Beyond Red & Blue

What you need to know about Karl Rove

I have no comment on the substance of this Karl Rove column in the Wall Street Journal, but I have to note that he has one of the longest author IDs I've ever seen:

About Karl Rove

Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007. At the White House he oversaw the Offices of Strategic Initiatives, Political Affairs, Public Liaison, and Intergovernmental Affairs and was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, coordinating the White House policy making process.

Before Karl became known as "The Architect" of President Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns, he was president of Karl Rove + Company, an Austin-based public affairs firm that worked for Republican candidates, nonpartisan causes, and nonprofit groups. His clients included over 75 Republican U.S. Senate, Congressional and gubernatorial candidates in 24 states, as well as the Moderate Party of Sweden.

Karl writes a weekly op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, is a Newsweek columnist and is now writing a book to be published by Simon & Schuster. Email the author at Karl@Rove.com or visit him on the web at Rove.com.

I'll put a lot more stock into what Karl Rove writes now that I know that his PR firm did work for the Moderate Party of Sweden!

If Rove follows the lead of Roland Burris, he may need a zoning variance to accommodate the height of his gravestone.

Obama's excellent trip to the science museum

The Boston Globe's Foon Rhee finds it "curious" that President Obama jetted out to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science to sign the federal stimulus bill. (Many Globe readers instead call it "hypocritical" to use so much fuel on the way to sign a bill aimed at increasing "green" jobs.) Rhee wonders if the setting is "something of an in-your-face move to opponents of funding for the arts."

I prefer to think it has something to do with this:

"While we were working to eliminate these pork barrel earmarks, he voted for nearly $1 billion in pork barrel earmark projects including $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago," [John] McCain said during the second of three presidential debates, blasting what became an unsuccessful effort to rebuild the 40-year-old Zeiss Optical Skyshow projector at the Adler Planetarium.

I'm IN Tucson but not OF Tucson, says state rep.

The Arizona Daily Star has an item on a state representative from Tucson who objects to having that city associated with his name, as in the ID "state Rep. Frank Antenori, R-Tucson." (Hat tip to Alan Ehrenhalt at The Ballot Box.)

Antenori prefers the more generic “Southern Arizona,” because he rightly points out that his legislative district, No. 30, reaches far past the city limits.

But nevertheless, Antenori does live in Tucson, in East side Mesquite Ranch, to be exact. “I don’t represent Tucson as a whole,” said Antenori. “I live in Tucson, but on the very edge of it — 400 feet from the border.”

Not that Antenori's attitude is so surprising. Expressing disdain toward big cities has long been considered a prerequisite to winning suburban votes. This is even true in densely populated Massachusetts. See, for example, this account by Jon Keller of a 2001 special election in a district that was mostly suburban but also included a big chunk of Boston:

In a mass mailing and print ad campaign targeted at suburban voters during the final days before the special primary preceding the election, [state Sen. Brian] Joyce argued for changes in a state formula for distributing public-school aid that favored Boston at the expense of the suburbs. "THEY WANT TO KEEP TAKING OUR MONEY AND GIVING IT TO THEIR NEIGHBORHOODS!" screamed the ad. "DON'T LET THEM DO IT!" His opponents, Joyce wrote - both Boston city councillors - opposed a change to the education funding formula that would benefit suburban schools and taxpayers.

Better know a district, through Google Maps

See my post on CW Unbound about using Google Maps to see where your congressman (actually, his or her staff) hangs out in the district.

New mobility data: New Jersey more attractive than California?

New Geography.com has posted a map and state-by-state data on American mobility -- specifically, the percentages of non-immigrants who live in the same state in which they were born. (Hat tip: Brainiac.)

 

A few observations:

California is clearly no longer much of a magnet for other Americans. Outside of immigrants, 72 percent of the people now living there were born there; that's the same number as in North Dakota. (And there are no songs titled "North Dakota, Here I Come!" or "North Dakota Dreamin.'") The comparable number in 1990 was 60 percent.

What do Massachusetts and North Dakota have in common?

They were the only states with wetter-than-normal weather in January.

 

Another NOAA map shows that the US was neatly divided into two regions. The "Hey, what happened to global warming?" jokesters are in the East, and the "Save the polar bears!" people are in the West.

Has the filibuster become socially acceptable?

Yesterday's Washington Post had a story headlined "Senate Lacks Votes to Pass Stimulus." I'm pretty sure, but not certain, that this was shorthand for "Senate Lacks Votes to End Filibuster Against Stimulus." The strongest clue comes in the sixth paragraph:

For now, the Senate bill remains a work in progress. "We're trying to find a way to reach 60" votes, Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), the Senate's chief vote counter, told reporters. "A number of Democrats have said they want to see changes to the bill before they can vote for it."

When I learned about the filibuster in high school, it was a last-resort parliamentary procedure to block laws that had majority support. There was political risk involved, since the party or individuals who used the procedure came off as obstructionists -- and often looked ridiculous, as they wasted time making nonsense speeches in order to stop the Senate from taking a roll call vote. (These days, senators can hold up legislation simply by declaring their willingness to filibuster.) And filibustering senators usually felt it necessary to make an argument as to why the action of a majority would not be legitimate -- most notoriously, when Southerners argued that civil rights legislation impinged on states' rights. (The film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington also makes a fairly persuasive case for using the filibuster when another senator is trying to frame you for graft.)

But the media coverage of the current debate over President Obama's stimulus legislation seems to take for granted that there will be a filibuster against it, and that opponents need not justify the raising of the hurdle from 50 percent to 60 percent of the Senate.

My guess is that political reporters don't want to seem naive or ill-informed by overlooking the possibility of a filibuster, so they treat it as a natural, commonplace procedure. But that can be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

UPDATE: Brendan Nyhan has a good post on how Obama's call for bipartisanship may have been taken too literally by the press and how he's now trying to get out of that box. It's significant that, beyond breaking a filibuster, 60 votes for the stimulus package would also mean that at least one Republican voted for it.

Vermont mocks New Hampshire's lack of "weather fortitude"

The Thicket passes on news of a very sarcastic proclamation from Montpelier, prompted by a 2008 blizzard that closed down the Legislature in next-door New Hampshire:

Whereas, while the New Hampshire General Court was forsaking the majestic halls of the state house in Concord, the Vermont General Assembly learning of a not dissimilar weather forecast for the Green Mountain State rolled up its law-making sleeves and continued to perform its legislative duties, and

Whereas, the fortitude and moral fiber of the Green Mountain Boys endures in the members of the Vermont General Assembly in contrast to the actions of their colleagues on the Connecticut River’s eastern bank, now therefore be it

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives:

That the General Assembly wishes the members of the New Hampshire General Court a comfy snooze on a typical northern New England day...

I'd hate to find out what Vermont thinks of us weather wimps in Massachusetts.

Where was Obama's surge in 2008?

Last summer I posted on the counties that contributed to George W. Bush's "surge" from 2000 to 2004. Now it's time to look at the biggest swings toward the Democrats from 2004 to 2008 (click below to embiggen). For thousands of other fascinating maps and tables, go to Dave Leip's Atlas of US Presidential Elections, at which I verified much of the data below.

 

BIGGEST % INCREASES FOR DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE, 2004-2008

1. Maverick, Texas. Total vote: 10,939. Obama percentage: 78.2%, up 18.9 points.
This is an amusing No. 1, given John McCain's attempts to own the label "maverick," but it's not a shock by historical standards. The county is on the Mexican border, is about 95 percent Latino, and hasn't voted for a Republican since Herbert Hoover in 1928. George W. Bush kept Democrat John Kerry slightly below 60% here in 2004, probably because of Bush's Texan roots. In last year's Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton beat Obama here by almost 3-to-1, part of a pattern in which he lost badly in mostly Latino counties. To the great disappointment of the GOP, Obama had no problem winning over Latino voters by November.

Birmingham tells apostophes to shove off

Birmingham, England, is officially giving up the fight for the proper use of the apostrophe. From the Times Online:

After a tense grammatical debate Birmingham City Council has decreed that possessive apostrophes shall no longer appear on its street signs.

No ceremony marked this expulsion from the municipality, only a statement from Martin Mullaney, chairman of the council’s transportation scrutiny committee. He noted that for some time the apostrophe had been slipping from signs all over the city.

Mr Mullaney argued that since the monarchy no longer owned Kings Heath, or Kings Norton, and since the Acock family no longer owned Acocks Green, the punctuation marks that once appeared in those names were now redundant.

Times writer Will Pavia notes that the US government threw the apostrophe overboard a long time ago, with very few exceptions (one of which is Martha's Vineyard, here in Massachusetts).

UPDATE: Oops. A reader points out a consequence of not proofreading blog entries:

Interesting point of view, but have you started a new movement by dropping Rs? I see you left the "r" out of "apostophes" in your headline. I thought dropping Rs in the state of Massachusetts was just something that was done in speech but not in writing. ;-)

Glad to know Matha's Vineyard, oops, I mean Martha's Vineyard still has it right.

I deeply reget the mistake.