May 2008

The Wall Street Journal trashes Barack Obama’s abysmal trade rhetoric:

Here’s one “change” presidential candidate Barack Obama apparently believes in: higher prices. Witness his letter last week urging President George W. Bush not to submit the U.S.-South Korea free-trade agreement to Congress for ratification.

Heritage notes that this would have an impact on trade by lowering the trade deficit by between $3b and $4.5b.:

The U.S. International Trade Commission has estimated it would increase annual U.S. exports to South Korea by between $10 billion and $11 billion, and increase imports from the longtime Asian ally by between $6.4 billion and $6.9 billion.

But Obama opposes it…:

On the record so far, Mr. Obama is the most protectionist U.S. presidential candidate in decades. In February he inserted a statement opposing the Korean trade deal into the Congressional record only days before securing the endorsement of the powerful Teamsters union.

This is the same union that he also wants to end federal oversight of, even though he knows they are corrupt.

How does that help American workers or the Teamsters members who would ship those goods?

There will be plenty of attention to the Presidential race this year, and for good reason. Keeping the White House has got to be the highest priority for Republicans of all stripes.

One of the goals of The Next Right is to provide a central location at which junkies, activists, interest group people, etc. can find good information. If people are operating off of the same information, hopefully we as a movement can start to get on the same page.

We would like to invite contributors who know about these races to write about these races and others that might be important. Stuart Rothenberg’s list of races and his categorization are below.

My sense is that these are basically correct. A number of these depend on primaries. (note that Redstate’s Erick Erickson has posted a calendar and feed of primaries) For example, if former Rep. Jeb Bradley (NH) wins his September 9th primary, I suspect that race moves into Toss Up. However, if Don Young (AK) wins his primary, I suspect it moves into Tilt D. (local polling suggests that)

I also suspect that Darren White (NM-1) is, perhaps, our best recruit of the cycle, and will probably be able to pull this off.

I want to know more. What is out there?

Barack Obama argues that his judgement is why he should be elected President. His whole campaign is predicated on a speech that he gave in October of 2002 in which he claims to have demonstrated that judgement. Here’s part of that speech:

My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton’s army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain. I don’t oppose all wars.

Like Auschwitz, Treblinka was in Poland and liberated by the Soviets. Obama’s staff claims that he misspoke yesterday. Instead, it turns out that one of his stock lines is just false.

And the speech in which Obama claims to have demonstrated his judgement, he instead demonstrated his ignorance.

Today, Barack Obama, gave a speech on the housing crisis. In the speech, he said:

I do not accept an America where Washington’s only message to working people is: “you’re on your own.”

But Barack Obama didn’t need Washington when he was buying a house. Because he had a politically connected real estate developer, Tony Rezko, under federal criminal investigation who subsidized his house.

Is that Barack’s lesson? That if you aren’t lucky enough to know a corrupt real estate developer, you need Washington?

The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, writing about Barack Obama’s problems with his numerous and contradictory statements on Iran says:

I attribute Obama’s predicament to inexperience and a certain worrisome naivete. When he said he would personally negotiate with Iran (if he were president), he might not have realized exactly what he was saying.

That about nails it.

And if he doesn’t know what he is saying now, what is he going to do as President?

There is a tendency in the online political world to look at the online political world as the object. However, in the Obama campaign, the organizing success has less to do with the blogosphere and more to do with other organizing strategies. The online world was mainly a tool to empower the offline world. To my knowledge the best description of those organizing strategies is from a March Rolling Stone article. One of the key insights was this one:

Figueroa’s goal is not to put supporters to work but to enable them to put themselves to work, without having to depend on the campaign for constant guidance. "We decided that we didn’t want to train volunteers," he says. "We want to train organizers — folks who can fend for themselves. …

The result was a network of trained organizers who became what Figueroa calls the campaign’s "secret weapon." Early on, the volunteers essentially served as Obama’s staff in key states where he didn’t have employees. "It quadrupled the size of our operation in states that were going to be voting not only on February 5th, but February 9th, February 12th and here on March 4th," Figueroa says. "We had an anchor in those states for a long, long, long time."

The key insight here is that a volunteer organization isn’t made up of volunteers but of volunteer organizers and recruiters. The people who are in touch with and motivate the volunteers. This is a shift in thinking from both traditional Democratic and Republican organizing strategies. Some people will look at this as nothing new because it is somewhat based in community organizing principles, but it is quite similar to organizational innovations in other spheres. For example, in megachuches, small group leaders are the pointy end of the spear in member recruitment and retention. We will look at more examples in a second.

Read on.

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These recruiters are not just trained. They are given tools and organizing authority:

Using the social-networking tools of MyBo, the volunteers began to create city- and statewide networks with names like IdahObama, groups that could be tapped later by the professional staff to organize down to the precinct level. In Maryland, the campaign was able to mobilize 3,000 volunteers in only three weeks, thanks to the months of groundwork by groups like Baltimore for Barack Obama.

In other words, recruiters were not just identified, but they were provided tools to allow them to connect their recruits to the rest of the campaign. They knew what their task was: word of mouth spread of excitement about Obama by getting them to sign up to the campaign.

Again, compare to other organizations. These guys are just at the cutting edge of organizational strategies. In recent years, the Marines have placed increasingly emphasis on the Strategic Corporal, recognizing that problems are solved at the point of contact near the bottom of the chain of command, rather than at the top of the chain of command. Or Toyota’s moving the power to innovate into line workers, captured in the term with "autonomation," defined as a "type of automation [that] implements some supervisory functions rather than production functions." (anyone who has done the 72 hour program can relate to the "production function" problem) In each case, authority and innovation are pushed down into the hands of people on the front lines.

I want to extract two kinds of recommendations from this.

One recommendation is that, long term, the RNC (or the new institutions of a conservative movement) needs to focus more on training and empowering recruiters, and they need to provide them tools to build and deploy their organizations. In addition, this could help address some of the pressures that field office staff suffer from and help alleviate volunteer burnout, which were real problems in 2006 and are likely to be worse in 2008.

The other recommendation is about deploying more community-style blogs on the right. We don’t have a structure where good information and good bloggers can conveniently trickle up. We hope that The Next Right itself is a step in the right direction.

I am going to follow up on these in future posts.

Fidel Castro writes on Barack Obama:

What did he say in his speech in Miami, this man who is doubtless, from the social and human points of view, the most progressive candidate to the U.S. presidency?

Meanwhile Castro attacks John McCain personally:

Cuban leader Fidel Castro blasted Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Friday for his criticism of the Cuban government this week, saying McCain had shown why he finished near the bottom of his class at West Point.

[Note by Jeff: The fact that McCain went to the Naval Academy (at Annapolis, MD), not the U.S. Military Academy (at West Point) appears to be lost on either Mr. Castro or on the writer of the Reuters article. If the former, that shows why Mr. Castro “finished near the bottom of his class at” the Petty Dictators Academy, and the lack of a correction in-text shows that the Reuters writer is either too ignorant to know the difference, too lazy to care, or too biased to correct Castro in favor of McCain. Of course, if it was just a mistake by the Reuters writer (and editor), then that simply demonstrates why they “finished near the bottom of [their] class at” Wannabe Journalist School. Either way, poor job by the news bureau all-stars.]

One candidate is attacked by Castro. The other is praised by Castro. And Hamas. Sometimes you know a man by his friends and enemies.

Just saying.

Barack Obama has wanted to be President for seemingly his entire life. But he thinks that people serve and protect our country only because of coercion. For real. Chatting with a bunch of liberal reporters, he said:

I didn’t serve as many people my age because Vietnam was over by the time I was of draft age and we had then moved to an all volunteer army.

He could talk about being called to serve the country in some other way. But he doesn’t. He could talk about what else he has done. But he doesn’t. Instead he says that he didn’t serve because he wasn’t forced to do so.

This raises real questions about whether Obama actually has experience or understanding to command our military. He claims he does:

Obama later said he will “cede to no one the ability to talk about veterans issues.” He said his grandfather was a veteran and vowed to “advocate fiercely” on their behalf.

How can he advocate on anyone’s behalf when he doesn’t even understand why they serve their country? That’s an astonishing level of naive arrogance.