Tonight on his site Flash Report, which is a nice source of California Republican political news, Jon Fleischman announced that he is pulling the proposal to close our state’s Republican primaries.
Right now, anyone who Declines To State a party preference is allowed to vote in our primaries, with the exception of Presidential primaries. But Fleischman had made a proposal, which the party was set to vote on in Indian Wells late this month, that would deny non-Republicans the chance to vote in our primaries. People would have to join our party to have a say in who represents our party.
However two hours ago he wrote this:
After consultation with many fellow supporters of my proposed change in the California Republican Party Bylaws, I made the very difficult decision just a few minutes ago to withdraw the change.
To make a long story short, while I am confident that the votes were there to pass the change at the convention, the matter was becoming extremely divisive due to a lot of misinformation being spread about the proposal, and its effects.
I am disappointed to hear this, and I hope that we don’t pay for it in June.
I’m seeing a distressing amount of criticism of Joe Wilson around these parts, for the sole reason that issued the following statement after shouting at President Obama during his “reform” sales pitch:
This evening I let my emotions get the best of me when listening to the President’s remarks regarding the coverage of illegal immigrants in the health care bill. While I disagree with the President’s statement, my comments were inappropriate and regrettable. I extend sincere apologies to the President for this lack of civility.
Nobody should criticize Joe Wilson over this apology who thinks the President is lying on illegal aliens.
We deal in weak apologies all the time at RedState. Trolls pretend to apologize all the time, then get banned for failing to making a genuine apology for their transgressions. So when I first heard Wilson apologized, I immediately hoped he made one with lots of loopholes, and was gratified to see this statement. Let me take it bit by bit to show you what I mean.
This evening I let my emotions get the best of me when listening to the President’s remarks regarding the coverage of illegal immigrants in the health care bill. I’m sure we all can understand where Wilson is coming from here. I never listen to Obama speak, and never have. This guy had to sit there listening during the joint session. Hearing the President lie repeatedly probably got Wilson angry, and put him in a state of mind where he might speak out in a way he ordinarily might not.
While I disagree with the President’s statement…. Right here, Wilson sends a message. He does not retract his statement about the lie. He does not retreat, he does not compromise, and he does not waver. This phrase boils down to ‘The President is still lying.’ Do not condemn him for this; praise him for having the temerity not to back down in the face of pressure.
…my comments were inappropriate and regrettable. Firstly note the bland, generic use of ‘comments,’ which is another sign that this apology is insincere. If he meant it, he would have said ‘comment,’ because this is about one comment. The use of ‘comments’ marks this as a statement against his heart for political gain.
Then note his descriptors. He does not call his comment incorrect. He does not call it unfair. He merely calls it inappropriate, as it clearly was in that context. It was rude, and against the accepted protocols of such a speech. He also calls it regrettable, which makes sense given all the lefty death threats he’s probably receiving right now. He didn’t say he regretted speaking the truth; he regrets the manner in which he did it.
I extend sincere apologies to the President for this lack of civility. And to conclude, Wilson reiterates that he is not apologizing for speaking the truth about the President’s lies, but merely for speaking the truth in an uncivil way. Every line of this piece is crafted not to apologize for the accusation of a lie. It only apologizes for the way in which the accusation was delivered.
So please, lay off of Joe Wilson if you agree with what he shouted. He’s not backing down. He’s just playing the game.
So it turns out the PS3 controller works mostly fine on my Mac if I plug it in to a USB port. The big downside is that the analog axes apparently show as buttons. I wonder if I can do something about that though.
Joe Wilson apologized for his statement during your speech. Now it’s your turn to man up and apologize for what you said about Sarah Palin during your speech.
So just as I’m mixing in some Patapon 2 with my Pangya on the elliptical, Sony re-releases Patapon in the Playstation Store. So I picked that up, and while I was there got Wipeout HD, since it was reasonably priced as well.
It’s an attractive game, and I expect to play it now and then. But all these downloaded games are killing my ability ever to catch up with all the games I’ve bought. On disc I stil have Makai Kingdom, and Disgaeas 2 and 3 to deal with. I’d like to play Phantom Brave Wii Meet again as well. SimCity DS calls me for snippets now and then. Street Fighter IV isn’t bad. Etrian Odyssey and its sequel await.
That’s enough as it is, but once you start throwing in impulse buys like Wipeout HD and Marvel v. Capcom 2 (Chun Li, Roll, and Megaman!), or World of Goo and the whole world of Wiiware and Virtual Console downloads, I can’t even pretend to have a clear queue anymore.
At some point maybe I should just take a week of pure vacation and just play.
At our next Republican Convention here in California, the most important vote we take may be the vote to close our primary elections, ensuring that people are Republicans before they can choose who will represent our party on the ballot. Since 1999 when we opened our primaries to those who do not join a party, we have had no noteworthy statewide electoral success from primary-nominated Republicans (our dear Governor Schwarzenegger, remember, bypassed the primary process in the recall of Governor Gray Davis).
So the benefits of the open primary have been shown to be minimal. Yet a certain coalition of Republicans will be fighting hard to keep our primaries open. Notable in that coalition are the backers of Meg “I’m a huge fan of Van Jones” Whitman, candidate for Governor; Carly “The fundamental objective [of HP is] to be a good international citizen” Fiorina, candidate for Senate; and of course Governor Arnold “Right-wing crazies” Schwarzenegger. See a pattern?
This is what I’ve been saying all along about the Chuck DeVore/Carly Fiorina primary race for Senate. This is about more than who’s going to be the sacrifice on the ballot this time around. This is about what our party will stand for, and who will get to claim the mantle of speaking for the party the next time our legislative conservatives obstruct Democrat tax hikes.
And I’m perfectly willing to concede our two US Senate seats and Governor’s chair in exchange for strong Assembly and state Senate caucuses, as well as strong conservatives in the US House, free of undermining influences from said Senate nominees and Governor’s offices. We’re not going to win the statewide offices anyway, because if push came to shove the unions and their allies would start running ads with as many lies as it took to win, or to raise the money it took to run those ads, just as the pro-abort forces did to beat back Parental Notification last year.
Just look at the record: We did no better containing spending under Schwarzenegger than under Davis*, this despite his big talk on taxes and spending. As usual, the squish on social policy turned out to be a squish on fiscal policy as well, failing to use the line-item veto to bring the budget under control, instead letting the spending grow until it became a crisis, and then supporting tax hikes and accounting shell games to pretend to fix the crisis.
Outside of the obscure technical offices like Secretary of State or Insurance Commissioner, or the recall fluke which bypassed the base**, with or without Independents in our primaries we haven’t been able to do anything statewide since we ran hard on illegal immigration in 1994. And of course once we did that, President Clinton triangulated on us with Operation Gatekeeper. He did so with urgency in order to keep our precious Electoral votes off the table in 1996. Note that since his goal was only to help California, and more specifically to help himself in California, he did nothing to help Arizona. In fact he just sent a lot of our runoff their way, which is why they followed our path and were a major state in the Minuteman movement a decade later.
And yes, Governor Girly Man has been wide open about his express aims to change the rules to crush conservatives, whom he once termed as “right-wing crazies” and, in the context of impeachment, “an embarassment.” That’s why he supported a plan to change the way districts are drawn in the state, selling Proposition 11 as a way to kick out conservatives who wouldn’t budge on taxes, accomplishing this by spreading us conservative voters to prevent us from controlling any districts. But even that’s not enough to satisfy his hunger to purge us from the party, because now he wants to ensure that we Republicans don’t even control our own primaries.
So sure, I understand why outsiders may want us in California to nominate the ambiguous-on-life Fiorina*** in order to try to kick out the Senate’s dumbest member, but we who live here have more at stake. We don’t want our party to become useless instead of just weak. We also want our party to represent its members, and so must close our primaries to all but our own members. Joining the party is a fast and easy process; why not encourage Californians to join it to vote in a heated primary? Let’s get more people identifying as Republican instead of just dipping a toe into our pool, then pulling it back out later.
The author is a lifelong California Resident, a new media and online consultant for hire, and can be found on Twitter.
* According to the Department of Finance, General Fund spending went up from $57.8 billion (1998-1999; Wilson’s last Budget) to $78.3 billion (2002-2003; Davis’s last budget) under Gray Davis, an increase of 35.5%. The budget then grew from that $78.3 billion to $103.0 billion (2007-2008; the last pre-recession budget) under Arnold Schwarzenegger, an increase of 33.0%. Only the Constitutional requirement for a balanced budget forced him to end the good times for government unions. He would never have done so on his own without the recession slashing tax revenues.
** It’s clear to me, from the results of the Recall election, that if not for the Recall in 2003 it would have been McClintock v. Davis in 2006, because the base Republicans backed McClintock while the center-left backed Schwarzenegger, but the latter doesn’t generally vote in our primaries. It also would have been Bustamante as the frontrunner this time but he went and backstabbed the whole state party and struck out on his own in the Recall, only to get slapped down. Now Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown, Ronald Reagan’s successor, is probably going to get another shot.
*** We all know that’s what people mean when they call her electable. She calls herself personally pro-life (like John Kerry), but never elaborates. That’s all anybody means when they call a Republican electable in a Democrat-leaning state: squishy on the issues. And abortion is the king of issues in this state. You won’t be able to turn on a television or radio without seeing or hearing Barbara Boxer saying “woman’s right to choose” no matter whom we nominate next year, and especially if we’re dealing with a Supreme Court vacancy in the summer of 2010.
The excitement this morning on Twitter seems all about Mike Huckabee. There has been no doubt in my mind that he never stopped running for President after conceding the nomination to John McCain last year. He just changed which Presidential election he was running in.
Which is why it was such a huge (but very silly, given the timing) argument late last year over who “came in second” in the primary race, and by proxy who the early 2012 “frontrunner” was going to be. Mitt Romney had a dedicated core of supporters fighting for him, and so did Huckabee. Some of them on each side just wouldn’t give up, while the rest of us just got back to work.
It appears that Mike Huckabee himself got back to work as well. Gone is the religious demagoguery from the campaign, as are the left-wing economic ideas he was pushing. Instead we have a man who’s fighting the embattled Barack Obama on his reckless spending and disastrous foreign policy, and the Democrats apparently are scared by it. In 2008 the Democrats loved him, but in 2009 they hate him. That in itself is a change that speaks well of Huckabee’s future hopes.
Republicans are creatures of habit. We tend to like seeing the same batches of people in one primary after another, and eventually the stable, persistent men get their shot. Even John McCain got his. But if Mike Huckabee wants to try for his, there is one more thing he needs to do: Help us take back the House.
As of a month ago, his PAC raised over $300,000. That money needs to get out to Repubican challengers nationwide, with less of a Southern bias than he now shows. Democrats took the House by challenging everywhere, and so will we. Reports are that Huckabee plans to back 50 candidates with his PAC. I hope he does, and I hope he funnels substantial amounts of money to each both through the PAC, and through direct (and free) fundraising stops.
If Mike Huckabee can be a rainmaker for Republicans who take back the House, then yes, Huckabee becomes a leading man in the Republican party and will be excellently positioned to run again in 2012. By proving he could raise money and be a genuine party leader, he will have earned it.
That is the missing piece for Mike Huckabee, and I truly hope he fits it into place.