http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
A FEW QUICK THOUGHTS ON COCHRAN
1. Beating a Senate incumbent is still really hard. Even when the votes go your way, the incumbents have any number of dirty options at their disposal. It happened in Alaska. Now it happened again.
The system itself is corrupt and winning an election means beating the system. The bigger the election, the harder the system pushes back. It’s an elastic effect. Scale that up and you can see how hard winning the White House becomes.
This is why the left started at the bottom. It’s much easier to take over organizations from the top than the bottom. You have to become the system before you can beat the system.
2. The Tea Party brand has been severely damaged. That is to be expected. Even the left doesn’t stick with a brand. It uses innumerable front groups. The Tea Party brand should be retained as feeders for recruitment, but it might be wiser to route actual work through groups branded with names like “Reform” and “Change”.
And that takes me to…
3. The ongoing problem on the right is that it talks ‘extremist’ and legislates ‘moderate’ while the left talks ‘moderate’ and legislates ‘extremist’.
That’s a big part of why Obama is in the White House and conservatives are still struggling to make headway.
Obama isn’t in the White House because Americans woke up Communist one morning. I know that “Free Stuff” is a popular theory, but people always liked free stuff. The larger welfare population helped shift the balance, but if Obama had been a non-viable candidate, there would have been no balance to shift and it would have done him as much good as it did Jesse Jackson or Dukakis.
Obama is in office because much of the country believes that he is a moderate and a centrist.
The left can get away with it because it talks centrist and lives radical. If the right is ever going to do better than another liberal Republican, its candidates are going to have to talk like liberal Republicans while legislating well to the right.
It is doable. Rand Paul has been doing the talking part well enough. Unfortunately he talks the talk so well because he actually is well to the left.
And that’s the bigger problem.
Lefty candidates can have a certain amount of trust from the base because they are committed to an ideology. Obama’s supporters knew that he was for gay marriage and racial polarization no matter what he said. The right needs candidates who are ideologically committed so that trust stops being an issue.
NOT A ONE
There can be no conservative case for amnesty because there is no such thing as a conservative case for a policy that will not have a conservative outcome.
The only meaningful argument for a policy is based on outcomes.
If the outcome of a conservative policy is more liberalism, it was never a conservative policy to begin with. That is the simplest and most reliable acid test of any “conservative” policy agenda.
Will Policy X put the country on a more liberal or conservative track?
There Is No Conservative Case for Amnesty
Kerry: Russia Must “Literally” Disarm, State Department, Don’t Take Him “Literally” – This administration and its foreign policy are literally a joke.
CYNICAL AND DISHONEST
The leading factor behind the resurgence of Al Qaeda in Iraq didn’t come from Iraq. It came from Syria.
The theory that turned Al Qaeda into a regional monster didn’t come from Dick Cheney. It came from Obama’s Presidential Study Directive 11 which helped pave the way for the Arab Spring. The definitive speech that opened the gates of hell wasn’t Bush’s speech on Iraq, but Obama’s Cairo speech.
Al Qaeda in Iraq was a vicious terrorist organization before the Arab Spring, but it was not capable of menacing Baghdad with a sizable army while crushing numerically superior forces along the way.
That didn’t happen in Iraq. It happened in Syria.
Don’t Blame Bush for Al Qaeda in Iraq, Blame Obama