Jay Reding.com

Every year I do my annual round-up of predictions for the coming year, some of which come true, many of which, well, do not. Last year’s predictions turned out to be less than accurate—let’s see how I did.

Politics/National

• Hillary Clinton defeats Obama for the Democratic Nomination. She picks Mark Warner as her running mate. — Nope, instead Obama managed to run a better ground game, and buoyed by a synchophatic media, he took the nomination. Instead, Clinton gets to be Obama’s Secretary of State, where she will enjoy the Sisyphean task of trying to create peace in the Middle East rather than resurrecting her political career. It’s essentially like being exiled to Siberia for her.
• She then narrowly loses to the Republican candidate (who is not Mike Huckabee). — Instead, Obama won by a convincing margin and an Electoral College blowout. But Huckabee was not the nominee, thankfully.
• Sensing a weak field, Michael Bloomberg runs for the Presidency on a third-party ticket, picking CNN anchor Lou Dobbs — Chuck Hagel as his running mate. He barely registers in the polls, despite pouring millions of his own money into the race. Not even close. Apparently Bloomberg isn’t a dumb as I thought.
• The Democrats retain control of Congress, but not be margins large enough to threaten vetos. Pelosi and Reid remain in control of their respective chambers, but end up being just as ineffectual as they have been over the last major year. Congress still does almost nothing throughout the year, and this Congress leaves with no major legislative achievements to its name. — The Democrats won’t get their veto-proof Senate majority, but this year was another GOP bloodbath. The Democrats have to lead now, however, and that will be more challenging for them. The only legislative “achievement” this year? A massively unpopular “bailout” bill that represents one of the biggest dangers to this Republic in decades. Congress is and will remain profoundly unpopular because of it.

International

• Violence in Iraq remains sporadic, as US forces slowly withdraw. Iraq becomes less and less of a domestic political issue. Al-Qaeda attempts a Tet Offensive, but it is quickly crushed thanks to solid intelligence provided by Iraqi civilians. — I was correct on the first part, but al-Qaeda hasn’t been able to push back in Iraq. For all practical purposes, the “war” in Iraq is over, and our mission will be to train the Iraqi police, military, and government as best we can. President Obama seems like he will not precipitously withdraw from Iraq, and there’s no reason to. Gen. Petraeus and the U.S. military has done its job in Iraq. What’s sad is how little recognized their monumental achievement has been.
• The center-right remains triumphant as Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, Kevin Rudd, and Stephen Harper all work towards free market reforms in their respective countries to great popular acclaim. — For the most part, this is true. Stephen Harper’s problems in Canada may end up hurting the divided Canadian left more than him. The big problem is whether the financial crisis will lead to a dangerous expansion of government or the realization that the more control government has over industry, the more problems with one will harm the other.
• The situation in Pakistan remains deeply unsettled, with Musharraf having only a tenuous hold on power. — Musharraf is out of power, and so far Pakistan has not yet exploded as some had feared. But it hangs on the knife’s edge, and if Pakistan collapses, the effects would be catastrophic.
• Iran continues to rattle sabers, and continues to enrich uranium, while the Bush Administration tries to ratchet up diplomatic pressure—to no avail. — This was a sure bet. Iran has no reason not to rattle their sabers, because they know that no one has the stones to stop them. However, with oil price plummeting, it may be domestic turmoil that does what the rest of the world won’t.
• The Annapolis Peace Conference accomplishes nothing as once again Israel offers concessions and the Palestinians end up being too divided to offer anything in return. — This was like predicting that the sun will rise in the East and set in the West.
• China improves its image with the Beijing Olympics. — They did, but they remain a curious hybrid of free-market optimism and state-run oppression. China remains a country that is divided between the future and the past, and what is keeping that arrangement together is the entrepreneurial spirit of their people. They could be a superpower, or their country could collapse, and it’s hard to tell which way things will go. There is the potential for a major economic crisis in China this year, and the effects could be massive.

Economics

• While the media continues to paint their picture of economic despair, the real story continues to be the “Goldilocks economy” of low unemployment, high economic growth, and steady wage growth. — Oh, how I wish that came true. While the first half of 2008 was relatively strong, the economic crisis of the last half was the beginning of a fundamental economic shift. What happens from here is anyone’s guess, but it seems likely to get worse before it gets better.
• The sub-prime mortgage issue fades as the impact becomes more fully known. As the uncertainty fades, it becomes clear that the fears of recession were baseless. — I don’t think that the assumptions about the recession were right at that time (although there is some evidence that the recession did start around December of 2007), but there is little question we’re now in a recession. While everyone blames Bush, the real culprit is years of Washington and Wall Street engaging in an incestuous relationship—and both parties are guilty of that. We need to realize that in many cases regulation does not level the playing field, it tilts it.
• Oil prices stabilize around $100/barrel. — Oil has fallen to around $40/barrel this month, which is probably too low. The equilibrium price is probably closer to $100, but right now the market is seeing a major collapse in demand. That means cheaper oil, and more hurt for petro-dictators like Chavez and Ahmadinejad. However, we can’t expect the prices to stay this low forever.

Society/Culture/Technology

• At MacWorld, Apple announces iTunes movie rentals – in HD, with a new Apple TV to match. They also announce an enhanced iPhone, an ultraportable MacBook with a flash-based hard drive and long battery life. Apple stock continues to climb. — This all turned out to be true. The MacBook Air is not quite the machine I imagined, but I love mine and think it’s the best built laptop I’ve ever bought.
• However, Amazon’s DRM-free MP3 download store starts stealing some marketshare from iTunes. More studios embrace selling their music unencumbered by DRM, leading iTunes to abandon their FairPlay DRM on music by the end of the year. — Amazon’s store is still very nice, and Apple would love to ditch DRM, but the music labels are still resisting. The day the RIAA and the labels become irrelevant is rapidly approaching, however.
• Despite blockbusters like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Star Trek, box office receipts decline both in number of tickets and dollars grossed as the price of high-def movie equipment declines. While movie ticket sales decline, sales of HDTVs, home theater setups, and HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players soar. HD-DVD players hit the $100 mark by the end of the year, meaning that HD-DVD adoption pulls away from Blu-Ray. — Star Trek was pushed back to next summer. HD-DVD lost the format war. But the larger point remains, movies are becoming more of a personal thing, and with the economic downturn, that’s going to be ever more of a factor next year.

Also, No Country for Old Men did win Best Picture, as it very well should have.

My predictions were widely off the mark in a year of phenomenal “change.” Obama’s surge, the economy’s collapse, and the aftereffects of both were currents that will carry us into a turbulent new year. But every new year is a turbulent one, and the assumptions we all make now may be as broken as the ones I made a year ago.

Later, my predictions for 2009, as well as an important announcement.

Sen. Ted Stevens, perennial embarrassment and convicted felon, has narrowly lost his Senate seat. Had the GOP been sensible, they would have asked him to resign—and it was that lack of sense that has contributed to the waning fortunes of the GOP over the past few years.

There is no excuse for corruption. Not cleaning house was a major mistake. Losing Stevens’ seat puts the Democrats closer to a filibuster-proof majority, but the Republicans were fools to rely on him in the first place.

Via the incomparable James Lileks comes a map that should send chills down the spine of every Republican:

A county-by-county map of the 2008 election results.

Even though this election was relatively close, the map does not show that McCain did very well in spreading his message nationwide. The Republican Party cannot hope to win as a regional party any more than the Democrats could. The task for the coming years will be in crafting a Republican message that can resonate beyond the Bible Belt of the country.

The good news is that this country remains a center-right country. There are still more self-described conservatives than liberals, and the center remains persuadable. If Obama over-reaches—and with a strident liberal Congress that is quite likely, the Republicans can come back again. This isn’t necessarily a realigning election that presages a Democratic majority for years to come any more than 2004 was the same. The normal political cycle of realigning elections in this country seems to be dramatically shortened thanks to mass media and technology. Republicans shouldn’t be consigning themselves to defeat yet.

But we have to admit that this map shows a massive problem. The strategies of exploiting cultural wedge issues and national security won’t work anymore. The Karl Rove playbook worked in 2000, 2002, and 2004. It didn’t in 2006 or 2008, and it won’t work in 2010 and 2012. The Republican Party needs to broaden itself and admit that it has a problem reaching out to the center.

Granted, the 2008 result was largely due to two factors: President Bush’s unpopularity and Barack Obama’s immense political skill. Those factors aren’t going to repeat themselves again—and in 2012 it could be a skilled Republican like Bobby Jindal versus an unpopular President Obama. But even if that is true, the problems with the Republican Party are structural, and need to be fixed.

I don’t pretend to have the right answer. There’s going to be gallons of ink and gigabytes of blog posts figuring out where to go next. What I do know is that something has got to change, and the Republican Party will have to adapt to a changing political climate. That does not have to mean compromising on our values—Republicans can win in places like the Northeast without compromising on key values. But it’s also going to require the GOP to do more than try to use cultural wedge issues to their partisan advantage.

In a democracy, parties can and should win and lose. Politics is cyclical, and the Republican Party has done much to put themselves in this position. The goal moving forward is to rebuild the party for a post-Bush world. There can be a Republican renaissance, but only if the party and its constituents are willing to make it happen.

In the aftermath of the defeat of the McCain campaign, Republicans are trying to figure out not only what went wrong, but what to do in the future. This is a conversation that is a long time coming. From 2000 on, the GOP was unified around George W. Bush. From about 2005 on, Bush was as toxic as a mortgage-backed security. Political movements based around single individuals do not tend to last, and by hitching their wagons to Bush, the Republican Party sowed the seeds of their own downfall. (Note that the Democrats are doing the same with Obama now. Sic transit gloria mundi.)

The failure of the McCain campaign must be tied to the failure of the Bush Presidency. He fought on a completely uneven playing field. The media was in the tank for Obama, and the Democratic machine was energized. But that doesn’t excuse the mistakes of the McCain campaign. They had the right message in the “Country First” theme, but they never really used it effectively. McCain could have won, but it would have taken an incredibly smart campaign to have done it. Instead, the McCain campaign went for the tried-and-true techniques of Bush 2000 and 2004—in a political climate that could not have been more different.

How McCain Could Have Won

The first step that a candidate has to do is understand the political climate. McCain never really had a handle on it. The American public was furious with Congress. Congress’ approval ratings were at the level usually associated with used-car salesmen and dirty diapers. The “politics as usual” of the last 8 years was creating the perfect climate for someone to run against the Beltway.

Obama was “change.” McCain should have been “reform.” With an incredibly unpopular Congress, McCain could have easily ran as the candidate who would clean up government. That’s why the Palin pick was, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the right pick. But the McCain camp never really used her in the right way. Their “maverick” message was nice, but it wasn’t substantive enough. They let the media paint the picture of Sarah Palin, and they lost control of the only one truly brilliant tactical choice they made. The Palin situation could have saved McCain, and it gave him his best numbers, but they never built on the momentum she generated.

When the financial crisis hit, what did McCain do? He ran to the Beltway, and pushed through another pork-laden Beltway deal. I agree with Todd Zywicki that the bailout was the moment where McCain cruised to failure. It undercut McCain’s credentials as a reformer. The “suspension” of his campaign never went anywhere, and McCain never capitalized on it in the way he should have. It made him look panicky and indecisive, which only made Obama’s too-cool-for-school demeanor more attractive.

What should McCain have done? I think the idea of a suspension was not played right. He should not have suspended his campaign, but gone to Washington. He should have demanded that Congress pass a clean bailout with no pork but lots of accountability. He should have stood against both the Congress and the President and opposed the final bill. He should have clearly and convincingly said that his choice to do those things was based on a rejection of the usual politics in Washington. If the bailout passed (which it would have), he should have continued to use it in every speech as a sign about how the whole system in Washington is broken.

If this had been an election about generic “change” versus substantive reform, McCain could have won. But McCain’s campaign was too orthodox to defeat the Obama juggernaut. They ran a stereotypical Republican campaign when they should have run a campaign that pit McCain as the experienced leader that would clean up Washington. McCain’s campaign executed their strategy quite well, all things considered, but their strategy was simply the wrong one at the wrong time.

It looks like Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States. All partisanship aside, this is unquestionably a historic moment for this nation.

Let’s hope that he makes the best of it.

I have had neither the time nor the inclination to do my usual election-time prognostication, but I’ll give it a go for old time’s sake:

Minnesota CD 2: John Kline will do what he always does: kick ass and take names. Steve Sarvi will lose in a blowout.

Minnesota Senate: Norm Coleman is not a Republican’s Republican, but he’s a smart and honest guy. Franken is and always has been a joke. Franken will lose by at least 5.

Minnesota Presidential Results: I wish that someday Minnesota will turn red, but it won’t be this year. Obama will win, but not in a blowout. Obama by 4.

Other Minnesota House Races: Paulsen will squeak by Madia by the narrowest of margins, Bachmann will narrowly beat out Tinklenberg, and the rest are obvious.

President of the United States: I’m going to go off on a limb here and say that McCain will win Pennsylvania, and thus the Presidency. Obama and Biden have done much to alienate voters in Western Pennsylvania. From the “clinging” comment to Joe the Plumber to Jack Murtha’s accusations of racism to the recent brouhaha over bankrupting coal companies, the gaffes have just kept on coming. In the end, the Palin pick was one of the smartest things that McCain could have done, as it let him connect with the voters in the heartland. She’s one of them, and that may make her hated in the Boston-NYC-DC megalopolis, but it makes her popular with the rest of America. McCain will eke out the narrowest of Electoral College wins, trading PA for CO, IA, and NM. VA stays red by the slimmest of margins.

U.S. Senate: The Democrats miss their filibuster-proof majority (thank God), but pick up enough seats to be close: 58.

U.S. House of Representatives: The Dems pick up plenty of seats, but there’s one silver lining for Republicans: the execrable John Murtha is sent packing.

We’ll see how this plays out as the night goes on.

Today is Election Day. For weeks we’ve heard how Barack Obama is going to be the next President of the United States. Now is the time for every good man and woman in this country to take their stand. John McCain is a man of honor, wisdom, and patriotism. He nearly gave his life in service of his country, and while he isn’t perfect, he will help keep this country strong. Every Republican and conservative needs to vote today, and they need to vote for John McCain.

We know what the stakes are. We can either have a government that is responsible to us or a government that tries to be responsible for us. McCain, imperfect as he is, will fight the abuse of earmarks. He will fight government waste, tooth and nail. He will clean out the sewer of Washington D.C. and root out corruption. We need that now more than ever.

John McCain has never bowed to tyrants. He will stand up to Ahmadinejad, Chavez, and Putin. He will not flinch in supporting America’s interests abroad. He will fight al-Qaeda with vigor, and he will not give them an inch of ground in Iraq. He is the only candidate in this race who has truly fought for us. The men and women of our Armed Forces trust John McCain, and we dare not let them down.

Our economy is in crisis. We cannot have higher taxes, more intrusive regulation that benefits Democratic special interests over the common good, and a system of government that thinks it’s Robin Hood. McCain realizes that. Obama does not. Obama will take his cues for Herbert Hoover by raising taxes and engaging in economic protectionism—the very actions that made the Great Depression great. He will make the economy even worse. McCain will keep taxes low, support growth-enabling policies, and help America recover. The choice could not be more clear.

When it comes to the defense of the unborn, the choice could not be more clear. Obama is part and parcel of the abortion culture. He has failed to stand up for infant protection. He supports the judicial monstrosity of Roe v. Wade. A few misguided individuals think that Obama will support life, despite his record. They are wrong—dead wrong. McCain is absolutely solid in his support for life, and every pro-life voter should vote their conscience and vote for McCain. He is the only consistent choice on this issue.

This country does not need a cult of personality. It does not need empty promises and mindless slogans. Hope is not a plan, and change is not a direction. John McCain offers substantive reform, real policies, and a real plan for America’s future. It is time to stand up for the values that have made us a land of opportunity.

Now is the time to stand up and be counted. John McCain needs our help, and far more importantly America’s future needs our help. We must not allow this country to go in the wrong direction, and John McCain will hold the line as he has always done. It is time for him to go on one last mission on our behalf.