How McCain Can Win Minnesota

The Star Tribune shows John McCain pulling even with Barack Obama in Minnesota:

A Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday found that Obama leads McCain 46 percent to 44 percent among the state's likely voters, a statistical tie.

The Republican National Convention will be held in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis-St. Paul), which is home to a large community of Laotian Hmong immigrants numbering an estimated 60,000 people. With polling at a statistical tie, this voting group can provide John McCain (or Barack Obama) with a margin of victory that can deliver Minnesota's 10 electoral votes.

How can McCain win the support of Hmong voters? It's simple. Last year, Major General Vang Pao, the undisputed leader of the Hmong community in America, was arrested and charged with attempting to overthrow the communist government of Laos.

Many people in the Hmong community, who have historically supported Republican candidates, blame the current Republican administration for this turn of events. McCain will need to reach out to the Hmong community and fix the damage. If he really wants the unequivocal support of the Hmong community, he will need to strongly hint to the Hmong community that as president, he would pardon General Vang Pao should he be convicted.

This will help bring many disillusioned Hmong back into the Republican fold and inject some enthusiasm into his campaign in Minnesota. The McCain organization should not underestimate the importance of the Hmong community. The Hmong are politically active in Minnesota and have already elected two state legislators. With their help, Minnesota's 10 electoral votes can be delivered to John McCain.

McCain-Condi or McCain-Huckabee?

This space is usually devoted to pristine moral reasoning, but, hell, it’s an election year. Let’s get down and dirty. If McCain really wants to have it all—to refurbish his maverick image without having to flip-flop on the panderings that have tarnished it; to galvanize the attention of the press, the nation, and the world; to make a bold play for the center without seriously alienating “the base”—then he can avail himself of a highly interesting option: Condoleezza Rice.

To deal first with the obvious: Rice may be “only” the second woman and the second African-American to be Secretary of State, but she is indisputably the highest-ranking black female official ever to have served in any branch of the United States government. Her nomination to a constitutional executive office would cost McCain the votes of his party’s hardened racists and incorrigible misogynists. They are surely fewer in number, though, than the people who would like to participate in breaking the glass ceiling of race or gender but, given the choice, would rather do so in a more timid way, and/or without abandoning their party. And with Rice on the ticket the Republicans could attack Clinton or Obama with far less restraint.

By choosing Rice, McCain would shackle himself anew to Bush’s Iraq war. But it’s hard to see how those chains could get much tighter than he has already made them. Rice would fit nicely into McCain’s view of the war as worth fighting but, until Donald Rumsfeld’s exit from the Pentagon, fought clumsily. And it would be fairly easy to establish a story line that would cast Rice as having been less Bush’s enabler than a loyal subordinate who nevertheless pushed gently from within for a more reasonable, more diplomatic approach.

Rice is already fourth in line for the Presidency, and getting bumped up three places would be a shorter leap than any of the three Presidential candidates propose to make. It’s true that her record in office has been one of failure, from downgrading terrorism as a priority before 9/11 to ignoring the Israel-Palestine problem until (almost certainly) too late. But this does not seem to have done much damage to her popularity. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll taken when opposition to the Iraq war was approaching its height, she enjoyed a “favorable-unfavorable” rating of nearly two to one. The conservative rank and file likes her. Though she once described herself as “mildly pro-choice,” she is agile enough to complete the journey to mildly pro-life. And she is a preacher’s daughter.

Choosing Rice would be a trick. Her failures would be buried in an avalanche of positive publicity for a personal story as yet only vaguely known to the broad public. (One of the little girls who died in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing was her playmate? We didn’t know that!) But the trick would not be an entirely cynical one. Her ascension, though nowhere near as momentous a breakthrough as the election of Obama or Clinton, would be a breakthrough all the same. In this connection, a kind word for George W. Bush may be in order. By appointing first Colin Powell and then Rice to the most senior job in the Cabinet, a job of global scope, Bush changed the way millions of white Americans think about black public officials. This may turn out to the most positive legacy of his benighted Presidency. (New Yorker)

Our guy doesn't need teleprompters

"This country was built on the impossible"

When a conservative's a "radical"

New York Times:

Mike Huckabee signed a no-new-taxes pledge and campaigned on a (borderline-crackpot) tax plan to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and institute a national sales tax. Yet he found himself caricatured as a “Christian socialist” because he had raised gas taxes and cigarette taxes while governor of Arkansas. Merely acknowledging that some corporate chief executives might be overpaid and some working-class voters might be struggling was enough to get him dismissed by George Will as a “radical” who had supposedly repudiated “free trade, low taxes, the essential legitimacy of America’s corporate entities and the market system allocating wealth and opportunity.”

The conservative critics of Mr. McCain and Mr. Huckabee weren’t wrong on every issue. But in their zeal to read both candidates out of the conservative movement, often on the flimsiest of pretexts, the movement’s leaders raised a standard of ideological purity that not even Ronald Reagan could have lived up to.

Huckabee electrifies CPAC crowd

Fox News reports that Huck electrified the CPAC crowd:

If the loud audience reaction is an accurate indicator, then yes, Huckabee delivered today.

Hitting his mark, he emphasized the issues that resonated well with the several hundred cheering conservatives in the room:

Pro-traditional marriage, pro-life stance, border security, all Republican platform benchmarks, and with Huckabee’s argument for each, the audience roared with approval,and regular standing ovations.

Huckabee also took the opportunity to say that, despite McCain’s colossal lead in delegates, he had no plans to bow out.

“I know the pundits, and I know what they say, that the math doesn’t work out.Folks,I didn’t major in math,I majored in miracles, and I believe in those,” Huckabee said to cheers. “Am I quitting? Let’s get that settled right now. No, I’m not.” The crowd waved signs, and chanted: We like Mike… We like Mike.

Huckabee then concluded with a story from a supporter from Kentucky who had recently lost her house in the tornadoes that ravaged the South on Tuesday.

“Despite damage to her home there was one thing that was pretty remarkable,she had a Mike Huckabee yard sign..when the tornado had gone through,standing pristine, without a hint of damage, or even meaning,was that yard sign.”Huckabee continued.”Across America, everywhere there is still a vote to be cast, I am still standing.”

McCain nearly abandoned GOP

As reported by The Hill:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was close to leaving the Republican Party in 2001, weeks before then-Sen. Jim Jeffords (Vt.) famously announced his decision to become an Independent, according to former Democratic lawmakers who say they were involved in the discussions.

In interviews with The Hill this month, former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and ex-Rep. Tom Downey (D-N.Y.) said there were nearly two months of talks with the maverick lawmaker following an approach by John Weaver, McCain’s chief political strategist...

Daschle noted that McCain at that time was frustrated with the Bush administration as a result of his loss to George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican primary.

Daschle said that throughout April and May of 2001, he and McCain “had meetings and conversations on the floor and in his office, I think in mine as well, about how we would do it, what the conditions would be. We talked about committees and his seniority … [A lot of issues] were on the table.”