Posted on 04/30/2015 7:10:18 PM PDT by Daniel Clark
Campaign Canards: Dont fall for these electoral fallacies
by Daniel Clark
Now that candidates are officially entering the 2016 race, its only a matter of time before political pundits and historians start regurgitating every factoid, tidbit and dose of conventional wisdom theres ever been about presidential campaigns. Unfortunately, most of them will be wrong. In particular, here are some of the most stubborn electoral fallacies that we can expect to hear repeated over the next 18 months:
* The New Hampshire primary results are very important. From a fundraising standpoint, there may be some truth to that, but the idea that the First-in-the-Nation primary serves as a predictor of the nationwide outcome hasnt panned out over the years. True, a majority of the votes have been won by the eventual nominees, but many of those have been in races involving an incumbent president, or an otherwise prohibitive favorite. When nominations have been more hotly contested, the NH primary has been won by such losers as Democrats Edmund Muskie, Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas and Hillary Clinton, and Republicans Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and Pat Buchanan. John McCain actually carried the state by a greater margin in 2000, when he lost the nomination, than when he won it in 2008.
* A Republican candidate must run to the right in the primaries, and to the center during the general election campaign. In other words, he should misrepresent himself at least half of the time. This tactic is often attributed to Richard Nixon, who, to the contrary, won the presidency by attacking the 60s counterculture and accusing Hubert Humphrey of being soft on Communism. Our next two-term president, Ronald Reagan, was noted for his ideological consistency, and did not tailor his message to fit the political calendar. The best example of a candidate who did follow this advice was John McCain, who during the 08 primaries pandered to conservatives on border security with his laughable complete the danged fence ad. During the general election campaign, I will work with Democrats became his unofficial slogan. Howd that work out?
* Presidential debate performances are critical With few exceptions, the media will routinely claim that the Democrat won, and will cook up dubious polling results to prove it. Can you remember any Democrat who was actually a great debater, though? If youre old enough, you probably answered Walter Mondale. The former VP clearly won the first of his two debates with President Reagan, and he also performed very well in the debate that Reagan won. Had it been a World Cup qualifying aggregate goals series, Mondale would have been declared the winner, but what good did it do him? He probably would have carried Minnesota anyway. On the other hand, Al Gore was the worst debater of all time. In the 92 vice presidential debate, Dan Quayle hammered away at Bill Clinton all night long, and Gore never once piped up in his defense. In 2000, Gore set all-time presidential debating records for retractions, audible sighs, comical makeup jobs, mental instability and general creepiness. Yet he would have become president if only the Democrat toadies on the Floridian canvassing boards had continued their Carnac the Magnificent routine for 538 more ballots. G.W. Bush was a terrible debater himself, and so was Barack Obama, and each went on to become a two-term president.
* Howard Dean lost in 2004 because of his scream after the Iowa caucuses. Or, as a typical left-wing fruit bat would put it, the former Vermont governor lost because of his fictitious scream, which was fabricated by dastardly conservative radio hosts who feared his nomination. In truth, theres no doubt about the authenticity of his public unraveling, where the scream merely punctuated a harangue in which he randomly shouted the names of states he intended to carry. His deranged facial expression and wild gesticulations were reminiscent of Curly, in that Three Stooges episode where they sang Swingin the Alphabet (b-a-bay!, b-e-bee!). Moreover, this display was the result of his failed campaign, and not the cause of it. The reason Dean gave the speech was to keep his supporters spirits up after a devastating loss in Iowa. The media hype over his high-tech, youth-centered campaign had made him the favorite to win the nomination. In particular, he was thought to have an organizational advantage that would prove effective in a caucus format. His third-place finish in the Hawkeye State showed that to be illusory. The subsequent scream was not a turning point, but only an off-key swan song for a campaign that never was.
* The primary system lends itself to the nomination of extremists This canard is based on the belief that a candidate can only win his partys nomination by appealing to its base. In reality, the frontloading of open primary states on the electoral schedule gives a distinct advantage to so-called moderate candidates. This perverse arrangement allows members of one party to cross over and vote in the other partys primary. Thus, a Florida Democrat can have a say in who wins the GOP nomination, whereas a Pennsylvania Republican wont get to cast a ballot until the race is effectively over. This system only produces extreme nominees in that they are extremely mushy.
* A presidential nominee can be expected to pick one of his primary opponents as his running mate. Media speculation about the selection of a VP candidate usually swirls around the field of primary candidates, when more often, the nominee will go off the board and pick someone who wasnt running. If you look at the occasions in recent decades where primary opponents have paired up, its easy to see why it doesnt happen more often. Remember Bush accusing Reagan of practicing voodoo economics, or Biden saying that Obama wasnt ready to be president. Such unnecessary conflicts are easily avoided by picking a running mate from outside the primary race, like Quayle, Gore, Lieberman, Cheney, Palin or Ryan.
* Nixon employed a racist Southern Strategy to win in 1968, thereby magically transferring the Democrat Partys long history of racial oppression to the GOP. When confronted with their own partys past, liberals often respond with the phrase Southern Strategy as if they were declaring checkmate, but have you ever heard them explain what they mean by it? There was no initiative that Nixon called his Southern Strategy, nor did he fare all that well in the South. The racist was Democrat governor George Wallace of Alabama, who waged a segregationist third-party campaign against Nixon and Democrat nominee Humphrey. While Wallace and Humphrey divided the Democrat vote, Nixon carried the Republican strongholds in the West and Midwest, winning the election largely on the strength of California, Illinois and Ohio. The conventional wisdom, as told by liberal media and academia, is a total fabrication, as usual.
* Pat Buchanans 1992 convention speech caused George H.W. Bush to lose his reelection bid. Its unlikely enough that a sitting president was rejected because of controversial remarks from his chief detractor, but Buchanan absolutely did not call for a religious war in America, as he would later be accused of doing. He simply acknowledged one that was already going on. It is a cultural war, he added, as critical to the kind of a nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. Thats so plainly true as to be uncontroversial, which may be why his speech was well received, contrary to revisionist fantasy. If any speech at that convention was a disaster, it was First Lady Barbara Bushs family values speech, in which she undermined the whole event by nonjudgmentally blathering, However you define family, thats what we mean by family values. Of course, the only person really at fault for President Bushs defeat was himself, for his willingness to compromise with the Democrats on the largest tax hike to that point in American history.
* America wasnt ready for a female vice president in 1984 Anybody could see that Walter Mondale was not going to unseat incumbent president Reagan. How convenient, then, that he would pick obscure House member Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate. If America wasnt ready for a female VP, then Mondales inevitable crushing defeat would demonstrate that he and his party were superior to America, wouldnt it? It naturally follows that he might have won, if only hed stooped to the same level as those morally inferior American voters. In reality, the voters of 49 states rejected him, not her. The man represented a return to the Carter years, after all. If there was anything for which America wasnt ready, that was it.
* We needed Carter in order to get Reagan If nobody ever remembers anything else about the 70s, we should remember that there was absolutely no need for America to experience the tragedy that was President James Earl Carter. The common rationalization is that the Reagan presidency only happened as a reaction to Carter, and therefore that victory in the Cold War and the economic boom of the 80s were the indirect results of four years of malaise and defeatism. The fact of the matter is that we could have had Reagan in 1976, when he almost beat incumbent president Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination. Carter only defeated Ford 50 percent to 48, in spite of Fords having to carry Nixons baggage, the controversy of his having pardoned Nixon, and his shocking obliviousness to Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Reagan would almost certainly have defeated Carter in 76, just as he did in 80. For the last time, we did not need Jimmy Carter. He is the single most unnecessary person in American political history.
* In 2008, Barack Obama promised to fundamentally transform America, announced his intention to spread the wealth, deployed truth squads of sympathetic prosecutors and law enforcement officials to threaten his critics with unspecified punishments, apologized for America and declared himself a citizen of the world during a speech in Germany, and publicly joked about himself being a Communist, yet was still elected president. Actually, this one is true. Sorry.
-- Daniel Clark is a writer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author and editor of a web publication called The Shinbone: The Frontier of the Free Press, where he also publishes a seasonal sports digest as The College Football Czar.
If only Reagan had defeated Carter. No D of Ed or Energy and a longer boom with a smaller government.
DoEd was enacted by Carter NOT Reagan.... Reagan was not the candidate in 1976 if you remember
Right, I know. I meant if Ford had lost to Reagan and Reagan beat Carter. Therefore, under my alternate history: No DOEd or DOEnergy. Plus, a much smaller government, no abandonment of the Shah, and no dumb energy policies.
Democrats can’t run a country, state, county, city or village.
Good article, but nothing can explain or forgive the re-election of Barack “miserable failure” Obama.
Greed,fraud, and stupidity are enough.
I can’t forgive it but I can explain it. The Obama campaign out-fundraised and out-”get out the vote(d)” the Romney campaign. The Obama campaign raised $715,677,692 (the most for any candidate, ever) and the Romney campaign raised $446,135,997.
I’m shocked at those fundraising numbers. You’d think that’d be the one area where Romney would have excelled.
Oh well, he probably was proud he played nice.
This is why I loved what Rand Paul said about would Debbie Wasserman Schultz be OK with aborting “a seven pound baby”. It was just graphic and brutal and I loved it.
Tired of fielding the nice guys as our team.
Greed, Self Interest and STUPIDITY are all that is needed to explain that.
Yeah, they destroyed Romney particularly in the use of the Internet to raise money and with money you can mount a massive “get out the vote” drive, Plus five million registered Republicans stayed home in 2012, That can NEVER be allowed to happen again,
How do you propose to fix it, outside nominating someone who can electrify the base?
Quite frankly I also blame Chris Christie for Obama’s re-election. That big hug he gave him after Sandy is something I’ll never forgive him for.
Got it.....my mind is easily confused and I do enjoy alternate bits of the universe.
And let’s not forget one more idiotic fallacy that just will not die. Republican governors DO NOT deliver electoral votes. The pubs had CA, NY, PA, NJ, WI, MI,IL after the 1994 election and not one of those states went Republican in 1996. R governors were in charge in PA, WI, OH, FL,VA,NV,NM,IA, etc. in 2012 and none went republican. The list goes on and on. Political junkies are as detached from reality as so many other professions that they just buy into the conventional wisdom and don’t bother to look around to see how things really are. Every four years you see the article about so and so’s “secret weapon the governor mansions”
BINGO!
Neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney “electrified” the conservative base since both were centrist Republicans and the base is to the right of both of them.
John McCain said of Obama: “I have to tell you. Sen. Obama is a decent person and a person you dont have to be scared of as president of the United States...” “He’s a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign’s all about.”
And the differences between “romneycare” in Massachusetts and Obamacare were perceived of as negligible by the general public.
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