Most of the news I find interesting runs on Mondays for some reason. Usually Mondays are a bad day for news. Limited readership means limited ad dollars, smaller papers, and less news. That’s why Sunday papers are enormous. More subscribers means more ads and more space for news.

But really, I find the Monday news to be the most valuable, generally. I guess they have to be picky about what they run, so they run better stuff. Today is no exception.

The Washington Post’s Edsall and Goldfarb (that sounds like a small town law firm) have an interesting take on the decline of Democrat success over the last several election cycles. The basic argument is the Democrats are clustered together while Republicans are spread out. Combined with an increased tendency for party line voting, that dilutes the effectiveness of the Democrat vote nationally. It’s an interesting argument.

In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, about 40 percent of all House Democrats represented districts that voted for GOP presidential candidates. Many were in the South, where local Democratic politicians often disowned the “national” Democratic Party and many endorsed the GOP presidential nominee.

In the 1990s, the number of districts voting Republican for president but for a Democratic House candidate fell to a little more than 20 percent, and in this decade, down to 13 percent.

The fact that the Republican base is so widely cast actually makes GOTV a challenge. It’s much easier to go door-to-door and touch many voters when they’re a few steps away. That’s much more challenging when they’re miles apart. That contributes to GOP mastery of technologies like telemarketing, direct mail, and broadcast messaging. It’s also why our online operation was tied so effective to our offline efforts last year. Anything we can do to move an extra voter needs to be done. It’s one reason I have any confidence at all about our chances of keeping Congress come November.

Hoping to continue playing the race and gender card for political gain, the House Democrats released a study showing the Clinton had more diversity in his political appointees. Wow! The Democrats really do have an agenda to make America safer. I’m sure we’ll sleep like angels knowing that this is the crap House Democrats are spending our taxpayer dollars on. Keep up the good work, guys, and you’ll keep winning… Oh… wait…

Rep. Steny Hoyer takes a good long look at the public financing issue.

Prior to the 2004 election, the system all but guaranteed that the November outcome would rest largely on the appeal of the candidates and their platforms, not the size of their campaign treasuries. Because major party conventions were held within two or three weeks of one another, the nominees started with the exact same bankroll more or less at the same time.

That changed in 2004. To attract the widest possible audience, the Democratic Party scheduled its convention in late July, before the Summer Olympic Games began. In contrast, the Republican Party held its convention in the last week of August. The result was a six-week gap that forced Kerry to finance his campaign with public money while Bush continued to raise and spend money from private contributors.

Let me stress that I no more fault the Republican Party for scheduling its convention as late as it did than I do the Democratic Party for holding its convention in July. Each sought to avoid competing against the Olympics and with one another. But in my judgment, the timing of the conventions should not have had the effect of putting the candidate who was nominated first at a disadvantage.

Actually, the Democrats, figuring they had an advantage, picked the July date hoping the GOP would either a) go earlier or b) be forced to compete with the Olympics. The GOP, however, outsmarted the Democrats and chose to wait until nearly September to hold their convention. It had the unfortunate effect of forcing us to pay for a lot of convention overhead with general election funds, but it still left us ahead.

That also assumes that Kerry was at a disadvantage solely because of the timing. The fact is, Kerry’s was the first convention to get no bump (and in many cases actually scored a negative bump) for the candidate. They should have come out of the convention with momentum, and been able to ride it for a month. Instead, they came out of the convo with no momentum, and paired with the Summer of Swift Boats they were forced to endure because they tried to exploit John Kerry’s non-heroism, they squandered an opportunity.

The Wall Street Journal takes a look at Gore’s political ambitions for 2008.

In 2008, that could mean a once-unimaginable battle for Democrats’ nomination between Bill Clinton’s former vice president and his wife, Hillary Clinton. To some pro-Gore Democrats, worried about Mrs. Clinton’s electability, that is part of the appeal.

Hilary’s unelectability is part of the appeal for a Gore candidacy? How does that work? Hilary is too hated to win, so we’ll pick that guy that only our most rabid partisans could possibly believe will win? It’s that kind of thinking that makes you wonder about the Dems.

It’s Rumsfeld 2, Opposition 6. Two retired generals have come to the aid of the embattled Secretary of Defense. That’s one third the number that have called for his ouster, but still a far cry from the roughly 8,000 retired generals still alive.

8,000 retired generals? Can that be right? The media makes it sound like 6 is a huge number, but 6 out of 8,000 is pretty minimal, right? Yes, it is. Everywhere but in the media, that is. You have to love their ability to blow things out of proportion, huh?

Time Magazine keeps it in perspective, though. Joe Klein takes a look at the current efforts of Newt Gingrich.

It’s almost always a joy listening to Gingrich when he’s on a tear. And he’s almost always on a tear of some sort. I caught up with Newt as he wandered around New Hampshire last week, which is what people who think they’re running for President do. Please, God, no, you say. Not that angry guy again. “He’s probably carrying too much baggage to be President,” said Peter Bergin, a Republican state representative from Amherst, N.H. “But he sure is a terrific idea man. He needs to be part of the debate.”

A place in the debate is about all he’s likely to have. He’s probably one of the sharpest minds we have in the party. Unfortunately, he’s also almost entirely unelectable outside a GOP primary. GOP voters tend to be pragmatic when electing our nominee for President. We vote for the guy that’s closest to our beliefs, but still has a reasonable chance of winning. Newt’s there on the ideas, but has fav/unfav ratings slightly higher than Bush, but slightly lower than Satan.

On the subject of losers, Dick Morris has penned a column calling President Bush the Republican Jimmy Carter. I’ll take his word for it. If anyone would know something about the worst of both the GOP and the Dems, it would be Morris. The toe-sucking foot-fetishist was a low-demand Republican operative before becoming a senior advisor to Bill Clinton and getting caught in a scandal with a skanky prostitute.

Morris was able to get a paid gig writing occasional columns for the New York Post – the conservative media equivalent of the Weekly World News. If a douchebag like Morris tells you you’re fuqing up, you’re fuqing up.

I was talking to a friend and former colleague on the phone a few minutes ago and we discussed the increasingly vile depths to which the Democrats will sink in their quest for political victory. Specifically, we were discussing the fact that the Democrats seem to be spending more time looking into the operatives that work on campaigns, and are spending considerably less time trying to carry out policy debates or formulating sound strategies for solving the country’s ills.

A couple of days ago, I ran across a story about John McCain’s acquisition of Terry Nelson as a campaign advisor. Unlike most of the articles I had read about the deal, this one came from a blog. Unlike just about all of the other articles I had read, this one wasn’t very complimentary. In fact, it was downright hostile.

Two things struck me about this article. First, it greatly exaggerates the “crime” of which DeLay is accused and Terry’s role in it. Second, it fails to accurately capture the real world of campaign politics.

Terry’s situation with regard to the DeLay case falls into the jumbled morass of campaign finance laws. To erase the half-truths and outright lies of the left, let me explain the world of “legal money laundering” that existed in campaigns until the passage of BCRA.

Under the previous legal regime, parties were allowed to raise two types of money: federal and non-federal. They’re also referred to as hard dollars and soft dollars, or clean dollars and dirty dollars. It was a goofy system created in response to the abuses of the pre-Watergate era and rife for manipulation.
(Read more…)

The WaPo has a good little read on the dysfunction gripping the Republican Party.

Republicans insist they remain united around core principles of smaller government, lower taxes and a strong national defense, but can no longer agree on how to implement that philosophy and are squabbling over their delivery on those commitments.

For any elected GOPers who happen to be reading this, let me offer a few suggestions:

• 1 – Do not believe for a second that price controls and increased regulation make a better market
• 2 – A vote to raise the debt ceiling is a vote to grow government, not to shrink it.
• 3 – The National Endowment for the Arts is a joke. Kill it! Don’t increase its funding.
• 4 – There are two simple truths in life. Education is an issue best dealt with at the local level and some children will get left behind. Plumping the federal government won’t make it otherwise.
• 5 – Medicare was complicated enough. If your plan to reform it requires the creation of a Medicare Drug Plan Locator, it’s too damn complicated. People can’t program a VCR, what makes you think they can master this?

If your big argument is how best to institute a smaller government, you’re doing a pretty poor job.

Why not start with something simple like P.J. O’Rourke’s Law of Circumcision – you can take 10% off the top of anything and it will function just as well.

Start cutting, fellas.

The FEC has set March 16th as the date for a vote on FEC regulation of the Internet. The decision has been eagerly anticipated by the online political community.

I suspect what we’ll see is passage of regulations that exempt individual speech through a vehicle like blogs, but full reporting and disclosure of advertising run on the web, and payments to bloggers for consulting services, etc.

That’s the way it should be. No one is opposed to counting online advertising dollars. They should avoid any attempt to stifle discussion. That would be the net effect of forcing bloggers to report some or all of the cost of their site should they post a positive story. That would be unrealistic and terribly hard to enforce.