From The Department Of Wait... What?

Rudy! Giuliani is going to run for President again?

Recall that in 2005, Giuliani began preparations after a "Draft Rudy" movement formed (and of course he had a hand in that, let's not be sly about that). He declared in 2007 and quickly supplanted John McCain as the Republican front-runner in the early stages of the primaries. He raised more money than anyone (Mitt Romney had more money than anyone, but that's because he tapped his own personal fortune). He attracted a lot of attention and support. Hell, I supported him.

Then Rudy! got some bad polling numbers from Iowa basically dropped out of the Iowa caucuses, coming in sixth out of seven major candidates there. Then, he came in fourth place out of eight in New Hampshire, attracting barely 9% of the total vote. Then, he came in sixth place three times in a row -- in Michigan he got 3% of the vote, in Nevada 4%, and in South Carolina 2%. He put all his eggs in the basket of Florida's early primary, coming in third place with not quite 15% of the vote, and that was basically it.

That's a pretty miserable showing for over seventy-five million dollars spent. Despite promising to appoint "strict constructionist" judges and coming as close as he could to flip-flopping on abortion, Rudy! just never caught on with conservative voters; he never shook off the mud slung at him concerning his personal life. Now, he says "there's opportunity for a moderate candidate with a background in national security." Maybe, Yerhonner, but that candidate isn't you.

Rudy!, your moment has passed. Your moment was really in 2004, but good for you, you were loyal to the party and didn't challenge W. And you didn't angle for a Cabinet position, either, which you should have done to burnish your resume for 2008. Instead, you went for the money, founding a security consultancy and attaching your name to a high-powered law firm.

By the time of the first election in 2012, it will have been more than ten years since you last really got to shine as a holder of public office. The remainder of your professional life is going to consist of security and governmental consulting for your consulting firm for as long as people will listen to you, and rainmaking for your top-100 law firm, and you've already got all the money you'll ever need to live as comfortably as you want and leave a lot for your hot wife and your adult kids, both estranged and still-gruntled.

Granted, you have to pay for your own plane, but all things considered, this is a damn sweet setup you've got going. Enjoy it, and let me dream a dream about Gary Johnson in 2012, until harsh reality intrudes on that.

New Apportionment

With new census results out, seats will be reallocated in the House of Representatives and with that, the map of the Electoral College and thus the calculus of electing the President in 2012 will change. Had the last election been run with the future allocation, the result would have been Obama 353, McCain 185, a shift of twelve votes from "D" to "R."

The Oral Argument

I've tried, something like twelve times tonight, to load up and watch the oral arguments in Perry v. Schwarzenegger. I've been mostly frustrated.

I half-listened to the arguments about standing at work, and they affirmed what I already thought -- there is something fishy about the elected officials of the state refusing to defend the law, and it leaves a hole in the format of adversarial proceedings that needs to be filled before a decision can be fully legitimated. The voters passed a law, and someone has to speak for the voters. The whole reason there are ballot initiatives is so that the voters can go around the public officials who may not like a law for whatever reason, so again, someone has to be able to speak for the voters. I thought that the proponents were reasonably strong on the standing issue, although I was singularly unimpressed with the argument by Imperial County -- why the Supervisors of Imperial County couldn't get the actual county clerk to stand as an intervenor is a good question, which was left unanswered. The opponents were strongest pointing out that Article III standing requires a particularized, personal injury by a litigant, which had not been articulated by anyone -- but they didn't address the fundamental question of who speaks for the voters in defense of what the voters decided to do.

On the substantive merits, I only got through about two-thirds of the proponents' argument. Their attorney did as well as anyone could under the circumstances but here he seemed much less convincing than he did arguing for standing. Essentially, he relied on the procreative argument as a rational basis for Prop. 8 after having begun by admitting that marriage is a fundamental right, if not the most fundamental right of all. This is no way to get into the world of rational basis review -- fundamental rights, as all first-year con law students know, are analyzed for strict scrutiny.

Worse (for the proponents), they seemed to encounter skepticism from Randy Smith, the most conservative of the three judges assigned to the panel, about whether Prop. 8 had even a rational basis justification.  Judge Smith appeared to be moved by the presence of a broad, close-to-marriage in substantive rights, institution of domestic partnership which was unchallenged by Prop. 8, and he essentially asked the proponents, "So doesn't that leave us with just the name?" The proponents' attorney responded that "The word essentially is the institution; you cannot separate the two." So even if there is a thing, "X," that is functionally identical to marriage, the different taxonomy created a substantive difference. Judge Smith looked like he had been served a turd on a hoagie roll when he was asked to swallow that one. Maybe I'm reading his facial expression wrong.

The rest of the emphasis I could get from the proponents' argument rested on Baker v. Nelson (1972) 409 U.S. 810, a one-line opinion by the Supreme Court declining to grant review to a decision of the Minnesota Supreme Court that denied marriage to a same-sex couple in the early 1970's for want of a "substantial Federal question." Because under the rules of the Court then in existence, a decision to not grant appellate review to a state supreme court case counted as a substantive ruling, the argument is that Baker is binding Supreme Court precedent that there is no Federally-protected right that would compel a state to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple. Today, the Baker decision would have been decided to the same result and using the same reasoning as a procedural matter, denying certiorari.  So it's not exactly clear whether Baker remains a substantive, on-the-merits decision or not, but the proponents certainly argued that it was binding precedent.

I could not get Ted Olsen's argument to play at all despite several attempts to run the C-SPAN video.  Just wouldn't do it. I had to skip ahead to Therese Stewart's argument, which nearly ended soon after I started it, so I really don't have a good sense of what the opponents of Prop. 8 said. This summation of the argument suggests that the proponents' citation of Crawford v. Los Angeles Board of Education made some headway. In Crawford, the voters reversed, by initiative, some court-mandated busing of students to remediate racial discrimination. Because the busing was only one way that the race discrimination problem could have been addressed, the voters were free to tell the school system, and the state itself, "No, go find another way to deal with this." Because that, by itself, did not violate the Constitution, the will of the voters was upheld against a 14th amendment challenge and the initiative stood.  I'm not sure that I buy this as a point for the proponents, though. The opening of the proponents' argument was a structured concession that the voters cannot pass initiatives that defy the Constitution -- so the question is whether there is a right to marry in the Fourteenth Amendment that includes the right to marry someone of the same sex. If I were arguing for the proponents, I'd have stuck with Baker as the centerpiece of that argument, too.

Anyway, I did get to a significant portion of Therese Stewart's analysis. (I could swear that I had Therese Stewart as an adjunct professor in law school, that she taught my State Constitutional Law class. But I can't find any record of that at all one way or the other. She sure sounded like the woman who taught that class, smart, strong, and direct.) She pointed the Court back to the second substantive issue on the merits, which was whether Prop. 8 crossed the line into classifying citizens for the sake of having a classification, singling them out for special invidious treatment by popular initiative -- clearly aiming directly at the holding in Romer v. Evans. Romer is still one of the most controversial decisions from the Court in the past generation, but its author, Anthony Kennedy, remains on the bench of the Supreme Court and is in all likelihood the swing vote if and when this case ever gets there. So this strikes me as laying the foundation for the real battle, and Stewart was laying clam to the terrain upon which she wants to fight. That's smart advocacy.

The impression I was left with is that Imperial County for sure is unlikely to have standing. The Ninth Circuit Panel may well certify the question of the proponents' standing back to the California Supreme Court. Frankly, I think that's a good idea -- it will establish whether California state law does or does not convey a right to speak on behalf of the voters when elected officials will not do so for whatever reason. If the Court chooses to find standing by the proponents, there is no doubt that the proponents here gave Prop. 8 a vigorous defense. And the system only really works when both sides present their cases with zeal and urgency instead of proceeding by default.

Now, here's the thing. If, as I predict, the panel certifies the question of standing to the California Supreme Court for an advisory opinion, that will take several months. Then it will take several more months for an opinion to be crafted, which will in all likelihood affirm the trial court ruling in some way. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the panel ducks the merits altogether and rules only on the basis of standing. But if it does address the merits, it will do so in a full-throated way, and likely find that Prop. 8 fails the rational basis test. That decision will then go on to review en banc, before an 11-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit. From there, whoever loses will petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court in, probably, early 2012.

Which of course will grant it, and guarantee that the issue is front and center during the 2012 Presidential election. A friend thinks that the Supremes will want to duck the issue, but I say, all Nine of the Justices worked very hard to get on the Supreme Court, and the whole, entire reason that anyone would angle to be on the Supreme Court is to be able to decide this very case. So we'll still be talking and arguing about this issue in two years. Maybe longer than that.

Welcome To The Next Cycle's Wedge Issue

(Cross-posted at League of Ordinary Gentlemen)

Once upon a time, illegal immigrants getting welfare were used as whipping boys to drive voters to the polls. Then it was gays trying to get married and atheists not wanting to say the Pledge of Allegiance. Next, it's about to be... Muslims! Specifically, Muslims with the temerity to use the courts. The preview is to be found in the great state of Oklahoma, where voters will shortly be presented with Measure 755, asking Oklahomans the following:

This measure amends the State Constitution. It changes a section that deals with the courts of this state. It would amend Article 7, Section 1. It makes courts rely on federal and state law when deciding cases. It forbids courts from considering or using international law. It forbids courts from considering or using Sharia Law. International law is also known as the law of nations. It deals with the conduct of international organizations and independent nations, such as countries, states and tribes. It deals with their relationship with each other. It also deals with some of their relationships with persons.

The law of nations is formed by the general assent of civilized nations. Sources of international law also include international agreements, as well as treaties.

Sharia Law is Islamic law. It is based on two principal sources, the Koran and the teaching of Mohammed.

Shall the proposal be approved?

Now, I suppose the first question that may come to your mind is, "Wow! Is this really happening in, of all places, Oklahoma?"If you check the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's recent U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, you'll find the most recent, statistically reliable data about the religious composition and behavior of people in the United States. There, we find that the religious makeup of Oklahoma is as follows:

Evangelical Protestants	53%
Mainline Protestants	16%
Historically Black Protestants	3%
Catholic	12%
Mormon	Less than .5%
Jehovah's Witness	Less than .5%
Other Christian	Less than .5%
Jewish	Less than .5%
Muslim	Less than .5%
Buddhist	1%
Hindu	Less than .5%
Other World Religions	Less than .5%
Other Faiths	1%
Unaffiliated	12%
Don't Know/Refused to Answer	1%

(For the record, Oklahoma has the highest percentage of self-identified Evangelical Christians of any state in the nation.)

So, it would seem unlikely that there is a lot of demand on Oklahoma courts to address Muslim issues, what with Muslims constituting such a small percentage of the population there (about 15,000 total). And, in fact,"the amendment's sponsors and strongest supporters cannot statutorily cite a case in which Oklahoma courts have applied Sharia law in any ruling."

I'm not exactly sure what Marc Ambinder means in the previously-linked article by the phrase "statutorily cite a case." Authors of legislation rarely cite to case law in statutes, except when they wish to legislatively reverse specific cases (e.g., the Civil Rights Act of 1991, statutorily reversing Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio (1989) 490 U.S. 642, thus giving lie to the idea that once the Supreme Court has spoken on a subject, the Constitution must be amended to reverse its effect). I presume, though, that Ambinder means that while these legislators don't like the idea of Oklahoma courts applying Sharia law, they can't find any examples of that actually happening.

But note that the issue is one of using Sharia law to interpret the Constitution and laws:  "[Measure 755] makes courts rely on federal and state law when deciding cases. It forbids courts from considering or using international law. It forbids courts from considering or using Sharia Law." Let's unpack that:

Measure 755 makes courts rely on federal and state law when deciding cases. Do you mean to suggest they aren't already doing that now? Of course they are.

I'll take the next one out of order.  Measure 755 forbids courts from considering or using Sharia Law. This despite the fact that the sponsors of the law can't seem to find a single instance of that actually happening. The only instances that I can find anywhere -- or that legal scholars with unlimited, free access to state-of-the-art legal research tools have found -- are cases involving family law and small business commercial disputes in which principles of Sharia law were specified to in choice-of-law clauses of contracts containing mandatory binding arbitration agreements.

So what this would really do in practice is prevent courts from enforcing private contracts in which the parties mutually agreed upon the use of Sharia laws -- restricting the right of free people to contract as they choose. What's more, it would not restrict the right of people to use other kinds of religious texts as the basis for their contracts that include arbitration clauses; one would be free to agree to "Christian arbitration" or "Talmudic law" as the choice-of-law in a private contract. That, of course, is somewhat problematic under existing Equal Protections jurisprudence.

One wonders what impact this would have on tribal courts in Oklahoma -- a not inconsiderable issue, given Oklahoma's racial and political demographics -- because those courts rely upon tribal law which, in some cases, are based upon ancient tribal religious traditions. As noted in articles linked above, tribal leaders in Oklahoma are against Measure 755 not because they like Sharia law and Muslims so much, but precisely because they want to protect their own traditions and religions. They, at least, get it that when one group of people are singled out, there's no telling which group is next, so everyone needs to be vigilant about the rights of even disliked minorities.

Now, back to the second point.  Measure 755 would forbid courts from considering or using international law. International law is defined in Measure 755 as "international agreements, as well as treaties." Which means that an Oklahoma state court would have to disregard international agreements and treaties if those were invoked in a particular dispute. Like, say, NAFTA. Or extradition agreements. Now, in theory, if a party to a case invokes a treaty, that may invoke Federal removal jurisdiction, but that isn't always the case. So you could be left with a state court required to disregard a treaty ratified by the Senate, and thus break an international commitment of the entire nation.

The authors of Measure 755 should read Article VI of the United States Constitution. Doing so would remind them that they are obligated as state legisators to uphold the United States Constitution and treaties made thereunder -- something which they are in fact attempting to subvert with this law.

And then there's the question of why, exactly, they are so afraid of Sharia law anyway. Sharia are practical legal principles derived from the Koran (the holy book purportedly written by Mohammed) and the Hadith (a collection of sayings attributed to Mohammed by oral tradition). Many of the teachings and commands of Sharia look a lot like the teachings and commands of, say, the Christian Bible. Worship is compulsory. Marriage is encouraged, children are encouraged within marriage, sex outside marriage is forbidden. Murder, theft, and dishonesty are generally forbidden. That's not to say that everything in Sharia is above criticism. It's to say that if you look into it a little bit, there is not much that is so awful it can't be tolerated in a private arbitration agreement. If there are prohibitions against women being treated equally as witnesses or litigants, that subverts an important Constitutional policy, but the few cases I've looked at have generally broken in favor of the women litigants so it can't be any worse than any of the more familiar religious choice-of-law clauses that ought to be enforced in courts for the very good reason that the parties to the agreement chose them.

Nor is anyone credible actually calling for Sharia law to supplant the Constitution as the supreme law of the United States. I don't include the Osama bin Ladens of the world; bin Laden is not credible sitting in a cave in Afghanistan mere feet away from a dialysis machine powered by a car battery, on the glide-path to obscurity and burial in a dusty, anonymous grave. When a Congressional candidate from a major party says that he will propose an amendment to the Constitution to guide courts to rely upon Sharia, I'll worry about this. Until then, this is a bogeyman.

But none of that is important. The facts don't matter and they are, indeed, inconvenient. The point is to make people scared of the toothless shibboleth that is Sharia law and thus drive them to the polls to vote for meaningless-at-best and Constitution-subverting-at-worst wedge issues like Measure 755. Don't fall for it -- keep it in perspective, folks.

Taiwanese Animators Forecast 2012 Election

A working knowledge of Mandarin is absolutely unnecessary to understand everything said or depicted in the video.

It Is Happening Again

In less than twenty-four hours, I have learned that SarahPAC has raised over $866,000 and spent over $742,000 flying its celebrity politician about the country.  The ability to raise numbers approaching a million dollars a quarter, and less commented on but probably more significant, the massive outreach to conservative grassroots, has lent weight and given a spotlight to what I already through were former Governor Palin's Presidential ambitions.

Almost immediately, as if to counter the possibility that Sarah Palin would become the annointed, inevitable Repubilcan Republican nominee, Newt Gingrich (!) announced that he was more serious than ever about running for President during the upcoming cycle.   This isn't actually all much of a statement when read at face value, seeing as Gingrich has never actually declared his candidacy for President in any cycle.  But the impact is not in the literal truth but rather the fact that he raised the flag at all.  So while not quite tossing his hat in the ring, Gingrich through surrogates offered comparisons of himself to Bill Clinton as a candidate.

And then this morning, I can read that the Obama camp is already preparing their campaign template to run against Palin, Tim Pawlenty, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney or pretty much anyone else the GOP nominates -- by running against George W. Bush.  The idea is, I guess, that any GOP candidate is "going backwards" while Obama is "going forwards" and therefore the representative of "change" despite being the incumbent.

When you play chess, if your first or second moves are not what you wanted, you still have time to change your strategy and set up a different kind of play.  That's the import that should be read into these "events," which of course are not really events at all but simply factoids and throwaway comments scooped up by a voracious and hypercompetitive news industry hungry for any kind of a political story at all.  Chances are still favorable that the eventual GOP nominee will be someone who right now has a relatively low profile and some ideas that can catch fire.  (A guy can always hope, right?)

Today's point is -- the 2012 Presidential election is now underway.

Calling For A Truce

Mitch Daniels is the Governor of Indiana. He is a dark-horse possibility for the Republican nomination for President in 2012, although I'm not entirely sure of how much traction that would get. But he has raised his profile significantly by saying that Republicans need to call a "truce" on social issues and focus on anti-terrorism and fiscal responsibility.

He's quite serious about this.  And he should be taken seriously.  Daniels himself is a social conservative -- pro-life, anti-same-sex-marriage, a churchgoer, all the right credentials to be popular with members of the social conservative wing of the GOP, who fancy themselves collectively to be the Republican espirt vivant.  So maybe it takes a guy like Daniels to point out that our government's fiances and our collective security should be prioritized significantly above social issues which, social conservatives are sporadically quick to remind me, are generally left to the states rather than the Federal government.  He may not have the best credibility of fiscal issues, having been George W. Bush's Director of the Office of Management and Budget, but on the other hand that does make him knowledgeable about Federal spending.

I know social issues are a lot of fun for people.  Sometimes they're fun for me, too.  And there's less flexibility to cut the Federal budget as much as some would like.  But that's where our energies, our brainpower, and our political efforts need to be -- as a party, as a nation, and as responsible human beings.

This Is Almost Certainly Correct

I've little time for blogging right now.  In between a heavy work schedule and a mission from The Wife to build a table that seats eight for the back patio in time for a dinner party on Saturday* (she is doing a lot of the work on the project too), by the time I sit down to a computer I've little writing left in me -- much as I want to do it.  So for the time being, I have to point to some other writers and await the day when I can sit down and organize my thoughts about something of general interest, not related to a case I am actively handling, and unrelated to my feeble attempts at carpentry.

But I came across one thing that I think is dead on.  Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi have killed Mitt Romney's chances at getting the 2012 GOP nomination for President.  The just-passed health care reform plan is too similar to the one Romney handled and praised as governor of Massachusetts, and the GOP is lined up lockstep in opposition to it.  While it might be a principled and appropriate thing for a Constitutional law professor to say, "It's one thing for a state to do it and something else for the Federal government to do it," to a Presidential candidate, it's either a good idea or it's a bad idea, and Romney can't criticize something he once endorsed. 

Well, then again, Romney was pro-choice before he wasn't, and he was anti-balanced budget until he wasn't, and he was anti-gun until he wasn't, was anti-Department of Education until he wasn't, and so on -- so why should he have been pro-health care entitlement until some point in the future he isn't?

Anyway, it's off to a late-night client meeting, so more from the busy busy busy TL when I have a chance.


* On that note, thanks to Commenter zzi for a recipe for pesto alla Trapanese that I intend to use as the foundation for my pasta sauce on Saturday.  Unless I get my mind changed for me, and do rosemary roasted potatoes instead.  The good news is, I should have my sous vide at last for the meat!

Senator Giuliani

So it appears that Rudy! Giuliani will run for Senate in 2010 and not Governor of New York.  This, I think, is not a good use of his skill set.  Rudy! is an executive; he has no experience in a deliberative body, no experience with the give-and-take logrolling that is inherently a part of legislative compromising.  I understand a desire to not be in Albany -- the New York Legislature is thoroughly controlled by someone who isn't Rudy! and there's no practical way to break in to that.

The Senate is, ultimately, a poor proving ground for grooming future Presidents.  It's not a partisan issue -- it's that the skill sets necessary for success in the Presidency are different than the skill sets necessary for success in the Legislature.  If Rudy! is thinking the Senate is a fine coda for his career, then fine.  But I can't believe he isn't thinking about challenging Obama in 2012.  Rudy! has charisma and is very smart, but his personality is ill-suited for the job.

Election Depression

A few days ago I was philosophically pleased and comfortable with the state of our nation despite its fractious politics.  This morning I'm less pleased.  There are several reasons why.

First, it appears that by about a margin of 53% to 47%, voters in Maine have repealed a same-sex marriage law.  This is a margin similar to California's Proposition 8 a year ago.  Along the way, the backers of the initiative fought tooth and nail to not disclose where the money to pay for their political campaign came from, and once again claimed to be "protecting marriage," "protecting churches," "protecting families," and "protecting children."  Protecting them from what?

It was another campaign based on questionable political tactics and lies, with the goal of enshrining bigotry into law.

Second, the weight of the world was placed on a special election in New York's 23rd Congressional District.  This district, which is very rural, looks on a map a little bit like Canada dropped several gobs of paint on top of New York State, which then oozed down about three-quarters of the way to Albany. It has always been a Republican stronghold; it hasn't sent a Democrat to Congress since before the Civil War.  The Republicans nominated a member of the state legislature and the Democrats found their patsy to stand up for the party, hoping forlornly for something bizarre to happen.  Well, it did; "Tea Party" conservatives found the Republican nominee "too liberal" and ran a political novice against her on the Conservative Party ballot (New York has four political parties, with the Liberal and Conservative parties being used for this purpose often enough to tweak moderates to more extreme positions).  Whether she was "too liberal" because she had voted for tax increases in Albany or because she was pro-choice remains a little bit uncertain in my mind.  But the effect of the split the right-of-center votes was to siphon off enough support from the mainstream GOP candidate that the Democrat appeared to have a plurality.  So then the mainstream Republican withdrew from the race -- and endorsed the Democrat.  Now, it appears that the Democrat has won, although the polls are very close and it's at least mathematically possible that the Conservative could pull it out; I'm not fluent enough in the politics of the area to know whether that's a realistic possibility or not.

In the grand scheme of things, one seat in the House of Representatives switching parties isn't going to matter all that much.  There are two depressing things about this election.  First and foremost, it seems there was thuggery and intimidation at the polls, and the supporters of the insurgent conservative candidate are to blame.  It was depressing when progressives sent out thugs to poll-watch in 2008 and it's depressing to see conservatives do it now.  But while of less immediacy, I find more pernicious in the long run the fact that, even as the Conservative candidate (prematurely?) conceded defeat, the social conservatives have called this race a victory for conservatives over liberal elements in their own party.  They didn't care about winning the election.  They cared about ideological purity within their own party. 


This is not a recipe for political success, as the apparent results in New York demonstrate.  The recipe for success is what happened in Virginia, where the Republican candidate found a way to bridge the gap between the two wings of his party, keep the voters' eyes on the prize -- the promise of good government -- and got a majority of voters behind him.  Or even in New Jersey, where the Republican gubernatorial candidate withstood charges of corruption (and obesity) to promise competent government and defeat the (bald) incumbent.

Deliver good government.  Work change incrementally.  Make room at the table.  Find common causes.  Oh, and duck the bigotry.

I feel like something of a lone wolf howling at the moon on this.  I know I'm not, that other sane Republicans can see an existential threat to our party in this growing schism.  But for the moment, we are being hooted down as "liberals," "traitors," or subject to ad hominem attacks.  Both of the thoughtful and well-written bloggers I linked to in this paragraph have recently been at the receiving end of intramural brawls and efforts to purge them from the "movement."  As for the national party leadership, I've got to conclude that at minimum, the RNC is completely useless in dealing with the schism.  I saw this sort of thing emerging in the California GOP twenty years ago, and just look at the electoral success it's brought us in California ever since.

The trend will continue, with a higher-stakes primary battle in Florida between Governor Charlie Crist, an ally of John McCain, and Tea Partier Marco Rubio for the Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate.  That primary election will probably be the playboard upon which the opening moves of the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination are executed, and right now the likely candidates are looking like Palin, Pawlenty, Huckabee, and Romney; the surprising early leader is Mike Huckabee.  Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, but I would have thought it would have been Palin or Romney.  Other potential candidates have either self-destructed on the "Appalachian Trail" or exorcised themselves from contention.  Of course, 2012 is a long time in the future in political terms so it's easy to read too much into the maneuvers and polling.

My big point here is that as I had sadly feared, the hard-line conservatives motivated by social issues and unthinking reactionarianism, appear to have taken the upper hand in the struggle for the soul of the GOP.  William F. Buckley described his efforts, back when he helped revive conservatism as a vital, intellectually important force in American politics, as standing athwart history yelling "Stop!"  But it's important to read the entire thing, to understand what Buckley wanted conservatives to do once they got history to pause -- and that was to think carefully about what would happen next, to take the time to understand what's important and good about our country and adapt those ideas to the problems of the day.

I won't say that there are no Tea Party Conservatives or social conservatives who would do that.  Plenty are.  And sometimes I'll agree with them and sometimes I'll disagree with them.  But there doesn't seem to be a lot of thought going on at all over in that camp.  There's a lot of emotion, a lot of passion, a lot of something that smells like fanaticism.  If anyone stopped to think about same-sex marriage, they'd see that it is where the future is and opposition to it is based on nothing but bigotry; it's fanaticism that makes people adhere to that bigotry -- which is why I lump the Maine SSM election results in with the intramural knife fight (aside from the fact that it's a good bet that there is considerable overlap between Tea Partiers rejoicing at the NY-23 results and anti-SSM advocates rejoicing at the Maine results).* 

I have not drunk the Kool-Aid and I find the recent behavior of those who have to be repellent.  It's fanaticism that rejoices in causing a Republican candidate for office to withdraw from a race and endorse a Democrat; it's fanaticism that causes conservatives to think that electing a Democrat to Congress is better than electing a moderate Republican.  And while I can deal with a thoughtful conservative who disagrees with me on individual planks in our party's platform, it's fanaticism that repels me.  There's no room for someone like me in a party of fanatics.


* If you're a Tea Partier who is in favor of same-sex marriage, please comment here so that I can at least know that someone like that even exists.

Wimpy Dollars

The political issue of the strength of our currency is coming down the pike.  I've been a lone wolf on this issue for a while and finally -- finally -- some news organizations are starting to notice that our prolonged insistence on nearly non-existent interest on government debt, and massive-deficit-spending ways, have made the dollars worth less than they have been in more than a century. 

This will be a political issue in the upcoming political cycle -- and, ironically enough for me, Sarah Palin appears to be the first Republican to be picking up on it.  The upcoming j'accuse in the 2012 Presidential debate will be: "You've made our money worthless!"  (It won't matter that the process started under President Bush; this is politics we're talking about here and by 2012, George W. Bush will be a historical figure.)  The Democrats will not have the ability to stop deficit spending in any meaningful way, but they could in theory induce the Fed to raise interest rates on government debt, so the Administration could, in theory, do something to mitigate the problem. 

But I predict that they will not.  Weak dollars will be the order of the day and an issue in 2012.  You read it here first.  This time, you really did.

A Party Of Antiscience

Rick Moran has been running a great series of posts at Right Wing Nut House about the decline of intellectualism in modern conservatism.  And I can think of no more telling symptom of that problem than this tidbit pointed out by David Hume:  it appears that all of the likely Republican Presidential candidate for 2012 are creationists and deny evolution, and favor the "teach the controversy" position:

Bobby Jindal "...has suggested that teaching intelligent design as an alternative to evolution may not be out of place in public schools."  He put his money where his mouth was on that issue, too, authorizing public school teachers to teach intelligent design and criticism of evolution.

Tim Pawlenty is on record as defending Sarah Palin thusly:  "Intelligent design is something that, in my view, is plausible and credible and something that I personally believe in but, more importantly, from an educational and scientific standpoint, it should be decided by local school boards at the local school district level."

Former Governor Palin herself has said of the subject:  "Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of information.  Healthy debate is so important and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both."

Mike Huckabee, for his part, tries as hard as he can to not answer direct questions about teaching intelligent design, which is what we lawyers call "tap dancing."  But there's little doubt that he actively disbelieves in evolution.

Of the prominent Republicans out there right now, only Mitt Romney comes closest to actually embracing science -- and with trademark style, he tries to have things both ways:  "I believe God is intelligent and I believe he designed the creation. And I believe he used the process of evolution to create the human body."  Of course, in doing this, he is missing the point of evolution entirely -- if God guided evolution, then evolution isn't natural selection at work, but rather artificial selection, the way a dog breeder creates a daschund out of successive generations of larger hound dogs.

For a guy who is in the middle of reading Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show On Earth, reciting mountains and mountains of evidence -- not just fossils -- for evolution, this is a bitter pill to swallow indeed.  No likely GOP candidate understands science and most of them subscribe to a "teach the controversy" policy platform.

Teaching the controversy sounds like a politically palatable compromise, but there are plenty of "controversies" we shouldn't teach in public schools because the "other side" of the "theory" is simply not worthy of credulous presentation -- some of which at one time were accepted as the unimpeachable scientific truth and the state of the art of human knowledge.  These include:

• Intelligent falling
  
• The geocentric model of the solar system
• Alien construction of the Great Pyramids
• Cryptozoology (that is, Bigfoot, Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, Chupycabra, etc.)
• The "stork theory" of human reproduction
• Human health as the balance of the "four viscous humours" of phlegm, black bile, yellow bile, and blood
• Santa Claus
• Jerusalem-centric tricontinental global cartography

There is no need to teach any of these "opposing theories" or subject the "conventional" theories to which they are opposed, because these "opposing theories" are laughably and demonstrably not science.  We should take into account a candidate's endorsement of teaching mythology in science class when evaluating that candidate's world view and suitability for office.  Treat a candidate for office who insists that both intelligent design and evolution should be taught in science class the same way you would treat a candidate who insists that the "stork theory" be taught in sex education.

Which portends very poorly for the Republican party indeed.

The Force Will Not Be With Her

Big Hollywood blogger Kurt Schlichter is, I fear, a bit too fond of Sarah Palin for his own good. He wrote yesterday that her abrupt and as-yet unexplained resignation from the Governorship of Alaska may have been prompted by media criticism of her and vicious attacks on her family, but this has made her “more powerful than [her enemies] can possibly imagine.” A cute analogy, especially with the clip from Star Wars. But Schlichter’s Obi-Wan Kenobi analogy is simply not right. I know that Sarah Palin fans want to believe what Schlichter is writing turns out to be true, but wanting it doesn’t make it so.

Soon-to-be-former-Governor Palin is not stronger now than she was before and certainly will not become stronger than her liberal critics can possibly imagine in the future. She is weaker now, not stronger, than she was even a week ago. She will only become weaker once she becomes “Former Governor Palin.” In order to gain power, you need to show that you can use the power you already have effectively. No less a staunch partisan Republican political strategist than Karl Rove agreed with former Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee that her resignation is a “risky strategy” that has left him “perplexed.”

First, if she’s going to try and build a national campaign starting now, this is a very unorthodox move and consequently, she’s shooting herself in both feet. Three recent examples demonstrate that bailing out of government is a bad way to prepare for a Presidential campaign:

A) Hillary Rodham Clinton. Eight years’ worth of machinations, resume-building, maintenance and upgrades to an already-impressive political machine, and what's more, possibly the most impressive set of political alliances and presumptions of inevitability did not result in President Hillary Clinton. Senator Clinton was outdone by then-Senator Obama virtue of the fact that fundamentally, she did not have enough personal executive experience running an enterprise like a Presidential campaign. At best for Palin, she has not yet demonstrated the kind of executive skill necessary to do that. Palin fans will likely bristle at this characterization of Governor Palin, but see my explanation below examples B) and C).

Nor has she been able to convince me that she is capable of personally overseeing the kind of political machine-building that Clinton did during the Bush Administration. Maybe she wouldn't need to if she piggybacks on the "movement," which already exists and already has machinery of its own in place. That seems to be how she catapulted herself onto the stage of state politics several years ago.

B) Fred Dalton Thompson. He didn’t declare for months after the primary season opened. He assembled “virtual” machinery, recording YouTube videos from a small studio in his house. He skipped debates and continued to party like a private citizen. He didn’t network, didn’t fundraise, and took too long to put together a platform on the issues – and when he did get around to doing that, he didn’t look or sound all that different than the guys who had been out on the campaign trail for months. He didn’t win a single delegate and got only eight unelected delegates to commit to him before he released them to McCain.

An unorthodox campaign style with “new machinery” did not produce President Fred Thompson – for all the talk of the “new machinery” Obama assembled, a scandalous amount of his electoral power came from old-fashioned volunteer work, and even more old-fashioned dirty tricks like ballot-box stuffing and polling-place thuggery. What was new about Obama was that he found a new way to build the old-fashioned machinery. What was new about Fred Thompson was that his non-traditional campaign produced non-traditional results.

C) Rudolph William Lewis Giuliani. Remarkable personal charisma and six years’ worth of groundwork raising money for himself and for the political allies he sought as backers was not enough for Rudy! to find purchase in the Republican Party. Too many strange things from his past, too many bad decisions made along the campaign trail. Now, in his case, he did not reverse position on abortion, but he did promise "movement conservatives" that he would appoint "strict constructionist" judges to the Supreme Court, and as we all know, "strict constructionist" is conservative code for "Will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade," something that is so far on top of the conservatives' wish list that they seem willing to forgive nearly anything else a politician or a judge does as long as they do that.

Sarah Palin, too, has outstanding personal charisma and unlike Rudy! she is personally pro-life and does not need to cozy up to the religious right on this issue. Now, I presume that if she is quitting now to lay the groundwork for a run full-time and from a location more convenient than Juneau or Wasilla. She will do the same thing that Rudy! did from 2002 to 2008 by whoring himself out to other candidates to give speeches and lend his political support and fundraising ability to them. Palin, too, can only try to make the right friends by raising money and making campaign appearances for them in 2010. But making very strange decisions – personal, policy, and political – are a pattern that can be found in Sarah Palin’s abbreviated political history, as well. The resignation is only the culmination of a series of odd decisions she's made, from "going maverick" in the middle of the McCain campaign to letting herself get interviewed in front of a working open-air poultry slaughterhouse to demanding new elections for Senator after it seemed to her the voters of Alaska voted wrong. And this bodes very poorly for her abilities as a candidate.

As promised, here is my thesis for Sarah Palin’s unproven executive ability. Sure, Alaska has a balanced budget, but that’s because it makes so damn much money on its excise tax that a fourth-grader could balance the state’s budget. Palin's brief tenure as Governor of Alaska has been highlighted by a number of ethics investigations that found the Governor to have abused her authority but which lacked the teeth to punish her in the face of a generally-friendly Legislature -- the most high profile of which she claimed exonerated her when in fact the exact opposite was true. Also, she presided over the the creation of a natural gas pipeline that had been in the works for four years before she assumed office, vacillated on accepting Federal pork money, and the institution of helicopter wolf hunts (which may make sense if you accept the idea that wolves in Alaska needed to be culled, but it just looks bad and besides, this is hardly a towering accomplishment). She took on some corruption in her own party, which was good, but has been unable to escape the taint of corruption herself. You can find the rumors about how her really nice house got built yourself.

Second, whether there is a scandal or corruption problems with her or not, it looks like she’s stepping down because she has something she wants to hide. You could say, “She wants to protect her family from this evil media machine,” and I’d totally respect that if it were true. But if she refuses to endure the media circus, then that means that she doesn’t want to run for President (at least, in a way which would be reasonably calculated to her actually winning). The fact that it looks like she’s running out of the kitchen because she can’t stand the heat is what’s important, because perception matters more than reality. I’ve heard more than a few rumors that the scandal she is ducking has to do with her time as Mayor of Wasilla rather than as Governor of Alaska, with a deal that looks really similar to the Ted Stevens scandal.

(An aside: Palin didn’t win any points with me for sticking up for Ted Stevens, either. That’s not to say I think the prosecutors handled the case against him well, because they didn’t. Stevens is a free man now because the prosecutors overstepped the case. But to say the prosecutors screwed up the case is not the same thing as saying Stevens was innocent. The evidence strongly suggests he was on the take, and we don’t need a figure of towering, arrogant, unapologetic corruption as a leader in the GOP. We now return to the peroration of your regularly-scheduled jeremiad.)

There were people -- nearly all of them self-identified "movement conservatives" -- who wanted Dan Quayle to run for President in 1996, in 2000 and even still had a few die-hard proponents early in the 2008 cycle. Quayle’s supporters were attracted to the former Vice President for the same sort of visceral reason that they are attracted to Governor Palin now: he was an object of derision and hate by the left and they felt sympathy for him as a whipping boy who didn’t really deserve the abuse he got. This was a reaction to a choice made by the Left. Had the Left not savaged Quayle so thoroughly, the Right would have picked a different avatar.

This was, and still is, bad politics -- don't let the Left pick your candidates for you because they're going to pick the one that they think they can beat easiest. That person, right now, is Sarah Palin. Ever since her resignation, every Democrat I know has said, "I hope this means she does run for President, and I hope you guys are dumb enough to nominate her." This is the political equivalent of the double-dog dare. These Democrats say that not because they fear or despise Palin. (Well, they do despise her, but that's because she's a "gender-traitor," a woman who dares to adhere to a political point of view at variance with the "feminist" constellation of policy positions.) It's because like Republicans, they like winning. And hey're convinced they can beat her.

You may (correctly) think the Democrats are wrong-headed about (many of) their policies, and you may find them (more or less correctly) to be morally bankrupt as a political unit and as represented by their leadership. But don't let that fool you into thinking they're stoooopid.

Dan Quayle was irrelevant in 2000 and even more irrelevant in 2008, and he had the good sense to realize that. He shows up to events, speaks to the rank-and-file faithful, raises some money, and then he goes home. Dan Quayle’s past is Sarah Palin’s future.

Well Now That's Interesting

Gee, why do you think she's doing this?

Whip Ads: A Sign Of The Times

A cruise of Real Clear Politics this morning revealed videos six hit advertisements from moveon.org -- aimed at Dianne Feinstein, Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu, Mark Pryor, and Tom Carper. What all of these politicians have in common is a reputation as "moderate" or "centrist" Democrats. What all these advertisements have in common is that they take these Democrats to task for deviating from the "progressive" agenda moveon.org would prefer to see enacted into policy.

In the past, moveon.org has focused most of its vitriol at Republicans. But this seems to be becoming a thing of the past -- these "whip ads" are intended to push the Democrats into a more rigid, left-wing conformity. For better or for worse, though, they also signal the fact that for political progressives, the Republicans have become simply irrelevant:

Which is, frankly, becoming a less and less controversial sort of position for people to take -- even those who feel a natural gravitation away from Democrats.

As further support for my proposition that, until further notice, the GOP is irrelevant, consider this. If there were to be a Republican Presidential primary held right now, it would be Mitt Romney versus Sarah Palin, with Mike Huckabee playing spoiler. The tactical parallels to the Democratic primary in 2008 are obvious. The difference is that all three of these "leaders" are what counts as "old news" and therefore substantially weakened as candidates despite the fact that they would be running against a charismatic incumbent Democrat with the best political fundraising machine ever assembled.

Tow of the four even remotely interesting GOP Presdiential possibility from the GOP have been plucked out of the running already, one by a clever political appointment from that same formidable incumbent, and the other through an act of political self-immolation. I use the phrase "remotely" interesting because from what I can tell, Tim Pawlenty is really dull. The Exorcist is not boring, but does appear to be from the crazy wing of the party rather than the one that might one day become a force to contend with again.

So it makes a lot of sense for people who are trying to affect and control public policy to simply ignore Republicans completely. As things look right now, the chances of the Republicans being relevant to shaping or influencing national policymaking in a meaningful way are slim to none, at least until after the 2016 elections. That's a long way out, and yeah, a lot of things can happen between now and 2012. But sometimes, the road out of the wilderness is exactly as long and difficult as it appears when you go in.

There are two strategies being suggested as the way to get out of the wilderness. One is to narrow the party's focus and pump up the base's numbers -- that is to say, the 2008 platform, only more of it. The other is to broaden and expand the base by reaching out to different groups and presenting different kinds of policies -- that is to say, the "big tent." I'm a big-tenter. But it seems likely that the "pump up the base" strategy is what's going to be tried first.

Hope It Was Worth It

Man, that's one expensive trip Mark Sanford just took to Buenos Aires. I don't mean the airfare, hotel, and car rental. He'll be paying that price in the future.

Beijing Jon Huntsman

It was only a couple of weeks ago that Utah's Governor, Jon Huntsman, came up on the national radar as a potential rival to Barack Obama's eventual re-election bid in 2012. Huntsman is young, competent, articulate, and appears to be able to position himself as acceptable to both social conservatives and fiscal conservatives. Sort of.

Obama, in turn, might be looking around to wonder whether he can hold on to his office under these crushing economic circumstances. If he can't turn the economy around, he'll have to absorb the blame. So he would want to make sure that the Republicans don't send someone against him who can take away the perception that he brings more competence and good economic policy to the White House than the Republicans can offer. So he might feel good reason to fear Huntsman. And he found a solution to that problem. Sort of.

President Obama appointed Gov. Huntsman to be his ambassador to China, and Huntsman has accepted. Now, this will give him familiarity with working with Democrats, and the ambassadorship to China would give him huge experience dealing with the most significant set of challenges facing America in the long term. So in terms of making him a good choice to be President, it only helps Huntsman. But of course Republicans will need to be given a very good reason to trust Huntsman ever again after this. He has taken himself out of the running for the 2012 nomination and possibly out of Presidential politics forever.

A clever move by the President, if Huntsman's prowess as a candidate was what the early hype was suggesting. And if that's really the case, I have to wonder why Huntsman would have accepted the appointment. If I were in politics, I'd rather finish out my resume by being President than by being Ambassador to China. Maybe he's counting on the political landscape looking very different in 2016 than it does today -- very different as in a radical restructuring or outright collapse of the Republican Party.

Not Enough To Say No

Jon Huntsman is a possible candidate for President in 2012? I'd not really thought about it, but I have to admit that he's stepping up to say something in a real leadership capacity today. (People have to start getting his name right, for starters.) Politico calls him the fastest-rising Republican you've never heard of, and that's about right because he seems to have kept a very low profile despite providing what appears to be pretty competent government to his state.

My point today is, he's the guy who's saying, "You can't just say no. You can't just obstruct or obfuscate." Republicans need to actually come up with new ideas of their own. They need to show that, if given power back, they will actually do something that could potentially be beneficial with that power. Otherwise, they'll be reduced to doing what Democrats did for a long time -- waiting for the party in power to screw the pooch so badly that the public will grow disgusted with them and hand things off to anyone else on general principles.

In fact, even that's a halfway unfair characterization of how the Democrats got their mojo back -- they did say they were going to change and then end the war in Iraq. But it only worked because the public had grown so disgusted with the way the war was going that they were looking for anything, any strategy, anyone, who would effect a meaningful change.

This is why the Tea Party movement is not proving particularly useful or effective in terms of effecting political change (as many people, including me, predicted). It's fun to say "no" all the time because it's easy to criticize and it's easy to get party unity and strong discipline on opposing someone. And it's a valid political point to be against something. But when you're just opposed to something, it sort of ends there. (And your message gets co-opted pretty easily.)

The trick is to channel that energy into being in favor of something. That's how real change happens. Huntsman is dead on right about that. That's something that Barack Obama did when he ran for President, and in retrospect it's amazing how effective he was at it. He managed to advocate a whole constellation of policy ideas, at a very high level of generalization, by talking constantly about "hope" and "change." Yes, I know it's not like he only said those words on his campaign but he never really offered much by way of specifics. Really, he did little more than identify a set of problems and indicated that it would be a priority in his White House.

Now is the time when the rubber meets the road. Now is the time for specifics. Obama is still short on actual, substantive policy ideas. You want proof? Take a look at his budget report. I did yesterday and I was astonished. On the surface, it looks great. There's all sorts of policy statements that sound good; it's difficult to disagree with much of what's there. But look closer. It's about 170 pages long. Twelve pages are a "don't blame me for the crappy economy" argument, which blithely ignores that as a Senator, Obama was part of the team that created the budgets the country's been running on for the past two years and he personally did nothing to help. A sin of omission, to be sure.

Then, the next twenty-six pages are a wish list of policy changes that have apparently not been thought through all the way, dressed up as intellectual justifications for optimistic economic projections. After that, you get more policy wish lists, going department by department through the whole Federal government. You don't get to any real numbers until you hit the appendix. Even then, the numbers are presented in a summary fashion, making it very difficult to figure out exactly what these departments are going to do with all this money. You're better off using this third-party produced interactive budget toy to break down where money is going to go.

This creates an opportunity for Republicans. Obama needs actual ideas. Once you get past the wish lists, he's really short on specifics. Repubicans, step up to the plate and plunk your ideas down on the table. Do it now, and argue for them now. Don't "save" them for a rainy day when the Democrats have flubbed things up so badly you get back in power by default.

If you do this, one of two things will happen. First possibility -- Obama and the Democrats will actually adopt the ideas you argue for. If this happens, you get credit as the originator of the idea and as someone who offers "bipartisan" solutions to problems. Second possibility -- Obama and the Democrats will reject your ideas. If this happens, you get credit as having offered a solution to a problem, and you get to lambaste the Democrats as the real obstructionists. Either way, you win politically.

But you have to have actual ideas to offer, first. Here, let me help you -- I've offered ten substantive ideas that are at least defensible from a policy standpoint and not already occupied as Democratic turf. They could make for bright points in a comprehensive Republican policy platform. Some young (that is, in his or her 50's) Republican holding a Governor's seat or a Senator's seat or some other prominent elective office, to fashion that policy platform and combine that with his or her political machinery and charisma. Right now, the closest things to leaders that Republicans have are a talk show host who cheers on defections from the party, a former Congressman who's been out of office for over ten years, and a floor leader in the House whose policy contributions so far consist of complaints of nausea. So the floor's wide open, as far as I can see it.

But it's not enough to look good and criticize the incumbent. You have to have some actual ideas in your head. Ah, but that's always the hard part, isn't it?

Planetary Politics And Sarah Palin's Future

Nate Silver, though not a conservative himself, does seem to have a fairly clear eye about politics. He has created a very interesting way of indexing the potential contenders for the GOP's 2012 nomination, by graphing in two dimensions the social conservatism of the politician with the politician's credential as an "outsider" versus a "populist." Shamelessly hotlinked, the chart looks more or less right to me:

I'm pretty sure the "Bush" in the diagram is Jeb Bush, not either of the former Presidents.

Now, to some extent I think that the chart is limited in scope by virtue of the fact that there aren't that many contenders out there now, so Silver relied on several names from the 2008 race. He suggests that there is a reasonable possibility that Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson may be in the mix in three years; I kind of doubt that myself. I also have a real hard time seeing Kay Bailey Hutchison in the mix, either.

But for the most part, I think this is right. It is right both in execution and more importantly in concept. It's not enough to index candidates on their degree of social conservatism, because there are other dimensions by which Republicans distinguish themselves. A figure like Mitt Romney gains appeal by promising competent, effective government; a Mike Huckabee gains appeal by promising to "shake things up" in Washington. These are fundamentally polarized kinds of appeals and both parties have candidates from up and down that spectrum.

There are other dimensions worth examining as well, such as economic policy; however, at this time, it would seem that the Republicans have lost their way on this issue, since they still lack credibility as budget hawks and haven't come up with all that many ideas for addressing our present economic woes. And they're all going to be advocates of beefier national defense than will be in place come 2012, so in that sense they'll be indistinguishable from one another also.

So the big lesson here is that in terms of populist/outsider appeal and strong social conservatism, Sarah Palin appears to have cornered the market. Unless someone on the right side of the spectrum makes a convincing populist play, that quadrant of the field would be Palin's for the taking. If she wants it, which it's becoming clear to me that she does.

So it looks like my earlier obituary on her political future may have been in error.

Anti-Dynasticism Is A Bipartisan Sentiment

Remember what I said about how we should all assess the possibility of Caroline Kennedy with a trace of negativity because of the many high governmental positions held by members of her immediate family? How it shouldn't automatically disqualify her, but it should raise the bar she has to meet in order to demonstrate that she's the right person to hold the office? And the reason why, remember that? The reason being that this is not a country of overt aristocracy, a country that firmly rejected the principle of hereditary monarchy and dynastic succession. We are all, or should be, rightfully proud of our republican (small "r" heritage).

Well, what I said for Caroline Kennedy goes the same for Jeb Bush. At least in my book, Governor Jeb is going to have a higher burden than someone else who has served two terms as Governor of a large state to earn my support for his candidacy for President. Now, I realize that he is not his brother or his dad. But we've had twelve years of that particular family running the show.