As predicted before the election, there’s been a massive round of post-mortem analysis focused on where the Republicans went wrong and the disastrous state the party is in at this point. Here’s a roundup of some of the pieces that have appeared on CNN.com on this topic recently (I tend to use CNN.com as my main source of main stream news – not because I think it’s particularly unbiased but simply because it often has the broadest coverage, and has recently added commentary from key figures on both sides – an interesting feature):

• GOP faces identity crisis in months ahead
• Commentary: Conservatives didn’t lose election, GOP did
• Is Romney the man to save GOP in 2012?
• Zakaria: GOP bereft of ideas or trapped by wrong ones
• Moderates to blame for GOP losses, conservative leader says

It’s a mix of stupid stuff, more thoughtful stuff (some of which is still wrong) and sensible thinking. The first post is just ridiculous, having as one of its main arguments that the Republican party doesn’t have a leader – did the Democratic party have a leader in 2000 or 2004? No – of course not – that’s just not the way US presidential elections work – unlike, say, UK general elections, where the leader of the losing party remains leader unless an explicit change is made.Zakaria makes some of the same arguments more thoughtfully, and though I think he’s wrong on most of what he says, it at least appears he’s thought about them.

On the other hand, I find Governor Sanford’s remarks (the second link in the list above) and those of Tony Perkins (in the last link) to be much closer to my own views on this subject, as expressed in my final pre-election thoughts a couple of weeks ago. I really think the issue for the GOP hasn’t been its ideas are stale or wrong, but that it hasn’t argued them cogently or governed accordingly when in power.

The whole ‘Joe the Plumber‘ episode towards the end of the election cycle proved that when GOP ideas are well articulated by the right people they have real appeal. Unfortunately, Joe the plumber made the case much better than John the politician, and there’s lots that the leaders of the Republican party can learn from him and those like him – and from Ronald Reagan, who was really the last leader of the GOP to do this well. Newt Gingrich has real potential in this department, but I think his role should be helping a presidential candidate formulate arguments along these lines rather than running for that office himself in 2012.

I’ve started seeing the post-mortem pieces appearing in the media about what went wrong for John McCain, how the Republicans are out of touch and need to change, and whether Palin will be the candidate in 2012. Aside from the obvious point about doing an autopsy on someone who’s still breathing, there is a lot of muddled thinking in all that’s being written.

Firstly, the problem for the Republicans in this election isn’t too much conservatism. In fact, it’s the opposite. For president they’re running an apathetically middle of the road Republican with very little personal charm, a notoriously bad temper, serious health issues and very little track record of successfully running anything, who tried to use his VP pick as a bandaid to patch several holes in his own candidacy (youth, gender and conservatism being the obvious ones).

Meanwhile, the Republicans in Congress have been doing their best impersonation of Democrats for so long that voters figured they might as well have the real thing. Spending has increased more and more quickly under the Bush administration than under the Clinton administration, and not just because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The utter failure to use their combined occupancy of the White House and the majority offices in Congress from 2000-2006 to push through any meaningful changes or improvements in the way the country is run was reason enough to kick them out. But the fact that they also presided over such a bloating of the government with so little effort to reduce not only pork barrel but also all other forms of spending was a disgrace. They gave their natural supporters so few reasons to vote for them it’s remarkable that they still have so many seats. Of course, that will change next week too.

The idea that conservatism has had its day, or that Sarah Palin represents anything like the kind of candidate needed to revive its fortunes, is preposterous. Republicans (conservative ones, at least in theory, with the exception of Bush 1) have occupied the White House for 20 of the last 28 years. They also had majorities in Congress for a good chunk of that time period. Voters are rejecting not conservatism, but a Republicanism that’s lost its teeth and no longer knows what it stands for. If you vote Democratic, at least you know that the bigger government, higher taxes and increased regulation are all deliberate and coordinated attempts to achieve a certain goal. When Republicans enact the same policies it’s out of lassitude and spinelessness.

The Republicans in Congress were punished in 2006 for not being conservative enough and instead of learning their lesson they nominated one of their own number for President in the face of several other options with no connections to Congress (the only institution in the country with a lower approval rating than President Bush). Far from being a Washington outsider with the power and will to change the status quo, McCain was Exhibit A in all that’s gone wrong in the nation’s capital for the last few years. As such, for all his speeches attempting to misappropriate Obama’s change message, McCain was powerless to say what really needed to be said in this election: that Republicans had abused the trust of the American people and he intended to regain that trust by being true to the core principles of the party. Instead we get this misguided stuff about standing up to his own party: does anyone actually want that? Don’t we really want him to stand up against his colleagues in Congress and be true to his party, which surely consists of registered Republican voters?

Sarah Palin as a candidate in 2012? Why on earth would that be a good idea? She was a terrible and cynical choice for the VP role, simultaneously exposing McCain’s poor decision making and fondness for a gimmick, and neutralising the best attack against Obama that McCain had: the former’s inexperience. If we’ve learned anything since Palin was nominated, it’s that she has very little meaningful executive experience, she’s way out of her depth in a national campaign, and perfect SNL fodder. She has brought no lasting bounce to McCain’s campaign and arguably has hurt it considerably. If all we want for president is someone with reliable conservative instincts and two X chromosomes, there are plenty of choices out there. But if we want someone capable of not just winning an election but running the largest country in the world we surely need much more than that.

Imagine now that Mitt Romney had been either the Republican presidential candidate or McCain’s VP pick. How different things would look. Against Obama’s inexperience and the combined Democratic ticket’s Congressional background, you’d have a true Washington outsider, someone who’s only been tainted by politics for four years, with all four spent in an executive role. Someone who truly understands the economy and money, and could explain it all to voters with patience and credibility. As VP, he would be a wonderful counterpoint to McCain’s crusty maverick – reliably conservative (who wants a maverick with his finger on the nuclear button, anyway?), confidence-inspiring, with economic and executive experience, and ready to take over at any minute should McCain not last the full four years. It’s too late for all that now, of course, but why couldn’t voters and McCain see this at the time? Was McCain really that desperate?

At any rate, the post-mortems will begin in earnest on the 5th, and there will no doubt be much self-examination in the Republican party. I just hope they learn the real lessons from this campaign rather than the lessons the media wants them to learn.

CNN has a piece today about Huckabee’s forthcoming book:

Two weeks after the next president is elected, Mike Huckabee will publish a book sharing details on his failed bid for the White House and offering his vision for remodeling the conservative movement.

It’s those last few words I take issue with. Huckabee does not represent the “conservative movement” – he represents one wing of it – Christian evangelicals (and to an extent, though not wholly, social conservative s generally).  The group he never brought on board and has virtually no appeal to is fiscal conservatives, who are famously the other half of the conservative coalition that has been winning elections for so many years. His “fair tax” plans and happy-go-lucky approach to public spending (“add an extra lane to I-95”) made fiscal conservatives hugely skeptical of both his seriousness as a candidate and his commitment to the issues that are dear to them.

As such, Huckabee can only really articulate a vision for the social conservative movement, or even more narrowly, Christian evangelical conservatives. He successfully acted as if he was the conservative candidate once Romney bowed out, but no-one but him and his campaign believes this nonsense. He carried a certain percentage of the base – arguably, a segment roughly equally as radical as the Ron Paul crowd – which refused to go for McCain even once it was obvious no-one else had a chance of winning. Do we really want this crowd dictating electoral strategy for the Republicans for the next four years. I’d much rather have Romney, who – for all his changes in position – at least now espouses solidly conservative positions across both the social and fiscal policy fields.

It appears there’s growing frustration among the media following the Obama campaign that the candidate has stopped talking to them. Toby Harnden of the UK’s Daily Telegraph writes in a blog entry today that details some of what’s going on in the minds of the press:

On Obama One, there’s a sense of growing mutiny. There’s been no press availability for 11 days and only two in April.

…

A few hours later, Obama was unrepentant, again rebuffing a reporter’s question. This time, it was Margaret Talev of McLatchy – who was in the press pool with Anburajan for the day – who had a go. Just as Obama was sitting down to tape a session of “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart, Talev asked him why he felt it important to respond to the late-breaking Clinton television ad with an ad of his own and what he thought of her ad.

“Are you supposed to be doing this with the pool?” Obama responded, and laughed. Then he sat down and had his earpiece put in. Talev asked him if he’d comment after the taping. He said: “Maybe, it depends on how well behaved you are.” As Talev put in her poll report, however “after the taping, I was whisked off ahead of him and didn’t get to bug him again”.

On Obama One, the only official to venture back to the press seats was the affable David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, a former reporter who appears to enjoy relaxing in the company of us hacks and pops back fairly frequently. This time, however, we were so starved of access that he immediately had a dozen tape recorders pushed under his nose and was peppered with questions.

When we asked him why Obama wasn’t talking to us, he responded: “I’m sure that he’ll be spending time with you some time soon. He’s done a series of interviews today on national television, on local television with local press so he’s done a lot of media.”

The impression Harnden got – and one that’s difficult to escape, is that Obama has done so badly when he’s gone unscripted recently that essentially he’s almost always off message when speaking off the cuff. His handlers appear to have decided that the only way to keep him “on message” is to have him only deliver formal, scripted messages and essentially restrict him to “no message” in all other situations.

This is going to be problematic for a guy who is trying to avoid allegations of elitism. Not that journalists truly represent the common people, but they’re the only proxy there is in many cases, and his desire to avoid them smacks of a desire to avoid engaging with anyone in a real way. Perhaps he’s hoping that he can simply pull this strategy until Pennsylvania is over, then re-engage more afterwards once Hillary is seen off. Quite apart from the fact that CNN is currently projecting a Clinton win in PA, this strategy can’t pay off. There are almost seven months left until the general election, and Obama can’t simply hide out for that period. He must begin to engage again and no amount of spin and damage control can prevent him from putting his foot in it if that’s his tendency. The result may just end up being that it becomes too late for the Democrats to do anything about this tendency and then they’re stuck with him in the general election. Fine by me.

With all this talk about “bitterness” in Pennsylvania, I’ve actually been thinking about the two Primary campaigns and the fact that the Democratic campaign appears to have become more bitter than the Republican campaign was. Howard Dean told CNN that he wants a nominee chosen ASAP because:

We cannot give up two or three months of active campaigning and healing time. We’ve got to know who our nominee is.

Did the Republicans need “healing time”? There were one or two stories about the bitterness behind the scenes – mostly on the part of the other candidates and directed at Romney. But that has blown over so quickly that it’s barely a memory at this point. Romney, of course, is campaigning for McCain. Thompson and the others have endorsed McCain strongly. Huckabee is perhaps the weakest link at this point, but it really didn’t take very long for the “healing” process to take place.

The other point that strikes me is the fact that the bitterness on the Republican side (other than that directed at Romney) was mostly between rival factions who had distinctly different policy goals. Huckabee supporters distrusted the other candidates because they were not conservative enough on social issues. Thompson and Romney supporters mistrusted Huckabee because of his unserious policies on taxation. This was, on the whole, not about personality differences.

On the Democratic side, however, the bitterness is very much about personality, since there’s very little that separates the candidates on the major issues. And that may make it that much harder for them to “heal” afterwards, because the criticisms the two camps have directed at each other have not been about differences of opinion on policy. If they were – as on the Republican side – they would be easily overcome by taking the approach that the Democratic platform is ultimately what people need to get behind. But suggestions that your opponent is too inexperienced to be President are not so easy to brush off when they become the party’s nominee. Some of McCain’s best ammunition in the general election will be comments made by Hillary about Obama (assuming he’s the nominee): “If your own party doesn’t think you’re experienced enough to govern, why should the American people feel differently?” etc.

Long may the Democratic primary continue.

As in almost every election cycle recently (or so it seems) there have been allegations from some quarters that there is little to separate the candidates on the issues, and this is one of the reasons why people aren’t engaging in the process more. There’s always some truth in this, and certainly (for all Barack Obama’s protestations to the contrary) all candidates and both parties are more or less equally guilty of playing the game of politics as usual.

But it is worth remembering that there are real and significant policy differences between the major candidates and especially between the two major parties, and pointing out what these are. This, after all, is what we’re all fighting for.

So, what are we fighting for?

• Taxation – the Democrats want to revoke the Bush tax cuts and generally raise taxes, with the only significant difference being how open they are about the latter aim. Certainly the increases in spending they propose must lead to increases in taxation, but they’d rather leave the voters to connect those dots themselves than spell it out for them.
• Foreign Policy – the Democrats are essentially embarrassed for America and want to make things right with the rest of the world. Rather than believe that the US needs to act in its own interests, they believe it needs to do what will make the rest of the world happy. This means mea culpas over Iraq and Afghanistan and a speedy withdrawal from the former regardless of the consequences to the US or Iraq itself.
• Judges – at least in theory, John McCain would appoint the kind of judges Bush has to the Supreme and lower courts – that is, strict constructionists who will not read the constitution’s aura to find new “emanations” and “penumbras” containing hitherto hidden meaning justifying massive increases in governmental power. These judges would further continue to take the court in the direction it has been going in the last several years on abortion, finding room for more restrictions on it and perhaps eventually overturning Roe vs. Wade and leaving individual states to determine their own abortion laws.
• Healthcare. Here, the Republican position is essentially to do nothing to change the current system, which has flaws but consistently provides higher standards of health care to the vast majority of Americans than citizens of any other country enjoy. Democrats, of course, want to effectively nationalize healthcare and turn the American system into a more expensive version of Britain’s National Health Service, with bloated bureaucracies and massive waiting lists coupled with second-world care.

These are, I think, the four key reasons why anyone who supports the Republican position on these issues needs to be actively engaged with the electoral process and committed to getting John McCain elected. The economy is a red herring as an issue, other than as it relates to tax policy. Education is another where there is little daylight between the positions of the candidates or parties. But these issues ought to get Republicans energized and invested in the process, because if they don’t win there will be a significant negative impact on our economy and way of life.

I posted a few months back about JFK and Democratic snobbery.The thrust of that post was that Democrats, while claiming to be the party of the little guy – of the working class – in fact engages in a greater degree of snobbishness than the Republicans, who nominally favor the middle and upper classes and have little sympathy for the little guy.

Barack Obama this week has demonstrated that, for all his appeal to the little guy and his suggestion that he had a hard-knocks upbringing, he’s just as guilty of this as his predecessors have been. The comments in question came at a poorly-reported event in California, and ironically were only reported by a liberal blogger at the Huffington Post:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The comments were made to a snooty crowd and so to some extent the snobbishness is not out of place. But of course these days you can’t tailor your message to audiences in such a way that you can cater to one with comments that will be taken hard by another, and Obama’s found out the hard way. Both McCain and Clinton have pounced on the remarks and made hay as much as they could. But this is just another signal that Obama may not be quite the friend of the little guy many think he is.

Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation and conservative commentator, was a Mitt Romney backer when the latter was still in the primary running. However, he was recently cited as a member of a group which had started a petition to keep Romney out of McCain’s VP slot. To have gone from being a staunch Mitt supporter in the presidential race to finding him unworthy of even the VP slot was a turnaround the New York Times thought worth commenting on, suggesting a wider theme which isn’t borne out by the facts (that Romney’s “friends” more broadly have deserted him).

At any rate, two explanations – competing ones – have now emerged, both from Weyrich himself. The first is an account of a supposed conversion he experienced, which was reported by World Magazine, as follows:

Last month at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New Orleans, several dozen leaders of the “Christian right” met to strategize next steps—but the meeting inevitably included discussion of missteps in the GOP presidential campaign. Michael Farris of the Home School Legal Defense Association, an early supporter of Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, chided the group for cold-shouldering his candidate until it was too late. Others, including Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, disagreed. The meeting quickly threatened to dissolve into accusations, rebuttals, and recriminations.

Then, venerable Paul Weyrich—a founder of the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the Council for National Policy (CNP)—raised his hand to speak. Weyrich is a man whose mortality is plain to see. A freak accident several years ago left him with a spinal injury, which ultimately led to both his legs being amputated in 2005. He now gets around in a motorized wheelchair. He is visibly paler and grayer than he was just a few years ago, a fact not lost on many of his friends in the room, some of whom had fought in the political trenches with him since the 1960s.

The room—which had been taken over by argument and side-conversations—became suddenly quiet. Weyrich, a Romney supporter and one of those Farris had chastised for not supporting Huckabee, steered his wheelchair to the front of the room and slowly turned to face his compatriots. In a voice barely above a whisper, he said, “Friends, before all of you and before almighty God, I want to say I was wrong.”

In a quiet, brief, but passionate speech, Weyrich essentially confessed that he and the other leaders should have backed Huckabee, a candidate who shared their values more fully than any other candidate in a generation. He agreed with Farris that many conservative leaders had blown it. By chasing other candidates with greater visibility, they failed to see what many of their supporters in the trenches saw clearly: Huckabee was their guy.

Apart from both Weyrich’s statement and the telling of it being unnecessarily melodramatic, this would explain the change of tone from Weyrich – that he genuinely thought he had been wrong, and had therefore somehow abandoned the evangelical base in favor of political expediency. Fair enough – can’t agree on the merits but he’s entitled to change his mind (as Romney was…).

But the second explanation (which I can only find quoted here directly) appears to contradict it, or at least suggests that Weyrich hadn’t really changed his mind, or at least didn’t feel as strongly as that account above suggests:

Recently I received a phone call from someone asking if former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney should be Arizona Senator John McCain’s selection for Vice President of the United States.

I said, “No” because I did not think this was the best path for Romney right now; nor was it, in my view, the right fit for McCain. My understanding was that this was to be a personal letter to the Senator; it was not clear to me that this was to be an advertisement.

Thus, I now request that my involvement in this effort be disregarded as this effort to influence the Senator moves on.

So, basically, he thought it was the wrong move for both Romney and McCain but didn’t feel strongly enough it to state this publicly. Rather a different story from the dramatic conversion experience. But then things get even weirder:

I did support Romney in the early primaries and then supported former Arkansas Governor Huckabee when he and McCain were the last two candidates in the field.

That Senator McCain most likely will be in a position to select a Vice Presidential nominee is a failure of our movement, including myself, to unite behind a single candidate. In the unlikely development that the Senator would ask for my view on this matter, I would convey it to him in private as I have traditionally done.

He seems to resent the fact that McCain will be able to choose his VP candidate rather than having someone foisted upon him by the evangelical movement (at least that’s the implication – it’s poorly worded, and so perhaps he merely means that it’s unfortunate McCain is the nominee at all). I find this a little distasteful.

Yes, it would be great if evangelicals and conservatives more broadly had been able to coalesce around a single candidate for president, but we are where we are – going on about past failures isn’t really helpful to anyone at this point. There was no single candidate conservatives could coalesce around because we had a range of proto-conservatives (Huckabee the social but not fiscal conservative, Giuliani the fiscal and foreign policy but not social conservative, Thompson the lazy conservative and Romney the alleged conservative) and that’s why we ended up with McCain – the electable but slightly soft conservative, but ultimately the man everyone else’s supporters had the weakest objections to.

At any rate, none of these speaks well for Weyrich or the stability of his views.

Just saw a poll on the CNN site. Looks like the Bosnia thing (and one or two others) have really hurt Hillary’s reputation for trustworthiness:

What’s more surprising is that Obama and McCain are even in this, even though Barack has undoubtedly been much worse in trying to pad his resume and make his achievements sound more grandiose than McCain has. Arguably, McCain has the opposite problem – over-honesty about his weakness in financial matters, for example. But I guess that can be put down to partisanship as much as anything else. Obviously this isn’t scientific – it’s just an online poll with self-selection and no attempt to make the result representative, but it’s telling nonetheless.

The Wall Street Journal had a piece a couple of days ago on Chris Cox, currently SEC Chairman and a former Congressman and Reagan staffer, suggesting that he is being considered by some as a VP option for McCain. The Journal’s suggestion is that his financial knowhow would counter-balance McCain’s self-confessed weakness in that area. But does McCain really need a VP with financial credibility enough to worry so little about everything else?

Now, no-one is suggesting that Chris Cox is a liberal in conservative clothing. His time working for Reagan is reassuring, and the fact that he earned law and business degrees from Harvard (though not, apparently, at the same time) reminds me of another VP candidate… It’s also an intriguing thought that we might have a ticket with two men with severe physical handicaps. But the Journal’s case for this man seems to rest entirely on his financial street cred and the strongest words it uses in support of him are “serious,” “sober minded,” “careful,” and finally “successful” (in reference to his stint at the SEC).

Presidents have Treasury Secretaries to deal with the detailed economic stuff (although you hope they’re committed to some basic principles like low taxation, tight spending and sound monetary policy). Does McCain really need to give away so much of what the VP choice could provide just to solve the financial issue? Does anyone believe that either Obama or Clinton has the financial chops to make this a serious problem for McCain? It seems misguided to believe any of that, and McCain would do much better to select a VP who would provide a more clearly conservative counter-balance to his own more centrist positions on some of the issues.