Archive for the ‘Government’ Category
Campaign Theories
Oct26
By John Feehery
It is generally assumed that Herman Cain will not be the Republican nominee for President. Likewise, it is assumed that Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann, Jon Huntsman and Gary Johnson won’t get the nomination either.
That leaves Rick Perry and Mitt Romney.
The Perry campaign assumes that the dominant conservative wing of the party will never nominate somebody like Mitt Romney.
The Romney campaign assumes that Rick Perry is not ready for prime time and that his Texas shtick won’t translate beyond the Lone Star State.
Neither the Perry nor the Romney campaign are completely sold on their assumptions though, which is why they are slugging away at each other, ignoring the rest of the field, especially the current front-running, Mr. Cain.
Perry and Romney are the only two candidates who have the money to last them past January. If Santorum wins Iowa, perhaps his campaign might breathe in some new life, but I wouldn’t bank on it.
Perry is running the same campaign that he ran against Kay Bailey Hutchinson, the Senator from Texas and his chief rival in his re-election bid. The whole Republican establishment supported Hutchinson, but Perry ran far to her right, nodded to the secessionist wing of the party, condemned her work as an appropriator, called her a Washington insider, and basically bludgeoned her with sharp attacks on her conservative bone fides.
Perry’s theory is that he can take what was successful in Texas, and take in on the road. This strategy ran into a few bumps early on. He got hammered from Republican rivals who saw him as a threat to their own campaign futures on issues as diverse as the HPV virus and his position on giving illegal aliens tuition tax breaks. That forced him to go farther to the right than he initially anticipated, and now he has to do things like give a nod to the birthers and come up with a dramatic tax reform plan that will probably complicate his general election strategy should he win the nomination.
But Perry isn’t worried about the general election yet. You can’t say the same about Mitt Romney.
Romney seems overly worried about his eventual campaign against Barack Obama. He offers nuanced answers to almost every question. He defended the TARP program. He refused to weigh in on behalf of John Kasich’s fight against the unions. He keeps talking about middle income voters. He talks glowingly about legal immigration. All of this should help in a battle against the President. But I don’t see how it helps with the conservative base of the party.
Romney’s attack on Perry on the immigration issue successfully knocked the Texas governor off of his stride but it hasn’t yet knocked him out of the race. I think it is far too early to predict the eventual outcome of this two-person race, but if I were the Romney campaign, I wouldn’t count my chickens.
Romney has to reassure the GOP base that he understands their chief concerns and that he will remain faithful to the conservative cause. Many in the base would rather see a principled conservative lose than see a mealy-mouthed moderate win and then betray them. That certainly is the Perry theory.
In my humble opinion, Romney needs to take a dramatic step to reassure that reluctant base. If I were advising him, I would tell him to stop running a premature general election (think Hillary Clinton) and start feeding some red meat to the red-meat crowd. Start talking more about the Constitution, about the sanctity of life, and the need for pro-growth policies. And I would offer those voters a contract that lays out what he promises to do and more importantly, what he promises not to do if he is elected President.
Viva Las Vegas
Oct24
By John Feehery
Politicians in Washington rushed Nevada into Statehood in 1864 to assure Abraham Lincoln a comfortable margin in his bid for reelection smack dab in the middle of the Civil War, and ever since then, the Silver State has played a unique role in American political history.
Nevada is mostly desert, so it has always been a bit creative in how it has looked at its growth potential. In the early 1900’s, it went the libertarian route, allowing prostitution and gambling, as way to draw more settlers from California. It worked, and Nevadans found a formula that has kept it growing for most of its relatively short history. That is, up until the Obama years.
It was Bugsy Siegel who first thought of building a strip in Las Vegas and the mobsters that followed him gave the city its well-deserved moniker of “Sin City.” An ad campaign that ran a few years ago – “What Goes In Vegas, Stays in Vegas” – helped cement that reputation.
Las Vegas is not necessarily family-friendly. You drive into the city and you see ads on the billboards that would make you blush if you were going with your inquisitive five-year old, for example. In fact, it has one of the highest crime rates in the country, although most of that is attributed to boorish behavior by out of town visitors.
Barack Obama has been very, very bad for Las Vegas. At the height of the economic collapse, Obama publicly urged companies not to have their retreats in Vegas. What he failed to realize is that all of those corporate gatherings helped employ all of those poor suckers who swept Obama into office the first time (and hopefully, the last time).
Obama has done nothing to fix the housing mess, and in fact, all of his proposals have made the situation worse. Mitt Romney stumbled onto the truth when he said that the only way out of the morass is for the market to hit a real bottom, so that investors can have some confidence that this indeed is a good time to buy.
Obama’s strategy has been to give homeowners temporary life-lines, and then pass laws making it harder for banks to loan. Nice going.
Nevada has an interesting mix of people. The biggest religious group is Catholics, at 25 percent, many Hispanic, but a good percentage of whom are Irish and Italian. Mormons make up the second biggest religious sect at around 15 percent, and the third largest denomination is Southern Baptist, which claims about 12 percent of the population. None of these religions or denominations can be called socially liberal or libertarian. And yet Nevada’s biggest city is a paragon of vice for all the world to enjoy.
That makes for some interesting politics. Nevada has correctly picked every eventual Presidential winner since 1912, except when it voted against Jimmy Carter and for Gerry Ford (that turned out to be the right vote).
It voted twice for Bill Clinton, twice for George W. Bush, and once for Barack Hussein Obama. Mr. Obama is visiting there again today in the hopes of convincing Nevadans that he isn’t the disaster that he seems to be. In other words, he wants them to not believe their eyes, but be beguiled by his voice.
The gamblers in Las Vegas took a big gamble by going all in for the President last time around. My guess is that they won’t make that same mistake next November.
