Author: Doug Santo

“…Democrats won the U.S. House last night. They also fell devastatingly short of their own expectations, and the resounding rebuke they hoped to deliver to President Trump has landed as a modest disagreement.

Their House victory will make Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the new speaker, and that will matter in how this country is governed over the next two years. But the base and most of the media had wanted so much more.

Instead, we got a normal midterm election in a year, and with a president, we were told was anything but normal.

Should Trump feel repudiated by his party’s loss of the House? The strongest argument for this points to Republicans’ poorer-than-usual performance among suburban women in key House races. This, CNN’s Mark Preston suggested, is supposed to illustrate a GOP coalition falling apart under the strain of Trump’s peculiar brand of Republicanism.

But does it really? Or does it exemplify the same problems Republicans have long had with “soccer moms” (as they were once called) at times when the political center and the mood of the country turned against them? The difference between 2006 and 2018 might just be that the losses of 2018 are far less severe, limited mostly to House races, and don’t result in Democrats having any real power over anything — not even the power to block Trump’s nominations…”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/blue-wave-turns-out-to-be-ordinary-election-rather-than-an-extraordinary-rebuke-to-trump

This is a great piece by Mark Penn. Penn’s non-partisan, rational analysis of the current political landscape is the best I’ve read.

Mark Penn:

“…The Harvard Caps/Harris Poll this month show two rather remarkable figures on President Trump. On the one hand, 57 percent approve of the job that he is doing on the economy, even before the upbeat jobs numbers on Friday, yet when asked if they personally like Trump, only 27 percent said “yes” in a remarkable divergence between policy and personality that will play itself out in the final midterm vote tallies.

When working for President Clinton, we developed the theory of a Saturday night Clinton and an Oval Office Clinton. It was the Saturday night side of him that caused all the trouble. Today there is obviously an economic Trump, more knowledgeable than any recent president about what makes the market tick, and a Twitter Trump, who throws verbal bombs that explode daily in the public square, dragging down his image.

Of course, there is an entire complex of billionaires, partisans, and some in the media devoted to bringing down Trump. So, in fairness, it is not all him, though he seems to revel in the combat that holds him back. It is important to remember that George Bush, the guy everyone wanted to have a beer with, sank down to the 20s in his job approval and was labeled a war criminal and an idiot, shunned even at the Republican Party convention. Almost no one in politics today has a net positive image, and both Trump and Hillary Clinton are viewed rather harshly, almost unchanged, and possibly even worse than during the campaign.

Objectively, the economic Trump has racked up surprising results in a short time, adding more than 5 million jobs after a long expansion that started under President Obama but had stalled. Wages are rising and millions have gone back to the labor force, and an expanded base of workers has a multiplier effect of expanding the consumer and tax base of the country. Trump promised to bring back the coal industry and he did.

Trump even renegotiated NAFTA, and most observers laughed at the idea that he could use threats of tariffs as negotiating chits to get results for American workers who had been abandoned by previous presidents. Obama scoffed at bringing back manufacturing jobs to America as a fantasy, yet hundreds of thousands of such jobs have returned.

Trump also deployed a new kind of economic warfare. When the Turkish government refused to hand over a political prisoner, he imposed sanctions that wrecked the Turkish currency. It took only a few months for the Turkish prime minister to rethink his relationship with the United States and send back Pastor Andrew Brunson. The Chinese first laughed at the demands by Trump to stop stealing our intellectual property. Several hundred billions of tariffs later, and a nearly 30 percent decline in the value of Chinese assets, and Beijing is ready to come to the table…”

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/414880-the-paradox-of-trump-and-midterms

Sarah Hoyt:

“…Please? Because I want to write without worrying about what insanity they’re going to impose on all of us next.  And oooh, boy, every time I think they’ve reached peak insane they go “Hold my beer and watch me falsely accuse someone of rape while wearing a vagina costume.”  So…. please?  I write SF/F and even my mind can’t imagine the new depths of crazy they’ll plumb next…”

From the Victory Girls:

“…A vote for a Democrat, any Democrat, is to reward some of the most divisive, hysterical, irrational behavior in modern politics.

Roll up your voter’s guide, point to the corner and send every Democrat you can into a long time-out. This cannot continue. Do not let it continue.

Just do it, while we still can…”

http://victorygirlsblog.com/vote-no-on-democrats/

Neo-neocon:

“…Nobody knows anything, but dear LORD.  Even if you hate your local GOP knucklehead, even if he is a RINO loser…. do you want Nancy “Grey Goose” Pelosi in charge of the House again?  Do you want those idiots on the left to think — as they have since they successfully demonized the squishy GWB — that they need to keep turning up the insanity and drama and lies? They’re already too crazy. Worse, do you want them to enact their contract on America, from higher taxes to throttling our energy production? Are you NOSTALGIC for the Obama years? I for one would like a chance to dig myself out of the financial hole those years left me in. Vote for your local Republican knucklehead. Even if you’d like someone better.  You go to war with the underwear you got on.  Vote against the democrat lunatics. It’s important…”

https://www.thenewneo.com/2018/11/05/tomorrow-is-election-day/

Ann Althouse:

“…You might think Trump has set the midterms up as a referendum on himself, and I think that’s true. But if the GOP wins, Trump antagonists are not going to give it to Trump and say his referendum passed and bow to democratic choice. They’re going to say that racism won, and resisting and fighting is even more important now that we know so many Americans have been caught up in Trump’s horrible scheme…”

https://althouse.blogspot.com/2018/11/you-know-what-democrats-are-going-to.html

Here is another image that brings back great memories and foretells good times this year. 

I am absolutely jam-packed at work and trying to get all my stuff done before the upcoming holiday. I am really looking forward to Thanksgiving in Yosemite. I love the memories and I love the place. Here is a photo from Thanksgiving 2014.

A long comprehensive look at polling, some recent mistakes, where the industry is going. 

Karlyn Bowman:

“…As political pundits and the general public prepare for the 2018 midterm elections this fall, it’s a safe bet that pollsters will undergo fresh scrutiny. Questions are still being raised about their performance in the 2016 presidential election, and the results from some major 2017 contests did little to allay those concerns. Few polls, for example, predicted the size of Virginia governor Ralph Northam’s nine-point victory last November. And in the special election last December for a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, the final polls ranged from a nine-point victory for Republican Roy Moore to a 10-point victory for Democrat Doug Jones. Jones won by one and a half percentage points…”

https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-trouble-with-polling

Democrats should watch a Trump MAGA rally. I saw portions of one yesterday at a hangar at some airport. There were 20,000 people there according to official estimates. The crowd was raucous, fired-up, clapping and screaming for each of Trump’s stump statements. I haven’t seen this kind of thing for a politician in midterms. This is one of many such rallys the president has attended in the last few months.

Frank Bruni:

“…Too many Democrats spend too much time trumpeting Clinton’s popular-vote victory, blaming the Russians or combing the shadows for anything that absolves them of error. They dismiss Trump as an accident, a freak or a fad. It’s consoling, sure. It’s also an invitation to his next inauguration…”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/opinion/midterms-democrats-trump-2020.html

Gail Herriot:

“…Its operative clause states: “The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting.”

The hope of many Proposition 209 supporters was that the measure would reduce the effects of mismatch. And during the years it was adhered to, it appears to have done exactly that: Minority graduation rates rose rapidly, and minority on-time (four-year) graduation rates rose even faster. At the same time, minority science and engineering rose by about 50%, while the number of minority students majoring in ethnic studies or communications fell by 20%. And minority GPAs increased…”

“…Modern America is characterized by an intense grassroots distrust of American elites — with red America especially disdainful of progressive elite institutions. Much ink has been spilled explaining the reasons for this distrust, and I don’t intend for a single short piece to encompass the whole of the argument, but I do think we underestimate the extent to which prolonged exposure to a flawed and biased elite-ordered and elite-controlled education system is profoundly dispiriting and embittering for millions of Americans.

Public education has been marked by diminished local control, top-down reform driven by ideological and educational fads, and failed experiment after failed experiment. For example, the intense opposition to the Common Core in the recent past was driven in part by the too-fresh memory of other grand ideas and technocratic national movements.

As for higher education, its gatekeepers are often explicit ideological radicals. At their worst, they attempt to micromanage a freshman class’s racial and socioeconomic background (and sometimes its political composition) based on theories about privilege that are utterly at odds with the lived experience of the American families at their mercy…”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/how-progressive-elite-control-of-education-embitters-americans

The lesson: Always think for yourself

“…I “blew out” of the cult — to use its own lingo for leaving — after my senior year to attend a Catholic university 20 miles away. I still read the Apostle Paul, but Jane Austen and James Joyce, too. Then I earned a PhD in English at the University of Minnesota, where I rehearsed Marx’s and Freud’s critiques of religion. Simmering with smug resentment, I was certain that I, an intellectual, was on the right side of history, a sworn opponent of the oppressive ideologies I ascribed to organized religion.

But I had to climb only so far up the ivory tower to recognize patterns of abuse that I thought — in my new, secular life — I had left behind. Because academia, I slowly realized, is also a cult.

Cults are systems of social control. They are insular but often evangelical organizations whose aims (be they money, power, sex or something else) are rooted in submission to a dogma manifested by an authority figure: a charismatic preacher or, say, a tenured professor. The relationship between shepherd and sheep is couched in unwavering commitment to a supposedly noble, transcendent cause. For the Living Word Fellowship, that meant “the Lordship of Jesus Christ”; for academia, “the production of knowledge.” In both cases, though, faith ultimately amounts to mastering the rules of the leaders, whose infallibility — whether by divine right or endowed chair — excuses all else.

Looking back, the evidence was everywhere: I’d seen needless tears in the eyes of classmates, harangued in office hours for having the gall to request a letter of recommendation from an adviser. Others’ lives were put on hold for months or sometimes years by dissertation committee members’ refusal to schedule an exam or respond to an email. I met the wives and girlfriends of senior faculty members, often former and sometimes current advisees, and heard rumors of famed scholars whisked abroad to sister institutions in the wake of grad student affairs gone awry. I’d first come in contact with such unchecked power dynamics as a child, in the context of church. In adulthood, as both a student and an employee of a university, I found myself subject to them once again. . . . The Ronell scandal should alert us to the broader ways in which the 21st-century university is an absolutist institution, a promoter of sycophancy and an enemy of dissent…”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/academia-is-a-cult

I found this diagram instructive

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-test-of-trump-midterms-could-result-in-a-mixed-verdict-1541336400

The Judiciary Committee report finds no evidence to support any charge against Kavanaugh

Summary of Investigation, page 3, 4th paragraph:

“…After an extensive investigation that included the thorough review of all potentiallycredible  evidence submitted and interviews of more than 40 individuals with information relating to the allegations, including classmates and friends of all those involved, Committee investigators found no witness who could provide any verifiable evidence to support any of the allegations brought against Justice Kavanaugh. In other words, following the separate and extensive investigations by both the Committee and the FBI, there was no evidence to substantiate any of the claims of sexual assault made against Justice Kavanaugh…”

Full Report

It is popular to celebrate this guy on the right side of politics, and under normal circumstances, that would be cause for me to reject this man. That would be a mistake. This is a smart man worth listening to. His celebrity is earned.

This is a great piece on media and democrats. Click over and read it.

Jim Geraghty:

“…The national media started sending correspondents to hang out with O’Rourke, and just about all of them fell in love with him: Vanity Fair, Town and Country, Spin, GQ (twice!), BuzzFeed, Yahoo News, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Time, the Washington Post (twice!), the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg News, the BBC . . .

Correspondents seemed oddly fixated on his sweat. Politico swooned, “Sweat pours off his lean, 6-foot-4-inch frame.” In Vanity Fair, Peter Hamby described him “sweating through a button-down shirt at one of his jam-packed town halls.” The BBC wrote, “His toes are well over the edge of the boards” of the stage “and his suede shoes are soaking up dark splashes of sweat from his brow.”

It’s Texas. It’s summer. It’s hot. Everybody sweats at outdoor events.

Beyond their not-so-hidden partisan preference, many reporters want to discover the southern Democrat with national potential — Bill Clinton 2.0 — and write the first glossy profile piece of a future president. The piece will double as a book proposal, and the book will allow its author to spend the latter half of his or her career as a quasi-historian expert on a particular president.

Reading through all of these profiles as they emphasize the same points over and over again — He was in a punk-rock band! He skateboards! He’s handsome! He’s Kennedyesque! He speaks fluent Spanish! — one keeps waiting for the section that describes what makes O’Rourke actually unique among Democratic candidates. And that section never arrives…”

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/11/12/long-shot-beto/