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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Friday, November 08, 2002 :::
This is of pretty local interest, I imagine, though that may include my brother. This Herald piece from Tuesday, in which Bill Mallard (chairman of the Boston Republican City Committee and a member of the Republican state committee) tears into Romney, has attracted some attention from Massachusetts Republicans. The state committee last night tabled a motion to censure Mallard.
::: posted by Steven at 2:20 PM
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I've been behind on my Andrew Sullivan.
We don't have the full results yet, but it seems clear, as I write, that the Republicans will gain in the House and win back the Senate. For a first term president who didn't win a plurality to win in a mid-term election with a deeply troubled economy is, quite simply, an astonishing victory.
Actually, the fact that he didn't win a plurality may have helped. The most common theory for why the president's party does badly in mid-term elections is that people get tired of him -- which they clearly haven't in Bush's case -- but an other theory, which I rather like, says he has coat-tails going in, so the backswing two years later is just a lack of any coat-tails to ride. Every Republican congressman who won re-election this week had won an election two years earlier with no coat-tails, and every Democratic Senator besides Carnahan who was up for re-election had won the previous race in 1996, with a President helping, rather than campaigning for their opponents.
I'm sure there have been empirical studies of this theory, but I've either not seen them or forgotten them. I suppose I could probably find the data myself, but I'm more interested right now in doing some analyses of the latest Massachusetts results.
::: posted by Steven at 1:46 PM
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I've been contemplating negative advertising again. It occurred to me that, while negative ads aren't exclusively political -- "who wants to spend Christmas afternoon downloading Windows drivers?" -- they're overwhelmingly so.
There are a few obvious explanations for this. For one thing, negative political ads are generally invoked in duopoly situations -- if you drive someone away from your opponent, they either come to you, or they leave the pool of voters altogether. And in politics, but not commerce, driving them away from your opponent is a plus, even if they don't come to you.
I'm not really trying to say anything profound here, so much as I'm trying to avoid studying.
::: posted by Steven at 1:17 PM
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On a football note, if Green Bay beats Detroit on Sunday -- they're favored by 10 -- and wins three more games (out of seven), they'll win their division, no tie-breaker necessary.
At the beginning of the season, I thought New England would do better than Green Bay. I've been wrong.
Since I'm on football: after BC gave Notre Dame their first loss last week, my roommate Edward pointed out the oddity that, of those two teams, the one called the "Irish" is the one from Notre Dame.
::: posted by Steven at 12:39 PM
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The UN Security Council seems to have unanimously passed an America-led-yet-toothless resolution on Iraq. For what it's worth.
::: posted by Steven at 12:05 PM
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Steve reminds me of a letter to the editor that I saw once that criticized Bush for going to Peru and asking for things the United States wants -- there was no criticism for failing to listen to Toledo, mind you, just the implication that he should have, I guess, already concluded the full dialog in his head before he went to Peru. Let me tell you that if Bush did go to Peru and tell them what the results of their dialog were as soon as he got there, the person who wrote that letter would not have been happy.
::: posted by dWj at 11:37 AM
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The Chicago Tribune (registration possibly required) reports:
Then another journalist asked what the president had given first lady Laura Bush. It wasn't clear whether the question pertained to the present for her 56th birthday on Monday or the couple's 25th wedding anniversary on Tuesday, but no matter; the query hit pay dirt.
Bush turned around in the doorway, flashed a wide grin - and winked broadly at his journalistic audience.
There was no immediate response from the first lady.
::: posted by dWj at 11:29 AM
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There have been a few smug suggestions lately -- letters to the editor and the like -- that since Governor-elect Romney successfully made the argument that the state government shouldn't be controlled by a single party, he should call for the same on the national level.
My first response is that if the Democratic candidate for President in 2004 wants to make that argument, it's his (hers?) to make, though Republican control of Congress beyond 2004 is far from assured. There's no reason Romney has to make that argument for him. If the argument is made, though, and Romney is asked to rebut it for the party, though, that's not hard.
See, the federal Senate has 100 seats. 51, maybe 52 will be held by Republicans. The state Senate has 40 seats. Six are held by Republicans. Republican measures on the federal level are subject to filibuster. Vetos on the state level can be overridden without a single Republican vote, even with quite a few Democratic defections. Denny Hastert, Trent Lott, and George Bush are all Republicans, but that doesn't mean they can act with impunity -- as I've pointed out, if Lincoln Chafee and Susan Collins dislike a measure, it loses, even without a filibuster.
::: posted by Steven at 11:01 AM
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Jonah Goldberg writes:
The first thing Bush has got to do is move some judges through the Senate. Whether he should lead with the most controversial ones or the least is a tricky question. The Left and the Democrats will paint anybody the Republicans confirm as a hate-mongering, Orwellian goose-stepper. So the question is, does that mean you should put the most palatable ones up first, so the Dems look hysterical for no good reason ? or do you put the hard-core guys up first because this may be the GOP's only chance? I don't know. But I do know that the conservative base demands, expects, and deserves a lot of good judges to be confirmed by the Senate because of this, and Bush needs to placate them right away.
It's widely considered good politics to take care of your base early in the election cycle, when people who don't participate in politics except on election day aren't watching, and move to the center toward the end of the cycle, when your base is on-board. This would suggest that if Bush has a list of judges he wants to appoint, he should start with the more conservative ones and move toward the less contraversial.
Keep in mind, though, that we'll only have 51, or possibly 52, seats in the Senate. Anyone who meets with disapproval from Lincoln Chafee and Susan Collins isn't going to be confirmed at either the beginning of the session or the end.
::: posted by Steven at 10:40 AM
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John J. Miller writes about Nancy Pelosi, who is likely to be the next House minority leader, at National Review Online.
Pelosi voted against the recent war resolution. She also came out against the Gulf War a decade ago. Neither of these is an especially remarkable position for a liberal Democrat to take. Pelosi, however, made the latter one remarkable when she based her opposition to the war on the environment: "While we are gravely concerned about the loss of life from combat in the Persian Gulf War, environmental consequences of the war are as important to the people there as the air they breathe and the water they drink."
Isn't this exactly the kind of person conservatives would like to see the Democrats put forward as their leading spokesman (oops! spokeswoman) in the House?
As Glenn Reynolds would say, that seems about right.
::: posted by Steven at 10:33 AM
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Thursday, November 07, 2002 :::
Yahoo! News - Squirrel Terrorizes Town
I've seen this link both at the Corner and at the Kitchen Cabinet. What I find most amusing is that they decided they needed a picture of a squirrel to go with the story. If you click on the picture to enlarge it, there's a caption informing you that the squirrel in question isn't the squirrel pictured, it's a squirrel "similar to the one shown in this file photo". I suppose it's in case people don't know what a squirrel is.
::: posted by Steven at 10:28 PM
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Professor Volokh points out that pundits who predicted Tuesday's results won't necessarily get it right in general. I suspect -- though I haven't really looked into it -- that conservative pundits may have done better than liberal pundits, since those types tend to be optimistic, and the election did not go surprisingly Democratic.
::: posted by Steven at 6:27 PM
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My impression of Cambridge Republicans, at least, is not one of extremists, but I'm sure they trend right of Communist. With at least one exception that I can think of.
::: posted by dWj at 4:49 PM
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The assumption that a woman will be to the left of a similar man might also suggest that the bump for women would be more likely for Republicans than for Democrats in the ward committee elections.
If you assume the primary voters are centrist, that works. That likely depends on the election year. In 2000, Massachusetts had almost as many voters in the Republican primary as in the Democratic, so there were probably a lot of McCain-voting independent types; the Democrats might have had more extremists. I expect that the voters in the 2004 Republican primary will be more commited, therefore presumably more conservative, than those from the 2000 primary.
::: posted by Steven at 2:57 PM
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The assumption that a woman will be to the left of a similar man might also suggest that the bump for women would be more likely for Republicans than for Democrats in the ward committee elections. Personally, I believe that women collect more votes because of their sex than men do; in fact, I think this is true of male voters in general. (More likely than that, though, it's true of male voters who match the demographic of the kind of people I know -- more educated, predominantly white-collar. I often get the feeling that racism -- other than of the anti-white sort -- and sexism -- of the anti-woman sort -- are more pervasive in communities I don't frequent than they are in those that I do and in the media.)
::: posted by dWj at 2:31 PM
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Double standard only half explains Shannon's loss, writes Margery Eagan in today's Herald. Jay Fitzgerald (you'll note that blogspot perma-links frequently don't get you to the right part of the page) reacts by commenting, "Some women blindly voted for Shannon because she was a woman. Some men blindly voted the opposite because she was a woman. They canceled each other out, in effect." His first two points are right, though I'd like to point out that not all sexism is in favor of one's own sex. Whether the two pulls are roughly equal is a matter for debate.
Let me explain how ward committees are elected in Massachusetts; I'll be back on topic soon.
Every four years, with the presidential primary, ward committee candidates are on the ballot (as are state committee members). To get on the ballot, a candidate needs five signatures from the same party (unenrolled voters -- what most people would call independents -- might be allowed to sign, but I'm not sure) and ward. These signatures can apply to slates of candidates, so five candidates for ward committee can all sign for each other on a single form. All committee members are voted on individually, though.
For Republicans in Cambridge, if you get on the ballot, you get on the ward committee -- we never have more candidates than committee slots, so the vote totals don't really matter. If you choose to look at them, though, you'll notice a few tendencies, most notably:
- Of those candidates who were on the ballot, there's not a lot of variance within a ward. Bill Weld used to get extra votes when he was in Cambridge; David Trumbull got a few extra after he'd run for City Council and been the chairman of the city committee. Otherwise, though, people appear to vote for all of the candidates listed or none of them.
- Women consistently get about 3-5% more votes than men.
For example, here are the results from Ward 7 last time:
Wayne Drugan, Jr. - 99
Mary Samp - 104
Edward Samp, Jr. - 99
Patricia Field - 103
Frederick Meyer - 101
I tend to believe -- and this backs me up -- that there are more sexist voters going for women than going for men. I've heard it asserted that women are considered less "executive" than men. This may have an element of truth to it. I've also been told that the first female president will be a Republican, because a Republican woman will be assumed centrist, while a Democratic woman will be assumed leftist. This might be true, too, though one can hope voters will learn enough about presidential candidates that they don't have to make such assumptions. I don't offer conclusions about what factors outweigh what other factors; I'm just offering a few observations.
Romney, on the other hand, is like some 19th century throwback. He's to the manner born, gazing lovingly at the beauteous Ann, doting on the grandkids, a creature from a more civil and refined time when the phrase ``women and children first'' was seen as gentlemanly good manners - not some condescending, patriarchal plot.
This is what I took from his use of the word "unbecoming." It's not condescending so much as it is archaic.
::: posted by Steven at 11:39 AM
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Wednesday, November 06, 2002 :::
Ramesh Ponnuru suggests in The Corner that the big winner in yesterday's election is Mrs. Mark Pryor.
::: posted by Steven at 8:44 PM
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At The Kitchen Cabinet, Lily responds to the New York Times:
With pep rallies devoid of pep and stump speeches that stirred few voters, the campaign that led up to the balloting was nevertheless notably lifeless and cheerless.
Well, except for the Wellstone memorial service.
::: posted by Steven at 5:41 PM
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Howie Carr points out that Mondale has now lost in every state.
::: posted by Steven at 3:27 PM
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God bless the good people of Georgia for having the courage to elect a man with a name like Saxby Chambliss. "Let's confirm some judges!" is the first thing I thought when I heard the radio this morning.
It ought to be remarkable that the national media didn't report the results on the state income tax question -- I know I did hear about bilingual education -- but it really isn't surprising at this point.
::: posted by dWj at 11:39 AM
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So, who's in a good mood today? I know I am. Let's confirm some judges!
The Globe has complete results for Massachusetts. The most remarkable point is that 45% of the voters in Massachusetts voted to eliminate the state income tax.
::: posted by Steven at 10:23 AM
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Tuesday, November 05, 2002 :::
Q. How Do You Catch A Unique Rabbit?
A. Unique Up On It.
Q. How Do You Catch A Tame Rabbit?
A. Tame Way, Unique Up On It.
My brother still hasn't kicked me off his blog.
::: posted by dWj at 6:00 PM
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On NPR this weekend I heard a report that, when members of the media in Iraq lose their administration-appointed "translator", they are hearing increasing opposition to Hussein -- as well as to U.S. foreign policy. I'm curious as to how well they know what the latter is exactly, but I'm also curious as to what they would prefer, and what they object to about what we have now. (That's not rhetorical, where I'd mean to imply that there could be no better foreign policy; I mean that literally, that I'm curious as to what they'd like.)
::: posted by dWj at 1:44 PM
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The Kitchen Cabinet has posted excerpts, transcribed by me, of the book "Showdown at Gucci Gulch", the source of the Mondale "tax their ass off" quote.
I hope you know what I mean by that, because I'm going to go do electiony stuff rather than explain it.
::: posted by Steven at 7:17 AM
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Monday, November 04, 2002 :::
Howie Carr points out that Bill and Hillary Clinton have each been up here campaigning with Shannon O'Brien -- but not together.
::: posted by Steven at 5:14 PM
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The Globe's endorsement for O'Brien for governor includes the following comment:
Romney's most visible ''appointment'' was his running mate, Kerry Healey, a person with a disturbing lack of credentials to become lieutenant governor.
Followers of the race will remember that the Globe endorsed Healey in the Republican primary.
::: posted by Steven at 4:42 PM
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Bill Bennett writes about the shamelessness of the Democratic party.
::: posted by dWj at 12:46 PM
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USA Today has some poll numbers for five of the six closest Senate races (Minnesota was left out, but any poll from there would be out of date anyway). They're at the bottom of the web page.
::: posted by Steven at 11:12 AM
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Sunday, November 03, 2002 :::
Something I learned from watching George Will on ABC's "This Week" -- Bellesiles is pronounced "buhLEEL", i.e., in French. "Belles iles", I suppose.
It reminded me how much of my information comes from reading.
::: posted by Steven at 11:57 AM
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The New Republic suggests that France lose its Security Council seat.
For international organizations to be relevant, privilege must follow power, and for them to be admirable, privilege must follow decency. Nothing would more dramatically further both goals than dethroning France.
Link via Instapundit, among others.
::: posted by Steven at 6:51 AM
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Warren Buffett has re-gained the respect of The Establishment [cue minor-key music]. Is this a sell signal for Berkshire Hathaway?
Not quite, I'd say. Buffett does say in the article that Berkshire Hathaway's share price is "kind of high right now, though I'd rather own it than the S&P 500."
::: posted by Steven at 6:24 AM
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