Explaining Bain

Bill Bennett and Fred Barnes are on the wireless worrying over Mitt's problem of explaining Bain. His advisers are spending their own intellectual capital on figuring out how to deal with this. Here's how; and if they need more advice, my rates are reasonable:

"Have you ever worked in a company that was being run into the ground? A company that was running down, that was being managed so poorly that you knew it was a matter of time before it went under and you lost your job? Or had a relative or friend who worked for a company like that? Well, we looked for companies like that, stepped in and bought them, streamlined them and turned them around. If it worked, people kept their jobs, and we made some money."

Thank you. Next problem?

BULLETIN: 150 Religious Conservatives For Taft over Eisenhower for GOP Nomination

A group of 150 influential religious conservative leaders have endorsed Senator Robert A. Taft (R-- Oh) over General Dwight D. Eisenhower for the 1952 Republican nomination. The leaders had been divided, with many supporting the candidacies of General Douglas Macarthur and former Minnesota governor Harold Stassen.

“Many of our members have been sitting on the fence, wanting to look more closely at these candidates,” said Kinfolk Analysis Coalition president Pony Terkins. “However we have determined that now is the time to act, when together we can have the decisive influence over the choice. The only major events that we have missed are the caucuses in Iowa and primary in New Hampshire, which are small states with relatively few delegates and not very important.There was not a fear that this is too late; there was a sense that this could be exactly the right time,” Terkins did say that the group was influenced to act now by a presentation by a noted political consultant, who suggested that the group should not wait overlong before acting as their ability to make an impact would be hurt by the fact that many of the delegates were now dead and so unlikely to be influenced to change their minds.

An Audition for Schiffren

Mitt Romney has a bigger problem than his exploits, in his role as Robber Baron, as ruthless exploiter of the people. It’s one that we’re likely to hear more about steadily during the campaign. It’s described by many labels... inauthenticity, stiffness, distance from the average guy.

Michael Leahy describes the affliction as “failure to connect’:

...concerns about his ability to connect are casually noted by Republican insiders, even among some who once worked for him.

“This is Romney: He knows what is wrong with a car engine, and he knows how to rebuild that engine — but he doesn’t acknowledge the person driving the car,” said Doug Gross, who served as the Romney campaign’s Iowa state chairman in 2008 but is uncommitted in the 2012 race....“He’s not able to warm a room immediately or make an audience feel like he is speaking to them,” Gross said. “You’d have to put a new card in him for that to happen.”

Leahy names Tom Dewey and Michael Dukakis as two whose presidential campaigns have foundered on this not-quite-humanness. (I’m surprised that the story of Dewey’s furious outburst against a careless train engineer didn’t make the story. ) I would have thought that Al Gore definitely makes this list, and John Kerry deserves at least an honourable mention.
It would be a mistake to try to be someone other than he is, to affect a ‘jes-folks’ demeanour and empathetic mien. As Dukakis’s press secretary says,

“You can talk all you want about changing a candidate, but eventually the candidate will go back to his default position — he is who he is,” said Duncan, who along the way with Dukakis learned the most humbling truth of all, one that Romney likely has already discovered. “The attention of a presidential campaign is so glaring, so unrelenting for a candidate. Those parts of you that make you who you are eventually get exposed.”

Lisa Schiffren thinks that conservatives could do better, but is trying to accept the reality of Romney:

he is very handsome, and has such a good work ethic for a rich guy who really does not have a clue what it means to have to make the choices that normal middle-class people always have to make — which is why we don’t really trust him. Have you ever noticed how the very rich have so much more sympathy for the non-working poor than for the boring old middle class? ...Especially if he picks the right advisers. But why can’t he hire a conservative speechwriter, who knows the words and the music?

Right on point. Mitt can’t stifle himself from blurting out that he likes to be able to fire people, or that other candidates are attacking him over Bain Capital out of envy. But he can hire speechwriters who can try to evoke that sense of hope and confidence that successful candidates evoke. And hey -- Lisa Schiffren’s a speechwriter isn’t she? Maybe she has better things to do, but isn’t that the good thing about being Richie Rich, that you can keep piling stacks of money on the table until you can get people to do what you want? If Lisa won’t do the writing, she should sure be picking and supervising the people who do.

Keep a watch on who Romney’s speechwriters this campaign. It’ll tell us a lot.

Newt the Uniter

Could there be brilliant strategy behind Newt’s kamikaze attacks against Mitt? At first glance there’s no possible gain to the Republican Party or conservatism in launching a kamikaze campaign against the future presidential nominee of your party, depicting him as a remorseless capitalist vampire bloodsucker. Let’s see...you’re helping the Democrats hone their plan of attack and handing them ammunition to carry it out. You’re exacerbating divisions within the party of the kind that are slow to heal. You’re diverting attention from whatever shared positive ideas the GOP does have for the nation.

But maybe there’s silver linings. Suddenly, people like Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, and the Club for Growth, who should be spending their time right now denouncing Romney as a pathetic and useless RINO deserving of reprobation by all true conservatives, are united in his defence; now Mitt is a Hero of Free Enterprise, a truer conservative than the man who won the House of Representatives at a time when people thought the GOP would never win the it again in their lifetimes. Politics fans get the demolition derby they expect from the primary season; populist conservatives have their catharsis, their opportunity to see a lashing given to the Wall Street/Big Corporation wing of the party. At the end of the day, everyone’s anger at the state of things having been voiced, everyone can resign themselves to Mitt in the end, knowing that they are not unrepresented in the party.

Knowing Newt, if this is a brilliantly concocted masterpiece of strategy, complete with double feint, bait-and-switch and fumblerooski ploy, we can be sure that Newt will tell us.

Wanted: A Canadian Rehnquist

The Harper government should have an opportunity during its term to make the Supreme Court into a body where the principles of judicial restraint and sound legal reasoning have strong exponents. Its opportunity is however restricted by the complete absence in Canada of a movement comparable to the U.S. conservative judicial revolution of the last few decades. It is not Stephen Harper's fault that one may look over the entire Court of Appeal plus all law faculties in the province and find no one who dares to dissent from the current regime of legal Bolshevism that followed the enactment of the Charter of Rights. Worse, the Ontario A-G and Federal DOJ constitutional lawyers of whom I have personal knowledge are if not card-carrying members, at least committed sympathizers of the left-wing human rights industry.

What the Government needs to come up with is another William Rehnquist. Rehnquist's career prior to his nomination as a SCOTUS judge was not as a judge or legal academic, but as a lawyer in the Department of Justice. (President Nixon happened to drop by a meeting at the Department of Justice which Rehnquist had handled with great skill. He was also at that time however wearing a jacket with a flamboyantly wide lapel and a bright yellow tie, leading Nixon to refer to him thereafter as "that clown". Nixon also was unable to remember Rehnquist's name, so after two of his nominees had been defeated by the Democratic Senate, Nixon, searching for a replacement, asked, 'What about that clown Renchburg?') The extent of Rehnquist's legal conservatism was, because of his DOJ background, unknown to those passing scrutiny on him. With the paper trail he would have had as a judge or professor, he would never have got through the Senate.

In addition, Rehnquist had the courage of his convictions. Rehnquist had no problem with recurrently being on the wrong end of 8-1 decisions, earning him the title, seriously or mockingly, of "The Great Dissenter". It would be over a decade before Rehnquist would be joined on the court by anyone else with a similar commitment to judicial restraint and original meaning. And longer than that before the legal academics were to take conservative legal thought seriously. But once you have 3 or 4 exponents of any judicial approach on the court, they have no choice.

With two Ontario appointments this summer, the Government can be cautious and prudent and select a woman practitioner or government lawyer who at least is not a full-fledged fanatic. But with the other appointment. what the Prime Minister needs to do is to pull, apparently out of his hat, the name of another Rehnquist, someone to hold the fort until the lower courts can be seeded with possible future appointees and some means can be designed to give the jurisprudence of true meaning and judicial restraint a foothold in the academy. He needs to be able to find himself a facsimile of "that clown Renchburg".

A Miss Thorne Conservative

When I came upon Trollope's portrait of Mr Thorne in Barchester Towers, I thought that I had found a man of fellow temperament:

In politics, Mr. Thorne was an unflinching conservative. He looked on those fifty-three Trojans, who, as Mr. Dod tells us, censured free trade in November, 1852, as the only patriots left among the public men of England. When that terrible crisis of free trade had arrived, when the repeal of the corn laws was carried by those very men whom Mr. Thorne had hitherto regarded as the only possible saviours of his country, he was for a time paralysed. His country was lost; but that was comparatively a small thing. Other countries had flourished and fallen, and the human race still went on improving under God's providence. But now all trust in human faith must for ever be at an end. Not only most ruin come, but it must come through the apostasy of those who has been regarded as the truest of true believers. Politics in England, as a pursuit for gentlemen, must be at an end. Had Mr. Thorne been trodden under foot by a Whig, he could have borne it as a Tory and a martyr; but to be so utterly thrown over and deceived by those he had so earnestly trusted, was more than he could endure and live.

Mr Thorne for a while withdrew from political discussion and social intercourse entirely, but

...that plan of his for avoiding the world did not answer. He, however, and others around him who still maintained the same staunch principles of protection -- men like himself, who were too true, to flinch at the cry of a mob -- had their own way of consoling themselves. They were, and felt themselves to be, the only true depositaries left of certain Eleusinian mysteries...To them and them only was it now given to know these things, and to perpetuate them, if that might still be done, by the careful and secret education of their children...He had within him something of the feeling of Cato, who gloried that he could kill himself because Romans were no longer worthy of their name. Mr Thorne had no thought of killing himself, being a Christian, and still possessing his 4000& a year; but the feeling was not on that account the less comfortable.

But Trollope had better to come. On discovering his sister, Miss Thorne, my feelings of sympathy of temperament were perfected:

As a politician, Miss Thorne had been so thoroughly disgusted with public life by base deeds long antecedent to the Corn Law question, that that had but little moved her. In her estimation her brother had been a fast young man, hurried away by a too ardent temperament into democratic tendencies. Now happily he was brought to sounder views by seeing the iniquity of the world. She had not yet reconciled herself to the Reform Bill, and still groaned in spirit over the defalcations of the Duke as touching the Catholic Emancipation. If asked whom she thought the Queen should take as her counsellor, she probably would have named Lord Eldon; and when reminded that that venerable man was no longer present in the flesh to assist us, she would probably have answered with a sigh that none now could help us but the dead.

I've never known how to describe myself when asked what kind of conservative I was. Now I can say that I am a "Miss Thorne conservative".

Projection: Looking for 10 Ridings Good and True

The final polling weekend indicates that the final trend is continuing decline by the Liberals, mostly to the Conservatives in Ontario, mostly to the NDP in British Columbia.

Expect as follows:
ATLANTIC:
Conservative 13, NDP 10, Liberal 9
QUEBEC:
NDP 41, Bloc 17, Liberal 10, Conservative 7
ONTARIO:
Conservative 58, NDP 26, Liberal 22
PRAIRIES:
Conservative 20, NDP 6, Liberal 2
ALBERTA:
Conservative 27, NDP 1
BRITISH COLUMBIA:
Conservative 19, NDP 14, Liberal 3
NORTH:
Conservative 1, NDP 1, Liberal 1

TOTAL:
Conservative 145, NDP 99, Liberal 47, Bloc 17

That means we're looking for 10 ridings good men and true, to stand up and give us a Conservative majority. Here's a list of 10 prospects. The Conservatives don't need to win all 10 to win a majority; if they fail in one area they could make it up by picking up additional marginals elsewhere. In particular there's 4 more GTA ridings that could fall if the Liberal collapse is even more severe than it seems. But, for a majority, the Conservatives should be winning (or holding) 7 or more of these 10 to form a majority:

Central Nova, Essex, Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca, Kamloops-Thompson-Caribou, Kingston and the Islands, Lotbiniere-Chutes de la Chaudiere, Mississauga-Streetsville, Palliser, Pontiac, South Shore-St. Margaret's

So those of you who live in Atlantica should watch to see whether the Tories can hold Central Nova and South Shore-St. Margaret's against the NDP tide. For those elsewhere, I understand that Elections Canada has ruled that the results can be transmitted west from the Atlantic by smoke signals, so long as the fire is started by matches and not by any more modern technological device, particularly one that uses hashtags.

One final note: don't cheer too loud at the evisceration of the Bloc. The last 2 things we want are the NDP and Liberals together having more seats than the Tories, or, worse, having a majority without needing Bloc assistance.