A Minor Musing About The Political Left, Right, And Center

George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind foolishness and and his decision to invade Iraq despite the fact that there was no evidence Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11 or had the weaponry to produce the mushroom cloud Bush's Vice-President Cheney ominously warned Americans about moved me leftward on the political spectrum.

In a sane political universe I would still be one step to the right of center. In South Dakota, therefore, I'm three steps to the left, a spot that most of South Dakota's conservatives believe is a full step left of Marx and Lenin.

As the name of this blog indicates, I am used to being in empty spaces, but two recent national columns give me a bit of comfort. First in yesterday's column, Max Boot writes that the Republican party has morphed. It was "a conservative party with a white-nationalist fringe. Now it’s a white-nationalist party with a conservative fringe." If memory serves, Boot was a NeoCon cheerleader for the Iraq invasion, so I should make some snide remark about getting a comeuppance, but his work also provided my policy debaters with DA link and impact cards, so I have a soft spot for Max.

I also agree with two trenchant bits of analysis from the column. First, he points out that Trump and his enablers

“want to transform the GOP into a European-style nationalist party that opposes cuts in entitlement programs, believes in deportation of undocumented immigrants, white identity politics, protectionism and isolationism backed by hyper-macho threats to bomb the living daylights out of anyone who messes with us.” 

More importantly, the cult of Trump has totally destroyed the GOP's soul.

If Trump announced he were going to spit-roast immigrant kids and eat them on national TV (apologies to Jonathan Swift), most Republicans probably would approve of that, too. The entire Republican platform can now be reduced to three words: whatever Trump says. 

The second quotation leads nicely into today's E.J Dionne column. Dionne points to an Alan I. Abramowitz book which points out that Republicans have moved further right than Democrats have moved left.

And the centrist heavenly chorus is off-key in another respect: While it sings mournful songs about the major parties becoming “extreme,” Abramowitz’s data make clear that the two sides are not equivalent. Republicans have moved significantly further to the right than Democrats have moved to the left.

Between 1972 and 2012, he notes, the proportion of Democrats who put themselves at the center of the ideological spectrum (or were unable to place themselves) dropped from 52 percent to 41 percent, an 11-point drop. In the same period, the comparable figures for Republicans were 44 percent and 22 percent, double the Democratic swing.

The upshot: The share of Democrats in the ideological middle is nearly twice that of Republicans.

Boot's and Dionne's analysis indicate what red state Democrats and moderate independents have long known. Republicans will continue to demonize moderate positions as leftist/socialist/communist not because those positions are actually left of center but because Republicans have moved so far to the right that the center has become distorted. More importantly, Trump may have made that situation irreversible.

 

A Minor Musing: Mayor Mike Huether Independent Edition

South Dakota's two biggest political blogs are devoting many posts to Mayor Mike Huether's decision to leave the Democratic Party. They and their commentators seem to be adequately analyzing how Huether's decision will effect South Dakota Democrats and which statewide race he will enter.

I take it as a given that Huether will enter a statewide race, but there's one question that I would like answered. Huether has a functional political skill set or he would not have been elected Sioux Falls mayor. To the best of my knowledge, the first rule of politics is have the money folk lined up before any formal candidacy announcement. That fact prompts one simple question: did a big name donor demand this change as a condition for financial support?

A Minor Musing About The Paula Hawks Candidacy

Let's encapsulate what will happen in the Paula Hawks challenge to Kristi Noem. First, Republicans will repeatedly cast Hawks as a tax and spend liberal; they will then go on to accuse her of being a socialist or a terrorist sympathizer who will weaken the nation and force school children to begin each school day by reciting entire suras from the Quran. Perhaps they will attempt to be creative and combine the accusations.

Later, the Noem campaign will find a news article or a Hawks social media post and use it to create a YouTube video to belittle Hawks. Hawks will respond by citing Noem's voting record; Republicans and South Dakota's incumbent-friendly mainstream media will accuse Hawks of negative campaigning.

Throughout the campaign, Noem will decry government waste but tout her work on the farm bill and the highway bill that should be finished later this year, and the conservatives who profess to hate pork barrel politics will applaud Noem's work on these bacony pieces of legislation because they provide South Dakota with a heaping helping of Washington's largesse.

Hawks has not begun well. The rollout has been underwhelming. Cory Heidelberger's mostly positive review admits the announcement video lacked thunder. Ken Santema finds it "lackluster." Pat Powers, as his wont for every non-Republican campaign, echoes those who call it "substandard." Whatever mistakes Hawks has made, her worst mistake is not having a professional war room ready to respond to the attacks and poor reviews, especially those from mainstream media outlets.

Another mistake she may be tempted to make is trying to copy Noem's efforts to tie Stephanie Herseth Sandlin to Nancy Pelosi  by attempting to tie Noem to Speaker John Boehner. I find orange skinned men who weep too easily disconcerting at best. Most South Dakota Republicans are not disconcerted in the least. Perhaps Boehner's orange hue makes them nostalgic for the television program Alf.  Pelosi, on the other hand, is a San Francisco Democrat. For most South Dakotans, that description is a pejorative only slightly less offensive than a short guttural verb that been appended with both prefix and suffix to imply that one has experienced carnal knowledge with one's female parent.

South Dakota needs competitive statewide races. I hope Hawks will successfully challenge Noem, but Hawks needs to be ready for fifteen months of rough and tumble campaigning.

What's An "R" behind A Candidate's Name Worth In A South Dakota Statewide Election

Yesterday, Dakota War College called the 2016 South Dakota United States Senate race for Republican incumbent John Thune. In the comments, Troy Jones makes an observation more interesting that the post's prognostication:

I hope Thune has competition. I want to know how low the yellow dog line really is in SD. This would give us a definitive number. I think it is 27%. (75% of registered Democrats). Weiland just about got there with 29.5%. My gut says it is a bit lower.

If Jones is using the "yellow dog" term in its traditional sense, Democrats who will vote for an actual yellow dog before voting Republican, then Susan Wismer's 25.4% in the 2014 gubernatorial race is probably an accurate number. If, on the other hand, the term is being used to indicate voters who absolutely will not vote for a Republican even without a Democrat on the ballot, then Chad Haber's 18% in the 2014 attorney-general race is probably a good number to set as an over/under.

I would like to look at the situation from a different angle. In competitive two-candidate races, each candidate is alleged to start with a base that comprises 40% of the electorate and the battle is waged to get the majority of the remaining 20%. It's pretty that in statewide races, South Dakota's Democrats do not start out with a 40% base and Republicans start with a base well about 40%. That fact raises an obvious question: What is the "R" behind a candidate's name worth? 45%?, 48%, 50% + 1 vote?

I don't know the answer. but I do have one more question; if it's truly impossible for a Republican to lose a statewide race in South Dakota, how long will it take to see the absolute corruption that comes with absolute power?

A Minor Musing For South Dakota's Democrats

Over at Madville, Cory has spent a lot of time working through strategies for the Democrats to regroup and grow. Pat Powers has shed a few nostalgic crocodile tears about a time when Democrats were competitive. I'll add my two cents to the discussion.

First, to play Captain Obvious, elections matter. Legislative elections during sessions that determine redistricting matter more than most. Republicans won elections and did a great job of creating districts that marginalized Democrats. Democrats need to win elections that will allow them to control either the state senate or the state house before the next redistricting.

Second, conservatives in 2014 are more conservative than Ronald Reagan and liberals in 2014 are more liberal than George McGovern. Moderates in 2014 are an endangered species unless one counts pragmatism or the overhyped political term triangulation as a moderate principle.

Third, Matt Varilek and Rick Weiland prove that former staffers will likely not win.

Fourth, campaigning on education is a fool's errand. Voters may claim to care about education. They may actually care about education, but in the voting booth other issues dominate.

Fifth, winners win. Right now, Democrats have won about twenty legislative seats, a Sioux Falls mayor, and a former congresswoman whom the party may or may not wish to reject. Democrats need to win city, count, and school board elections. (Let's leave aside for the moment the fiction that those elections are non-partisan.)

Sixth, politics is played by competitive people. If Democrats provide no competition, Republicans will turn on themselves. That event, while entertaining, is also likely to produce some terrible policies.

I don't have any real answers for Democrats, but it took them a long time come to this state, It will take them a long time to rebuild.

Republicans Will Likely Sweep On November 4. So What?

South Dakota voters will likely give Republicans the key to every statewide office on November 4, 2014.  The Democrats will continue to hold a few seats in the legislature but are unlikely to make any measurable gains. For the foreseeable future Republicans will have complete political power within South Dakota. Although the political landscape may change dramatically, it's likely that Republican Senator John Thune and Republican Representative Kristi Noem will will re-election in 2016.

Republicans have no real reason to celebrate. The R next to their names on the ballot provided an automatic advantage. Democrats ran no one for attorney general. Susan Wismer's campaign was lackluster. Corinna Robinson's campaign for the House of Representatives and Angelia Schultz's campaign for South Dakota Secretary of State were nonexistent. Mike Rounds should feel a sense of relief because he dodged the consequences of his actions as governor, but he can also feel a small sense of satisfaction that he defeated Rick Weiland who ran a first-rate campaign

Human nature has not changed since the factual or metaphoric Eden. Lord Acton was correct: power corrupts and absolute power corrupt absolutely. Single party dominance means South Dakotans will continue to see sweetheart deals like those of EB-5 that stretch the law beyond recognition. It will be like the South during Long era. The Longs had the virtue of being characters; their South Dakota equivalents will be no less corrupt but much more boring.

Another fact that history illustrates is that concentrated power tends to breed inertia. South Dakota is famous for granite faces and low wages. That situation will remain constant for the foreseeable future.

Finally, I will keep blogging about politics. It's a great way to vent. That said, I agree wholeheartedly with this Rod Dreher sentence on his blog at The American Conservative: “I no longer believe that politics is capable of addressing the core of our social and cultural problems.” I also agree with this Ryan Booth statement from the same post.

As a former GOP political operative and activist who has come to the same conclusion, I am now trying to come with new standards for deciding whom to vote for. One thing that I have decided is that I don’t want to vote for any “Christian conservative” who expresses hatred for liberals, as I now believe such people hurt my witness as a Christian. If someone is running as a Christian, I want to see evidence of Christian love. So, my witness now comes first.

On social issues, I see a very interesting dynamic emerging. Whether they admit it or not, the GOP (and especially the Religious Right) has basically given up on America. Their idea of America has nothing in common with the depth of community Tocqueville found. It’s rather a vision of a lone family, left alone by government and everyone else, in the woods with their guns.

I suspect South Dakota politics will see much more of the latter paragraph before it sees any of the former.

Once Upon A Time There Was This Plan That Should Have Come Together But Then This Rabbit Hole Appeared

Older readers may remember hearing actor George Peppard say the following line during nearly every episode of the original A-team.

Politicians frequently plan. For example, a certain politician planned to become an attorney general candidate in South Dakota. He had a plan:

Haber’s plan the entire time was to get the Libertarian Party nomination. The convention will be in August in Sioux Falls. We hadn’t announced this because the details were still being worked out.

South Dakota's Libertarians certainly seem to want to make planning easy. David Montgomery reports,

"Our party always has been and always will be as flexible as we can to allow new people to join our party and participate,"[Party Chairperson] Reistroffer said. "We had no objection to people registering the day of. However, to be qualified to be nominated rested entirely on each candidate's own conscience as to whether they were qualified."

So, it appears all one has to do is register as a Libertarian, get a bunch of friends to register as Libertarians, and then get them to give up a Saturday in August. Oh yeah, if one wants these friends and family members to give up the Saturday, one should also pay the fee that allows them to participate in the convention.

Before going on to steps 2, 3, and 4, Most people would begin with step 1, especially if it's an easy step. Registering as Libertarian is relatively simple. All one needs to do is go to the county court house in the county where one resides and fill out a single sheet of paper. When I changed my registration, I filled out the form around 11 am and the Secretary of State's registration portal had the change later that day.

So, if one has a plan, a big plan, and everything is predicated on one simple task, how does this happen?

Two Libertarian candidates for statewide office could be booted off the ballot due to issues with party registration.

South Dakota Libertarian Party chair Emmett Reistroffer confirmed the report Wednesday, two days after the party submitted the results of its Saturday convention to Secretary of State Jason Gant.

At that Saturday convention, Chad Haber was nominated for attorney general and Ryan Gaddy was nominated for Public Utilities Commission. But the two men filled out the forms to register as Libertarians that morning -- which means the forms weren't filed with the county auditor until Monday.

I guess mistakes happen. It's not like the candidate's spouse ran for the United States Senate and then 24 hours after the primary was charged with election fraud. If something like a spouse getting arrested happened, a candidate would surely make sure that the plan involved having paperwork done correctly and turned in in a timely fashion. One would, of course be particularly careful if, the person investigating the spouse is "overzealous" and also happened to be the person one is trying to replace

Overzealous South Dakota Attorney General spared no expense in investigating Dr. Annette Bosworth for legitimate signatures of genuine supporters.

Oh, wait...Haber is Bosworth's husband? Ok. let's just take a page from Gordon Howie's playbook and blame it on RINOs.

READ: The RINOs running South Dakota may challenge nomination of man exposing #MetteRapeScandal http://t.co/9TM9gcPMT8
— Lee Stranahan (@stranahan) August 13, 2014

A Short Take On John Thune And 2016

Over at Madville, Cory has begun speculating about John Thune's plans for the White House.

Can we all stipulate that Senator Thune, Representative Noem, Governor Daugaard, and U.S, Senate candidate Mike Rounds are such plastic politicians that it's a miracle South Dakota Republicans haven't all mutated or died of leukemia from drinking the BPA laced  Kool-Aid they dish out by the gallon?

In fact that miracle is so profound that were I advising Gordon Howie of God, Guns, and Gordon fame, I'd tell him to stop talking about God and focus solely on guns. (The only Gordon candidate Howie should talk about is the Barenaked Ladies album. Breathe deeply and return to the subject of the post.)

Thune looks like a movie director's ideal politician, a tall thin man with good hair and a smile ready made for a toothpaste commercial. Those physical features and a plastic nature may make him attractive to South Dakotans. Thune's plasticity does, however, make him cautions.

In a post on his New York Times blog, Ross Douthat, with only a bit of hyperbole, claims conservatives want a magic pill to have the Dow reach 35,000 and a federal budget that reduces spending to levels that existed before the New Deal. Thune may pay lip service to such bromides, but he is unlikely to feature them in a campaign. Nor is he likely to accept anything that Douthat calls "reform conservatism," especially if that reform leads to this result:

A dramatic de-cronyization and de-rentierization of public policy, extending across agriculture and food, energy and housing, higher education and high finance.

A South Dakota Republican running against cronyism would likely be read out of the party.

In short, I don't see Thune running in 2016. That race will feature Republicans using Obama's name like chum to froth up the waters in a manner that makes Sharknado seem as calm as a tiny goldfish bowl. Thune will be too cautious to embrace any idea that will move him stand out of such a Republican presidential candidate pack.

Besides, I'm betting he has a staffer or two telling him that the map looks bad for Republicans in 2016 but that no party has held the White House for more than three terms since Roosevelt and Truman held office from 1933 until 1953. The smart move might be 2020. Even then, Thune will likely advocate an agenda that in Douthat's words "is too modest to matter" rather than one that's "too immodest to succeed."

A Minor Musing About The State Auditor's Race

Unless South Dakota's Democrats have developed a campaign strategy that copies the time travel strategy of Charles Xavier and Magneto from X-Men: Days of Future Past, incumbent governor Dennis Daugaard will easily defeat Democrat Susan Wismer and Republicans will easily maintain dominance of the South Dakota legislature.

Given that reality, Democrats should make taking the State Auditor's office a priority. The website for the current Republican Auditor asserts

The State Auditor serves as the taxpayers' watchdog. It is the State Auditor who scrutinizes the manner in which state tax dollars are being spent. Simply stated, the Office of State Auditor is constitutionally the office of "checks and balances" of state government.

Quite frankly, it should be an easy sell that the party that controls the executive branch and the legislature should not be allowed to monitor itself. The EB-5, or whatever one wishes to call it, debacle should be all the proof that one needs to see state funds have not always been used properly.

The candidate would have to craft the message carefully; conceding that many of the other Democrats running for state office are going to lose is not the best way to build confidence or insure that the party will have a complete slate of candidates during the next election.cycle. That said, most South Dakotans know that Republicans have dominated the state for recent decades. If a candidate runs as a reformer who will make every effort to ensure that a little sunlight will shine on the darker areas of state spending, that campaign should resonate with voters.

Last night, Pat Powers sneered at idea that Democrat Angelia Schultz would run for the State Auditor position. She may not be the right person for the job, but Democrats are on the right track by creating the impression that that they believe this office is a priority.

A Minor Musing: Breaking The South Dakota Conservative Coalition Down To Its Constituent Parts

Since I have a little extra time and want to avoid sorting the pile of books and kipple surrounding my personal area, aka "the nest," I thought I'd engage in a fool's errand and analyze the types of conservatives populating the South Dakota's blogosphere and political offices. I'm creating some of my own titles, and, as with any such grouping, I'm painting with a broad brush.

I will try to be more nuanced than those conservatives who have destroyed the word "liberal" by applying it to anyone whose political stance was metaphorically 1/16 of an inch to left of their own. I also will not apply Ronald Reagan, Tea Party, or social conservative as titles to any of these categories. All are too malleable to be used to explain differences.

First, Ken Santema, writing at Sodak Liberty, represents a strain of conservatism rather rare to South Dakota, a libertarian of the late Goldwater vein. It is the traditional libertarian view; leave adults alone so long as they don't do physical harm to others or defraud others. Were I to venture a guess, it's a relatively small group in the South Dakota conservative coalition.

Second, the neo-Randians are a group that has done the impossible; they have further perverted Ayn Rand's already perverse philosophy. Rand believed that business equaled wealth equaled morality, but to her credit, she wanted government away from business. The neo-Randians see government as a tool to aid and assist those with wealth at the expense of everyone else. It is South Dakota's dominant strain of conservatism efficiently practiced by Governors Rounds and Daugaard.

Third, there are a few iconoclasts with South Dakota's conservative community; chief among them Representative Rev. Steve Hickey who toes a social conservative line on most hot button social issues like abortion and gay marriage but strays from orthodoxy on the death penalty and usury laws, the latter stance causing the neo-Randians considerable consternation.

Fourth, Gordon Howie and Bob Ellis call themselves Christian conservatives, but much of their writing, especially Ellis's work, puts indicates they should be called angry populists. In the 19th Century, they would have helped form the Know Nothing coalition. Steve Sibson is a little more paranoid than angry but he fits here as well.

Fifth, is the neo-Birchers, William F. Buckley and Russel Kirk relegated the original Birch group to the fringes, but frequent DWC commenter, Jammer, seems to want to bring them back:

Members of the John Birch Society are some of the strongest defenders on the US Constitution in this country. They are also solid conservatives on almost every issue. I would challenge anyone who calls themselves a Republican to review the positions of the John Birch Society and tell me how they deviate from what you believe are Republican principles. I think you will be hard pressed to find very many areas that are not in agreement with the party platform.

Sixth, while dealing with the prefix "neo," one should mention Kristi Noem who seems to have a strong neo-con streak that involves supporting a government that is small enough to go to war with every other nation on the face of the Earth and spy on every American citizen. Perpetual war and supervision, according to neo-cons, are necessary to keep Americans safe,

Seventh, there are confused conservatives. I do not mean the adjective pejoratively These are good folks who enjoy small towns, church on Sunday morning, and hunting and fishing, facts that mean they are probably smart enough not to read blogs. They are Republicans by blood and tradition. They feel their world is slowly slipping away and don't know why, so they cast about between the various conservative  camps, always hearing answers that utter the old verities but never quite fit the new conditions, This is probably the largest group of South Dakota conservatives,and the ones who have been most ill-served by the neo-Randians and the neo-cons.

Finally, I invoked William F. Buckley earlier, I don't see too many South Dakota conservatives in the Buckley tradition. The closest seems to be PNR whose recent post about Stace Nelson prompted the train of thought that led to this musing. PNR reads and quotes the National Review rather than Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or Glenn Beck. The former publication has the benefit of complete sentences and attempts mature thought; the latter three do not.

One final caveat, this list is in no particular order and will, as most lists of this kind do, reveal more about my biases than the ideas being categorized.