Be Careful What You Accept

After the elections tomorrow, the Republican party is likely to control the House of Representatives, the Senate, a majority of the governors, and a large majority of state legislative bodies.  In other words, except for the presidency, every sort of major political office will have Republicans in control.  This fact is important to remember when you read the post election analyses from the pundits or hear the talking heads give their deep thoughts on TV about the "meaning" of the election.  The truth is that these people are often wrong, sometimes very, very wrong.  Remember the days after president Obama won election in 2008?  The standard analysis, indeed the accepted wisdom of the next six months was that the electorate had moved permanently towards the Democrats.  Pundit after pundit told us that demographic trends had given Democrats an advantage which would only grow over time, so that the Republicans would become just a small regional (Southern) opposition party.  We were all instructed that 2008 was for all intents and purposes the end of the GOP.

So how could the pundits have been so wrong?  There are some who still cling to the position that demographics doom the Republicans; these are the ones who refuse to recognize reality.  Others see aberrational events controlling current election trends; bad economic or foreign events have temporarily overtaken the basic truths of demographics in their view.  For me, this group is the rough equivalent of the global warming crowd that explains the nearly two decade halt in warming as the result of some unnamed transient factor; they "know" the truth, even though they realize that the facts are different.

The real key to understanding the election results is to realize that voting turns for the most part on two things: (1) the conditions of the moment that push voters one way or the other, and (2) major events that push voters almost permanently into one party or the other.  An example of the first category is president Obama's being the first black presidential candidate in 2008.  Obama carried nearly every African American vote across the country and gained many votes from whites for that reason.  In 2016, however, when Obama is no longer on the ballot, will African Americans still vote as a monolith for the Democrats?  The likely answer is that they will still provide a huge majority to the Democrats, but the size of that majority as well as the size of the turnout of such voters will be reduced.  An example of the second category is the demise of the Soviet Union and America's victory in the Cold War.  That happened when president Reagan changed the nature of America's position in the Cold War from containment to confrontation with the Soviets.  It happened also with Reagan and Republicans actively battling opposition from Democrats who called Reagan a war-monger and did everything they could to stop or hamper the adoption of the new position.  When the Soviets collapsed, it was a world-changing event that proved that the Reagan policy was the correct one.  That Soviet collapse also gave the Republicans an edge that they still hold today in public perception as to which party is better dealing with international crises. 

The truth is that we do not know today what conditions will be like in 2016, so there is no way to tell which way the electorate will move.  For all we know, the Republicans will nominate the first Hispanic candidate for national office (like Rubio, Cruz or Martinez) and that will swing huge numbers of votes from the Democrats to the GOP.  Maybe the Democrats will nominate Hillary Clinton and that will swing women towards the "first woman president".  If the economy heads south in the next two years, voters most likely will blame Obama and the Democrats even if the GOP controls the Congress, but who knows.  If ISIS and the other terrorist groups continue to prosper while America does little, voters may seek to get rid of the incompetents from the Democrats that are now guiding our policies.

So keep this all in mind tomorrow night when you hear about the analysis of the results and in the days and weeks that follow.  The people providing the analysis really don't know what the future will bring.  They are just guessing.

 

Predictions for Tuesday

Since I have written many times about others views of who will win on Tuesday, I figure that I ought to put my own predictions out there.  So here goes:

For the Senate I expect that the GOP will most likely end up with 53 seats.  That is a pick up of eight seats.  Certain seats are clearly going to switch from Democrat to Republican; these include Montana, South Dakota, West Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana (after a runoff in December), Alaska, Colorado and Iowa.  Republicans will hold their seats in Kentucky and Georgia.  Republicans also ought to win in Kansas after the big gaffe made by Independent/liberal Orman in calling Bob Dole a clown (which is a major mistake in Kansas).  Republicans ought to pick up at least one seat from among New Hampshire, North Carolina, Minnesota, Michigan, and even New Mexico and Virginia.

In the House, there will be a net gain by the GOP of at least 15 seats.  There seems to be only one seat currently held by a Republican that is in jeopardy of flipping to the Democrats.  There are at least 20 that may move the other way.

Among the governor's races, the picture remains murkier.  Here too, I expect pick ups by the GOP of at least one seat.  The quality of the seats held by the Democrats looks likely to improve, however.  Barring a major surprise, the Democrats will win in Pennsylvania and they may win also in Florida.  Even a possible Republican pick up in Illinois would not offset those two losses.

State legislatures are not the subject of polling by national pollsters. Nevertheless, the likely outcome here is that the GOP should pick up control of between three and five legislative houses in states across the country. 

This Clinches It

For anyone wondering if the Republicans will take control of the Senate with this year's elections, we now have the ultimate confirmation that the political insiders all agree that it will happen.  The chair of the Democrat party, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, told a Sunday morning interview show today that the Democrats would win because they were not far behind in many states and that when the races are close, Democrats win.  It was a startling statement.  The head cheerleader for the Democrats did not claim that her candidates were winning; she admitted that they were behind in the polls.  Normally, the last weekend before elections, the main spokesman for each side predict victory as a way to push supporters out to the polls.  Admission of defeat is believed to demoralize potential voters and to cost the party seats in close votes.  Debbie's position is just that.  She admits the Dems are behind and seems to be expecting some sort of magic to move them ahead.

In many respects, what the DNC chair said is best categorized as a Freudian slip.  She could not help herself and let the truth come out by mistake.

The Obama Doctrine

It is worth noting that sometimes those outside our country see things here more clearly than many Americans.  I was struck by this idea when I read a tweet from Gary Kasparov, the former world chess champion who is now a pro-democracy activist in Russia.  Here is Kasparov's short distillation of president Obama's foreign policy:

The Obama Doctrine: "Do as little as necessary to appear to be doing something without actually committing to a cause or course of action."

Kasparov really hits the nail on the head.  When Russia invaded Crimea, Obama's response was to impose sanctions that did nothing.  A few high ranking Russian officials had their American assets frozen after they were given about a two week period to first move them elsewhere.  It was a joke, but it allowed Obama to look sternly into the cameras and talk about American sanctions on Russia when, in reality, there were none.  Crimea has stayed Russian and there is no chance of that situation changing.

When ISIS began moving into Iraq, Obama did nothing.  When ISIS took the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah and their roughly 1 million inhabitants, Obama called them "jayvee terrorists" and did nothing.  When ISIS began months later to take more territory across Iraq to the point that it controlled nearly half the country, Obama demanded that the Baghdad government change its composition before America could act to help stop ISIS.  During all this time, it was clear who ISIS was; there were murders and more murders of thousands in Iraq.  ISIS had no doubt what to do with opponents:  it killed all of them it could find.  Only once ISIS began beheading American captives did Obama become forced to act.  Even since then, Obama has done as little as possible in order to appear to be taking action.  American air power has been deployed against ISIS on many occasions during the last three months.  Even so, however, the number of air attacks against ISIS in Iraq since August is less than the number of attacks by American planes on an average day during the Gulf War or the invasion of Iraq in 2002.  It is like trying to kill a rhinoceros with a flyswatter.

Kasparov did not include domestic policy, but there too, one finds a similar Obama Doctrine.  Think what Obama has done on the economy.  We have faced stagnation for years, but Obama has not done anything.  Think about just the last two years.  Obama has not even had a program to grow the economy; not even a proposal.  Instead, we got nonsense like the need for universal pre-K education and raising the minimum wage as an "economic program".  That allowed Obama to say that he had a program when he really had not even made a proposal and had certainly done NOTHING.

The Reality of Israeli Settlements

I recently visited Jerusalem for the first time in many decades.  The changes in the city are extraordinary.  Oh, the old buildings are still there, but there are new and beautiful urban neighborhoods of a sort which did not exist in 1973 when I was last there.  To be clear, these neighborhoods are not just for Jewish Israelis.  Arab areas also have seen a major renaissance and clearly now are the wealthiest Arab areas in the world aside from the crazy petro-dollar fueled places like Qatar.  A good example of this phenomenon is the city of Bethlehem.  While Bethlehem was a separate city from Jerusalem over the last two thousand years or more, the two cites have now grown to the point where there is really no space between them.  Bethlehem is actually an extension of Jerusalem today.  The biggest difference between Jerusalem and Bethlehem is that Israel controls the local administration of Jerusalem while the Palestinian Authority does the same in Bethlehem.

As you drive through Jerusalem, there are no remnants of the border that used to separate Israel from Jordan.  It is all one big city.  No one who lives in the city seems to pay any attention to where the old cease fire line from 1949 used to run.  It is a forgotten line for the city residents.  In the rest of the world, however, people who have no sense of the actual conditions in the city cling to the old cease fire line as if it were of paramount significance.  For these people, if a home is built by an Israeli on one side of the street it is of no moment, but should the same Israeli build his home on the other side of the street and on the other side of the old abandoned cease fire line, it is a "settlement", a horrific attack on the Palestinians and their aspirations for a state. 

I was particularly taken with the ridiculous nature of the settlement debate one afternoon during my visit when I had lunch in a café in the Jewish quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem.  To be clear, the Jewish quarter is a section of the city which got its name about five hundred years ago from the Turks who ruled the area.  Jerusalem of that day had a Moslem, Armenian, Christian and Jewish quarter based upon the identity of the groups who lived in the area.  For many centuries the Jewish quarter was predominantly inhabited by Jews until they were forced out of their family homes by the Jordanian army in 1948 and 1949.  From 1949 to 1967, Jordan would not allow any Jews to enter the Old City and the Jewish quarter was mostly abandoned.  Heavy damage to the section of the city that had occurred during the war following Israel's independence was never repaired under Jordanian rule, so no one actually lived there.  Following the Israeli victory in 1967, Israel took control of the entire city, including the Jewish Quarter.  Jews, whose families had lived in Jerusalem for millennia were able to move back to ancestral homes and reestablish a Jewish presence in the Old City.  So in the Jewish quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, we have a traditional site of Jewish residences that were rebuilt after 1967.  For Israel, this is now just a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem.  In much of the rest of the world, however, this section is filled with "settlements".  After all, the Old City was not part of Israel according to the 1949 armistice lines.  Families who went to the homes that they own and refurbished them and moved in became "settlers" in the diplomatic vernacular.  This is bad enough, but the reverse makes it even worse.

It is important to understand that after the Six Day War in 1967, Israel unified the city of Jerusalem.  Arabs who lived in the city prior to the war were able to move to new neighborhoods if they so chose.  If these people move to a neighborhood that was on the Israeli side prior to 1967, they are not settlers, but if the Israelis do the opposite, they are settlers.  The truth is that both would just be residents of Jerusalem moving to a new home in the city where they were already living.

The next time someone tells you about the Israeli "settlements", tell them about the reality of the situation.  There are other areas where there are settlements, but the vast bulk of all of what are called settlements are within Jerusalem.  For the most part, the subject of settlements is a phony issue that has been used by the Palestinians more to delay the chance of peace than to promote it.  The saddest thing is that president Obama and his secretaries of state Clinton and Kerry have bought into this myth.

 

An Interesting Twist in Wisconsin

There is so much election news this weekend, that many items can get lost in the mist.  One that I think extremely important comes from Wisconsin.  The big race in that state is the one for governor in which Scott Walker seeks re-election.  His opponent, Democrat Mary Burke, has based much of her claim to executive competence on her days as an officer of Trek, the bicycle manufacturer.  It is true that during her time at Trek, Burke's family controlled the company, so her stint there has always been a questionable basis for a claim of competence.  After all, her position may have been more a testament to nepotism than to any executive ability.  Now, however, something new has happened which ought to sink Burke's campaign completely.  That something new is the disclosure that Burke was in fact fired from her job at Trek for lack of competence.  Think about that for a moment.  Burke was fired by her own family company for incompetence.  If your family is not willing to keep you on as an executive, how incompetent must you be?  This news ought to send undecided and even some Burke voters to Walker.  At a minimum, it ought to depress the number of voters for Burke.

It is interesting also to see Burke's response to the news.  She is now pushing the position that the news is somehow Walker's fault and that it shows just how evil he is.  The response is deranged.  The story that Burke was fired has been confirmed by the main executives of Trek from the time of the dismissal.  Blaming Walker for the truth coming out, particularly after Burke lied about the details for many months during the campaign (she claimed she left of her own accord after being "burned out") is nothing more than political flailing.  The most likely result has been to guarantee a Walker re-election.  It certainly ought to be the result.

 

The Perspective That Distance Provides

I have been out of the country for the last two weeks and unable to post.  It is amazing the additional perspective that being 6000 miles from home provides.  I also have to say that some things that I often discuss in posts became much clearer as I got near to the actual events.  For example, the other morning, I actually watched from a mountainside as the Assad forces in Syria shelled al Qaeda terrorists who had taken control of the southwestern borders of the country.  There is non=stop debate in America about whether or not shots should be taken or bombs dropped if civilians might be hit.  Just think of the criticism leveled at the Israelis when civilians were hit in Gaza.  That debate seems silly, however, when you watch an artillery barrage from Assad's Shiite troops destroying areas and people in an attempt to prevent the al Qaeda terrorists from taking more territory.  (It is important to note that neither side here was ISIS.  It was just Assad and his terrorist sidekicks from Hezbollah shooting at the Sunni terrorists from al Qaeda; the medieval Sunni terrorist group ISIS had no involvement.  We were not close enough to see who, if anyone was killed in the barrages, but the outlook of the terrorists that civilian casualties do not matter in the least was blatantly apparent.  It seems that the West fights with the Geneva convention in mind while the Islamic terrorists fight to kill anyone and everyone who do not agree with them.