August 2008

Barack Obama’s flip-flop on offshore oil drilling is a major strategic victory for House and Senate Republicans.

The Democratic plan was to reup the Congressional ban on offshore oil drilling as part of a long-term continuing resolution. Reid had originally promised a vote on offshore drilling, but has backed off that promise now that it has become a potent issue.

Now it is time to drive this issue home as a clearly branded Republican issue. The longer the fight goes on, the more it paints Democrats into a terrible corner. And there is a synergy between high energy costs and broader economic insecurity that will likely be the driving issue in November.

But let’s review the dynamics that will lead to the win on this issue:

First, the dramatic events yesterday on the House floor telegraphed an intent to take this issue into recess. Undoubtedly, this is the major issue that Republican members will be talking about during the recesss. I would be shocked if there were not robocalls dropped in prior to townhalls in Democratic Congressional seats around the country. There will almost certainly be ads. Now the Republicans have a line that "even Barack Obama supports this, so why can’t we get a vote in the House and Senate?"

Second, there is a bipartisan group of Senators who are pressuring Reid on this point, not to mention significant caucus-internal pressure on Pelosi. There will be enormous pressure from inside the Congress to force a vote on these issues.

Third, Republicans and conservatives are actually organized on this issue. Drill Here Drill Now has 1.4 million signatures and the American Family Association, with their 3.3 million person list, also seems inclined to play on this issue. You can expect enormous pressure from constituents on these issues.

Fourth,  an enormous majority is with us, and the higher-profile the issue is, the more people are likely to actually vote it. But the Dems have no reasonable action they can take until September while we pound them.

This will be fun. We have to keep track of what happens in Congressional districts and at town halls this recess.

More on that coming.

Obama campaign unprepared for this debate

Mark has addressed some of Barack Obama’s campaign’s handling
of the “race card” issue. But it is worth watching the appearance.
It is astonishing that Axelrod was so unprepared for this:

Note that the closing argument that Obama has never proposed an
energy tax increase is laughably false with today’s
Politico story about funding a $1,000 rebate with a tax on
energy companies. Axelrod is just lying and making stuff up.
Totally unprepared and without a single compelling answer.

At the same time, Davis just drills away.

Real Clear Politics felt the same way:

I had the read the quotes from the AM Report posted
earlier today, but hadn’t watched the video until just now. This
was, to put it politely, not Axelrod’s best. He essentially
admitted that Obama was in fact making a reference to his race with
his “dollar bill” remarks and then – almost as if he recognized the
mistake and lost his train of thought – stumbled badly when trying
to answer on the question of energy and taxes.

So let’s stop talking about racism and follow Obama’s words

Strieff nicely handled the absurd charges of racism against
John McCain for the celebrity ad. Hopefully the blowhard press can
let that one lie.

But Barack Obama’s slip last night on Hillary Clinton is telling
and fits a pattern of mysogyny in his campaign. Visa CBS:

“At a time when we’ve got bigger challenges than any
time in our history and you’re running ads with Hillary and er –
with Britney and ah Paris in it. I mean come on. The American
people deserve better.”

Of course, this is par for the course. He diminished Hillary
Clinton with sexist attacks in the primary.
I wrote this a while back:

Jake Tapper first noted this when Obama said that Hillary was
“taking out the claws.” At the same time he noted that Obama would
use “[l]anguage such as ‘when she’s feeling down’ ‘periodically’
she ‘launches attacks.'” Tapper noted that a
number of female reporters and bloggers picked up on this.
Later Obama complained that Hillary was “throwing the China” at
him. Again,
Tapper heard the dog whistle. Tapper noted that this “feeds
into the ‘harridan‘ caricature
of Clinton.”

Obama’s slip was just more of the same.

For good reasons, the Democrats have successfully tarred Republicans with "corruption." We have and have had criminals in our midst like Ted Stevens, Jack Abramoff, Bob Ney, and others. We have done an inadequate job of shooting our own criminals in public, although the response to Stevens is encouraging.

In that context Sean makes an important point:

Voters who remember the results of liberal excess in the 1970s grow increasingly few and far between. Most voters don’t recall that the scandals which engulfed the GOP Congress were preceded by similar scandals that plagued Democrats for most of the 80s and early 90s; how many people today remember that the Democratic Speaker and Majority Whip both resigned as a result of separate ethical scandals in the 101st Congress?

People have certainly forgotten the old tales of Democratic corruption. We are also failing to tell today’s stories of the corruption of Democrats and their allies. Some of this is media bias, but some is that we are not doing a good enough job of generating our own content. We have had Nancy Pelosi raising the minimum wage for everywhere but where she has financial interest. We have Ben Nelson giving earmarks to companies run by his children. Paul Kanjorski, Chris Dodd, John Murtha, etc. We have systemic union corruption. We have groups like ACORN who, at the least, establish incentive structures that encourage election fraud.

Where are we telling these stories?