The Daily Gouge, Friday, November 16th, 2012

On November 15, 2012, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Friday, November 16th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, the WSJ‘s Kimberly Strassel suggests what should be self-evident….

GOP Lessons in the San Joaquin

A Californian shows the way forward for the GOP and Hispanic voters.

 

Imagine a congressional district in California, a state where the GOP last week suffered a political bloodbath. Imagine this district voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and has a significant Democratic voter advantage. Imagine, too, that 70% of its residents are Hispanic.

Now imagine that last week, a first-time Republican candidate trounced his Hispanic Democratic opponent, capturing 60% of the vote. Pure fantasy, right?

Pure reality, as it happens. In January, David Valadao will come to Washington to represent California’s 21st District, nestled in the San Joaquin Valley. In a state where Republicans suffered at least four incumbent losses on Nov. 6, Mr. Valadao was the party’s only offensive victory, flipping a seat that hasn’t elected a Republican in 20 years, and doing it with strong support from the district’s majority Hispanic voters.

His win offers valuable lessons to a Republican Party that is rightly alarmed by its downward slide among Hispanics, which hit a new low last week with Mitt Romney’s dismal 27% share of the Hispanic vote. The rap—the outright fear—is that the GOP is too white, too right and too late to make gains among this increasingly powerful voting group. Mr. Valadao’s victory proves that isn’t true, provided the GOP takes some obvious steps.

Topping the list has to be a new resolve to nurture and recruit candidates who understand their constituents and can connect with Hispanics. Mr. Valadao, 35, grew up in the 21st District, the son of Portuguese immigrants. He speaks English, Portuguese and Spanish. Before winning a seat in the California Assembly two years ago, he was a local dairy farmer.

His farming background counted big in the 21st District, which is heavily blue-collar, with a huge farming industry and oil-drilling sector. What Hispanic and non-Hispanic residents there share is a growing fury over federal, state and green-group actions that have cut off water for farmers, made life tougher for drillers, driven up prices, and led overall to some of the highest unemployment rates in the country. (i.e., connect on local issues!)

Democratic Rep. Jim Costa had represented this district since 2004. But faced with voter frustration over his lack of leadership—and redistricting that made the 21st a bit less Democratic—Mr. Costa early this year jumped ship to run for a safer, neighboring seat. Democrats ultimately chose John Hernandez, the president of the local Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, to be their candidate.

In a district with a double-digit Democratic voter advantage, where more than 50% of registered voters are Hispanic, Mr. Hernandez should have been well-positioned. Instead, while the Democrat waxed lyrical about Sacramento’s expensive bullet-train project and other liberal priorities, it was Mr. Valadao’s family and agricultural background that gave him credibility to connect with voters on jobs, water issues, health care, and gas prices.

The Republican kept the focus on those topics by embracing the immigration issue early on—a second lesson for the GOP. Mr. Valadao, who likes to note that his own parents are immigrants, made clear his frustrations with a broken immigration system that separates families, keeps people waiting decades for visas, robs employers of workers and leaves nobody happy.

These are the day-to-day concerns of many Hispanics and of many employers in the 21st District—not to mention the roots of the broader illegal-immigration issue—and Mr. Valadao’s promise to push for a total overhaul moved the debate beyond flash-point terms like “amnesty” or “border security.”

The Republican credits his success in talking about immigration to his “common-sense approach,” though colleagues note that a big part of it was simply his tone. His willingness to tackle immigration reassured Hispanic voters, freeing them to concentrate on even more pressing policy concerns.

While “we were asked about immigration a lot,” Mr. Valadao told me in an interview Wednesday, “it wasn’t the top issue. The focus of voters in our district was jobs, water for our farmers, lower energy costs, putting kids through school, living life freely.”

Which gets to the third lesson: Political parties at their peril lump Hispanic voters into a monolithic voting bloc.

“When Hispanics work in the private sector or own a business, they are receptive to our message of jobs, low taxes, and free enterprise,” says Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, who represents a neighboring San Joaquin district that also has many Hispanic residents who work in the private sector.

The GOP message may never resonate as strongly with urban Hispanics who work for the government or are in unions. The party would do well to recognize the distinction and figure out where it is best positioned to build support.

Mr. Valadao isn’t the first Republican to have cracked the code. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, New Mexico Gov. Susannah Martinez, Texas Sen.-elect Ted Cruz—all have demonstrated the ability to attract Hispanic voters with the GOP message. Yet these office-holders are too few and far between. If the Republican Party wants Hispanic votes, it will have to work for them. The good news, as Mr. Valadao shows, is that it is eminently possible.

Next, writing at the NRO, Michael Auslin approaches the same goal from a different direction:

We will never win unless . . .

 

All the discussion here and elsewhere dominating GOP/conservative issues is playing small-ball, I fear. Forget elections, the only thing that matters from now on is reclaiming as much of the culture as we can. Immigration, taxes, demographics are important, but in terms of electoral success, they are symptoms, not causes of GOP decline. Without getting too bogged down in esoterica, it seems uncontroversial to say that, at the end of the day, politics is culture (and of course, political systems reflect the cultures from which they grow). If that’s the case, then we will be in ever greater danger at the national level unless we start winning on the cultural battlefield. Losing five of the last six popular votes for the presidency should be a wake-up call.

As Irving Kristol noted, the culture war is over, and we lost. We were driven out of the universities, surrendered popular culture, and hunted from the mainstream media (from which most Americans continue to get their news). But we better start opening up some new fronts, conducting guerilla warfare, and investing in long-term strategy to have just the hope of keeping even. We need to fully accept the fact that nearly two generations have grown up in a dominantly liberal culture outside the home. It’s not simply that many don’t agree with conservative positions, it’s that they reflexively think in mainstream liberal terms. Moreover, conservatives, and the GOP in particular, have been vilified for so long that large swaths of the country see us as no less than dangerous to American society.

The campus conservative movement was an important, but small, push back, along with its campus media focus. Groups such as ISI continue to fight on, but we are holding small bridgeheads, at best. The majority of the time we are on the defensive, outside of churches and some synagogues. We start from a position of weakness and have to expend most of our energy just getting to even. The ratings success of Fox doesn’t translate into broader cultural appeal; instead we are increasingly in our own echo chamber.

We have to break out, and undermine the fallacious, unrealistic, idealistic, offensive nostrums of far-left liberalism. And, we have to offer a rational and appealing view of life to counter more moderate liberalism. That, I think, will even answer Ramesh’s keen insight: The GOP has lost ground because it did not become the party of middle-class economic interests. But that’s in part because a generation was getting educated that free enterprise was evil, and that it was easier to get government handouts than spend decades working patiently.

We have to forget about elections and play the very long game of changing the underlying cultural stratum of society. It’s what the liberals did quietly for decades, securing each triumph so that they did not have to worry about counterattacks (when was the last time a university academic department suddenly became filled with conservatives?). Andrew Breitbart was on to this with Big Hollywood, just as Fox was on to it in the media. But we either need to redouble our efforts or we need to think outside the box.

There’s also a huge temptation to play dirty, the way Ted Kennedy and his ilk did against Robert Bork; I’m not so sure that’s wrong. They play dirty against us in academia, and mock us on television. We hold ourselves to higher standards, but that’s not much help in an increasingly liberal, dependent society. Maybe we shouldn’t flinch from playing dirty (or dirtier). It certainly hasn’t delegitimized liberals among their supporters. But we have to attack their ideals, their dangerous utopianism, and not the individuals. We shouldn’t pull any punches in highlighting their hypocrisy or their radicalism, the way that McCain pulled every punch in 2008.  

The bottom line is (with apologies to Victor), even the greatness of the Spartans failed against the numbers of the Persian. We are outnumbered and outplayed, and no matter how brilliant we are at the tactical level, we are losing the war.

Losing….but not lost. 

And since we’re on the subject of losers, next up, it’s “The More Things Change, The More They Remain The Same” segment, courtesy of Bill Meisen, The Hill, and Dimocratic Senator Patsy….

Murray: Can’t guarantee 2014 budget 

 

No….I’m serious!

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) confirmed Thursday that she will seek the chairmanship of the Senate Budget Committee next year but told The Hill that she cannot commit to doing a budget. This opens up the possibility that Senate Democrats will avoiding passing a budget resolution for the fourth year in a row.

The last time the Senate passed a standalone budget resolution was in 2009.

Which is yet another reason for House Republicans to push a very tough bargain on any tax compromise.

And in the “Shutting The Barn Door After The Horse Is Out” segment….

Panetta orders ethics training review as several generals face scrutiny over conduct

 

Gee….why would they have….

….an ethics problem?!?

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s these from TLJ….

….and Balls Cotton’s take on the end of the world:

Which brings us to the Idiots on Parade segment, and the L.A. City Council demonstrating anew why California’s known as The Land of Fruits & Nuts:

Los Angeles City Council endorses ‘meatless Mondays’

 

The Los Angeles City Council has declared every Monday to be a so-called ‘meatless Monday,’ and is urging all residents to participate in the weekly day of vegetarianism. NBC Los Angeles reports that with the vote Los Angeles has become the largest city to embrace the Meatless Monday campaign, a nonprofit with the goal of cutting down on meat consumption for health and environmental reasons.

Neither city officials nor law enforcement will be allowed to force residents to not eat meat, The Los Angeles Daily News reports. Rather, the resolution is meant to encourage residents to not eat meat once a week in the hopes of starting a city-wide trend.

Councilwoman Jan Perry, who has pushed for a ban on new fast-food restaurants in South Los Angeles, said the resolution is part of an overall “good food” agenda for the city. “We can reduce saturated fats and reduce the risk of heart disease by 19 percent,” Perry said according to the Los Angeles Daily News. “While this is a symbolic gesture, it is asking people to think about the food choices they make. Eating less meat can reverse some of our nation’s most common illnesses.”

Meat: the only possible explanation for America’s obesity epidemic….particularly among the porculent poor!

In a related item, as we learn in the “What Could Go Wrong With THIS?!?” segment, when they’re not telling you what to eat, they’re dictating what you drive; courtesy of the People’s Dimocratic Republic of Maryland, another shining example of centralized government planning at its best:

Montgomery County considers giving more of the road to buses

 

Planners in Montgomery County are proposing converting some lanes on the county’s busiest roads to bus-only lanes, The Washington Post reports. Eager to avoid widening roads, the planners say bus-only lanes would be a faster and more affordable way to improve transit and limit growing traffic congestion.

Larry Cole, a Montgomery transportation planner, said the county’s continued population growth will require persuading more people to forgo the convenience of driving by making buses faster and more reliableeven if that means motorists get less room on the road.

Not to mention persuading more people to forgo living in Montgomery County!

Finally, in the “NOW You Tell Us!” segment, this just in:

Not All Guard Dogs Protect Homes From Burglars

 

NOW you tell us!

P.S.  Those are ours.  L to R, meet Bam-Bam, Pebbles, Abby, Bonnie and Zoe.  Slip and fall and they’ll rip your throat out!

Magoo



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