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President Bush is confronted with a historic opportunity in naming a new successor to the Supreme Court Associate Justice seat held by Sandra Day O’Conner, but one wonders whether or not he will avail himself of the promises made in 2000 and 2004 to name someone reflective of a conservative philosophy to the court in place of O’Conner.

Failing his first two tests of presidential leadership concerning reconfiguarion of the judiciary by forwarding John Roberts as chief justice rather than a dependable stalwart like Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia, and in failing to back the Republican party in the Senate when they pondered the Nuclear option, Bush must carefully consider his next appointment, lest he completely alienate the base that has carried him and the Republican party to their electoral success.

While the hard left would openly rally to challenge a conservative nominee, there is a greater substantive risk in abandoning the hard right for the Republican party– Bush and companions have never counted on the backing of Planned Parenthood members, NARALites, or ACLU members at election time. They cannot win without the likes of Focus on the Family, Operation Rescue, and think tank backing from places like the Heritage Foundation mobilizing voters and creating issues for electoral fodder.

Conservatives have carried their electoral pre-eminence to every level of American government that can be reached by the ballot box- 10 consecutive Republican Congresses, and a 7-3 advantage in the last 10 presidential elections. At the state level, Republican govenorships are at an unprecidented level, and Republicans control more state legislative bodies outright than the Democrats. It is difficult to overstate how thorough the victories of the Republican party have been over the last 10 years in particular, as it broke through historical lethargy that had previously religated it to what was seemingly indefinite minority party status in legislative bodies.

What has mobilized voters to vote Republican? Social issues are a key factor– school prayer, abortion, special rights for minorities [affirmative action, homosexual entitlements], and a myriad of unpopular Court decisions that have expressed an animus to the way of life of middle-America. To these people, the Supreme Court hasn’t been a neutral force in forty years– it has engaged in a systematic assault upon the core values of the American people– and now they expect the President they took to the White House to do something to correct this situation. They will be naturally wary- they remember David Souter all-too well, and are antsy about John Roberts as a second coming of the trojan liberal.

How serious are both ends of the spectrum about the coming battle? It promises to dwarf the $35 million spent in advocacy concerning the Roberts nomination, with some estimates coming in closer to the $100 million mark. Phone banks and national contact drives are already being planned logistically by both the Right and the Left; lists of nominees are being vetted privately by every major organization on each side of the spectrum, and everyone is ready for a fight. Even this correspondent has waded into the fray with a private donation for advocacy– something it is hard to get an evil money-grubbing Conservative to do willingly.

For many, this is bigger than 2000 or 2004. These are rarer opportunities than Presidential elections, and have consequences that last decades without opportunity to revisit decisions. As both sides prepare for battle, the question remains if this is a conservative Midway or the culture war’s Stalingrad.

Publius Uncategorized

Today is preliminary election day (city council, mostly) here in sunny Massachusetts, and I am currently as apathetic as my exhausted mind and the weather may possibly allow, which is to say, really, that I’m not sure I could care less. The sad truth is, I lost a lot of my faith in voting and the democratic process during and after the 2004 presidential election.

Dr. Dennis Loo in California compiled a list of improbabilities here, stating, “In order to believe that George Bush won the November 2, 2004 presidential election, you must also believe all of the following extremely improbable or outright impossible things.” If you have some time on your hands, I’d definitely recommend giving it a wayward glance. It’s a quick read, one that will, if you’re at all like me, bring you right back to those devastating days directly following the election and the sunken feeling I fought to keep out of my gut.

I’m not one for sour grapes and I’m certainly not one for conspiracy theories. I’ll leave those for X-Philes and Kool-Aid conoisseurs. And I’m not a statistician or a political poll analyst (one in the family is quite enough, thanks), either. But I do know a thing or two about the myriad of exit polls and analyses that come out after elections, namely that at least a few of them are usually correct. I remember sitting on the couch being glued to my television as the results came pouring in, noting the reluctance on the parts of the major news networks to divulge any information until the very last possible minute. I remember comparing what was flashing on the screen to what had been predicted with exit polls and just being shocked. No matter how much I had prepared for the inevitability of Bush’s re-election, the exit poll data kept taunting me with hope. Damn them all.

I remember friends in Columbus, Ohio, telling me about long lines and misrepresented hours of operation at the polls. I remember their determination as they waited hours upon hours to cast their votes. One friend of mine took her young daughters to the polling place with her so they could see democracy in action. She had much more hope than I did. She was also much more let down. Many of my friends there, who had toiled hard registering voters, going out into poor areas to encourage lapsed voters, and phone banked, were simply shattered by the results and outraged when the Democrats conceded with “grace.”

Why were they not outraged? Why did they not share in the collective devastation of their hard-working volunteers? Why was there such a quick concession, with improbabilities like the following:

• The fact that Bush “won” Ohio by 51-48%, but this was not matched by the court-supervised hand count of the 147,400 absentee and provisional ballots in which Kerry received 54.46% of the vote.
• The fact that Bush far exceeded the 85% of registered Florida Republicans’ votes that he got in 2000, receiving in 2004 more than 100% of the registered Republican votes in 47 out of 67 Florida counties, 200% of registered Republicans in 15 counties, and over 300% of registered Republicans in 4 counties. He managed to do this despite the fact that his share of the crossover votes by registered Democrats in Florida did not increase over 2000 and he lost ground among registered Independents, dropping 15 points.

Like I said, I’m not one for conspiracy theories and I’m not going to tell you that George W. Bush is the devil. It’s the morning before preliminary elections here in my lovely little town, and I’m just thinking – about the voting process, about elections, about election polling, and about what, in another lifetime or a parallel voting universe, might have been. It’s been some time since that fateful November night, and many more sensational and newsworthy events have filled our newspapers and screens. I thought a little jog of the memory could be a pre-election good time. Discuss.

(Don’t blame me, I voted for David Cobb.)

jude Uncategorized

A comment made by arr_squared in response to my last column got me thinking on this subject and an anecdote from my time at the University of Georgia. I was taking Honors Introduction to Political Science with Professor Russell (who was a local lawyer and the nephew of fmr. Senator Richard B. Russell). During the course of discussion in the class, the subject of helmet laws came up.

I have been for a long while a firm believer that helmet laws should not exist for motorcycle riders. I took this position in class and Prof. Russell came back at me with a simple question: what do you do if the person has an accident with no helmet on, ends up in the hospital, and has no insurance or other way to cover his expenses? When he first asked this, it stumped me and I sat there a bit like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming truck. After all, it’s one thing to take a position of that nature in a vacuum, but you suddenly add in the repercussions from those actions into the equations and it makes it a bit more difficult. Seeing my quandary, he told me to think about it for the rest of class as he moved on with the discussion.

At the end of the class on my way out, I stopped to talk to Prof. Russell and told him that if that happened, then you let the rider die as he made the decision to ride without a helmet and it was his responsibility to deal with the repercussions of his decision. He just smiled, nodded, and noted that it wasn’t as easy to make the decision when you threw in factors of that nature into it. He didn’t criticize my decision and position, but he did make the comment that maintaining a position through its logical conclusion was important and never easy.

Over the years since then, I’ve watched the slow slide of Western Civilization into a place where far too many people believe they are not responsible for the consequences of their actions. They believe they can do anything they want, and someone else will make it all better when it falls down around their heads. When you’re a small child, it’s expected that mom and dad will make things better. When you’re adult, you should still be living your life with that same belief. Unfortunately, far too many people do that—substituting the Government for mom and dad.

I look at a number of things in my life that aren’t the way I’d like them to be. Be they my finances, my health, my job situation, or the like, there’s only one person that I can blame for them and expect to fix them: me. Too many people in society today, however, do not see it as their responsibility to correct their own situation or see that they have to accept responsibility for being there in the first place.

In many cases, it becomes a situation of people wanting the easy way out. They want someone else to clean up after their mistakes. When they get in over their heads in debt, they want to be able to wipe their hands of it and move on. When they get close to retirement, they want the Government to have taken care of their retirement needs. When they get a fat ass from eating too many Big Macs, they want to be able to sue McDonalds. There are far too few people in this country now who are willing to own up to the repercussions from their own choices and deal with the consequences. Between Government School bringing up a new generation where legitimate self-esteem is cheapened and students aren’t forced to deal with failure to the plethora of external things on which adults are able to pin their troubles to keep from having to pin it on themselves, this civilization is tipping the slippery slope more and more toward the vertical.

I’m currently in the midst of my annual re-reading of Atlas Shrugged, and it’s showing me again the worst case scenario destination of this type of thought process. Despairingly, however, the cries of ‘It’s not my fault’ and ‘You take care of it’ in the novel resonate more and more each year with what is actually happening in the real world. I would ask the direction to Galt’s Gulch, but I fear I may be more of an Eddie Willers than a Hank Rearden.

© Clint Hauser, 2005

stranger Uncategorized