Now that my pampered first world lifestyle is no longer dependent on the backup generators next door, I find myself thinking about one of my (many) favorite subjects: Southern politics. I seem to remember a meme taking hold in the fallout from the 2008 election to the effect that the GOP would forever be relegated to the status of the regional party of the South. This is of course demonstrably false, but I have to wonder what will happen to this stronghold of Republican support in the near future. It would be interesting to speculate on what the South's place within the Republican coalition as the political climate shifts.

As I look across today's political landscape, I can't help but notice that of the major figures within the party today, fewer than one might expect come from the South. When I look at Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Scott Walker and Sarah Palin, it occurs to me that the axis of Republican politics may be shifting away from the South. I will leave it to you to figure whether Ron Paul and Rick Perry should be included in the South; I have known Texans to be somewhat touchy on the question as to whether they are Southern or Western. Even as a Virginian, I have difficulty including my Governor, who, despite policy successes, has not attained the "name - rec" status of some Northern Republicans.

Anyhow, none of us can see far ahead into the future, so it would be grandiose to proclaim the coming geographic realignment of the Republican Party base. I just think it should be pointed out that, save Eric Cantor and Jim DeMint--important figures to be sure--there aren't as many Southern leaders in the GOP coalition as there once were. Granted, there have been important non-Southerners in the GOP since Southern realignment--Bob Dole, Dennis Hastert, and Henry Hyde--but the GOP's association with the South has become almost unshakeable. Can anyone think of any other dynamic Southerners in the GOP? Let me know of any obvious omissions. And, more importantly, has populist conservatism become such a fixture of the national political landscape, for the moment at least, that Southern identity is less important? (I would also like to point out that for the sake of a common frame of reference, I am using the so-called "11 state South" definition)

I find it harder and harder to be surprised by this kind of thing anymore (h/t Hotair):

Under AB 889, household “employers” (aka “parents”) who hire a babysitter on a Friday night will be legally obligated to pay at least minimum wage to any sitter over the age of 18 (unless it is a family member), provide a substitute caregiver every two hours to cover rest and meal breaks, in addition to workers' compensation coverage, overtime pay, and a meticulously calculated timecard/paycheck.

This nonsense is precisely the kind of stuff that I would make an insane joke about with a flair of "like that would ever happen." Is there nothing that California won't regulate? To ask the question is to imply the answer. What I'm wondering is if I'm entitled to benefits from the neighbors whose lawn I used to mow when I was in high school. Then again, I probably shouldn't give these guys any more ideas.

Update: As I have now learned, the bill does not regulate the hiring of babysitters who are still minors, a practice that is not uncommon where I grew up. Nevertheless, the potential for overreach is great.

No stranger to embarrassing disclosures and revelations, the federal Justice Department recently saw the failed 'gunwalking' stings of Operation Fast and Furious end up at the top of Google's News Search when the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms chief and the U.S. Attorney for Arizona resigned 'amid fast and furious uproar' and a rapidly expanding internal investigation. 

At first glance, 'gunwalking' is a loopy scandal about incompetent operatives hoping to discover key players in a gun-trafficking ring in Arizona by observing "straw purchasers" buy assault weapons on behalf of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico and then...doing nothing. Some of these weapons were traced to the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent last year. It is clear that incompetence has had fatal consequences, particularly because Mexican drug cartels can now personally thank the U.S. government for acting as accessories to weapons purchases that evade tough Mexican gun control laws. As a DoJ employee recently pointed out, Operation Fast and Furious has become a 'Perfect Storm of Idiocy.'

But gunwalking has had me thinking about our role in the larger Mexican drug conflict. It is clear that Mexico's 'war on drugs' is turning the border regions into something out of Afghanistan or Somalia. It is also clear that constantly escalating violence threatens to wipe out Mexico's civic fabric, and--let's face it--create a failed state out of our neighbor.  It seems beyond tragic, however, that arms fueling death and destruction in Mexico often originate in the U.S., and that our Second Amendment rights are being exploited by narco-terrorists in Mexico.

How can we best tackle this problem?  Whatever the U.S. government is doing right now isn't working. 

Check out this excellent profile of Florida Senator, (and to some people, potential next Vice President of the United States), Marco Rubio. The writer, Cal Thomas, asks us to consider Senator Rubio's recent Reagan Library speech:

The right philosophy is key and the Reagan Library speech proves that Rubio has the most important ingredient of any leader: vision. Read it, be inspired and then consider whether Rubio's tide is rising.

So what are y'all's thoughts? Is Marco Rubio ready? Should he simply wait to be part of the very exciting "class of 2016" that we keep hearing about [which could include names such as Sen. John Thune (SD), Gov. Chris Christie (NJ), Gov. Bobby Jindal (LA), and Rep. Paul Ryan (WI)]? What, if anything, can he do to separate himself from the problem that then-candidate Obama had to face concerning his lack of experience? Will it be enough to have the political philosophy down, or must he also be able to point to tangible results?

According to the White House, it's all about Obama:

After weeks of internal debate, White House officials adopted the communications documents to shape public events and official statements, and they sought to strike a delicate balance between messages designed for these two very important but very different audiences on a day when the world’s attention will be focused on President Obama, his leadership team and his nation.

I think the fact that they say it is his nation speaks volumes.  You do not own this country Mr. President, it is a country made by the people, for the people.

I was sitting in my 7th grade homeroom when we heard the news of the planes hitting the twin towers.  I imagine everyone old enough remembers exactly where they were and the emotions they felt, and none were about a community organizer in Chicago.  9/11 is about the thousands of lives lost on that tragic day. Despite the tragedy America still stood strong and did not cower to terrorism and threats to the American Dream of a constitutional republic.  Shame on you and your staff for trying to declare it as a day about you, your leadership team, and 'your nation'.  It has absolutely nothing to do with you.

Reelection odds are generally pretty good for a sitting president. It is no mistake that since WWII the only sitting presidents to lose reelection were Carter and Bush 41; even presidents who are suffering at the polls and who are dealing with major political crises stand better than even odds of getting reelected.That is why some, particularly on the left, have casually dismissed the idea that President Obama, even with very his poor polling, is in danger of actually losing his reelection bid.

But recent evidence from the always-reliable Gallup poll suggests that president Obama's disapproval rate may, in fact, almost preclude a victory next year. President Obama's weekly average approval rating now hovers around 40%, a rating that includes several days worth of sub 40 numbers and a general trend that shows no sign of improving, at least in the short term. Baring any sort of major economic recovery in the very near future, or another major overseas success that we haven't yet considered (unfortunately for the president, you can only assassinate Bin Laden once) this is the reality that we will be dealing with between now and the election. Since 1960, there is only one example of a president who's approval rating changed dramatically in the last year of his presidency, and that is the aforementioned Bush I, whose once high approval rating—which was bolstered by a roaring victory in the Gulf War—plummeted because of the ongoing pain of recession and a reversal on his much ballyhooed insistence on not raising taxes. Realistically, the only major fluctuations in polling from about a year out is between 5%-8%, giving us a viable range of what we could be looking at from President Obama in the next year or so.

This brings me to a rather prescient post by Nate Silver from earlier this year about calculating reelection odds looking just at Gallup Poll approval ratings. Silver:

What does this mean for Barack Obama? Right now, we’re still in the period where the most useful number for estimating his re-election chances is not his approval rating but rather the historical track record of incumbent presidents. As I wrote on Wednesday, since the Civil War, 73 percent of incumbent presidents who sought another term won, as have 70 percent since World War II. Plugging Mr. Obama’s current numbers into the regression model that I described above yields a 65 percent likelihood of re-election — but again, this is a really rough guess, based mostly on the high historical batting average for incumbents rather than anything to do with Mr. Obama himself.

What we can say is important is the range in which Mr. Obama’s approval ratings have been varying in recent months: between about 45 and about 50 percent. If Mr. Obama’s approval rating is at the top of that range, 50 percent, on Nov. 6, 2012 — about where it is now — the model figures that his chances of winning re-election will be greater than 80 percent. But if his approval rating is at the bottom of the range instead, at 45 percent, his chances for a second term will be only about one in three, and he’ll have to hope that the Republican nominee is a weak one.

Read the whole thing, but I want pay special attention to Silver's use of logistic regression modeling to predict overall reelection odds. What he finds is not terribly surprising in and of itself; one would certainly like to believe that the public approval of a president at least vaugely played some role in his potential for reelection. What this method does discover that is remarkable is the gigantic difference between very similar approval ratings. Silver, trying to predict reelection, comes up with this helpful graphic to better grasp the nuance of what is being said here; minute differences in approval rating over time have a great predictive power in assessing the likelihood of reelection.

Suffice it to say, his current 40% approval rating about 14 months away from the election puts his reelection odds right around 40%. What is even more significant is that his reelection odds absolutely tank in the ensuing months. The widest 5 point gap is between 40% and 45% right up until the election, where 45% approval odds drops precipitously.

The reason statistical persons like to use metrics like the "approval rating" system created by Gallup over 70 years ago is that, frankly, it works well. This observation about the relationship between approval rating and the outcome of reelection campaigns is hardly a controversial one; the fact remains that since the political realignment that took place in the mid 60s to the early 70s, not a single sitting president has won reelection with a Gallup approval rating below 50% a year before the election. Certainly, the concept of "approval" is nebulous and undefined, but this is one of the reasons, interestingly enough, it is as good a predictor as it is. The reason people use the Gallup poll is because the question is beautiful in its simplicity and continuity; they have been using the exact same wording for the question since its inception, allowing a perfect comparison from day to day and year to year. Because "approval" is left undefined, we know people will generally interpret this very differently; disaffected supports can "disapprove" of a president for not taking the extreme ideological route they had hoped he would take, but they would never consider voting for the other guy given their ideological bent. So it is not a one-to-one stand in for voting; what it does capture, however, is the broad change in public opinion on the president, and however silly it sounds, the difference between a 45% approval rating and a 50% approval rating for reelection odds is rather large.

The overall impact of his declining approval rating may end up snowballing on the current president. There is ample evidence to suggest that a President with lower approval ratings end up getting fewer things done legislatively and, therefore, lives and dies on the vitality of the economy. Given the current state of the economy, I would venture to guess that this presidency may, in fact, be only for a single term. Later, I will explore various economic models of predicting presidential reelection, and try to find something that incorporates both economic data, popularity, and other exogenous factors.

Greetings to the Ricochet Community! 

The "national conversation" on education today included the Associated Press's cheerful reporting on the reversal of societal norms by parents who 'unschool' their children(read ultra-progressive homeschooling by 'learning through living'). This generated enough of a buzz that the Washington Post, when printing this article, excitedly proclaimed that 'unschooled' children "take the teacher's seat."

While the Post's strange new respect for homeschooling--no longer solely the provenance of those antisocial know-nothing religious weirdos-- is heartwarming, I was nevertheless skeptical. Unschooling seemed to be the latest product of our obnoxious culture of indulging children's "authentic" desires and drives instead of instilling timeless principles and values, excessively emphasizing that they"question authority," and sacrificing knowledge in exchange for idiotic slogans and buzzwords. Unlike homeschooling, which emphasizes parents' roles as teachers, unschooling emphasizes "facilitation." Which of course means encouraging your children to do whatever they want. If reading is not interesting, no problem. Watch a video instead. If kids are not coming to class "juiced to learn U.S. history," why bother with it at all? Keeping your child satisfied is clearly more important than teaching citizenship or cultivating a love for our country. Uninterested in science? Self-actualize in a redwood grove, though that probably won't help you acquire hard skills that will let you excel as an engineer, doctor, or scientist. 

Unschooling forgets two important things. Some things are necessary, even if they are not fun. And children don't know enough to be fully entrusted with their own education. If they did, we would let them vote. 

But on the other hand, unschooling doesn't seem as stupid at second glance. Kids don't seem to have trouble keeping up with their classroom peers on standardized tests and evaluations(though that doesn't mean much in the era of dumbed-down standards). And our public schools seem more and more to be 'unschools' devoid of adequate instruction. While California's students fall further and further behind in math, science, and English, our legislature comes up with a brilliant solution. Heretofore, history books in California schools must include "the contributions of LGBTQ individuals" throughout our history. Never mind that no one knows for sure if any meaningful figure of American history before 1950 was gay. Surely the most bizarre 'unschooling' curriculum could do no worse for its student. And there is some merit to gaining practical 'unschooled' experience in business or science as a method of awakening interest. 

So, thoughts on 'unschooling'?

I just read this editorial from the NYT. Not only does it entirely repaint President Obama's conduct before Libyan intervention (non-commital, hesitant, etc), but it reaffirms a never ceasing commitment of the left to international organizations. The Times' reaction to the weaknesses of NATO (which certainly exist, but we cannot forget that it was Europe who lead on this issue) is a call for pouring more resources into a structural flawed system. Instead, the difficulties surrounding Libya should reaffirm the necessity of American hegemony. But that probably won't end up in the Times soon...

I'm delighted to contribute here, and thought I'd begin a conversation about one of the most interesting truths of modern politics.

With few exceptions, the same people find themselves glaring at each other from opposite sides of almost every issue. Writers like Sowell, Kirk and Niebuhr have made the argument that there is a certain kind of "root" idea or set of ideas that form the assumptions for the political framework of our modern polity.

What are those root ideas that underpin the two fundamental -- almost "archetypical" -- political perspectives?

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 29% of Likely U.S. Voters believe the president is doing a good or an excellent job on the economy. That’s down from 30% in each of the last two weeks, down from 36% three weeks ago and the lowest ratings on the economy yet recorded for this president.

(You can find the entire summary of this recent survey here.)

However, recent Public Policy Polling polls show Obama tied with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, and ahead of all the other Republican candidates in the current GOP field. The question is this: what do the Republicans have to do to take the White House next November? Will it be enough to merely focus on the economy? If so, what factors are going to push the Republican nominee past President Obama next November? If not, what strategies must the Republican nominee employ if he/she is going to win?

On college campuses student government affects the lives of students more directly than municipal, state, or federal government. At the University of Wisconsin the student government is controlled by students with strong, progressive, liberal ideology. As good conservatives we always preach about local control and local governing, but why does it always seem the most simple forms of governments, e.g., school boards, city councils, planning commissions, etc. are controlled by the left? Do conservative candidates frequently lose at these lower level positions, are liberals better at governing local, or are we just missing the boat altogether? Your thoughts are appreciated.

As happy as I am to start participating here at Ricochet, my first contribution will be of a rather different nature than I had originally intended. As I am situated in the Tidewater of eastern Virginia, a rather nasty little lady named Irene has necessitated that I evacuate further inland. I have spent the past few days several miles to the west of Williamsburg in rural Charles City, Virginia, where I have been without power, internet, or reliable indoor plumbing, so this little sojourn to a Starbucks has been my first access to internet for a while. We're still in hurricane cleanup mode out here, but I just decided to chime in and let you all know that I do, in fact, exist. I will begin contributing more regularly and more topically when I return to Williamsburg probably sometime early tomorrow afternoon.

After a year of college, riddled with Keynesian economics, moral relativism, and revisionist history, the question "Why am I here?" is a logical one for any conservative.

Sure, there are the clear advantages to a college degree, from the job opportunities to the social environment (as well as getting to write for the College Feed!). But, in today's economy, a college degree is far from a guarantee for a job and even though I love the camaraderie at school, eight years of tuition is a really expensive tab for jello shots.

There is a lack of "higher" ideas in American higher education. The point of a liberal arts education is to train young adults for the responsibilities of being a free individual. This doesn't mean have a working knowledge of Milton or the ability to pick out constellations, but rather a grounding in the moral and objective truths which define the West.

Unfortunately, American academia, through loose requisites and an utter embrace (as Allan Bloom so conclusively displayed) of relativism, has turned higher education into a shopping mall, wherein students jump from class to class, worldview to worldview, truth to truth, ultimately reinforcing a surrounding narrative covertly founded in nihilism.

Many universities, though, possess the opportunities and resources where a true liberal arts education can be found. It's a difficult balance and expedition, but a possible and redeeming one if discovered. Nevertheless, this is a burdensome onus that befalls only students, punished for their adherence and commitment to higher values.

So, why college? I'm not entirely sure. At the end of the day, examining the academic culture around me, I think its most important role will be to push me to ask the right questions - even if the school doesn't choose to recognize the answers.

Here's a question that has been on my mind. It was articulated recently by both Jon Huntsman and Paul Krugman, and is a frightening prospect.

Is the Republican party becoming the anti-science party?

As Huntsman said:

The minute that the Republican Party becomes the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012.... I can't remember a time in our history where we actually were willing to shun science and become a party that was antithetical to science. I'm not sure that's good for our future, and it's not a winning formula.

Thoughts?

I was in Austin, TX sitting down to a little Saturday morning breakfast and picked up the paper to see this Austin Chronicle's ad staring me in the face:

If they are willing to sink to this level, at least be consistent.  Investigate if there are people who have Obama-Ayers/Wright stories, did cocaine with him, saw his grades in college, have a copy of a paper he wrote, etc.

The media seems far more interested in who Rick has slept with, and considering they are offering cash rewards I bet they have already received more fictitious stories than they know what to do with.

To all the college students out there, I guess this is a reminder to keep your noses clean, because someday people might pay to see how dirty it was.

It’s never been fashionable to hold right-of-center political convictions on most college campuses.  In fact, academia is often downright hostile to conservative thought.  Which is where Ricochet’s College Feed comes in.  The purpose of the College Feed is threefold:

1. To provide a meeting place where right-of-center college students can connect with others who share similar political outlooks and world views
2. To create a space in which young conservatives can discuss the issues that are important to them, from life on campus to the most pressing geopolitical matters of our time
3. To offer up unique insight to our general Membership into how the upcoming generation of conservatives approaches politics

We’re launching the College Feed with a roster of 17 College Contributors.  Free College Memberships are available to every student pursuing undergraduate or graduate studies. College Memberships are available by invitation-only right now; only those students invited by a College Contributor or College Member will be able to register.  We will open up Membership to anyone with a .edu e-mail address in the future.