Lautenberg bulks up funds for '08 run (Tom Kean, Jr. not expected to run again)

With legislative races this year expected to do little to tilt the balance of power in Trenton, the hottest race in New Jersey could very well be the one for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Frank Lautenberg.

Although voters will not decide the race until November 2008, Lautenberg is filling his campaign treasury, with three fund-raisers down and others planned for Palm Beach, Fla.; Austin, Texas; Denver, and Los Angeles.

Tim Yehl, Lautenberg's chief of staff, expects the race to cost each candidate up to $15 million. That's bad news for Lautenberg, who loves being a senator but hates the fund-raising grind.

"The best part of the job is not the fund-raising," Lautenberg, in a recent interview, said dryly.

But Lautenberg will be hitting the road, like it or not, because the 33 Senate seats up for grabs next year will be extremely important to both parties. Democrats won a one-seat majority last year, and the 12 incumbent Democratic senators running next year will be doing their part to hold onto it.

For Lautenberg, who turned 83 on Jan. 23, that will mean turning back a Republican to be named later.

The most well-known likely Republican candidate, U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, took himself out of the running last month, signaling other Republicans they could start exploring a run.

U.S. Rep. Frank A. LoBiondo, a South Jersey Republican, seems unlikely to run, though he has been mentioned on the short list of possible candidates. But Bill Baroni, a moderate GOP assemblyman who keeps winning in a Democratic-leaning Mercer County district, is paying attention to party leaders who have asked him to at least think about it.

The problem with the Northeast is that the voters aren't given the option of a Conservative candidate. They're offered liberal rodents and liberal RINOs and we wonder why the voters choose the real deal. As for it spreading, you're going on the results of one election, a serious mistake with long-term analysis. Saying Missouri is getting more 'Rat is hillarious. The state is now more GOP than at any point since Reconstruction. Just because a phony rodent managed to put one over on a Republican state doesn't mean that will always hold true. And as for Ohio, it was corrupt and statist RINOs that caused the complete meltdown. The 'Rats will overreach there and things will return to normalcy soon enough.

Not that I necessarily object to RINOs running in hyper-Democrat districts, fine and dandy, but we need to take a good hard look at the fact that the erosion in many states is either due to RINOs themselves or gutless Conservatives failing to do what needs to be done. That's one of the main reasons, besides the usual historical cycle, that we lost Congress.

I also don't recall nearly losing the '04 Presidential race, either, despite the '00 outcome. I'm not sure what you propose to do in that instance, either. Nominating a RINO won't win you the election or get a wider percent of the vote.

I live on long island. we just had a special election here for a state senate seat. the republican was a pro-lifer, a woman. The Dem was backed by Spitzer, and ran a barrage of ads against the republican linking her pro-life position to opposition to stem cell research. she lost. the votes were simply not there.

we won the 2004 presedential election via a 65K vote swing in Ohio. analysis of the 2004 Presidential race showed the one thing Rove did extremely well - he maximized the vote of social conservatives for Bush. So what does this tell us? It tells us that with a maximum effort amongst social conservatives - the best we did in a Presidential election was a one state electoral win where a 65K vote swing would have otherwise elected a liberal from the northeast.

I am willing to listen to anyone who has ideas on how we can do BETTER then we did in 2004, and with which candidate. Hispanics went 69/31 Dem in 2006, Generation Y is running 58/42 Dem. Those two trends alone, how are we going to make up for that in the 2008 presidential election? we are running out of untapped pools of white evangelicals and social conservatives, where are we going to go to get votes?

OK, maybe Missouri was an "aberration" as you say. how about Virginia? how about the migration trends of people moving to the south and west, and bringing their politics with them? how about the Democratic pickups in governorships? All aberrations?

"I live on long island. we just had a special election here for a state senate seat. the republican was a pro-lifer, a woman. The Dem was backed by Spitzer, and ran a barrage of ads against the republican linking her pro-life position to opposition to stem cell research. she lost. the votes were simply not there."

I was following that race. I'm willing to venture a guess the spending for the 'Rat was quite lopsided over the Republican. Did the GOP exploit Spitzer's megalomania (i.e. "I'm a f*cking steamroller.") ? I'm guessing they didn't make hay with that. As with Congress, you have a statist majority party in addition to a Senate leader (Bruno) in serious trouble. None of those things are helping to keep (in this case) a historically GOP seat.

"we won the 2004 presedential election via a 65K vote swing in Ohio. analysis of the 2004 Presidential race showed the one thing Rove did extremely well - he maximized the vote of social conservatives for Bush. So what does this tell us? It tells us that with a maximum effort amongst social conservatives - the best we did in a Presidential election was a one state electoral win where a 65K vote swing would have otherwise elected a liberal from the northeast."

If you view it through the prism of one state, that's one way to put it. The fact that we managed to carry Ohio at a time when the state party was doing everything it could to ensure a LOSS was rather remarkable. Thanks to the likes of Taft and DeWine, that state very well could've delivered a GOP state to Lurch.

"I am willing to listen to anyone who has ideas on how we can do BETTER then we did in 2004, and with which candidate. Hispanics went 69/31 Dem in 2006, Generation Y is running 58/42 Dem. Those two trends alone, how are we going to make up for that in the 2008 presidential election? we are running out of untapped pools of white evangelicals and social conservatives, where are we going to go to get votes?"

The candidates I want aren't running. The lead candidates range from mediocre to ghastly. Rudy McRomney will lead us into a permanent sunset of the party. But as I said, what do you suggest ? If running one of those liberal RINOs is a solution, the Northeast would be chin deep in RINO legislative and Congressional majorities. That just won't work.

"OK, maybe Missouri was an "aberration" as you say. how about Virginia? how about the migration trends of people moving to the south and west, and bringing their politics with them? how about the Democratic pickups in governorships? All aberrations?"

Virginia (the Senate race) was the result largely because of a verbal gaffe on behalf of the incumbent that he was never able to recover from (but make no mistake, if that race were rerun today, Allen would win -- the new incumbent is, for lack of a better word, a lunatic, and has one-termer stamped all over him). The other complaint I heard was that his campaign foundered because he didn't adequately bring out the Conservatives (remember, despite the victory of Webb, the state House delegation is 8 GOP-3 'Rat, and we didn't lose a single House seat there). Yes, some people are bringing their politics with them from other states after crapping in their own nests, but that's not always the case. As for the 'Rat pickups in Governorships, aside from some here and there, many were not particularly surprising (it was more surprising that we failed to dislodge any weak 'Rat incumbents), and we still suffered the loss of only 1 incumbent in hyper-'Rat Maryland. Given the slaughter, it could've been worse. Simply put, this was a horrible election year. So was 1994 to the 'Rats. Things will swing back to us again, as long as we don't sell out our values. As I pointed out some time ago, it was the Republicans who lost, but not Conservatism, as many rodents ran on Conservative positions and platforms and even attempted to get to the right of the GOP (even if they had no intention of voting that way). My own state of TN, the only one that sent a new GOP Senator, featured a contest between the weakest imaginable RINO who got only a plurality of the vote in the primary against 2 Conservative candidates facing off against a Black Democrat who acted like he was to the right of Pat Robertson. The Black Dem lost only because he came from the biggest crime family in the state and because this state's GOP leanings dragged his unworthy RINO opponent's ass across the line.

You're right about Mike Ferguson and guns, which is part of the reason why I describe him as a "pro-life moderate" (he's also very liberal on environmental issues). But remember that Congressman Garrett is the only NJ Congressman over the past what, 30 years?, that has had a pro-gun voting record, and I don't think Garrett would do well in a statewide run.

Mike Ferguson's lifetime ACU rating is 76, which is second-highest in the delegation (to Garrett's 100) and is in the ballpark of that of several moderate-to-conservative GOP Senators, such as Gordon Smith, Ted Stevens, Lisa Murkowski, Voinovich, Gregg, Lugar and Coleman, and far better than the two Maine RINOs. I wish we could elect a NJ Senator even more conservative than Ferguson, but other than Steve Forbes (who has celebrity and major moolah on his side) I fear that we don't have a solid conservative who could win. Ferguson may just be the "right-most electable candidate" for the U.S. Senate from New Jersey, and he would be a huge step up from the Keans and Allens and Whitmans and Frankses and Zimmers that the RINOs keep pushing (and which can't win Senate elections).

But George Bush was running in 2004, and he is a "perfect" candidate on the social issues - abortion, gay marriage, 2nd amendment. And he's a religious man himself, a good family man.

the point is - that man, with a maximum turnout effort in 2004 amongst social conservatives - won by one state. He didn't win in a landslide, he won by one state.

Tell me how we do better then Bush 2004? Go further right? There aren't any untapped pools of voters further to the right, not that I see. So we have two choices:

- we can try to repeat the 2004 election model, but I'm telling you that two demographic trends are working against us for 2008 - Hispanics and Generation Y. We also have another drag on us in 2008, "Bush fatigue" - high negatives on iraq for example, are making independents less likely to vote republican. so we need some ideas on how to overcome that.

- we can try and get a candidate who can do better amongst independents, to whom the social issues are not paramount voting issues. The razor's edge - can we do that without alienating a larger portion of the base then we get from the middle.

It's worth pointing out that Bush received a whopping 11.6 million more votes in 2004 over 2000 (more than Reagan's increase of 10.6 million from '80 to '84). Only Richard Nixon from '68 to '72 netted a larger increase in the voter turnout. Kerry performed only 8 million above Gore. 2004 was still an extraordinarily polarizing election, egged on by the media hate and the plethora of BDS moonbats. Sadly, we're now in a phase where most of the states are "locked in" with whom they'll support in a Presidential election, and so now it's about maximizing your base supporters to make sure you carry those base states. For Republicans now, campaigning in states like NY or CA (or even IL) are exercises in futility. You might manage to carry a decent number of Congressional districts in those states, but the urban moonbat areas override the desires of the mainstream voters of the rest of those states.

I've had this discussion online over the past 9 years, how do we increase our share of the vote ? What do we do ? Well, firstly, whatever you do, you cannot afford to piss off the base, bedrock voters of the party. Trying a tack where you downplay certain issues (or nominate candidates that are obviously hostile to those issues that the base cares about), is a recipe for disaster. Will you pick up some more independent voters with those candidates ? Quite possibly, yes. But you will stand to lose far more base voters.

Let's look at Giuliani, for example. Giuliani is a social policy Democrat. How will the base react to his nomination ? Easy, it will cause a serious rift and depress turnout in a number of key states (such as mine, which is now a solid GOP state at the Presidential level), and cause a 3rd party Conservative candidate to rise. At best, you may increase support for him in some suburban areas in the Northeast, but what you'll lose elsewhere will be considerable.

As we know, we're in a very polarizing period, and there aren't any clear-cut answers as to how to move things more in our direction. I believe that we lost serious focus with our Congressional majority (indeed, it was my Senator that was the former Majority Leader, and I believed he was utterly incapable of performing the duties of that job) and we forgot WHY we were sent there in the first place. In a lot of ways, we lost our cajones with the first government shutdown under Clinton, scarcely a year into our majority. Had we stood up fully to him at that point, and unapologetically so, I believe we'd be at a different point today. Too much we've allowed the 'Rats to dictate to us, instead of the other way around, and now they're back in charge again. We need to stop acting like battered wives and take control of the agenda, and that includes the President. These folks are on the wrong side of the issues, and the President should use that effectively (just as Clinton did at a point where he looked like he was a one-termer, which reinvigorated his Presidency), but I'm not seeing that.

I should add, too, that I'm a Conservative first. I have no use for the party once it starts moving in a leftist, Democrat-lite (or heavy) direction. The country will similarly have no need for the party if it is a me-too party (witness that by the 1960s, absent the Goldwater Revolution, the party was on track to becoming a moribund one -- in fact, I doubt the party would've survived into the 1980s before a separate new Conservative party would pop up). I've always found it remarkable that after Conservative ideals are the winners in practice, the ideology that brings the most prosperity and freedom to the people, we're trying to move leftwards into an ideology that enslaves, restricts, and oppresses.

We need fearless people, unafraid to go into those "hostile" areas and say, "Hey, this is what I stand for, this is what I believe in, and this is what will make us a stronger and better nation." That's what Reagan did, and he carried areas of the country that are almost unimaginable today. It can be done again, with the right person. Bush has some personal liabilities in that he has never been a great communicator and doesn't have strong charisma. Sadly, for some, they need to see a person with those qualities before they support them, no matter what they stand for.

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