South Carolina Sees Big Cuts with 2012 Budget Battle (ContributorNetwork)
South Carolina Sees Big Cuts with 2012 Budget Battle (ContributorNetwork)
South Carolina Sees Big Cuts with 2012 Budget Battle (ContributorNetwork)
Perry Has History of Acrimony With George W. Bush
Rick Perry was in Iowa three years ago, talking up a favored candidate, when the subject turned to George W. Bush, the president and a fellow Republican who preceded Perry as Texas governor. Bush, or "George," as Perry called him, was no fiscal conservative — "never was" — and his work on tort reform, a subject dear to Republican hearts, paled next to Perry's achievements, the governor said.
Perry Adviser: Secessionism Criticism Is Baseless
By Erin McPike - June 30, 2011Critics of Rick Perry already have begun to drop into the political conversation two hurdles facing him should he launch a presidential bid this summer, but they don't pass muster with the Texas governor's chief political adviser, David Carney.Ask a political strategist inside the Beltway to assess Perry's prospects for landing the GOP nomination -- or the presidency -- and a common response is: "He called for Texas to secede from the union, so he'll never be president," even though that's not quite true. The second thing you...
Cut, Cap, and Balance
We enthusiastically support the “Cut, Cap, and Balance” framework for debt-ceiling negotiations and are committed to opposing any deal that fails to follow it: substantially cutting spending immediately, capping it going forward, and adopting a balanced-budget amendment with strict tax and spending limitations. But for the cuts to go beyond a blip on the otherwise relentlessly upward march of government spending (or worse, amount to accounting gimmicks), they must be based on specific, structural, permanent reforms to grow the economy while lowering the trajectory of federal spending. Moreover, without those reforms, caps will prove unenforceable when they get overwhelmed by entitlement promises, or when the political pendulum swings back toward tax-and-spenders.
First, spending cuts should be deepest where there is the most bang for the buck in terms of enhanced economic growth, productivity, and job creation. We can’t balance the budget or tackle any of the other problems the country faces without robust economic growth. That means taking not a scalpel but a meat cleaver to the budgets of federal regulatory agencies.
There are simply no greater job destroyers than rogue agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, which is hell-bent on imposing job-crushing energy restrictions that Congress already rejected; the National Labor Relations Board (staffed by Obama appointees who avoided Senate confirmation), which is launching an all-out assault on the right to work; and the Federal Communications Commission, which is ignoring the courts, Congress, and the American people to regulate the Internet in the name of net neutrality.
Looking at 50 years of empirical data, Phoenix Center economists found a strong relationship between spending cuts in the budgets of regulatory agencies and economic growth. They further found that each federal employee in a regulatory agency now destroys 98 private-sector jobs per year, and that a budget cut of 16 percent for regulatory agencies would create an astonishing 3.75 million private-sector jobs. These cuts should be paired with language specifically de-funding the most egregious regulations.
Second, while Paul Ryan’s proposed Medicare reforms have provoked a firestorm of distortion and demagoguery — even including one of the dirtiest political ads of all time, featuring a woman in a wheelchair being thrown off a cliff — the media has largely ignored the impending disaster for seniors under Obama’s health-care law: the so-called Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). IPAB is exactly the wrong way to contain costs in Medicare, giving power over medical decisions to unelected federal bureaucrats. A broad coalition of 272 groups, representing near-unanimity in the health-care sector, recently signed a letter calling for IPAB repeal. Repeal would refocus the national debate on the reality that, in a world of limited resources, the real question we face is whether government bureaucrats will decide what health care we can have, or whether we will own and control our health-care dollars and health-care choices.
Third, while broader Medicare reform is, unfortunately, stymied for now by Democratic obstinacy, reforming Medicaid is probably the biggest genuinely achievable spending reform that could be made part of the debt-ceiling negotiations. Democrats have failed to score any political points against Ryan’s commonsense proposal to reform Medicaid by block-granting it to the states, cutting the strings, and allowing states to run their own programs. Even deep-blue Washington State is now on board a version of this idea; its Democratic state legislature unanimously passed, and its Democratic governor signed, a request for a modified block-grant waiver for Medicaid. Rhode Island already has a block-grant waiver, and Texas also just passed legislation calling for one.
Any state legislator or governor who would oppose the block-grant plan will have a difficult time explaining to voters how elected federal welfare bureaucrats can do a better job administering a health-care program than states can. If the states unite, even a Democratic president will be hard-pressed to defy them. In 1996, Bill Clinton vetoed the block-grant approach to reforming the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children twice. The third time, Congress revised it to match what the states were calling for; Clinton relented and signed it, and of course it has been a remarkable success.
Ryan’s plan, “Welfare Reform, Part II,” would block-grant Medicaid and food stamps. We urge Congress to go farther, as Peter Ferrara suggests in his provocative new book America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb,taking the entire $700 billion a year in federal welfare spending, including the refundable portion of tax credits, cutting it back to pre-Obama levels, and sending it to the states in a finite block grant.
Fourth, there must be genuine program terminations. Not just small programs, but programs big enough to move the needle on overall federal spending. Ronald Reagan famously said at the 1964 convention: “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” Republicans have long promised lengthy lists of program terminations, including whole cabinet departments, but it never seems to happen. At the very least the $200 billion of duplicative and unnecessary programs identified by the Government Accountability Office in March should be ended.
The next few weeks present a historic opportunity to address our fiscal crisis and put the country on the path to prosperity again. These specifics can help make cutting, capping, and balancing the federal budget achievable.
— Tim Phillips is president of Americans for Prosperity. Phil Kerpen is its vice president for policy and author of Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America – and How to Stop Him (BenBella Books, October 2011).
Cut, Cap, and Balance
We enthusiastically support the “Cut, Cap, and Balance” framework for debt-ceiling negotiations and are committed to opposing any deal that fails to follow it: substantially cutting spending immediately, capping it going forward, and adopting a balanced-budget amendment with strict tax and spending limitations. But for the cuts to go beyond a blip on the otherwise relentlessly upward march of government spending (or worse, amount to accounting gimmicks), they must be based on specific, structural, permanent reforms to grow the economy while lowering the trajectory of federal spending. Moreover, without those reforms, caps will prove unenforceable when they get overwhelmed by entitlement promises, or when the political pendulum swings back toward tax-and-spenders.
First, spending cuts should be deepest where there is the most bang for the buck in terms of enhanced economic growth, productivity, and job creation. We can’t balance the budget or tackle any of the other problems the country faces without robust economic growth. That means taking not a scalpel but a meat cleaver to the budgets of federal regulatory agencies.
There are simply no greater job destroyers than rogue agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, which is hell-bent on imposing job-crushing energy restrictions that Congress already rejected; the National Labor Relations Board (staffed by Obama appointees who avoided Senate confirmation), which is launching an all-out assault on the right to work; and the Federal Communications Commission, which is ignoring the courts, Congress, and the American people to regulate the Internet in the name of net neutrality.
Looking at 50 years of empirical data, Phoenix Center economists found a strong relationship between spending cuts in the budgets of regulatory agencies and economic growth. They further found that each federal employee in a regulatory agency now destroys 98 private-sector jobs per year, and that a budget cut of 16 percent for regulatory agencies would create an astonishing 3.75 million private-sector jobs. These cuts should be paired with language specifically de-funding the most egregious regulations.
Second, while Paul Ryan’s proposed Medicare reforms have provoked a firestorm of distortion and demagoguery — even including one of the dirtiest political ads of all time, featuring a woman in a wheelchair being thrown off a cliff — the media has largely ignored the impending disaster for seniors under Obama’s health-care law: the so-called Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). IPAB is exactly the wrong way to contain costs in Medicare, giving power over medical decisions to unelected federal bureaucrats. A broad coalition of 272 groups, representing near-unanimity in the health-care sector, recently signed a letter calling for IPAB repeal. Repeal would refocus the national debate on the reality that, in a world of limited resources, the real question we face is whether government bureaucrats will decide what health care we can have, or whether we will own and control our health-care dollars and health-care choices.
Third, while broader Medicare reform is, unfortunately, stymied for now by Democratic obstinacy, reforming Medicaid is probably the biggest genuinely achievable spending reform that could be made part of the debt-ceiling negotiations. Democrats have failed to score any political points against Ryan’s commonsense proposal to reform Medicaid by block-granting it to the states, cutting the strings, and allowing states to run their own programs. Even deep-blue Washington State is now on board a version of this idea; its Democratic state legislature unanimously passed, and its Democratic governor signed, a request for a modified block-grant waiver for Medicaid. Rhode Island already has a block-grant waiver, and Texas also just passed legislation calling for one.
Any state legislator or governor who would oppose the block-grant plan will have a difficult time explaining to voters how elected federal welfare bureaucrats can do a better job administering a health-care program than states can. If the states unite, even a Democratic president will be hard-pressed to defy them. In 1996, Bill Clinton vetoed the block-grant approach to reforming the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children twice. The third time, Congress revised it to match what the states were calling for; Clinton relented and signed it, and of course it has been a remarkable success.
Ryan’s plan, “Welfare Reform, Part II,” would block-grant Medicaid and food stamps. We urge Congress to go farther, as Peter Ferrara suggests in his provocative new book America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb,taking the entire $700 billion a year in federal welfare spending, including the refundable portion of tax credits, cutting it back to pre-Obama levels, and sending it to the states in a finite block grant.
Fourth, there must be genuine program terminations. Not just small programs, but programs big enough to move the needle on overall federal spending. Ronald Reagan famously said at the 1964 convention: “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” Republicans have long promised lengthy lists of program terminations, including whole cabinet departments, but it never seems to happen. At the very least the $200 billion of duplicative and unnecessary programs identified by the Government Accountability Office in March should be ended.
The next few weeks present a historic opportunity to address our fiscal crisis and put the country on the path to prosperity again. These specifics can help make cutting, capping, and balancing the federal budget achievable.
— Tim Phillips is president of Americans for Prosperity. Phil Kerpen is its vice president for policy and author of Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America – and How to Stop Him (BenBella Books, October 2011).
Cut, Cap, and Balance
We enthusiastically support the “Cut, Cap, and Balance” framework for debt-ceiling negotiations and are committed to opposing any deal that fails to follow it: substantially cutting spending immediately, capping it going forward, and adopting a balanced-budget amendment with strict tax and spending limitations. But for the cuts to go beyond a blip on the otherwise relentlessly upward march of government spending (or worse, amount to accounting gimmicks), they must be based on specific, structural, permanent reforms to grow the economy while lowering the trajectory of federal spending. Moreover, without those reforms, caps will prove unenforceable when they get overwhelmed by entitlement promises, or when the political pendulum swings back toward tax-and-spenders.
First, spending cuts should be deepest where there is the most bang for the buck in terms of enhanced economic growth, productivity, and job creation. We can’t balance the budget or tackle any of the other problems the country faces without robust economic growth. That means taking not a scalpel but a meat cleaver to the budgets of federal regulatory agencies.
There are simply no greater job destroyers than rogue agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, which is hell-bent on imposing job-crushing energy restrictions that Congress already rejected; the National Labor Relations Board (staffed by Obama appointees who avoided Senate confirmation), which is launching an all-out assault on the right to work; and the Federal Communications Commission, which is ignoring the courts, Congress, and the American people to regulate the Internet in the name of net neutrality.
Looking at 50 years of empirical data, Phoenix Center economists found a strong relationship between spending cuts in the budgets of regulatory agencies and economic growth. They further found that each federal employee in a regulatory agency now destroys 98 private-sector jobs per year, and that a budget cut of 16 percent for regulatory agencies would create an astonishing 3.75 million private-sector jobs. These cuts should be paired with language specifically de-funding the most egregious regulations.
Second, while Paul Ryan’s proposed Medicare reforms have provoked a firestorm of distortion and demagoguery — even including one of the dirtiest political ads of all time, featuring a woman in a wheelchair being thrown off a cliff — the media has largely ignored the impending disaster for seniors under Obama’s health-care law: the so-called Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). IPAB is exactly the wrong way to contain costs in Medicare, giving power over medical decisions to unelected federal bureaucrats. A broad coalition of 272 groups, representing near-unanimity in the health-care sector, recently signed a letter calling for IPAB repeal. Repeal would refocus the national debate on the reality that, in a world of limited resources, the real question we face is whether government bureaucrats will decide what health care we can have, or whether we will own and control our health-care dollars and health-care choices.
Third, while broader Medicare reform is, unfortunately, stymied for now by Democratic obstinacy, reforming Medicaid is probably the biggest genuinely achievable spending reform that could be made part of the debt-ceiling negotiations. Democrats have failed to score any political points against Ryan’s commonsense proposal to reform Medicaid by block-granting it to the states, cutting the strings, and allowing states to run their own programs. Even deep-blue Washington State is now on board a version of this idea; its Democratic state legislature unanimously passed, and its Democratic governor signed, a request for a modified block-grant waiver for Medicaid. Rhode Island already has a block-grant waiver, and Texas also just passed legislation calling for one.
Any state legislator or governor who would oppose the block-grant plan will have a difficult time explaining to voters how elected federal welfare bureaucrats can do a better job administering a health-care program than states can. If the states unite, even a Democratic president will be hard-pressed to defy them. In 1996, Bill Clinton vetoed the block-grant approach to reforming the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children twice. The third time, Congress revised it to match what the states were calling for; Clinton relented and signed it, and of course it has been a remarkable success.
Ryan’s plan, “Welfare Reform, Part II,” would block-grant Medicaid and food stamps. We urge Congress to go farther, as Peter Ferrara suggests in his provocative new book America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb,taking the entire $700 billion a year in federal welfare spending, including the refundable portion of tax credits, cutting it back to pre-Obama levels, and sending it to the states in a finite block grant.
Fourth, there must be genuine program terminations. Not just small programs, but programs big enough to move the needle on overall federal spending. Ronald Reagan famously said at the 1964 convention: “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” Republicans have long promised lengthy lists of program terminations, including whole cabinet departments, but it never seems to happen. At the very least the $200 billion of duplicative and unnecessary programs identified by the Government Accountability Office in March should be ended.
The next few weeks present a historic opportunity to address our fiscal crisis and put the country on the path to prosperity again. These specifics can help make cutting, capping, and balancing the federal budget achievable.
— Tim Phillips is president of Americans for Prosperity. Phil Kerpen is its vice president for policy and author of Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America – and How to Stop Him (BenBella Books, October 2011).
Cut, Cap, and Balance
We enthusiastically support the “Cut, Cap, and Balance” framework for debt-ceiling negotiations and are committed to opposing any deal that fails to follow it: substantially cutting spending immediately, capping it going forward, and adopting a balanced-budget amendment with strict tax and spending limitations. But for the cuts to go beyond a blip on the otherwise relentlessly upward march of government spending (or worse, amount to accounting gimmicks), they must be based on specific, structural, permanent reforms to grow the economy while lowering the trajectory of federal spending. Moreover, without those reforms, caps will prove unenforceable when they get overwhelmed by entitlement promises, or when the political pendulum swings back toward tax-and-spenders.
First, spending cuts should be deepest where there is the most bang for the buck in terms of enhanced economic growth, productivity, and job creation. We can’t balance the budget or tackle any of the other problems the country faces without robust economic growth. That means taking not a scalpel but a meat cleaver to the budgets of federal regulatory agencies.
There are simply no greater job destroyers than rogue agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, which is hell-bent on imposing job-crushing energy restrictions that Congress already rejected; the National Labor Relations Board (staffed by Obama appointees who avoided Senate confirmation), which is launching an all-out assault on the right to work; and the Federal Communications Commission, which is ignoring the courts, Congress, and the American people to regulate the Internet in the name of net neutrality.
Looking at 50 years of empirical data, Phoenix Center economists found a strong relationship between spending cuts in the budgets of regulatory agencies and economic growth. They further found that each federal employee in a regulatory agency now destroys 98 private-sector jobs per year, and that a budget cut of 16 percent for regulatory agencies would create an astonishing 3.75 million private-sector jobs. These cuts should be paired with language specifically de-funding the most egregious regulations.
Second, while Paul Ryan’s proposed Medicare reforms have provoked a firestorm of distortion and demagoguery — even including one of the dirtiest political ads of all time, featuring a woman in a wheelchair being thrown off a cliff — the media has largely ignored the impending disaster for seniors under Obama’s health-care law: the so-called Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). IPAB is exactly the wrong way to contain costs in Medicare, giving power over medical decisions to unelected federal bureaucrats. A broad coalition of 272 groups, representing near-unanimity in the health-care sector, recently signed a letter calling for IPAB repeal. Repeal would refocus the national debate on the reality that, in a world of limited resources, the real question we face is whether government bureaucrats will decide what health care we can have, or whether we will own and control our health-care dollars and health-care choices.
Third, while broader Medicare reform is, unfortunately, stymied for now by Democratic obstinacy, reforming Medicaid is probably the biggest genuinely achievable spending reform that could be made part of the debt-ceiling negotiations. Democrats have failed to score any political points against Ryan’s commonsense proposal to reform Medicaid by block-granting it to the states, cutting the strings, and allowing states to run their own programs. Even deep-blue Washington State is now on board a version of this idea; its Democratic state legislature unanimously passed, and its Democratic governor signed, a request for a modified block-grant waiver for Medicaid. Rhode Island already has a block-grant waiver, and Texas also just passed legislation calling for one.
Any state legislator or governor who would oppose the block-grant plan will have a difficult time explaining to voters how elected federal welfare bureaucrats can do a better job administering a health-care program than states can. If the states unite, even a Democratic president will be hard-pressed to defy them. In 1996, Bill Clinton vetoed the block-grant approach to reforming the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children twice. The third time, Congress revised it to match what the states were calling for; Clinton relented and signed it, and of course it has been a remarkable success.
Ryan’s plan, “Welfare Reform, Part II,” would block-grant Medicaid and food stamps. We urge Congress to go farther, as Peter Ferrara suggests in his provocative new book America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb,taking the entire $700 billion a year in federal welfare spending, including the refundable portion of tax credits, cutting it back to pre-Obama levels, and sending it to the states in a finite block grant.
Fourth, there must be genuine program terminations. Not just small programs, but programs big enough to move the needle on overall federal spending. Ronald Reagan famously said at the 1964 convention: “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” Republicans have long promised lengthy lists of program terminations, including whole cabinet departments, but it never seems to happen. At the very least the $200 billion of duplicative and unnecessary programs identified by the Government Accountability Office in March should be ended.
The next few weeks present a historic opportunity to address our fiscal crisis and put the country on the path to prosperity again. These specifics can help make cutting, capping, and balancing the federal budget achievable.
— Tim Phillips is president of Americans for Prosperity. Phil Kerpen is its vice president for policy and author of Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America – and How to Stop Him (BenBella Books, October 2011).
Can We Please Stop Talking About Huntsman?
Never before in the history of the Western world has the vast gulf between the level of national media coverage received and the level of national media coverage deserved been wider for a political candidate than for Jon Huntsman Jr.
Bigfoot journalists, respected political analysts, news anchors, and everyone else under the sun have breathlessly anointed the former U.S. ambassador to China and twice-elected former governor of Utah as a first-tier candidate, the “strongest possible Republican nominee” to challenge President Obama, and, as Time’s Mark Halperin said, “as good a retail politician as George W. Bush or Bill Clinton.”
You cannot possibly overstate the level of overstatement.
Pardon me for interrupting the universal, collective golf clap from the chattering class, but does Mr. Huntsman have a path to the Republican nomination?
Of course not. In fact, no one has even bothered to ask if there is one.
Let me point out this simple yet inconvenient fact: In order to defeat President Obama, you must first win the Republican nomination. If you have no path to do that, you deserve the same level of coverage as Buddy Roemer.
Let’s examine what Huntsman has recently said and done and what that means for his “first-tier” primary campaign:
He said he would not run in Iowa, so he won’t win there. 0–1.
The Suffolk University poll of likely New Hampshire voters released June 28 had Huntsman at 4 percent, behind Bachmann, Ron Paul, and possible candidate Rudy Giuliani. Part-time New Hampshire resident Mitt Romney had 36 percent and he will do whatever it takes to win there. This means Huntsman will be 0–2.
Evangelical South Carolina is unlikely to elect a Mormon as the winner of its primary. Southern candidates like possible candidate Rick Perry and businessman Herman Cain, or Tea Party favorite Michele Bachmann, are likely to win there. Huntsman is 0–3.
He will then stake his claim in Nevada, where all recent polls have shown Romney with a commanding lead, although no public poll has included Huntsman yet. Romney is the overwhelming favorite in Nevada. You guessed it, 0–4.
Fear not, Florida awaits. His campaign is headquartered there (for the most defensible reason that his wife’s parents are from there), so surely that will deliver the state to him. And waiting to win your first primary in Florida worked so well for Rudy Giuliani in 2008.
It gets worse.
Huntsman remains the only candidate to openly oppose signing a pledge to pass a Cut, Cap, Balance plan, angering the 84 outside conservative groups and the 126 Tea Party organizations pushing the pledge, and causing the influential Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) to say he cannot support Huntsman in 2012. New entrant Bachmann has said she is considering it. All six other serious candidates have signed it.
Huntsman also made the curious admission to the New Hampshire Union Leader, the state’s largest and most influential newspaper, that “he has yet to formulate a comprehensive economic policy.” Rather important in an election in which the economy is the No. 1 issue.
Owing to some of his ideological views, Huntsman has additional problems with the Republican primary electorate.
Social conservatives believe in traditional marriage, and these voters have outsize influence in the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary. Huntsman’s record demonstrates his support for civil unions. In fact, as Politico reported, he’s raising money off of it. The vice chair of the California Log Cabin Republicans recently sent an e-mail fundraising solicitation, which the Huntsman campaign confirmed, that called attention to Huntsman’s record of signing “into law Utah’s first Civil Unions legislation” and reaching out to the LGBT community, promising that Huntsman would run a “fully inclusive campaign.” While the gay-marriage movement won a significant political victory in New York last week, support for it is not a winning political position in a Republican primary.
The Republican base is angry at the incumbent president, and they turned out in the 2010 midterms to display their disaffection with the Obama administration. While some of that anger has subsided, it lingers among the base, and Republican-primary voters do not want a candidate calling for “civility” who left the governor’s office just after winning reelection to serve in Obama’s administration in one of the most significant diplomatic posts in the world. They want a candidate who will go at Obama directly, as Michele Bachmann has, and as they suspect Rick Perry will.
Huntsman has also been a moderate on the issue of climate change. In 2007, while governor of Utah, Huntsman brought the state into the Western Climate Initiative, a regional cap-and-trade program. No issue better unites Republicans in Congress than opposition to cap and trade, which then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi passed in the House and which Obama tried to institute through an executive order when he couldn’t get it through the Senate. And even when Huntsman was ambassador to China, he repeatedly called for action on climate change, which he has refused to say is not caused by man. When Romney said something similar, influential radio-talk-show host Rush Limbaugh pronounced his campaign dead on arrival.
Conservative activists, Tea Party supporters, and Republican-primary voters want a reliable conservative candidate, not an undeniable moderate. They can tell that Huntsman is the latter — in fact, he isn’t even hiding it.
The cruel reality is that Huntsman is a fully media-generated candidate, with no real base of support, no record of achievement in nationally important conservative causes, and little work in party building.
Huntsman is a very interesting and impressive person and if he’s on Charlie Rose, I’ll watch for the full hour. He has an exemplary record of public service, twice serving as U.S. ambassador in Asia, working in the Reagan White House, serving in the George W. Bush administration as the deputy trade representative, and winning two statewide elections in the reddest state in the country. He deserves a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his patriotism, selflessness, and skill. I do not wish him ill, nor do I begrudge his campaign team, some of whom I know personally and respect.
But he will not be the Republican nominee.
As a final illustration of how absurd the Huntsman coverage has been, his meticulously planned announcement event, coinciding with dozens of profile stories, TV interviews, and a New York Times magazine profile, and mystifyingly held in a state park in New Jersey in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, drew less than 100 voters — and over 100 credentialed media. A 1:1 ratio of voters to media is unprecedented. Two months ago, Herman Cain had 12,000 people attend his announcement in Atlanta, and he is now polling third nationally. Guess who earned more coverage?
Can we all now agree to stop the profile stories, stop the courtship, stop the over-worn praise of his “civility” and impressive worldliness? He might have been the Republican nominee if this were 1948. We are in a different era now.
— Matt Mackowiak is a Washington- and Austin-based Republican consultant and president of Potomac Strategy Group, LLC. He has been an adviser to two U.S. senators and one governor, and has worked on two winning campaigns.
editor’s note: This article has been amended since its initial publication.
Can We Please Stop Talking About Huntsman?
Never before in the history of the Western world has the vast gulf between the level of national media coverage received and the level of national media coverage deserved been wider for a political candidate than for Jon Huntsman Jr.
Bigfoot journalists, respected political analysts, news anchors, and everyone else under the sun have breathlessly anointed the former U.S. ambassador to China and twice-elected former governor of Utah as a first-tier candidate, the “strongest possible Republican nominee” to challenge President Obama, and, as Time’s Mark Halperin said, “as good a retail politician as George W. Bush or Bill Clinton.”
You cannot possibly overstate the level of overstatement.
Pardon me for interrupting the universal, collective golf clap from the chattering class, but does Mr. Huntsman have a path to the Republican nomination?
Of course not. In fact, no one has even bothered to ask if there is one.
Let me point out this simple yet inconvenient fact: In order to defeat President Obama, you must first win the Republican nomination. If you have no path to do that, you deserve the same level of coverage as Buddy Roemer.
Let’s examine what Huntsman has recently said and done and what that means for his “first-tier” primary campaign:
He said he would not run in Iowa, so he won’t win there. 0–1.
The Suffolk University poll of likely New Hampshire voters released June 28 had Huntsman at 4 percent, behind Bachmann, Ron Paul, and possible candidate Rudy Giuliani. Part-time New Hampshire resident Mitt Romney had 36 percent and he will do whatever it takes to win there. This means Huntsman will be 0–2.
Evangelical South Carolina is unlikely to elect a Mormon as the winner of its primary. Southern candidates like possible candidate Rick Perry and businessman Herman Cain, or Tea Party favorite Michele Bachmann, are likely to win there. Huntsman is 0–3.
He will then stake his claim in Nevada, where all recent polls have shown Romney with a commanding lead, although no public poll has included Huntsman yet. Romney is the overwhelming favorite in Nevada. You guessed it, 0–4.
Fear not, Florida awaits. His campaign is headquartered there (for the most defensible reason that his wife’s parents are from there), so surely that will deliver the state to him. And waiting to win your first primary in Florida worked so well for Rudy Giuliani in 2008.
It gets worse.
Huntsman remains the only candidate to openly oppose signing a pledge to pass a Cut, Cap, Balance plan, angering the 84 outside conservative groups and the 126 Tea Party organizations pushing the pledge, and causing the influential Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) to say he cannot support Huntsman in 2012. New entrant Bachmann has said she is considering it. All six other serious candidates have signed it.
Huntsman also made the curious admission to the New Hampshire Union Leader, the state’s largest and most influential newspaper, that “he has yet to formulate a comprehensive economic policy.” Rather important in an election in which the economy is the No. 1 issue.
Owing to some of his ideological views, Huntsman has additional problems with the Republican primary electorate.
Social conservatives believe in traditional marriage, and these voters have outsize influence in the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary. Huntsman’s record demonstrates his support for civil unions. In fact, as Politico reported, he’s raising money off of it. The vice chair of the California Log Cabin Republicans recently sent an e-mail fundraising solicitation, which the Huntsman campaign confirmed, that called attention to Huntsman’s record of signing “into law Utah’s first Civil Unions legislation” and reaching out to the LGBT community, promising that Huntsman would run a “fully inclusive campaign.” While the gay-marriage movement won a significant political victory in New York last week, support for it is not a winning political position in a Republican primary.
The Republican base is angry at the incumbent president, and they turned out in the 2010 midterms to display their disaffection with the Obama administration. While some of that anger has subsided, it lingers among the base, and Republican-primary voters do not want a candidate calling for “civility” who left the governor’s office just after winning reelection to serve in Obama’s administration in one of the most significant diplomatic posts in the world. They want a candidate who will go at Obama directly, as Michele Bachmann has, and as they suspect Rick Perry will.
Huntsman has also been a moderate on the issue of climate change. In 2007, while governor of Utah, Huntsman brought the state into the Western Climate Initiative, a regional cap-and-trade program. No issue better unites Republicans in Congress than opposition to cap and trade, which then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi passed in the House and which Obama tried to institute through an executive order when he couldn’t get it through the Senate. And even when Huntsman was ambassador to China, he repeatedly called for action on climate change, which he has refused to say is not caused by man. When Romney said something similar, influential radio-talk-show host Rush Limbaugh pronounced his campaign dead on arrival.
Conservative activists, Tea Party supporters, and Republican-primary voters want a reliable conservative candidate, not an undeniable moderate. They can tell that Huntsman is the latter — in fact, he isn’t even hiding it.
The cruel reality is that Huntsman is a fully media-generated candidate, with no real base of support, no record of achievement in nationally important conservative causes, and little work in party building.
Huntsman is a very interesting and impressive person and if he’s on Charlie Rose, I’ll watch for the full hour. He has an exemplary record of public service, twice serving as U.S. ambassador in Asia, working in the Reagan White House, serving in the George W. Bush administration as the deputy trade representative, and winning two statewide elections in the reddest state in the country. He deserves a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his patriotism, selflessness, and skill. I do not wish him ill, nor do I begrudge his campaign team, some of whom I know personally and respect.
But he will not be the Republican nominee.
As a final illustration of how absurd the Huntsman coverage has been, his meticulously planned announcement event, coinciding with dozens of profile stories, TV interviews, and a New York Times magazine profile, and mystifyingly held in a state park in New Jersey in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, drew less than 100 voters — and over 100 credentialed media. A 1:1 ratio of voters to media is unprecedented. Two months ago, Herman Cain had 12,000 people attend his announcement in Atlanta, and he is now polling third nationally. Guess who earned more coverage?
Can we all now agree to stop the profile stories, stop the courtship, stop the over-worn praise of his “civility” and impressive worldliness? He might have been the Republican nominee if this were 1948. We are in a different era now.
— Matt Mackowiak is a Washington- and Austin-based Republican consultant and president of Potomac Strategy Group, LLC. He has been an adviser to two U.S. senators and one governor, and has worked on two winning campaigns.
editor’s note: This article has been amended since its initial publication.
Can We Please Stop Talking About Huntsman?
Never before in the history of the Western world has the vast gulf between the level of national media coverage received and the level of national media coverage deserved been wider for a political candidate than for Jon Huntsman Jr.
Bigfoot journalists, respected political analysts, news anchors, and everyone else under the sun have breathlessly anointed the former U.S. ambassador to China and twice-elected former governor of Utah as a first-tier candidate, the “strongest possible Republican nominee” to challenge President Obama, and, as Time’s Mark Halperin said, “as good a retail politician as George W. Bush or Bill Clinton.”
You cannot possibly overstate the level of overstatement.
Pardon me for interrupting the universal, collective golf clap from the chattering class, but does Mr. Huntsman have a path to the Republican nomination?
Of course not. In fact, no one has even bothered to ask if there is one.
Let me point out this simple yet inconvenient fact: In order to defeat President Obama, you must first win the Republican nomination. If you have no path to do that, you deserve the same level of coverage as Buddy Roemer.
Let’s examine what Huntsman has recently said and done and what that means for his “first-tier” primary campaign:
He said he would not run in Iowa, so he won’t win there. 0–1.
The Suffolk University poll of likely New Hampshire voters released June 28 had Huntsman at 4 percent, behind Bachmann, Ron Paul, and possible candidate Rudy Giuliani. Part-time New Hampshire resident Mitt Romney had 36 percent and he will do whatever it takes to win there. This means Huntsman will be 0–2.
Evangelical South Carolina is unlikely to elect a Mormon as the winner of its primary. Southern candidates like possible candidate Rick Perry and businessman Herman Cain, or Tea Party favorite Michele Bachmann, are likely to win there. Huntsman is 0–3.
He will then stake his claim in Nevada, where all recent polls have shown Romney with a commanding lead, although no public poll has included Huntsman yet. Romney is the overwhelming favorite in Nevada. You guessed it, 0–4.
Fear not, Florida awaits. His campaign is headquartered there (for the most defensible reason that his wife’s parents are from there), so surely that will deliver the state to him. And waiting to win your first primary in Florida worked so well for Rudy Giuliani in 2008.
It gets worse.
Huntsman remains the only candidate to openly oppose signing a pledge to pass a Cut, Cap, Balance plan, angering the 84 outside conservative groups and the 126 Tea Party organizations pushing the pledge, and causing the influential Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) to say he cannot support Huntsman in 2012. New entrant Bachmann has said she is considering it. All six other serious candidates have signed it.
Huntsman also made the curious admission to the New Hampshire Union Leader, the state’s largest and most influential newspaper, that “he has yet to formulate a comprehensive economic policy.” Rather important in an election in which the economy is the No. 1 issue.
Owing to some of his ideological views, Huntsman has additional problems with the Republican primary electorate.
Social conservatives believe in traditional marriage, and these voters have outsize influence in the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary. Huntsman’s record demonstrates his support for civil unions. In fact, as Politico reported, he’s raising money off of it. The vice chair of the California Log Cabin Republicans recently sent an e-mail fundraising solicitation, which the Huntsman campaign confirmed, that called attention to Huntsman’s record of signing “into law Utah’s first Civil Unions legislation” and reaching out to the LGBT community, promising that Huntsman would run a “fully inclusive campaign.” While the gay-marriage movement won a significant political victory in New York last week, support for it is not a winning political position in a Republican primary.
The Republican base is angry at the incumbent president, and they turned out in the 2010 midterms to display their disaffection with the Obama administration. While some of that anger has subsided, it lingers among the base, and Republican-primary voters do not want a candidate calling for “civility” who left the governor’s office just after winning reelection to serve in Obama’s administration in one of the most significant diplomatic posts in the world. They want a candidate who will go at Obama directly, as Michele Bachmann has, and as they suspect Rick Perry will.
Huntsman has also been a moderate on the issue of climate change. In 2007, while governor of Utah, Huntsman brought the state into the Western Climate Initiative, a regional cap-and-trade program. No issue better unites Republicans in Congress than opposition to cap and trade, which then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi passed in the House and which Obama tried to institute through an executive order when he couldn’t get it through the Senate. And even when Huntsman was ambassador to China, he repeatedly called for action on climate change, which he has refused to say is not caused by man. When Romney said something similar, influential radio-talk-show host Rush Limbaugh pronounced his campaign dead on arrival.
Conservative activists, Tea Party supporters, and Republican-primary voters want a reliable conservative candidate, not an undeniable moderate. They can tell that Huntsman is the latter — in fact, he isn’t even hiding it.
The cruel reality is that Huntsman is a fully media-generated candidate, with no real base of support, no record of achievement in nationally important conservative causes, and little work in party building.
Huntsman is a very interesting and impressive person and if he’s on Charlie Rose, I’ll watch for the full hour. He has an exemplary record of public service, twice serving as U.S. ambassador in Asia, working in the Reagan White House, serving in the George W. Bush administration as the deputy trade representative, and winning two statewide elections in the reddest state in the country. He deserves a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his patriotism, selflessness, and skill. I do not wish him ill, nor do I begrudge his campaign team, some of whom I know personally and respect.
But he will not be the Republican nominee.
As a final illustration of how absurd the Huntsman coverage has been, his meticulously planned announcement event, coinciding with dozens of profile stories, TV interviews, and a New York Times magazine profile, and mystifyingly held in a state park in New Jersey in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, drew less than 100 voters — and over 100 credentialed media. A 1:1 ratio of voters to media is unprecedented. Two months ago, Herman Cain had 12,000 people attend his announcement in Atlanta, and he is now polling third nationally. Guess who earned more coverage?
Can we all now agree to stop the profile stories, stop the courtship, stop the over-worn praise of his “civility” and impressive worldliness? He might have been the Republican nominee if this were 1948. We are in a different era now.
— Matt Mackowiak is a Washington- and Austin-based Republican consultant and president of Potomac Strategy Group, LLC. He has been an adviser to two U.S. senators and one governor, and has worked on two winning campaigns.
editor’s note: This article has been amended since its initial publication.
Can We Please Stop Talking About Huntsman?
Never before in the history of the Western world has the vast gulf between the level of national media coverage received and the level of national media coverage deserved been wider for a political candidate than for Jon Huntsman Jr.
Bigfoot journalists, respected political analysts, news anchors, and everyone else under the sun have breathlessly anointed the former U.S. ambassador to China and twice-elected former governor of Utah as a first-tier candidate, the “strongest possible Republican nominee” to challenge President Obama, and, as Time’s Mark Halperin said, “as good a retail politician as George W. Bush or Bill Clinton.”
You cannot possibly overstate the level of overstatement.
Pardon me for interrupting the universal, collective golf clap from the chattering class, but does Mr. Huntsman have a path to the Republican nomination?
Of course not. In fact, no one has even bothered to ask if there is one.
Let me point out this simple yet inconvenient fact: In order to defeat President Obama, you must first win the Republican nomination. If you have no path to do that, you deserve the same level of coverage as Buddy Roemer.
Let’s examine what Huntsman has recently said and done and what that means for his “first-tier” primary campaign:
He said he would not run in Iowa, so he won’t win there. 0–1.
The Suffolk University poll of likely New Hampshire voters released June 28 had Huntsman at 4 percent, behind Bachmann, Ron Paul, and possible candidate Rudy Giuliani. Part-time New Hampshire resident Mitt Romney had 36 percent and he will do whatever it takes to win there. This means Huntsman will be 0–2.
Evangelical South Carolina is unlikely to elect a Mormon as the winner of its primary. Southern candidates like possible candidate Rick Perry and businessman Herman Cain, or Tea Party favorite Michele Bachmann, are likely to win there. Huntsman is 0–3.
He will then stake his claim in Nevada, where all recent polls have shown Romney with a commanding lead, although no public poll has included Huntsman yet. Romney is the overwhelming favorite in Nevada. You guessed it, 0–4.
Fear not, Florida awaits. His campaign is headquartered there (for the most defensible reason that his wife’s parents are from there), so surely that will deliver the state to him. And waiting to win your first primary in Florida worked so well for Rudy Giuliani in 2008.
It gets worse.
Huntsman remains the only candidate to openly oppose signing a pledge to pass a Cut, Cap, Balance plan, angering the 84 outside conservative groups and the 126 Tea Party organizations pushing the pledge, and causing the influential Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) to say he cannot support Huntsman in 2012. New entrant Bachmann has said she is considering it. All six other serious candidates have signed it.
Huntsman also made the curious admission to the New Hampshire Union Leader, the state’s largest and most influential newspaper, that “he has yet to formulate a comprehensive economic policy.” Rather important in an election in which the economy is the No. 1 issue.
Owing to some of his ideological views, Huntsman has additional problems with the Republican primary electorate.
Social conservatives believe in traditional marriage, and these voters have outsize influence in the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary. Huntsman’s record demonstrates his support for civil unions. In fact, as Politico reported, he’s raising money off of it. The vice chair of the California Log Cabin Republicans recently sent an e-mail fundraising solicitation, which the Huntsman campaign confirmed, that called attention to Huntsman’s record of signing “into law Utah’s first Civil Unions legislation” and reaching out to the LGBT community, promising that Huntsman would run a “fully inclusive campaign.” While the gay-marriage movement won a significant political victory in New York last week, support for it is not a winning political position in a Republican primary.
The Republican base is angry at the incumbent president, and they turned out in the 2010 midterms to display their disaffection with the Obama administration. While some of that anger has subsided, it lingers among the base, and Republican-primary voters do not want a candidate calling for “civility” who left the governor’s office just after winning reelection to serve in Obama’s administration in one of the most significant diplomatic posts in the world. They want a candidate who will go at Obama directly, as Michele Bachmann has, and as they suspect Rick Perry will.
Huntsman has also been a moderate on the issue of climate change. In 2007, while governor of Utah, Huntsman brought the state into the Western Climate Initiative, a regional cap-and-trade program. No issue better unites Republicans in Congress than opposition to cap and trade, which then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi passed in the House and which Obama tried to institute through an executive order when he couldn’t get it through the Senate. And even when Huntsman was ambassador to China, he repeatedly called for action on climate change, which he has refused to say is not caused by man. When Romney said something similar, influential radio-talk-show host Rush Limbaugh pronounced his campaign dead on arrival.
Conservative activists, Tea Party supporters, and Republican-primary voters want a reliable conservative candidate, not an undeniable moderate. They can tell that Huntsman is the latter — in fact, he isn’t even hiding it.
The cruel reality is that Huntsman is a fully media-generated candidate, with no real base of support, no record of achievement in nationally important conservative causes, and little work in party building.
Huntsman is a very interesting and impressive person and if he’s on Charlie Rose, I’ll watch for the full hour. He has an exemplary record of public service, twice serving as U.S. ambassador in Asia, working in the Reagan White House, serving in the George W. Bush administration as the deputy trade representative, and winning two statewide elections in the reddest state in the country. He deserves a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his patriotism, selflessness, and skill. I do not wish him ill, nor do I begrudge his campaign team, some of whom I know personally and respect.
But he will not be the Republican nominee.
As a final illustration of how absurd the Huntsman coverage has been, his meticulously planned announcement event, coinciding with dozens of profile stories, TV interviews, and a New York Times magazine profile, and mystifyingly held in a state park in New Jersey in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, drew less than 100 voters — and over 100 credentialed media. A 1:1 ratio of voters to media is unprecedented. Two months ago, Herman Cain had 12,000 people attend his announcement in Atlanta, and he is now polling third nationally. Guess who earned more coverage?
Can we all now agree to stop the profile stories, stop the courtship, stop the over-worn praise of his “civility” and impressive worldliness? He might have been the Republican nominee if this were 1948. We are in a different era now.
— Matt Mackowiak is a Washington- and Austin-based Republican consultant and president of Potomac Strategy Group, LLC. He has been an adviser to two U.S. senators and one governor, and has worked on two winning campaigns.
editor’s note: This article has been amended since its initial publication.
Perry Adviser: Secessionism Criticism Is Baseless
By Erin McPike - June 30, 2011Critics of Rick Perry already have begun to drop into the political conversation two hurdles facing him should he launch a presidential bid this summer, but they don't pass muster with the Texas governor's chief political adviser, David Carney.Ask a political strategist inside the Beltway to assess Perry's prospects for landing the GOP nomination -- or the presidency -- and a common response is: "He called for Texas to secede from the union, so he'll never be president," even though that's not quite true. The second thing you...
Bachmann claims the media wants her to have ‘mud-wrestling’ match with Palin (Daily Caller)
Bachmann claims the media wants her to have ‘mud-wrestling’ match with Palin (Daily Caller)
Bachmann claims the media wants her to have ‘mud-wrestling’ match with Palin (Daily Caller)
Bachmann: People want to see me ‘mud-wrestling’ with Palin (Politico)
Bachmann: People want to see me ‘mud-wrestling’ with Palin (Politico)
What the GOP Field Should Know About Perry
Let's assume Rick Perry runs for president. Once a high-profile leader says he doesn't want the job but then starts talking about it and giving speeches around the country as the election heats up, you can bet he's running. Here, then, are a few things his GOP opponents need to know about Texas' governor: Most of all, don't underestimate his ability to win. Since his days at Texas A&M University, Perry has known how to prevail. In the early 1970s, he won election as a yell leader. Those are the guys you see in white outfits doing contorted...
Gov. Brown To Sign Pared-Down Calif. Budget Deal
Lawmakers in California have agreed to a new budget. The legislature has sent Gov. Jerry Brown a nearly $86 billion spending plan that begins Friday. The governor is expected to sign the measure.
Gov. Brown To Sign Pared-Down Calif. Budget Deal
Lawmakers in California have agreed to a new budget. The legislature has sent Gov. Jerry Brown a nearly $86 billion spending plan that begins Friday. The governor is expected to sign the measure.
Gov. Brown To Sign Pared-Down Calif. Budget Deal
Lawmakers in California have agreed to a new budget. The legislature has sent Gov. Jerry Brown a nearly $86 billion spending plan that begins Friday. The governor is expected to sign the measure.
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Where Rick Perry Falls Flat
SAN DIEGO -- When it comes to opinions about the governor of Texas, being inside-the-Beltway sometimes means being out of touch.The Washington Times gushed in a recent editorial:"Rick Perry is having a good month. With all eyes on his possible bid for the Republican presidential nomination, the Texas governor is showing that his anti-Washington rhetoric is more than just talk. By vetoing feel-good, nanny-state regulations and thwarting of federal intervention in his state, he's demonstrating the kind of leadership America needs."A good month? I take it that whoever wrote that...
