Meet the Candidates

Posted on 2010-02-22 by David

Ben Horsley, a friend and candidate for House District 19 this year, put together a meet the candidates event as part of his campaign on Saturday at Bountiful City Hall. This was not a chance to meet the candidates for District 19 (where I don’t live anyway but if I did I’d be voting for him) but the candidates for U.S. Senate. It included all the Republican Candidates as well as other political figures in Utah (most prominently Rob Bishop and Mark Shurtleff). Although I have been interested in this race for over a year and thus have been closely studying the candidates for a long time I had not previously met Tim Bridgewater or James Williams – I could hardly pass up such a great opportunity right in my own back yard (so to speak). Thanks Ben!

Having studied the candidate previously I had some idea of my order of preference, but I really enjoyed this debate as it allowed me to really get things sorted out. Here’s my order of preference:

1. Mike Lee – I don’t think that surprises anyone considering I already publicly endorsed him but after hearing him with all the other candidates together I am that much more confident that he should be our Senator come next year.

2. Tim Bridgewater – I really like Tim overall. I think he’d make a decent senator – I just think that Mike would be better at filling the Constitutional duties of a senator.

3. (tie) Laura Bridgewater – she sat in for her husband for the first bit of the debate as he was running late and she had a good grasp of what our next senator should be and do – she’d be a great support to Tim if he were elected.

3. (tie) Sharon Lee – I’ve heard her speak before and believe she is a good support for Mike. I hadn’t thought to rank her among the candidates until I saw Mrs. Bridgewater in her husband’s place among the candidates but I think either of those two spouses would be better than the other candidates.

5. (tie) Bob Bennett – Despite his failings Bennett is not the worst choice available to us in this campaign. Like a typical Washington insider he is so busy viewing everything as “extremely complicated” that he seems to have lost sight of most of the simple facts that should be informing our complicated decisions.

5. (tie) James Williams – I had high hopes for James. I had heard really good things about him from people attending other debates, but after listening to him I am forced to conclude that he is a good and well-intentioned man who is out of his depth politically. Philosophically he has good principles, but I don’t believe that he would be an effective force at representing those principles or the people of Utah.

7. Cherilyn Eagar – I remember being excited about the possibilities when I started investigating her as a candidate, but seeing her in a debate showed her as combative, passionate, and disrespectful. If I wanted someone like that there must be 20 other states I could move to where I would have two such Senators in place already. She argues that having a conservative woman in the Senate would be a powerful thing – I’m sure that’s true, but I’ve already named two other conservative women from Utah who would make better senators.

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Resetting Expectations

Posted on 2010-02-17 by David

I have been profoundly disappointed in my lack of opportunity to write here lately (combined with a drastic scaling back in my ability to comment elsewhere or participate in other related activities). I am forced to admit that this situation is likely to continue for an extended period of time and must reset my own expectations regarding my online participation in political dialog. Hopefully I will be able write something on a weekly basis (or I can still dream of twice in a week). As I write less I anticipate that comments will drop to a level that I can still manage (safe guess as they have already done so).

I sincerely hope that I can offer thoughts that others will find valuable even as I scale back the time and energy available for that purpose. At the least, those who are paying close enough attention to wonder at my relative silence will have an explanation – and may know what to expect going forward.

Posted in General, life | Tagged | 5 Comments

Evolving News

Posted on 2010-02-12 by David

It’s interesting to watch as nothing turns into a news story. Here’s the roundup of one such process from this week.

Holly Richardson writes about Tim Bridgewater’s momentum. When she talks about his fund raising she doesn’t mention that over 80% of it was a loan to himself. Tim likes the coverage (naturally) and the next day he posts her article on his RedState diary. Tim gave all the proper attribution and everything – I’m not trying to accuse him of plagiarism. The day after that Thomas Burr writes that “Holly Richardson is boosting Tim Bridgewater’s campaign” over at RedState. Whether it was an oversight or a calculated move is open for speculation, but the fact is that Holly didn’t promote Tim over at RedState – unless she did so under Tim’s name. Finally, Tim gets to tweet about the article by Thomas Burr which declares how beneficial Holly’s support is.

So with a couple of nudges from Tim this little game of Chinese whispers has produced, with a little invented fact here (Holly promoting Tim on RedState) and a little omitted fact there (Tim providing almost all his own campaign funding), almost a week’s worth of positive coverage.

The point here is not to accuse Tim of anything untoward – it is to illustrate the cycle of coverage growing in a vacuum. Tim did nothing this week (at least nothing to garner more coverage in those articles) and yet he got a four days of positive news from a topic (fund raising numbers) that seemed to have died before Holly’s post.

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Multi-Dimensional Political Perspectives

Posted on 2010-02-09 by David

photo credit: mkandlez

Jane Hamsher wrote about the 11 Dimensional Chess approach to health care legislation that the Obama administration tried. That sent me back to some earlier thoughts I had shared about how we visualize the political spectrum. The simplest way to view things is one dimensional. Like the opening image here it breaks down into a right/left, red/blue, conservative/liberal, Republican/Democrat, or another single-axis spectrum. Many people recognize how inadequate such a simplified view is and various people (including myself) have sought to devise two-dimensional representations of the political landscape.

Of the many maps out there I think the easiest to comprehend is this from the Worlds Smallest Political Quiz:

With an axis measuring personal freedom issues and an axis measuring economic freedom issues it is not difficult to grasp the lay of the land according to this graph. Unfortunately this two dimensional representation, like all other two-dimensional representations, falls short of accurately describing reality.

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Posted in culture, General, pictures | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Endorsing Mike Lee

Posted on 2010-02-04 by David
Mike Lee for Senate

Last night I finally got to meet Mike Lee in person. I had been looking forward to the opportunity for a number of reasons. As long as I have been interested in this Senate race I have been carefully looking at the many candidates (past and present). Even before Mike entered the race I had met almost every candidate seeking this seat and, despite how promising a few of them initially looked, I had found many that I could not endorse and none that I was comfortable endorsing. In fact, by the time Mike announced his intention to run I was almost ready to support him by default (there was only one other candidate I had not completely ruled out by then).

After meeting Mike last night and talking to him, asking a few questions and listening as he answered the questions of a few other people, I came away knowing that this was a candidate I could endorse as completely and freely as I would endorse myself if I were a candidate for some office. Mike Lee is the right candidate for this position. He has the knowledge and the capacity to fill this office well and he is in the race for the right reasons. In fact, as I talked to him I discovered that he is in the race for the exact same reason that I have been so interested in this race for so long.

My plan now is to go out and do everything I can to make sure that I don’t have to try making another endorsement as the field of candidates is whittled down. I plan to still be cheering Mike on in December.

Posted in State | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Don’t Rely on the Altruism of Baby Boomers

Posted on 2010-02-02 by David

David Brooks must have thought yesterday was April Fools Day – that or he thinks he’s getting old so he decided to pen a column painting a rosy picture for seniors by coming to a senile conclusion. In The Geezers’ Crusade he comes to this wildly impossible conclusion:

It now seems clear that the only way the U.S. is going to avoid an economic crisis is if the oldsters take it upon themselves to arise and force change. The young lack the political power. Only the old can lead a generativity revolution — millions of people demanding changes in health care spending and the retirement age to make life better for their grandchildren.

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Abolish Earmarks

Posted on 2010-02-01 by David

photo credit: Skrewtape

For some time I have been internally conflicted on the issue of congressional earmarking. Many people, including such diverse characters as President Obama and Congressman Chaffetz, have been vocal about calling for an end to earmarks. Others such as my own Congressman, Rob Bishop, reply that earmarks are not an addition to the total size of our federal expenditures – but simply a direction regarding the spending of money already appropriated. Believers in small government who make that argument say that our focus should be on reducing total expenditures rather than shutting down the earmarking process. Personally, I would like to see an end to earmarking and a significant reduction in total spending. (Earmarks alone are an insignificant portion of our spending.)

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Marionette Bob Bennett

Posted on 2010-01-29 by David

photo credit: © Giorgio

While candidate Mike Lee acted like a senator on the issue of confirming Ben Bernanke for another term as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Bob Bennett acted like a marionette under the control of the mystical wizard of Washington D.C. With a short press release and a predictable vote, our “Senator” Bob Bennett plainly demonstrated the cancerous logic that is rampant among Washington insiders. Here is how he justified his vote to confirm Ben Bernanke:

I reluctantly cast a vote in favor of Ben Bernanke because I do not want to give President Obama the opportunity to put someone who shares his leftist views in charge of the Federal Reserve. I am aware of the mistakes that have been made at the Fed while Chairman Bernanke has been there, but I fear an alternative would be worse for the country’s economic future.

So our elected Marionette is simply trying to save us from having the president nominate someone else. Cute. Perhaps he should have engaged his brain and realized two simple facts – first, if Bernanke was not confirmed by the senate there is little chance that President Obama would have name a more extreme nominee (the natural reaction would be to nominate a safer pick); second, considering the makeup of the Senate (not to mention the final vote tally) opposing Bernanke would have been unlikely to prevent his confirmation but at least it would not have demonstrated approval for his performance (a vote to confirm sends that message more strongly than any press release about your supposed reluctance to cast the vote).

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The Right to be Charitable (or Not)

Posted on 2010-01-28 by David

photo credit: Monjori

A couple of days ago I heard Jason Lewis on the radio talking about how socialism does not create wealth (after Obama’s “where opportunity is absent government must create it” comment it’s obvious that some people just don’t understand that fact) and that the only way that socialism can seem to work is if there are people in society selfishly creating wealth to be redistributed. While Jason started going on about how much better natural self interest is for society than synthetic altruism (my terms, not his) I began thinking that the right to be charitable is one that we must each earn in life.

As an example,  I cannot donate a million dollars to help the relief efforts of Haiti. No matter how much I might want to I simply don’t have the money. There are other people who, through some combination of hard work and chance, have amassed a million dollars or more of money they don’t need for themselves and they can choose to donate that much money to help in Haiti. They have earned the right to make a decision about whether they will do something that generous, but I have not earned that right.

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Change I Could Believe In

Posted on 2010-01-26 by David

photo credit: jasoneppink

Back in October I wrote about the dangers of a crisis mentality and tried to show that the abuse of crisis was not a one-party trait. I see that Will Wilkinson did a better job of showing that this month in Let the next crisis go to waste:

The Aughts began in crisis when the second plane hit the second tower on Sept. 11, 2001. The Bush administration, loath to let a serious crisis go to waste, managed to parlay the nation’s alarm and credulity into an ill-conceived invasion of an entirely unrelated country, wasting over a trillion dollars and many tens of thousands of lives, all while losing control of the fight in Afghanistan and failing utterly to bring down Osama bin Laden.

Bush’s botched attempts to capitalize on crisis—the ugly aftermath to which Obama is heir—might have made an alert leader wary. But instead, Obama set up shop in the Oval Office and proceeded immediately to use crisis as (Emanuel’s words again) “an opportunity to do things you’d think you could not do.”

Rather than acting as a prudent guardian of the public good in a time of economic turbulence and hardship, Obama and the Democratic Congress have hurried to check the boxes on their partisan wish list precisely when the nation most needed a restorative break from transformative ambition.

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