Pelosi's Victory, and Other Election News
THE SCRAPBOOK is pleased to see so many national Democratic leaders whistling a happy tune after last Tuesday's elections. It's always good to know that one's political opponents enjoy a rich fantasy life.
Take House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "From our perspective, we won last night," the San Francisco Democrat told reporters on the morning after. "We had one race that we were engaged in, it was in northern New York, it was a race where a Republican has held the seat since the Civil War. And we won that seat. So, from our standpoint, . . . a candidate was victorious who supports health care reform, and his remarks last night said this was a victory for health care reform and other initiatives for the American people."
It must have been sheer unfortunate coincidence, then, that Rep. John Adler, a New Jersey Democrat, announced on Friday that he was going to vote against Pelosi's health care bill. As the Wall Street Journal's Peter Landers noted, "Adler's state, of course, was the scene of a big Republican win this week when Chris Christie defeated incumbent Democrat Jon Corzine in the New Jersey gubernatorial race. Seeking his first term in Congress last year, Adler squeaked to victory with 52 percent of the vote, and he's one of the many Democratic freshmen who's vulnerable to a Republican challenge in 2010. The seat had long been held by GOP Rep. Jim Saxton who retired last year."
The governor's race in New Jersey, aside from three electioneering appearances by Barack Obama, must not have been one that Democrats "were engaged in," by Pelosi's lights. We're sure she will manage to straighten Mr. Adler out on that.
Meanwhile Democratic Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin of South Dakota also announced her opposition to Pelosi's bill on Friday, as did Idaho Democrat Walt Minnick. What an odd reaction, given their party's "victory for health care reform" in Tuesday's elections!
Michael Barone, the political analyst and Washington Examiner columnist, drilled down into the election results deeper than Pelosi must have. Among his other findings:
Bergen County, New Jersey, a 56-42 percent Corzine constituency in 2005, came within a point or two of voting for Christie. Westchester County, New York, voted 58-42 percent for a Republican county executive, Rob Astorino, after voting almost exactly the opposite way in his race against the same candidate, Democratic incumbent Andy Spano, four years ago. The Virginia Board of Elections results by congressional district showed that three Democrats who captured seats in 2008 by very narrow margins (the Second, Fifth, and Eleventh districts) saw their districts go to Republican Bob McDonnell by whopping margins (24 points, 22 points, and 10 points, respectively).
Barone believes this last fact will not be lost on those freshman Democrats, or presumably on other Democrats who aren't drinking the Pelosi Kool-Aid.
What happened in Westchester County, by the way, to prompt such a radical reversal? Walter Olson of the Manhattan Institute has a theory that won't be welcome news to the Obama administration:
Taxes were a key issue, but so was the county's consent to what was billed as a landmark housing-reform settlement in which it agreed to arm-twist affluent towns into accepting low-income housing. Many Westchester residents were wary of the potential consequences--and downright insulted when Spano suggested that to resist the lawsuit further would be to make the generally liberal-leaning county a "symbol of racism." The federally brokered settlement is itself of interest far beyond Westchester, if only as the occasion of a truly remarkable rhetorical flourish from an Obama Administration official, HUD deputy secretary Ron Sims: "It's time to remove zip codes as a factor in the quality of life in America." It was also hailed at once in some quarters as a model for similar legal action against other suburban jurisdictions considered guilty of not being hospitable enough to low-income housing. The Westchester voter revolt . . . may serve as a signal to local officials elsewhere to fight, rather than roll over, when the social engineers and their lawyers come knocking.
THE SCRAPBOOK wishes Nancy Pelosi many more victories like the one she enjoyed last week.
Heckuva Medal, Dr. Joe Medicine Crow
George W. Bush was rightly pilloried for flying in to inspect the damage done by Hurricane Katrina and lapsing into hack-politician mode on an occasion that called for something finer: "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job," he said of his hapless FEMA director Michael Brown.
Barack Obama's crack communications team put out word last Thursday that the president would make his first statement on the massacre at Ft. Hood at 5 P.M., during his previously scheduled appearance at the Department of Interior's Tribal Nations Conference. So with all the camera's rolling, and the nation watching, what did the president do? He lapsed into hack-politician mode:
Let me first of all just thank Ken and the entire Department of the Interior staff for organizing just an extraordinary conference. I want to thank my Cabinet members and senior administration officials who participated today. I hear that Dr. Joe Medicine Crow was around, and so I want to give a shout-out to that Congressional Medal of Honor winner. It's good to see you. (Applause.)
He continued in this vein for another couple of minutes before finally noting the obvious: "As some of you might have heard, there has been a tragic shooting at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas."
But let's go back to that "shout-out" for a moment, and sum up the tone-deafness here. Now, Joe Medicine Crow seems to be a great guy. According to Wikipedia, while a scout in the 103rd Infantry Division during World War II, he "led a successful war party . . . making a midnight raid to steal the horses from a battalion of German officers (as he rode off, he sang a traditional Crow honor song)." How cool is that? But while he was awarded a Bronze Star, he did not earn a Congressional Medal of Honor. What's more, it is a faux pas to say the least to refer to anyone "winning" such an honor, as the president did. These awards are earned and bestowed--the Powerball jackpot is something you win.
All in all, it was a heck of an unpresidential performance. That said, THE SCRAPBOOK will eat its homburg if the media make even a tenth as much mention of it as they did of Bush's Brownie moment.
Of Purges and Stalinists
THE SCRAPBOOK confesses that it usually reads Frank Rich's weekly column in the New York Times for its comic potential--or if we're lucky, for its numerous pop-cultural references to the likes of Desi Arnaz, Mister Ed, or the deeper meaning of Reagan-era TV programs such as St. Elsewhere.
Most of the time, however, we're disappointed. For Rich's columns tend to offer disturbingly clinical depictions of their author's spleen, as he sputters and rages and grows red in the face at the mention of Republicans or conservatives, or worse, conservative Republicans. Last week's essay on the contentious, three-way race in New York's 23rd congressional district was no exception, offering feverish descriptions of "GOP killing fields," the "wacky paranoid cult" of the right, "seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt," "a riotous and bloody national GOP civil war"--well, you get the idea.
What struck us as odd, however, was Rich's insistence on characterizing conservatives as "Stalinists," a conceit that so entranced his editors that they titled his piece, "The GOP Stalinists Invade Upstate New York."
You would think that the New York Times, which was full of admiration for Stalin in his day, would be hesitant about using the word "Stalinist" as an epithet. Indeed, there has been a movement in recent years to force the Times to surrender the Pulitzer Prize awarded in 1932 to its Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, whose false stories from Moscow were deliberately designed to disguise Stalin's mass killings and starvation in the Ukraine.
You would also think that Frank Rich would be careful about losing self-control on the subject of "Stalinism in full purge mode" when Republicans complain about Republican candidates who stray from core party principles. For the most famous case of a "purge" on the basis of party ideology was carried out not by any Republican, but by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Democrat of New York, in 1938.
In the same year that Stalin was conducting his famous purge trials in Moscow--in effect, judicially murdering old Bolsheviks--FDR declared that Senate Democrats who opposed New Deal measures were "deliberately repudiating the very principles of progress which they had espoused in order to be elected." And so he campaigned in Democratic primaries in Ohio, Kentucky, California, Oklahoma, -Georgia, South Carolina, and Maryland in support of candidates who opposed incumbents and were more to Roosevelt's taste.
Of course, as we know, FDR's attempted "purge," as his critics labeled it, was a failure: Most of his favored candidates lost their races, his targets got credit for political independence, and the president's political clout was greatly diminished in Congress.
As any serious student of history will attest, Roosevelt was wrong to initiate the purge--he was destined to fail and it hurt him in the long run--but the president was certainly entitled to fight for his beliefs within the democratic process. That is what FDR did, and that is what conservatives did in New York's 23rd. Does this mean that the Democratic party of Franklin D. Roosevelt's day was a "wacky paranoid cult" full of "maniacal contempt" for its adversaries? Or that FDR was a Stalinist? Of course not.
The wacky paranoid cult is probably the one that prevails in the Times newsroom, where dissenters on the right are routinely purged, and columnists who should know better use terms like "Stalinist" without realizing what it means--especially in the house of Walter Duranty.
Ohio Rolls the Dice
What is it that makes Ohio seem the essence of wholesomeness? A mild Midwestern landscape and mainstream politics? The Cincinnati roots of soap opera and Ivory Snow? John Glenn's smile? One thing it isn't any longer, as of last week, is the Buckeye State's rejection of casino gambling. Even as the culture of family-friendly "gaming," as the euphemism has it, invaded all but one of the neighboring states, Ohio voters held the line, defeating four ballot initiatives. But on Tuesday they finally caved. By a six-point margin, they adopted a constitutional amendment drafted by gambling interests, which will enjoy monopoly protection such that local jurisdictions won't even be able to prevent casinos from staying open 24 hours.
Inevitable? Maybe, with unemployment in the state over 10 percent and cities near the state line tired of watching local residents travel to swell the coffers of other states. Also inevitable, though, are the human costs. If you haven't kept up with the refinements of high-tech slot machines--now the chief attraction at most casinos--we recommend Maura Casey's eye-opening "Gambling with Lives" at the First Things website. It recounts how slot machines are elaborately customized to induce the gambler to keep playing faster, longer. Read it and weep.
Boycott Pistachios!
THE SCRAPBOOK does not, as a matter of principle, either endorse or promote business boycotts. Some of us at THE WEEKLY STANDARD have traumatic memories of César Chávez and his grape/lettuce boycott of the 1960s and '70s, or the inanities of the Nestlé baby formula boycott of the 1970s and '80s, and--well, the list goes on.
But to every rule there must be an exception, and here is ours. A California company called Wonderful Pistachios has retained, as its public mascot, Levi Johnston--the boorish 19-year-old father of Sarah Palin's grandchild, who is best known for his relentless public trashing of the Palin family, and is soon to appear naked in the pages of Playgirl. In one television commercial, Johnston saunters toward the camera while offstage female voices call out his name and a huge security man walks beside him. The bodyguard nods in the direction of Johnston, who cracks open a nut from its shell, and a snarky adolescent voice intones, "Now Levi Johnston does it with protection."
As we say, THE SCRAPBOOK is reluctant to call for a boycott; but Wonderful Pistachio's decision to employ Levi Johnston for a public giggle at the expense of his 11-month-old son should, in our opinion, cost Wonderful Pistachios some business. Until they find a new spokesman, we're munching on cashews.