Posted on 10/09/2010 1:51:46 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
SAN FRANCISCO—After Carly Fiorina won California's GOP primary in June, conventional wisdom held she would go after incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer as many Republicans have before: by tacking toward the center to lure voters beyond the conservative base.
Instead, Ms. Fiorina has made a bold and possibly risky bet that pivotal undecided swing voters care more about the economy than social issues and are disenchanted with Washington.
So, she is hewing to conservative stands on immigration and social issues, such as abortion and gay marriage, while working to shift the debate to fixing the state's economy.
"We are going to continue to talk to voters about what they care about, which is the economy," Ms. Fiorina said in an interview this past week, adding that many of her recent events have been targeted to independents and disaffected Democrats.
It is a gamble because Ms. Fiorina needs independents to win. Republicans have fallen to 30.9% of registered California voters from 35.6% in 1998, state figures show, while Democrats went to 44.3% from 46.7%. In the middle are 20.2% with no affiliation, up sharply from 12.6%.
That constitutes a huge swing vote, which tends to gravitate to moderates from either party.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
I wish Fiorina every bit of luck that she didn’t have at Lucent....
Good. I think that even in California this will appeal more to the voters—especially this year, than more of that Arnie “Me too” cr*p.
NO, WSJ, Carly remaining conservative is NOT a “gamble!” Juan McCain sought to appeal to “moderates and undecideds”—in other words, empty headed, spineless know-nothings whose vote depended upon the most recently viewed CNN broadcast. Didn’t the strategy of attacking the conservative base while bending over for the politically correct work out WELL for Juan??!! Fiorina is doing PRECISELY the right thing to get elected-—tell the TRUTH, appeal to the conservative MAJORITY in the US and DON’T play the RINO republican weasel games of the parties limp-wristed elites.
I’d vote for OJ Simpson before I cast a vote for Boxer.
I agree....however we seem to have a population that doesn’t work that way.
Good. I’m pleasantly surprised. And we have to pitch Boxer out.
Remember how close Bill Simon came to knocking out Grey Davis when the polls said it would be a blowout?
This is definitely encouraging. A neophyte politician with a business background running as a conservative in a liberal state and not shying away from her conservative principles. I expect a Republican win in the California senate race and if Carly Fiorina and other GOP candidates running as honest conservatives remain committed to those principles once in office (never a sure bet) this county may have a prayer of surviving under the onslaught of Obama and the socialist ‘liberals’ attempting to destroy it.
What we have are some killer issues and they must be pushed hard.
Issue #1 is JOBS ~ with no jobs even the illegal aliens have a stake in the outcome of this election, and it's pretty obvious Barbara Boxer simply does not care. This is a color-blind, sex-blind, ethnicity-blind, class-blind question in California.
Issue #2 is HOUSING ~ Californians have had boom/bust cycles in housing before ~ over and over ~ but this time it's different. With declining population those empty acres are NOT going to be filled any time soon. It's pretty obvious, again, that Boxer doesn't care. She's a Barney Frank girl ~ but this time all the bucks are going to the East Coast to sustain Detroit's slums, Florida's condos, and windfarms in Cape Cod. (At least you can say that, and it does sound rather euphonious eh).
Given a choice between dithering and incompetency on the part of the do-nothing Democrats, or a clear-cut standard regarding economic sanity on the part of the Republicans, I think ALL California voters know what to do.
Finally a republican that just might have a clue about what it is to be a republican. But we’ll see how she hangs in there.
She might want to respond to Boxer’s charge of outsourcing 30,000 jobs from HP. She needs to pound Boxer on creating the business friendly atmosphere in California that makes the state 48th worst on the list for businesses. Boxer passed law after law making it nearly impossible for businesses to operate profitably in the state. Boxer and her partners in crime caused those outsourced jobs. In the 18 years since Boxer has been penalizing businesses, how many companies and corporations have outsourced themselves in total, moving to North Carolina and other places to escape the intolerably poisonous business atmosphere in California. How many jobs in total has Boxer outsourced. Added to the 30k she ascribes to Fiorina, the number must be in the millions. Have someone tally the numbers and hammer Boxer relentlessly with this message. Find some of the CEO’s in new states and interview them.
Outsource Boxer.
Many of the things the Democrats propose are, logically speaking, either good or not good. If they are good, they should be supported as much as possible. If they are bad, they should be opposed completely, on that basis. If it's unclear whether a proposal would be good or bad, it might be worthwhile to attempt a limited-scope pilot version of it, but the program should be allowed all the funding it might need to achieve its limited objective, such that a failure cannot be attributed to the pilot's program not having as much funding, in relative terms, as would be available in a full-scale program.
Unfortunately, the usual "moderate" program is to concede that programs might be a good thing, but to constrain their funding to the point that failure can be blamed on the funding constraint. Such constraints do nothing to stop the destruction caused by such programs, and arguably don't even really slow it down (since the program's failure will be rewarded with increased funding).
I wish there were some way to convince politicians that in many cases a "compromise" position will be a guaranteed-loss proposition. (To use a poker analogy, when you don't have the best hand: fold and you'll cut your losses; bet and you may increase your losses, but you might win. Call and your chance of winning will be no better than if you fold, but your losses will be greater. Call may be a "compromise" between betting and folding, but it represents the worst of both).
Reminds me of people saying that Voters should vote their self interests. What the heck does that mean?
If you vote to have a Politician steal money from another Citizen so you can have it, that might serve your self interest, but it does the opposite to the person being targeted by the thieving Politician.
Empathy has no place in Law in a Free Society.
I am speaking in generalities here BTW.
It would cost $XYZ.NN per annum to run the call center project nationwide.
The dollar value was sufficiently high that it had to be reviewed and approved by the Board of Governors.
For a number of reasons the Board decided that the amount of money invested in this should be cut substantially from management's request AND at the same time, the amount of call center service provided should also be cut.
Alas, this project was one of a class where you either do it, or you don't do it. There were no compromises since it was a nationwide system, and the "services to be provided" were pretty much customer driven ~ customer calls, asks ABC, center matches up ABC, with CBA, work takes place. Customers could not logically be told to ONLY BRING ISSUES AB to the call center ~ No C's please.
Management tried a couple of times to drag the project back before the Board but their minds were shut tight like a welded steel drum. The only solution was to simply drop the idea, shut down the test bed operations, and lay off a bunch of people.
This can happen in every large organization where you have people who imagine that all processes are analog ~ some are quantum! The more complex they become the more likely they are to be "quantum" or "take the whole thing or leave the whole thing" in nature.
Congress does not, to my understanding, have a single member who understands quantum processes. People who believe in "reach arounds" and "compromise" are not fit to evaluate such matters anyway.
Even if one ignores questions of Constitutionality, from a purely pragmatic perspective the common behavior of moderates makes no sense. Regardless of whether the proposed program would have been good or bad by practically any measure, supporting a program while constraining its funding below what would arguably be required for it to work means that money will be wasted on a program that won’t work, while granting political ammunition to those who were supporting it.
Strategically, her plan is perfect. This is an off-year election (i.e., mid-term) and turnout will be light. But if any side can fire up their base, they have a HUGH (or Hugo) advantage, as their base will be disproportionally represented. For the Dems, there’s no hope in firing up their base - their only real hope was that the Republicans would play to the center and also not fire up their own base, but it looks like Carly figured out what’s needed to win.
Time to go for the RAT’s jugular; every RAT running for office down to dog catcher. Expose their dirt, expose their arrogance, expose their votes against the American people, expose their corruption, expose everything in their dirty backroom deals and under-the-table scams.
Global warming, cap and trade, DREAM act... I’d say she flew far left of “middle of the road.”
She’s almost as conservative as John McCain.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.