What’s happening to the GOP is uncannily like what happened to the Tories after 1997:
"It is a problem for Republicans. As they continue to cater to their culturally conservative rural base, they continue to alienate educated voters," said Rep. Tom Davis, who is retiring and whose Fairfax County district was taken over by the Democrats on Tuesday. "The suburban vote is steadily slipping away, and the party’s trying to ignore it and pretend it’s not happening."
Score one for Judis.
Allahpundit fisks Novak.
"I supported George W. Bush in 2000 because I thought he had a conservative bone in his body somewhere. I supported him in 2004 because I thought him the lesser of two evils. At this point, I wouldn’t let the fool park his car in my driveway," – John Derbyshire.
Michael Weiss explains the acquired taste for Rahm Emanuel’s conversational erudition. It’s 1992 and Clinton’s enemies are discussed in a post-campaign release:
Suddenly Emanuel grabbed his steak knife and, as those who were there remember it, shouted out the name of another enemy, lifted the knife, then brought it down with full force into the table. ”Dead!” he screamed. The group immediately joined in the cathartic release:
”Nat Landow! Dead! Cliff Jackson! Dead! Bill Schaefer! Dead!”
Toss in a deeply uncomfortable but funny line about cementing his assistant’s asshole shut, and you’ve got Gold, baby.
Whenever I’ve come across him, he has seemed like a massive, world class, meshuggena asshole. Goldie explains:
I’ve known Rahm for a long time, and he’s yelled at me for no good reason on many occasions. This, of course, is the way he expresses affection.
He loves me! Then this:
Rahm, precisely because he’s a lover of Israel, will not have much patience with Israeli excuse-making, so when the next Prime Minister tells President Obama that as much as he’d love to, he can’t dismantle the Neve Manyak settlement outpost, or whichever outpost needs dismantling, because of a) domestic politics; b) security concerns, or c) the Bible, Rahm will call out such nonsense, and it will be very hard for right-wing Israelis to come back and accuse him of being a self-hating Jew.
Time for Krauthammer to panic. David Corn, on the other hand, is worried:
When I attended Obama’s final campaign rally at Manassas, Virginia, on Monday night, I asked Obama supporters in the massive crowd what they wanted to see in an Obama presidency. There was a pattern in the replies: the older white guys all said they wanted Obama to move beyond partisan confrontations and remake the political culture of Washington. That is, they really were moved by his campaign trail vow to bring a new kind of politics to the nation’s capital. So Obama ought to take steps that meet that rhetoric darn fast. Appointing Emanuel obviously doesn’t fall into such a category.
It all depends on what a chief-of-staff would do in an Obama administration. I see this at first blush as a bad cop to match a good cop within the administration and someone who won’t sugar-coat anything for the boss.
(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)
A California legal reader I trust writes:
I’ve just read the NCLR brief challenging the validity of Prop. 8, and it is not at all frivolous: The difference between a constitutional "revision" and a constitutional "amendment" is quite important under California constitutional law, and I have worked on cases dealing with it in the context of insurance regulation.
Briefly, an amendment to the constitution may be accomplished by a simple vote of the people, but a revision to our constitution must begin in the Legislature and then go to the voters.
In my opinion, this brief makes a very good legal argument which, in a non-political context, would be pretty persuasive. However, we have here a hyper-political context, and I think the courts will have a very hard time overruling Prop. 8. Still, I think this is a responsible brief — if a dangerous and risky political move.
Eugene Volokh counters here. I’m no legal expert, but as a political matter, I do not favor litigating this. I favor continuing the work in educating people about marriage equality, about gay couples, and the good, integrative effect of allowing this reform. And I think the greatest way to do this will not be lawsuits but the witness and example of thousands of legally married couples in California. That’s how fears of miscegenation abated in time: seeing inter-racial couples live and breathe defused the opposition. Remember, the anti-marriage equality forces lost over ten points in eight years in two consecutive initiatives. We’re winning. Just not all the time.
Patrick Ruffini sounds the alarm. The GOP won’t have a future until it appeals to young voters again. Bush turned an entire generation blue. Obama merely mobilized it.
A hard-ass is chief-of-staff and the campaign media manager is press secretary.
George Will is depressed:
Although John McCain’s loss was not as numerically stunning as the 1964 defeat of Barry Goldwater, who won 16 fewer states and 122 fewer electoral votes than McCain seems to have won as of this writing, Tuesday’s trouncing was more dispiriting for conservatives. Goldwater’s loss was constructive; it invigorated his party by reorienting it ideologically. McCain’s loss was sterile, containing no seeds of intellectual rebirth.
Agreed.
Sources in the McCain camp just put out this previously unknown Palin home video:
The Dish 