Hip-Pocket Politics: How To Become a Tack
by Gary North
hat tip: Lew Rockwell
“If you are in the hip pocket of any political party, prepare to be sat on.” ~ Gary North
Political victory in the United States is best defined as follows:
Getting your political agenda enacted into law, enforced by the Executive branch, and upheld by the courts.
A definition of political victory that ignores any of these criteria is part of a shell game: getting people elected for their careers’ sake, not your agenda.
To achieve this three-part victory, you must be part of a voting bloc that has the power to impose sanctions: positive and negative.
Establishment politicians understand this. They respect it. They have learned to exploit it. They tell their constituents: “You can win through me if you supply the votes to enable me to win (positive sanction) at the expense of my opponent (negative sanction).” This is the politics of the shell game, what I call the Punch and Judy show.
The correct definition of the power to impose political sanctions is this:
Sufficient votes to deliberately keep your party’s candidate from winning in November if he waffles, and sufficient votes to elect his replacement two years later.
There is a corollary:
The willingness to run a post-nomination independent candidate against an incumbent member of your party if he has waffled during his most recent term in office.
Any voting bloc that has this ability will not be in any party’s hip pocket.
Conclusion: a fundamental strategy for political success is to get the rival wing of your party into the party’s hip pocket.
In modern American history, we saw this strategy applied by the Eastern Republican Establishment’s refusal to support Goldwater in 1964. They ran Governor Scranton as a last-ditch effort to keep Goldwater from getting the nomination. When that failed, they literally walked out of the convention.
Johnson won in 1964. He did not run in 1968. Nixon defeated Humphrey, and the Republican Establishment took over the White House in 1969. They were willing to go down to defeat in 1964 in order to ruin the Goldwater wing of the party. They were wise to do this.
Rule By The Rich
By Paul Craig Roberts
The election of Republican Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate by Democratic voters in Massachusetts sends President Obama a message. Voters perceive that Obama’s administration has morphed into a Bush-Cheney government. Obama has reneged on every promise he made, from ending wars, to closing Gitmo, to providing health care for Americans, to curtailing the domestic police state, to putting the interests of dispossessed Americans ahead of the interests of the rich banksters who robbed Americans of their homes and pensions.
But what can Obama do other then spout more rhetoric?
The Democrats were destroyed as an independent party by jobs offshoring and so-called free trade agreements such as NAFTA. The effect of “globalism” has been to destroy the industrial and manufacturing unions, thus leaving the Democrats without a power base and source of funding.
Obama and the Democrats cannot be an opposition party, because Democrats are as dependent as Republicans on corporate interest groups for campaign funding.
The Democrats have to support war and the police state if they want funding from the military/security complex. They have to make the health care bill into a subsidy for private insurance if they want funding from the insurance companies. They have to abandon the American people for the rich banksters if they want funding from the financial lobby.
Pat Tiberi: “[Our election] is a dead horse”
Pat Tiberi, in the midst of Ohio’s massively documented e-voting frauds declares, “The horse is dead. We’re beating a dead horse” and “The election is over, let’s get on with it.”
Last night (October 16) at the debate held at the Reynoldsburg United Methodist Church, Pat Tiberi said, ” I will continue to work hard for you everyday to do what’s right for America–to do what’s right for our children.”
Yeah, “cause at the end of the day, when [he] looks into his daughter’s eyes, it’s about her.”
Isn’t that sweet?
Pat Tiberi is endorsed by the Columbus Dispatch Printing Company
Central Ohio residents have been treated to yet more of the Columbus Dispatch Printing Company’s (CDPC) ‘fair and balanced’ judgment. Pat Tiberi, a Republican currently holding the 12th Congressional seat at the People’s House, has gotten the local daily printing company’s endorsement for Congress.
Hopefully, CDPC readers will remember the past ‘judgment’ of the company’s endorsements–including George W. Bush for president in both 2000 and 2004, when shortly before the 2004 election, even the CDPC seemed to know better. In the midst of this latest fill-in-the-blank-shock-and-awe (economic) crisis, that presidential endorsement has shown where the loyalties of the Wolfe family media empire really LIE. Much like Washington serves its lobbyists, the CDPC likewise serves the corporations who pay for their ads.
The fact that a local printing company’s public informational monopoly would find it within their job description to endorse a candidate before even informing the population of where all candidates stand on the issues that affect them most, is discrediting to not only to the endorsement, but raises questions as to the credibility of the CDPC itself.
