Archive for category Colorado Politics
Waterloo
Posted by Joshua Sharf in PPC, President 2012 on August 14th, 2011
For this evening, Waterloo, IA is the center of the Republican political universe. It wouldn’t have been 2 weeks ago, but this happens to Iowa towns with some regularity, so they handle it well. The Black Hawk County Republicans have done a nice job handling the plague of locusts reporters who have descended on the place. All I wanted was a good sound location for the recorder. What I got was a microphone feed. I’ll post the sound from Perry and Bachmann (cast listed in order of appearance) later this evening.
I’ve spoken to a couple of Iowans here, and while that’s not necessarily a representative sample, there does seem to be some open-mindedness about things. One Romney supporter from 2008 is undecided this year. Another older fellow, unhappy with the caucus system because is makes it difficult for seniors to participate, is planning to support Perry.
I’ll stay away from the usual bromides about Iowa politics and the press. Everything you’ve heard it true. But if Perry is half as good a retail politician as he appears to be at first glance, he’ll do well in February.
Post-Debate Thoughts
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, PPC, President 2012 on August 11th, 2011
Romney won. Mostly by not losing. He bobbed, weaved, occasionally answered a question, and looked like an adult doing it. But he didn’t do anything to put people at ease, and still hasn’t shown that he can either take a punch or deliver one.
Everyone else looked, well, sort of 2nd tier. Rick Santorum did the politician’s version of an Arnold Horshack impersonation, complaining twice about not getting enough airtime. Bachmann answered a number of tough questions well, but gave back a lot of what she won when she pleaded to be allowed to keep talking past the doorbell. The one thing she did well was deal with Pawlenty. The governor has a perfectly good line of attack and just can’t make it work. It fell to Rick Santorum of all people, to point out that Ron Paul (who all but said, “Come Home, America,” to the cheers of his fans and the boos of everyone else) and Bachmann want to lead the country, but couldn’t even lead their party during the debt ceiling debate. Herman Cain, a smart man, didn’t come across that way tonight. Gingrich came across as the least-canned, most genuine, and thoughtful of the candidates, which at this point, along with $3.58, will get him a grande latte at the flagship Starbucks in Seattle.
So Romney won. And Rick Perry also won.
Make no mistake, the questions were tough, by all the panelists. In fact, someone pointed out that Fox & the Examiner had, in the course of 90 minutes, asked more tough questions of the Republican candidates than the whole MSM has of Barack Obama in the entirety of his candidacy and presidency. Conservatives are bound and determine not to repeat the liberal mistake of softballing their own guys, only to see them fail for lack of vetting once they get into office.
That said, Pat Caddell made a telling point on the Fox News ringside webcast – this was a political class debate, with a political class schedule of topics, wasting way too much time on ancillary topics and ancillary candidates. We got Tim Pawlenty getting into a spitting match with Michelle Bachmann. We got Rick Santorum pointing out the utter idiocy of Ron Paul’s foreign policy, while a former ambassador to China barely got to discuss foreign policy at all. We got an entire segment on gay marriage and abortion.
The country has serious, serious economic, fiscal, and monetary issues, and not only did the moderators wait until the very end to get to jobs, none of the candidates took over the debate and forced the issue. No wonder there’s no passion for any of the candidates who has a chance to win.
On Wisconsin
Posted by Joshua Sharf in PPC, President 2012 on August 10th, 2011
On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin!
Champion of the right
“Forward”, our motto,
God will give thee might!
It’s hard to overstate the importance of yesterday’s wins in the Wisconsin recall elections. Needing to break even to retake control of the State Senate, the unions and their Democrat subsidiary fell short, winning only two six recalls. And while it’s hard to see what else they could have done to unseat Luther Olson, the Rs were within on 25-year-old secretary of making it 5-1. Apparently, all the union boots on the ground and national organization, along with $32,000,000, will get them a cup of coffee. Maybe a t-shirt.
Make no mistake, this was a coordinated asault on a national scale. The Democrats picked the seats they’d contest. They picked the folks who would contest them. In the case of the Fred Clark – Luther Olson race, they picked This American Life to highlight the race and do an not-too-subtle job on Gov. Scott Walker. Early in the evening, the Democrat state chair was quoted as saying that, while it would be close, his team had “done what they had to do.”
And it wasn’t enough.
Wisconsin isn’t the upper-midwest Massachussets that some Republicans would like to paint it as. The districts where Republicans won flipped back and forth between George W. Bush and Obama. Russ Feingold, today’s lefty savior against Scott Walker, only barely won re-election in 1998, not a banner year for Republicans. Tommy Thompson was elected Governor four times (although it’s not unusual for states to elect governors of opposing parties, while remaining consistent in the composition of the state legislature; look at Colorado from 1962 – 2002). In 2002, Ed Thompson, Tommy’s brother, running on the Libertarian ticket, took 10% of the vote, thus delivering the office to the Democrat Jim Doyle with only 45% of the vote, the ideal election outcome for Libertarians.
The Republicans lost control of the state legislature in the 70s,and the Dems’ high-water mark came in the 1976 Presidential Election. With Carter barely carrying the state, the Dems racked up a 66-33 majority in the House, and a 23-10 majority in the Senate. But the Republicans were never uncompetitive, and by the 90s had clawed their way back to parity in the State Senate, and had retaken the House. In fact, 2009-2010 was the first legislative session with a Democrat House majority since 1993. The Republicans had held a 19-14 Senate majority as recently as the 1995-96 legislature.
Still up until 2010, the birthplace of both the Republican Party and the most welcoming host of the political virus known as the Progressive Movement had a definite leftward tilt. There’s a reason that “Fightin’ Bob” LaFollette is one of the few Republicans my history textbooks looked on with favor. For much of the time in the 1920s and 30s, the main opposition party to usually-lopsided Republican majorities wasn’t the Dems, it was the Progressives, with a few Socialists thrown in for good measure:
| Senate | House | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year | Democrat | Republican | Prog. | Socialist | Democrat | Republican | Prog. | Socialist | |
| 1919 | 2 | 27 | – | 4 | 5 | 79 | – | 16 | |
| 1921 | 2 | 27 | – | 4 | 2 | 92 | – | 6 | |
| 1923 | – | 30 | – | 3 | 1 | 89 | – | 10 | |
| 1925 | – | 30 | – | 3 | 1 | 92 | – | 7 | |
| 1927 | – | 31 | – | 2 | 3 | 89 | – | 8 | |
| 1929 | – | 31 | – | 2 | 6 | 90 | – | 3 | |
| 1931 | 1 | 30 | – | 2 | 2 | 89 | – | 9 | |
| 1933 | 9 | 23 | – | 1 | 59 | 13 | 24 | 3 | |
| 1935 | 13 | 6 | 14 | – | 35 | 17 | 45 | 3 | |
| 1937 | 9 | 8 | 16 | – | 31 | 21 | 46 | 2 | |
| 1939 | 6 | 16 | 11 | – | 15 | 53 | 32 | – | |
| 1941 | 3 | 24 | 6 | – | 15 | 60 | 25 | – | |
| 1943 | 4 | 23 | 6 | – | 14 | 73 | 13 | – | |
| 1945 | 6 | 22 | 5 | – | 19 | 75 | 6 | – | |
Source: Wisconsin Legislative Blue Book
NPR’s This American Life did an extended story on the political discord in Wisconsin. The gist of it was that everybody got along just swimingly, Democrats and Republicans, dogs and cats, until Scott Walker forced – forced, I tell you! – them to pick sides, and then the body politic was rent in half. The storyline probably is true. The lefty press and the lefty Dems were perfectly happy to rhapsodize about Wisconsin’s benign political culture, where everyone was friends, as long as they more or less got their way. But when actual conservatives were elected – as in, got more votes than the other guy – and decided that this actually meant they should be implementing policies they had espoused during the campaign, well, that was just too much.
Which means that last night’s victory – and next week’s possible extensions – weren’t just a ratification of party labels. They were a conscious vote in favor of policies that the new government has pursued.
The unions weren’t just counting on a history of Wisconsinites voting Democrat. They were counting on a deep-seated political culture that has always leaned decisively to the left. The specific districts they targeted had favored Republicans in 2010, but had only narrowly supported George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, and had voted for Obama in 2008. That they didn’t return to form says that Wisconsinites – at least those voting last night, are still willing to give their conservative experiment more time, and that the Democrats haven’t given them any reason not to.
UPDATE: Seth Mandel over at Commentary argues that the Wisconsin Republicans should learn to be less aggressive in their agenda. I couldn’t disagree more strongly. This gives the opposition an unearned victory. He uses as his counterexample Chris Christie who, in a far less friendly environment, was able to get legislative Dems to sign on to the fiscal aspect of his plan, without trying to defang the unions. Christie may have accomplished all he could under the circumstances, but it’s not as though he won’t have to face all that public money in his re-election campaign. Scott Walker’s legislative majority survived to see his approach vindicated in finance, and given at least cautious approval by the electorate. The fact that this was, by and large, your money, your tax money, financing the opposition made the candle worth the game.
What the Republicans, in particular the national party, needs to learn, is to go on the offensive, or at least be nimble enough to fight defensively. The fact that the Dems had the initiative from the beginning meant they could pick the most congenial battleground they could imagine. Why on earth was the RNC caught flat-footed? Why on earth was there no concerted effort by the national party to get various state parties involved in making phone calls? Here in Colorado, we managed to provide a certain amount of help, but it’s quite clear that this was, like most other out-of-state efforts, on our own initiative, and mostly from the bottom-up. There’s no excuse for that sort of thing, no matter what’s going on at the Capitol or in the presidential nominating process.
Green Still Costs Green
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Business, Economics, Energy, PPC, President 2012 on August 2nd, 2011
Regular readers know, my favorite left-of-center blogger is Walter Russell Mead, over at The American Interest. The reason Mead is so interesting is that, unlike the Paul Krugmans and Ezra Kleins of the world, he’s willing to challenge liberal shibboleths, recognizing that for liberalism to be more relevant, it needs to be more intellectually robust. At times he writes almost like a conservative, although he’s not. This morning is one of those posts:
Wal-Mart has hitched its wagon to the local food train, but not to save the planet. It’s the money. As Darrin Robbins, Wal-Mart’s senior manager for produce told the Wall Street Journal:
“We can get chili peppers from Florida all day long, but at the end of the day that is not necessarily the best model for us” … “I’m going to pay a higher price in Ohio for peppers, but if I don’t have to ship them halfway across the country to a store, it’s a better deal.”
It turns out that in the age of high gasoline and transportation costs, local produce is ultimately cheaper.
I’ve written before that Walmart is doing more for the planet than Greenpeace; this is just more proof. A ruthless focus on price and efficiency is the best way to reduce humanity’s environmental footprint.
I think his conclusion is right: companies dislike waste more than most Greenies do – it hurts the bottom line. Usually Greenies are wasting someone else’s time or money. This doesn’t mean that some companies wouldn’t willingly forgo all sorts of reasonable environmental protections if they could, although it’s worth noting that the worst environmental disasters of the last century were centrally planned by the Soviet, and this century’s are shaping up to be centrally planned by the Chinese.
Nevertheless, I think he misses a more subtle point. Those higher gasoline and transportation costs are real, and they are the result of governmental policies, usually pursued by Democrats specifically in order to drive up fuel prices. They’ll admit this during primaries. Wal-Mart is simply responding to incentives.
The problem, of course, is that “buy local,” unless is some specialty item, almost always means a lower standard of living. It makes you more dependent on a smaller base of supply, and decreases out-of-season availability. If the local crop fails, you still have to import the food from farther away, at the higher cost. I don’t have data to back this up, but it would also make sense that the availability of long-haul refrigerated units for produce would decline along with demand, which adds even more to the marginal cost of replacing a local supply gone missing.
The country always undergoes a series of local crop failures which go unnoticed by consumers. Now they’ll be more likely to notice those failures, and more likely to hear someone other numb-nut attributing it to your air conditioning, as well. So not only do we bear the cost of food, we also have to put up with the sermonizing.
Mead’s incredibly insightful about larger social and economic trends, so it’s a shame to see him missing a trick on this one.
One More Thought on the BBA
Posted by Joshua Sharf in PPC, President 2012 on July 29th, 2011
There are a couple of ways that, skillfully used, the BBA could actually end up helping the Republicans, at least in this first round.
First, it’s a bargaining chip. If the owners can give up an 18-game season that the players were never going to play, the Republicans may be willing to settle for a BBA vote (as opposed to passage), forcing the Dems to re-assert their Big Government bona fides.
More interestingly, if Boehner 2.1 (Boehner 2.0 with the BBA upgrade) passes the House with Democrat support, as seems likely, it’s going to make it harder for them to go back on that when it actually comes time to vote on the BBA. And if it gets stripped out in the Senate, you may end up with the spectacle of House Dems, having vote against 2.0, and then for 2.1, having to turn around and vote for 2.0 when it comes back around.
Regardless, the Republicans need to hold firm on the smaller cap increase number. The benefit of having this debate again – and possibly yet again – before the election, both political and policy-wise, are too integral to the overall strategy to roll over on.
Debt Markets React to Washington – Finally
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Business, PPC, President 2012 on July 29th, 2011
People have noted the failure to demand higher yields for treasuries, and concluded that the debt markets don’t believe there’s any problem with August 2, or 10, or any other date we care to mention. In fact, this was largely out of disbelief that Washington could fail to act.
In fact, this week, the debt markets have begun to react. Banks are beginning to pull money out of treasury-heavy money market funds, which in turn are selling treasuries and putting their money in banks. This has the effect of reducing the financial flexibility of each. The repo market – where financial institutions lend securities money to one another, using treasuries as collateral – is beginning to demand higher interest rates. Companies that don’t even like debt are issuing short-term commercial paper to make sure they have cash on hand. Let’s not turn this into panic – it’s not. But the markets are beginning to take prudent and overdue steps to protect themselves against a loss of liquidity in treasuries, even if it doesn’t mean technical default.
In the meantime, it appears that Speaker Boehner has agreed to a stricter Balanced Budget Amendment requirement for the 2nd round of cuts & debt limit increases – requiring passage rather than just a vote. I think this is a mistake.
There is every indication that Boehner Plan 2.0 was pretty close to the plan that he and Harry Reid presented to the President on Sunday, and which he indicated he would veto. But a close reading of the tea leaves also indicates that he was hoping that a strong enough statement against it would prevent him from actually having to make that decision. If he had signed it, it would have strengthened the conservative case for governance immensely.
Now, the House has probably made it more likely that they will end up voting on – and probably passing – some compromise between McConnell and Reid. That deal would, in fact, work towards marginalizing the Tea Party groups who have done so much to get us to this point.
I hope I’m wrong, and that the wording of the BBA is something that can get passed – it requires no presidential signature – and that the extra time we’re buying is put to good use making the case for it. Certainly Obama & the Democrats’ desire to run the federal budget on auto-pilot helps in that regard.
But if not, and if the 30 or so Republicans end up setting the stage for an exact repeat of this in 6 months, with no BBA in hand, they may well end up moving the debate to the left, rather than to the right.
One other point – I do think reasoned analyses such as McArdle’s, which show what will likely happen if we don’t raise the ceiling, without the histrionics, actually help our case down the road. If the markets do shudder a little bit, it should server as a spectre of what will actually happen, for real, when the debt markets finally decide to take that decision out of Washington’s hands altogether.
UPDATE: The Dollar-denominated Swiss Franc ETF, FXF, opened almost 2% higher this morning, and stayed there the whole day. I went back and looked, and since 2006, the daily percentage change has been bigger than this – in this direction – only 10 days, so this is definitely a multi-sigma event. One guess as to why it happened.
The Most Popular Man In Town
Posted by Joshua Sharf in PPC, President 2012 on July 28th, 2011
Is usually the backup quarterback. Right now, Rick Perry is polling extremely well. He’s played this skillfully so far, not letting himself be rushed, getting people to ask him to enter, and them building up a fundraising effort and making all the right contacts. (Personally, I like what I see so far; he’s turned what was a weak office into a strong one, and made Texas – Gen. Kearney notwithstanding – into where Galt’s Gulch would be located if Rand were writing today. This stops well short of an endorsement, I’d just like to see him have a chance to make his case.)
That said, we really don’t know how he’ll do on the big stage of a presidential race, or much about his governing style yet. He’s the backup quarterback, whose popularity largely reflects discontent with the starters. Time will tell if he’s Tom Brady or Bubby Brister,.
Thaddeus McCotter Declares
Posted by Joshua Sharf in PPC, President 2012 on July 4th, 2011
Thaddeus who? Thaddeus McCotter, a Republican congressman from Wayne County, Michigan, has declared his candidacy for the Presidency. He’s sharp, quick, and intelligent, and with a razor sharp and very dry wit. He has a keen sense of the threats facing the country today, and is unafraid to articulate them:
So I explain to my constituent, the person who employs me, and the person that I work for (applause), that the United States faces four great challenges: we face the social, political, and economic challenges of globalization, we face a world war against an evil enemy, we face the rise of the Communist Chinese superstate as a strategic threat and rival model of governance, and we face the question as to whether a nation built on self-evident truths can survive the erosion of those truths through moral relativism…
The Republican Party continues to have four goals: 1) we expand liberty and self-government, 2) we conserve our cherished institutions of faith, family, liberty, and country, 3) we empower the American people to achieve necessary constructive change, and 4) we defend America from her enemies and we support her allies.
In pursing these goals we have five fundamental principles: 1) Our liberty is from God, not the government, 2) our sovereignty is in our souls and hearts, not the soil or a scepter, 3) our security comes from strength, not surrender or appeasement, 4) our prosperity is from the private sector not the public sector, and 5) our truths are self-evident, not relative.
Where, you might ask, are the fiscal issues? McCotter has voted against the bailout, against raising taxes, against the “stimulus,” and in favor of the Ryan Budget Plan. He would probably answer, although I haven’t seen him do so, that addressing our fiscal crisis is something that a responsible government must do, but that it is not an external challenge. It is instead the result of long-running governmental malfeasance. Correcting it will put us in a better position to address our current challenges.
Some of you may know him from his appearances on Fox News’s Red Eye. It says a lot that he’s not only able to hold his own in such an unorthodox setting, but that he’s willing to put them on his official YouTube Channel. McCotter takes his politics seriously, but not himself, a rare characteristic in a politician:
McCotter will not win the nomination, but I’m glad to see him running. As with Michelle Bachmann, it’s, ah, open to question, as to whether a few terms in House is sufficient qualification to be President. But he’s an effective voice for traditional conservatism at a time when we desperately need such a voice.
He may also well be Ron Paul’s worst nightmare. Because we’ll finally have comic relief that’s both funny and substantive.
The Kochs Visit Colorado
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Business, Colorado Politics, President 2012 on June 26th, 2011
The Koch Brothers, owners of Koch Industries, have made a name for themselves over the years supporting libertarian and conservative causes. For being some of the few of such wealth to actively oppose the progressive agenda, they have earned themselves a level of venom pretty much unprecedented for private citizens.
Recently, as outlined over at Powerline, “filmmaker” Robert Greenwald has been producing a series of agitprop shorts designed to get out the left’s talking points about the vast conspiracy to undermine America as we know it, that the Kochs supposedly fund.
Today through Thursday, the Koch brothers will be holding a series of private meetings in Vail. Colorado’s Local Looney Left has decided to use it as a rallying point and fundraising tool (not necessarily in that order), and so has sent out an email soliciting for both. Naturally, it too, repeats most of the tropes that have been levelled at the Kochs:
Two of the biggest right-wing money men in America have organized a secret conference of top conservative donors, pundits, and elected officials this weekend near Vail. In January, more than 1,500 people protested a similar event held in Palm Springs, California–just before the Koch brothers, Charles and David Koch, launched their war on teachers and public employees in Wisconsin.
The Kochs’ association with Governor Scott Walker and his budget reforms exists almost entirely in the fevered minds of the Left. The Kochs’ contribution to Walker’s campaign comes to less that 0.1% of the total money raised.
The Koch brothers have provided millions of dollars to fund recent attempts to privatize Medicare and Social Security.
Privatize Medicare? Hardly. Maybe having established that the Kochs own Wisconsin, and the fact that Paul Ryan comes from Wisconsin…? Oh, hell, who knows. Ryan’s proposal doesn’t come close to turning Medicare in to a service voucher system, anyway. It would make most of Medicare look like Medicare Part B already does, but I don’t think anyone’s counting that as “private.”
As for Social Security, while a proposal for personal accounts would be most welcome, I don’t know of any serious legislation on the table to that effect, and there’s reason to doubt that the excellect idea of individual government accounts, no matter how personalized, are actually “private.” In the meantime, raising the retirement age and means-testing benefits are eminently bi-partisan ideas, and even the AARP has seen the handwriting on the wall on this one.
In the aftermath of the Citizens United decision, unprecedented amounts of corporate money is expected to be funneled into the political process next year.
The Kochs’ personal fortunes run into the billions. Koch Industries is privately held, but even if they were inclined to spent other investors’ money on politics, there’s no reason to think they need to. They’ve been doing so long before the Citizens United ruling, and the only way to stop them from doing so now would be to severely limit individual political speech – not that Democrats or the Left are above that.
Citizens United is mostly a boon to small- and medium-sized businessmen, who pay themselves last, but who find their ability to do business hamstrung by regulators and legislators. If lobbying is a legitimate business expense for them, why not political advertising? Especially as corporate money tends to split far more evenly than the union dues spent almost exclusively to support Democrats.
The irony of an astro-turfed group, seeded almost entirely by the money of four Colorado “progressive” billionaires complaining about the secretive influence of money in politics would be comical if anyone in the MSM actually bothered to call them on it from time to time.
While Vail seems to have been chosen for its picturesque setting rather than for Colorado’s possible centrality in the upcoming presidential election, perhaps the best hope is that we can get some of the local money off the sidelines and into the fight.
If they do, in fact, meet with the locals, they’ll probably be disappointed (if not already so) at the early, near-universal support for Mitt Romney by the party establilshment.
In the meantime, the Local Looney Left is planning a protest today through Tuesday outside the hotel (and probably inside, if they can manage it) to embarrass and disrupt a private meeting. It would be very interesting and revealing to see exactly how ill-informed those folks are with regard to their chosen bete-noir.
Fewer Workers, More Claims
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Budget, Colorado Politics, PPC on June 13th, 2011
I’ve written a couple of times about the sorry (i.e., bankrupt) state of Colorado’s Unemployment Insurance program. Well, here’s why:
??
Source: Department of Labor, Weekly UI Claims Report
This is a chart of the number of employed workers divided by the number of continuing and new UI claims, as reported weekly, through May 21 of this year. This represents, in some sense, the coverage of UI payments by the cash flowing into the fund. If you’ve read a paper anytime in the last two years, this doesn’t tell you much new about our immediate situation.
First, the caveats. Unemployment insurance claims are incredibly seasonal, and reported weekly. The number of employed used in that report appears to change only quarterly. So I’ve taken the bumps and ridges out of the data by using a 6-month backward-looking/6-month forward-looking moving average. This is not for predictive purposes, it’s just to smooth the data out for graphing, and by doing it that way, I avoid the time lag of a trailing moving average.
And, of course, the leading part of the average goes away inside of 6 months from the end. That’s important, since the seasonal downtick in claims (or uptick in ratio) may not be done yet, making it look as though the ratio is cresting again when it’s not.
A couple of interesting facts emerge, aside from the record torpor.
We forget just how great – and how anomalous – the late 90s were for Colorado. Look at the slope of that line beginning in mid-1996, and look at the plunge it takes starting in 2000. As fondly as we remember the job market here through 2006, the ratio of workers to recipients never got back to 1997 levels, never mind early 2000. Still, the UI fund was taking in more than it was paying out, even as it was levying annual solvency increases on Colorado businesses.
The seasonal variation is also much less over the last several years, indication the sense of stasis the economy has had. Layoffs are down, but so is hiring:
The right-hand axis is total employment; the left-hand unemployment claims.
As in the rest of the country, we’re at an inflection point on the graph. Also, like the rest of the country, our unemployment insurance program is likely to stay broke for a while, no matter which way things go.
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