2022 Election
November 10, 2022 — Scott Johnson
In a perfect coda to the midterm elections, MSNBC is touting Senator-elect John Fetterman — his doctor said he was better, man — to run for president. It is an ingenious attempt to build a seamless transition from President Biden to the Democratic future. Fetterman should indeed be the face of the Democratic Party, or at least its neck. The future beckons. The possibilities are limitless. Unfortunately, we have plenty
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November 10, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Following up on Tuesday’s midterm elections President Biden held a press conference yesterday. Speaking in the style to which we have become accustomed in his dotage, he took a victory lap. The White House has posted the transcript here. The transcript reflects the usual lies, absurdities, and approximation (“obsessant,” “Biden is being apop- — apoc- –acop- — Biden is being extremist”). He’s going to keep on keeping on. One of
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November 10, 2022 — Scott Johnson
I have rethought this brief series in light of the downbeat events of this week. Rather than cancel it, I thought I might try to keep it in tune with the times. The first song that came to mind was Phil Ochs’s “No More Songs” from his bitter, ironically titled Greatest Hits (1970). It is the concluding track on the last studio album released before he ended his life in
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November 9, 2022 — John Hinderaker
A consensus is emerging among Republicans that it is time for Donald Trump to get off the stage and stop damaging his party and his country. It is reflected in tomorrow’s New York Post cover: In the same paper, John Podhoretz, never a Trump fan, writes: “Here’s how Donald Trump sabotaged the Republican midterms.” Trump’s record is bleak. Liberal fundraisers actually put money behind Trump-endorsed candidates in GOP primaries all
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November 9, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Just kidding. Out of the range of possible outcomes, what we saw last night was about as bad as it could be. The GOP’s failure to make progress stunned everyone, not least the Democrats. What happened? * Fantasy vs. Reality. It turns out that there are a great many voters who don’t care much about what traditionally have been considered decisive issues: inflation, crime, illegal immigration, lousy schools, etc. Many
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November 9, 2022 — Steven Hayward
There is no way to sugarcoat this pitiful Republican showing. What went wrong? For much of this year I had in the back of my mind the possibility that this mid-term could be a rerun of the 1978 midterm, when Republicans also underperformed in a very favorable political climate. Between Jimmy Carter’s sagging approval, rising inflation, and the flood tide of the tax revolt in the wake of Proposition 13 in
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November 9, 2022 — Scott Johnson
I offer just a few comments — ranging from personal self-evaluation to national results to the local Minnesota scene — on the fiasco this time. Here are my thoughts more or less in the order they occur to me with the results of a few races still in doubt: • I was pessimistic as usual, but I prefer to think of my pessimism as the higher realism. • I expected
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November 8, 2022 — John Hinderaker
As we wait for election results to begin coming in, this is a good time for a final set of predictions. Scott has said more than once that he is, by temperament, a pessimist. I balance that by being, for the most part, a hopeless optimist. You will see that reflected in my election forecast. U.S. Senate: GOP finishes the night with 55 senators. U.S. House: GOP picks up a
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November 8, 2022 — Steven Hayward
I got the Mathias Corvinus Collegium election night watch party off to a rousing start with a keynote talk about the American political landscape and the history of mid-term elections. It was standing room only—more than 200 highly motivated conservative students in the crowd—in the spacious and brightly designed Scruton Cafe that anchors the main MCC campus. Great food and drink after, but it’s getting late here and I need
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November 8, 2022 — Steven Hayward
So here it is. I’m down with the prediction that the GOP will net 26-35 House seats, and at least two in the Senate. Henry Olsen, a guest last week on our podcast, is out with his final predictions at the Washington Post. For those who aren’t subscribers, here are a couple highlights of his bullish predictions: Inflation, crime, progressive attempts at overreach and a general sense that President Biden
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November 8, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Bob Dylan seems to have written “When the Ship Comes In” after a hotel clerk insulted him for his shabby attire. So Joan Baez told Anthony Scaduto for his influential Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography (1972). Last year the University of Minnesota Press published transcripts of Scaduto’s interviews for the bio in The Dylan Tapes: Friends, Players, and Lovers Talkin’ Early Bob Dylan (2021). Most recently, Clinton Heylin refers to
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November 7, 2022 — John Hinderaker
It is not news that the Republicans’ share of black and Hispanic votes is rising, but the latest Wall Street Journal poll has some recent numbers: About 17% of Black voters said they would pick a Republican candidate for Congress over a Democrat in Journal polls both in late October and in August. That is a substantially larger share than the 8% of Black voters who voted for former President
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November 7, 2022 — Scott Johnson
The Washington Examiner expands on the video clip below in “Biden promises ‘no more drilling’ two days before crucial midterm elections.” Who ya gonna believe, Biden then or now? I go with neither, but that is a result of my intense antipathy to the man. He says anything to anybody unmodulated by what he said yesterday. One or the other of his contradictory statements probably obtains. On Twitter Matt Whitlock
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November 7, 2022 — Scott Johnson
On Friday NBC’s Today show reported a story bearing on the assault on Paul Pelosi. Within a few hours the network deep-sixed the story with the comment that “it did not meet NBC News reporting standards.” We posted the memory-holed story via Twitter and noted NBC’s retraction here. How did the story fail NBC News reporting standards? They didn’t say. The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi spoke to “people at the
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November 7, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Roll the tape back to early March of 2020, when the Democratic establishment closed ranks around Joe Biden after he had performed miserably in all of the early primaries. They managed to put Biden over the top in the South Carolina primary, and conveniently persuaded several competitors in the field to drop out and endorse him. The motive for this was transparent: it appeared that Bernie Sanders might run away
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November 6, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Yes indeed I am presently en route to Europe for a number of meetings in several different undisclosed locations to plot and scheme against the left, though my podcast co-conspirators John Yoo and Lucretia and I will surface briefly for a podcast recorded on location in Milan early next week. I do have one public event, however. I know Power Line has a handful of readers in Budapest, because one
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November 6, 2022 — Scott Johnson
President Biden said Friday during a speech in California on the CHIPS Act that coal plants cost too much money and that his administration will “be shutting these plants down all across America and having wind and solar.” Biden said he recently visited “the site of the largest old coal plant in America” in Massachusetts, which cost “too much money.” “No one is building new coal plants because they can’t
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