Moore Award Nominee

"This latest move by Kennedy, is so telling about the status of and respect for women’s rights, women’s voices, women’s equality, women’s authority and our ability – indeed, our obligation – to promote and earn and deserve and elect, unabashedly, a President that is the first woman after centuries of men who ‘know what’s best for us,’" – Marcia Pappas, president of New York State’s chapter of NOW.

Where’s Rudy?

Dave Barry knows:

It’s still wide open. Mitt "Mitt" Romney holds a slight edge in delegates, plus a heifer he got for winning Wyoming. Right behind him are John McCain, Chuck Norris and the late Ronald Reagan. Bringing up the rear is Rudy, who needs a win and has been frantically courting Florida voters. He’s mowing your lawn right now.

“The Asset Has Arrived”

Thanks for the many emails from DC today. Here’s a typical dispatch:

Just got back from trying to attend Barack’s AU speech. Couldn’t get in – place was too jam-packed. Passed a similarly rebuffed Chris Matthews on my way out. The line stretched for about a mile from Bender Arena, winding down two neighboring streets. Of the hundreds waiting in line outside I saw every age group and demographic possible. I eavesdropped on conversations between college students and picked up a dropped ham sandwich for an older gent in his sixties. Saw a few diva-looking types in mink coats and folks in baseball caps and jackets.

As the Bourne Ultimatum would have it, the asset has arrived.

Another reader:

It was multi-racial, mutli-generational crowd who were beyond enthused. It really did feel like a movement — the excitement was absolutely palpable. On the line, everyone was chatting about how they used to support Clinton during his presidency. They loved him. They felt so let down and disgusted, as well as disgusted with those who shrug and explain away the Clintons’ sliminess as simply pragmatic, as "what it takes." One said if you told her then that she would be rallying for a candidate running against Hillary for president, she never would have believed it. Everyone agreed.

A Conservative Of Doubt

"Cynicism towards the kind of vaporous flapdoodle Obama trades in is fully justified, and ought to be encouraged. Doubt that an Obama administration will be able to do any better with the nation’s issues than a Clinton, McCain, Romney, or Paul administration, is likewise fully justified, given Obama’s lack of executive experience, or of experience in any real job; as is doubt that the things Obama says he wants to do, are desirable. Fear that an Obama administration will just take more of our money to sluice away on bureaucratic extravaganzas, ditto.

The man’s a hard-left socialist, for Heaven’s sake. Anyone falling for this stuff learned nothing from the later 20th century," – John Derbyshire, failing to catch the Obama wave.

I would expect no less. But "hard-left socialist" is too crude. Obama is more interesting than that.

Dick Morris’ Insight

Yes, he has them – and when they’re good, they’re great:

Obama has made the Super Tuesday vote more about who we are than who the candidates running for president are.

It’s the community organizer in him. Only now the community he is organizing is an entire country. I do think this is an important aspect to Obama’s liberalism that provides a bridge to conservatism. He is not a traditional top-down big government liberal. He’s a pragmatist who believes in finding ways to empower people to run their own lives. No, he’s no libertarian. But his view of government’s role has absorbed some of the right-wing critiques of the 1970s and 1980s. Hence the lack of mandates in his healthcare proposal and his refusal to engage in racial victimology. This nuance is worth exploring. Unlike Hillary, he doesn’t believe he is going to save anyone. He thinks he has a chance to help some people save themselves.

Dissent Of The Day

For those interested in the history of British conservatism:

As a historian of Britain (specializing in the Whig party) I watched with interest the video you linked to (and praised) about the history of the Tory party.  Although an American who votes Democratic, if British I would almost certainly support the Tory party.  But this video is hardly what’s going to make me do it, for while a good amount of it is accurate and interesting, other bits are, to use a phrase, problematic.

First, Burke and Pitt both self-identified as Whigs and while most of Pitt’s followers became "Tories", the idea that Burke created the philosophical underpinnings of the Tory party grossly neglects the fact that his legacy is far more debatable than that.  You, for instance, have far more in common philosophically with Burke’s bete noir Thomas Paine and his emphasis on the equality of all men than you do with Burke’s single most important political importance–the necessity of a hereditary elite.

Second, Pitt, in addition to building up the military, also suspended Habeas Corpus, put people on trial for their political opinions (though unsuccessfully), passed a Seditious Meetings Act forbidding people to meet privately and peacefully if the government disapproved and took other steps that even his supporter the Times called "harsh measures against the liberties" of the subject.

Third, while the Duke of Wellington did help repeal the laws against Catholic participation in government, he fought so hard against every other political reform that fellow conservatives accused him of helping to increase the chance of a revolution.

Fourth, although Pitt was influenced by Smith and did lower some trade tariffs, he never pursued free trade as a system, passed other new tariffs, and his successors in what we will call here the Tory party passed the anti-free-trade laws, the corn duties, and drove Peel out of the party in an attempt to keep them at all costs. Peel’s free-trade supporters, like Gladstone, largely ended up opposing the Tories, and opposition to free trade is one of the things that drew Joseph Chamberlain, for instance, to the Tory party.

Fifth, while Baldwin (who, note, is the PM who ended the free trade policy dating back to 1848) is given credit for old-age pensions, it was actually the Liberal government nearly two decades earlier who had created old-age pensions (under the relevant minister, one Winston Churchill), Baldwin was merely expanding the system the direction already planned before he took office.

Sixth, to give the Tory party credit for health coverage "for all" is to radically misunderstand the politics that led to the creation of the NHS.

Seventh, I’m not sure that giving the Tory party "credit" for restricting  child labor in  1937  is as much of a recommendation as the video seems to think.  This had been first proposed nearly a century before by Lord Shaftesbury (who was, I must state, a conservative).

Eight, Rent control??

Ninth, all credit to Churchill, but he was only made leader of the Tory party because Labour refused to back the preferred candidate of the Tory MPs, the pro-treaty with Hitler Halifax.

Tenth, the 1944 Education Act was passed under a National Government in which Clement Attlee was Deputy PM and while the Tory minister in charge, RAB Butler, was the primary author, it was supported by all parties in the government.

Eleventh, standards of living may have been up 50% under the Macmillan government, but given that the increases were actually quite modest this a.) does not reflect well on previous Conservative governments and b.) ignores the collapse in Britain’s relative standard of living.

Twelfth, the section about Thatcher is the most accurate, but it does conveniently ignore that a large number of the things she is credited with undoing or fixing had been created by previous Tory governments.

Thirteenth, it is news to me that John Major won the Gulf War.

Obama As “Head Of State”?

Josh Claybourn helps explain how some on the right are drawn to Obama:

As a libertarian-minded conservative, I agree with almost nothing of Barack Obama’s actual policy positions. Whether it is with education, health care, or fiscal matters, Obama is a liberal in the truest sense of the word. He fails to respect federalism and his policies can often border on socialism. Indeed, I have trouble identifying any policy positions of Obama’s that appeal to me. In short, I think Barack Obama would make a terrible Head of Government.

Yet, as David Kopel has deftly noted, the Head of State is an entirely different role altogether, and regardless of your ideological perspective, there is something tremendously appealing about Obama. Indeed, several of his recent speeches – his Iowa victory, a speech on MLK Jr. Day, and the South Carolina victory – have given me goosebumps and caused me to swell with pride at being an American.