South, but his prospects seem very weak now that Huckabee is gonna split the Southern vote with him. Rudy Giuliani needs a big win in Florida to propel him into Super Tuesday, but that doesn't seem likely at this point as his poll numbers even in Florida seem to be downwardly mobile.

Obviously, factions within the Republican will be wringing their hands if either of the heretic candidates, McCain or Huckabee, get the nomination, but it's highly unlikely that that will matter come November as the vast majority of Republicans will stand by their candidate once there's an actual Democratic bogeyman on the ballot that "could win". As much as the hard-right purists used to getting their way on everything may detest the Republican candidates who occasionally deviate from the party platform, the opposition will assuredly scare them into supporting the Republican. And the independent appeal of John McCain or the everyman appeal of the folksy Huckabee will steal would-be votes from Democrats in a way that the less likable and hard-right Giuliani, Thompson, and Willard would not be able to.

As much as I enjoy the uncanny competitiveness of both parties' primaries, it's hard to get excited about the Democrats' prospects for the fall as they stand poised to nominate longshot candidates against personable and well-spoken Republicans with independent appeal, most likely with blistering downballot consequences.