How the Republicans Can Win in San FranciscoIt's
certainly not by following this prescription--err, description:
Who is he: Rob the Custom Bicycle Store Owner.
Rob Wong is a second generation Korean American whose parents immigrated here in the 1950's during the War. He is married and has three children. Growing up in San Francisco, he was the first person in his family to go to college, graduating with honors from Cal in 1991. That fall, he enrolled at a Masters Program at Stanford only to drop out six months later to join a Silicon Valley start-up. After 5 1/2 years of 90 hour weeks, the company went public and Rob became wealthy beyond his wildest dreams.
Rob survived the dot com bubble intact but shaken. He decided to return to work only to learn that steady work is less available. He accepted several consulting jobs and continued with his life.
If you read it, basically what the poster has done is create a biography that sells the candidate. But biography seldom trumps party ideology, absent other factors. Barring some huge scandal that brings down the Democrats, the idea that Republicans can win in San Francisco is absurd. Look at
the last election; Nancy Pelosi got 72% of the vote; her nearest competitor was Cindy Sheehan with 16%. After that came the Republican Dana Walsh with 10%.
So how in the world do the Republicans win in San Francisco? Answer: They really can't, and it's ridiculous to try. A gay Korean Medal-of-Honor winner custom bike shop owner who's very liberal on social issues but hates taxes would probably be lucky to get 25% in SF.
So why the exercise? Why is Next Right highlighting this post?
Because they are stuck on this ridiculous idea that the Republican Party has to compete in all 435 congressional districts. It's the whole "50-state strategy" from Howard Dean and the nutroots, but flipped around to the GOP.
Look, the
50-state strategy is
moronic, as I've pointed out numerous times:
Let me get this straight. You're going to push money to candidates that have no chance of winning in the hopes that this will force the Republicans to send money to candidates that have no chance of losing?
The 50-state strategy is a recipe for failure. That's not to say that the Democrats shouldn't work on developing the party in all the states, but sooner or later you've gotta concentrate on where you can get the best bang for the buck. There is no sense in a Democratic presidential candidate campaigning in Massachusetts, or in Idaho. They have to focus their efforts on the swing states--Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio for example.
Exactly! By furnishing resources to candidates who are going to lose by 20 points or more, you are denying them to candidates who are going to lose by 5 points or less. This is Poly Sci 101 stuff. Dean (along with much of the left wing of the Democrats), apparently believes in what I like to call "The Lost Tribe" theory, which is that there is an untapped group of radicals around the country who would vote Democratic, but nobody's speaking to them, so instead of voting they stay home.
This seems quite dubious at best, but let's assume they're right, and there's another 5% of non-voters who would be energized by a more Leftist policy from the Democrats. Where do you put your money then? Quite obviously in the closest races; the ones where an additional 5% could put you over the top. Dean and the bozos over at Swing State Project are leading the Democrats to disaster.
Now, you know how it is, the Democrats did win in 2006 and 2008, but they won in the places where they were already close; the problem was that the ground shifted out from under the Republicans with the Iraq War being the problem in the former year and the economy in the latter.
So having scorched the 50-state strategy, I can hard turn around and endorse the even more absurd 435-district strategy.
This post is an attempt to claim that Republicans can win anywhere without sacrificing any conservative "principles"; that is, without being one of those dreaded RINOs. Note that there is no discussion of Rob's positions, other than generally being upset about the homeless and heh, the omnipresent problem of public fornication. And this must be a mistake:
At the same time, this Gay Marriage stuff has gotten under Rob's skin. While he has gay friends, and doesn't really have a problem with Gay Marriage, he was appalled by the arrogance of the CA supreme court decision and quietly voted against Prop 8.
First, No on 8 was the pro-gay marriage position, so either Rob was inconsistent or the writer's botched the argument. If gay marriage has gotten under his skin and he opposes it, he's going to lose in SF by a large margin.
