Aloha from the Big Island here in Hawaii. As I take an opportunity to surf the web, while looking at the surf, I am reading various post-mortem thoughts on yesterday’s election results. FR friend, radio host and columnist Hugh Hewitt has an outstanding analysis that is laid out in the form of a letter to the Governor. I will excerpt the beginning here, and give you the link to the whole thing on his excellent website, below.
There is no such thing as a fusion candidate, no such thing as a bipartisan campaign or a non-partisan issue, and come election night, there are just two parties, one at the GOP HQ and one at the Dem HQ. There’s a winners’ party and a losers’ party. Last night you were speaking to the losers’ party.
I didn’t go. Why bother? The polls had shown for a few days that only Prop 75 had a chance (the measure to stop public employee unions from deducting political dues from their members’ paychecks without prior authroization), and besides, most of your people aren’t my friends and colleagues from nearly 30 years around California politics. They are fine folks, to be sure, and I have run into them in many of the seminar rooms of the state’s hundred universities, but you have now run into the reality of California politics. The folks who don’t care much about politics, well, they really don’t care much about politics. They certainly can’t get you wins on their own. There aren’t enough of them.
As Nixon often remarked: You can’t win with just the conservatives, but you cannot win without them.
Your team told you that if you put enough bait on the hook, you’d get the troops to marching. While those that showed up no doubt dutifully voted for your four initiatives –and Prop 73, which would have required notice to parents when their teen daughter sought an abortion– the base most certainly did not march. The collective yawn was hard to miss.
Hugh’s great commentary goes on at length right here. I sure hope that someone from the Governor’s staff puts this particular note on the chair in his office!.
Jon
P.S. It is always tranquil here in the Hawaiian Islands, and I always enjoy glancing at the headlines in the local paper. Today, one of the cities on this Island is thinking about hiring a lobbyist to keep an eye on what the State Legislature here in Hawaii is doing that may impact them. That made me chuckle. Back there in California, at least you can all once-again turn on a television without being overwhelming with often-misleading political ads.