A minor buzz was generated yesterday by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s veto message to the state assembly:

It seems that, if one ignores the first two and last two paragraphs, there’s a hidden message spelled out by the first letter of the remaining sentences. If that’s too complicated, Kevin Drum has a version with the message circled in red.

Speculation is that Schwarzenegger was sending a not-so-subtle message to bill sponsor Tom Ammiano, who yelled “You lie!” at the Governator (apparently, this practice is catching on in America’s legislative bodies) and told him to “kiss my gay ass.”

The governor’s spokesman, Aaron Lear, says this was just “a weird coincidence,” noting that other veto messages “spelled out things like ’soap’ and ‘ear’” but ABC polling director Gary Langer doesn’t think so.

What are the odds? Here’s how not to figure it precisely, rather a quick and unsophisticated back-of-the-envelope calculation: If the odds of picking a particular letter at random are one in 26, doing it over seven selections (the number of letters in question) is (1/26)^7, or .0000000001245. Just about one in 10 billion.

Small odds.

This, though, admittedly is not my field. A real calculation would take into account other matters, such as the frequency with which the individual letters in question start words, the ordering odds and the chances of a line break appearing in just the right spot between the two words in question, as it does.

A reader of Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire calculates the odds at .00000000000053937610200661%.

Stephen Green thinks this provides “one last reason to have some small amount of like left for The Governator.”  “Juvenile? Sure. But wouldn’t you rather have elected officials playing harmless pranks on one another, than doing to us what they usually do to us?”  And, indeed, Ammiano spokesman Quintin Mecke gave “Kudos to the governor for his creative use of coincidence” adding “You certainly have to have a sense of humor in politics. Unfortunately, this humor came at the cost of the Port of San Francisco.”

I suppose.  On the other hand, this is a very bizarre thing for a governor. Not least of which because it’s rather odd that someone took the time to look for hidden messages.

Mitt Romney is busy selling off a few of many his mansions and plans to move to his family vacation home in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, Hotline reports.  He has also registered his PAC there.  This has some people guessing that Romney is contemplating another run for the presidency.

“No doubt in my mind that they are doing the necessary maintenance to keep their network in New Hampshire together,” noted veteran Granite State GOP operative Mike Dennehy, who was a senior adviser to McCain’s 2008 campaign.

Establishing residency in NH could raise expectations for Romney’s performance in the state’s 2012 primary, but the state is also flush with important contests in the upcoming 2010 midterm elections, where Romney could lend a hand. First and foremost for Republicans, NH will host a critical Senate race to replace retiring Sen. Judd Gregg (R). At this point in the cycle, Democratic Rep. Paul Hodes is the only announced candidate, and with recent trends in the state, the seat is a top target for Democratic pick up. What’s more, Romney’s Wolfeboro home is in the 1st Congressional District, represented by Democratic Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, who is likely to face a strong Republican challenge by Manchester Mayor Frank Guinta. In both races Romney’s help–and even his vote–could matter.

At the same time, a case could be made for Romney to establish residency in CA [he already has a mansion in San Diego] instead. Romney’s loss to McCain in the Golden State on Super Tuesday last year was the death knell for his candidacy, given the state’s large share of delegates. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is a strong GOP contender for the open gubernatorial contest to replace outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), while Democrats barrel toward a competitive primary. Whitman originally endorsed Romney and assisted him in his primary campaign before he ended his bid, and former Romney campaign staffers are flocking to Whitman’s effort. And former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, a top McCain surrogate, is looking seriously at a challenge to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA).

To the extent that the Republican nomination goes to the candidate whose “turn” it is, Romney is well positioned. Technically, Mike Huckabee finished slightly ahead of him in the 2008 delegate count, but only as a function of shamelessly campaigning for months after he was mathematically eliminated, whereas Romney had the good grace to bow out at CPAC once the writing was on the wall.

Romney’s relatively moderate but the political advantage of setting up shop in California would be negligible; no Republican is going to beat Obama there in 2012.  The power of New Hampshire in the nominating process, on the other hand, is as obvious as it is ridiculous.

Some loosely related threads seen on memeorandum this morning:

• California’s Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger allows as to how he could conceivably endorse a Democrat as his successor — while insisting that he will himself remain a Republican

• Texas Republican Congressman Joe Barton likened the Bowl Championship Series, which determines college football’s top division’s national championship, to Communism.

• Red State’s Erick Erickson repeatedly Twitters that retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter is a child molester who also enjoys the occasional goat. (I could not find independent corroboration of this via Google.)

• Right Wing News’ John Hawkins takes to the pixels of Pajamas Media to argue that conservatives are hamstrung by being too civil and should be more like the Democrats

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was on ABC’s “This Week” this morning and two quotes in particular are garnering some attention.

Taegan Goddard awarded “Quote of the Day” honors to this one:

Well, Governor Sanford says that he does not want to take the money, the federal stimulus package money. And I want to say to him: I’ll take it. I’m more than happy to take his money or any other governor in this country that doesn’t want to take this money.

And Steve Benen is fond of this one:

You know, you’ve got to go beyond just the principles. You’ve got to go and say, ‘What is right for the country right now?’ I think that, if they — they should make an effort to work together and to find what is best for the people, because by derailing everything, it’s not going to help anybody, and it creates instability and insecurity.

Now, Schwarzenegger is a centrist Republican trying to run what has become a very Democratic state, so compromise is especially necessary in his case.  But, aside from being good political pandering, there’s not much to recommend those lines.

Yes, I’m sure California would love to have more “free” money courtesy of Uncle Sam.  The problem is, the money isn’t free.  Somebody has to pay for it.  For the most part, it’s not going to be the people getting the money.  Sanford said that:

We’re a nation that has $52 trillion of accumulated liability, $52 trillion of political promises that have been made, but not paid for. And the idea of stacking up another trillion, another trillion, another trillion, we really do get to that tipping point.

Will Sanford take the money since it’s going to be spent one way or the other?  One imagines he will.  Be that’s hardly the point.

The second point is simply asinine.  The actual quote from the transcript is even more so than George Stephanopoulos’s blog synopsis above:

STEPHANOPOULOS: But these are real differences of principle.

SCHWARZENEGGER: I know, but that’s why I said, you know, you’ve got to go beyond just the principles. You’ve got to go and say, “What is right for the country right now?” I mean, I see that as kind of like, you go to a doctor, the doctor’s office, and say, “Look, can you examine me?” The doctor says, “You have cancer.”

What you want to do at that point is you want to see this team of doctors around you, have their act together, be very clear, and say, “This is what we need to do,” rather than see a bunch of doctors fighting in front of you and arguing about the treatment. I mean, that is the worse thing. It creates insecurity in the patient.

The same is with the people in America. That creates insecurity when you have those two parties always arguing and attacking each other, rather than coming together and saying to the American people, “Here’s the recipe. This is going to be tough, but this is what we need to do for the next two years. And we both believe in that.” That will bring calmness to the market and stability to the market.

If the two parties agreed on what was best for the country, there wouldn’t be two parties.  And, goodness gracious man, our politicians aren’t oncologists and we’re not their patients.

Schwarzenegger was a novelty when he came onto the political scene five years ago and decided to transition from movie star to candidate for governor of the biggest state in the union.  But he’s been at the wheel now long enough to know that there isn’t some happy medium where “we both believe in that” on most matters of consequence.

As Dave Schuler has been predicting for a while now, the financial crisis is starting to hit state governments.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, alarmed by the ongoing national financial crisis, warned Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson on Thursday that the state might need an emergency loan of as much as $7 billion from the federal government within weeks. The warning comes as California is close to running out of cash to fund day-to-day government operations and is unable to access routine short-term loans that it typically relies on to remain solvent.

The state of California is the biggest of several governments nationwide that are being locked out of the bond market by the global credit crunch. If the state is unable to access the cash, administration officials say, payments to schools and other government entities could quickly be suspended and state employees could be laid off.

Plans by several state and local governments to borrow in recent days have been upended by the credit freeze. New Mexico was forced to put off a $500-million bond sale, Massachusetts had to pull the plug halfway into a $400-million offering, and Maine is considering canceling road projects that were to be funded with bonds.

Lending money to the states would seem like a no-brainer, regardless of one’s views of bailing out/rescuing the big banks.

California will become the first state in the Union to ban trans fats in restaurants and other public food facilities if Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signs into into law a bill passed by the state legislature Monday. Schwarzenegger has yet to announce his position publicly but he did sign a ban on trans fats in public school cafeterias last year.

Michelle Malkin wants to know, “Will Gov. Schwarzenegger actually sign this junk science meddle-gislation? Is this the kind of ‘rebranding’ of the Republican Party Schwarzenegger wants the national GOP to adopt?” It’s a fair question.

Such laws are a ridiculous overreach, in my view.  Dan Walters is right to worry about legislatures reacting to the latest scientific headlines rather than waiting for conclusive research.

Almost any product, activity or lifestyle in a modern society (sky diving, unprotected sex or crossing the street, for instance) poses some kind of theoretical risk, which means that life is a series of choices between competing values and impulses.

Trans fats, for instance, were developed to allow vegetable oils to replace animal fat, such as lard, in foods on the assumption that they would be healthier, but recent research indicates that they have health effects of their own, especially in raising levels of so-called “bad cholesterol.” But would banning them encourage restaurants to shift to even more questionable fats, such as palm oil, or return to lard? Potential consequences are rarely considered in the Capitol.

Indeed.

The silver lining here is that this is, after all, California we’re talking about.  The Golden State is often on the cutting edge of legislative experimentation, often setting a trend years or even decades before others follow.  Sometimes, they get it spectacularly wrong.  The beauty of federalism, though, is that the several states can serve as laboratories for these measures as their local cultures dictate.

John McCain has reshuffled his top campaign staff for the second time is a less than a year, elevating Karl Rove protégé Steve Schmidt to the top post.

Responding to Republican concerns that his candidacy was faltering, Mr. McCain put a veteran of President Bush’s 2004 campaign in charge of day-to-day operations and stepped away from a plan to have the campaign run by 11 regional managers, Mr. McCain’s aides said Wednesday.

The installation of Steve Schmidt, who worked closely with Karl Rove, at Mr. McCain’s headquarters represented a sharp diminishment of the responsibilities of Rick Davis, who has been Mr. McCain’s campaign manager since the last shake-up nearly a year ago.

The shift was approved by Mr. McCain after several of his aides, including Mr. Schmidt, went to him about 10 days ago and warned him that he was in danger of losing the presidential election to Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, unless he revamped his campaign operation, two officials close to the campaign said.

Mr. Schmidt’s elevation is the latest sign of increasing influence of veterans of Mr. Rove’s shop in the McCain operation. Nicolle Wallace, who was communications director for Mr. Bush in the 2004 campaign (and in his White House) has joined the campaign as a senior adviser, and will travel with Mr. McCain every other week. Greg Jenkins, another veteran of Mr. Rove’s operation who is a former Fox News producer and director of the presidential advance team in the Bush White House, was hired by Mr. Schmidt last week after a series of what Mr. McCain’s advisers acknowledged were poorly executed campaign events.

[...]

Mr. McCain’s advisers said that Mr. Davis would continue to hold the position of campaign manager, but that Mr. Schmidt had taken over every major operation where Mr. McCain has shown signs of struggling: communications, scheduling and basic political strategy. Mr. McCain’s aides said Mr. Davis would focus now more on longer-term campaign efforts, including helping with the selection of a running mate and planning for the Republican National Convention, which is now just two months away.

[...]

Mr. Schmidt, who is 37, is one of the most intense, hard-driving figures in his party today: when he worked for Mr. Bush, his nickname in the campaign was “The Bullet,” a reference to the shape of his shaved head.  He has been at the center of some of the most politically significant Republican operations of the last 10 years. In working with Mr. Rove and Ken Mehlman, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, Mr. Schmidt has become immersed in the use of data-driven methods to find and turn out Republican voters.

He also ran the campaign’s war room, which was responsible for capitalizing on mistakes of opponents; Mr. McCain’s advisers said that one sign of Mr. Schmidt’s increasing influence in the campaign’s rapid response operation was the quickness with which it seized on a remark by Gen. Wesley K. Clark questioning whether Mr. McCain’s years in Vietnam gave him the experience he needed to be president.

Mr. Schmidt also ran the successful re-election campaign of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the California Republican who won in a Democratic state by embracing moderate positions on issues like the environment and gay rights.

This sort of thing is too inside baseball even for me.  There’s not much doubt that the McCain campaign seemed rather unfocused.  On the other hand, he’s remarkably close to Obama in the polls (currently trailing by an average of 5.4 percent), which is phenomenal given the current state of the Republican brand and the incredible amount of attention Obama has gotten owing to his prolonged primary battle with Hillary Clinton.

Then again, somebody has to be running campaign scheduling and strategy. That person can’t be the candidate.

“Somebody asked, ‘what’s the strategy behind this?’ ” Mr. Black said of the foreign travel. “It’s simple. McCain says he wants to go to these places, and we say of course.”

AllahPundit has more thoughts along those lines.  If Team McCain is going to be run by people who know what the hell they’re doing, it’s a good thing.

The principal objection, of course, will be the Rove angle.   Karl Rove is “an example of how not to do it,” the conventional wisdom now tells us.  But the “it” is decidedly not “running a competent campaign.”  Schmidt has risen to his current position with success.   Further, with McCain, the logical approach is to take the angle Schmidt successfully used in rebuilding Schwarzenegger’s appeal in California rather than the divide-and-conquer strategy for which Rove is infamous.

Marc Ambinder tells us that, “In the year and a half since McCain and Schmidt first got to know each other, the two have grown close, almost like father and son; each very deferential to the other. Schmidt has taught McCain how to be John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate — a different creature from just plain ol’ John McCain.”  That’s pretty much the definition of a good campaign manager.  For McCain to have any chance of winning this thing, he’s going to have to do it as McCain. But any candidate needs to be disciplined to focus on what matters rather than simply doing what interests them.

Photo: Charles Dharapak / Associated Press (Via Andrew Malcolm, LAT)

Arthur Silber is, as am I, fascinated by the cult of personality surrounding Barack Obama.  He notes some anecdotal creepy gushing on a local radio show and then

Reactions of this kind to Obama are fairly common. No, they are not this extreme much of the time, but such statements are far from unusual. And many of Obama’s less obviously deluded supporters fall along the same continuum. Take a look at the woozily sentimental, intellectually reprehensible remarks collected at the beginning of “Obama’s Whitewash,” the third excerpt here, and the comments here. Moreover, this kind of reaction — an emotion-driven response utterly devoid of coherent ideational content, a response that leads far too many people to be enthusiastically willing to believe virtually anything that Obama might proclaim and to follow him anywhere — is one that Obama and his campaign explicitly seek to elicit.

People had better wake the hell up, and they had better study some history very damned fast. I have sometimes remarked, and I repeat the warning here, that the twentieth century was a nonstop train of horrors — yet in one sense, the most terrible and horrifying aspect of the twentieth century is that we learned absolutely nothing from it.

Among the horrors of the twentieth century were several notable leaders who initiated events that led to slaughter and destruction on an ungraspably monumental scale. These charismatic leaders evoked a response from their followers almost identical to that called forth by Obama. These leaders specialized in “personal stories of political conversion.” Doesn’t anyone see the connection? Doesn’t anyone remember any of this?

This, incidentally, from a man who can scarcely imagine voting for a Republican.

James Benjamin goes further:

Although I seriously doubt that Obama is the next Hitler, his followers are every bit as authoritarian as those who followed Bush (or Schwarzenegger, as I seem to recall) just a few years ago, and that’s something a despot, a strongman would want.

[...]

I would not be at all surprised if either Obama himself were revealed to be some sort of wild card authoritarian in his own right, and/or numerous of his followers were wild card authoritarians – i.e., those who can pose as “leftists” but once in a position of power begin to crack down on dissent much like the right-wingers we all know and loathe. Obama’s own embrace of warmongers, neoliberals, and of course of the awful FISA bill that is likely destined to pass does not bode well for those who wish to continue arguing that he is “progressive” (whatever that is supposed to mean any more). The behavior by groups of Obama fanatics on some of the community blogs (lots of bully tactics as I recall) and the apparent efforts by Obama partisans to shut down individually run anti-Obama blogs is a relatively mild expression of that authoritarianism; we should keep in mind that we’re still early in the game.

Jesse Taylor believes this line of reasoning has guano-level sanity and snarks, “While he lacks any political element of fascism in his platform, he makes up for it in some people liking him a lot, which is like 60% of fascism anyway.”

Obama is quite possibly the most charismatic politician of my lifetime.  Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both had superb oratorical skills and charismatic personalities but neither made crowds swoon to the extent Obama does.  John Kennedy was murdered before I was born and it’s hard for me to assess him apart from the strange fascination and conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination plot.  Perhaps Dwight Eisenhower and, certainly, Franklin Roosevelt had it.

Like Silber, it worries me when people get so emotionally involved in their leaders.  I’m not concerned that Obama is going to annex Canada and start the ethnic cleansing of white working class Appalachians and people named Larry;  Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were evil men, not good ones who went mad with too much power.

Then again, I don’t think that George Bush or Arnold Schwarzenegger (or even Rudy Giuliani) are “authoritarians,” “despots,” or “strongmen,” either.  Executives naturally believe in the rightness of their cause and seek to push the envelope of their power when they’re being thwarted by inconvenient institutions.  Some do so more than others.

The problem with cults of personality in the American experience is it that it furthers our tendency to trust government to take care of us.  FDR was well meaning in constructing the New Deal and the vast machinery of government bureaucracy needed to support it to combat the unique challenges of the Great Depression; unfortunately, the solution long outlasted the crisis.  Similarly, I believe torture, rendition, habeus corpus suspension, the Department of Homeland Security, and the other over-reactions to the 9/11 attacks were well intentioned measures to make us safer.

Both Obama and his opponent, John McCain, have a streak of crusading righteousness in them that leads to a dismissiveness to criticism.  Some of our best and some of our worst presidents have had it.   Fortunately, we have a set of institutions — separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism — and a political culture that make realizing authoritarian ideals difficult.

via memeorandum

General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner has announced the closure of four truck and SUV plants in North America and says the Hummer brand may be discontinued altogether.

The civilian version of the Hummer came out as I was getting out of the Army and, frankly, I never much understood the appeal. I had spent enough time riding and even living in a military HMMWV to know what an unwieldy, uncomfortable vehicle it was. The smaller H2 and H3 variants that came out later were more drivable but never made sense to me at the high prices they were bringing.

Regardless, we’ve seen this happen before. In the late 1970s, everyone was shifting to small cars. The previously scoffed at Japanese brands Toyota, Datsun (later, Nissan), Honda, and Mazda were suddenly seen everywhere as the American Big 4 (American Motors, which made Jeep, was still in existence then) were scrambling to catch up. Diesel powered cars were a significant market niche and cars that got 50 miles per gallon were widely available.

A decade later, though, the trend reversed itself and people were demanding comfortable, powerful cars again. That’ll happen again if gas prices settle down or the industry figures out how to power their vehicles more efficiently.

Still, even with the rise of behemoth SUVs, we never saw the resurgence of the land yachts. Today’s “large” cars would have been classified as “mid-size” in the 1970s. If the Hummer goes away, it may never come back. I doubt we’ll see a wave of Desert Storm nostalgia.

Photo credit: HydrogenCarsNow

Right wing shock jock Michael Savage had fun at the expense of Teddy Kennedy while announcing that the senator had being diagnosed with a brain tumor.

Following the announcement that Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, nationally syndicated radio host Michael Savage opened his May 20 show by interspersing audio of Kennedy singing “Ay Jalisco No Te Rajes” with clips of news reporters discussing Kennedy’s diagnosis and audio from the 1990 film Kindergarten Cop in which Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character says, “It’s not a tumor.” Later, Savage played the Dead Kennedys song “California Über Alles” after stating: “The poor guy’s been suffering for years, you know? Unfairly he’s been accused of alcoholism, but we see now that it was something much more deep-seated. And so, to cut this out in some respect for Ted Kennedy, here’s a tune coming at you from the Dead Kennedys. Go ahead and play it, please.”

After reading from the lyrics of “California Über Alles,” Savage said, “No gloating today, no laughter, all serious. You don’t joke about a man’s cancer. I do it, but I won’t do it today; it’s something I will not do.” At one point in the program, he told a caller, “You know I’m playing the Dead Kennedys not to mock Ted Kennedy. It’s just appropriate, that’s all.”

While there’s no need to pretend to like a public figure with whom you have strong political disagreements — and in the case of Kennedy, perhaps serious qualms about his morality as well — it’s just in really poor taste to make fun of the fact that he’s likely dying. And to do so while claiming you won’t do it is beyond tacky.

It’s not exactly news that the Republican Party is in the doldrums at the moment. It lost control of both Houses of Congress in the 2006 elections, its president is at historic lows in the polls, it has lost a string of special elections and its incumbent Congressmen are retiring in droves, and the odds are better than even that they’ll lose the White House in the Fall.

As usually happens when one of the two major parties is in a down cycle, the pundits and activists alike come out of the woodworks proposing a plan to save the party — invariably by making it more suitable to their own particular preferences. The latest entrants in this fray are a superb long piece in the New Yorker by George Packer, “The Fall of Conservatism — Have the Republicans run out of ideas?” (via memeorandum) and a call by moderate California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for a “rebranding” of the GOP (via Glenn Reynolds).

Packer provides a look at the rise and fall of the modern Republican Party, which begins with Goldwater’s massive defeat in 1964 and a quick turnaround leading to Richard Nixon’s stunning blowout victory four years later.

[The Nixon] Administration adopted an undercover strategy for building a Republican majority, working to create the impression that there were two Americas: the quiet, ordinary, patriotic, religious, law-abiding Many, and the noisy, élitist, amoral, disorderly, condescending Few.

A more charitable characterization would be that the overwhelming majority of Americans saw their culture under assault from an urban elite and a sympathetic Supreme Court. But the battle lines are about right no matter how one looks at it.

Political tactics have a way of outliving their ability to respond to the felt needs and aspirations of the electorate: Democrats continued to accuse Republicans of being like Herbert Hoover well into the nineteen-seventies; Republicans will no doubt accuse Democrats of being out of touch with real Americans long after George W. Bush retires to Crawford, Texas. But the 2006 and 2008 elections are the hinge on which America is entering a new political era.

This will be true whether or not John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, wins in November. He and his likely Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, “both embody a post-polarized, or anti-polarized, style of politics,” the Times columnist David Brooks told me. “McCain, crucially, missed the sixties, and in some ways he’s a pre-sixties figure. He and Obama don’t resonate with the sixties at all.” The fact that the least conservative, least divisive Republican in the 2008 race is the last one standing—despite being despised by significant voices on the right—shows how little life is left in the movement that Goldwater began, Nixon brought into power, Ronald Reagan gave mass appeal, Newt Gingrich radicalized, Tom DeLay criminalized, and Bush allowed to break into pieces.

[...]

After Reagan and the end of the Cold War, conservatism lost the ties that had bound together its disparate factions—libertarians, evangelicals, neoconservatives, Wall Street, working-class traditionalists.

This isn’t a new observation — after all, the Soviet Union fell seventeen years ago now! — but it has in fact been difficult to keep that coalition together without a common enemy. Then again, the GOP has won two of the four presidential elections wrested control of the Congress for several years during that span. So, clearly, they must have had something to offer besides warmed over 1960’s bromides.

Rcently, I spoke with a number of conservatives about their movement. The younger ones—say, those under fifty—uniformly subscribe to the reformist version. They are in a state of glowing revulsion at the condition of their political party. Most of them predicted that Republicans will lose the Presidency this year and suffer a rout in Congress. They seemed to feel that these losses would be deserved, and suggested that, if the party wins, it will be—in the words of Rich Lowry, the thirty-nine-year-old editor of National Review—“by default.”

[...]

Pat Buchanan was less polite, paraphrasing the social critic Eric Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

I tend to agree with both Lowry and Buchanan. The party became the enemy it preached against for so many years, embracing big government solutions, a moralistic foreign policy, and a huge appetite for pork. The K Street Project, the cover-up of the Mark Foley scandal, the Duke Cunningham mess and similar events demonstrated that holding on to and capitalizing on power was more important to some of the party’s leadership than the principles they had campaigned on.

At the same time, though, young activists are always disappointed in their leaders. Even when there’s no corruption involved, politicians naturally engage in compromise, logrolling, and the other distasteful but necessary facets of governing.

Packer also engages in some unfair jibes, such as:

By the end of the century, a movement inspired by sophisticated works such as Russell Kirk’s 1953 “The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot” churned out degenerate descendants with titles like “How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must).”

Rather obviously, these aren’t aimed at the same audiences. The former was for the elites, the latter for the masses. Surely, there was plenty of nonsense in the 1950s (say, the various tracts of the John Birch Society) and plenty of quality nowadays (including some books cited elsewhere in Packer’s piece). A mass political movement will always have both highbrow intellectualism and populist red meat.

Schwarzenegger, campaigning last week with John McCain, had some advice: The party should be, well, more like Arnold.

“The Republican idea is a great idea, but we can’t go and get stuck with just the right wing,” Schwarzenegger said. “Let’s let the party come all the way to the center. Let those people be heard as much as the right. Let it be the big tent we’ve talked about. Let’s invade and let’s cross over that (political) center,” he said. “The issues that they’re talking about? Let them be our issues, and let the party be known for that.”

He observed that his own political opponents, including former Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, tried to define him in much the way McCain is being defined by Democrats – as joined at the hip with Bush. “It didn’t work,” he laughed. But “how does (McCain) beat the Democrats? By offering a better future. He needs to offer hope, he needs to go in and show he can solve the problem in Iraq and have better relations with other countries again … and bring the economy back.”

But Schwarzenegger didn’t need rebranding; his “brand” is a larger-than-life persona he created over the years. McCain can’t very well run as an action hero. Packer ends his piece, though, by noting that McCain might just well manage to win as, well, John McCain.

McCain appeared to a warm reception. I had seen him in New Hampshire, where he gave off-the-cuff remarks with vigor; when he is stuck with a script, however, he is a terrible campaigner. Looking pallid, he sounded flat, and stumbled over his lines—and yet they were effective lines, ones that Obama would do well to study. “I can’t claim we come from the same background,” McCain began. “I’m not the son of a coal miner. I wasn’t raised by a family that made its living from the land or toiled in a mill or worked in the local schools or health clinic. I was raised in the United States Navy, and, after my own naval career, I became a politician. My work isn’t as hard as yours—it isn’t nearly as hard as yours. I had an easier start.” He paused and went on, “But you are my compatriots, my fellow-Americans, and that kinship means more to me than almost any other association.”

That’s the right message and a powerful one. But, really, it’s not as different from Nixon’s as Packer’s revisionism would have us believe. McCain is trying to forge a common definition of what it means to be “American” and identifying himself as the candidate most able to protect those values. He’s got an uphill fight, going against a younger man with a lot less baggage, but he’s got a puncher’s chance.

What’ll be interesting, whether McCain wins or loses in the Fall, is what lessons the GOP takes from his campaign. If he loses, one suspects we’ll see calls for a return to a harder line conservatism, which could well relegate the Republicans to regional status for a while. If he wins, I suspect we’ll still see calls for a harder line conservatism, since McCain will have run under the conservative banner, but there will also be more push for a bigger tent.

John McCain was born on a U.S. Navy base overseas. The NYT’s Carl Hulse has an interesting article about whether McCain is Constitutionally eligible to be president.

Mr. McCain’s likely nomination as the Republican candidate for president and the happenstance of his birth in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 are reviving a musty debate that has surfaced periodically since the founders first set quill to parchment and declared that only a “natural-born citizen” can hold the nation’s highest office.

Almost since those words were written in 1787 with scant explanation, their precise meaning has been the stuff of confusion, law school review articles, whisper campaigns and civics class debates over whether only those delivered on American soil can be truly natural born. To date, no American to take the presidential oath has had an official birthplace outside the 50 states.

The short answer is that most legal scholars presume someone who was born a citizen, regardless of location, qualifies. But the question has never been tested in court.

That it’s even an issue at this stage is silly. The Founders had a not unreasonable concern in 1789 that the fledgling nation be led by someone with unquestioned loyalty but they made a mistake enshrining that in the Constitution. Now, though, the idea that an Arnold Schwarzenegger or a Henry Kissinger or John Shalikashvili shouldn’t be eligible to run for president is absurd.

UPDATE: Jim Lindgren has a detailed discussion of the common law meaning of “natural born” demonstrating that McCain would, of course, qualify. Of particular interest is this passage from Blackstone:

When I say, that an alien is one who is born out of the king’s dominions, or allegiance, this also must be understood with some restrictions. The common law indeed stood absolutely so; with only a very few exceptions: so that a particular act of parliament became necessary after the restoration, for the naturalization of children of his majesty’s English subjects, born in foreign countries during the late troubles. And this maxim of the law proceeded upon a general principle, that every man owes natural allegiance where he is born, and cannot owe two such allegiances, or serve two masters, at once. Yet the children of the king’s embassadors born abroad were always held to be natural subjects: for as the father, though in a foreign country, owes not even a local allegiance to the prince to whom he is sent; so, with regard to the son also, he was held (by a kind of postliminium) to be born under the king of England’s allegiance, represented by his father, the embassador.

To encourage also foreign commerce, it was enacted by statute 25 Edw. III. st. 2. that all children born abroad, provided both their parents were at the time of the birth in allegiance to the king, and the mother had passed the seas by her husband’s consent, might inherit as if born in England: and accordingly it hath been so adjudged in behalf of merchants. But by several more modern statutes these restrictions are still farther taken off: so that all children, born out of the king’s ligeance, whose fathers were natural-born subjects, are now natural-born subjects themselves, to all intents and purposes, without any exception; unless their said fathers were attainted, or banished beyond sea, for high treason; or were then in the service of a prince at enmity with Great Britain.

That has always been my understanding as well. The distinction is between bithright citizens — i.e., those who were citizens at the time of birth — and naturalized citizens, who who born citizens of another country and have to apply and be admitted to American citizenship, renouncing their former allegiance.

As an educational service here at OTB, I thought it might be useful to elucidate one of the more common logical fallacies: the fallacy of guilt-by-association. This is also sometimes known as the “Bad Company” fallacy.

The typical structure of an argument that incorporates the guilt-by-association fallacy is something along the lines of:

Person X supports idea I.
Person X is bad (or believes bad things).
Therefore, idea I is bad.

A more real world example of this might be:

Social security is a state funded old age pension.
Nazis supported state funded old age pensions.
Therefore, social security is bad.

Obviously, this argument is ridiculous, because whether a particular person or group supports an idea is irrelevant to the actual merits of the proposal.

Sometimes, this argument goes even further to suggest that support for an idea agreed to by a bad person or group means that anyone who supports the idea is a part of that group or agrees with their ideas. An example of this might be:

The Nazi Party supported building a large, national highway system.
President Eisenhower supported building a large, national highway system.
Therefore, President Eisenhower was a Nazi.

The flaw in the reasoning is clear at this point, too. Acceptance of a particular idea does not mean that one is a member of every group that accepts that idea.

Another variant of this logical fallacy is as follows:

Jeff Albertson voted for Arnold Schwarzenegger for governor.
Jeff Albertson believes that the Vulcan ritual of pon farr should enacted into law.
Therefore, Arnold Schwarzenegger believes that pon farr should be enacted into law.

As you can see, this demonstrates the same type of fallacious reasoning–in this case, one person’s support for a particular candidate must indicate that the candidate holds the exact same ideas, which is clearly spurious reasoning.

I hope you enjoyed this foray into some logical theory for today. Feel free to apply this lesson in your everyday life, not to mention your day-to-day thinking about current events. See you next time!

The 2008 primaries are dividing political parties, with significant numbers of Republicans saying they won’t support John McCain and many Democrats saying they can’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton. With this weekend’s endorsement of McCain and Barack Obama by California first couple Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver, respectively, we see splits within families as well.

Maria Shriver woke up Sunday morning and decided to surprise the audience at a rally for Senator Barack Obama in Los Angeles, materializing alongside Oprah Winfrey and telling the crowd she was there because she sought “an America that’s about unity.” But not the family kind. Ms. Shriver is a member of the Kennedy clan, and in the past week, her relatives have split over the Democratic race, publicizing their preferences on opinion pages and at campaign events.

With Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mr. Obama locked in a tight race before Tuesday’s voting, the campaign has turned into a gigantic family feud, with prominent and everyday Democrats splitting with spouses, siblings, parents and children. There is former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin (Clinton supporter) and his son James (Obama); Representative Charles B. Rangel (Clinton), his wife, Alma (Obama); the Rev. Jesse Jackson (Obama), his wife, Jacqueline (Clinton), and their sons (split).

Loretta and Linda Sanchez, the only sisters in the House of Representatives, have endorsed Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, respectively. And Penny Pritzker, a Chicago philanthropist, serves as Mr. Obama’s national finance chairman even as her brother, Jay Robert, holds fund-raisers across town for Mrs. Clinton.

“Within the family, for the first time you have different opinions,” Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican governor of California and Ms. Shriver’s husband, told The San Francisco Chronicle last week, around the same time Mr. Obama was calling his wife and coaxing her to his side. Three of Robert F. Kennedy’s children have endorsed Mrs. Clinton, while their mother, Ethel Kennedy, supports Mr. Obama, along with Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy and Representative Patrick J. Kennedy. “I’ve been in the family 30 years, and I’ve never seen that,” said Mr. Schwarzenegger, who has endorsed Senator John McCain.

[...]

In any election, members of the same families choose competing candidates. But while some primaries hinge on policy differences, this one also turns on the deep, perennial disagreements between parents and children, husbands and wives. Older family members argue with younger ones about experience versus freshness. Men and women question whether they operate on a level playing field. And when husbands and wives discuss the Clinton marriage, they often touch on raw issues within their own.

There’s more passion in this race than we’ve seen in quite some time. Certainly, it’s been generations since we’ve seen both parties have nomination battles this competitive at the same time.

Story via Memeorandum. Photo from Sydney Morning Herald.

RealClearPolitics‘ John McIntyre reminds us that the 2004 convention gave President Bush a large bounce in the polls, while the Democratic convention did next to nothing for John Kerry. He’s got an interesting theory on why that was:

Who did Karl Rove and the GOP strategists chose to put front and center on prime-time television for the American people? Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Zell Miller.

These prime-time speaking slots were not an accident. For a President who was struggling with sub-50% job approval ratings (ratings that many pundits felt would ensure his loss) these four speakers were meant to send a clear message to Independents and moderate Democrats that they were welcome – and wanted – in a big tent, majority Republican Party.

Starting Tuesday in the state that delivered George W. Bush the presidency in 2000 and in California yesterday and today with the Giuliani and Schwarzenegger endorsements, the Bush/Cheney baton has been passed to John McCain.

Many on the more conservative side of the Republican Party are balking now that the Schwarzenegger, Giuliani, McCain faction looks likely to be the standard bearer in 2008. But with President Bush’s approval ratings hovering in the low 30’s (as opposed to the high 40’s of 2004) and after the wipe out in 2006 where the GOP was annihilated in the Northeast and basically everywhere outside of the South, the Republican party is putting forth – either through luck, serendipity, or design – its most competitive general election candidate, by far.

With the country screaming for change and very ready for a Democratic president, George W. Bush would not win a third term. But if the Democrats nominate the divisive Hillary Clinton over the inspiring Barack Obama, John McCain will be in a very strong position to keep the White House in Republican hands, with one caveat.

Without Schwarzenegger, Giuliani and McCain voters in 2004 George Bush would have lost to John Kerry and without Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and evangelical voters in 2008 John McCain does not have a chance against Hillary Clinton.

He’s right on both counts.

With Michelle Malkin saying she wouldn’t vote for McCain over Hillary Clinton and the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, and Bob Novak questioning McCain’s conservative credentials, McCain clearly has a lot of work to do to persuade staunch conservatives that he has far more in common with them than they think.

At the same time, though, McCain’s strength as a general election candidate is that he’s not viewed as an extremist. The hard-line Republican platform on torture, immigration, and the environment is a sure-fire loser in November. Not only does it ensure the GOP will never again be a strong contender in places like California and New York but it means that purple states like Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, Ohio, and elsewhere are likely to slide into the blue column.

McCain needs the support of staunch conservatives to win the election. They’re a critical part of his base. But they’re a damned sight short of a majority.

Photo: Charles Dharapak, AP