So far, when the Republican establishment has endorsed a republican in a primary, and Palin has endorsed a different candidate, Palin’s candidate wins. Looks like Republican party activists listen to Palin, and rank and file republicans listen to party activists. The next test of Palin’s power is Lisa Murkowski against Joe Miller. The party establishment are not only way to the left of the party base, they are also incompetent, corrupt, politically clumsy, and astonishingly stupid, the kind of stupid that only years of teaching in an elite university can induce.
But the establishment has to back an incumbent in a Senate primary, especially an incumbent who has played ball with them in Washington. You can’t have a political party if the party is not loyal to its team players.
The stupidity is in deciding the overall direction of the party. Conditional on that overall direction, backing Murkowski is the rational thing to do. The stupidity is not in rewarding Murkowski for going along with TARP, the stupidity was in asking her to go along with TARP in the first place — or, if you take a longer view, the stupidity was in the party bosses lining up behind Bush in 2000.
Obviously, it would be a very good thing for Lisa Murkowski to lose. Since the Republican leadership evidently cannot be successfully punished by voting for democrats, it has to be punished by voting for republicans it disfavors.
Bill says:
True, but how did he get to be an incumbent?
True, but it is not apparent that that team is the same team as the party rank and file. Oppositions are supposed to oppose.
All manner of bad things are happening. It is should be a very easy time for the opposition. All it has to do is complain that everything the government does is causing these kind of bad things. Instead, they are being constructive. Of course, you get extra credit if you actually have a coherent explanation of how the government is causing these bad things, and even more credit if you explain what you would have done differently, but the first step is to actually oppose. Lisa Murkowski is being constructive. If you are in opposition, and you cannot see anything wrong with what the government is doing, then at least tell them they are sons of bitches.
Quite so.
The Keynesian theory that spending stimulates the economy is true and false – and what is false about it is that in practice, it is always more government, and in practice government strangles the economy – the problem now is not lack of demand, but regime uncertainty and abandonment of the rule of law – the intervention in GM where the creditors were screwed in favor of the union discourages anyone from investing in anything, and what is going down with health care discourages anyone from hiring anyone. No one knows what the health care system is, or what it is going to be. The fact that so many criminal acts by financiers were overlooked and retroactively legalized means that financiers cannot trust each other.
I speculate that the reason why the financiers were forgiven, despite criminal conduct and public wrath, is that any examination of their crimes would expose the lies of affirmative action, and if any affirmative action lie comes to light, then the preceding lie is in turn exposed to light, all the way back to Marie Curie. Of course other theories, such as that they were all pals at Harvard together, are also supported by the evidence, and are surely also a factor.
Affirmative action caused the actions of the good old boys network that ran the investment banks? Astonishing…
Most of the missing money did not go to good old boys. It went to Mexicans who purchased million dollar houses despite having no job, no money, and no credit. So affirmative action is the obvious suspect