By Betsy Newmark
High School Government and History Teacher

Ted Stevens lost his reelection bid, but he did lose it narrowly. It’s interesting that he lost it by losing the absentee and early votes that may have come in either right before or just as the news of his conviction was in the headlines. Perhaps voters who voted later may have realized that a convicted Stevens couldn’t continue to serve and so a vote for Stevens was actually a vote for a new election with a Republican candidate who wasn’t also a felon.

Alaska Senator Ted Stevens/AP Photo

It’s a blessing to the Republicans not to have to defend this guy or have him in their caucus anymore. That’s the good news. And representing a solidly Republican electorate, as Alaska is, Senator Begich will not be a sure vote for every liberal idea of the Harry Reid-led Senate.

This whole sorry saga is a testament to Senator Stevens’ selfishness.

But he’ll be for enough and he’ll bring them one step closer to the 60 seats they need for a filibuster-proof Senate.

This whole sorry saga is a testament to Senator Stevens’ selfishness. He could have retired at age 85 once he was indicted and given a chance for a Republican who was not accused of bribery to win the seat. Instead he was full of his own self importance and convinced not only that he would be acquitted, but that Alaska should be represented by a guy who would be 91 by the end of his term. It is no surrender for a guy who is 85 years old to retire. Obviously, he was thinking of himself more than of the ideals he claims to represent. Of course, what did the guy really represent but a powerful desire to shovel more federal dollars back to his state?

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By Betsy Newmark
High School Government and History Teacher/Blogger

So the buzz is that Obama is thinking of offering Hillary Clinton the position as Secretary of State.  I wonder if she has to fill out the seven-page questionnaire that other cabinet appointees are required to fill out.  Wouldn’t we all like to see how she answered these questions?

“Please provide any other information, including information about other members of your family, that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the president-elect.”

The answer could duplicate the response to Question 8: “Briefly describe the most controversial matters you have been involved with during the course of your career.”

Seriously, what experience does she really have in formulating foreign policy?  Are we going to count first lady visits to tour schools and talk to spouses?  What about the derision that she demonstrated for Obama’s lack of experience?  And what would be Bill’s role while she’s jetting around the world trying to bring peace to all the hot spots?

Maybe this is a case of following LBJ’s advice of which side of the tent he wanted opponents to be on.
If it comes to a choice of whom you’d prefer to see on your televisions giving press conferences, I guess Hillary is less objectionable than John Kerry.  Is there anyone who wants to see him making speeches for the next four years?

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By Betsy Newmark
High School History and Government Teacher/Blogger

If the McCain campaign can’t use this Obama quote to raise doubts about his attitude towards wealth and success, then they deserve the shellacking they seem headed for.

“Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn’t it?” the plumber asked, complaining that he was being taxed “more and more for fulfilling the American dream.”

“It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance for success too,” Obama responded. “My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody … I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

Plumbers of the country, unite! Forget about the work and effort you put into building up a business or the scummy work that you do that many of us don’t know or don’t want to do. If you have succeeded, you should be willing to give up more of what you earn to help those who haven’t had the great good luck that you have had to be a successful plumber. Remember how Obama is going to give 95% of all of us a tax cut even though over 30% of the population doesn’t pay taxes?

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By Betsy Newmark
High School History and Government Teacher/Blogger

For Republicans who are hoping that John McCain will be able to turn the trajectory of this campaign around tonight, I would advise them not to get their hopes up. I wouldn’t depend on John McCain’s supposed superior ability to do town hall-type discussions. Barack Obama has been improving and he’ll probably show the same skill he showed in answering questions in the first debate.

And I wouldn’t expect John McCain to launch into negative attacks on Obama’s questionable associations with a whole series of radical people who seem to despise America. McCain doesn’t like making these attacks and I wouldn’t be surprised if he neglected the opportunity tonight to bring up those accusations. It’s one thing to have your vice presidential candidate bring up that sort of stuff, but it’s another to do it in front of a town hall debate when the questioners will probably be asking questions about all the issues that concern people today.

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By Betsy Newmark
High School History and Government Teacher/Blogger

If any House Republicans actually changed their votes on the bailout bill because Nancy Pelosi gave an ugly partisan speech, then they don’t deserve to be reelected. You could oppose the bill because you think it’s a lousy bill and you hope that it can be renegotiated and improved. But no Representative in this financial crisis should change a vote because Pelosi pulled her usual partisan shtick to blame this entire crisis on the Republicans. The markets are melting down and you’re voting no because you’re mad at Pelosi?

That just doesn’t compute and they should stop their whining.

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By Betsy Newmark
High School Government and History Teacher/Blogger

Senator Obama is running an ad hitting John McCain for opposing equal pay for women. This is so dishonest. First of all, since the 1963 Equal Pay Act, is has been illegal to pay women differently for the same work. So no matter how much of a Neanderthal you think John McCain is, he can’t block equal pay for equal work. It’s been the law for 45 years.

The ad cites the statistic loved by liberals that women earn 77 cents for every dollar that men earn. This is such a phony statistic.

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By Betsy Newmark
High School Government and History Teacher/Blogger

Everyone seems to be taking a shot at coming up with questions that Charlie Gibson should ask Sarah Palin. The Anchorage Daily News has a list of questions today, most of which are centered a tad too much on Alaskan politics. That’s fine, but probably not what Gibson, as the first national correspondent to question her, is interested in. I agree with Slate’s Jack Shafer that Gibson is not going to play gotcha politics by quizzing her on the leaders of various countries.

I don’t think the gotcha questions are the ones that would be most revealing of her abilities. And she’s reportedly a smart woman who can study up on the McCain position on most foreign policy areas and deliver a smooth enough answer to questions about hot points in the world today. What I would want Gibson to do is try to dig deeper on some of those policy issues that are basically insoluble and which present no good answers.

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By Betsy Newmark
High School Government and History Teacher/Blogger

Michelle Cottle has an essay in the New Republic that is really a cri de coeur about the failures of feminism. First she views the Hillary Clinton campaign, which was supposed to be such a high water mark for feminism degenerate into the same sort of complaints of the Obama campaign and media being unfair to the girl:

Then, amid the snows of Iowa, it all fell apart. To be fair, New Hampshire may be more to blame. Iowa was where Hillary’s inevitability narrative unraveled, but New Hampshire was where she got the idea that redemption lay in the legions of gals who rallied ’round when the (mostly male) political establishment and punditocracy began salivating at the thought of her imminent demise. That much of the animus toward Hillary had more to do with her last name than her chromosomes did not matter; women objected to seeing one of their own kicked to the curb with such haste. Hillary’s now famous moment of teary-eyed vulnerability fueled their fury. Sisterhood is what resurrected Hillary in New Hampshire.

The nomination fight degenerated into which candidate would become the tradition-busting first in our history: an African-American or a woman? And the woman lost.

Now the feminists have to deal with Sarah Palin.

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By Betsy Newmark
High School Government and History Teacher/Blogger

Disdaining Sarah Palin’s speech last night because she had a speechwriter is one of the lamest criticisms of her performance last night. The Obama campaign sent out a press release highlighting that a speechwriter, Matthew Scully, had crafted much of her speech last night — as if that should make people discount the whole thing. Then many of the TV analysts brought this up in their commentary sneering that Scully had written a good speech for her to read but all she had done was deliver someone else’s lines.

Well, Abraham Lincoln wrote his own speeches, (although he did get people like William Seward to help edit his First Inaugural) but most politicians use speechwriters. Even the saintly Barack Obama uses speechwriters. Andrew McCarthy reminds us of that whole kerfuffle when it turned out that Obama was using the same lines from Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts when he denied that his speeches were “just words.” Remember Hillary Clinton’s jab at “change you can Xerox”? And the reason he used the same lines was because the two men share a common speechwriter: David Axelrod.

Mark Hemingway links to articles here and here about Obama speechwriters. They all have speechwriters. Big whippety doo.

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By Betsy Newmark
High School Government and History Teacher/Blogger

I think the most clueless reaction I saw was when Mark Shields on PBS, while praising her delivery, criticized her speech for belittling Barack Obama. Ya think?

The theme running through a lot of the media and liberal (or do I repeat myself) reaction to her speech is to criticize her for being negative. Hello!? That is the traditional job of the vice presidential nominee. She demonstrated that she was willing to play that role, but do it with a smile and a sparkle in her eye. Perhaps it seems a mite bit sacrilegious to inside-the-Beltway admirers of the Democratic ticket, but that’s part of her job. If she can continue delivering her criticisms of Obama and Biden with a smile and a wisecrack, she’ll be very successful. We all know that the lines that people remember from the debates are always the well-delivered humorous ones. It’s tough to do, but a well-crafted zinger is worth a thousand words on policy. Perhaps that is a shallow way to evaluate a candidate, but it’s also the truth.

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