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OCTOBER 19-20, 2022

AND INTRODUCIN':   Do you know Kari Lake?  Hmm, maybe a little bit.  She's the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, and all we seem to hear about her is that she's controversial, a nut, and another example of a weak GOP choice.  But I wanted to find out for myself, and took some time this week to learn all I could about Kari Lake.  Others in this business are doing the same thing...because the new "word" on Kari is that she may be the hottest politician to come out of this year's elections.  She's all the buzz – a former newscaster who's smart, informed, attractive, poised, and willing to take on the press and spank it.  That doesn't mean you have to agree with her on everything, and you probably won't.  Rich Lowry has written an excellent portrait of her, and I think you should read it.  We may be seeing a lot of Kari in the next few years...if she wins on November 8th.  From Politico: 

Kari Lake is a dual frontrunner.

She is more likely than not to win her race for governor of Arizona, and then would have to be considered the favorite to become Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick should he win the Republican nomination again in 2024.

When Lake narrowly won the Republican gubernatorial nomination two months ago, it seemed the Arizona GOP had consigned itself to electoral oblivion. Lake is a “Stop the Steal” die-hard and political novice who, one assumed (certainly, I did), would suffer the fate of another Trump-endorsed true believer, the Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial nominee, Doug Mastriano, who consistently trails his opponent by about 10 points.

To the contrary, Lake has been a surprise. At the same time, she’s a reminder of the oldest of conventional political adages — candidate quality matters.

You can peddle conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and sink beneath the waves if you are a state senator with no especially notable political skills; or you can peddle conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and achieve liftoff if you are an exceptionally poised former news anchor.

Of course, Mastriano is the former and Lake is the latter, and that’s one key to their different trajectories.

A Lake win is by no means a lock. She’s ahead of Democrat Katie Hobbs by just 1.6 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average. Still, given the general political environment and how it is tilting further toward the Republicans, she’s clearly in a strong position.

Win or lose, there’s no doubt that a major political talent has emerged. Lake is the latest in a line of female champions of a grass-roots conservative populism that runs from Phyllis Schlafly to Sarah Palin to Marjorie Taylor Greene, spanning the 1950s to today.

These are wildly divergent figures. Schlafly had a deep seriousness of purpose and was one of the most consequential leaders of postwar conservatism; MTG trolls the libs and hopes to finagle a seat on the House oversight committee should Republicans take back the majority.

Yet there are common threads in this line of “momma bear” populists down through the decades: a fervent opposition to the elite; a disdain for the Republican establishment; a hatred for the press; a dark or frankly conspiratorial view of the world; a fervent base of support from activists and ordinary voters immune to influence by critical outside voices; and a fearlessness and instinctive combativeness that made or makes these women even more hateful to their opponents and admirable to their supporters.

What’s new about Lake and MTG is that loyalty to Donald Trump and the insistence that the 2020 election was stolen are now the litmus tests for this grassroots populism. When Phyllis Schlafly got her start in the 1950s, the intensity of someone’s anti-communism was the measuring stick.

A single-minded devotion to 2020 election denialism is not the most natural calling card in a closely contested state like Arizona. This is why Lake seemed like such a poor choice for the GOP. Her other attributes, though, have made up for her poisonously outrageous views on the elections.

As a local news anchor in Phoenix for 20 years, she entered the race with built-in name recognition and a reservoir of credibility that have stood her in good stead. It’s a little as if Walter Cronkite, back when network anchors were still near the height of their powers, up and decided to jump in the Democratic primary against President Jimmy Carter in 1980.
Then, there’s the fact that Lake loves the microphone and camera, and they love her back. She has communication skills that an army of consultants could never impart to a candidate with less experience. Lake has basically had more than 20 years of media training, and it shows.

At a rally with Tulsi Gabbard this week that involved a sit-down conversation with the former Democratic congresswoman on stage, Lake could have been mistaken for the celebrity MC. She was fluid and in control. Not a word was out of place. She seamlessly interwove pleasant chitchat with her campaign message, which, with an emphasis on the border, education and water issues, hardly sounded radical.

COMMENT:  Read the rest, and try to see Lake on television.  Whether you like her or her positions, I think you'll agree that a star is being born.

October 19-20, 2022       Permalink

YOU CANNOT MAKE THIS UP:  Is Stacey Abrams trying to lose the Georgia governorship race, or does she really understand her base?  It is impossible to answer that question, but her latest venture into advanced political philosophy must be rewarded with some kind of prize.  From Hot Air:

Er … what?

Just how desperate are Democrats to sell abortion in this midterm cycle dominated by inflation and crime? Stacey Abrams demonstrates here in an exchange with Mike Barnicle this morning on Morning Joe. Barnicle points out that Democrats’ attempts to use abortion to distract from the issues that matter most to voters in the cycle have flopped.

Abrams responds by claiming that abortion is a solution to inflation. And I’m not kidding:

BARNICLE: You’re running for governor of Georgia. I would assume, maybe incorrectly, but while abortion is an issue-20, it nowhere reaches the level of interest of the voters in terms of the cost of gas, food, bread, milk, things like that. What can a governor — what could you do as governor to alleviate the concerns of Georgia voters about those livability, daily, hourly issues that they’re confronted with?

ABRAMS:  But let’s be clear. Having children is why you’re worried about your price for gas. It’s why you’re concerned about how much food costs. For women, this is not a reductive issue — you can’t divorce being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy from the economic realities of having a child. And so these are — it’s important for us to have both/and conversations. We don’t have the luxury of reducing it or separating it out.

Exactly how does an abortion lower inflation? I’m curious about this, as an amateur economist. It might lower demand on a micro level, but it doesn’t do anything on a macro level to buying power or prices. In the long run and at the scale practiced in the US, it might depress demand a bit, but it will also depress production at the same time if it has that kind of impact — which makes it a wash.

As for concern over prices and the erosion of buying power, Abrams is also wrong. Everyone’s worried about those rising costs and diminishing real wages, of course, whether they have children or not. However, younger families have more options for scaling up their buying power. Inflation hammers hardest on people with fixed incomes and savings — retirees and others similarly situated who are unlikely in the extreme to reproduce. What will an abortion do for them, economically speaking?

And on a moral plane, this is just disgusting. People who don’t want to get pregnant should adjust their procreative activities rationally for that outcome. Once they have reproduced, however, the child should not have to pay for the parents’ irresponsibility in lacking the will to prevent that unwanted outcome. As a human being, the child has a right to life that transcends its economic cost. Abrams takes the utilitarianism that drives abortion (as well as euthanasia) and makes it even more grotesque in her attempt to stay relevant.

This is nothing but desperation on the part of Abrams, whose main claim to fame was election denialism until November 2020 made it out of fashion. She’s a radical extremist who couldn’t get elected in a Democrat wave election in 2018, and this is a great example of why.

COMMENT:  Abrams is simply not a big-league player.  She's a local politician with a fan club, for some reason.  Republican Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia, who is running for re-election, is ahead of her in the polls, and appears likely to defeat her.

I've seen and heard blunders by candidates, but suggesting abortion as a weapon against inflation is one of the worst.

October 19, 2022       Permalink

OCTOBER 18,  2022

WE CAN DREAM, CAN'T WE?  There is a real chance that our fading state of New York will have a Republican governor.  From the New York Post: 

In politics, as in sports, underdogs are often the most interesting people. Modest except in ambition, they take nothing for granted while daring to dream that anything is possible.

Lee Zeldin is one of those people. Until recently, he was relatively unknown outside his Long Island congressional district, but he’s now on the cusp of playing David to Gov. Hochul’s Goliath.

A series of surveys in recent weeks has showed the race tightening, and a big jolt came Tuesday when the Quinnipiac poll put him behind by just four points.

Now there can be no doubt — the race is a toss-up.

It’s a stunning development in a state where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by 2-1 and no GOP candidate has won a statewide race in two decades. But independents favor Zeldin by 20 points, the poll finds, and it shows him getting 37% support in the city, double what recent GOP statewide candidates got.

As he and others have noted, a Republican has no chance of winning the state with less than 30% in the five boroughs.

If the numbers in the Q poll are right, and if Zeldin can hold the city support and add to his leads in the suburbs and upstate, he will pull off a remarkable upset.

One arrow in his quiver among suburban voters is that he opposes expensive congestion pricing in the city, which Hochul supports. It would take effect next year.

So the trend is his friend, and Zeldin knows it.

We have the momentum and we have the right issues,” he told me Tuesday. “We also have a clear sense of purpose.”

He describes that purpose succinctly: “To save our state,” and adds: “I have been busting my tail every day to save New York while Kathy Hochul is trying to save herself by crawling across the finish line.”

He’s not alone in questioning Hochul’s approach, which is best described as an extreme version of a Rose Garden strategy. Extreme as in she has hardly campaigned, limiting her public appearances mostly to government ribbon cuttings and bland speeches.

It’s the kind of strategy often employed by incumbents in good times. But these are far from good times for many New Yorkers, so even some pollsters are baffled about what she’s thinking.

“I have no idea, it makes zero sense,” one said.

It’s not that the governor doesn’t have a clear agenda — it’s that she doesn’t have an agenda at all, at least one she’s told voters about. She’s keeping to herself any plan for what she would do if elected to a full term after taking office when the disgraced Andrew Cuomo resigned. Nor does she have a roster of surrogates who speak for her.

COMMENT:  Ah, just the thought of an upset by Zeldin restores my morale and makes me young again.   We need help here in New York State, and Zeldin is that help.  He has the right ideas and the right spirit...but he's up against a powerful Democratic machine that largely depends on zombie voters who will pull the Democratic lever even if it meant voting for Dracula.

Zeldin must pour on extra heat in these next three weeks, and the GOP must have a superb get-out-the-vote system on election day.  This can be done.

October 18, 2022       Permalink

A VERY HOT CASE:  The Supreme Court will soon take up a case as controversial as Roe v. Wade.  Prepare for fireworks, possible street demonstrations, and virtue signaling on an industrial scale.  From College Fix: 

Ivy League universities have signaled support for Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the Supreme Court prepares to begin hearings on affirmative action cases against both universities on October 31. 

In a joint amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court for the case, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 15 prestigious universities joined together in support of Harvard’s admissions practices, including all seven other Ivy League institutions.

Other signers included the University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon University and Duke University.
“
[Harvard’s] experience has demonstrated that the optimal means of creating a diverse student body—and thereby achieving Amici’s educational objectives— involves a limited consideration of race and ethnicity in admissions,” according to the brief.

“As the district court concluded in the Harvard trial, the evidence before the court ‘convincingly establish[ed] that no workable race-neutral alternatives [would yield] the level of racial diversity … necessary’ to achieve Harvard’s educational goals,” according to the brief.

The race-neutral admissions policy proposed by Students for Fair Admissions “would lead to a near 33% reduction in the number of African American students admitted, absent other admissions policy changes,” the brief stated.

The lawsuits, filed by , contend white and Asian-Americans students are unlawfully discriminated against as the universities use so-called holistic admissions approaches that favor Black, Hispanic and Native American applicants because of their ethnicity.

Students for Fair Admissions is a “nonprofit membership group of more than 20,000 students, parents, and others who believe that racial classifications and preferences in college admissions are unfair, unnecessary, and unconstitutional,” according to its website.

The Fix reached out to representatives at each of the 15 schools listed as parties in the amicus brief for comment in early September and again in October to ask what outcomes they foresee and how their own schools address questions of racial discrimination in the  admissions process. It has not received a response.

Some legal scholars have argued that the Supreme Court should strike down the use of affirmative action for admissions. The New Criterion compiled responses for an issue on the topic.

“There is no basis for this immunity in the Constitution; it’s simply a doctrine made up out of whole judicial cloth because courts don’t want to hear these kinds of suits,” University of Tennessee College of Law Professor Glenn Reynolds wrote. “But eliminating it would place both elected and unelected officials under considerably more pressure to follow the Constitution and the law.”

University of California Berkeley law professor John Yoo provided a history of Supreme Court cases that ended racial discrimination and argued that the same should happen this term.

Yoo wrote that he hopes the Court’s “misbegotten acceptance of express racial preferences in higher education” will soon end. “The Court has steadily banned racial discrimination in almost every other part of public life,” Yoo wrote for the New Criterion. He listed a number of past rulings that the Court should look to in his opinion.

COMMENT:  There is no issue more divisive than affirmative action.  It fundamentally holds that, in order to achieve a desirable social objective, some racial discrimination must be permitted.  But racial discrimination is inherently unconstitutional.  And why is "diversity," which only seems to favor certain groups popular on the left, so important? 

This case gives us a chance for a national conversation on these issues.  But I doubt that the press, in its current state of leftist supremacy, will allow it.

October 18, 2022       Permalink