Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

A lot of Republican pundits have said they wished he had been re-elected so he could resign and allow Governor Palin to appoint a Republican successor, but unlike most states Alaska law calls for a special election within 90 days; a legacy of Alaskans being pissed off at then-Governor Murkowski appointing his daughter Lisa to his vacated Senate seat on his election to the governorship.

Full disclosure: Senator-elect Mark Begich was a friend of several friends of mine back in high school, although we only met once or twice at most. Also, Ted Stevens was my dad’s attorney back the the ’60s before Stevens entered politics. (Thus I am two degrees of separation from pretty much everybody elected to national office since 1972, which degree of separation will continue.)

But that still doesn’t absolve Fox from giving credence to what is clearly intra-Republican backstabbing and vicious rumor-mongering. If Palin was really that stupid, you’d think that “anonymous McCain aides” would come forward and testify openly so as to prevent her from ever running for anything again. The fact that they haven’t done so, and that plenty of other people — friends and enemies — who know her from more than a couple of bad interviews (namely, the voters and politicians of Alaska) say that she’s plenty smart*, suggests to me that this is, as I said, merely a vicious rumor.

Anonymous sourcing is a first-class ticket to the sort of weasel politics we all should righteously despise, but nevertheless supposedly reputable institutions like the NYT or the Washington Post use it all too frequently against their political enemies. Shame on Fox for succumbing to the same racket.

Since I’ve made an issue of this story, I’m going to keep following it in case the identity of the anonymous source turns up.

* Blogger Beldar reports here:

In the many hours I spent online doing background research on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin before I wrote my first post about her on June 8, 2008, I read many dozens of newspaper stories about her, dating back to her time as mayor of Wasilla in the late 1990s, in the state’s largest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, as well as in some of the smaller Alaska newspapers. I was specifically looking for negatives: I knew that the Democrats would be too, in the (then unlikely) event that Gov. Palin became a serious possibility as the GOP Veep nominee.

The single most frequently recurring theme was that Sarah Palin’s political opponents underestimated her. In every campaign, her opponent attacked her as inexperienced. None of them argued, however, that she was stupid. The closest any opponent ever came to that was one of her two opponents in the 2006 gubernatorial race, Andrew Halcro, who claimed that she didn’t immerse herself in the minutia of policy detail in which he himself reveled. Halcro is a wonk, and an annoying, patronizing twerp, and a sore loser, and the people of Alaska recognized that by leaving him an embarrassing distant third in that race, with less than 10% of their votes. But even Halcro didn’t claim that Sarah Palin was stupid.

Nor did anyone else of consequence make that claim during Gov. Palin’s first year-and-a-half as governor. She was criticized for having “sharp elbows,” for holding political grudges, and for disfavoring those who’d crossed her — complaints leveled by losers left behind in the wake of every successful politician, because that’s the loser-side view of being held accountable for ones actions and positions. But dim? Provincial? Uneducated? Nobody in Alaska had ever seriously charged Sarah Palin with being an airhead — not even the political enemies she’d left bleeding in the dust.

[Emphasis in original]

Turns out it’s not even from a real McCain staffer, or actually even a real person at all.

The NYT:

Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.

Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.

And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by an Eisenstadt hoax, including The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.

Now a pair of obscure filmmakers say they created Martin Eisenstadt to help them pitch a TV show based on the character. But under the circumstances, why should anyone believe a word they say?

“That’s a really good question,” one of the two, Eitan Gorlin, said with a laugh.

Indeed. Read the whole thing and all that.

What this tells us is that political campaigns in the future need to be much more cognizant of what’s going on in the extended blogosphere. In a properly-run campaign, this story would have been spotted by a real staffer who could have had the campaign manager say “we’ve never heard of this guy — whoever he is, he doesn’t work for us.”

It also tells us that when a story looks too good to be true — when it perfectly confirms our pre-existing bias notions — that maybe we should treat it skeptically until we can verify it independently. Remember, “unnamed sources say” is exactly equivalent to “I heard this juicy rumor.”

The first was a conversation my wife and I had about someone we know, who is a recovering alcoholic. She said, “whatever is most advantageous to him at any particular moment, that’s what he thinks is true.” And I looked over at her and said, “well, substance abuser…”

The second was that I read Three Predictions for Obama’s America at ReasonOnline. This section struck me:

1. America’s political and pundit class will go through a clinical bout of ideological amnesia that will be dizzying and appalling for those of us with memories of life before January 2009.

This happens virtually every time a new president, and certainly a new party, takes unified control of the government. On a host of issues—including government spending, regulation, and especially foreign policy—you can expect to see Republican officeholders and their champions in the press rediscover their inner-small-government souls and rail about how Obama and the Democrats are budget-busting socialists desperate to start what vice-presidential candidate Bob Dole once declaimed as “Democrat wars.”

On the flip side, expect Democrats to start rattling sabers like the did under the Mad-Bomber-in-Chief Bill Clinton, who was quite happy to dispatch planes and bombs wherever and whenever he felt necessary or threatened by a domestic situation. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is the template here of what reason‘s Matt Welch identified as “temporary doves,” that is, folks whose taste for war is highly dependent on party affiliation.

Obama, who is certainly something of a “stealth candidate” (to use an election-night phrase from Fox News’ and NPR’s Juan Williams), has never been shy about asserting his bellicosity. He’s against “stupid” wars, don’t you know, which gives him plenty of latitude to prosecute what he considers smart ones (and conflicts necessary to prove that he’s no George McGovern). And here’s a Canadian dollar that says that Obama’s withdrawal plan from Iraq is precisely the one recommended by Gen. Petraeus.

Similarly, he will almost certainly follow the domestic policy trajectory of one George W. Bush by increasing spending (he’s already promised that today we spend, tomorrow we scrimp), increasing regulation, and increasing interventions large and small into the economy. The main difference will be that all this new stuff comes at the end of the Bush bender. And that Obama and his defenders will swear that they are radically changing course from the past eight years when in fact they will continue in the same grim direction, full speed ahead, Mr. Emanuel.

Obama’s conservative and Republican Party detractors will animate the corpse of Ronald Reagan and weep many crocodile tears about the end of the free enterprise system that they somehow missed out on during the GOP turn at the helm. Bailouts that were “reluctantly and sadly” necessary under Bush, to use Newt Gingrich’s phrase (hilariously uttered mere hours before the House GOP scuttled the plan), will be unendurable socialist slights under Obama. At least the second half of that statement will be true.

Oh, and all that liberal fretting over the singular abuse of executive power, domestic surveillance, and the like, under Bush-Cheney? That’s going to disappear faster than the Lackawanna Six, regardless of what Obama does (and don’t expect him to renounce any of Bush’s power grabs once he’s sworn into office). If the topic resurfaces (and it will), look for conservatives to have their knickers in a twist this time around.

[Emphasis added]

Whatever is most advantageous to them at any particular moment, is true.

Think about that for a second.

Lets look at some classic substance abuse symptoms, shall we?

1. If the drug is expensive, the addict will spend all their free time getting money to pay for it. Campaign fund raising. Check.
2. The addict will use and abuse all their relationships, telling anyone whatever they want to hear, to maintain their access to the drug. Pandering to special interests. Check.
3. If they cannot get their drug of choice, they will switch to a similar drug, like heroin addicts guzzling cough syrup. Congressmen turning into lobbyists. Check.
4. A self-pitying “look what you made me do mentality,” also called an “external locus of control.” Mistakes were made. The pressures of office drove me to pay for that hooker. Everything is the fault of Democrats/Republicans/special interests/commie infiltrators. Check.

Lord Acton’s saying is obviously a truism: Power tends to corrupt. And absolute power corrupts absolutely. And a cursory look at our political class — elected and bureaucratic — shows us that a very large percentage is corrupted. We have a government mostly made up of power-addicts.

We’ve had a lot of non-addicts in high office in this country, who could step into power and then walk away from it when they were done — mostly Presidents, limited in office by tradition and then by Constitutional Amendment to only a few years. But throughout our history, especially in Congress, the addicts have increasingly been the majority.

To fix this, we should look for ways to discourage the addicts and encourage non-addicts.

The most obvious way to discourage an addict is to limit the strength of the substance they can get at. An oxycontin addict is still a screwup, but isn’t likely to take himself and everyone around him down as fast as a heroin addict. In government, this means that we limit the power of the federal government. Actually, the federal government is supposed to be pretty limited, but back in the New Deal the Supreme Court pretty much gave Congress the power to affect anything it wanted, and Congress passed laws giving the Executive Branch the power to regulate pretty much anything. So either we pass an amendment saying “no, really, the Commerce Clause means interstate commerce and nothing else” (good luck) or we convince the Supreme Court that they made a mistake seventy years ago and they need to start steering back toward a stricter construction.

Another way to discourage the addict is to restrict the duration of their exposure. Bars close for the night so alcoholics can’t stay there drinking all night. In some states, liquor stores are closed on Sunday. This is not really terribly effective. In government, term limits might possibly help, but as long as Congressmen can become lobbyists, or as long as ex-Presidents can still be influential in their party committees, it won’t really work.

We need to look for non-addictive personalities and encourage them to run for office. The non-addictive personality is one who can partake of an addictive substance without any tendency to become addicted. The person who can drink socially for years, sometimes to excess but usually not, but never becomes an alcoholic. The person who tries cocaine once or twice but never gets into it. The person who gets prescribed Vicodin for a broken leg but doesn’t finish their prescription (much less try to get more).

In the political arena, maybe we need to look for people who got elected to their city council for a couple terms and then went back to running their business. Or have been in their state senate (in most states a part-time job) for years but have never talked about running for higher office.

We can’t always identify those people and convince them to run for Congress or the Presidency. We’ll probably be stuck with the self-promoting egotists that make up the first-time candidate class we have now. But I think there are some ways to winnow out the addictives.

Since drugs and alcohol are the addictive substances we’re most familiar with, I’d much rather vote for a candidate who says, “hell, yes, I tried drugs, but I didn’t like them” or “I used drugs off and on in college but haven’t in decades,” rather than one who insists they’ve, well, never inhaled.

As usual, it’s up to us, the voters, and we’ll get the government that we deserve. If we’re a nation of addicts ourselves, latched permanently onto the Federal teat, then it stands to reason that we’ll elect a co-dependent government of addicts who’ll promise us our fix, anything, as long as we’ll give them theirs.

On the other hand, if we’re really a nation of self-sufficient individuals like we tell ourselves, then we need to get off our ass and stage a much-belated intervention.

Now.

freecolorado.com: How the Republican Party Can Create a New Winning Coalition

1. Religious Freedom. The religious right has held the reins of the Republican Party for far too long — and has driven it straight over a cliff. A fertilized egg is not a person. A woman has a right to get an abortion. Homosexuals deserve equal rights. The government should not subsidize religious institutions, fund religious education, or censor Biblically-incorrect expression.

At the same time, people have the right to worship as they see fit — so long as they respect the rights of others — or not to worship at all. People have the right to teach their children their values, whether at home or at privately funded religious schools. Religion must stay out of politics, and the state must stay out of religion.

Religious voters can remain a part of a winning GOP coalition, so long as their goal is to keep politics out of religion, not inject religion into politics. Abortion bans and fear mongering about homosexuals can no longer be the litmus tests of primaries. Republican candidates must clearly endorse the separation of church and state, a separation necessary for the protection of both church and state.

As for those who insist on imposing God’s alleged will on the rest of us, let them join their compatriots on the left — as many are already doing. They can only corrupt and impede a new liberty coalition.

Volokh Conspiracy: Return of the Conservative-Libertarian Coalition?

transterrestrial.com: A New Libertarian-Conservative Coalition?

I’m sure that more than ten minutes’ surfing would turn up a lot more such articles.

Let’s hope that the Republicans can finally turn away from legislating morality. Not only does it not work, it often provokes the very behavior it tries to quash.

As I get into this, I just want to state for the record that when I write “Democrats” or “Republicans” I mean the official establishment of the party apparatus and their elected politicians. I’ll make it clear in context if I mean individual voters of whichever affiliation. So if I write “the Democrats are full of shit,” I don’t mean my wife or the guy next door, I mean Obama/Pelosi/Reid/Dean/the Democratic Congressional caucus/the Democratic Party.

Congratulations

First off, let me say that it’s a testament to how far we’ve come as a nation that an African-American can even be nominated for the Presidency, much less elected to it. My congratulations to President-Elect Obama and all his supporters — not only did you win, but you won big enough that the legitimacy of our election system can’t be seriously attacked this time.

Jonah Goldberg:

[D]uring the debate over the financial crisis, Obama said that a president should be able to do more than one thing at a time. Well, I think we members of the loyal opposition should be able to make distinctions simultaneously. It is a wonderful thing to have the first African-American president. It is a wonderful thing that in a country where feelings are so intense that power can be transferred so peacefully. Let us hope that the Obama his most dedicated — and most sensible! — fans see turns out to be the real Obama. Let us hope that Obama succeeds and becomes a great president, for all the right reasons.

What Scares Me

Ever since the early primaries, I’ve looked on this election as a choice between a merely bad President and an appalling President, and the American people have just elected the appalling one.

Look, we’re in a point in the cycle of history that basically assures that whoever the President turned out to be, he or she would be the Herbert Hoover of the 21st Century. Unfortunately, we’ve elected the candidate who I fear will be the [Herbert Hoover + Jimmy Carter + Franklin Roosevelt + Neville Chamberlain], instead of the [Herbert Hoover + Theodore Roosevelt].

Maybe Obama will govern as a center-left mainstream politician, as he insisted during the general campaign. But I tend to give more weight to what a politician does and says when the national klieg light isn’t on him, and back before he was a serious candidate Obama said a lot of things that make me think his first instinct is to govern from the far left.

(That’s assuming he’s capable of governing at all, of course. It’s a truism in American politics that the skills necessary to get elected aren’t the same skills necessary to run the country. Obama’s never governed anything — not even run a successful business — his state senate position was part time, and he’s spent all his time in the big leagues of the U.S. Senate either preparing to run or running for President. He’s got his name on a few pieces of legislation both in Illinois and in the Senate, but it seems that either his patron tacked his name onto already-completed bills or he attached himself to uncontroversial extensions of uncontroversial programs. It remains to be seen if he has the temperament and strength of will to head up the cutthroat world of the White House or the vast machinery of the Executive Branch, much less be able to manipulate Congress to do what he wants.)

Some examples: Conferring the prestige of a Presidential summit on execrable dictators without preconditions. Raising capital gains taxes on the grounds of “fairness” regardless of any decrease in revenue. Fleeing from our promises to Iraq even if it would mean genocide. Refusal to exploit our energy resources. Deliberately making the cost of energy “skyrocket”.

I’m sure there are more that I can’t think of right now. But these were all policies he advocated before he had to “run to the center” to get elected. Are these ideas going to be tossed in the name of expediency, or are they core principles waiting under a layer of camouflage? I have no idea, because he has no record of how he behaves in executive office, and that’s a little frightening.

Money Talks

Public financing for presidential campaigns is dead forever. The Obama campaign has proven that hundreds of millions of dollars can be raised for a campaign, and significantly it’s proven that large amounts of it can be raised semi-anonymously over the internet. Any future candidate who limits themselves to the $84 million provided by the government is an idiot.

Of course, they might be breaking the law. It’s impossible to prove that the Obama campaign accepted large amounts of illegal money either from foreigners or from Americans in violation of the contribution limits. But the campaign was pretty disingenuous about assuring us that there was nothing going on.

I think that our so-called campaign finance reform laws are idiotic and need to be completely thrown out, but that’s a subject for another post. I do think that the law as it stands needs to be respected, and I would be very reassured if someone could either fess up about the whole thing or definitively prove that illegal contributions weren’t an issue.

Nevertheless, being able to throw around bushels of money and outspend one’s opponent by a four to one ratio certainly made a difference.

The Press

The mainstream media has spent the last six months giving Obama a big, warm, wet, sloppy blowjob. Now that they’ve rested back on their heels, they’ll be looking to see if that makes them his bestest girlfriend or his prison bitch. I’m leaning more towards “prison bitch,” myself, and the existence only now of stories questioning this or that about Obama is evidence that they might have noticed too.

Seriously, the MSM has completely given up on impartiality and objectivity. When pressed they’ll sometimes come close to admitting it, but mostly they’ll self-righteously savage anyone who questions them. Who do they think they’re fooling? People on the right have lost all trust, and people on the left revel in the bias since it’s cheerleading for their team. But the media’s circulation/viewership and stock prices just keep going down.

Mandate?

The term “mandate” gets thrown around a lot in politics — My 50.05% of the popular vote demonstrates that the American people have given me their mandate! — and that of course cheapens the term into mere mouth noise. A 4% 6.4% margin in the popular vote is less than Bush got over Kerry GHW Bush got over Dukakis or Clinton got over Dole. It certainly doesn’t get up into Reagan/Mondale or Nixon/McGovern territory.

This election was no landslide, and Obama has no particular mandate to make any great changes. Most voters were voting against eight years of Bush as much as they were voting for four years of Obama. I mean, look, a history-making candidate running against a mediocre opponent and the legacy of a horribly unpopular President during an economic crisis with a blowjob media strewing flower petals in his path was only able to get 52% of Americans to vote for him. That doesn’t look like a mandate to me, it looks like a weak candidate who was given lots of advantages and still barely made it.

What Did They Know and When Did They Know It?

I think that at some point some section of the press will ask an inconvenient question and the Obama White House will shut down and get secretive. Really secretive — like to Nixon or Clinton levels. I think we’ve already seen the precursors of this in Obama’s refusal to release his college transcripts, his medical records, or his state senate papers, and in his campaign’s snubbing of a Florida TV station that made Joe Biden the teensiest bit uncomfortable.

Or they’ll discover what all Presidents do — that Congress is not their friend, even if it’s controlled by the same party. Some subcommittee will ask for some testimony from some minor appointee on some slightly embarrassing bagatelle and the White House will stonewall, for no particular reason except their own obstinacy.

Lessons for the GOP

The MSM, no matter how depleted and insolvent they are by 2012, will never treat a Republican fairly. Even though they may come around to asking Obama and the Congressional Democrats some hard questions during the term, when the campaign starts they will all fall into line and put their kneepads back on.

Therefore, the GOP needs to run a smart candidate who is unafraid to take on the press directly.

Note that I said smart, not intellectual. “Intellectual” connotes a preference for abstractions and philosophical niceties over reality; in a politician intellectualism tends to drive them to harsh uncompromising measures when their preconceptions are challenged by events. Look at Lenin, for example, forcing the Russian people onto the Procrustean Bed of the New Soviet Man ideal. Look at Woodrow Wilson, probably our most intellectual president ever, but also no great fan of the Constitution as written, an odious racist, an enthusiastic crusher of civil liberties during the Great War, and the author of the Palmer Raids and the first Red Scare after it.

No, the GOP needs a smart and unafraid candidate. A candidate who can speak clearly and lucidly without falling back on doublespeak or the daily talking points. A candidate who can answer the questions that are asked but turn their answer to their advantage, instead of ignoring the actual question and repeatedly answering the question they wanted to hear. A candidate who has no problem saying with a smile, “well, gee, Charlie, the very fact that you asked that question just proves how full of crap you are.” A candidate who knows where they stand on all the issues and can defend their position in their own words, but if surprised by an issue they hadn’t thought of can fall back on their principles and answer on the fly without embarrassing themselves and backtracking later. And as much as it pains me to say it (since I’ve learned that “proper” language is what comes out of peoples’ mouths, not what comes out of a dictionary), a candidate who doesn’t say nucular.

(Actually, this sort of candidate is what all parties need for all positions. Were politicians more like this, they wouldn’t be ranked down with the Ebola virus in popularity polls.)

I think that treating the press like a debate opponent will be necessary in the future. Pandering to them doesn’t work — as with all bullies, it will just invite their abuse. Ignoring them won’t work — for good or ill it’s where a large fraction of Americans will get their news and form their views of the candidates, even if they have to work to filter out the bias. Attacking the press will just make the Republican candidate look like a whiner; best to let unaffiliated proxies do the complaining.

There needs to be a realignment of the party’s priorities. On the political compass (whichever one you use) the GOP needs to shuffle a little closer to the economic liberty position and away from the Culture War position. Because, face it, the Culture War is over and the social-conservative Republicans lost. I’ll address why in a later post, but basically the American people on the whole don’t like the extreme positions, and the social cons scare lots of otherwise centrist people to death and keep them from voting Republican.

The GOP should take as its platform the principle that while Republicans may personally agree with the social con positions, and will afford every chance for the social cons to make their case in the public square, they will not as a matter of policy attempt to legally enforce the social con position on the American people.

Instead, the GOP should stand for economic and personal liberty, the free market, federalism, and decreasing the size and intrusiveness of government, and must be able to make the case for why those principles will bring prosperity — only the cranks like me care about the shape of government; the vast majority just want to feel like things are looking up for their families.

Democratic Predictions

1. Popularity is a very fleeting thing. Barring a one-off rally-round-the-flag event, if Obama governs from the left his approval ratings will be half their starting levels by 2010; 60-70% if he governs from the center.
2. Anti-Americanism runs deep overseas. Foreigners who profess to love us because of Obama will go back to hating us by next March; foreigners who love us now will still love us, only less so.
3. The Bill and Hillary Show is over. Hillary Clinton will have a long career ahead of her as a lioness of the Senate, and hopefully there will be another female Democratic candidate for the presidential ticket in four or eight years, one who isn’t horrible.

GOP Predictions

1. The GOP will make gains in Congress in 2010, but not re-enact 1994. There’s no charismatic leader with strong enough principles in Congress right now who could lead a majority-changing movement.
2. The Republican nominee for 2012 will be:
   • Sarah Palin — 40% chance
   • Bobby Jindal — 25% chance
   • Other known Republican — 10% chance
   • As yet unknown Republican — 25% chance
3. There will be a major housecleaning, although I’m not sure yet which corner’s junk will be thrown out. Fifteen years ago I predicted that it was the Democratic Party that would self-destruct and reinvent itself, but now I’m coming to the conclusion that its the turn of the Republican Party to do so.

Recap

I congratulate President-Elect Obama on his historic victory. I hope he proves me wrong. Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.

Regardless, there will be no Obama Derangement Syndrome from me. Obama is the President; contra the attitudes of many over the past eight years he is my President. I will oppose and criticize his every move if I think they are wrong or bad for the country, and I’m sure I will get angry on a regular basis, but spittle-flecked hatred will not be found here. I will not take the attitude of anything the Democrats want, I’m agin it. Civility and mutual courtesy must prevail in political discourse, else we are no better than barbarians.

This I pledge on my honor as an American.