MASON CONSERVATIVE

National Polls or Swing State Polls?

. . . or, is there a way for Romney to win without Ohio?

It will be difficult.  Romney is making serious headway in national polls but the state swing state polls remain stubbornly out of reach for him.  Specifically he cannot make a breakthrough in Ohio and I think it might be gone because Obama has just tarred him with wanting to let the car companies die and with them these voters jobs.  To win, Romney needs to sweep the South, grab Ohio and win one more state.  That is a tough need to thread.  Even if he takes VA, NC, and then add Ohio; Obama still wins 272 to 266.  In my analysis, there are only four states left:

• Ohio
• Iowa
• New Hampshire
• Colorado

First, take all of this under the assumption that Romney takes Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia while Obama takes Wisconsin and Nevada.  That could of course not happen - certainly Florida and Virginia are very tight and Wisconsin is close as well.  And if the night starts with Obama taking Florida and/or Virginia; this election is over before it starts for the President.

First fact . . . if Romney doesn't win Ohio he's not winning anything.  If Obama wins Ohio, Romney would need a clean sweep of NH, CO, and IA.  So to win this, Romney needs Ohio PLUS another state out of IA, NH, and CO.  Ohio plus a tag team partner is the only way Romney wins this election, along with a complete sweep of the South.

Second fact . . . Obama has way more outs than Romney.  If you count the full slate of swing states as NC, VA, FL, OH, IA, WI, CO, NH, and NV Obama can afford to lose more of these than Romney can.  Obama's electoral ceiling is 347, Romney's is 285.  Of the states above, its fascinating to me that we might come back to where it starts.  After Ohio, I think the two biggest opportunities for Romney to win are New Hampshire and Iowa.  Romney has a tighter road to manuever right now, but the state polls in those states seem to be moving his way.  But not in Ohio.

Again, like every year, it comes down to Ohio.  Well, for Romney it comes down to the Solid South, Ohio, New Hampshire, Colorado, and Iowa.  He sweeps that then he wins.  If he sweeps that and loses Ohio, he wins.  Its an awful tough road to plow.

Who's Afraid Of A Little Sequestration?

"Hard-Working Americans Are What Create Jobs, Not Government"

Except when it comes to gigantic federal contractors and huge defense spending, apparently.  I say bring it on.  We've been living fat and wealthy off of federal spending, i.e. other people's money, and avoiding  the problems of the rest of the country.

This is not a heartless position.  Rather, it is exposing the fantasy life we have been living here in many ways.  Fairfax's refusal to diversify it's economy, to rely on federal jobs and contractors fueled by federal money, has been a huge mistake.  Local politicians, Republicans and Democrats, have bowed before these contractors and developers that have bought the Chamber of Commerce and control the money in this county.  Tom Davis and Gerry Connolly are probably the biggest examples of how federal money and politics have mixed.

I have this weird belief that our politics would be better if the committed progressives and constitutional conservatives versus the decaying and pandering professional politicians that claim the center and are really in it just to be elected and hold that power.  Men and women from the right and left are in politics for the right reasons.  Fairfax is the perfect example of what is wrong with politics.  Mushy Democrats and mushy Republicans get elected year after year, pretending to be for something but are generally really for nothing.  Protect the contractors, protect the developers, take their money and get reelected.  That's politics here, that's business here.  

So I can understand that the John Fousts and Pat Herritys of the world are freaking out about this.  Me?  I think we as a community and area need to come to grips that we cannot exist on the federal teat.  The goals of our kids shouldn't be to "get a federal job" so you can live the easy life.  

I'm not afraid of sequestration.  The politicians, developers, and contractors might be; but I think we are better than that.  

George McGovern

It may shock some people that one of the political figures in history that I admire the most is former South Dakota Sen. George McGovern.  While McGovern is lazily characterized as one of the most liberal presidential candidates of our time, there is more to him.  To a constitutional conservative, to even a libertarian, McGovern's small-town prairie populism is endearing.  His run for president in 1972 was a tremendous failure, but it was a success of grassroots politics.  What McGovern did in 1972 is the same thing as what Barry Goldwater did in 1964.  The man was a true American hero who was against war because he had lived and fought war.

McGovern has to be one of the very few politicians in America who when their career was over could look in the mirror and know he had not sold out.  McGovern understood that the power in our politics was not a battle between left and right, and in fact the Old Right and New Left have something in common.  Both are looking to purify politics in their own way.  Both understand the dangers of Establishment consensus.  Consensus is what got us into Vietnam.  

It is weird to some that the two politicians I admire the most are McGovern and Barry Goldwater, but consider this excerpt from a profile of McGovern back in 2006:

Look: George McGovern was a liberal Democrat. He voted for social-welfare programs of every shape and size; his philosophy then and now was a product, he says, of the Social Gospel movement, which translates Christianity into an interventionist welfare state.

But at its not-frequent-enough best, McGovernism combined New Left participatory democracy with the small-town populism of the Upper Midwest. In a couple of April 1972 speeches, he seemed to second Barry Goldwater’s 1968 remark to aide Karl Hess that “When the histories are written, I’ll bet that the Old Right and the New Left are put down as having a lot in common and that the people in the middle will be the enemy.”

“[M]ost Americans see the establishment center as an empty, decaying void that commands neither their confidence nor their love,” McGovern asserted in one of the great unknown campaign speeches in American history. “It is the establishment center that has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster—a terrible cancer eating away the soul of the nation. … It was not the American worker who designed the Vietnam war or our military machine. It was the establishment wise men, the academicians of the center. As Walter Lippmann once observed, ‘There is nothing worse than a belligerent professor.’”

RIP to George McGovern, a politician we should aspire to represent us.