We begin with a non-musical anniversary: On Aug. 11, 1919, Green Bay Press–Gazette sports editor George Calhoun and Indian Packing Co. employee Earl “Curly” Lambeau, a former Notre Dame football player, organized a pro football team that would be called the Green Bay Packers:
(Clearly the photo was not taken on this day in 1919. Measurable snow has never fallen in Wisconsin in August … so far.)
Today in 1964, the Beatles movie “A Hard Day’s Night” opened in New York:
Two years later, the Beatles opened their last American concert tour on the same day that John Lennon apologized for saying that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus. … Look, I wasn’t saying The Beatles are better than God or Jesus, I said ‘Beatles’ because it’s easy for me to talk about The Beatles. I could have said ‘TV’ or ‘Cinema’, ‘Motorcars’ or anything popular and would have got away with it…”
Today in 1976, the Who drummer Keith Moon collapsed and was hospitalized in Miami.
You might have the knack for music trivia if you can identify the number one today in 1979:
Today in 1984, President Reagan either forgot or ignored the dictum that one should always assume a microphone is open:
Birthdays start with Manfred Mann drummer Mike Hegg:
James Kale of the Guess Who …
… was born the same day as Denis Payton, one of the Dave Clark Five:
Joe Jackson:
Who is Richie Beau? You know him better as Richie Ramone:
Today, this would be the sort of thing to embellish a band’s image. Not so in 1959, when four members of The Platters were arrested on drug and prostitution charges following a concert in Cincinnati when they were discovered with four women (three of them white) in what was reported as “various stages of undress.” Despite the fact that none of the Platters were convicted of anything, the Platters (who were all black) were removed from several radio stations’ playlists.
Speaking of odd music anniversaries: Today in 1985, Michael Jackson purchased the entire Beatles music library for more than $45 million.
The voiceover and constant musical refrain reminding us that we have never, ever, forever, ever never never ever seen a car this advanced before is just downright laughable. Remember, this is a 1984 Corvette. Yes, I suppose the world hadn’t seen the next generation of Corvette, but the most advanced car on the planet? This was years after the Group B-dominating Audi Quattro came out, while the first year of the C4 ‘Vette was stuck with a 5.7L V8 pumping out 205 horsepower and 290 lb-ft of torque through the rear wheels. …
Then there’s the claim that it’s “A new Chevrolet Corvette like never before.” Well, yeah, I suppose it was a clean-sheet re-design over the old C3 Corvette, but it was still recognizable as what it was. Maybe if they’d actually put one of those mid-engined concepts into production, I’d be more willing to believe this one.
The ad goes on to say that there was a never-before-seen computer-activated manual transmission (think more like an overdrive than a flappy-paddle setup), COOL WHEELS, and even tires. All of that is very advanced.
Oh wait – is that an LCD dash? Now that, my friends, is very neat indeed. Like those Casio watches that also had a calculator on them.
To be honest, seeing ads like this makes me miss that illustrious decade. It reminds me of a simpler time, when Reagan was President, we all feared instant atomic fiery death, our Corvettes had similar outputs to a modern European diesel, and we could all believe in America and everything its factories churned out as long as we heard the news with enough screaming Stratocasters laid over it.
The commercial appears to have screaming synthesizers, not Stratocasters, laid over it, but never mind that. The music is overwrought by 2013 standards, but it’s also inappropriate for a car ad, even if you’ve never seen anything like this before.
Recall that the C4 came out 15 years after the C3 debuted, so the C4’s debut was, to quote Corvette owner Joe Biden, a big f—ing deal. However, the wheels look like wheel covers for a decade-old land yacht (which might not be a bad idea for someone resto-modding, say, a 1975 Chevy Caprice, although the Vette’s 255/50R-16 tires are 2 inches shorter than the Caprice’s original 225/70R-15 tires, so speedometer error would result). The 4+3 manual grew to be universally reviled, and either version of the C4’s digital dash is an abomination. The car handled well, but it took until year two, 1985, for a horsepower upgrade.
I noted before that Motor Trend magazine has been known for making the most spectacularly wrong predictions about the next Corvette. Autos of Interest chronicles one:
If you haven’t yet guessed what the subject car is, it’s a Corvette. Or, it’s supposed to be. Midway through 1975, Motor Trend’s Bob Hall wrote an article entitled, “The 1977 Corvette!” (Exclamation and all.) …
Keep in mind that the C3 (or, third-generation Corvette) had been introduced as a 1968 model year car. It had trudged on largely unchanged over those years and by 1975 enthusiasts were understandably anticipating a replacement at any time. After all, Chevy had been showing off some mid-engined concepts and the speculation was ripe.
However, amazingly Motor Trend kept their cool and was calling for this heir apparent C4 to be front-engined. In fact, they were predicting just a re-skinning. Well, a major re-skinning. They compared the “rejuvenation” to what the line had gone through from C2 to C3. Although, I’m not sure where the artist came up with the idea that Corvette’s taillights would be horizontal slats. Strange.
They did call one thing correctly, the rear glass would go from ‘sugar scoop’ to fastback-style glass. However, that didn’t occur until the year following their prediction, in 1978, when Corvette celebrated its 25th anniversary and enjoyed a mild refresh and new dash layout.
Motor Trend also forecast an engine that never saw the light of day in Corvette. A turbo V-8 engine. They did preface the prediction by saying it was merely being considered but was clear that it was more than a casual consideration. …
As we know, the 1977 model Corvette came and went without any noteworthy changes. No flashy new body. No turbo V-8 engine. As mentioned above, it was the 1978 model year that got the biggest changes inside and out until the 1984 C4 debuted.
For what it’s worth, the 10-year-old who saw this Motor Trend thought it was an excellent-looking car. In many ways it looks better than the car that actually replaced the C3 Corvette …
… although comparing drawings to actual cars is usually an apples-to-oranges comparison. (Until computers started drawing cars, drawn cars always looked lower and longer than the actual finished product.) The taillights are wrong, and the doors should have had thinner window frames. Many sports car fans have an irrational hatred of hatchbacks (which the C3 adopted in 1981, two years after the rear window returned), but the C2 and C3 had neither hatch nor trunk (other than C2 convertibles), which severely limited their utility. (Owners had to drop a seat and throw behind it the suitcase for themselves and their fabulous babes, then reverse the process.)
Motor Trend isn’t the only offender in this regard. Consider Car and Driver magazine from 1973:
Never mind that the Corvette 4-Rotor looks like the wildest imaginings of some ivory tower stylist. It happens to be a very real car. And [Corvette chief engineer Zora Arkus] Duntov, known for his circumspection, is openly enthusiastic about it. “Looking back at my twenty-year association with styling, this is the best design ever produced. It is exceedingly beautiful.” That, coming from Duntov, is like hearing Barry Goldwater say that he has always admired Democrats. And if you know Duntov, that statement has a special meaning because, in the past, he has never shown more than a passing interest in the aesthetics of a fender. Apart from the normal considerations that must apply to production Corvettes—reliability and safety to name a couple of the major ones—he cares about one thing; capacity for speed. That boils down to aerodynamics and horsepower. And as the conversation progresses, you find that the Corvette 4-Rotor has both. …
What does that add up to on the road? Duntov smiles. There is a short test track at the GM Tech Center, less than a mile long. “Performance of this car? One-hundred forty-five mph . . . and that is leaving room for braking.
“The feeling of this car is a steady torque, no humps like a 454, no decline, and by virtue of its large displacement, you don’t feel that it’s sluggish from the line. Humans only know change of acceleration. But this car is like gravity . . . you don’t feel the acceleration. There is no high torque kick. But looking at the speedometer, it’s climbing, climbing, climbing. And looking outside, you know you’re going fast. This Wankel car is faster 0-100 mph than 454.”
That’s not a surprising statement, because the four-rotor was rated at 420 horsepower, while the 454 V-8 available in the 1973 Corvette was rated at just 275 horsepower, thanks to smog controls. However, the rotary engine concept never got to the starting line, because of the rotary’s poor fuel consumption. As you know, Chevrolet replaced the rotary with a 400 V-8, and thus was born Aerovette.
The reason Aerovette didn’t happen either is explained by Autos of Interest:
There is one very interesting part to the story that, if true, sheds some light on some of the internal resistance to the seemingly perpetual idea of a mid-engined Corvette. Apparently a Motor Trend staff member was told by a Chevrolet engineer, “Suppose you own a company that makes one-dollar bills. The cost to print the bills is 50¢ including paper, ink, and labor. One day, one of your product planners comes to you with the idea of printing two-dollar notes. Think of it… instead of a 50 cents profit, you’d be making an easy $1.50 profit. After consulting with the accountants you see another view. It seems that after you take into account the cost of the new printing plates, and the conversion of the presses, it would cost you $1.50 to print the new two-dollar bills. That’s still only a 50 cents profit, and since there is still a great demand for the one-dollar bill, you fire the product planner, and keep on printing the ones. If you’re not an accountant, you can’t win. You can at best draw.”
Autos of Interest (which I just found; it’s a great site) has additional details about the C4’s design process:
Framed by a seeming inability to recognize the value in Corvette’s iconic image for the brand, let alone increasing popularity, the so-called experts (otherwise referred to as “bean counters”) were hounding Chevrolet’s general manager, Mr. Bob Lund, to make a change. The most drastic of those proposed changes called for an end to the Corvette model.
It’s reported that, at a meeting, Mr. Lund had just finished stating how ending low-volume Corvette production would allow for greater high-volume Monte Carlo production when Chevrolet’s Director of Public Relations, Jim Williams, stood and said to Mr. Lund, “I don’t know about you, Bob, but I don’t want to be known as the PR chief who worked at Chevy when they dumped the Corvette.” …
This is a full-sized clay model from December of 1976 that, at first glance, looks just like the Aerovette. But, upon comparison, you’ll see several changes.
That’s because this clay model was the “productionized” version of the Aerovette that accounts for things necessary if it were to be built.
At this time, the mid-engine program was getting the majority of the attention. So much so that a mid-engined mule (built on a Porsche 914 platform!) had been constructed for testing. That’s where the mid-engine program lost its steam. Why?
Two problems were exposed by the mule. First was handling and Chevy recognized that Corvette customers had specific expectations about how their car should feel. The engineers ceded they didn’t feel they could meet those expectations with the new configuration in time for the debut.
The second problem had to do with power. In what seems a colossal oversight, the mid-engine proposal was planned from the start to be powered by the same engine/transmission combo as the upcoming X-cars (Citation/Phoenix/Skylark/Omega). That meant a 2.8-liter V6 pumping out a wheezing 110 HP. Boosting the engine’s output with a turbocharger was naturally considered but excessive costs (due to the unique design) and added component stress (which raised serious durability questions) were mortal blows to the doomed plan. …
The head of Chevy 3 design group, Mr. Jerry Palmer, had set five requirements for the epic model being redesigned under his watch: more passenger room, increase cargo space, reduce the drag coefficient, reduce the car’s height, and modernize the firewall-to-axle proportion. Some of those requirements would seem to conflict with another.
For example, in considering reducing the car’s overall height, they determined the ride height (the space between the body and the ground) couldn’t be reduced much compared the outgoing model.
To resolve the dilemma, Mr. Palmer and his team devised an interesting approach. By relocating the lowest components in the old design, the exhaust, including the catalytic converter, out from under the occupants’ seats and into a center tunnel, designers could lower the roof–and occupants–without affecting the car’s ride height.
This is the reason the C4 has what some consider to be an awkward ingress/egress design; others, myself included, feel it adds to the exotic appeal.
The interior design, with the hated digital instruments, combines two interior design concepts:
I believe the second steering wheel ended up in the mid-’80s Camaro. They should have stuck to the analog gauges.
Finally, here’s something you hardly see anymore, but used to see often in car magazines. This is remarkable to see for those of us who remember publications put together before desktop publishing, digital cameras and color availability on every page:
The Corvette C2 Registry passed on this story from the November 1962 Car Craft magazine. Cool detail.
Tim Nerenz coined the term “conservatarian” — conservative on economic issues, libertarian (or as Nerenz put it, neutral) on social issues.
I like that term, even though there isn’t much difference between today’s conservatives and libertarians on economic issues. (Libertarians would claim that Republicans say one thing and do another on economic issues, and libertarians have a pretty convincing argument.)
By that logic, the opposite should be “libertarial” — liberal on economic issues, libertarian on social issues. The Washington Amazon.com Post wonders where left–libertarians fit within the Democratic Party:
For evidence of the widespread uneasiness on the left, one need look no further than the vote in the House last week to defund the NSA’s phone record collection program. While much was made of the fact that nearly half of Republicans voted for the measure, it’s just as notable that 111 of 194 Democrats did the same.
In other words, well more than half the House Democratic conference voted to defund a surveillance program overseen by a president of their own party. That’s a pretty stunning fact that has gotten lost in the current debate.
So why hasn’t this issue played out on the Democratic side like it has on the Republican side (i.e. in full view)?
Put plainly: It’s a movement in search of a leader. There isn’t one big nationally known player on the left that is pushing this issue in a way that Paul is on the right.
For now, the de facto leaders of the left’s effort to rein in the Obama Administration’s surveillance programs are Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and, arguably, the journalist who has been working with Edward Snowden to reveal the programs, Glenn Greenwald. While these two have been pushing the issue hard, they aren’t exactly political figures with huge built-in constituencies.
Aside from those two, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has been talking about ways to make the programs better, working as a bridge between libertarian-leaning Democrats and the Obama Administration (she wrote a Washington Post op-ed to that effect earlier this week). But, as Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman, Feinstein is hardly a libertarian leader on the left. …
Privacy concerns in the Democratic Party have waned — predictably — since Obama took office, but there remains a sizeable constituency for a potential 2016 contender to take advantage of — particularly given two possible candidates closely tied to the administration’s national security programs (Hillary Clinton and Vice President Biden) currently lead the field of contenders. …
While Republicans were very hawkish during George W. Bush’s presidency, Democrats have long been conflicted on issues of privacy and national security.
“Now that [GOP concerns are] finally being voiced, it sounds louder in contrast with the previous silence, and may even be a bit louder for having been pent up all this time,” Sanchez said. “And so it’s natural to note that more than the somewhat hoarse-voiced and weary objections from civil libertarians on the left who’ve been shouting since 2002.”
Potential 2016 contenders who could take up this mantle include noted liberals like Howard Dean or even Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). But Dean hasn’t been a major figure in the Democratic Party for a while now, and Warren has close ties to the Obama Administration, which would seem to make her less likely to buck it on these issues.
My split between economic and social issues really requires a third category — foreign policy and war. On that issue, most Democrats have parroted whatever Barack Obama wants them to say. On foreign policy, for the most part the party parrots the president, the exception being during the Johnson administration on Vietnam. Democrats became quite dovish after Johnson, with disastrous consequences for this country, and, for that matter, their own political careers. Such peacenik Democratic U.S. senators as Frank Church, George McGovern and Wisconsin’s own Gaylord Nelson saw their political careers end like, well, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 1980 elections.
The Democrats have always been libertarian on certain social issues — abortion rights and women’s rights, to name two. The Democrats were libertarian on other social issues until Bill Clinton, as usual interested only in his own political present and future, figured out that voters supported candidates who were tough on crime. Democrats now oppose freedom of expression for their opponents, similar to many Republicans.
The modern Democratic Party has never been libertarian on economic issues, except to the extent that Bill Clinton and, in name only, Obama support free trade. Unions opposed liberalizing immigration because of the possibility of cheaper labor to compete against their members. To the extent Democrats now favor more open immigration, it is based on their belief that that will gain them new voters.
The appeal to me of libertarianism is that it is consistent. (Putting aside the fact that human beings are never consistent.) If you do not want government butting into your bedroom, you should not want government in your wallet either. Smaller government and fiscal responsibility with tax dollars are utterly anathema to the Democratic Party today, and that is unlikely to change in my lifetime.
Since Hillary Clinton appears to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2016, it will be interesting to see how these so-called libertarian Democrats take on foreign and military policies for which a Republican president would have been shredded, but are A-OK by the Obama/Hillary-worshiping Democrats.
In late July the Washington Examiner examined the salaries of city employees and found that — surprise! — salaries of City of Madison and City of Milwaukee employees were far out of whack compared to the salaries of those whose taxes pay their salaries.
What does “out of whack” mean? According to the U.S. Census, as of 2011 the average per capita income in this state was $27,192, and the median family income was $52,374. The average City of Madison employee makes $62,233 per year, and the average City of Milwaukee employee makes $61,729 per year.
The Examiner has done a similar comparison with county employees, this time comparing “average county worker salaries from the Census Bureau’s 2011 Government Employment & Payroll survey, and compared them with the median salaries of full-time workers in the same counties, from the Census’ 2009-2011 tally, to account for cost of living differences.”
So here’s the Wisconsin list, ranked in the nation:
74. Milwaukee County: Average county employee salary $54,994, which is 136 percent of the median salaries of Milwaukee County full-time workers.
111. Racine County: Average salary $54,364, 129 percent of median.
129. Rock County: Average salary $51,304, 127 percent of median.
132. Brown County: Average salary $51,529, 126 percent of median.
134. Kenosha County: Average salary $56,638, 126 percent of median.
137. Outagamie County: Average salary $54,847, 125 percent of median.
138. Walworth County: Average salary $50,970, 125 percent of median.
150. Fond du Lac County: Average salary $50,661, 124 percent of median.
152. Sheboygan County: Average salary $50,988, 123 percent of median.
174. Dane County: Average salary $55,630, 120 percent of median.
County employees in at least 10 counties — which means probably more than that, since the list ended at 117 percent of median — make more money by themselves than not only the median (as in half above and half below) worker in those employees, but make more than the median income of a family in this state. It’s not hard to see how UW Prof. Katherine Cramer Walsh was able to observe, “In most communities, the public workers are the ones who are rich.”
It also exposes the lack of veracity of claims by public employee unions during the Act 10 debate and resulting Recallarama that public employees traded lower pay for better benefits. When a government employee by himself or herself makes more money in a year than the average Wisconsin family does, that employee is getting better salary and benefits. It would be nice if the unions had been honest about that, but honesty has never been a strong point with union leadership in the political sphere. You’ll never get a union mouthpiece, particularly a teacher union mouthpiece, to admit, for instance, the reality of every workplace in the world — some employees are better than others, some employees work harder than others, and some employees work harder than their salaries and some barely meet the minimum requirements for their work. And unlike at a business that you choose to use or not, taxpayers are paying the salaries of good, bad and average government employees.
Public employee salaries are important for taxpayers to know because (1) taxpayers pay their salaries, (2) public employee salaries and expenses are the highest expense in nearly every unit of government; and (3) public employee pensions are the next looming fiscal crisis in some areas, except for those areas (Detroit, Illinois and California, for instance) where pensions are not a future crisis, they’re a crisis now.
I eagerly await the Examiner’s next examination of state employee salaries vs. those who pay their salaries through taxes. That one may be even more revealing. (I’ll give you another group who makes by themselves nearly as much money as the average family in this state: State legislators.)
Two anniversaries today demonstrate the fickle nature of the pop charts. This is the number one song today in 1960:
Three years later, the Kingsmen released “Louie Louie.” Some radio stations refused to play it because they claimed it was obscene. Which is ridiculous, because the lyrics were not obscene, merely incomprehensible:
Today in 1969, while the Beatles were wrapping up work on “Abbey Road,” they shot the album cover:
In 2014, Wisconsin will hold its third gubernatorial election in a little over four years. And in the run-up to an election that will shape the future of the state, Democrats have created the perfect candidate to win the election. Unfortunately for them, that candidate is Republican Scott Walker.
On the day after the 2012 Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election, I argued that Democrats essentially moved the 2014 election ahead two years. In trying to oust Walker over his plan to virtually end collective bargaining for most public employees, the Wisconsin left created a Republican star with national street cred and a database of donors that spanned the 50 states.
Now, Walker can raise a million dollars in the amount of time it takes him to listen to a Styx album. His talking points are now forged of titanium, impenetrable by any prospective electoral opponent.
Polls have shown that Walker is more popular than President Barack Obama, who also won the state twice. According to the latest Marquette University survey, Walker’s approval rating is down to 48%, although that number was only 51% when he won the recall election by seven percentage points. In fact, a large share of Walker’s slight drop is due to Republicans who believe his recently signed budget isn’t conservative enough. Presumably, in an election, those voters will come back home.
Of course, it takes two candidates to make an election, and in 2014, Walker only has to be better than the candidate the Democrats throw his way.
To date, the most prominent name rumored to be taking on Walker is Madison School Board member and millionaire former Trek Bicycle executive Mary Burke. The fact that an untested local school board representative is the best option the Democrats can dredge up in a statewide election is telling enough; but the progressives aren’t so hot on Burke’s candidacy, either.
In many ways, Burke is a moderate. If the state’s liberals were displeased with Tom Barrett as their Walker adversary in 2010 and 2012, they won’t be high-fiving over a Burke nomination; Burke makes Barrett look like Che Guevara.
Calling Burke the “Mitt Romney of the left,” many progressives have criticized Burke for donating $2.5 million to a failed effort to start a charter school for at-risk African-American and Latino children in Madison. Her critics on the left point out that she once supported a study urging staff cutbacks in the Milwaukee Public Schools — a post at the DailyKos asks the Romneyesque question, “Who would Mary Burke fire?” In taking on Walker, clearly Democrats want a choice, not an echo.
The GOP also quotes Ruth Conniff, an occasional Wisconsin Public Radio foil of mine, as saying, “The Democrats have seemed alarmingly unprepared to challenge him.” Which brings two lessons to mind: (1) Don’t be a member of a political party (and I am not), and (2) never underestimate your opponent. Wisconsin Democrats have underestimated Walker ever since he became Milwaukee County executive, and that is now biting them in the, uh, donkey. Recallarama not only flushed tens of millions of Democratic donor dollars down the drain of media companies’ bank accounts for no actual effect, it turned the governor of a state representing not even 2 percent of the U.S.’ populatoin into a conservative star and a potential presidential candidate, if not in 2016, then later.
If not Burke or Democrats you’ve heard of, then who? How about state Rep. Brett Hulsey (D–Madison)? The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Dan Bice reports:
With embattled Rep. Brett Hulsey, you never know what to expect.
This started out being a post on Hulsey’s unusual use of campaign funds to buy an old convertible and register for a triathlon. But by the end of two chats on Monday, the Madison lawmaker was openly contemplating a run for governor after dismissing the leading Democrat eyeing a bid.
“I was at an event with Mary Burke the other day,” said Hulsey, a Democrat. “She’s got the charisma of a turnip.”
Yes, that was on the record.
For those who don’t know, Hulsey is a 54-year-old liberal lawmaker who has made a name for himself with his sometimes bizzare behavior.
When he’s not getting ticketed for photographing and engaging in horseplay with a boy at a Madison beach, he is terrifying his Capitol staff by carrying around a box cutter and talking about toting a muzzle-loading rifle onto the Assembly floor. …
In May, Hulsey also paid $85.39 to participate in a triathlon. He wouldn’t identify which one it was, but online records show he finished 139th out of 324 competitors at the Pardeeville Triathlon on July 6.
Actually, Hulsey believes it’s his fellow Democrats who are leaking negative stories about him. Earlier this year, he said said he might bolt his party to become an Independent.
“It is pathetic that Democrats are going after me rather than fighting Gov. Scott Walker and trying to get Wisconsin working again,” he said Monday.
Hulsey certainly is not fond of Burke, the millionaire Madison School Board member and former Trek Bicycle executive who is making the rounds with Democratic leaders as she gears up for a possible gubernatorial run next year.
Not only did he suggest that she is personality-deprived, Hulsey said she was MIA during the fight with the GOP governorover his legislation stripping most state workers of their collective bargaining rights.
“While we were fighting Gov. Walker — trying to keep him from cutting $800 million from education and gut Wisconsin’s school system — she was working with right-wing interests to take money away from Madison schools to create this bogus private academy,” Hulsey said. “I’m not impressed.”
He’s referring to Burke’s $2.5 million donation in 2011 to set up two public charter schools in Madison targeting low-income, minority students. It has since been voted down by the Madison School Board.
Burke did not respond to a message about Hulsey’s remarks.
So who does Hulsey like for governor?
As crazy and implausible as it sounds, he suggested that he is pondering the idea. He said people like his message when he’s out and about the state.
But Hulsey — who raised only $30 in the past six months — certainly doesn’t have the campaign stash to match Burke or Walker. Undeterred, Hulsey said he would like to run a low-budget, populist-style campaign in the manner of former Wisconsin Sen. William Proxmire.
Given that Hulsey’s red convertible appears to be a Volkswagen Golf, one wonders how unions will feel about that.
The self-comparison to Proxmire is ludicrous, given that Proxmire was able to run his “low-budget, populist-style” campaigns after winning the 1957 special election to replace the deceased Sen. Joe McCarthy because Proxmire was an incumbent. Proxmire also was popular with non-Democrats because he was a fiscal conservative. No one considers Hulsey to be a fiscal conservative; the past five years prove that fiscal conservatives do not exist in today’s Wisconsin Democratic Party.
However, every Wisconsin political reporter, myself included, hopes that Hulsey does run. (Whether as a Democrat, presumably forcing a primary, or as an independent is immaterial, because no one who would consider voting for Hulsey would be voting for Walker anyway.) At a minimum, Hulsey would be entertaining to watch.
RedState has no fewer than 73 rules for prospective Republican presidential candidates, including (including me? We’ll see):
1-Run because you think your ideas are right and you believe you would be the best president. Don’t stay out because your chances are slim, and don’t get in because someone else wants you to. Candidates who don’t have a good reason for running or don’t want to be there are a fraud on their supporters.
2-Ask yourself what you’re willing to sacrifice or compromise on to win. If there’s nothing important you’d sacrifice, don’t run; you will lose. If there’s nothing important you wouldn’t, don’t run; you deserve to lose.
3- If you don’t like Republican voters, don’t run.
4-Don’t start a campaign if you’re not prepared for the possibility that you might become the frontrunner. Stranger things have happened.
5-If you’ve never won an election before, go win one first. This won’t be the first one you win.
6-Winning is what counts. Your primary and general election opponents will go negative, play wedge issues that work for them, and raise money wherever it can be found. If you aren’t willing to do all three enthusiastically, you’re going to be a high minded loser. Nobody who listens to the campaign-trail scolds wins. In the general election, if you don’t convey to voters that you believe in your heart that your opponent is a dangerously misguided choice, you will lose.
7-Pick your battles, or they will be picked for you. You can choose a few unpopular stances on principle, but even the most principled candidates need to spend most of their time holding defensible ground. If you have positions you can’t explain or defend without shooting yourself in the foot, drop them. …
10-You will be called a racist, regardless of your actual life history, behavior, beliefs or platform. Any effort to deny that you’re a racist will be taken as proof that you are one. Accept it as the price of admission. …
12-Ask yourself if there’s anything people will demand to know about you, and get it out there early. If your tax returns or your business partnerships are too important to disclose, don’t run. (We might call this the Bain Capital Rule). …
14-Run as who you are, not who you think the voters want. There’s no substitute for authenticity. …
16-If you never give the media new things to talk about, they’ll talk about things you don’t like.
17-Never assume the voters are stupid or foolish, but also don’t assume they are well-informed. Talk to them the way you’d explain something to your boss for the first time. …
19-Voters may be motivated by hope, fear, resentment, greed, altriusm or any number of other emotions, but they want to believe they are voting for something, not against someone. Give them some positive cause to rally around beyond defeating the other guy.
20-Optimism wins. If you are going to be a warrior, be a happy warrior. Anger turns people off, so laugh at yourself and the other side whenever possible, even in a heated argument.
21-Ideas don’t run for President; people do. If people don’t like you, they won’t listen to you.
22-Your biography is the opening act. Your policy proposals and principles are the headliner. Never confuse the two. The voters know the difference.
23-Show, don’t tell. Proclaiming your conservatism is meaningless, and it’s harder to sell to the unconverted than policy proposals and accomplishments that are based on conservative thinking. …
27-Be ready and able to explain how your plans benefit individual voters. Self-interest is a powerful thing in a democracy.
31-When in doubt, go on the attack against the Democratic frontrunner rather than your primary opponents. Never forget that you are auditioning to run the general election against the Democrat, not just trying to be the least-bad Republican.
32-Attacking your opponents from the left, or using left-wing language, is a mistake no matter how tempting the opportunity. It makes Republican voters associate you with people they don’t like. This is how both Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry ended up fumbling the Bain Capital attack.
33-Be prepared to defend every attack you make, no matter where your campaign made it. Nobody likes a rabbit puncher. Tim Pawlenty’s attack on Romneycare dissolved the instant he refused to repeat it to Romney’s face, and so did his campaign.
34-If your position has changed, explain why the old one was wrong. People want to know how you learn. If you don’t think the old one was wrong, just inconvenient, the voters will figure that out.
35-If a debate or interview question is biased or ridiculous, point that out. Voters want to know you can smell a trap. This worked for Newt Gingrich every single time he did it. It worked when George H.W. Bush did it to Dan Rather. It will work for you.
36-Cultivate sympathetic media, from explicitly conservative outlets to fair-minded local media. But even in the primaries, you need to engage periodically with hostile mainstream media outlets to stay in practice and prove to primary voters that you can hold your ground outside the bubble. …
38-Hecklers are an opportunity, not a nuisance. If you can’t win an exchange with a heckler, how are you going to win one with a presidential candidate? If you’re not sure how it’s done, go watch some of Chris Christie’s YouTube collection. …
40-Never whine about negative campaigning. If it’s false, fight back; if not, just keep telling your own story. Candidates who are complaining about negative campaigning smell like losing. …
44-Voters do not like obviously insincere pandering, but you cannot win an election by refusing on principle to meet the voters where they are. That includes, yes, addressing Hispanic and other identity groups with a plan for sustained outreach and an explanation of how they benefit from your agenda. Build your outreach team, including liaisons and advertising in Spanish-language media, early and stay engaged as if this was the only way to reach the voters. For some voters, it is. …
47-If you’re not making enemies among liberals, you’re doing it wrong.
49-The goal is to win the election, not just the primary. Never box yourself in to win a primary in a way that will cause you to lose the election.
51-Some Republicans can be persuaded to vote for you in the general, but not in the primary. Some will threaten to sit out the general. Ignore them. You can’t make everyone happy. Run a strong general election campaign and enough of them will come your way. …
54-If you’re not prepared for a debate, don’t go. Nobody ever had their campaign sunk by skipping a primary debate. But looking unprepared for a debate can, as Rick Perry learned, create a bad impression that even a decade-long record can’t overcome.
55-The Iowa Straw Poll is a trap with no upside. Avoid it. Michele Bachmann won the Straw Poll and still finished last in Iowa. …
63-Don’t plan to match the Democrats’ operations and technology, because then you’re just trying to win the last election. Plan to beat it.
64-Political consultants are like leeches. Small numbers, carefully applied, can be good for you. Large numbers will suck you dry, kill you, and move on to another host without a backward look. …
69-Getting distance from your base in the general on ancillary issues won’t hurt you; they’ll suck it up and independents will like it. Attacking your base on core issues will alienate your most loyal voters and confuse independents. …
72-Never, ever, ever take anything for granted. Every election, people lose primary or general elections because they were complacent.
73-Make a few rules of your own. Losing campaigns imitate; winning campaigns innovate.
To reinforce a couple of points: The party follows presidential candidates who win. Whether the GOP was on board with “compassionate conservatism” in 2000, they were as soon as George W. Bush became president. Whether the GOP was on board with what became Reaganomics in 1980, they were as soon as Ronald Reagan became president. If I win in 2016, the GOP will become a party of conservatarian ideas.
Truth be told, though, I don’t want to run for president. I’d rather be Lyn Nofziger.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 