Frank's Rants

NBC News Now Projects…

Volume 1, Number 29

It was about 5:30pm on a cool Tuesday evening, Election Night, 1980. I was managing the reelection campaign of a freshman GOP legislator and we were getting the headquarters ready for what we hoped would be a Victory Celebration (it was) later in the evening. The polls had just closed on the east coast, but California voters still had several hours to cast ballots. Many were headed to polling places from work. I had the television tuned to the local NBC news affiliate, when anchorman Tom Brokaw came on screen:

“NBC News has just projected that Ronald Wilson Reagan from the state of California has been elected President of the United States.”

Wow.

Reagan was my hero, a man I admired as much for his conservative stand on issues as for his extraordinary skill as a communicator. I also felt a personal connection to him. I was just 24, but many of my parents’ friends had known Reagan personally from his time as governor. And a woman on our campaign staff, 8 years my senior, had been Reagan’s secretary when he ran for president in 1976.

Soon after Brokaw’s announcement, President Jimmy Carter addressed supporters in Georgia (eastern time zone) and conceded defeat. Soon after that, people out west turned their cars toward home, figuring there was no need to stand in long lines to vote in an election whose outcome was already determined.

Election night 1980 has become famous because of the impact an early call of the presidential race had on turnout in parts of the country that hadn’t yet finished voting. The television networks have responded and now no longer make public predictions or pronouncements while voters are still casting ballots anywhere on the mainland United States.

The presidential election right now is shaping up for an overwhelming win for Barack Obama. The race does seem to be narrowing in some states, but that will just mean that McCain loses states more narrowly then he might have. The Electoral College math doesn’t seem to be in jeopardy. Obama is on track to win over 350 Electoral College votes, the type of landslide victory that Reagan achieved in 1980.

National TV networks will not be making early predictions of Obama’s expected victory next Tuesday, but a lot of others surely will be.

With the proliferation of news sources, especially on the Internet, news of an Obama win will be a hot topic of discussion on Tuesday night. We may very well know the winner of the election as people are leaving their places of work in California shortly after 5pm.
What will that do to turnout? Will all these new and occasional voters who only show up to cast a vote for president still bother to go to the polls if they think Obama has already won?

And if they don’t, what impact will that have on other contests?

This will be something interesting to watch for on Tuesday night, and for young people in political science classes to study years from now.

I only hope I am still around to write about what happened in 2008 as clearly as I can remember that cool fall night in 1980.

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Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his stand on all the ballot propositions yesterday. I got a call from someone asking for my reaction. Here it is:

“Who cares?”

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Is McCain Toast?

Volume 1, Number 28

With less than three weeks remaining in the election, John McCain isn’t quite political toast yet, but he’s under the broiler, there’s smoke around his edges and people are beginning to arrange the butter and jam.

McCain had his best debate performance of the election last night, and arguably might have won it. But that may be a bit like this year’s final tournament of the Fed Ex Cup golf playoffs. Vijay Singh had built such a lead by the time the final post-season tournament came around, all he had to do was complete it alive to win the $10 million Cup prize. Obama emerged from the debate on the defensive, with some bruises, but very much alive. That may be all he needed to do.

The daily national polls the media loves to tout are meaningless. To understand the condition of the presidential race, you have to look at the contest state by state. Right now, it looks very blue.

According to Real Clear Politics, Barack Obama has a clear lead in states with 249 of the 270 electoral votes necessary to win. He has a lead in states with another 37 electoral votes. John McCain has a solid lead in states with only 140 electoral votes, and a lead in states with 18 electoral votes. Six states with 94 electorate votes between them are considered a toss up, but Obama is leading in four of them.

For McCain to eke out a win, he would have to win every toss up state, and most of those that now lean toward Obama. That seems highly unlikely at this point.

Sensing gangrene starting to set in on Republican chances to hold onto the White House, some conservative commentators have taken to savaging McCain’s staff of advisors. William Kristol called on McCain to fire his entire campaign team and start from scratch. “It’s really become a pathetic campaign. There’s no strategy. They’re flailing around. They do things that don’t work and keep on doing them. They’re out of sync with their own candidate now.”

It’s true that the McCain campaign has had its share of organizational difficulties. When a former Reagan advance expert told the McCain team their advance operation wasn’t up to stuff, they blew him off. A few days later the campaign lost the luggage of the entire traveling press corps.

But the biggest problems with the McCain campaign are not with the staff, they are with the candidate. John McCain is undisciplined, erratic and seems to prefer to be in difficult situations of his own making. Given the choice of sticking to a script and hammering home a message, he’s liable to throw the notes away and say about anything that happens to come to his mind. Every day is a new message. As if he suffers from ADHD, McCain seems fidgety, incapable of developing a consistent theme.

His campaign is spending tens of millions of dollars on commercials telling voters that Barack Obama’s inexperience is scary in a dangerous world and he is not ready to lead. When one of his own volunteers tells McCain at a rally that she is afraid of Obama, McCain grabs the microphone and tells her that his opponent is a nice guy and she doesn’t have to be afraid of him.

Now that is a good strategy. You’re running against a guy who is the chosen one of his party, there are a lot more people in his party than yours, the incumbent president from your party is the most unpopular in the history of the nation, the economy is tanking on your president’s watch, the country is clamoring for change, and your message is that your opponent is actually a nice guy you don’t have to fear? Yeah, that’s the ticket.

All that being said, John McCain now seems to be in a position where he is most emotionally comfortable. He’s the underdog that nobody thinks can win. Maybe he’s so comfortable in this position of scorned candidate fighting long odds because of what he went through in Hanoi. Who knows?

I believe that we’re going to get the best of John McCain on the campaign trail over the next 20 days. We started to see that last night. He still has enough time, barely, to bring voters back to his side. But he’s going to have to consistently hammer Obama as a risky candidate in dangerous economic and international times. Even then it may be too late. But at least we’ll see if he has the discipline to make a race of it.

If he doesn’t, he’ll find himself traveling the same speech and dinner circuit as Bob Dole, another GOP Senator who got trounced by voters but remained immensely popular inside the beltway.

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Most people know that I am helping to manage the Yes on Proposition 8 campaign. Whatever you may think of the issue, I made my most important contribution to the marriage debate last Saturday. I walked my eldest daughter, Samantha, down the aisle to give herself in marriage to the young man she feel in love with in college, five years ago. What a series of emotions. It’s highly personal, but you can read the toast I gave at the reception by clicking here.

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Bailouts, Budgets and Vetoes

Volume 1, Number 27

The political leadership of the nation, from the President on down, are in near panic over the state of US financial markets. Governor Schwarzenegger has written lawmakers declaring the situation to be a crisis for California – the state will be unable to pay our bills unless we can access supposedly frozen credit markets.

Recognizing the influence of message positioning, people are running all over Washington and the cable news shows to declare that this is an economic recovery plan, not a bailout. It’s not about Wall Street, we’re told, but Main Street. The trouble is, it IS about Wall Street and it is a bailout. I don’t like it, and don’t support it.

Either you believe in economic freedom or you don’t. A lot of companies, and people, made big money in real estate over the past decade. A lot of companies and a lot of money. We saw a historic run up in values, record loan volumes, and unprecedented economic growth. It was that record growth that sowed the seeds of the current downturn. Lenders actively and aggressively loaned money to people who could not afford to pay it back. Those borrowers bet that their property would increase in value and they’d be able to refinance later when, presumably, they could afford the payments. The equity markets, egged on by investors eager for fat returns and government-backed agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, developed exotic investment vehicles to package those loans so that Wall Street could sell those packages. The good times flowed.

I don’t recall anybody suggesting back then that people should be sending their profits to the US Treasury Department (other than the normal confiscatory tax policies we deal with every day). Nor should they have. My wife and I bought a house in Fair Oaks in 1998 for $265,000. We invested about $100,000 in remodeling the house, and sold it in 2005 for just under $750,000. A handsome profit, indeed.

Now the real estate market has turned and a lot of people and companies stand to lose a lot of money. My wife and I are among that group as well. We invested our profits from the sale of our former home in the construction of a new home that, today, is worth at least one-third less than when we moved into it in 2006. So now should the taxpayers write us a check for the value we’ve lost due to the market turn? Of course not.

Now I realize that the situation facing the national financial markets is much more complicated than the simplistic example of Frank and Maryann Schubert, but the principles remain the same. I will feel badly for the investors and employees of those companies that go under, and for the vendors and suppliers to those companies. Credit markets will tighten considerably, in the short term. But they won’t stay that way for long. Lenders lend – that’s what they do. They will continue lending to people who are able to pay them back, with interest. And if the market is allowed to self-correct, it will do so as it always has. Assets now on the books of investors will be re-priced according to demand for those assets. That is inevitable. The only question is who bears the cost of the re-pricing – the taxpayers who did not profit when times were good, or the investors, who did.  I’m standing with the taxpayers.

For the US government to obligate the taxpayers to pick up the tab of this financial mess makes as much sense to me as the government loaning money to a homeowner whose beach house has been destroyed by a hurricane, so that the homeowner can rebuild in the very same spot.

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Regular readers of my Weekly Rant are familiar with my views of the recently concluded state “budget.” When last we visited, the legislature had passed a document that was “balanced” largely on the basis of forcing taxpayers to pay taxes months earlier than they were due. This, we were told, was not a tax increase because, eventually, taxpayers would be made whole (without interest). I called it one of the sorriest examples of legislating I had seen in my 30 years of following the budget dance. Fortunately, Governor Schwarzenegger threatened to veto the entire budget (but not over this issue. He was largely concerned about the details of the budget reserve). That threatened veto is to his credit. The budget that was ultimately passed included stronger language on the reserve, and fewer taxpayers who will be forced to pay up early.  But it is still a sorry piece of legislation that largely defers to the next Legislature the job of fixing the structural problem that California government spends more than it takes in, no matter how much it takes in.

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Just when you thought that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s relationships with legislators couldn’t get worse, they did. In an unprecedented decision, the governor terminated 136 bills through the issuance of a “general veto.” Huh? He said he would only sign bills that are “the highest priority for California.”  Those apparently included bills dealing with the labeling of olive oil, surplus property at the Lynwood Armory, dreissenid mussels and dungeness crabs. It was a good year for shellfish.

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