Obama, Clinton, Kerry inaction in Syria caused by Russian blackmail

July 2, 2016 — buckeyerino

Syria is a place where the Islamic State thrives but where the USA has been unwilling to go. There are even rumblings, purportedly from Foreign Service officers, that the USA ought to change strategies in Syria, including ousting Assad as ruler of Syria along with taking the fight to the Islamic State. VP Biden has said that we don’t dare do that because no one has a crystal ball to show how such a story would end. It could end quite badly, with a failed state (chaos) in a strategic location.  Nonetheless, with the Islamic State taking credit for violence in Bangladesh overnight, and an airport bombing in Istanbul just a couple of days ago, and a mass shooting in an Orlando nightclub, on top of still-seared-in-our-memory attacks in Brussels, San Bernadino, and Paris, the USA’s actions against the Islamic State confined to just Iraqi territory, do not appear to be bringing an end to the terror.  Russia has taken some actions against terrorists on Syrian soil, but Russia is also interested in protecting Assad, a useful pawn, just as Iran has, for many decades, been a useful proxy for Russia.

I ran across a video clip from MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Friday, July 1, 2016 wherein the pundits just acted bewildered over the Obama administration’s ineptitude in countering the Islamic State.  The plan appears to be to leave all Syrian-territory campaigns against the Islamic State in the hands of the Assad government (which is allied with and militarily aided by Russia and Iran).  The pundits on Morning Joe, in their bewilderment, surmise that the Obama administration is too risk-averse to do what needs to be done in Syria: Extinguish the Islamic Stand and depose Assad.

Click the following to open up the Morning Joe segment referenced above:

http://player.theplatform.com/p/7wvmTC/MSNBCEmbeddedOffSite?guid=n_mj_burns_160701

I’m not at all bewildered.  Russia has all the leverage.  They are blackmailing the Obama administration.  How do I deduce that?  I think if I just connect a couple of dots for you, I think you’ll be able to connect them with other dots so that you can see a bigger picture emerging.

When Syria crossed the red line of using chemical weapons, instead of punishing Assad, Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated with the Assad regime so that chemical weapons would be dismantled.  This is a clear signal that the USA did not envision anyone leading an independent Syria other than Assad.  So, despite the various factions jockeying for power in Syria, and despite the fact that we may feel sympathetic to one or more of the factions fighting to topple Assad, Kerry’s agreement reached with Assad underlines that the Obama administration will not seek regime change in Syria.  I am not surprised by this.  As for the reason why I am not surprised at this stance, it flows from a postmodern ideology (which I don’t agree with).  I don’t plan on delving into the ideology in this blog post.  It is sufficient to merely connect the dots to show Obama had no intention of toppling Assad or mobilizing our military in Syria.

But I will go further to say that not only does Obama have no intention of intervening in Syria, the Russians will make sure that Obama does not change his mind.

Remember that Clinton email server controversy?  Oh, yeah!  It’s all over the news!  The FBI has been investigating it!  Right?  But oftentimes, when key witnesses have been deposed, not only do the witnesses lawyer up as they head into these depositions, but the State Department and Justice Department have also, from time to time, sent their own lawyers.  Why?  To limit the scope of what questions the FBI asks.  So, connect this dot.  What does it mean when the State Department and the Justice Department (of which the FBI is a part!!!) see to it that the FBI inquiries are very narrow?  It’s one thing when questions go unanswered (and some witnesses have pled the 5th Amendment).  We, the public, are only permitted transcripts, so even our window into whatever little answers there are is a very narrow window.  It’s entirely another thing when question after question that the FBI would like to ask is considered out-of-bounds.  I say that the dots connected here are that the integrity of both the State Department and the Justice Department could be compromised if all questions could be asked and were answered.  If all facts came to light, it would devastate more than just Hillary Clinton.  State and Justice have skin in the game.

Hillary Clinton, for her part, wanted to be sure that any personal communications were to be safeguarded on the private server.  Never mind the classified top secret government information, for concern over leakage of that would be secondary to leakage over Clinton’s personal communications.

The mainstream media, for the most part, have been downplaying the Clinton’s private email server as a mistake.  The server could have been successfully hacked, but we don’t know that, so says the MSM.  So as long as we don’t know if the server was hacked, this mistake is forgivable and no harm has been done?

What if, on the other hand, the server was successfully hacked and Russia possesses ALL of the information that was on it, not just the top secret classified stuff, which might include troubling info about State and Justice, but Hillary’s personal stuff, too.  Since the Reagan administration, the Bush family, the Clinton family, and the Obama family have safeguarded each other’s White House secrets.  Though Republican voters had very little interest in a Jeb Bush POTUS candidacy, I think the Obamas and the Clintons were very much depending on a Bush nomination.  If Bush had been the presumptive nominee, his interest would have probably been confined to winning, not exposing Clinton or Obama, for they could expose two former Bush presidents.  If Russia possessed ALL of that information, Bush would probably suppress as much of the information as he could.  The mood of the electorate, though, has been for outsiders to oust the insiders.  If we, the voters, could trade places with an “outsider” candidate, like Trump, and we, as the outsider candidate, became dimly aware that the Russians possessed ALL of that information, would we want it?  Somewhere in that information that Russia would have is something that is “Kryptonite” to not only Hillary, but to the Justice Department, and to the State Department, for that’s what we can infer by all the lawyering up and the narrow limits placed upon the FBI inquiries.  So, if we as the outsider candidate, were aware that records exist of scandal and corruption, would we, unlike a Jeb Bush, have an appetite to expose it?  Such a scenario, then, would strengthen the hand of the Russians, for Clinton and Obama are in a more precarious situation than if they were running against Jeb.

The only way to wipe out the Islamic State is to get Russia and Iran to do it, for the Assad regime is not powerful enough to repel the Islamic State, nor will Russia allow anyone to interfere with Assad or Iran.  They have blackmailed the Obama administration with all that they know about our government’s corruption and scandals at the highest levels.  Obama cannot change course on Syria even if he wanted to (but he doesn’t).

How bad could the corruption, the scandals, possibly be?  For now, I leave those dots for you, the readers, to connect.  You’ve been hearing bits and pieces of things, haven’t you?

By the way, Saudi Arabia:  For all the influence that you think you bought by donating to the Clinton Global Initiative, you are not as protected from Iran as you think you are.  Russia poses an existential threat to Clintonian power, so that means Iran has more leverage than you.

 

Posted in 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump (R), executive branch, Hillary Clinton (D), International Politics, National Politics, Politics in the MSM, POTUS, terrorism, Uncategorized. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 3 Comments »

2016 POTUS race is like cable or satellite TV: so many options, but nothing that’s interesting

December 24, 2015 — buckeyerino

Yeah, the ratings for the Republican presidential campaign debates are through the roof.  Yeah, there are lots of choices this time around–and that’s a good thing.  That being said, I’m getting frustrated that I can’t identify a candidate I’m excited about.  I had a favorable opinion of Bobby Jindal based on how much less corrupt Louisiana state government is than it was before he took office.  A record of reform is appealing to me.  Jindal, however, is one of four GOP candidates who have dropped out of the race.  Lindsey Graham dropped out very recently.  Further back, Rick Perry dropped out.  Scott Walker was the first to drop out (which made total sense to me).  On the Democrat side (not that anybody across the aisle interests me), Jim Webb and Lincoln Chaffee have dropped out.  That still leaves 13 Republicans and 3 Democrats in the running:

To get an idea of the lay of the land, I’ve listed the candidates top to bottom in each party to approximate recent polling data (not an exact science to be sure).  I’ve linked each name in that list to the corresponding official campaign webpage.  Go ahead and click on the links.  See if anybody excites you.

Let me list some of the grievances that cause me to cross candidates off my list of preferences:

  • Crony capitalism?  Support for bailouts?  Ties to the gambling industry?  Ties to businesses “too big to fail?”  Pay-to-play politics?  Manipulate markets through artificial means to predetermine winners and losers of your own choosing?  More beholden to campaign donors than to voters?  Sorry, not for me.  Oops!  I just shoveled a bunch of people off my list already!
  • Isolationism?  Reluctant to propel our nation to lead the world?  Fearful of increasing legal immigration?  Hey, wake up!  People are watching us all around the world.  I am mindful of that.  We cannot have leaders that bury their heads in the sand.
  • Dishonesty?  Trying to be enigmatic about policy positions?  Talking out of both sides of your mouth?  Unwilling to be held accountable?  Holding double-standards?  Dodging culpability through legal technicalities and obfuscation?  Lacking integrity?  (I’m looking at you, Hillary Clinton.  This is why you’d be the last person I’d vote for of either party.)
  • Lack of leadership?  No executive experience?  Unable to rally people to your cause?  Unable to form coalitions?  Unwilling to negotiate with those on the other side of the political aisle?  A lone voice in the wilderness that no one cares to listen to?  Ineffective administrator?  Constantly making excuses for poor performance?  The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing?  Take credit for the good but pass blame for the bad?  The buck doesn’t stop at your desk?  There are places in society for such people.  They can be bloggers, just like me.  And, just like me, they shouldn’t be POTUS.
  • In trouble with the law?  Domestic violence?  Sexual harassment?  Driving while intoxicated?  Use of recreational drugs?  Evaded taxes?  Commingled personal funds with business funds, campaign funds, NGO funds, or government funds?  Hired a domestic that was not eligible to work in the United States?  Steered contracts for bribes and kickbacks?  Hid information from FOIA requests that the public has a right to know about?  Does a life of privilege protect you from reaping legal consequences that would ordinarily befall someone in less-priveleged circumstances?  No one should be exempt from the law.
  • Utopianism?  Should free markets go the way of the dinosaur?  In the interests of economic egalitarianism in pursuit of a classless society through destratification, should our society and economy be centrally planned by a benevolent federal government comprised of the best thinkers within the ivory tower?  Do we need to be saved from ourselves?  Are we citizens irrationally prone to vote against our own best interests?  Should the interests of the betterment of society trump the ambitions of individuals?  Wouldn’t equality guarantee happiness for everyone?  Well, I don’t call myself Buckeye RINO because I am okay with being herded like cattle.
  • Constitution allergy?  Is the U.S. Constitution inconvenient?  Should speech, religion, the press, and peaceable assembly be regulated?  Should firearm ownership be confined to on-duty law enforcement and military personnel?  Is the whole population comprised of suspects, thus seeking warrants just bothersome red tape?  Do the checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution intrude on the branches of government to the point that each branch needs work-arounds to circumvent the checks and balances?  Are the people too subversive to be sovereign?  Is it too hard to declare war before engaging in acts of war?  Is due process too much to expect when the government has an interest in seizing private property?  Shouldn’t the Senate have the same right of introducing an appropriations bill as does the House?  Should special interest groups be delegated the responsibility of writing the legislation that gets introduced in Congress?  If any act of Congress, on its face, is unenforceable, should the executive branch be given carte blanche to add whatever administrative code to it deemed necessary to make it enforceable?  Should the new loophole of regarding the U.S. Constitution as a “living document” render the Constitution malleable to the point at which it means whatever it is expedient to say it means at any given point in time?  Should any U.S. District Court judge be permitted to strike down the laws of any state, or institute new state laws, based upon the federal government’s interests and the federal government’s notions of political correctness?  Is holding on to power, whether for incumbents, the federal government as a whole, the two major political parties, businesses “too big to fail,” or government bureaucracies (like the IRS, the Federal Reserve Board, the Bureau of Land Management, the DEA, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, ICE, the FEC, the EPA, etc.) so imperative that the sovereign people, the 50 states, and the U.S. Constitution must ultimately be subjugated?  I cannot abide politicians who act in this manner, and maybe that’s why GOP voters have been driven toward non-politicians early on in this election cycle.

I already eliminated all the presidential candidates based on these 7 bulletpoints.  Now what?  Choose the least of the evils?  In that case, I find myself being pushed toward Rand Paul, for the 7th bulletpoint trumps them all.  I don’t think of Rand Paul as a leader.  I have no data from which I can extrapolate what kind of administrator he would be.  Libertarians often outsource the work of government because the government is deemed too inefficient.  I am not libertarian.  I think many functions of government should be kept in-house.  Ideally, there’d be a chain of command within government that would hold bureaucracies accountable to the chief executive and responsive to the people, thus a political leader should reform government agencies and lead them to greater efficiency.  I don’t agree with many tenets of libertarianism, legalization of recreational drugs being just one example of what I oppose.  I worry that a libertarian running the government would be like steering a rudderless ship, for I think that libertarianism aspires to such an extreme of individualism that it interferes with a sense of community.  I think having a sense of community is the essence of good government that rules by the consent of the governed.  I think Rand Paul is isolationist.  In foreign policy, I fear a President Rand Paul would project weakness.  I fear that the U.S. would step aside as world leader, and that, in turn, would leave a vacuum that Russia or China or many other nations would like to fill.  I must admit that I believe in American exceptionalism.  I think we have the best nation on the planet, and I wish that other nations would emulate ours at least to the extent that their respective constitutions grant liberties to their respective populations that are equal to our own Bill of Rights.

What scares me about so many other candidates is that they want to sound so tough on the homeland security front that they are willing to part with key provisions of the Bill of Rights, whether it’s gun control, the tendency to attempt to muzzle the media in the face of criticism (or script, in advance, the messages delivered by the media), and a barely concealed animosity toward religion on the left; or treating all citizens as suspects on the right.  Have you heard the GOP candidates’ stances on encryption?  They are chilling.  I believe the freedom of speech includes choosing who is and who is not the audience of any given communication.  This blog is unencrypted because I hope for a wide audience for the views I state here.  But if I’m talking about a sensitive personal matter, I want to communicate in complete privacy only to a specific audience of my choosing.  Unfortunately, the national security hawks want every civilian communication to be a public one with plenty of ways to eavesdrop at their disposal.  I never liked the so-called Patriot Act for its infringement of 4th Amendment provisions regarding warrants, or should I say the granting of policing power with either no warrants or issuance of secret warrants, thus circumventing the constitutional checks and balances upon policing power.  The result is an arrangement that makes the government opaque to the people and the people transparent to the government.  I think the people of this nation need to put terrorist acts in perspective.  What is the ratio of terrorist-on-American crime with respect to American-on-American crime?  Remember the chorus on the right side of the aisle that responded to prominent white-on-black criminal cases with the knee-jerk reaction of “What about black-on-black crime?”  The casualties from terrorist-on-American crime are much fewer than non-terrorist-on-American crime.  I suggest we not throw away our constitutional rights over this.  Chris Christie said he puts national security first because, for hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center, he didn’t know what had become of his wife.  Along that same line of reasoning, if someone close to Chris Christie, heaven forbid, should be threatened by a firearm, would that make it okay, in his mind, to rescind the 2nd Amendment?  I think the 2nd Amendment is one way to ensure that terrorists will never take control of our nation.  Do you remember a time when military coups were ubiquitous across the Third World?  In those nations, the people lacked the arms that governments and military insurgents had.  What purpose do assault weapons serve in the hands of a free people?  Some of the answers to that question are that we maintain a civilian-controlled military, that we deter foreign invasion, and that we prevent the formation of a totalitarian state (or that we have the power to overthrow a totalitarian state, heaven forbid).  I offered Chris Christie’s position as an example of the candidates’ rhetoric on national security, but he really shouldn’t be singled out, for candidates at the bottom of the polls, like Jim Gilmore and Martin O’Malley, all the way to the top of the polls, like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, envision a security state that must take precedence over constitutional liberties.

For the time being, I suppose I am cornered into the Rand Paul camp, and I don’t like it.  I’m not a happy camper.  I’m hoping candidates whose leadership skills I admire will come to their senses and take the side of the US Constitution.  Barring that, watching this race unfold is like channel surfing and finding nothing intriguing on TV.

Posted in executive branch, National Politics. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Fox News being selfish in only allowing 3 hours for first GOP debates scheduled for Aug. 6, 2015

August 1, 2015 — buckeyerino

Sound bites from the people that matter (the candidates for the GOP nomination for the 2016 presidential election) and hours of hashing and rehashing the sound bites from the people that don’t matter (media pundits): That is what we have to look forward to in the wake of the first GOP presidential candidate debates. This imbalance is the essence of my complaint.

The first GOP debates of the 2016 presidential campaign season will be held on Fox News on August 6,2015.  Seventeen candidates are eligible to participate in one of two debates that evening.  Originally, just one debate during two hours of primetime was scheduled to start at 9 PM Eastern Time.  That primetime debate would only have allowed for the top 10 candidates in the polls to be on stage.  Because of backlash, Fox News has announced an additional hour of debate for the remaining 7 candidates that starts at 5 pm Eastern Time, so all the major GOP candidates get some time on-camera.

But let’s put things into perspective.  Are these debates going to use all 180 minutes of those time slots on these debates?  Or will their be commercial breaks?  Or, at the least, station breaks?  Even if they air the debates nonstop without interruption, three hours does not seem to be much time considering that Fox News is on the air 24/7.  A candidate would be really lucky to total more than 10 minutes of speaking time during these debates.  How much can you really learn about a candidate’s platform in 10 minutes, especially if the moderator is steering conversation away from the message a candidate wants to emphasize?  With such a short timeframe to work with, a moderator has to be very selective about what issues to raise and responses to elicit.  Viewers will not get a chance to learn the depth and breadth of each candidacy.  Therefore, there will be too little information revealed to make apples to apples comparisons between candidates’ competing visions.

24-hour news networks can be boring to follow over the course of a day because so much information is repeated ad nauseum.  The debates will provide a welcome break from that.  Why not pre-empt all of the regularly scheduled programming that evening to give us a solid block of time to hear all the candidates more in-depth in a round robin that puts them all on stage at once?  After all, this is the debut.

A debut means that it is a special occasion that comes around only once every four years, so why the stinginess on time?  At any other time of the campaign season, people will have already dropped out–people who might have been worthy of further consideration, had they only been given a chance to have their say. One of the reasons that the freedom of the press is encoded into our U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights is so that we can access information about these very important political matters.  TV news outlets should exist for stuff such as this.

I say, start the cameras rolling at 4 pm and keep them rolling until midnight.  Yes, that’s a full eight-hour work shift during which the candidates need to remain engaged, but the work of the President of the United States is far more grueling than that, thus it should be no big deal.  Yeah, people need to eat and people need to use the bathroom during eight hours, so seat the candidates at long tables that will allow them to be served some dinner.  Since only one person can talk at a time anyway, there should be plenty of time for the other sixteen candidates to swallow a few bites and take a few swigs of their drinks as they listen in.  The candidates, of course, would need to be cued when they are on-deck so that they are free to speak without food in their mouths when it becomes their turn.  The candidates can grab restroom breaks during commercials.  While food is being served, the debate format can be Q & A between moderator and candidate, with each taking a turn.  After the food has been cleared away, the debate between candidates can begin in earnest, wherein candidates can challenge each other’s positions with much less input from the moderator.  At that point, the moderator would merely play traffic cop by identifying which speaker has the floor at any given point so that candidates do not talk over each other.

Who is going is going to watch an eight-hour debate in its entirety besides die-hard political junkies, you ask?  Never fear, for, in the weeks following, the pundits will all pile on to rehash what was said.  Therefore, if you only caught pieces of the debate, you are sure to see regurgitations of it.  The difference is, instead of the pundits playing upon the same sound bites over and over again, there will actually be enough substance from the candidates’ mouths that the pundits might actually say something insightful rather than knee-jerk.  There will be more context within which to analyze candidates’ statements.

When hours of punditry have to pick over mere seconds of sound bites, the political commentary tends to resemble tabloid TV reality shows.  We have enough of that on the tube already.  If the news networks made the changes I recommend, there would be more meat for the pundits to digest, and the commentary might actually become educational, and that would be refreshing.

Aren’t there way too many pundits?  Don’t they take up way too much broadcasting time?  More time should have been alloted to this debut event–specifically to the candidates.  The pundits are like the poor: They will always be with us.

By the way, here’s a recap of the 17 candidates, in no particular order, with links to their official websites (except for one, the latest entrant, former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, who doesn’t seem to have launched his website yet).

Former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore

Former New York Governor George Pataki

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee

Former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum

U.S. Senator from Florida, Marco Rubio

U.S. Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz

U.S. Senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul

U.S. Senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina

Pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson

Real estate tycoon Donald Trump

Ohio Governor John Kasich

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie

Posted in executive branch, National Politics, Politics in the MSM. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

How does Scott Walker win Ohio? He won’t.

July 28, 2015 — buckeyerino

I hear that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker gives really good stump speeches in his quest to win the U.S. Presidency in 2016.  In a very crowded GOP field where a candidate only has to have more than 10% support to be considered one of the serious contenders (really? when 2016 is still 5 months away?), Walker appears to be well positioned for the first GOP caucus contest early next year in Iowa.  So, what if he wins Iowa?  What if he wins nominating contests in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada?  A lot of competitors will have quit after striking out in the first four contests, true.  But will those potential wins provide the bump he needs to win the White House?  I don’t think so.  Though Ohio’s electoral votes seem to decrease with every census, I still do not see how a Republican candidate wins the White House without winning Ohio.  I don’t see how Scott Walker can win Ohio in a general election unless the Democrat nominee makes a mammoth (and I mean huge, huge, huge) blunder.

It is conceivable, however unlikely, that Walker could win a GOP primary in Ohio, especially if the GOP field is still crowded.  But the field won’t be crowded.  With so many candidates at this stage of the race, the double-digit support Walker currently has makes him seem like a Goliath (OK, maybe not compared to Donald Trump or former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, but I think you know what I mean).  In my memory, I can never recall a GOP primary ballot in Ohio that listed more than five presidential candidates.  Going from double-digit numbers of candidates down to 5 candidates would mean that Scott Walker would have to climb to at least 20% of the vote to win, and 20% would only win if the other candidates were also deadlocked with 20% of the vote yet each tallying one less vote than Scott Walker’s.  If there were just 2 candidates Ohio’s GOP primary ballot and one of them were Scott Walker, I seriously doubt he could cross the 50% threshold to win.  His best chance to win Ohio’s delegates is for all the other candidates to drop out (and sometimes that happens by the time Ohio votes).

Walker was making national news as governor of Wisconsin at the same time that John Kasich was making national news as governor of Ohio.  True, Kasich made national news as a key member of the Congress that balanced the federal budget in the 1990’s, but, for many voters, that is not recent memory.  Governors Walker and Kasich were in the national spotlight for the same thing: passing legislation to drastically alter the collective bargaining rights of the public-sector labor unions.

To me, showing real leadership in executive office means toughly negotiating a fair contract.  Leadership is needed not only at the state level to get labor contracts that strike the right balance, but also at the local levels of government, too.  Voters don’t always elect good leaders, and that’s on them if they didn’t do their homework prior to voting.  So, if labor contracts exist that are not in the public’s best interest, then the public needs to recruit good leaders and vote them into office.  After the victors take office, they need to remember that taxpayers expect that our government executives negotiate contracts that the public can support.

What Walker and Kasich tried to do was compensate for an overall lack of leadership, at state and local levels, regarding labor contract negotiations.  They tried to use the legislation to overturn negotiated contracts.  This step, in and of itself, is not only wrong (because it breaks promises), but it weakens the executive branch’s negotiating clout down the road.  Negotiating in good faith strengthens one’s clout.  Wiping out contracts with legislation shows that one did not negotiate in good faith.  Now, what does one do to engender trust when negotiating with the unions if the unions think that you’re just going to turn around and lobby the legislature to undercut what you just agreed to?  Walker is insulated from his mistake, for now, because voters in Wisconsin sided with him. Now, he needs to find votes in other states, and, speaking of states, Ohio is not an insignificant one.

I think that the labor unions in Wisconsin mistakenly thought that marketplace principles don’t apply to them, for they must have assumed that they could do a crappy job and get away with it. When I think about how things turned out, I think Walker’s victories must have had more to do with taxpayer discontent with public employee performance than with anything else. The moral to the story for Wisconsin’s public employees is this:  Serve the public well.  Had that been the case, Wisconsin’s public employees might have succeeded like the public-sector labor unions in Ohio did.  Ohio turned out to support its public employees at the ballot box.

In 2011, Ohio voters supported the referendum that killed Senate Bill 5, carrying 83 of Ohio’s 88 counties. In Kasich’s bid for re-election in 2014, he had to assure Ohioans that he had learned his lesson and would not go back down that same path to do an end run around labor contracts via legislation.  Lucky for Kasich, he was opposed by Ed Fitzgerald, an ineffective and disgraceful politician from Cuyahoga County, in the 2014 gubernatorial race.  Media observers outside Ohio should not read too much into Kasich’s 2014 win because they need to take into account just how pitifully weak a candidate Fitzgerald was.  Therefore, Kasich’s ability to win Ohio as a presidential candidate is not a foregone conclusion.

Let’s make something clear:  In turning back SB 5 in all but 5 counties (Delaware, Warren, Holmes, Shelby, and Mercer), it would appear that a number of Ohio Republicans thought that the bad-faith legislative end-run around promises made to public employees was a bad move.  Democrats, alone, didn’t kill that bill.  In a contested GOP primary, assuming Walker is still in the mix, he can only pick up the votes of those who favored the bill, which, as I pointed out, may not provide a winning margin if the number of candidates is dwindling.  I don’t know what Walker’s fundraising acumen is, but I suppose he could find well-heeled donors in Delaware and Warren counties to give the illusion that he has some kind of political support in Ohio, but money doesn’t necessarily add up to votes.  Though there are other planks in Walker’s platform besides union-busting, many of those same planks exist in the platforms of his competitors.  In other words, he is different from the other candidates in that he engaged in union-busting and got away with it.  Except, he really won’t get away with it, because the path to the White House leads through Ohio.  Kasich, for his part, is apologetic (but he still might not carry Ohio).  Walker remains unapologetic.  And this brings us to the general election of 2016 (okay, I said the 2016 general election might not even happen if all hell breaks loose).

Do we need to remind everyone that Ohio is a swing state?  The Democrats GOTV efforts in Ohio during presidential election years have been full-throttle, to say the least.  The Democrats know that no matter how large the magnitude of resources is that’s poured into Ohio, it pays off if they deny the GOP of Ohio’s electors.  So though Ohio looks red in between presidential election years, the Democrats painted Ohio blue in 2008 and 2012.  History shows us that Republicans do not win the White House without Ohio’s electors.  If Scott Walker were the GOP nominee, how does he carry Ohio?  The death of SB 5 would suggest that Walker will definitely not max out the Republican vote.  What does he offer for Democrats that may cause them to think about crossing over?  Nothing.

Walker slashed the unions claiming that it would save the taxpayers some money.  Maybe it just re-allocated where money is spent, for Walker plans to help the Milwaukee Bucks NBA team get a new arena with the help of taxpayer money–from new taxes.  That’s called corporate welfare.  That doesn’t even sell well with the Tea Party.  Meanwhile, as a saving grace, Kasich works wonders with budgets without more taxation.  Conclusion: Walker’s union-busting is a bust in Ohio.  White House access denied.

Kasich, for his part, has a chance, but the Democrat nominee will not be Ed Fitzgerald in November 2016.  I think he knows that.

Posted in executive branch, gambling, National Politics, Politics in the MSM, State Politics. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »