Tag Archives: Democrats

Elizabeth Warren for president? Why does this seem so familiar?

23 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by in ACA, Clinton, Democrats, election, Elizabeth Warren, health care, Republicans

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By Greg Smith

It is downright sad to hear the growing chorus of Democrats calling for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA to run for president.

“Let’s get a liberal populist former Harvard law professor with little Senate experience and no legislative accomplishments to run for president because her speeches are electrifying,” shouts a participant at a Peace And A Metric Ton of Justice for Homeless Transsexuals protest in Boston, clutching her $11 free-trade soy frappe mocha. “Yeah, that’s what the country needs.”

The 2016 presidential election is shaping up to be tough on the Democratic Party. Obamacare will be the gift that keeps on giving, to Republicans.

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The hacking of Sony Pictures Studio and threats of violence against movie cinemas is going to hurt the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party in 2016. There is a persistent notion that the GOP is the party of the rich, but in reality the super-rich are at least if not more likely to financially support Democrats.

The super-rich have seen a belligerent foreign power cause many millions of dollars in damages to an American company on American soil and threaten violence against theaters, and get away with it. It makes one wonder if they now have a little more understanding of the general reality behind Col. Nathan R. Jessup, Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men: “. . . My existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.”

“You snotty little bastard!”

Most of the world’s governments do not follow Western notions of freedom and tolerance. Since U.S. merchant ships and crews in the Mediterranean Sea faced the threat of captivity and death at the hands of Barbary pirates – and New England merchants and bankers at home faced financial ruin — Americans have learned time and again that real or perceived weakness on our part is looked at merely as an opportunity by these enemies. Wealthy liberals are going to wonder if a little more fear of American power is necessarily a bad thing.

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The 2014 midterm election revealed the Democratic Party has a problem with white voters. Party officials may not yet even understand how the racially charged atmosphere that motivated the assassination of two on-duty police officers by a black man in New York City is going to sway the nation politically. White voters are not turned off by some protests and generally support legitimate agitation against injustice, but when protesters walk the streets calling for the murder of police, which shortly comes about, that is a recipe for continued white flight from the party of Jefferson.

The current unrest in New York City and across the country is nothing more than a pathetic political correctness run amok. The city is a bastion of liberalism that not only tolerated but silently approved of stop-and-frisk laws that mock the Constitution and the notion of personal freedom. Had stop-and-frisk been carried out on Wall Street, outside synagogues or in white neighborhoods there would have been a hue and a cry, but the heavily Democratic city was silent so long as minorities were the target. Now they want to pretend they care about all lives.

Hypocrites.   ©

Greg Smith is a freelance writer and political consultant who lives in Bantam, CT. His blog is found at www.betterfatthanfascist.com.

Voter Mobilization Begins and Ends With Candidates, Ideas

02 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by in 2014 Election, 52, 53, 54, Democrats, GOP, Republicans, runoff, Senate

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By Greg Smith

If you want to mobilize voters, give them good candidates and attractive ideas. Newt Gingrich understood that and led the Republican Party to an historic victory in 1994. By 2008 the party had forgotten this truism and has since suffered two defeats in presidential campaigns.

Now it is the Democratic Party’s turn to re-learn that lesson.

In 2012 the Obama campaign’s voter mobilization effort was credited as a main source of victory. Much has been written of it as a masterful use of technology to drive voter turnout by identifying and communicating at an individual level, even using Facebook pages to identify likely supporters to target in the ground game of phone calls and home visits.

In reality, the Republicans lost in 2012 because they nominated a bad candidate. I didn’t say a bad man, bad campaigner, bad debater or a potentially bad president. In 2012 I told everyone who would listen that Romney wouldn’t win the nomination because the GOP must have learned its lesson in 2008 about running another rich white guy who wants people to like him and believes some nebulous form of compassionate conservatism is a tonic for a lack of a specific plan and platform focusing on individual freedom. Republicans almost always fail when they try to soften their image and say ‘let’s be friends’ and only greatly succeed when running on specific plans.

In 2012 my prediction was almost correct. In the primaries Romney was the front-runner almost from the beginning, but couldn’t muster a majority of GOP support. Each time one of the rest of the pack would pull closer to Romney in the polls and then fade, another also-ran surged because Romney did not excite voters. They continued to look for an alternative in a group of poor candidates.

Romney won the 2012 nomination by default by pushing the usual generic Republican line that lacked a specific call to action. If you can’t even excite primary voters you can kiss the general election goodbye. In the end he only had real support from a plurality of Republicans who mistakenly think their party needs to soften its image rather than provide solid, specific ideas besides cutting taxes.

The conventional wisdom is Democratic candidates in 2014 have at least a small advantage in getting its base to turn out because of the lessons learned by the Democratic Party in Obama’s 2012 reelection. Predictions include Alaska Sen. Mark Begich driving large numbers of indigenous Alaskans, or Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina pushing enough blacks to vote to possibly pull out a narrow win. I disagree.

Politics is and will always be a game of ideas and candidates, in that order. Even a good idea needs a strong candidate building political support, and an otherwise personable candidate needs a platform to attract voters.

The impetus for the massive voter organization drives is the limit placed on how much of an individual’s political contribution can be used to expressly advocate for a candidate. Parties and political action committees can use the rest, called “soft money,” without limit for party-building activities like get-out-the-vote efforts. Since every possible dollar is shaken from the tree, parties have a lot of soft money with relatively few ways to spend it. There is a lot of pressure on parties and PACs to show donations have an influence. They have reason to point to the ground game as a necessary and useful expense.

The impact a get-out-the-vote drive can have on an election runs parallel to the quality of the candidate and platform. Run a gay vegan hairdresser for Congress in rural Texas and see how a sophisticated, well-funded get-out-the-vote drive helps.

Which begs the question, do Democrats have candidates with platforms that will benefit from a ground game? As hard as I am on the GOP for a lack of a platform, Democratic candidates have no platform either and have resorted to inflammatory statements on race and gender. What exactly are their plans if they won either the Senate or both houses? President Obama has refused to compromise with Republicans, and since GOP control of the House is considered a foregone conclusion, Democratic voters don’t have much to lose from a GOP Senate. Judicial nominees are about all, but with Obama nominating them Democrats don’t even have a motivating fear of another Antonin Scalia. A last minute knock at the door or phone call hardly seems like enough to overcome the disappointment Democrats have in Obama.

Get-out-the-vote drives do not begin days, weeks or months before an election. They begin the day after the previous election. Democrats have had, from most voters’ perspective, six years to make their case. Indications are they failed. Last-minute door knocking and phone calling comprise a bandage on a serious political wound.

As Sir Thomas More wrote in Utopia, “It is a wise man’s part rather to avoid sickness than to wish for medicines, and rather to drive away and put to flight careful griefs than to call for comfort.”

My view is Republicans in spite of themselves will wind up with at least 52 Senate seats with a good chance at 53. If turnout is lower than predicted they have a shot at 54. Of the eight Senate seats considered toss-ups, only New Hampshire seems out of reach.

We will have to wait and see if Harry Reid blames the Koch brothers when another Democrat is elected minority leader.   ©

Greg Smith is a freelance writer and political consultant who lives in Bantam, CT. His blog is found at www.betterfatthanfascist.com.

Nov. 4 Forecast: Rainy and Windy With A Chance of 54 GOP Senators

28 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by in 2014 Election, 52, 53, 54, Democrats, GOP, Republicans, runoff, weather

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By Greg Smith

Ironically, Republicans should be hoping Al Gore was right about global warming. If the year’s sluggish cyclone season cooks up a storm for Nov. 4, a small hurricane Hanna or Isaias could possibly mean 54 Republican senators.

The Southeast, from Texas to Virginia, has 13 Senate races including five considered toss-ups in Kentucky, North Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas and Louisiana. The election projections on RealClearPolitics.com on the 27 races considered leaning or solid toward either party appear to be on target, and these show the GOP with 45 likely seats, Democrats with 45, and 10 races that are statistically tied.

Of the 10 considered statistically even, seven are currently seats held by Democrats, and two of those look like certain GOP wins.

In Alaska, Republican challenger Dan Sullivan has been leading incumbent Democrat Sen. Mark Begich in the polls for two months. Begich would have a fighting chance in any other election, but he doesn’t have much in the way of accomplishments and is heading into a gale force wind that is President Obama’s unpopularity. In 2008 Begich managed to win by just 1.2 percentage points over an incumbent just convicted on corruption charges, the now deceased Sen. Ted Stevens. And of Alaskans who voted for a presidential candidate in 2008, 2.3 percent didn’t bother to vote for a Senate candidate, meaning if all the votes for the Republican presidential candidate had translated into a vote for Stevens, he still would have won. Alaska should be a GOP slam dunk.

In Louisiana, Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu is facing two Republicans in what amounts to a primary. Polls have her at about 40 percent, with neither GOP opponent anywhere near 50 percent. If no candidate receives 50 percent of the vote, a runoff between the top two would take place Dec. 6. Polls have Landrieu handily losing the likely runoff.

And in Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell has consistently led Democratic challenger Alison Grimes slightly in the polls and would likely be Senate majority leader in the event of a Republican Senate takeover. Kentuckians, who for years watched Sen. Robert Byrd of neighboring West Virginia turn the federal budget into an ATM for his state, are not going to throw that kind of political clout away. Just last year McConnell got a $3 billion earmark for a dam in Kentucky. It was a taste of things to come. Barring some major snafu, McConnell wins this race going away.

Of the other seven races considered a toss up, only New Hampshire seems a likely Democratic victory. Colorado Republican challenger Cory Gardner is slightly up in the polls against incumbent Democrat Sen. Mark Udall. Sen. Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican, has brought his poll numbers back from under 40 percent to just about tie with independent challenger Greg Orman. Orman’s poll numbers have been very consistent, but have dropped off very slightly. According to polls this race is considered a toss-up, but I seriously doubt on Election Day deeply Republican Kansas would possibly deny the GOP a majority in the Senate.

In Iowa, Republican Joni Ernst has consistently led Democrat Bruce Braley for the open seat being vacated by five-term Democrat Tom Harkin, as has Republican challenger Mark Cotton led Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor in Arkansas.

Only Georgia and North Carolina have had the Democrats slightly ahead in polls. In North Carolina, Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan has been ahead of Republican challenger Thom Tillis by about two percentage points while Libertarian candidate Sean Haugh is polling over five percent. Libertarians generally pull more votes from Republicans, and voters generally don’t like to vote for candidates who have no chance at winning. If Haugh supporters abandon him in the voting booth because it is such a close race, that could push Tillis over the top.

Democrat Michelle Nunn and Republican David Purdue running for the seat of retiring Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss are in a dead heat. As in Louisiana, if neither candidate gets 50 percent, the two candidates with the most votes will have a runoff Jan. 6, 2015. Libertarian candidate Amanda Swafford is polling four percent. If the election looks razor thin, Swafford supporters will have an incentive to vote for one of the major candidates, which at least won’t hurt Purdue, though he will be better off if a runoff is needed.

The likelihood of no candidate winning either Georgia or Louisiana on Election Day also helps Republicans, as they are more likely to go to the polls for special elections.

These closest races will decide who controls the Senate, and these races will be decided by voter turnout. Turnout is projected to be quite low, and a Gallup forecast shows Republicans hold a massive edge over Democrats in voter motivation and enthusiasm, similar to the advantages they held in 2010 when the GOP picked up 63 seats in the House.

Consider Colorado. Incumbent Democrat Mark Udall last year moved in favor of further gun control, while challenger Cory Gardner is pro-gun rights. Second Amendment advocates will eat bacon and wear fur while crawling through a PETA rally to vote, and the network that helped recall two pro-gun control state senators and forced another to resign last year will be working to get voters to the polls. Low turnout will be a huge benefit to Gardner, as it should be to every other Republican.

As the races now stand any major weather event – even just a cold snap — that covers a decent portion of the country should further impinge voter turnout and seal 53 seats for the GOP. A day of heavy rain could allow the GOP to take nine of the 10 close races.

While not quite probable, 54 Republican Senate seats is very possible —  and rather interesting. In any case, Republicans need 52 seats to prevent losing the Senate to a party switch. Considering its advantages at this point, anything less than 52 should be considered a disappointment.   ©

Greg Smith is a freelance writer and political consultant who lives in Bantam, CT. His blog is found at www.betterfatthanfascist.com.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2014/senate/2014_elections_senate_map.html

http://www.gallup.com/poll/178130/voter-engagement-lower-2010-2006-midterms.aspx

 

Tax Cuts Should Take Backseat to Spending Cuts, Reforms

08 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by in American Resurgence, Domestic Policy

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By Greg Smith

This is boring. This is dull. This is important.

For many years the standard Republican template for economic growth has been cutting taxes, but with an enormous national debt it is time to recognize tax cuts without spending cuts, tax and regulatory reform are almost meaningless. Today, whether you tax or borrow the money from the private sector the effects will be nearly the same.

In years past one of the favorite descriptions Republicans pinned on Democrats was “tax and spend.” Democrats wanted bigger government and were willing to raise taxes to pay for it. President Reagan’s massive tax cuts passed in 1981 were very sensible and when you look at the 33% increase in federal tax revenue in constant dollars from 1981 to 1990 the tax cuts more than paid for themselves. Military and social spending went up considerably, which was why the national debt increased in the 1980s.

Post-Reagan GOP

Comparing the Republican Congress of 1995-99 with the Bush administration, which enjoyed Republican control of Congress from 2001-07, show a considerably different agenda and outcome.

The elections of 1994 were such an enormous victory for Republicans that President Clinton was actually forced to explain why he was still even relevant. The Republican-controlled Congresses from 1995 through 1999 among other initiatives reformed welfare and farm subsidies while controlling spending increases, resulting in government much friendlier to economic growth and employment. Clinton was pretty much forced to go along. When he takes credit for the balanced budget toward the end of his term, he is taking credit for Republican plans he fought tooth and nail.

These were serious reforms with serious consequences: By 1999 the country was at four percent unemployment, which economists consider to be full employment. National debt actually began to be retired. Quite a contrast to the predictions made by detractors in 1995.

President Bush took office in 2001 and Republicans held both houses of Congress until 2007. Bush was never a conservative and was not much of an ideologue when it came to tightening the purse strings. While both the defense budget and social spending increased, Republicans stuck to the idea of lower taxes because it worked under Reagan, but when Reagan took office tax rates were much higher and a greater impediment to growth, so his cuts had the potential to unleash much more growth.

One of the basic arguments for Reagan’s tax cuts was the Laffer Curve, which argues government would collect zero tax revenue with tax rates of 0% or 100%. In the latter case no one would bother working on the books. Government would actually collect more money with 50% tax rates than at 90% tax rates because of the greater incentive to work. The truth of this is elemental.

But if tax rates continue to decline at some point government begins to collect less revenue. Where this point sits is an open question, but it explains tax cuts today – while they should still increase revenue and are justifiable on other grounds – are not going to produce the same increase in revenue as under Reagan because marginal tax rates are already much lower than in 1981. Tax cuts should produce slightly greater revenue, but tax cuts by themselves will not solve our debt problem. We cannot grow our way out of our debt without cutting regulation, waste and simplifying the tax code.

Continuing to spend as we are now requires borrowing, and borrowing money causes the same outcome as taxing: wealth is destroyed because it is taken from economically useful activities – the private sector which exists on its own merits – and given to the public sector in which only a fraction of the money is spent in a way that indirectly generates wealth-producing jobs.

Today, tax cuts without spending cuts are almost meaningless because whether you tax or borrow the money out of the economy matters very little, you still remove it from the private sector. The GOP should look at the successes of Congress from 1995-99 – reform, cut and simplify government bureaucracy and programs, and then consider tax cuts. Republicans fail to claim the success of this strategy at their electoral peril.  ©

Greg Smith is a freelance writer and political consultant who lives in Bantam, CT. His blog is found at www.betterfatthanfascist.com.