RSS Feed MenuConservatives on radio and the web are preparing to hail a Doug Hoffman victory in NY-23, if it occurs, as a mighty victory for the fire-breathing style. Jonah Goldberg summed up the prevailing mood at NRO yesterday:
The story is not that the GOP is self-destructing, it is that the conventional wisdom is being shown to be ludicrous. For some time now Frank Rich, Sam Tanenhaus and countless others (including David Frum) have been arguing that the GOP is a rump party and the only way for it to survive is for it to embrace me-too Republicanism of one flavor or another. The story of all three major races (VA, NJ, and NY-23) is that this conventional wisdom was incandescently wrong and ill-advised. Hoffman and McDonnell owe their success to the support of independents (the independents all of these people said wanted moderate, Democrat-lite policies) and to Republicans determined to stay true to conservative principles. Not only was the conventional wisdom wrong, the idea that there’s a “civil war” within the GOP revolving around this argument is nonsense. The GOP is an unapologetically conservative party, providing a choice not an echo, and — horror of horrors — it’s working.
This is a deeply unrealistic assessment. In two of the three most watched races in the country, the candidate of the president’s party is running neck and neck against his main challenger – in the midst of the worst recession since World War II.
This is what you call a conservative politics that is “working”? What would it look like if conservative politics were failing?
It’s instructive to compare the elections one year into the Obama administration with the elections of 1993, one year into the Clinton administration. In 1993, Republicans narrowly defeated an incumbent governor in New Jersey and an incumbent mayor in New York City. For good measure, Republicans also won the mayoralty of Los Angeles 54-46 and won the governorship of Virginia 58-41.
On Tuesday, by contrast, we will likely see squeakers in New Jersey and the special election in New York’s 23d congressional district.
Why so much more successful 16 years ago than today?
Two reasons: programs and candidates.
In 1993, the big problems of the voting cities and states – crime, disorder and excessive local taxation – could convincingly be laid at the doors of out-of-touch Democratic administrations. Republicans offered credible alternatives: welfare reform, broken windows policing, and reform of government spending.
Today’s big problem is the economy of course. Republicans and conservatives would like to blame the recession on the president. In time perhaps that accusation will gain greater credibility. For now, though, it’s still George Bush’s recession and we remain George Bush’s party.
The second difference between 1993 and 2009 are the candidates. Back then, Republicans nominated the pro-choice Christie Todd Whitman to run in New Jersey, the former Bobby Kennedy supporter Rudy Giuliani in New York, and the pro-public transit Richard Riordan in Los Angeles – at the same time as they backed George Allen in Virginia. That’s what national governing coalitions do.
But where are the Richard Riordans of today? John Cornyn is working hard to recruit them for next year’s Senate races. But if the message of 2009 is that the Carly Fiorinas and the Charlie Crists are unwelcome in the GOP – his job is about to get a lot harder. And David Axelrod’s is about to get a lot easier.
divinitas // Nov 3, 2009 at 12:07 am
It’s amazing what strong emotions this race brings to republicans and conservatives. It’s like watching a fight between between blue dog democrats and progressives. I’ve read this site for a few months now and didn’t feel compelled to write til now.
There are way TOO many outsiders poking their nose into this race. The time and money spent on NY-23 should of been spent convincing Americans of an alternative healthcare plan that will provide them with some security or on how to get their jobs back – what a stupid distraction!
However, many of the earlier statements regarding the demographics of the country are true. Urban areas are becoming more dense and with that a tendency to be more democratic, diverse and socially liberal. I don’t think this should be ignored.
Socrates // Nov 3, 2009 at 1:01 am
In an off year, these races mean as much as or as little as the pundits and the spinmeisters make them out to be. They give people something to pontificate. By this time next year, who knows what will happen. A year in politics is a long time. Just go back to November 2007 and re-read the old newspaper. The pundits were certainly singing a different song then what happened in November 2008.
This also goes for the GOP infighting in NY23. It too will pass. Next year, when hundred of races are on, who knows what will happen.
Meanwhile, people go on with their life! Yet, for the life of me, I don’t know why we care so much about future predictions, knowing that guesses of the experts are just about as good as ours.
cicerorising // Nov 3, 2009 at 4:43 am
I am really confused David- so maybe you can explain something to me.
You write that the GOP did so much better in 1993 because it:
1) Barely won the NJ Gub race with a pro-choice moderate C. Whitman over a Dem incumb.
2) Won a huge victory in the Virginia Gub race
3) Won the NYC Mayoral election.
and
4) Won the LA Mayoral election.
Now it looks as if tomm. the GOP/conservative movement, will:
1) Narrowly defeat a Dem incumb. in the NJ Gub. election, but this time with a pro-life Republican.
2) Massively win the Virginia Gub election
3) Win the NYC Mayoral election
4) Win a special election in a Republican district that was recently carried by Obama, despite the fact that the candidate (Hoffman) was not an official party candidate.
and finally
5) Come much closer to victory in an overwhelmingly democrat district in California.
But because Tony Villers had no real opposition (hardly surprising considering he is the first modern Hispanic mayor of Los Angeles) in his re-elect campaign (despite it being a non-partisan election) this somehow means that the GOP is doomed.
???
Come on.
NY-23 « Benighted Comment // Nov 3, 2009 at 5:35 am
[...] PDRTJS_settings_322334_post_1250 = { "id" : "322334", "unique_id" : "wp-post-1250", "title" : "NY-23", "item_id" : "_post_1250", "permalink" : "http%3A%2F%2Fbenightedcomment.wordpress.com%2F2009%2F11%2F03%2Fny-23%2F" } From Mark Steyn: Incidentally, it’s not just the Associated Press that’s pre-emptively dismissing any Republican victories on the morrow as a mere dead-cat bounce on the plummet into the abyss. So is the proprietor of the former New Majority. [...]
Churl // Nov 3, 2009 at 9:01 am
ottovbs, you sound somewhat bitter right now. Wait for a while before you get too upset. Shortage of military absentee ballots in VA may help your candidate for governor, SEIU and some ghostly partner of ACORN are fiddling votes in NY-23, and the NJ electoral technicians are doubtless working their wonders. Your guys may win yet.
Keep the faith!
ProfNickD // Nov 3, 2009 at 9:04 am
Ken Longo,
Illinois, California, Pennsylvania, Michigan and New York will still be solidly “Blue” and still count for huge percentage of Electoral Votes in 2012.
You evidently didn’t read what I posted, likely because you are one of those who have faith in the magical importance of the northeast.
These places are dying.
TX, FL, GA, VA is where the growth is — and they never were “reliably Republican.” They’ve been Democratic through their entire history until the conservative/Reagan Revolution.
ottovbvs // Nov 3, 2009 at 9:31 am
Churl // Nov 3, 2009 at 9:01 am
“ottovbs, you sound somewhat bitter right now.”
……Your powers of invention remain in full vigor I see.
ottovbvs // Nov 3, 2009 at 9:38 am
32 franco 2 // Nov 3, 2009 at 9:06 am
” I see little has changed here except that otto still feels the need to spew his leftist bile and apparently has no life .”
……In your absense you missed I was MIA for a month having no life in Italy and the UK……..certainly nothing has changed with you……you’ve still got your complex about David…..but then nothing is going to change because this site essentially performs the function of the argument room in that Monty Python skit……do you want a $5 argument or a $20 one?…….now I have to leave you to waste more of my life getting my boat out of the water.
sinz54 // Nov 3, 2009 at 10:37 am
divinitas: Urban areas are becoming more dense and with that a tendency to be more democratic, diverse and socially liberal.
Urban areas are not becoming more dense. Large swaths of Detroit have become virtual ghost towns.
Suburban areas have grown enormously (horrifying those liberal thinkers who detest “suburban sprawl”; they should think about where their votes come from). And suburbia, once a Republican stronghold, has become a Democratic stronghold. Why? Because suburbanites tend to be fairly libertarian in their outlook; they moved there from the cities to have a home with some privacy and land they could call their own. The Religious Right, with its advocacy of “Christian values” supported by law and Constitutional Amendments, is antithetical to this suburban libertarianism. The GOP could win those areas back, if it sounded more libertarian and less traditionalist. But the GOP doesn’t have many such candidates.
sinz54 // Nov 3, 2009 at 10:43 am
ProfnickD: TX, FL, GA, VA is where the growth is — and they never were “reliably Republican.”
TX, GA, and VA were all Republican strongholds until Bush’s failures chased away many voters in VA. FL, while not quite a Republican stronghold, certainly leaned Republican because of the Cuban-Americans there.
But picking up some 12 electoral votes in 2012 won’t help us much. In 2012, if Obama holds on to all the states he won in 2008, he will still win by 140 electoral votes.
At that rate, it could take 30 years before the electoral votes of the Northeast become so depleted that the GOP could win mostly by the votes of the South.
Besides, you’ve also ignored the huge influx of Hispanic voters into the Southwest and West, who mostly vote Dem and are threatening to pull those states into the Dem camp. Bush tried to appeal to Hispanic voters with immigration reform. The right wing of his own party, much of which opposes even LEGAL immigration of Hispanics because they know those Hispanics will vote against them, shot down Bush’s immigration reform.
sinz54 // Nov 3, 2009 at 10:53 am
balconesfault: whether the conduct of the campaigns will say anything significant with respect to the intra-party political fights going into 2010.
Even if the GOP had been a little smarter, and picked a center-right candidate instead of Scozzafava, challenges to other GOP “RINOs” were coming. I read RedState.com and I can see what they’re planning, regardless of what happens in NY-23.
Long before NY-23 became a big fight, the RedStaters were planning to back Marco Rubio to challenge Charlie Crist in FL. They’re also targeting Mark Kirk in IL. And those will be bigger problems for the GOP than NY-23.
If Crist beats Rubio fair and square in the primary, will the RedStaters close ranks behind Crist and work to defeat the Dem in November 2010? From what they’ve written, I expect that most (though not all) of them will. The FL TeaPartiers, on the other hand, have already said that they will not. They have said that they would prefer that any moderate Republicans lose, even if it means that the Dems win more seats and governorships.
sinz54 // Nov 3, 2009 at 12:06 pm
ottovbs: I was MIA for a month having no life in Italy and the UK
Shame on you for going AWOL!
A true political junkie would have taken his laptop with him, found an ISP in UK and Italy, and connected to New Majority from there.
Reason60 // Nov 3, 2009 at 12:43 pm
Richard Riordan, our former mayor of LA, exemplifies why the Tea Party will be a trainwreck on the GOP; mayors by job description have to be pragmatic managers- you can huff and puff all day about John Adams and Ayn Rand, but at the end of the day, the trash needs to be picked up, and potholes filled.
This requires a working coalition of diverse and parochial interests, mutual backscratching, and the messy muddy workings of politics.
The Tea Party purity drive just doesn’t work in a managerial situation- even if magically half the nation’s mayors and governors became Tea Party conservatives tomorrow, they would still have to contend with this same equation; and either they would compromise and become centrists, or get taken out with the trash at the next election cycle.
franco 2 // Nov 3, 2009 at 12:55 pm
“deeply unrealistic”…. projection David, projection. You are desperate to spin this by selectively characterizing Republicans of yore…I.E Giuliani a former Bobby Kennedy supporter! It is not just grasping at straws – it is grasping at the memory of straws long past… I too was a Kennedy supporter at one time… I also at one time could not add subtract and divide. If Bobby Kennedy were alive today statists like Frum would decry them as too conservative and out of the mainstream claiming that his zealous overreach got his own brother killed by the mafia or some such thing.
Incidentally I just voted for a statist Republican (and a fat guy to boot) so don’t y’all say I’m not a “team player”. Chris Christie is definitely an improvement over Corzine and in this case I’m not going to throw away my vote on a third party.
Why is Frum mum on the endorsement by the Republican star/nominee of the 23rd endorsing the Democrat? No POSSIBLE way to spin that even for a Yale poli-sci grad with a propensity to fudge and distort. It has to be embarrassing to him and other statist Republicans who have to witness with us the ideological depravity that infects the R party . More Colin Powell Republicanism….endorse Democrats and then lecture the rest of us…
franco 2 // Nov 3, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Mark Steyn in The Corner writes:
This is where David Frum & Co miss the point: I’m all for growing the base, expanding the coalition, etc. But the Scozzafava candidacy was a characteristic example of the tin-eared faux-sophistry that does nothing but blow your own foot off. It’s a shame over 900 grand’s worth of good people’s donations at a time of recession should have to be tossed out of a moving vehicle on the Adirondack Northway to demonstrate the obvious point that nobody needs Scozzafava Republicanism.
balconesfault // Nov 3, 2009 at 4:32 pm
If Bobby Kennedy were alive today statists like Frum would decry them as too conservative and out of the mainstream claiming that his zealous overreach got his own brother killed by the mafia or some such thing.
thanks for sharing your … ummm … opinion
Churl // Nov 3, 2009 at 4:57 pm
reason60 says, “…but at the end of the day, the trash needs to be picked up, and potholes filled.
This requires a working coalition of diverse and parochial interests, mutual backscratching, and the messy muddy workings of politics.”
Well, perhaps in Chicago or LA you need to deal with diverse and parochial interests and scratch backs to get the trash picked up or potholes filled. This not everywhere the case.
franco 2 // Nov 3, 2009 at 6:12 pm
You’re welcome balcone anytime…What’s yours? Oh, everyone who is the least bit to the right of you is a raving maniac, I forgot…
balconesfault // Nov 3, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Oh, everyone who is the least bit to the right of you is a raving maniac, I forgot…
Nice strawman. But no, there are many who are to the right of me who I consider intelligent actors, valuable in any policy discussion.
Unfortunately, these days those same people are largely being expelled from the Republican Party as RINOs. Often, it’s simply one position they may hold … be it being pro-choice … or favoring government action to slow the emissions of CO2 … or being in favor of raising taxes in some forms as part of a strategy to reduce the deficit … and suddenly they are now on the wrong side of a line.
There are no doubt some who disagree with me on pretty much everything who aren’t maniacs, for the simple reason that they start with a different set of presuppositions – but they are internally consistent within a framework, and modify their beliefs to fit evidence presented to them, and don’t go on the attack when contradictory evidence is presented, but rather weigh it to consider whether they believe it, and how it may affect their original beliefs.
That’s acting rationally. Doesn’t mean that I’ll agree with them at the end of the day, but I can at least see that they got somewhere out of logic, and not simply reactionary thinking.
sinz54 // Nov 4, 2009 at 10:12 am
franco 2: Incidentally I just voted for a statist Republican (and a fat guy to boot) so don’t y’all say I’m not a “team player”. Chris Christie is definitely an improvement over Corzine and in this case I’m not going to throw away my vote on a third party.
I assume folks like you favor Rubio over Crist, right?
OK, let’s suppose Crist manages to beat Rubio and win the primary fair and square. Will you close ranks behind Crist and work to get him elected in November 2010? Or will you stalk off in a huff and refuse to support him because he wasn’t your guy?
sinz54 // Nov 4, 2009 at 10:12 am
franco 2:
The reason I asked you that question, is because the FL Tea Partiers already said that if Crist wins the primary, they won’t support him. In fact, they actually said that if Crist wins the primary, they hope he loses to the Dem in November 2010.