Sen. John McCain has released his own Christmas ad, and it’s an incredibly powerful one:
Like many conservatives, I don’t always agree with John McCain on every issue. However, there is no doubt that Sen. McCain is one of the most patriotic Americans in government service today, a man who has made incredible sacrifices for his country, and someone who stands for his principles no matter what the political cost. I have a feeling that many conservatives are taking a second look at McCain, especially in contrast to Mike Huckabee’s crude moralism. It’s one thing to talk about the Christmas spirit, it’s another thing to give us such a heartfelt reminder of what that spirit really is.
I may not always agree with John McCain, but there are times when I’m damn glad this country has men and women like him.
What this goes to show is how volatile polling in Iowa really is. The dynamics of the race are constantly shifting, and a long-shot contender like McCain has just as much of a shot as Romney or Huckabee. Because this is a caucus rather than an open primary the actual results will be decided by a relatively small number of people—and those people aren’t always the people answering the pollster’s questions.
It will be interesting to see if Sen. McCain can execute an “up the middle” strategy in Iowa and New Hampshire. The big issue that has been hurting McCain has been immigration, but that issue hasn’t been dominating the headlines as much as it has. McCain has a strong appeal with fiscal and national defense conservatives, and he’s an acceptable candidate with social conservatives as well. If McCain does well in Iowa and New Hampshire, it could completely alter the dynamics of the race.
Could there be a McCain/Lieberman unity ticket in the future? I wouldn’t be making any big bets on it, but in this fluid time, it’s not impossible either.
On this day in 1998, in a sickening display of partisanship, the House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton for consensual sex obstruction of justice and perjury.
The next time a corporate CEO is brought up on charges of sexually harassing a subordinate, I’d love for them to try to use the “it was consensual!” defense. I’m sure that would excuse such behavior. It’s ironic that a party that’s supposed to represent the interest of feminists is so quick to dismiss someone misusing the highest position of power in the country to avail oneself of a naïve 21-year-old intern. And by ironic, I mean reprehensible.
Not to mention that Clinton was hardly innocent—he was disbarred in Arkansas and had to step down from the Supreme Court bar before they disbarred him as well. It’s one thing to make the reasonable argument that lying in a civil deposition doesn’t justify the impeachment of a President. It’s a thin reed to hang on, but it’s something. The argument that it was “just about sex” was always a trope, and those who use it demonstrate once again that for some, partisanship eclipses all reason.
Please, commemorate this anniversary of an impeachment that should not have occurred by supporting one that is long overdue: Please sign Rep. Wexler’s petition to hold impeachment hearings on Dick Cheney.
Yes, because politicized impeachments are terrible things! So we need more of them!
The magnitude of the idiocy is astounding.
Part of me would love to see Rep. Wexler’s impeachment pipe-dream come to pass. I’d love to see the Democrats try to further politicize matters of national security, justify their own idiotic claims that Bush “lied” about something that everyone else in the world believed in, and generally make fools of themselves in an election year. Especially given that under the Constitution, Cheney would preside at his own trial.
Of course, the simple truth of the matter is this: there will never be an impeachment. Rep. Wexler and the rest of the Congressional Clown Caucus are playing Lucy to the raving left’s Charlie Brown. They’ll keep dangling that football out them to get the raving partisans fired up, but they’ll always pull it away at the last second. Why? Because they know there’s no case there, and if they actually had to defend their political rantings in an impeachment trial they’d end up looking like fools. The radical left is being played, and they’re still too mired in their own petty hatred to see it.
Not to rehash the battles of the past, but it does serve as a reminder of just how much Kool-Aid the left continues to quaff in this country.
Inside, Thompson shook a few hands — there were only about 15 people there — and then Chief Dan McKenzie handed Thompson the chief’s fire hat so Thompson could put it on.
Thompson looked at it with a sour expression on his face.
“I’ve got a silly hat rule,” Thompson said.
In point of fact, the “silly” hat was the one Chief McKenzie wore to fires and I am guessing none of the firefighters in attendance considered it particularly silly, but Thompson was not going to put it on. He just stood there holding it and staring at it.
To save the moment, Jeri Thompson took the hat from her husband’s hands and put it on her head.
“You look cute,” Thompson said to her. She did.
Unfortunately for The Politico, a CBS News reporter happened to be there and captured the actual event:
This just goes to show how the media doesn’t always give you the straight story. With the advent of things like YouTube it’s harder for people to get away with these mischaracterizations. The media has a narrative, and sometimes that narrative and reality don’t occupy the same ZIP code.
There have been many criticisms of Thompson’s campaign style (or lack thereof). Given that Thompson is on a major bus tour of Iowa, visiting 54 of the state’s 99 countries in the days before Christmas, that narrative might end up haunting the media. Iowa’s voters tend not to do what the media thinks they’ll do, which makes for a much more interesting race. When you’re locked into one mode of looking at the world, it’s much more difficult to see the nuances that can quickly decide a race as close as this one.
Time’s Man of the Year for 2007 is Russian President Vladimir Putin. It isn’t a bad pick (although I would have picked Gen. David Petraeus)—Vladimir Putin’s actions are most certainly of great import in shaping our world. The problem is that they’re not shaping our world for the better. Putin has been slowly but surely turning Russia into just another banana republic petro-state, and ultimately that course is not sustainable. Ss democracy in Russia dies, the potential for another wave of destructive totalitarianism grows.
The Time article plays into the idea that Putin just happened to amble into history and become President of Russia. This seems unlikely—more likely is that Russia is still being ruled by the same forces that ruled the country during the Communist age. Putin’s status as a former KGB agent and head of the FSB (the agency that took over from the KGB after the fall of the Soviet Union) serves him well when it comes down to doing the two things he does best: keeping Russia in line and ensuring that his political opponents cause him no trouble.
Putin is certainly a man with a mission:
Putin’s mission is not to win over the West. It is to restore to Russians a sense of their nation’s greatness, something they have not known for years. This is not idle dreaming. When historians talk about Putin’s place in Russian history, they draw parallels with Stalin or the Tsars. Putin, one can’t stress enough, is not a Stalin. There are no mass purges in Russia today, no broad climate of terror. But Putin is reconstituting a strong state, and anyone who stands in his way will pay for it. “Putin has returned to the mechanism of one-man rule,” says Talbott of the Brookings Institution. “Yet it’s a new kind of state, with elements that are contemporary and elements from the past.”
And there’s plenty that could go wrong. The depth of corruption, the pockets of militant unrest, the ever present vulnerability of the economy to swings in commodity prices—all this threatens to unravel the gains that have been made. But Putin has played his own hand well. As Prime Minister, he is set to see out the rest of the drama of Russia’s re-emergence. And almost no one in Russia is in a position to stop him. If he succeeds, Russia will become a political competitor to the U.S. and to rising nations like China and India. It will be one of the great powers of the new world.
Unfortunately, it won’t stay there for long. Totalitarian regimes—and Russia is already authoritarian and sliding more and more towards totalitarianism every single day—tend not to last very long. There are no purges, no mass executions now, but Putin’s authoritarian state makes it far easier for either him or the next dictator to make it happen. Putin can steer Russia towards the right course, but it would mean more openness rather than less, and a willingness to sacrifice his rule for the benefit of Russia’s future.
Putin’s Russia is slowly sliding away from democracy and towards tyranny, and Vladimir Putin is responsible for that. He is a man whose vision of Russia as a strong state is compelling, but ultimately he is sacrificing the future of his nation for his own ends. The line between autocrat and tyrant is a thin one, and Putin is already skating the edge—and once Russia crosses that line once more, it may be even harder for it to recover than it already has been.
The point here, in case it is not obvious: Non-response bias may have exaggerated the percentages of younger (under 45) caucus goers the 2004 Iowa entrance poll (something I wondered about a month or so ago). And since I’m assuming that age is strongly related to having attended a caucus in the past, the entrance poll estimate of the number of caucus newcomers in 2004 may be exaggerated as well.
Basically, older caucus-goers are less likely to talk with younger polltakers, which means that candidates like Dean or Obama that tend to have more support from younger voters look stronger in the polls than they actually are. The way in which the Iowa caucus system works heavily favors older voters who tend to be a part of the caucuses year after year. That’s why the results in Iowa may be vastly different from the way they’re portrayed—candidates like Obama don’t tend to have the same appeal to the typical Iowa caucus-goer as they do to the typical voter.
I’d be willing to guess that the story coming out of Iowa will be the resurgence of Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s made some major missteps in the last few months, but that’s made it easier for her to steal a page from her husband’s playbook and become the Comeback Kid—and with the latest CNN/WaPo poll putting her comfortably ahead in New Hampshire helps in painting a picture of a campaign on the upswing.
As for the Republican race, the effect of potential poll bias remains to be seen. It could be that Huckabee’s appeal to evangelicals matches with the target profile of Iowa caucus-goers. Or it could mean that Romney, McCain, or Thompson could get a boost from older voters. The race has been up in the air for weeks now, and the potential for change is so great that it’s simply impossible to make a worthwhile call.
Polling is never an exact science, which is why it only has limited utility in a campaign. A candidate like John Kerry who was in the single digits at this point in 2003 can suddenly sweep the nomination. A candidate like Howard Dean that appears unstoppable can end up losing big. Part of the fun in politics is in contests like this where anything could change. (Although it’s much less fun for those on the inside of a campaign.) The first rule of polling should be not to trust polling, as it’s as much of an art as a science. It’s quite possible that everything we’ve heard about the race in the last few weeks may be rendered moot when Iowans actually go into their caucuses and pick their candidates.