Erick Erickson and “The Power of Plain Speaking”…
I’ve been hammering Erick (and some of his fellow bloggers on the right) lately for what I think are over-generalized, over-heated, over-the-top criticisms of various Republican Senate leaders. I’ve gotten a lot out of the resulting back-and-forth. Not sure any minds have been changed, but it’s good to hash out the logic and be challenged on our rhetoric.
Yesterday, on his RedState blog, Erick posted The Power of Plain Speaking. which was very specific, very measured, and very not over-the-top.
Politicians of all stripes go to Washington and lose the ability to relate to people. Part of that is an inability for politicians to speak plainly, even when talking to the base.
This is one of the many aspects of citizens getting elected, going to Washington, and going native. Same thing happens to diplomats. They simply lose their ability to talk like normal Americans, which I often suspect is less a problem of speaking clearly than of thinking clearly to begin with.
I have criticized Mitch McConnell repeated[ly] for wanting to beat the spread instead of actually beating health care. Being in the good old boys club that is the United States Senate means Senators often put collegiality before the fight.
Some of you have said I have been too hard on Mitch McConnell [don't know if Erick was thinking of me, but I plead guilty...], but I stand by the comments.
Erick then describes (in good Sunday School teacher fashion) the teaching of Jesus to let our “Yes” be “Yes” and our “No” be “No.”
This is a complaint I share. Here’s what Erick quotes McConnell saying:
Well, certainly, politically, it’s a big problem for them. They all kind of joined hands and went off the cliff together. Every single Democrat provided the vote that passed it in the Senate. You have seen what’s happened already with Congressman Parker Griffith in Alabama switching parties. There are rumors there may be others. There is great unrest in the Democratic Party. And the reason for that is, the surveys indicate the American people are overwhelmingly opposed to this effort to have the government take over all of their health care. It will be a huge political issue next year, and that’s why you hear the Democrats saying, let’s don’t tackle any more big issues. I mean, I was reading an article this morning indicating they don’t want to do cap-and-trade anymore, they’re nervous about financial reregulation. What they understand is the new administration and the new Congress has squandered its goodwill with the American people, leading to what could be a big setback for them a year from now.
Truthfully, I don’t think there’s anything I necessarily disagree with in that answer.
The problem, though, is two-fold:
- His answer isn’t clear. In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s a kind of thinking out loud thought stream. Like this is the first chance he’s had to vent about this.
- Even worse, it didn’t answer the question.
It was a yes or no question.
Of course, the correct answer is “Yes.” Followed by “Of course we are.” Followed by “For these reasons: Blam! Blam! Blam!” Followed by “We’re gonna do it this way: Blam! Blam! Blam!”
McConnell looks to me like he’s not thinking ahead. The Democrats know they’re going to lose a lot of seats. But they think it will be too late. McConnell isn’t leveraging the probabilities. He isn’t going to the Blanche Lincolns in his world and showing them the polls demonstrating they’re about to have their brains knocked out in the coming elections. He needs to be standing at the highest pulpit saying, “We’re going to beat the stuffing out of you guys in the next election and we’re going to repeal. And if President Obama vetoes the repeal, we’re going tie that veto around his neck and beat him next time. And then we’ll repeal again.”
Truth is, they should’ve been talking like this from the beginning. Then it might not have gotten this far.
Cross-posted to RedState.
adding by selling…
This morning I was reading an excellent post by Jennifer Rubin on Contentions, The Politics of Addition. In it she talks about the McDonnell win in Virginia, purity tests, reaching out to moderates, and so forth. While I agree with most of what she said, I think there’s something missing, a dynamic at work that is making everyone basically talk past one another.
I think there’s a very powerful “one size fits all” misconception that is apparently hardwired into human nature somehow. Because it pops up everywhere in multiple guises.
Take Sarah Palin, for instance (of course, you might not want to take her). But I like her. Especially now when she’s not running for anything but is, instead, serving the extremely useful function of Great Scourge Against Self-Appointed Guardians of What is Elite and Good. In other, words, the condescending, non-comprehending, thickheaded establishment.
In that role, her disparaging of the media is very effective. For one, because it’s demonstrably true and they need to be called to account. For another, it rallies the troops. Plus, it makes her the lightning rod that allows the Bob McDonnells of this world to stay focused on the issues that resonate with their voters. (Conservative pundits like Jennifer Rubin can also fulfill this role, though with a more focused audience.)
As a candidate, though, especially a national candidate—not so much.
So the role makes a difference in the choice of approaches.
Should we avoid having doctrinal purity tests? Of course not. All of us have them. They just differ from each other. And we differ on whether and how we talk about them. I am against throwing all standards and principles out in service to party dominance. Sorry. Don’t buy into it. There’s no excuse here in Texas, for instance, for electing moderate Republicans to statewide office. Run the best conservatives and tell the moderates “no thank you.” Will that work in Connecticut or New Hampshire? Probably not. But nominate the most conservative electable candidate you can and convince the voters that the conservative solutions will work for them. Even if you don’t win, you’re educating the voter. Lose in a winning way. But pouring resources into the re-election campaigns of a Jim Jeffords or Lincoln Chafee or Arlen Specter isn’t a winning proposition—either for the Party or for the conservative cause. It isn’t the Republican Party—because it’s the Republican Party—that’s going to turn America around. It’s conservative ideas and values. We don’t need to purge the Party. We do need to win the debates.
The takeaway from the McDonnell campaign isn’t the electoral power of the Big Tent. It’s understanding current problems in light of long-term principles and applying those principles to those problems. The other key lesson is listening to the voters, knowing what they (not you) believe are the most critical issues, and then convincing those voters you have the (conservative) solutions to those problems.
Small application of the above: Yesterday Orrin Hatch was tweeting about how current iterations of healthcare reform and financial regulations were harming small businesses. Which, of course, is true. So I tweeted him, “What you have to help public understand is these policies hurt ALL OF US.” And I pointed out “I’m still underemployed because of them…”
This is what he started tweeting (don’t know if in response to me, or that he’d planned it anyway):
- At the same time the President held a jobs summit, Dems pushing a $2.5 T tax-and-spend health care bill that will be a major job killer.
- This bill is especially harmful to the small-business community which is the job-creating engine of our economy
- Here are the top five reasons why the Senate health care bill is a job killer:
- 1) Disproportionate impact on small businesses – every dollar lost to new taxes will be a dollar taken away from job
- 2) Job-killing employer mandate
And then he tweeted three more good reasons to oppose the bill.
We shouldn’t be throwing anyone under the bus except bad candidates. And what constitutes a bad candidate differs according to the situation.
What we need to be doing is fighting for our ideas, listening to people, hearing them, and responding with solutions they will understand and embrace.
Out in the world where I live, we call that selling. I think it’s the future both of the Republican Party and the conservative movement. And I think it’s the only available hope for America’s future.
questions for Andrew Revkin…
Andrew Revkin has begun blogging about Climategate. After reading his last post (Hacked E-Mail Data Prompts Calls for Changes in Climate Research) I emailed him a couple of questions:
Andrew,
Two questions:
1) Why do you assume the emails (and data, which I don’t think you mentioned) were hacked and not released by a whistle blower?
2) Why don’t you take time off from the he said/she said narrative and analyze the emails and data yourself?
Thanks!
Actually, I have the same questions for all the other “prestige media” who are playing the he said/she said game with these revelations: Why don’t you pretend you’re a reporter and, you know, read and analyze the primary sources instead of relying on different people’s opinions and defenses?
I’ll post his reply if he sends one.
global warming, Eisenhower, and the danger of institutionalized science…
Eisenhower and Washington gave the two most-quoted “Farewell Addresses” by presidents. Most of these quotes, at least in my lifetime, have been offered up by isolationists, pacifists, and the like-minded. Washington’s has been creatively interpreted by subsequent generations who ignore its context and meaning within its time. Eisenhower’s has been cherry-picked to great effect. (Notice how often references to the military industrial complex fail to include the line “We recognize the imperative need for this development.”)
One important section of the Eisenhower address today seems—in light of recent revelations concerning the Great Global Warming Scare—unusually prescient. Here it is (emphasis mine):
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
Does this not seem to be what has occurred? Whatever fascistic dynamic may (or may not) have taken hold of us through the growth of what Eisenhower himself viewed as the necessary evil of the military industrial complex, our core governing institutions—our universities, our think tanks, our regulatory agencies, our journalism, huge swaths of our national legislature, the U.N. (with its hydra head of related and subsidiary agencies)—all of them have coalesced around what increasingly appears to be a hoax. And in exactly the way Eisenhower described both military industry and science. I am as amazed by Eisenhower’s vision as I am appalled by what we have allowed to occur.
How did this breakdown happen and how do we keep it from happening again?
Obamacare and abortion…
John McCormack reports that “Obamacare would make public and private insurance plans cover abortion.”
In July 2007, presidential candidate Barack Obama told a group of Planned Parenthood activists that he would require coverage for abortion in both his public plan and in private insurance plans:
In my mind reproductive care is essential care. It is basic care, and so it is at the center, the heart of the plan that I propose. … we’re going to set up a public plan that all persons and all women can access if they don’t have health insurance. It’ll be a plan that will provide all essential services, including reproductive services… We also will subsidize those who prefer to stay in the private insurance market except the insurers are going to have to abide by the same rules in terms of providing comprehensive care, including reproductive care.
Contacted afterward by the Chicago Tribune, an Obama spokesman said that “reproductive services” included abortions. Now, Obama plans to follow through on this campaign promise without taking the political hit for this deeply unpopular proposal….
But Obama and his administration are trying to do everything they can to obscure this fact. Asked at today’s press briefing if Obama should support an amendment to prohibit abortion funding in order to achieve his oft-stated goal of reducing the number of abortions, Robert Gibbs said that “the President and this administration agree that that’s — a benefit package is better left to experts in the medical field to determine how best and what procedures to cover.”
Why is President Obama no longer willing to say explicitly, as he did in 2007, that his plan should mandate abortion coverage? Does Obama really think it’s possible to simultaneously subsidize abortions and reduce the incidence of abortion?
okay, I’m slow picking up this blog thing…
I admit it.
Came across another great blog this morning. One that has already past the “1-million-visitors Site Meter threshold.” Last February. (For the record, the humble blog you’re reading now is scheduled to reach that threshold about the time they finish building the Starship Enterprise. The third one. Anyway…)
It’s called The Other McCain. I don’t yet know the first name of this McCain person, or whether it’s a man or woman. Or who gave him/her permission to do this blog thing.
I just know it looks like a good blog.
Anyway, this morning’s post ( SIGTARP Strikes: IG Barofsky Report Says Treasury Not Tracking Bailout Cash), reacts to a report from The Hill about a top government watchdog blasting the administration for “rejecting ‘common sense’ by not requiring banks receiving billions of dollars in government money to say how they are using the money.”
Here’s what The Other McCain has to say about it:
This SIGTARP report is a perfect example of why the Obama adminstration hates IGs. The Democrats just want to shovel money out the door and don’t care who gets it, except to be sure their well-connected friends get their share.
According to the liberal neo-Keynesian economic gospel, as long as the federal government does X-billion dollars of deficit spending, that will produce X-plus-Y amount of stimulus value (where Y = Magic Government Spending Multiplier Effect) without regard to whether the money ends up feeding orphans or supplying the mistresses of Goldman Sachs executives with bustiers and garter belts
Unfortunately for liberals, the stupid taxpayers can never seem to comprehend the nuances of neo-Keynesian theory the way Nobel Prize-winning genius Paul Krugman does.
No matter how many times they’re lectured about this “stimulus”/bailout brilliance, the idiots who pay the taxes get a little miffed to discover that their great-grandchildren’s future has been hocked to pay for new wallpaper and wainscoting in the executive lavatory of a giant banking conglomerate which — as every expert in Washington explained last fall — was so frantically in need of cash that the branch managers were sending tellers to sell plasma to the blood bank, merely to prevent a complete catastrophic meltdown in the global finance system.
Those stupid taxpayers are like that. They have a habit of remembering irrelevant minor details like those 90-point headlines on the front pages of all the newspapers:
CRISIS LOOMS: WORLD ECONOMY TEETERS ON BRINK OF FINAL APOCALYPSE; CONGRESS DESPERATELY FIGHTS TO AVERT ECONOMIC DOOMSDAY; PLAGUES OF LOCUSTS, FROGS FEAREDDamned idiot taxpayers. What do they know about economics and budgets and stuff that only people with Ivy League Ph.Ds can ever hope to understand?
Wow. I certainly agree with that…
raw power, huh? let’s try some of that…
Rich Lowry, on The Corner:
Democrats are having a tough time of it on health care and Obama’s numbers are sinking, but they still have one enormous advantage, as E. J. Dionne reminds us today: raw power. No matter how incoherent the Democrats’ health-care program is or how unpersuasive they are in selling it, they still have a lot of votes to play with.
Question:
Isn’t “raw power” an awfully risky tactic? They’d basically be passing very iffy stuff over the dead bodies of the voters.
All I can say on their behalf is that it had better work or they’ll be in the minority for the next 50 years…
found a beautiful blog this morning…
…by John Dickerson.
His topmost post today is his answer to a question about a special room:
What would you put in your room?
My friend’s mother has this wonderful studio on her farm. I’ve always wanted a small collection of rooms like this in which to write and read. If you could design a set of rooms like this what would you put in there? I’ll start: bookshelves, fireplace, record collection, map of the world, standing desk, guitars, bottles of ink, fountain pens, stationery, a gross of pencils, antique typewriters.
There would be a space for reading books that would be separate from the space for reading papers which would be separate from the writing spaces. There would be two writing spaces. One for handwriting letters another for work writing.
Oh and a chess set with weighted pieces, candles, a wall of pictures, huge chalk board….
That’s my incomplete list and there are many more questions to be figured out. For example: would there be a space for company, or would it be a solitary place?
My special room?
A large wooden desk with lots of drawers. A powerful mac w/ TWO large flat panel monitors. A small fridge with lots of Dr Pepper. As many bookcases as would fit. Lots of pictures of Carol and the kids. An autographed picture of John Dickerson (ideally, somehow, standing next to Jake Tapper). A portrait of Lincoln. Lots and lots of books, mostly biographies of great men–Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, both Roosevelts, Truman, Eisenhower, Grant, Churchill, Thatcher, Reagan….
A Bible. A copy of Hinds Feet on High Places.
Lots of CDs. Bach, Beethoven, Barber, Vaughan Williams, Brahms, Schubert, Mendelssohn, John Adams (the composer, and the older one of those two).
A picture window looking into the woods (I know, we’re supposed to be deciding what to put in our room, but a critical part of our room is the view outside, the world outside our paradigm).
A coffee pot. Lots of creamer. Flavored.
A stack of yellow pads and a cup-full of fine-tip ballpoint pens.
A sketchpad and lots of pencils and kneadable erasors.
And a cat…
letter to David Ignatius (on Obama’s foreign policy)…
OK. Confession up front:
I was hoping your bottom line was going to be It Sucks!
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you managed to include every Democratic Party foreign policy, bash-Bush talking point of this decade.
David, just as one example…do I need to point you to the dictionary definition of unilateral? You referred to “the Bush administration’s arrogance and unilateralism.” You know better than that. The accurate (and honest) descriptor would be non-U.N. sanctioned.
Here’s another, contained within the same phrase: arrogance.You are not amazed at the arrogance of a president with no foreign policy experience at all (zero, nada) thrusting himself onto the world stage filled to the brim and overflowing with the (apparently sincere) belief that his words alone could make all America’s enemies turn their swords into plowshares and we could all be friends? And the thought that, by turning his back on Bush administration agreements with Israel—agreements that Israel acted on in good faith—and by adopting the intellectually-bankrupt moral equivalence line of every Israel-basher from the U.N. to Ron Paul in telling Israel to engage in some “serious self-reflection”… This doesn’t look like arrogance to you?
The one redeeming quality I find in your well-crafted, elegantly-worded, and completely misguided column, is the opportunity it provides to write an incisive (and better-informed) retort. I’ll just publish this letter on my blog. Hey, if you’re lucky, I’ll even publish your response!
