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Posted at 2:53pm on Jun. 24, 2008 Trevino: Address to the California Republican Jewish Coalition.

By trevino

This speech was delivered to the California Republican Jewish Coalition on Saturday, 21 June 2008. The prepared text follows, and the audio of the speech may be heard here.

I’d like to thank Ken and Cynthia Wornick for hosting this event. Back in 2004, the Jewish News Weekly of Northern California quoted Ken as saying that being a Jewish Republican in the Bay Area: “is … like [being] a salmon swimming upstream.”

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Posted at 2:33am on May 26, 2008 Grassley, ethanol, and the imposition of reality.

By trevino

This piece originally appeared at Grassley Watch, where we're trying to help Iowa's Republican Senator .... be a Republican.

It's sort of touching to see Chuck Grassley touting "facts" on ethanol, in the way that it's touching to see any true believer barge forward when all the world is against him. In that vein, his Thursday press conference, held in concert with Senators Kit Bond (R-MO) and Ben Nelson (R-NE), holds all the fascination of witnessing a believing Millerite on the day after the Great Disappointment.

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Posted at 11:48am on Apr. 30, 2008 Chuck Grassley versus America's dinnertables.

By trevino

This was originally posted at Grassley Watch, where we're trying to get Iowa's Republican Senator to .... act like a Republican.

Americans -- and especially Iowans -- know full well that there's a food crisis underway. Every mom who shops for groceries knows it, as does every restauranteur, and every worker who puts in some overtime to afford the next meal knows it.

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Posted at 2:47pm on Apr. 22, 2008 Senator Grassley vs. Religious Freedom

By trevino

This post originally appeared at Grassley Watch, where we're looking for writers who want to push Iowa's Republican Senator ... to act like a Republican.

It's never a good idea to speak freely in Washington, D.C., unless you want to be heard -- and it seems that some of Senator Grassley's staffers wanted to be heard last week.

A colleague reports being at a social function in which senior staffers from the Senator's D.C. office were conversing. The topic? The Senator's crusade -- if we may call it that -- against Christian proponents of the "prosperity gospel." Now, you may or may not agree with the theological validity of this take on Christianity (no one at Grassley Watch, to our knowledge, does), but that's not actually relevant. We don't believe in the theological validity of the Battlestar Galactica pantheon either, but this being America, folks who want to can.

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Posted at 3:15am on Apr. 18, 2008 Grassley: tax cuts are the same as spending.

By trevino

This piece originally appeared at Grassley Watch, where we're trying to get Iowa's Republican Senator to ... act like a Republican.

This is a month old, but worth revisiting for the curious insight it gives us into the mindset of Senator Charles Grassley, who can't quite tell the difference between a tax cut and government spending. In his March 10th remarks on the Senate floor at the opening of debate on the federal FY 2009 budget, the Senator noted the Democratic takeover of Congress in January 2007, and asked, "Did the people really want us to increase spending and raise taxes? That's not what I heard back home. What I heard from folks across Iowa was rein in the spending. Live within your means. That's what I heard." So far, so good: a welcome note of fiscal responsibility from a Senator who is not always a friend to the notion.

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Posted at 1:41am on Jan. 30, 2008 Romney's Florida win.

By trevino

This piece originally appeared here.

You read that right. Oh, don't get me wrong: McCain won Florida this evening, and it's a big deal. Giuliani is out, which is great -- even if you agree with his policy views, his personnel practices would have made George W. Bush look like a sterling judge of men. Huckabee is down, probably decisively, if only for lack of cash. (I urged the Huckabee campaign to skip New Hampshire, and Freddoso writes that going to Michigan was the error -- either way, he tried for too many states with too little money.) And Romney -- well, there's the story. Mitt Romney is in a bad way. He blew through $10 million Iowa and lost; and outspent McCain eight to one in Florida, and lost that too. But for all this, Mitt Romney is not done yet -- and the reason lies in the breakdown of this evening's Florida vote.

CNN has the exit-poll numbers, and they reveal some surprising things:

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Posted at 2:09am on Jan. 15, 2008 With the Michigan you have.

By trevino

This piece originally appeared here.

Michigan does not matter. Not in an existential sense, of course -- I've loved every day I've ever spent there, and I've liked every person I've ever met from there. Yet in the electoral sense, it is difficult to conjure up a state with less meaning to the Republicans than Michigan in 2008. Bad enough that it is stripped of half its convention delegates for moving its primary before 5 February. Bad enough that its Democratic primary has one candidate on the ballot; and bad enough that as a consequence, there's a movement afoot to have Dems take advantage of the open primary and skew the results for Mitt Romney.

On top of all this, add in the reality of Michigan in precipitous decline, with its old order crumbling, and its new reality profoundly uncertain. Alone among the states, Michigan continues to endure on a large scale the slow agony of traditional manufacturing's end. Remember the early '80s social trauma that gave us Billy Joel's Allentown? Nearly a quarter-century on, that scenario of loss and generational dislocation is still playing out in Michigan. The suffering happens for no one cause, unless an ossified and failing syndicate of production and government counts as a single cause. Once-great Michigan plummets to the level of Mississippi because Michigan has bad unions, because Michigan has bad government, and because Michigan is shot through with tottering corporate behemoths that are victimized in turn by themselves and the state's elected officials. Toss in Detroit, and you've got a state whose primary tells you almost nothing -- except, of course, who is the most popular Republican in Michigan. (Or, if the Democratic shenanigans have a meaningful effect, whom the other side regards as worst for us.)

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Posted at 1:35am on Jan. 4, 2008 The big win.

By trevino

This piece originally appeared here.

Mike Huckabee wins. Mike Huckabee wins, I was wrong, and I'm glad to be wrong. It wasn't even close, with a victory well beyond what the poll averages predicted. What lessons may we draw from his triumph?

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Posted at 7:24pm on Jan. 2, 2008 Iowa predictions.

By trevino

Originally posted here.

Presented here, for what they're worth. Please keep in mind that I predicted a narrow Kerry victory in 2004, and the Democratic victories in 2006: a .500 average for the recent past. I am also a pessimist. Nonetheless:

Republicans (latest poll averages):

Posted at 6:34pm on Jan. 1, 2008 Let us have peace.

By trevino

This piece originally appeared here.

The new year brings new things, and among the most interesting -- and troubling -- new things we will deal with this year is the fate of the conservative coalition. As I've written, I agree with Clark Judge's model of the triple factions of social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and national-defense conservatives. This is an oversimplification, of course: there are factions upon factions, and subsets of each. (One of the big surprises, for me, in 2006 was learning that the Straussians detest many of the conservative legal giants of our era. Who knew?) But as a broad-picture analysis, it will do; and its validity is confirmed, in a mostly-regrettable fashion, in the 2008 primary campaign. By an accident, or perhaps inevitability, of history, there is only one candidate with a perceived advantage on all three points -- Fred Thompson, and he's not going anywhere except, perhaps, to a successful radio show or the Vice Presidency. Of the four front-runners, the perceived strengths on each point look something like this:

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Posted at 4:35pm on Dec. 30, 2007 The passing moment.

By trevino

This piece originally appeared here.

The big show in Iowa is on Thursday, and it looks like Mitt Romney may eke out a win in spite of the Huckabee surge of the past several weeks. The polls are tremendously close, of course, and one should not place too much emphasis on their reliability. As Dan Spencer notes, "One in three Iowa Republicans .... say they might still change their preference." Still, given the massive advantage in money and personnel that Romney enjoys, if he's polling within striking distance, it's a good bet that superior campaign organization and resources will carry the day for him on January 3rd.

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Posted at 5:55pm on Dec. 28, 2007 Huckabee call update.

By trevino

This item originally appeared here. RedState's own Rob Bluey was also on this call.

Mike Huckabee held his first blogger conference call today, and though it was short -- approximately 30 minutes -- it was still worthwhile, for us if not the candidate. Hopefully there's more to come, and you can't blame the Governor for focusing upon actual voters rather than a gaggle of bloggers. The call drew upon bloggers from around the country, and though I appreciated that as a Californian, I'm not sure it's the best use of the campaign's time. Instead of spending 30 minutes on a call with bloggers from disparate states, why not spend 90 minutes on three calls for bloggers only in, say, Iowa, South Carolina, and Florida? The candidate could then focus his comments and delve into actionable substance. Doubtless it's easier for the campaign staff to put out a general call instead of researching in-state players and getting them on a call -- but a smart campaign would outsource that stuff to the eager base. (As an aside, I'm not even sure the call was a general one: most of the participants appeared to be from registered pro-Huckabee sites. Why not reach out to sources of criticism from the right like, say, RedState?) I'm pretty sure the guys at Huck's Army would love to put something like that together, and be willing to do the detail work to make it happen. In my own area, the leadership of the Sacramento Huckabee Meetup is chomping at the bit for this sort of assignment, with very little feedback or direction from Little Rock. The lesson here is that treating bloggers as an interest group or minor media outlet is only part of the answer for campaigns: they should be, rather, an extension of the campaign, and given active roles on its behalf.

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Posted at 3:07pm on Dec. 11, 2007 The Arkansan and war.

By trevino

This piece originally posted at joshua.trevino.at.

Three days ago, I wrote that where Mike Huckabee and his rising support is concerned, "Probably without realizing it, and for reasons rooted in a generally inchoate frustration, one faction of the conservative coalition has roused itself to war against another." You see it in the erroneous assumptions of apostasy from the free-market cause (to reiterate, most Huckabee supporters are free-market believers -- but not just that -- and even Norquist gives the man a chance); you see it in Peggy Noonan's peevish denunciation of social conservatives of faith as "idiots"; and you see it in the move from attacking Huckabee on fiscal policy, which has some merit, to attacking him on foreign policy. These attacks, thus far, have little merit at all, centering mostly on the candidate's being caught flat-footed when the Iran NIE was released -- an indictment of Huckabee's staff rather than Huckabee -- and on the notion that he diverges unacceptably from the foreign-policy line established by the George W. Bush Administration.

This last is especially evident in the blistering broadside directed at Huckabee's foreign-policy views by the Editors of National Review. The piece leaned heavily upon the most substantive foreign-policy statement made thus far by the former governor, a speech delivered on 28 September 2007 to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (PDF here). Among the kinder adjectives the NR Editors used were "superficial," "conventional," "deeply naïve," and "twisted." Most telling, though, is their complaint that Huckabee's remarks "included many unfair criticisms of President Bush." The laundry list of "unfairness" includes Huckabee's preference for a shutdown of the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities (a defensible stance); his public disagreement with the Bush Administration's undervaluation of diplomacy (an extraordinarily defensible assessment); and his stated willingness to engage in direct relations with Iran (his least defensible departure from Administration orthodoxy, but one unlikely to do harm, it being better to jaw-jaw). The NR Editors declare that Mike Huckabee, burdened with these "twisted" views, is doomed to "repeat the experience of President Jimmy Carter at his most ineffectual" -- damning words indeed from the flagship publication of the conservative movement.

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Posted at 4:32am on Jun. 7, 2007 A soldier's final flight.

By trevino

This piece originally ran in Human Events. See the photographs here.

Continental Flight 1889 left Houston, Texas, on May 29th, 2007, at 6:25 pm local, and arrived at Sacramento, California, at 8:29 pm local. On board were two pilots, four flight attendants, about 160 passengers, several hundred pounds of luggage, and one fallen American.

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Posted at 3:47pm on May 21, 2007 Saving technology from the technologists.

By trevino

This piece originally appeared at joshua.trevino.at.

It is an unending source of wonder that partisans of a thing almost always believe that the thing would be made immeasurably better with the involvement of the government. No experience with a state bureaucracy appears to dissuade them; no visit to the DMV imparts any lesson of the inherent tendencies of statist organization; no dismay at the failures of government in one area leads them to rational prediction of government's success in another. The perceived failures of the market, runs the reasoning, will be eliminated if the market itself is eliminated: and of course any meaningful incentive to improve is eliminated along with that market. So we see all manner of counterintuitive projects, from government-run health care to government-run airport security -- and now government-run internet is on the table, in the minds of those who care deeply about its potential and future.

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