The Obama Bus Tour
By Paul Greenberg

Another day, another jobs bill/economic stimulus. And another presidential tour to promote it.

This time our president and partisan-in-chief chose North Carolina for the setting, and who can blame him? Who wouldn’t want to drive through its mountains and vistas these beautiful fall days — instead of actually working out a compromise with those tiresome types in Congress? The kind who are always raising irritating questions, like whether the president’s programs will actually work. Unlike those that have succeeded mainly in raising the country’s unemployment rate to 9 percent or more.

No matter how many times his presidential prescriptions have failed to do much for the economy, Dr. Obama assures us that the same old approach (spend still more) will work this time — if we’ll just increase the dosage and suspend disbelief.

But in the ways that matter most, like jobs, the patient seems to have grown worse, not better, under his ministrations. Those higher and higher unemployment rates are starting to look like a fever chart, and not an assuring one.

Yet this president won’t change course. Unlike a real economic innovator like Franklin Roosevelt. FDR had his disastrous programs, too, but was quick to abandon them when they collided with reality, not to mention the U.S. Constitution. Anybody remember the NRA, its Blue Eagle and all the price-fixing that went with it? FDR threw it all overboard when it proved unworkable, legally and every other way. Barack Obama only doubles down on failure.

But the country is beginning to catch on. As this president’s falling approval rates indicate.

It strikes some of us as passing strange that Mr. Obama should now be campaigning in a part of the country and culture whose people he used to describe/deride as hopelessly bitter types. Their only response to hard times, he claimed at one point, is to “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

That kind of talk may have gone over big at a party for the president’s big givers out in San Francisco, but it struck a lot of us here in the middle of the country as about as dumb as anything else our bicoastal intelligentsia believes.

Barack Obama doesn’t get it. Not emotionally, anyway. He seems so busy analyzing us he may not understand us. There is a disconnecting distance, an emotional coolness, to his words when he puts us under his microscope. The man might score high on an IQ test, but emotional intelligence is something else.

These folks he was subjecting to his oh-so-astute sociological analysis weren’t clinging to their guns and Bibles because they were poor materially, but because their heritage, their faith, their history is so rich. You bet they’re going to cling to it. And with considerable justification.

They know where they come from, these people. It is part of their being. And, yes, they’re going to hold onto a heritage that is beyond price — in good times and bad. They may even cling to it even more when their faith is tested. That is the nature of faith. For what good is a faith that holds up only in the good times?

The people Barack Obama was so neatly pigeonholing in a few ill-chosen words stem from the pioneers who followed the Cumberland Gap across the Appalachians to conquer a wilderness. They made those hills and vales American even before the American flag flew over them. Their descendants still draw their faith, and strength, from the intrepid explorers and settlers who crossed those mountains with, yes, a Bible in one hand and flintlock in the other.

One of the president’s stops on his tour was at a general store in Boone, N.C. He seemed oblivious to the qualities that name still invokes, like self-reliance and freedom and adventure and in general the promise of this new world. They weren’t seeking a European-style security but a new birth of freedom. But this president’s slogan and message is no longer We Can, as in the last presidential election. Now it’s Big Government Can — even when the record of the past few years indicates it can’t.

To spread his message this week, the president of the United States chose to grace the hills and hollers of North Carolina with his presence and that of his sleek, super-sized $1.1-million bus. (Are the U.S. taxpayers footing the bill for all that?) Let’s just say his mode of transport wasn’t exactly a covered wagon. Yes, Americans have come a long way since Daniel Boone’s day but, on such occasions, the thought occurs that we’ve advanced only materially, not spiritually.

Listening to the president on his well-appointed Blue Ridge tour, some of us who have to take notice and even notes on presidential campaign speeches (for that’s what he was really delivering) could only shake our heads sadly. No, the man just doesn’t get it.

Barack Obama long ago lost the common touch — if he ever had it — but he still seems to believe he’s talking the language of The People even when he’s just spouting Washington nerdspeak. Or trying to do a poor, a very poor, imitation of Harry Truman giving ‘em hell. Maybe because Mr. Truman was authentic. As solid as any other show-me Missourian. But this president shows more condescension than connection to the American spirit.

And the people this president presumes to speak for are starting to notice. Which may explain why they’ve stopped paying him much attention. Remember when one of his presidential addresses, whether before a joint session of Congress or at a general store in the hills, was an occasion? Remember when people were actually interested in what he had to say? Now? Not so much.

“It’s as if he doesn’t like people,” to quote a loyal Democrat but independent thinker by the name of Mort Zuckerman, a real estate mogul and big time newspaper publisher in New York. He was one those earnest middle-of-the-road Democrats who back in 2008 thought Barack Obama was just what the country needed. He no longer does. And the number of Americans who share his disappointment seems to grow every day, presidential bus tours or no presidential bus tours. Because it’s not what a president says that matters so much in this always practical-minded country, but what he does. And this president is not doing well.

Even worse, this president seems to think that doing it all over again — another jobs bill, another economic stimulus — is just what the country needs.

It isn’t.

Newt Gingrich vs. Mitt Romney: Will the Republican Please Stand Up?
By Larry Elder

Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney make me think of Dorothy Jones.

“Aunt” Dorothy, my mom’s closest friend, was a warm, smart, comedienne-quick funny woman from a large family. Unlike my mom’s other friends, Dorothy was single and remained so until she died. I once asked her, in the rude way only children can, why she never married.

“You know,” she said while pointing, one by one, at four imaginary men lined up in front her, “if you took the best qualities from all my sisters’ husbands and rolled them up into one man — you’d still come up short.”

This describes how it feels when trying to find a GOP presidential candidate. What are we small “L” libertarian, tea-party-type, low-tax, low-regulation, serious-about-entitlement-reform, non-”climate-change”-hysterical voters looking for?

For starters, how about someone who believes that the Constitution means what it says and says what it means, and won’t abide the “principled” Republican politician who wanders off the page in search of “compromise” to “get things done” to “do the people’s business”? Not too much to ask.

This brings us to the declared and confused GOP presidential candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and the soon-to-be declared, and confused, GOP candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Gingrich masterfully engineered the 1994 GOP takeover of the House. He came up with the Contract With America, and once called Sen. Bob Dole, the party’s 1996 presidential candidate, “the tax collector for the welfare state.” He is bright and knowledgeable, which makes some of his positions all the more indefensible.

Did Gingrich really write off Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan’s gutsy Medicare reform idea as “right-wing social engineering,” after having praised Ryan’s debt and deficit reduction ideas just two months earlier? Yes, he did.

Did Gingrich really cut a video with global-warming fanatic Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in which they pledged to work together to fight “climate change”? Yes, he did.

Did Gingrich come out in favor of ethanol and the federal boondoggle that pays farmers to convert farmland producing edible corn into land devoted to corn for ethanol — a product that, but for mandates and subsidies, would have no market? Did Gingrich support ethanol even after Al “Mr. Environment” Gore renounced his previous support and admitted that he only supported ethanol to secure the 2000 farm vote? Yes and yes.

Did Gingrich team up with race hustler extraordinaire, the Rev. Al Sharpton, to tour the country to raise awareness of the education “race gap”? Did Gingrich team with the man who not only opposes vouchers — a serious attempt to provide alternatives to and competition against government schools — but who calls vouchers “racist”? Yes, he did.

Romney, for his part, ran in 2008 as a fiscal conservative elected in a liberal state and who, therefore, represents someone who “can reach across the aisle” and appeal to independents and “conservative Democrats” — whatever that means. Unfortunately, his signature achievement is the statist RomneyCare, a Bay State “universal health care program” that includes a mandate. It served as a model for ObamaCare.

Believers in limited government, to put it mildly, intensely dislike ObamaCare and reserve a special place in hell for the mandate that forces every man, woman and child to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty. The Wall Street Journal and Investors Business Daily point out that RomneyCare fails to control premium costs, exceeded budget projections and “works” only because of money from the federal government.

Many Republicans encouraged Romney to call RomneyCare a blunder, and use it as an object lesson of yet another well-intended but wrongheaded government intrusion that produced unintended and hurtful consequences.

Did Romney not only refuse to apologize for RomneyCare, but praise it as a “state solution”? Did Romney defend the Massachusetts mandate while criticizing Obama’s federal one? Did Romney thus support the concept of allowing government to force people to purchase health insurance or face a fine, so long as it does so at the state level? Does Romney therefore disagree with conservatives who call RomneyCare a disaster that other states emulate at their own peril? Yes, yes, yes and yes, he does.

So much for Gingrich and Romney. Now what?

What about Thomas Sowell? The economist/writer/philosopher/limited government/free-market advocate, the most clear-headed opinionator in America, is 80. The 80 is not the problem. It is the clear-headed part that made Sowell double over in laughter when he was asked about running for office. Former left-wing David Mamet partially credits Sowell with turning him from being “a brain-dead liberal.” Yes, Sowell is that good.

Who else?

What about Margaret Thatcher, the 85-year-old fiscal conservative British ex-prime minister? Could we persuade her into renouncing her citizenship and running for president here in the States? Alas, that requires an amendment to the Constitution, which currently allows only a “natural born citizen” to become president.

What would Aunt Dorothy do?

Trump Is for Real
By Matt Towery

I’ve listened over the past few weeks as the mainstream GOP establishment and pundits have tried to demean the possibility of a presidential candidacy by Donald Trump.

Mr. Trump, take it from me, someone who has run for and held elective office, and has been involved in more campaigns, from presidential on down, than I care to count: They are scared of you.

Let’s look at some of the criticisms of a Trump candidacy that have been leveled.

It’s commonly said that he’s too much into promoting himself and his products. Gee, seems as a kid, I recall a guy named Ronald Reagan riding on a horse and promoting some sort of soap product. Even before he launched his 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan starred in a miniature radio version of Trump’s current TV show, in which Reagan essentially delivered a Paul Harvey-like message on stations across the nation.

At the time, Reagan’s show brought on the same condescension from the GOP establishment that all of Trump’s projects and media exposures do now. So let’s take that silly argument and throw it in the trash. What’s essential is that Trump has huge name identification, and that’s worth gold (another commodity that I presume that Trump owns).

Next is the experience factor. Does anybody recall that our current president had precious little political experience when he was elected? It consisted of a few years in a state legislature and three years in the U.S. Senate, two of which were consumed either by laying the groundwork for a presidential run or actually running. The experience President Obama lacks is real-world experience in business. He’s never run as much as a Popsicle stand.

Now, don’t say I am trying to compare my small world to “The Donald’s.” But in my last years of service in my state legislature, I was also CEO of one of the nation’s largest printers of corporate annual reports. I was simultaneously dealing with hundreds of employees and also continuing as then-Speaker Newt Gingrich’s campaign chair, plus serving in the Georgia House of Representatives.

To their credit, most of the legislators I served with had businesses or notable professional careers. But there were some who had no apparent job other than to be a lawmaker. With some exceptions, these were the least capable of my colleagues.

I believe Trump’s business experience might be just what the GOP — and maybe the nation, too — wants to see in a president.

The next argument against Trump is that he is politically naive. This is partially true. But I can remember serving as chief strategist for a multi-millionaire who was running for governor of Georgia. On the other side from our team was a strategist named James Carville (whom I like immensely).

“My” candidate in that race had nowhere near the experience with the media that Trump has. And yet, to this day, I believe the man I worked for became one of the best candidates with whom I ever worked. He listened to the pros, didn’t take offense at criticism and grew as a candidate. In my opinion, if he runs, Trump will do the same.

I’m not saying Trump will be the next nominee of the GOP or that he could necessarily defeat Obama. I still believe that if Gingrich stops talking about every subject under the sun and instead starts reminding the public of what he accomplished as speaker, he could rocket to the top. He needs only to stop replying to the “baggage issue” and stick to his message.

Then there is Mitt Romney, who has enjoyed both business and political success. He remains, in my mind, the best-organized candidate in the early going.

But as someone who knows the GOP from more than 30 of experience with it, I have to say to Donald Trump: Those in the Republican establishment are playing you down because they are afraid of your potential to catch on fire and become someone they cannot control or use for their own benefit down the road.

Here’s the bad piece of news, Mr. Trump: People often tell me I look like you. If that’s the case, you have my sympathies!

Pelosi Could Guarantee Destruction of Democrats in 2012
by Matt Towery

It was the dumbest thing the Democratic members of the U.S. House could have done. And it is already jeopardizing the chances of President Obama to reverse the fortunes of himself and his party. “It” was making Nancy Pelosi the minority leader of the House, and thus the head of what is now an even more liberal delegation of lawmakers.

I find it interesting when a veteran news/talk celebrity like Barbara Walters asks President Obama to respond to Sarah Palin’s comment that if she runs for president in 2012, she believes she could win. Obama at first gracefully dodges the question, only to have Walters laugh and condescending suggest that surely he believes he could defeat Palin. So we’re to assume automatically that Palin is a lightweight, but that someone like Pelosi is a political pro and an asset to her party.

If Pelosi is such a pro, she should realize that her hard stand of opposing an extension of tax cuts for so-called “wealthy Americans” as part of an extension of the George W. Bush tax cuts is placing what few moderates she has from her own party in Congress in political hot water. Moreover, this puts her at odds with the president. That’s not to say he wants to extend these cuts for those who earn over $250,000 as a family. Rather, it’s to say that, at least for the short term, he desperately needs to do so.

The problem is that Pelosi, who at one point was known vaguely by the public, is now becoming the left-wing spokesperson and a potential obstructionist to compromise. This will only hurt her own party and the president as she rises in name identification. It was Pelosi who was unapologetic for the beating her colleagues took in the elections. Now even major national newspapers are reporting that she is becoming a huge thorn in the side of a president who desperately needs to appear more moderate in order to have a prayer of re-election in 2012.

I have drawn the comparison between the Obama administration and that of Jimmy Carter’s more than once. Now history truly is repeating itself. In the 1970s, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill was a powerful Democratic speaker of the House. At first, he and Carter worked together. But when Carter began challenging pet projects of O’Neill’s, and also failed to push for universal heath care, O’Neill turned into the Nancy Pelosi of his era.

Many forget that while the Democrats held onto the House in 1980, O’Neill was used as a major weapon by the GOP in that year’s presidential election. They argued that the Democrats were too liberal and that Carter had to go. And so Jimmy Carter went. Doubtless he was painfully aware of the large target O’Neill had placed on his back.

It seems likely that the more soon-to-be Minority Leader Pelosi opens her mouth, the more she will appear out of touch with political reality. For example, she never flinched over the use of government planes to fly her across the country, to and from her district. Did it ever dawn on her that the Republican speaker that Democrats most loved to hate, Newt Gingrich, generally flew commercial airliners to and from his district, most often in coach, unless he had earned a legitimate “frequent flier” upgrade?

This was before Pelosi’s party got spanked on Election Day, of course. Her refusal to acknowledge the consequences of the elections, and her desire to soldier on with a pure leftist agenda, create not just problems for Obama with the public, but potentially within his own party, as well.

While Hillary Clinton has emphatically denied that she will seek the presidency, a recent PollPosition national survey showed her basically tied among likely voters in a Clinton-Obama contest in 2012. And recent surveys have shown Clinton’s favorable polling percentages are higher than Obama’s, while the president’s unfavorable percentages among voters are higher than Clinton’s.

Could this explain why, throughout the early days of the recent North Korea-South Korea crisis, Secretary of State Clinton has been nowhere to be found? Can you say “Bobby Kennedy in 1968″?

With President Obama having to deal with an inflexibly leftist Democratic House caucus, and at the same time needing to recapture the support of moderate voters who abandoned the Democrats in the recent election, the last thing he needs is a louder, shriller and more stubborn Nancy Pelosi. It could spell doom for him in the next presidential contest. Just ask Jimmy Carter.

A New Generation GOP Is Good News for Conservative Future
by Michael Medved

It’s true that the November elections brought prominent winners in both parties, but the contrast between Democratic and Republican victors is highly revealing.

The biggest Democratic success stories involved re-elected Sens. Barbara Boxer and Harry Reid, and new California governor Jerry Brown – all age 70 or above! The GOP, meanwhile, hailed breakthrough victories for 39-year-old Sen. Marco Rubio in Florida, 43-year old Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin, 38-year old Governor Nikki Haley in South Carolina, 42-year- old Sen. Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire, 47-year-old Sen. Rand Paul in Kentucky, and many other youthful candidates bringing fresh, conservative perspectives to high office. Moreover, with Hillary Clinton ruling out a future presidential race, Joe Biden reaching age 74 by 2016, and John Edwards utterly unthinkable, what younger generation Democratic star could plausibly succeed Obama?

The Democrats, in other words, have become a party of shop-worn retreads while the GOP bench is full of next-generation leaders of potential national stature, including Governors Chris Christie of New Jersey, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, Rick Perry of Texas, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Senators John Thune of South Dakota, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, and many more.

Looking toward the future, the rising stars of the GOP not only look more vibrant and dynamic than the Pelosi/Reid Democrats, they also count as increasingly diverse.

After the recent elections, skeptics can no longer deride the GOP as an all-white party of grumpy old men. Marco Rubio, 39, became the new Senator from Florida while fellow Latino Republicans Bryan Sandoval in Nevada and Susana Martinez in New Mexico became the nation’s only two Hispanic Governors. Jaime Herrera, age 31, captured a Democratic Congressional seat in Washington State, while Raul Labrador did the same in Idaho. Two more Hispanic Republicans– Bill Flores and Quico Canseco—knocked out incumbent Democrats in Texas. In South Carolina, Indian-American Nikki Haley won for Governor while black conservative Tim Scott beat Strom Thurmond’s son (among others) for a Congressional seat. Alan West, an African-American Iraq War hero, trounced an incumbent white Florida Democrat.

In the new Republican House of Representatives, eight members of the GOP majority will proudly qualify for a potential “Republican Hispanic Caucus.” Geraldo Rivera may dismiss such victories as “window dressing,” (as he did recently on Fox News) but they have changed both image and substance of the GOP.

The Myth of Conservative Vulnerability
by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

This week’s primary victories of Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and Joe DioGuardi in New York illustrate how the tea party is cleansing the Republican Party and installing true believers over professional politicians. It is a healthy trend that will continue to recreate the Party of Reagan.

But the conventional media, instead of hailing this trend, warns that conservatives cannot be elected and bemoans the victory of true believers saying that it is equivalent to handing seats to the Democrats and the liberals. This reasoning, which made sense in other times, is badly flawed in today’s political climate.

When social issues like abortion, gays and guns dominate the political discourse, moderates have a big advantage. Voters in these times tend to measure themselves on a left to right spectrum and find those flanked sharply to their right to be extremist on these issues and reject their candidacies.

But these days, social issues are in remission and economic/fiscal problems have, understandably, taken center stage. In this environment, purists of the right have a big advantage because nobody doubts the sincerity with which they embrace the goals of limited government, low taxes and reduced spending. Politicians of all stripes — including most Democrats — vow allegiance to them, as does the overwhelming majority of the electorate.

In this environment, the distinctions of left and right give way to the difference between sincerity and insincerity, leaving the voters to judge. With candidates like Sharron Angle in Nevada or O’Donnell in Delaware or DioGuardia in New York, voters don’t have to guess. They know real conservatives when they see them.

Of course, Rep. Mike Castle had a big advantage in the Delaware Senate contest because of his name recognition and voter support after having run successfully statewide more than a dozen times (congressmen in Delaware serve at large). But don’t count O’Donnell out. She is the real thing — a conservative small-government devotee whose advocacy of low taxes is sincere and heartfelt. The national Republican establishment was stupid and short-sighted in the negatives they threw at her during the primary. Now they will have to eat their words at great financial and political cost.

But, in a way, their obduracy gives O’Donnell a great opportunity to run as the anti-establishment candidate, putting a plague on the houses of both parties and calling attention to the corruption of each. By separating herself from the Washington Republicans, she is able to embrace the values of small government and low taxes without doubt about the depth of her commitment. She is free of party labels and can luxuriate in that liberty.

For his part, DioGuardi has a very good chance to defeat Kristin Gillibrand. The appointed Democratic senator has not used the primary period, when she had a monopoly of the airwaves, to solidify her incumbency and generate familiarity among voters. Now she opens the general election likely at or even below 50 percent of the vote.

DioGuardi has a great chance to close the gap between them if he can get enough funding. Republicans looking for a lock on the Senate should send him plenty of funding. The Republicans running in Wisconsin, California, Illinois and West Virginia are largely self-funded. It should be possible to concentrate resources on those states where the need is the greatest, and if the GOP is smart, Delaware and New York will be high on the list.

Do journalists overseas have a better understanding of American politics than our own mainstream media?  I certainly think so.  Enjoy this animated video depiction of The Tea Party Express running wild with Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnell!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRXu4wna11I

The GOP’s Need for Speed
by Hugh Hewitt

Mike Pence gets it.

In an interview with CNBC –picked up by The Hill– the House GOP’s number three gave the explicit assurance that a return to the majority for Republicans would mean an extension of the tax cuts.

“Well, we’re going to stay focused on Election Day. But I think before that, we’re going to continue to demand that this administration and this Congress make it clear that no American will see a tax increase in January of next year,” The Hill quotes Pence as saying on the business network.

“So the first thing that we will do is try to preserve the tax relief of 2001 and 2003 for all Americans — for all small businesses and family farmers. But we also want to look at the kind of across the board tax relief, the kind of tax relief that will encourage capital formation, to get this economy moving again,” he added.

This is a great start and more needs to come. In an interview with me on my Monday program –the transcript is here– Republican Leader and presumptive Speaker if the GOP regains the majority John Boehner demurred when I pressed him on the GOP’s need for speed. Boehner obviously recognizes that he cannot speak for a majority that doesn’t exist or for members who haven’t yet been elected or given him their votes as speaker.

An appropriate refusal to be presumptuous, however, has to yield to the suspicion in the country that all Beltway electeds are part of a club and that the club really doesn’t feel the country’s pain and fear. The standard legislative schedule cannot control when a new Congress returns to D.C. in 2011. The House especially, the “People’s Chamber,” cannot slip into the old calendar where budget resolutions emerge in April and appropriations bills in September at the earliest. Boehner has to rally his leadership and his troops in November and December and begin the new year with a raft of legislation that atckles the big stuff and proposes serious solutions. The country is ready for that. Not producing it, at least through a House where a majority exists, will be a huge and lasting error.

Pence’s comments to CNBC are a good sign that some inside the caucus know that there is an overriding “need for speed.” Once and future Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier on my program has also pledged immediate action to rescind the move to add 18,000 IRS agents, which is a good goal example of the specificity that the voters are demanding, but about one line on a two hundred line agenda that needs to be laid out.

Paul Ryan is a superstar because he has laid out a plan. The GOP will keep any new majority they gain only if they collectively embrace a plan that genuinely carves back the spending, extends the tax cuts and keeps the Department of Defense fully funded. Obamacare has to be defunded, and a reform of Social Security advanced asap. Republicans have historically waiting until a consensus emerges, but they cannot do so this time or they will waste their opportunity and squander their momentum.

Hopefully John Boehner has a transition team working in some quiet office building in northern Virginia, ready to ship a detailed schedule and very detailed proposals to the members of the caucus on November 3. Those plans will leak and the lame duck session will be awash in recriminations and denunciations, false charges and alarmism.

Fine. If the GOP gets the rarest of all things in politics, a second chance, they have to expect that plans for using it will bring many squeals of false pain and feigned outrage. The Democrats will demand meetings of the sort they did not hold and bipartisanship of the sort they refused on health care and the stimulus. The MSM will amplify every charge.

If we don’t hear Democratic/MSM outrage coming out of D.C. in November and December as Nancy Pelosi prepares to give over the gavel, the country will be in a very bad place indeed.

And the GOP will have fumbled away a once-in-a-generation opportunity to set the country back on a right course.

Could a Wave be Building?
by George Will

Demure Delaware was the first state to ratify the Constitution, but since then has not made many waves. It might, however, be part of a political wave a year from now, thanks to a direct descendent of Benjamin Franklin.

The great man’s great-great-great-great-great grandson, Mike Castle, 70, a nine-term Delaware congressman, will be next year’s Republican nominee for the Senate seat Joe Biden held for 36 years. This and other candidate-recruitment successes make it reasonable for Republicans to hope that in January 2011 the Senate will contain fewer than 60 Democrats.

Biden’s seat is currently occupied by a former Biden staffer who, in service to the ancient notion that public offices should be family patrimonies, will disappear when Biden’s son Beau, 40, runs. He is the state’s attorney general and has just returned from serving in Iraq with his Army National Guard unit. Delaware has not elected a Republican senator since 1994, but Castle, who has never lost a race, has run statewide 12 times: Once for lieutenant governor, twice for governor and nine times for the state’s only congressional seat. In the last four elections he averaged 65 percent of the vote.

In 2010, each party will be defending 19 Senate seats. The high number of 38 reflects the fact that six of today’s 100 serving senators were appointed, not elected — one each from Massachusetts (Ted Kennedy’s replacement), New York (Hillary Clinton’s replacement), Illinois (Barack Obama’s replacement), Colorado (the replacement of Ken Salazar, who became Interior Secretary), Florida (the replacement for Mel Martinez, who quit) and Delaware.

In Colorado, where Democrats have won the last two Senate races, the appointed Democrat, Michael Bennet, faces a primary challenger, Andrew Romanoff, a former speaker of the state House. Annoyed because the governor did not appoint him to replace Salazar, Romanoff spurned the plea of a future Nobel Peace Prize winner that he not challenge Bennet. The Republican nominee might be a former statewide winner — Jane Norton, who was lieutenant governor.

In Illinois, which has not elected a Republican senator since 1998, the front-runner for the Republican nomination is Mark Kirk, a five-term congressman from the Chicago suburbs, where statewide elections often are decided. He annoyed his party by voting for the cap-and-trade legislation, but has sort of semi-apologized.

Connecticut’s Sen. Chris Dodd, seeking a sixth term, has an approval rating of 43 percent and has drawn several serious Republican challengers. Any incumbent with a job approval below 50 percent should worry; Nevada’s Harry Reid’s is below 40.

Three seats held by Republicans are currently in jeopardy — Missouri’s (Kit Bond is retiring), Ohio’s (George Voinovich is retiring) and New Hampshire’s (Judd Gregg is retiring). But Republicans have strong candidates in each state: In Missouri, Rep. Roy Blunt, former House Republican whip; in Ohio, Rob Portman, former congressman, head of the Office of Management and Budget, and trade representative; in New Hampshire, a possible nominee, former state Attorney General Kelly Ayotte, is currently leading her likely Democratic opponent.

Regarding House elections, substantial Republican gains are possible. As analyst Charles Cook notes, 84 House Democrats represent districts that were carried either by George W. Bush in 2004 or John McCain in 2008, and 48 of those districts were carried by both Bush and McCain. These and other uneasy incumbents know that Congress’ job approval is 22 percent.

Much can change, nationally and locally, before Nov. 2, 2010. But perhaps the most politically salient thing is unlikely to change: high unemployment. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the economy, which has lost 7.2 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007, must create 100,000 a month just to match population growth. Joseph Seneca, a Rutgers economist, estimates that even if job creation were immediately to reach the pace of the 1990s — an average of 2.15 million private-sector jobs were added each year, double the pace of 2001-2007 — the unemployment rate would not fall to 5 percent until 2017.

September’s 9.8 percent unemployment rate was the worst since June 1983. But robust growth began then and just 17 months later Ronald Reagan came within 3,800 Minnesota votes of carrying all 50 states. Reagan, however, was reducing government’s burdens — taxes, regulations — on the economy. Obama is increasing them.

The possibility of Republican gains, especially in the Senate, helps explain why Obama is in such a rush to remake the nation and save the planet. His window of opportunity could be closing.

GOP: Time To Get Things Undone
by Michelle Malkin

President Obama thinks he knows what the primary objective of Republicans in Washington should be: to “get things done.” Bashing Rush Limbaugh last week, Obama urged GOP lawmakers to ignore the voices of obstructionism and sign on to his behemoth stimulus package: “We shouldn’t let partisan politics derail what are very important things that need to get done.” Meeting with GOP leaders on Tuesday, Obama repeated his entreaty: “I don’t expect 100 percent agreement from my Republican colleagues, but I do hope that we can all put politics aside and do the American people’s business right now.”

Since when did it become the Republican Party’s top priority to “get things done”? It was as annoying a campaign platitude when John McCain adopted it as it is now coming from Obama’s lips.

History has shown us that “Get Things Done” is mindless liberal code for passing ineffective legislation and expanding government for government’s sake. “Reaching across the political aisle” and “putting politics aside” always entail selling out the right and putting conservative principles aside. How about preventing the damage done by Democratic meddlers trying to get their “things done”? How about getting more things undone?

For the past year, I’ve chronicled the inevitable lard-up of bipartisan bailouts and stimulus boondoggles — and the predictable Chicken Little dance in Washington when these massive emergency “fixes” have fallen short. Contrary to the belief that Obama is America’s Lightworker who can defy political gravity, H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, guarantees more of the same old borrow-spend-panic-repeat cycle that got us into our current mess in the first place. This is not an investment in America’s future. It’s an unprecedented mortgaging of America’s future — which is why the bill is forever known in my book as the Generational Theft Act of 2009.

The ruckus over Nancy Pelosi’s contraception funding (which still may sneak its way into the bill) is the tip of the iceberg. Despite Obama’s vow to prevent earmarks from bogging down the bill, the package is stuffed with goodies for every special interest group from left-wing fraudsters ACORN and other subprime shakedown activists ($4 billion for “neighborhood stabilization”) to Hollywood ($246 million in new targeted tax breaks) to universal health care promotion ($600 million) to dubious “green job” projects ($24 billion). More fundamentally, there is no there there.

On Monday night, the Congressional Budget Office sent out a full analysis of the House stimulus bill. The new report elaborates on what last week’s partial analysis disseminated by Republican Hill sources illuminated: The vaunted infrastructure spending will take years and years and years to kick in. Just 7 percent of the total $800 billion-plus stimulus funding would enter the economy by the end of this year.

The nonpartisan CBO tells eternal truths about government spending in the past, present and future:

“Frequently in the past, in all types of federal programs, a noticeable lag has occurred between sharp increases in budget authority and the resulting increases in outlays. Based on such experiences, CBO expects that federal agencies, along with states and other recipients of that funding, would find it difficult to properly manage and oversee a rapid expansion of existing programs so as to expend the added funds as quickly as they expend the resources provided for their ongoing programs.

“Brand-new programs pose additional challenges. Developing procedures and criteria, issuing the necessary regulations, and reviewing plans and proposals would make distributing money quickly even more difficult — as can be seen, for example, in the lack of any disbursements to date under the loan programs established for automakers last summer to invest in producing energy-efficient vehicles. Throughout the federal government, spending for new programs has frequently been slower than expected and rarely been faster.”

Translation: They can’t spend the stimulus money fast enough to actually stimulate anything other than campaign coffers, media buzz and bureaucratic paperwork.

Assignment for the Republicans
by William Rusher

America is now entering upon an era of government by the Democratic Party. Barack Obama will be our president for at least the next four years, possibly eight. The Democrats will control both Houses of Congress for at least the next two years, and quite possibly four or more. The Republicans are doomed, therefore, to be the minority party for some time to come. How should they conduct themselves?

It goes without saying (at least, I hope it does) that they should avoid mere nitpicking — complaining about small matters. The American people won’t be impressed by Republican objections to this or that minor Democratic blunder. What the GOP must do is put forward a strong case for the proposition that the country would be better off under a Republican president and Congress.

And that will entail not so much demolishing the Democrats as constructing a powerful affirmative case for a Republican administration. The task, in other words, is to build an image of a Republican Party that is based on sound and attractive ideas — and be capable of implementing them in a Republican administration.

No doubt about it, that is a tall order. It requires the GOP to concentrate, not on criticizing this or that Democratic policy, but constructing an image of a Republican Party that has a firm concept of what good government amounts to and a clear plan for bringing it into existence. Luckily, the GOP has acquitted itself relatively well in recent decades. The Eisenhower and Reagan administrations are, in general, favorably remembered by the American people, and — while Nixon certainly had his critics — he is quite rightly identified with various American successes, particularly in the field of foreign affairs.

The Cold War was conducted resolutely and successfully, and ended in the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was surely our most formidable adversary in the 20th century. And while Democratic presidents contributed mightily to that collapse, it is fair to contend that Republican opposition to the spread of world Communism was the central engine of American policy on that subject.

La. Gov. Jindal: 2012 presidential bid unlikely
By BOB LEWIS

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said Wednesday he’s not interested in a 2012 Republican presidential bid and will seek a second term as governor in 2011.

Jindal, who appeared at a news conference to back Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell, was asked if he was interested in being president.

“No,” he replied.

Jindal’s trip to Iowa last month fueled speculation that he was laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign, and he did not rule out changing his mind over the next few years.

Instead, he said Americans are weary after the longest, most expensive election cycle in U.S. history.

“I think anybody who is even thinking of running would be well served to roll up their sleeves and support our new president,” Jindal said. “I told our people, ‘It doesn’t matter whether you’re Republican, Democrat or independent, it doesn’t matter whether you voted for him or not, President-elect Barack Obama is our president.’”

In the wake of Republican losses in Congress and a blowout defeat in the presidential race, Jindal is an early favorite among many Republicans for 2012.

He’s young, 37, and has strong support from conservatives for his income tax-cutting initiatives. Many of them advocated for John McCain to pick Jindal as his vice presidential running mate.

Jindal also enjoyed broad-based approval for his handling of back-to-back hurricanes, Gustav and Ike, that menaced his state and New Orleans in particular in August and September, just three years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the area.

Five Hard Truths For RINOS
John Hawkins

After a GOP beating, there is always a debate between the people who want the party to become more principled and those who want to turn the GOP into a poll-driven pile of mush that they believe will be more appealing to centrists. The problem with this whole discussion is that the “we need to be more moderate” crowd tends to simply ignore a number of inconvenient facts that make their position completely untenable.

We’ve already gone the moderate route — and lost. One of the most surreal aspects of the post-2008 campaign is listening to moderates pretend that the last eight years never happened.

You say that the GOP can’t win as a small government party. Well, we’ve already tried being a big government party for the last 8 years and it failed. You think running a moderate, pro-amnesty candidate who eschews social issues is the key to winning elections? Well, that’s who we ran in 2008 and he received even less votes than George Bush did in 2004.

Basically, we have a lot of moderates in the GOP taking the same attitude that the Left used to take towards communism, “It works, but it just hasn’t been tried by the right people yet.” It didn’t make much sense when the lefties were saying it and it makes even less sense now.

A “moderate” GOP can’t generate the volunteers or money needed to win. Yes, the GOP needs both moderate and conservative voters to win elections. Additionally, in certain districts and states, moderate Republicans are more electable than conservatives.

That being said, the rightward leaning media, fundraising, and campaign workers are dominated by conservatives. So, if the right side of the party is depressed, there’s not enough money or campaign workers to go around and there isn’t a strong pushback against the lies put out by Democrats.

That’s exactly what happened over the last two election cycles, when the conservative base was too demoralized to generate enough excess cash and campaign workers to float the entire Republican Party. Many of the strongest Republicans managed to survive, but the more marginal Republicans, moderates in the West and Northeast, were practically wiped out.

There can be no fiscal conservatism in D.C. without social conservatism. There are some people who think the GOP needs to kick social conservatives to the curb and focus entirely on fiscal conservatism in order to help our election prospects, but they’re missing three very important points.

After the Election, Rebooting the Right
By Ramesh Ponnuru

Republicans are feuding in the wake of the November election. But they are not descending into civil war. That would be too tidy. What is unfolding instead is an overlapping series of Republican civil wars, each with its own theme.

The war that will get the most attention will center on social conservatives. Some Republicans believe that their reputation for intolerance is costing the party the votes of the next generation of Americans. But that argument got harder to make when California, one of the most liberal states in the country, passed a ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage. The party is unlikely to change its positions on social issues, but it will see a lot of back and forth on how much emphasis to give them.

Next in the dock will be the neoconservatives. Republicans were doing fine, critics will say, until the neocons pushed the country into the Iraq war. The neocons will defend themselves by noting that while they had plenty of company in supporting the war, they are not responsible for its botched execution and that Iraq ended up not being a major issue this fall.

Not long after, expect a range war over legal and illegal immigration. Supporters of looser rules will say the party’s anti-immigrant tone has alienated Hispanics and given part of the Mountain West to the Democrats, with Texas to follow. Opponents will point out that John McCain co-sponsored an amnesty bill and Hispanics still shunned him.

The party’s small-government purists, meanwhile, will insist that voters punished Republicans for going on a spending spree and that what the party most needs to do is re-establish an image of tightfistedness. The problem with this theory is while spending restraint is popular in general, so is nearly every specific spending program.

Other clashes will turn on personality and style. Conservatives will say McCain’s moderate record cost him votes. Moderates will say he ran too far to the right–and erred by picking Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin has vocal defenders who think that she helped the ticket and should run for President herself in 2012. In Congress, some Republicans will want to cooperate with President-elect Barack Obama, heeding the voters’ desire for bipartisanship. Others will seek to draw a clear contrast between their ideas and his.

My guess is that the winning side in these Republican debates will be tough on illegal immigration, federal spending and Obama. But all these arguments will also largely miss the point. When a party suffers the kind of beating the Republicans have taken in the past two elections, the public has not rejected one of its factions. It has rejected the party as a whole. Voters have turned on pro-choice as well as pro-life Republicans, on Senators who favored amnesty and ones who fought it. Evidently voters did not believe that Republicans of any stripe offered solutions to the challenges America faces now.

Daniel Finkelstein, a British Conservative, recently wrote that his party went through a similar period of internal strife after Tony Blair kicked it out of office in 1997. More painful than all the mutual recriminations, he wrote, was the slow realization that nobody outside a small circle cared about any of these arguments. More than a decade later, Conservatives are still out of power in Britain.

Republicans are counting on the natural tides of politics to lift their numbers in Congress in 2010. The Democrats may overreach, or their supporters may get complacent. But to get back in the driver’s seat, to become relevant again, Republicans will have to devise an agenda that speaks to a country where more people feel the bite of payroll taxes than income taxes, where health-care costs eat up raises even in good times, where the length of the daily commute is a bigger irritant than are earmarks and where whites are a declining proportion of the electorate.

At the GOP governors’ meeting this month, Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota argued that Republicans need to stay conservative but also modernize. A revitalized conservatism would push for tax reform with an eye on middle-class families, not hedge-fund operators. It would seek solutions to global warming rather than deny that it exists. It would place a higher priority on making health care affordable than on slashing pork programs. It would promote the assimilation of Hispanics rather than regard them as a menace or a source of cheap labor.

The refurbishing of conservatism is unlikely to take place in the next three years. That will probably take a presidential candidate who seeks to lead a reformed party in 2012–and a party that is desperate enough to permit it.