Samizdata

Although much will be made of the GOP victories in Virginia and New Jersey, I do not think they really matter that much. The one that did matter, the third party insurgency in New York, was won by Obama’s man… that was the important one.

All the wrong conclusions will now be drawn. The doom-loop has not been broken.

In New York 23 Hoffman is going up against both the Democrat and the Republican machines (Dede S. having endorsed the Democrat and working closely with him on get-out-the-vote) so if he wins it will be a big upset in a district that supported Barack Obama.

Actually the New York Conservative party may evolve (from an unimportant group that just follows in the wake of the Republicans) into something like the “Barnburner” (later Van Buren) faction of the New York Democrats of the early 19th century.

No doubt the Republicans will reach out to Hoffman if he wins and say “Caucus with us” – but he would be sensible (again if he wins) to keep them at arms length and avoid going back into bed with people who stabbed him the back.

The Virginia race looks won for the Republicans (famous-last-words) a big defeat not just for Barack Obama – but also for the Washington Post (which ran smear ariticles on the Republican almost every day for the last month or so).

New Jersey.

My prediction is the same as I have been saying for a long time – Christie will win on the day, but Goldman Sachs will remain Governor.

One indication already – 3000 absentee ballots were checked and it was found that the signatures did not match. But, no doubt, they will be counted anyway (and this is the tip of the iceberg – there are more absentee ballots this year than there were in the Presidential election year).

In short, as so often, in New Jersey the fix is in.

I hope I am proved wrong on that one – but it would take a get-out-the-vote effort by the Republicans on a scale they have not managed in New Jersey since 1993 (when there were simply so many people voting Republican that their votes outnumbered the fake votes).

Sometimes a ‘leader’ is the person at the rear directing others to do things… but sometimes the ‘leader’ is the one out in front, well, leading, and the people who follow that person’s lead only after they see the way things are developing are mere ‘followers’… the bandwagon jumpers and weathervane watchers.

And that makes Sarah Palin a leader… quite possibly the de facto leader if she really wants. Certainly people who bet their party machine politics against her will think long and hard before crossing her after what happened to Dede Scozzafava, who the left wing statist press hilariously describe as a ‘moderate’ Republican. That the likes of Palin, Armey et al. can come in and kick the snot out of the established local party, even when it has the backing of people like Gingrich, will gave many pause for thought.

Of course some Democrats will rub their hands with glee and see this as the ‘Republicans tearing themselves apart’… and they are right, but wrong to be happy about it, because in truth the party that Obama beat needs to ‘tear itself apart’ and the fact it is starting to do so means the party opposing Obama could be a very different party in a few years… a party that rejects the catastrophic Bush years that hugely expanded the scope of the state and which made everything that Obama is trying to do now possible.

I suspect the reason so much effort was put into rubbishing and ridiculing Palin was an early indication that many of the ultra-statist in both parties saw what Palin represents as deeply unsettling, and not for any of the reasons usually given. Certainly I started to take Palin far more seriously the more she was lampooned by the usual coterie of dismal entertainment biz apparatchiks.

She ain’t no libertarian but she certainly ain’t no John McCain/George Bush either. I suspect her principle-over-party endorsement of an obscure New York conservative over an obscure New York Republican on the far-left of the party, may represent one of those seemingly minor events that turn out to be the precursor to something quite interesting and far reaching. Only time will tell but I think the winds of change are blowing and quite a lot of people are going to be genuinely surprised when their political careers get dumped in Boston Harbor.

Update: And to the commenter who called himself ‘Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle’ on my previous post about this issue… you said:

You know what is really funny? The Republican party candidate is not a lefty at all. She’s made nice to unions a time or two. That’s about it. She isn’t a RINO by any stretch of the imagination

Oh really? Well guess what… Republican Dede Scozzafava, who suspended her campaign yesterday in the New York 23rd Congressional District, has endorsed Democrat Bill Owens.

Yeah, not a RINO at all. This actually makes the “Palin called it right” contention incontrovertible. By doing this Scozzafava has just made Palin even stronger.

Sarah Palin has joined several other quite prominent Republicans and demonstrated that she ‘gets it’ by endorsing a third party Conservative over a Republican RINO running for the House in New York … whereas Newt Gingrich has demonstrated the exact opposite.

Gingrich stated of his backing the official Republican nomination Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava:

“We have to decide which business we are in. If we are in the business about feeling good about ourselves while our country gets crushed then I probably made the wrong decision.”

Which means he thinks the way to revitalise the Republican Party is to nominate Republicans who are functionally interchangeable with Democrats on a great many issues.

Contrast with Palin’s view, who clearly drew the correct lessons from her experience running as McCain’s veep, has picked the Conservative Party of New York candidate over the official Republican one, as did Dick Armey and Fred Thompson:

“The Republican Party today has decided to choose a candidate who more than blurs the lines, and there is no real difference between the Democrat and the Republican in this race.”

As I have been arguing for quite some time now, this is exactly the sort of notion that needs to work its way into the Republican Party. No wonder the media hate her.