Immigration, Affirmative Action, Bucking The Bailout – All Potential Election Winners For McCain
Breaking news: A veteran Democratic
operative, who worked on Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley`s
much-cited losing run for governor of California in
1982, just told me that a combination of the
"Bradley
Effect", in which undecided white Democrats
(e.g.,
Hillary Clinton voters) can`t make themselves pull
the lever for the black candidate, and John McCain
winning all seven toss-up states,
could elect
McCain president.
(What`s never mentioned about the Bradley
Effect, by the way: Bradley got a rematch with Deukmejian in
1986—and wound up getting crushed
61-37.
was a very different state back then…)
But even
if the Bradley Effect kicks in, McCain would still have to
win all seven toss-up states. The odds of flipping seven
heads in a row is one out of 128.
Hmmm.
I don`t make horse race predictions about
elections. There are a million people in that business, and
the usefulness of all that trivia you have to learn about
this year`s
Battleground States mostly evaporates on Election Day.
Instead, I go to work when most pundits knock off. I begin
analyzing the results as soon as 100 percent of the
precincts are in and I have
hard data to work with.
But for
the purposes of this Election Day article, I`m assuming that
Obama wins.
What did
the Republicans do wrong?
Let`s stipulate that McCain has done a few
things right. Most notably, he toned down the
Bomb-Bomb-Bomb, Bomb-Bomb-Iran stuff.
Back in February, I
explained that the Republicans would likely need to
choose between two general strategies
My guess was that McCain would shun the
former because he was terrified of being criticized by his
media friends for being "divisive". So instead he`d opt for the latter: try to whip up
World
War III (IV?) fever against
Iran
to
"bring us together".
I was right that McCain didn`t have the
guts to bring up Obama`s obvious Achilles Heel, Rev. Dr.
Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.—although Obama
donated $53,770 to Wright`s church in 2005-2007,
according to the candidate`s tax returns.
Rev. Wright spent April
auditioning enthusiastically for the role of
Willie Horton of 2008, the
easily understood embodiment of the Democratic
candidate`s leftism. But McCain was too prissy to take
Wright up on his offer.
McCain supporters kept assuring me that
"Maverick" wasn`t
a wimp, he was just waiting for the precisely-timed moment
in October to roll out a barrage of ads featuring Rev.
AmeriKKKa`s greatest hits
collected from the DVDs his church sold on the Web for
years.
Well,
it`s November now, and McCain hasn`t mentioned Wright`s name
since April. Maybe he`s gearing up for a big rollout of
those killer Wright ads in December?
But I was wrong, too: McCain didn`t play
up the idea of getting
America
into a
third land war in
Asia as much as I thought he might.
That was the good news. The bad news: it
left McCain without much of anything to talk about. Mostly,
he just talked about
what a hero he is.
Okay, he was
for offshore oil
drilling. And then there`s … uh …
nuclear power plants! And, well, some other stuff, no
doubt.
The problem is that the things McCain
really cares about, like
Invading the World and Inviting
the World, are death on the campaign trail in 2008.
The Republicans` winning issue this year
could have been
mass immigration, both illegal and legal. But they somehow
wound up with the author of the 2006 McCain-Kennedy amnesty
bill as their candidate!
Imagine if Obama`s
illegal alien aunt had surfaced after the GOP candidate
had spent the fall defining the immigration issue in the
American mind. It would have been the
coup de grace. As
it was, McCain operative Mark Salter
threw the issue away, saying
"It`s a family matter"—as
if the laws of the
"family matter".
(Maybe they will be, but not just yet).
And what
was McCain against?
Well, he
was against socialism, redistribution of wealth, and
unrepentant terrorist William Ayers!
Yes, but
what does Ayers have to do with Obama? Well, they worked
together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
But wasn`t
Walter Annenberg the biggest Republican donor of his
day?
Okay,
now, you know and I know that Old Man Annenberg got taken to
the cleaners by some slick leftists who didn`t do a darn
thing for the test scores of Chicago public school students,
but who built their brand names in the tax-and-grant
consuming sectors of Chicago`s leftist fringe by handing out
Annenberg`s millions to all their friends and allies. But do
the voters?
Maybe there
is more of a
connection between Obama and Ayers than opportunism. But if
McCain was going to use Ayers as his trump card, he should
have hired private detectives in
Obama-Ayers relationship and then leak the findings to the
National Enquirer. Heck, anthropologist
Stanley
Kurtz has singlehandedly
done a better job of tracking down the Obama-Ayers links
than the entire McCain campaign.
(Don`t
you have the feeling that nobody in the McCain brain trust
ever got around to buying Rev. Wright`s DVDs?)
In contrast to Obama`s murky dealings with
Ayers, the Democratic candidate has long boasted of Wright`s
mentorship, devoting
most of pp. 274-295 of his first book, Dtreams From My Father,
to
Wright, and borrowing the title of his second, The Audacity of Hope, from
Wright`s
sermon about how
"white
folks` greed runs a world in need".
Let`s be clear: the reason McCain has gone
on and on about Bill Ayers but hasn`t mentioned in six
months Jeremiah Wright is because
Ayers is white and
Wright is black. McCain is terrified that if he mentions
Wright, Republicans will be smeared as racists.
Well, guess what? Republicans are being
smeared as racists anyway. Heck, Obama smeared
Bill Clinton as
racist. Of course,
the
Obama forces were going to do it to the GOP.
The question for Republicans was never
whether or not they are going to get smeared as racists. The
question was always whether they were going to wind up a
smeared winner—or a
smeared loser.
McCain
chose the latter.
If you
don`t allow yourself to bring up race, you simply cannot run
against the real Barack Obama. You wind up running against
the
fantasy made up by his strategist
David Axelrod, credulously
summed up last week by the
New York Times`
Brian Stelter as Obama`s
"refusal to be
defined by his race and his aspirations to bridge the
partisan divide".
Why can`t you run against the real Obama
without talking about race?
Because the real
Barack is all about race.
Look, Obama wrote a 460-page memoir about
his successful struggle to define himself as a black man,
which he helpfully subtitled
A Story of Race and Inheritance.
Only after rejection by black voters in a
2000 election as not
"black enough" threw him off his carefully plotted career path of
revenging
Harold Washington, the late first black mayor of
Chicago, by retaking the mayor`s office for the black race,
did he have Axelrod whip him up a new white-friendly image
as the postracial healer.
It`s
utterly ridiculous that Obama has been running for President
for 20 months and almost nobody in public life has carefully
read the man`s autobiography. (Except me—see below).
McCain
walked into exactly the same trap as Hillary Clinton did—for
exactly the same reason. He failed to make coherent and
vivid to voters` Obama`s long history of leftism.
Why not?
Because the single thread explaining Obama`s leftism is
race. Once you rule out anything touching upon race, such as
Rev. Wright, you`re left only with vague generalities and
random-sounding connections, such as Ayers.
For example, you might think that McCain
would have run against
"Chicago politicians",
since the
Hawaiian-born Obama chose to become one of that
notorious breed. But you`ll be denounced as a racist for
suggesting it, though, since Obama chose Chicago precisely
because, as he
said
in 2000, "Chicago
in many ways is the capital of the African-American
community in the country."
Obama`s leftism
doesn`t derive from any particular ideological conviction.
Instead it`s utterly an outgrowth of his race. Leftism is
his way of reassuring other blacks—and himself—of what he
himself calls in his autobiography his
"racial credentials".
By spending 23 years in the business of, in effect,
taking money from whites and giving it to blacks, Obama,
who is
half white by nature and
utterly non-black by nurture, proves that he is
"black enough"
to other blacks and to himself.
Some
other thoughts:
-
Whatever happened to Affirmative Action?
As I
pointed out in July, Obama handed McCain the Affirmative
Action/quota issue by opposing the heroic Ward Connerly`s
initiatives that are on state ballots in this election
cycle. Obama favors quotas—
overwhelming disapproves. In fact, Obama
is an Affirmative
Action candidate, as none other than
Geraldine Ferarro said in March. McCain nominally
endorsed Connerly`s efforts, but made no further attempt to
use the issue. Yet he could have won this election on
Affirmative Action alone.
The Republican
primary system was a disaster.
In this front-end loaded mix of winner
take-all states and proportional states,
John McCain wrapped up the nomination on
February 5—nine months ago!—by lucking into narrow
victories, while
Mitt Romney and
Mike Huckabee won mostly in states with proportional
distribution of delegates. There`s little evidence that
McCain was the most popular vote-getter, just the most
fortunate.
Winner-take-all primaries are justified
with the fallacy that a long drawn-out primary process, like
the Obama-Clinton epic, is
"divisive". So
what? The Democrats` extra four months of campaigning
garnered them hundreds of millions of dollars of free media.
It excited their base to donate hundreds of millions of
dollars more. Meanwhile, Republicans hit the snooze button
from February 5 until
Sarah Palin was announced as
McCain`s running mate in late August.
Something else that became clear this year:
Don`t procrastinate until the last moment on the Veep
choice.
It was
asking too much of anybody to come in cold and have to
start defending something as contradictory and incoherent as
McCainism without any warm-up.
Nominees need a two-stage process for
choosing a Veep. A month before the final deadline, McCain
should have made up a short list of three potential choices.
Then each one should have been told to make a featured
speech at the convention and to help on the campaign trail.
Aides should have been dispatched to work with them on their
surrogate skills. McCain should have listened to his aides`
feedback, then
make your final pick.
-
Don`t dangle Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman as a
Veep choice in front of the
neocons and neoliberals.
It just raised
their hopes that, despite their catastrophic advice over the
last two terms, they were
still going to
complete their takeover of the Republican Party. Then McCain
not only yanked Lieberman away from their fingertips, but
replaced him with a
small-town American, the kind of person that the neocons`
grandparents always swore to them would someday come after
them with torches and pitchforks.
-
If you are going to run as a "maverick", then act like a
maverick.
When the
long-foretold financial crisis finally arrived, don`t
suspend your campaign and rush to
Washington
just to yell "Me,
too!" along with
Rich Lowry and the
rest of the Establishment.
Stand up for
the taxpayers and say:
"Wait a minute! You
want how many
hundreds of billions of the taxpayers` money, Mr. Paulson,
for your
deadbeat speculator friends in the financial industry?"
Once the
economy collapsed on the Republican incumbent`s watch,
McCain was doomed…unless he vociferously separated himself
from the Bush Administration`s policy. The Establishment
media would have denounced him, but fed-up taxpayers would
have rallied to him.
That was his
one chance. But, of course, McCain is not truly a maverick.
He`s completely a creature of the MainStream Media.
I`m sure
McCain was counting on the Bush Administration being able to
keep the economic catastrophe from happening until after the
election. That`s how they do it down in
Mexico
collapses followed the election of the ruling PRI`s
successor
candidates in 1976, 1982, and 1994. The
Bush dynasty has had
warm
relations with the Mexican ruling class for half a
century. So they understand how the game is played.
But it
just turned out that the Bush Administration was even less
competent than those Mexican governments at keeping the
balls in the air until McCain was home free.
-
We`re going to hear all over again about how crucial the
Hispanic vote was to Obama`s win. It`s bunk.
You know—how
the GOP killed itself by
not
favoring open borders abjectly enough, and so forth and
so on. Hysterical pundits will announce that the Hispanic
tidal wave accounted for 8 or 9 or even 10 percent of the
vote!
Then, a year
from now, the Census Bureau will quietly announce the
results of its huge post-election survey of voting, the gold
standard of ethnic voting shares. It will show that the
Hispanic share of the vote, which was
5.4
percent in 2000 and
6.0
percent in 2004 actually was only 6.9 percent in 2008,
or whatever.
And nobody
will pay any attention at all because the fallacious
conventional wisdom (10
percent!!!) will already be carved into everybody`s
brains.
Moreover, you`ll hear all about how the GOP share of the
Hispanic vote dropped from 44 percent in 2004 to, say, 30
percent on Tuesday.
Sigh. First,
as I`ve shown repeatedly, it wasn`t 44 percent in 2004. The
exit
poll company admitted the mistake several months later.
It was about 40 percent.
Second, the
reason the GOP even got 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in
2004 was because Bush and Rove
bought the
Hispanic vote via the
Great Hispanic Housing Bubble. In part due to Bush`s
jihad against
down payments on home loans, mortgage dollars borrowed
for home purchases by Hispanics increased 691 percent from
1999 to 2006. In 1999, less than 7 percent of first time
buyers in
California
black hole of the Bubble, put no money down. By 2004, it
was 33 percent, by 2006 an incredible 41 percent.
Democrats
appealed to Hispanics by being the Tax and Spend party.
Bush and Rove resolved that Republicans would win Hispanics
over by being the Borrow and Spend party.
And
debauching credit standards for Hispanics debauched them for
everybody. So there was a huge amount of unneeded
construction and remodeling, carried out in large part by
Hispanics workers, making Hispanics unusually pleased with
the Republican incumbent in 2004.
In 2008, though, as made clear by a recent
LA Times article
on how Hispanic voters in Las Vegas are
trending toward Obama because so many have defaulted on
their mortgages, the firehose of Other People`s Money has
finally been turned off. And Latinos are returning to
their
natural political home.
[Economic
strife drives Latino vote, By Marjorie Miller,
October 26, 2008 ]
The
Mortgage Minority Meltdown. The Diversity Recession. And
landslide losses anyway. How did the Bush-Rove experiment
work out for the GOP—let alone
(Cheerful footnote: To combat all this
confused thinking, I`ve written a new book about Obama`s
life story. As the two parts of the title imply, it
contrasts the recent Axelrodian hagiography of Obama as the
biracial transcender with the man`s own evasively written
but ultimately quite clear autobiography. Thus I call it, in
tribute to the upcoming
Harry Potter movie,
America
For the updated FREE pdf download, click
here.)
[Steve
Sailer (email
him) is
movie critic
for
The American Conservative.
His
website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com
features his daily blog. His new book,
BARACK OBAMA`S "STORY OF
RACE AND INHERITANCE", is available
here.]


