A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

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IN-09: The Debate over debates

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Lesley Stedman Weidenbener has an article on the “debate over debates” in Indiana’s 9th District. Democrat Baron Hill is chiding Republican Mike Sodrel over his current reluctance to debate. Meanwhile, Libertarian Eric Schansberg is chiding Hill over his reluctance to debate him. It’s an interesting dynamic.

Says Weidenbener of Schansberg:

[I]t’s likely that neither Sodrel nor Hill will need additional publicity. The race will undoubtedly receive tremendous attention in the local and national media, and both candidates will have deep pockets to pay for whatever advertising they want.

Schansberg, though, will likely be looking for a little attention.

Sodrel’s chief of staff, Cam Savage, said the Republican wants to attend “multiple debates.” And it’s likely Hill and Schansberg will want the same.

The real question will likely be whether any debates that develop will include Schansberg.

After all, his chance of winning the race is slim to none, but his chance of affecting it is quite large.

In 2004, Sodrel had only about 1,400 more votes than Hill. So even if Schansberg takes just 2 percent or 3 percent or 4 percent of the vote, he could determine the outcome of the race.

Also, Schansberg is a professor, economist, prolific writer and articulate speaker. So it’s possible that he could hurt both of his opponents in a debate or at least stir up some issues that neither really wants to address.

I’ll be interested in Schansberg’s reaction when, presumably, the major candidates decline to include him in the debate. Will he argue that it’s in the best interest of society that all candidates be included in debates? Or will he take what I would regard to be a more libertarian approach of cheerfully agreeing that if it’s not in Hill and Sodrel’s personal best interest to debate him that they ought not agree or be compelled to agree to it?

Chocola O.K. with federal government warrantlessly monitoring tens of millions of American phone calls

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James Wensits has an article in the South Bend Tribune primarily focused on reaction to Bush’s immigration press conference on Monday. More interesting to me, however, is the aside about Rep. Chocola’s reaction to news that the National Security Agency had obtained, without a warrant, billions of phone records of tens of millions of American citizens. Among other things, the federal government is using such phone records to track down reporters’ confidential sources.

In a separate issue, [Chris Chocola] said he understands concerns that have been voiced in the wake of revelations that the National Security Agency has been tracking telephone records of domestic calls, but believes the administration has the “right intent to protect Americans.”

While he is comfortable with the present situation, Chocola said he would be opposed should he learn that government agents were monitoring domestic phone conversations without a warrant.

“I would have a problem with that,” he said. “That’s illegal.”

So he’s o.k. with the executive branch using a dragnet with no court supervision or other form of accountability that lets them get records showing that a citizen called their bookie, their mistress, their local reporter, their church, a political action group, a phone sex chat room, or whatever; just so long as the federal government doesn’t listen to what was actually said until they get a warrant. What a nice wide view of the liberties bestowed upon us by the Founding Fathers and, if the Founders were correct, our Creator. Chocola is apparently willing to sell his liberty cheap for the illusion of security. I’m not.

DarkSyde taunts the conservatives

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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Conservatives seem to be backsliding from winning to fighting and now they’re at the part where they get laughed at.

DarkSyde over at Kos has a post chiding the conservatives for having been made the fool by George W. Bush. He opens with:

Yes, my conservative friends, George Bush has sold you down the river. Now, you’re finally starting to suspect that it was never about abortion or limiting government or even national security. Those were just useful emotional distractions held by the left hand so that the right one could deftly rip-off the Federal Treasury and enact measures preventing We the People from interfering with the heist.

He goes on to predict that, by looking the other way on illegal immigration and by granting amnesty, the ranks of the Democratic Party will swell. He concludes:

Here’s the best part of all: While the GOP has gerrymandered themselves into a political strait jacket, most of us on this side of the aisle are OK with some version of the Bush-Kennedy amnesty plan. It’s realistic and moral. But the icing on the cake is that it will hasten the inevitable day when the Republican Party is a permanent minority due to the fastest growing segment of our population becoming eligible to vote for democrats. Although I must admit we never, ever foresaw George Bush as the midwife of progressive ascendancy and the executioner of neo-conservatism. Hasta la vista republicanistas!

My tendency is to think he presumes too much by assuming that immigrants will necessarily be primarily Democrats, but if conservatives are citing the German model of moving the Jews with approval when discussing what might be possible in ridding the U.S. of illegal immigrants.

World Net Daily– [Bush] lied when he said: “Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic – it’s just not going to work.” Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.

In order to increase its attractiveness to immigrants who become voters, Republicans are going to have to square the circle and reconcile the racist contingent of their base with the more practical elements and with the sensibilities of immigrants-turned-voters.

Of course, Democrats have their work cut out for them too trying to reconcile the disparate elements of their base in a way that is principled and easily understood. I suggest basic populism, but that won’t necessarily sit well with the big-donors Beltway Democrats have come to know and love. But I digress.

Fractal Politics

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John Hood, writing in National Review Online, takes a look at how the parties stack up at the state level. I was surprised at how evenly balanced the parties are:

Here’s how the numbers stack up as of this writing. There are 99 legislative chambers (Nebraska as a unicameral and nonpartisan legislature). Of the 98 partisan bodies, Republicans hold 49 and Democrats 47. Two chambers, the Iowa senate and Montana house, are tied. As a whole, Republicans control 20 state legislatures and Democrats 19, with 10 legislatures split between the parties. On the other hand, Democrats enjoy a slight edge in the total number of state lawmakers, at 3,663 to the GOP’s 3,643.

His entry on Indiana reads as follows:

Republicans hold a 33-17 margin in the senate, but only a 52-48 edge in the house. One GOP operative told me that he expects Indiana’s races to be “close and competitive” and that, for the foreseeable future, “they always will be.” Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels, former budget director for President Bush, had only a 35 percent approval rating in an April poll. This is one instance where a truly local issue may matter a lot: Daniel’s controversial and successful push to put Indiana on daylight-saving time. No kidding.

Another mark on the Big Brother checklist

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According to ABC News, the federal government is tracking the phone numbers used by members of the press while they’re talking to confidential sources. From the ABC News blog:

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

“It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick,” the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

I recently spoke to one of my good friends who happens to be a conservative. (“Some of my best friends are conservatives.”) I like to use him as a barometer of that side of the political spectrum. I asked if he thought that the Bush administration had gone too far by obtaining billions of phone records about tens of millions of American citizens from the big telephone companies. He said, simply, “no.” I didn’t press because, while he humors me on brief inquiries, friction can arise if we dwell on politics for too long.

It’s probably too obvious to bother with, but it seems fairly clear to me that most of the folks who are o.k. with this kind of warrantless domestic surveillance of innocent citizens would have had kittens over Bill Clinton doing the same thing.

Leahy on the Bush administration

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This quote from Sen. Leahy about the Bush administration captures the point pretty succinctly:

LEAHY: Every time this administration screws up, whether it’s with homeland security, after Katrina, a massive failure even though they spent billions of dollars to make sure that thing wouldn’t happen, when they screw up along the border, when they get caught doing illegal surveillance of Americans, they say, well, but 9/11, 9/11.

Well, I’d remind them 9/11 happened on their watch. I think Americans are getting fed up with simply using an excuse for your mistakes and classify everything else so that you can’t talk about it.

I want us to be safe. I don’t think that this administration is doing it the right way. They screwed up with homeland security. They screwed up with Katrina. I mean, after all, they were told, go catch a 6’6″ Arab running around Afghanistan, probably on dialysis, according to the press reports, Osama bin Laden.

Anyone have a Big Brother checklist handy?

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The three biggest phone companies, AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth, provided the National Security Agency billions of phone records made by tens of millions of U.S. citizens. (Qwest Communications resisted the NSA records sweep.) But at least, as Doghouse Riley points out, it has yielded us all of those captured terrorists. . . or not.

Bush tried to defend the indefensible by saying:

“Al-Qaeda is our enemy, and we want to know their plans,” Bush said before heading to Mississippi to give a speech on Hurricane Katrina relief. He didn’t provide any specifics about the program, however, and walked away without responding to questions from reporters.

To which Senator Leahy replied:

“Are you telling me tens of millions of Americans are involved with al-Qaeda?” Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, railed at a morning hearing. “These are tens of millions of Americans who are not suspected of anything.”

Maybe I haven’t had enough coffee yet, but at the moment, I’m having trouble mustering a lot of rage at this outrageous behavior. I just expect this kind of civil liberties trampeling garbage from this administration and its Forever War. Maybe that’s the plan, just numb the populace with scandal after scandal until we simply shrug our shoulders and submit.

Camp Bayh

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I received an interesting mailer from Evan Bayh’s All America PAC. I’ll just cut and paste it as a public service announcement:

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Evan Bayh will visit Indianapolis on Saturday, May 13th, to host Camp Bayh, a training session for people interested in working on political campaigns, building interest in local politics or running for office themselves. The two-and-a-half day training session will consist of a number of workshops led by Indiana and national campaign experts who will teach the nuts and bolts of organizing winning campaigns. On Saturday, Senator Bayh will meet with participants and speak with them about the importance of public service, his experiences in grassroots politics, and how he hopes Camp Bayh will help put Democrats in a position to win this fall.

The Indianapolis Camp Bayh runs from Friday, May 12th, through Sunday, May 14th, and will be held on the IUPUI campus. The Camp will include three separate training tracks, for those who want to work on a paid position in a campaign, for local party leaders and activists, and for candidates running for office this year. A second Camp Bayh will take place in South Bend from July 7th – 9th.

Portions of Camp Bayh will be open to the media, including Senator Bayh’s remarks to the Camp participants.

Saturday May 13 at 5:00 p.m. ET
IUPUI-Cavanaugh Hall, corner of Michigan St. & University Blvd.

Media interested in covering additional portions of Camp Bayh should contact the All America PAC at 202-326-0450.

This is not your father’s Republican Party

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I think Andrea Neal is engaged in some wishful thinking in this column. She suggests that the primary defeats of Senator Garton, Rep. Budak, Sen. Borst, and Sen. Johnson were cases of “voter imposed term limits.” In other words, she thinks that these legislators were removed primarily because they had served too long and lost touch with their constituency. If you look at their defeats, I think there is a different story to be told. I don’t know much about Budak, but Garton, Borst, and Johnson were all economic conservatives, but were reasonably moderate (by Indiana standards, anyway) with respect to social issues. They were taken down by social conservatives in primary fights where highly motivated and well-organized right-to-lifers can control the show.

The Republican Party in Indiana is becoming less and less friendly for social moderates and libertarians. If you are in favor of a government that stays out of your pocketbook *and* out of your bedroom, today’s Republican Party is not for you. This is not the Republican Party in which I was raised. This is not the Republican Party of Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower or Rockefeller. It’s not even the Republican Party of Goldwater or Reagan. It’s something else. The theocratic wing of the party is taking over. They want an end to abortion. They want their version of Jesus Christ in the classroom, the courthouse, and the State House. If science conflicts with their preconceived notions, they want it out of the public discourse. Evolution must be diluted and placed along side Bible-friendly pseudoscience. Medical opinion on the beginnings of human life must be put aside in favor of religious dogma. Sex education must be abstinence only, even if it’s ineffective. Gays must be condemned, not tolerated, and certainly not treated as equals.

Ms. Neal’s theory that Garton, Borst, and Johnson were ousted because constituents regarded them as legislative deadwood that needed to be cut out in favor of fresher ideas ignores the politics of Walker, Waltz, and Drozda who defeated them. All of them are part of the so-called “Christian” right. (Though most of the social policies coming out of the “Christian” right seem more in line with select bits of the Old Testament than with the Sermon on the Mount.) Whereas the mantra of Goldwater  Republicans was “smaller government,” with the current batch it has morphed into “government small enough to fit into your bedroom.”

In today’s Indianapolis Star we see one of Senator Drozda’s efforts at social engineering cropping up again:  prohibit orphans from being adopted if they’re being adopted by the wrong sort of caring, competent parents, i.e. unmarried and/or gay ones.  Advance Indiana’s Gary Welsh was featured prominently in the Star article:

Gary Welsh, a family law attorney and Republican who worked in the 1980s for the Illinois House speaker, said the adoption issue could become politically charged if the case ends up before the Indiana Supreme Court and justices issue an opinion before the election.

Impact: While preventing gays from adopting is important to many in the “Christian right” and would spur them to vote, he said, other, more moderate Republicans might be turned off.

Comment: “A lot of people just see it as mean-spirited,” he said, “particularly if they know of a (gay) couple raising a child. Gay couples often are adopting very hard-to-adopt children. Often they are children no one else wants.”

So many of these social policies seem counterproductive to me. They steadfastly oppose abortion, and they discourage informing young women about birth control. Inevitably this is going to lead to more unwanted pregnancies and, presumably, children in need of adoption. Then they turn around and actively try to reduce the number of potential qualified adopting parents.

This is part and parcel with a “right to life” agenda that seems to envision only a right to life without rights except before birth and after brain death but not in between. That may explain why the United States has an infant mortality rate almost three times as high as Japan’s and on par with Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Judging from the comparative efforts of the Christian right to improve access to healthcare for citizens or improve the lot of impoverished citizens generally versus efforts to make sure they don’t get accurate reproduction information from their doctors or have the ability to obtain an abortion, the theory seems to be that it’s important to get them out of the womb alive (even if only just barely) and the heck with them after that.

There are more angles and links to this issue that I’d like to add, so I may end up updating it, but for now, suffice it to say that Andrea Neal’s suggestion that the victory of Walker, Waltz, and Drozda over Garton, Borst, and Johnson is merely a sign of “voter imposed term limits” is to miss the big story, in my opinion. This is a battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party. More and more, the Republican Party is the party of the social conservative with economic conservatism being an afterthought instead of vice-versa as it used to be.