RUTHFULLY YOURS

Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska has become something of a lightning rod on the Right.https://amgreatness.com/2017/07/10/curious-case-ben-sasse/

Many movement conservatives are drawn to his erudite and scholarly manner and see him as a principled statesman in contrast to Donald Trump who, they argue—and quite rightly I might add—has abandoned what has come to be called conservatism. Those inclined to support Trump instead, tend to view Sasse as part of the problem due to his vocal rejection of much of the Trump agenda—and thereby the views of the tens of millions of people who voted to implement that agenda. They see Sasse as possessing utopian political sensibilities combined with an overly moralistic view of politics that lacks a spirited defense of the people’s right to rule themselves—even if ruling themselves may mean, occasionally, getting it wrong.

Stepping back and viewing Sasse’s positives and negatives in a clear light can help us see the truth contained in these conflicting portrayals.

Sasse is obviously a good family man and understands the devastating impact of fatherlessness on our culture, as is attested by his recent Father’s Day message. His advocacy of recovering liberal education is very important in light of the intellectual rot to which most, if not all, of our public universities have succumbed. And his absolute hatred of the worst Canadian export of all-time—the rock band Nickelback—should have all Americans nodding their heads in agreement.

His recent book, The Vanishing American Adult, has garnered much acclaim and deserves to be read. In the book, Sasse explores how younger generations are increasingly ill-prepared to thrive in the world and form stable families of their own. By teaching the importance of reading, hard manual labor, and learning from individuals who have significant life experiences, Sasse charts out a path that he hopes will lead younger generations to live better lives and, ultimately, to help form a healthier civic culture.

That the book’s teachings are laudable is virtually unquestionable. But doesn’t Sasse, who has only been in the Senate for two-and-a-half years, have better things to do? It’s surely true that the decline in the American character is worthy of contemplation and exploration. But Sasse is supposed to be a full-time legislator.

What Does a Senator Do, Anyway?

There has been no shortage of effort by pundits and big data analysts to try to draw conclusions on whether the results of the two special elections for open House seats in Georgia and and South Carolina last week meant that Democrats or Republicans had (choose one) underperformed or overperformed, as compared to the recent district votes for President and Congress in 2016. Similar analyses followed the special elections in Kansas and Montana earlier.

In all four cases, new Trump administration Cabinet members who had won their district races comfortably in 2016 were replaced by Republicans who won the open seat races far less comfortably. In 3 of the 4 races, the margin for the winning Republican in the special election was narrower than Trump’s margin of victory in the district in the Presidential race last year (Georgia 6 the exception — Trump won by a smaller percentage margin than Karen Handel).

It is highly likely, however, that if the four new Cabinet members — Tom Price, Mike Pompeo, Ryan Zinke and Mick Mulvaney — had stayed in the House and would run again in 2018, they all would win easily. In essence, special elections are a lot different than races where incumbents are running for re-election in regular cycles, especially from generally safe districts.

Special elections are open seat races, meaning there is no incumbent. Normally, they are held on a day when this race is the only contested one. Turnout is usually far lower than the turnout in a normal midterm, much less a presidential year. In the two contests last week, in districts with the same approximate population, 260,000 votes were cast for the candidates in Georgia and 87,000 for the two candidates in South Carolina. The difference is accounted for by the amount of fundraising and media attention lavished on the Georgia, but not on the South Carolina race. Each race however wound up with a margin of victory of between 3% and 4%.

In regular election cycles, there is a big advantage to incumbency. When House seats turn over, the percentage of open seats that shift between the parties is usually far higher than the percentage of seats that turn over among the incumbents running for re-election. If you were running the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for 2018, a district where the incumbent Republican is retiring and which provided a 55% to 45% margin in the last cycle, would be a far better target than a seat in which the incumbent Republican is running for re-election and also won by that same margin last time around.

The major impact of the races last week for the GOP, particularly the closely followed Georgia election, is that it may encourage more Republicans who may have thought of retiring to stick around (They told potential candidates that the world is not ending, yet), and may slightly discourage some Democrats from thinking 2018 is a sure thing to win a Republican-held seat, damaging the party’s candidate recruitment efforts.

Day in and day out, one cannot pick up a newspaper or tune-in to TV news without reading or hearing about the latest effort by Democrats to bring down our duly-elected 45th president, Donald Trump. The vitriol that accompanies their efforts shows a level of incivility I haven’t seen before in my eight decades of life.

It was well established by many writers, yours truly included, that on Election Day, November 8, 2016, voters would uncomfortably choose between two seriously flawed candidates for president – Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – and one of them would win.

Looking back at Ronald Reagan’s campaign against Jimmy Carter, a sitting president in his fourth year presiding over the government of a country in economic straits worsened by high inflation, Reagan asked the voting public, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” There was general agreement that folks weren’t any better off and Carter was limited to one term.

Once the 2016 GOP and Democratic Conventions were over and presidential campaigns begun in earnest, the Reagan question resurfaced, highlighting President Obama’s 8 years in office, during which he had been unable to turn around high unemployment and the wretched economy he had inherited, despite Democratic control of both Houses of Congress augmented by a filibuster-proof Senate during his first two years. He did manage to double our nation’s debt, however. Hillary Clinton, a flawed candidate to begin with, chose a flawed platform to run on, which amounted to four more years of the Obama administration.

While Hillary was in essence saying that our country’s stagnation was the “new normal,” Trump, also a flawed candidate but a successful business man not of the Washington elites, was vowing to “Make America Great Again” by increasing jobs, restoring the economy, and resurrecting the American way. It was a winning platform.

In the short time Trump has been in the White House, he has had moderate success making good on some of his campaign promises. In addition to improving the economy and gaining jobs, the Trump agenda is also aimed at restoring the vision of the Founding Fathers, guaranteeing individual freedom and rights under a non-intrusive government while requiring individual responsibility under government that is protective of rights and fiscally responsible. And that is what the Democrats are up in arms about.

Democrats seem to see our future being assured by greater government dependency, bigger government and America being more like Western Europe. Under both Democratic and Republican administrations our country has been on a slow slide down that slippery slope. The Trump agenda seeks to put on the brakes, and the electorate appears to agree with him if recent special Congressional elections to fill empty seats are a yardstick.

Democrats thought they could pick up a GOP-leaning House seat by turning Tuesday’s special election in Georgia’s sixth congressional district into a referendum on the Trump Presidency. The lesson of the GOP’s four-percentage-point victory is that Republicans can preserve their congressional majority despite doubts about Donald Trump—if they deliver on their agenda.

Republicans staved off what the press would have portrayed as a catastrophe and portent of a GOP wipeout in next year’s midterm elections. And they did so with a weak candidate in Karen Handel, a former Georgia secretary of state who lost bids for Governor in 2010 and U.S. Senate in 2014.

Democrats thought they could steal the seat because it is full of the upscale, college-educated Republicans who dislike Mr. Trump. While Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was re-elected last November by 23 points, Hillary Clinton came within two points of beating Mr. Trump. Democrats—who, by the way, favor limits on campaign spending—poured $31 million into the district to turn out liberal voters.

Yet Republicans managed to turn out their voters by portraying Jon Ossoff, a 30-year-old former congressional aide who doesn’t live in the district, as a foot soldier for Nancy Pelosi. Conservative voters showed they aren’t ready to hand the House back to Mrs. Pelosi whatever their doubts about Mr. Trump.

One immediate benefit is that the victory might deter some Republican retirements that would create more open seats in 2018 if they fear a Democratic wave. But Democrats are still likely to turn out in big numbers next year. The challenge for Republicans will be to give their voters a reason to match that liberal enthusiasm. That’s all the more reason to put accomplishments on the board that voters can see on health care, taxes and more.

As for Democrats, the defeat underlies the contradiction between the total resistance to Mr. Trump needed to win a primary and the centrist coloration needed to flip a GOP-leaning seat in areas like northern Virginia (held by Barbara Comstock ) and Upper Hudson Valley New York ( John Faso ). Mr. Ossoff energized progressives by promising “to make Trump furious.” After the primary he tacked to the middle by running as a fiscal conservative and against tax increases on the rich.

But by then Republicans were already defining him as a Pelosi pawn. It didn’t help that so much of his cash came from liberal redoubts like San Francisco or that he was endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Some groups on the left like MoveOn.org are now saying that the lesson from Mr. Ossoff’s defeat is that Democrats need to run as pure left-wing populists in 2018.

This left-center tension in the Democratic Party is likely to intensify, especially if the GOP racks up some policy victories, which could propel Democrats to nominate candidates who are too far left for the districts they need to win in 2018. But Republicans can’t afford complacency, and their best defense against an anti-Trump wave is legislative success.

Leave it to John McCain to pour fuel on an anti-Trump fire. Said the senator yesterday on Fox News:

With the appointment of Mr. Mueller, we are now at that stage of a scandal. And now the question is how is it handled. Is it handled the way Watergate was where drip, drip, drip with every day, more and more?

Or do we handle it like Ronald Reagan handled Iran-Contra? It was a scandal. He fired people. He went on national television and said we made mistakes, we did wrong, and we’re not going to do it again and the American people let him move forward.

Here’s the video:

For all the talk of scandal, McCain and his establishment friends are glossing over the major detail: there is absolutely no evidence that Trump colluded with Russia to win last year’s election.

Yes, he’s a bit too friendly toward Putin for my taste, but attempting diplomatic relations with an adversary does not a traitor make. If it did, Hillary Clinton should’ve been jailed years ago when she gave Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov a bizarre “reset” button in 2009.

McCain and the rest of the irrational Trump opposition — there’s a difference between being critical of the man, as I am, and being unable to assess his performance reasonably — are making fools of themselves with talk of “scandal” and “Watergate.”

Trump Derangement Syndrome is clearly an even worse malady than Bush Derangement Syndrome, the version that infected so many liberals in the first decade of this century. And that’s saying something.