The Lincoln Project, as a formal organization and a mindset, is proving to be as problematic as Trumpism and leftism

 It's a joy to watch conservative groups that vehemently oppose Donald Trump spring up throughout the land. They, and the publications taking that position as their editorial stance, are solid proof that Trumpism  has not marginalized the insistence on consistent principles, clarity, and decorum and character. We have not gone anywhere and our voice is strong. 

Many of these groups take the laudable position that the "Never Trump" tent (and I dislike that term as much as I ever have) should be big, that a considerable range of ideas is healthy as long as there is a shared commitment to some kind of agreed-upon definition of conservatism.

Some, though, stretch the fabric of this tent to the tearing point by adopting the mirror opposite of the binary-choice argument that the Trumpists make - that is, by an insistence on the necessity of supporting Joe Biden. 

Some take it that far and no farther, arguing that maintaining a Republican Senate majority assures the country a foil against the implementation of the kinds of identity-politics-and-redistribution-on-steroids policy moves that modern-day Democrats advocate. This seems to me to have a herding-cats implausibility to it. Who is clever enough to devise a strategy for exhorting voters to split the ticket in various far-flung states across this big country?

Some go all the way, arguing for a burn-it-all-down strategy that seems largely emotion-fueled. Proponents of this approach let their disgust with most, if not all, Senators and House members for not explicitly repudiating Trump override their considerations of hard politics realities, as well as those legislators' track records of support for real conservatism.

The Exhibit-A organization representing this position is The Lincoln Project. 

Wariness about its passing muster as an actually conservative group starts with a look at its four founders. Steve Schmidt and John Weaver boast a number of political-consultant bona fides between them, but they seem to be generally in the service of Republicans who are decidedly not conservatives, such as John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Between Weaver's stints on the 2000 and 2000 McCain campaigns, he worked for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. George Conway's vocal aversion to Trump is laudable and seems sincere, given that it's been a strain on his marriage. Rick Wilson seems to fit the description of a conservative on the level of abstract principles, but his demeanor, particularly his foul mouth, does nothing to help lift our national discourse out of the gutter. 

Then there's the matter of The Lincoln Project's funding:

By far the biggest donor has been Stephen Mandel, who gave the Lincoln Project — which, as far as I can tell, produces cheap b-roll-laden ads and takes nearly 90 percent of its budget in “operating expenditures” — a million dollars. Employees at his company Lone Pine Capital, it seems, have given the Democratic Party Senate committee $497,000 this year, $248,500 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign committee, and a bunch of money to other left-wing candidates. During the 2018 cycle, employees at Lone Pine Capital doled out $5,893,300 to Democrats and $1,333,333 to Planned Parenthood.

I’m confused somewhat by one of the other top names: Arturas Kerelis, who news reports say is actually an Internet grifter named Arturas Rosenbacher. Maybe the donor is a different person. Then again, it would fit. (It looks like his donation was refunded.) Amos Hostetter, who droppedover a million dollars on the Obama Foundation, and David Geffen have been giving money to Democrats decades before Donald Trump ever ran for president or “Trumpism” existed. As has another top Lincoln Project donor, Joshua Bekenstein, director of Bain Capital, who gaveDemocrats $3.5 million in 2018.

David Geffen! 

But I think we can also refer to Lincoln-Project-ism as a mindset. You will notice that those mentioned above who now take the gotta-vote-Biden position reserve their remaining modicum of respect for Republicans based on what we might call their RINO identities, also known as squishiness, or, to use a term coined here at Late in the Day long ago, Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome. 

Another such Reasonable Gentleman is Mitt Romney. I'm sorry, but I don't have much use for this new-found admiration for Mitt as some kind of statesman the likes of which we need more of in this country. It was clear in 2012 that he didn't speak conservative as his first language, and, like McCain, went out of his way to avoid speaking plainly about Barack Obama's radical background.

And now comes a book by Stuart Stevens, who was Romney's chief strategist in 2012, which, as far as I'm concerned, sheds a lot of light on the pretty-much-leftist turn he takes in It Was All A Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump. 

His assessment of what conservatism has been about since its modern iteration's formative years sounds like it could have been cooked up by The Nation:

In the short version, Republican deceits began in 1964, when, writes Stevens, “Barry Goldwater ran on a carefully crafted platform of coded racism.” This was the era of “Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, which became to conservatives what Mao’s Little Red Book was to the Red Guard.” William F. Buckley Jr. wasn’t any help in those days, on this account, advocating as he did limits on federal power along with the principle of a color-blind society that, says Stevens, we now know to be “perversely racist but reassuring to white people.” From which it follows that National Review’s founder was just “a more articulate version of the same deep ugliness and bigotry that is the hallmark of Trumpism.” He comes back to NR later on, pointing out that despite their own misgivings about Trump’s candidacy in 2016, some editors and writers have since been Trump’s well-wishers whenever he pursues conservative policies: “fanciful rationalizations.” The “racism” is gone but now NR’s problem is “moral collapse.”

After Goldwater came Richard Nixon, with appeals to “forgotten Americans” — “code words” for “white.” And then our 40th president with his stories of the “welfare queen,” an unkind term often attributed to him but which he never used, although for Stevens enough to prove “a direct line from the more genteel prejudice of Ronald Reagan to the white nationalism of Donald Trump.” And then George Bush with the Willie Horton ad . . . and so on all the way up to the nightmarish present, in a chronology every freshman in poli sci has heard chillingly recited to explain why, in national contests, Democrats don’t always win but always deserve to.

Apparently the assigned reading these days is Dog Whistle Politics by a University of California at Berkeley expert in “critical race theory” and “white and Latinx racial identity.” With special attention to the chapter “The White Man’s Party,” this book rates citation by Stevens as some authoritative treatment of Republican politics, along with some obscure study explaining “the Republican decision to exploit the race issue” in 1964. But to see what Goldwater’s “carefully crafted platform of coded racism” actually looked like, you have to go fetch it yourself. Republicans in 1964 pledged “full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes; . . . such additional administrative or legislative actions as may be required to end the denial, for whatever unlawful reason, of the right to vote; . . . continued opposition to discrimination based on race, creed, national origin or sex. We recognize that the elimination of any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and education, as well as of equal rights under law.”

Across the South, we’re to believe, ears went up at the dog whistle in this language, so subtle that even now no one else can pick it up. Even if Stevens’s point is that 1964 marked a sharp decline in African-American votes for Republicans, that proves only that the sum of Goldwater’s platform and convictions held less appeal to black citizens than did Lyndon Johnson’s activist government and Great Society agenda. As NR’s Kevin Williamson has skillfully explained, African-American support for Democrats began to rise long before the 1960s with the programs of the New Deal. Everything isn’t about race; presumably black voters acted in the belief that these economic policies best served their own and their country’s interests. And this despite the fact that many prominent Democrats themselves in that era, including LBJ, had disgraceful records on civil rights.

On that score it would have been relevant for Stevens to mention that Barry Goldwater — the most upright of men, whose reputation was good enough for the proud one-time “Goldwater Girl” nominated for president in 2016 — was a champion of and fundraiser for efforts to end segregation in Phoenix schools, in 1946 led the desegregation of the Arizona National Guard, and was a founding member of the Arizona NAACP. Easy to fault the senator now for overthinking constitutional objections to elements of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, despite his consistent votes for civil-rights bills before that, and to note adverse electoral consequences for his party. But to accuse Republicans of stirring up racial hatred with that man and that platform is a gross misstatement of fact.

As a rule of thumb, moreover, anyone so glib and presumptuous as to brush off as “ugliness and bigotry” the enduring political and moral legacy of William F. Buckley Jr. has, for that reason alone, no business involving himself in Republican affairs. And then there’s the “genteel prejudice” of Ronald Reagan: Here Stevens is referring to a man who one morning in 1982 read a Washington Post item about a persecuted black family in a white neighborhood in Maryland —  their home had been vandalized, a burning cross left on their lawn — and then ordered Marine One fired up and that very afternoon paid the family a presidential visit, just to show what he thought about racists: an act entirely consistent with everything else in his character and life.

This is all undeniably tricky. As I say, narrowly constructed litmus tests are probably just a recipe for further fracturing of our political landscape.

Still I would caution Principles First, a group with a truly admirable mission, to reconsider the hand of solidarity it has extended to the Lincoln Project and LP types. It appears that it's still firming up its list of speakers for its upcoming Convention on Founding Principles. I'd be encouraged to see more of the likes of Mona Charen and Amanda Carpenter, and less of the likes of Jennifer Horn.

How about booking Justin Stapley?

This must all be handled deftly. First and foremost, we must remember that we embrace something that needs and deserves defending - against Trumpists and against Democrats. 

 

The array of players shaping our current juncture

Allow me to attempt to systematize the various players shaping our current juncture.

I'll start with three broadly defined political actors - the president, the Republican Party, and the Democrat party - and the base for each. Then I'll look at other players having an impact on the present situation.

The president - He's proven, in these much-hyped first 100 days, to be the same man he was during the campaign season, during his run as a reality-television star, during his indulgences in sexual braggadocio on Howard Stern's radio show, and in his books - that is, a vulgar, shallow, rudderless, bombastic narcissist. The most recent evidence is last night's address to a rally at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

His base - It really has two components: the die-hard water-carriers who actually like a speech like last night's, the all-caps commenters who proudly wear the nationalist and populist labels, and then the conservatives who cling to the moves on the positive side of the ledger that Trump has made so far as evidence that all is going well.

The Republicans - By this, I pretty much mean federal-level Senators and House members. There are a few principled conservatives among them (Ben Sasse, Ted Cruz, Louis Gohmert, Mia Love and Trey Gowdy come to mind), but collectively speaking, this is a group that does not know how to act like victors. The glaring example is, of course, the lack of the requisite testicular fortitude for just repealing the "A"CA and responding to any howls of outrage with full-throated defense of the free market.

Their base - They really don't have one, as both slavish devotees of Trump and actual conservatives are disgusted by their spinelessness.


The Democrats - Again, I basically mean federal-level Senators and House members, but also include DNC officials. This crowd is the kind of Leftist that Orwell portrayed so chillingly in the Napoleon character in Animal Farm, the thoroughly cynical and corrupt power-seeker who talks a good game about Leftist values - equality and fairness and living in peace - but are completely guided by their nose for amassing goodies. (As with the handful of actual conservatives among Republicans, there are some sincerely Leftist lawmakers, but most of them seem to have pretty fancy homes and fat portfolios of assets.)

Their base - The students, faculty and administrators on the nation's college and university campuses, the writers for The New Republic, the organizers of the pussy-hat march and the march for "science," 99 percent of the arts-and-entertainment world. These people blindly invest trust in the above-described Democrats, but are better at acting on their impatience than grassroots conservatives are. These people are our society's jackboots, the  most dangerous force among those being enumerated here. They are determined to crush everyone's First Amendment rights, not to mention their determination to obliterate the family structure and the notion of human nature itself.

The media bubble - Shouldn't I differentiate between right-leaning and left-leaning outlets here? Make a distinction between MSNBC and the New York Times on the one hand and Fox News and the New York Post on the other? I'm afraid that doesn't accurately reflect the dynamics involved, especially since FNC has been exposed  for the sybaritic atmosphere attendant to its Roger Ailes years. And consider how many of its leading lights past and present were not actual conservatives. Exhibit A: Bill O'Reilly. These are people driven by advancing their careers, having their good looks affirmed, and getting good tables at prestigious restaurants.

Enemies of the United States, and adversaries that back them - North Korea, Iran and the jihadists in the first category, and Russia and China in the second.

It's interesting that I'm scrambling to finish this post so as to head off to church. The above cast of players, considered in toto, constitutes the picture of a fallen world.

Does it frustrate you, maybe bring you a bit too close to the brink of resignation, maybe even despair?

Then get clear about what you value.

This is no time to be a mere spectator to some passing parade, sighing with an it-was-ever-thus absence of stake.

Start with some prayer. It's Sunday morning.

Lord, bring clarity to this scenario, and courage to each of us so petitioning.

Do the Brits have more hoss sense than they've generally been given credit for?

Janet Daly of the Telegraph says she took a gamble on the recently-concluded elections in the UK:

I took the kind of punt that professional commentators are not supposed to risk last week. In the face of overwhelming polling data which was even endorsed by the judgment of the American statistical sage Nate Silver, and the virtual unanimity of my brother pundits, I forecast that the electorate would defy all predictions and vote decisively for the Conservatives. 

Based on nothing but the conceit of my own intuition, I ventured that so many people would be enraged and alarmed by the absurdity of the Labour leadership combined with the effrontery of the SNP which threatened to impose its will (“lock David Cameron out of Downing Street”, etc) on the vast population which had no say in its election, that they would turn out in force to register their resistance.

After some white-knuckle moments, it turned out that she'd been on solid ground:

So we got to Thursday night and the exit poll. You know the rest. Watching the expressions on the faces of the “experts” in the television studios is a memory which I shall cherish. After it was announced at around 1:50am that the Conservatives had held Nuneaton, which had been a crucial Labour target seat, the whole thing became a bit of a blur – literally, because by that time I was crying with relief.

Daly points up the well-duh nature of the assessments of the big-shot polling gurus.

So what was the thought process of this British majority?

Somehow we have arrived at a point where the conscientiously held beliefs and values of the majority of the population have become a matter for secret shame. The desire to do as well as you can in life, to develop your potential and expect to be rewarded for it, to provide your family with the greatest possible opportunity for self-improvement and to do that on your own without being dependent on the state – these are the assumptions that seem to have become so unacceptable that identifying with them is beyond the pale, or at least so socially outrageous that it is not worth the ignominy of admitting to them.
The Left has so dominated the conversation and so noisily traduced the “petit bourgeois” values that guide the lives of what used to be called the “respectable working class” that, ironically, it is only the most socially confident who can openly embrace them. The very people whom Labour needs to attract (and which it did attract when it had re-invented itself as New Labour) are once again being bullied into hiding their true attitudes and opinions. 

So they prevaricate and evade when asked how they will vote because they are intimidated by the condemnation of the Left-wing mob, or else they just are not self-assured enough to make the moral case (even in their own minds) for their choice. But when they reach the sacred solitude of the voting booth, they do what they know must be done for the sake of their own futures, and that of their families, and even of those the Left insists are being disadvantaged – because they genuinely believe that dependency is a bad thing and that self-determination is a social good. 

Which kind of gets us back to the point of the post immediately below.  The Freedom-Haters can cow the populace into not speaking its mind, but as long as it has access to the privacy of a voting booth, quite often it makes a perfectly rational normal-people choice.

Britain, of course, is where Western civilization gets much of not only its political underpinnings - from the Magna Carta to the Glorious Revolution - but its basic level-headedness as well. Maybe this is a harbinger of a hopeful development.

In any event, things just got a lot more interesting for the continent where Greece is about to go bankrupt, Italy is not reproducing fast enough for its native population to match the influx of Muslim immigration, and the Baltic states feel Russia breathing down their necks.

The fat lady has not yet sung.

 

Why isn't this woman in jail?

Jennifer Longoria is a field organizer for Battleground Texas, which wants to turn Texas blue.  Texas has a very clear law about not taking contact information such as a phone number from a voter registration form.  Yet that's exactly what she's been training her minions to do.

They brought the culture war to us, not the other way around

To anyone who is still using the phrase "our friends on the Left," knock it off.  It has no place in the current cultural climate.

Ask New York Governor Cuomo, who says those who oppose the extermination of fetal Americans have no place in his state.

Ask Maria Conchita Alonso, who was let go from her latest acting gig for endorsing Tea Party California gubernatorial candidate Tim Donnelly.

Ask actress Tamera Mowry, who has endured all manner of degrading slurs and accusations that she's not authentically black becuase she's married to a white Fox News reporter.

They will not tolerate us.  They are our enemies.

Welcome aboard, Senator!

Louisiana State Senator Elbert Guillory, who had been a Dem, becomes a Pub.  Says good-bye to tyranny, decline and dehumanization and hello to freedom, American greatness, commonsense and decency.

The GOP's main problem for years has been Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome

Charlotte Hays has a column at Townhall this morning on Stuart Stevens's post-Romney-campaign gig as a Daily Beast columnist.  She says that between his latest column there and the RNC's recent Growth and Opportunity Report, it's obvious that the official position of the Pubs continues to be an open invitation to the Freedom-Haters to claw out their entrails:

What is so poignant (and infuriating) is that, after being bloodied and run circles around by the ruthless and determined Obama campaign, Stevens persists in believing that, golly, if we calm down and aren’t rude to one another, we can solve these danged problems. Stuart is dismayed that what should have been a Socratic dialogue has degenerated into “desperate anger” with manifestations of an “almost willful contempt.”

It is that “almost” that tugs at my heart. Stuart must have missed some of the ruder protests in front of the Supreme Court as that venerable body began to address the issue of gays and marriage. But I am being too kind. Let's face it--it takes willful blindness to ignore the fullness of the contempt the left showers on those who dare to disagree with them. There’s no “almost” about it, Stuart.

She nails the influence of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome on the recent RNC report:

much of the report shows willful blindness of the fierceness of the opponent. Constituencies that currently hate Republicans’ guts are called “demographic partners.” Well, of course, they aren’t demographic partners yet but the second they realize that we're taking all the old guys out to shoot them, they will want to join. A new “Growth and Opportunity Inclusion Council within the RNC” will surely fix the GOP's problems.

Manifesting a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome, the Growth and Opportunity report buys implicitly the Democratic critique of the GOP. Like the Romney campaign, it never confronts an all-important issue: how do you confront smears? It is essential to reach out and make the GOP case for people who have never voted Republican, but it is also just as important to realize that the Democrats aren't going to go to their quiet places and let this happen.

As does Stuart Stevens in his guns and gays column, the GOP report fails to recognize the fierceness of the army arrayed against it. How can the GOP attract more women and African Americans, when we know that women and African Americans who become Republicans will face a barrage of vicious assaults from a well-oiled Democratic smear machine?

The Growth and Opportunity Project report exists in a vacuum, as if there is nobody on the other side tossing grenades. I’d love to see a more genteel style of politics in this country. I share Stuart Steven's apparent longing for a more civilized political arena. I’d love to not see language distorted and lies told. But when the answer to these things is to just close your eyes, you lose.

It's not the Tea Party, it's not Christians, it's not talk radio that's besetting the Pubs with their deep, possibly existential problems.  It's their unwillingness to see what is really going on: a war for America's soul.

More proof that docs want him out

Results of a new poll show small private practices prefer Mitt to the MEC overwhelmingly.

LITD likes this

The RNC sends the Most Equal Comrade a 51st birthday cake inscribed with icing: "You didn't bake this."

It's so easy to debunk FHer smear jobs

Take, for instance, this recent push to make it look like Mitt Romney was at Bain Capital longer than he was.

Is our worst fear being realized?

I'ms seeing way too many articles like this Jed Babbin piece at The American Spectator for my own comfort.  There's a pervasive sense taking hold among conservatives that, within Romney's character makeup, the ratio of ideologically principled warrior to decent guy who's got a great business head is tilted in favor of the latter.  In short, he's too afflicted with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome to rescue America.  It's looking disturbingly like we've cast our lot with yet another mush-head, just as we have every damn election for the last fifty years excluding the two when we chose Ronald Reagan whether we won them or lost them.

There is an ample supply of fire-breathing, plain-talking champions of freedom and American greatness on the political scene today - Allen West and Paul Ryan come to mind (as do a number of Romney's primary opponents) - but in general, there is something about the right-of-center sensibility that renders it ill-suited to go up against those who will spare no thuggery in their imposition of statism and decline.  From committed conservatives to those skirting the center line from the right, we all tend to assume a level of comity among our opponents, a shared sense of decency.  Even the fact that I would here choose the term "opponents" rather than "enemies" in order to keep my prose from striking the reader as distractingly purple demonstrates in the first person what I'm addressing.

By definition, conservatism is about preserving that which fosters human refinement.  It is about high standards for interaction with others.  We rightly champion the ideas and verities that  define us.  The irony is that one such core principle is a national willingness to mount a defense against foreign forces that would violate us that's commensurate with the challenge.  Nothing short of victory, ever.  Why would we bring any lesser degree of resolve to political stuggles?

My alarm level was raised considerably a few months ago when Romney said, "He [the MEC] is a good guy; he's just in over his head."  It is now time for him to walk back that statement.  It's the kind of admission of a mistake that would not only not harm his standing at this point in the race; it would galvanize his whole campaign and electrify huge numbers of currently wary voters.   He could say, "I've had a chance to consider my opponent from a wider perspective now, and I can see that he is not a good guy and the problem is far worse than his being in over his head; he's a socialist who holds the country he presides over in utter contempt."

I mean it.  It's time to talk about the MEC's lifelong radicalism, about how the principle that a person's money is his own knows (or at least should know) no class boundaries, about how the EPA, the HHS, the Departments of Justice, Agriculture, Thransportation, Education and the Interior have been turned into tools of a mad regime, about the peril posed to the world from no longer having American leadership, about czars, executive fiat, ruinous debt, the vulgarity and nacricissm of the celebrities with whom the MEC chooses to associate, the childishness of class envy, about how health care by definition cannot be considered a right, and about how late in the day it is.

Maybe there's somebody on Team Romney whose job duties include taking the pulse of the conservatism, reading articles like Babbin's, listening to Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh.  If so, that person ought to be authorized to bitch-slap our ostensible standard-bearer and tell him to get a clue and fast.

What political-strategy wiz came up with this?

I'm far from the first or only blogger to remark on the Anna Wintour and Sarah Jessica Parker campaign ads for the MEC, and Pundit & Pundette have a roundup of observation that will get anyone still unacquainted with the matter started.

Still, it was such a mind-blowingly stupid idea that I can't resist chiming in.  It paints the biggest target on the MEC I can imagine.

 My main question is, will Spin Sisters author Myrna Blyth be chiming in on it?  I hope so.  She understands the fashion / feelings / relationships sector of the magazine-publishing world from a seasoned insider's perspective.

About that supremely dishonest new MEC campaign ad . . .

The one about Bain capital and GST Steel.  A few facts:

1.) Romney left Bain capital in 1999.  The shutdown was in 2001.

2.) Here's who was still at Bain, though, and oversaw the outsourcing of the jobs: a major MEC campaign-fund bundler.

3.) The mill that was shut down was on the skids anyway, in no small part because it was busting its ass to try to comply with EPA standards.

4.) That mill was unionized.  GTS's other mill, in Ft. Wayne, IN, is non-union and still making steel today.

As with the silly business about the 1965 wrestling-the-unconventional-blond-kid-to-the-ground-and-cutting-his-hair story, the fact that the truth subsequently comes out is secondary to the damage done by Freedom-hater lying.

This is how it's going to be right up to early November.

Beautiful and glorious - today's edition

Richard Mourdock defeats one of the Senate's most egregious Reasonable Gentlemen.

Here's why we here at LITD don't make any big defense of the Republican party per se

They are all too often the stupid party, that's why.  Even the smart wings that emerge within it from time to time, such as the Young Guns, can do incredibly goofy stuff like tell conservative voters that Lugar is a better choice than Mourdock. Hello?  Do they really want to plant their flag in from of the stinkin' Department of Education?

These people are thugs

Kim Strassel at the WSJ on the MEC's enemies list.  Romney donors being named individually and made to sound unsavory just because, in some cases, such as foreclosing on homes or running energy companies, they're doing their jobs, and in some cases because they are on record as holding pro-normalcy positions like keeping the definition of marriage what it has always been.

This regime is going to get so nasty and ruthless between now and November, we must be surprised at nothing. 

Another Reasonable Gentleman must face a primary challenger

Orrin Hatch in Utah.  He, like anyone afflicted with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, can point to a few things he's gotten right over the years, but now it's time for him to answer for his yay votes on Medicare Part D, Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac bailouts, the SCHIP program, raising the debt ceiling sixteen times, and establishing the Department of Education.

Real conservatism is thriving on the state level.  So how did we once again get saddled by a candidate for prez in the advanced stage of RGS (and who is endorsing Hatch in the Utah Senate race)?

Regardless of how the state-run media organs and the regime's minions try to paint him, he's a principled champion of freedom and prosperity and a success at implementing those principles

They can butcher Rick Perry's recent New Hampshire speech until there's no context left and they can try to make last night's debate gaffe into some kind of fatally pivotal moment, but they can't make him quit his run for the presidency.