Posted on May 25th, 2008 at 6:32 pm by Scott
“Electability” Apparently Doesn’t Mean Actually Winning Elections

At least according to the Costas-supporting Porter County Politics:

Jon Costas, Mitch Daniels, and John McCain are electable. I worry greatly that Greg Zoeller, Dan Quayle, Eric Miller and Newt Gingrich all find themselves in the position of being strong conservative minds that can’t get elected.

Lost in the liberal smear of Dan Quayle, and Newt Gingrich’s resignation in the wake of the 1998 elections, are the fact that both were very electable.

Newt Gingrich brought the Republicans into the majority in Congress for the first time in forty years, and his Contract with America remains the gold standard for an agenda of conservative change and a campaign of ideas.

Dan Quayle was only twenty-nine when he defeated an eight-term Democrat incumbent to become a member of Congress. He was reelected two years later with the largest margin ever seen in northeastern Indiana (at least to that point).

When Quayle ran for the Senate, he was the youngest person from Indiana ever to do so, and he defeated a three-term incumbent (Birch Bayh) who was such a legendary fixture in Indiana politics that the last name of Bayh was enough to put his son into the State House as governor. When Quayle was reelected six years later, it was by the largest margin ever seen in Indiana to that point. Quayle, of course, went on to become Vice President (in another pretty one-sided election in 1988) and became a favorite target for attacks by the media.

So you’ll pardon me if I disagree with the notion that folks like Newt Gingrich and Dan Quayle weren’t electable. It’s hard to not be electable when you keep, you know, winning elections.

It’s also hard to make an argument about somebody like Costas being electable when they’ve only been elected mayor of a city of 28,000 (sorry, Valpo, but it’s true), and governed so liberally that the Democrats didn’t bother to run a candidate of their own the next go around.

This post is also available at Hoosierpundit.

Attorney General Race, Elections | 6 Comments »

6 Responses

  2. First, I’m glad that Costas has reduced government in Valpo. How will that help him in terms of reducing government at the AG’s office?

    Second, I’m glad that Jon Costas has shown a profound skill at redeveloping failed shopping malls. How will that help him in terms of running the AG’s office?

    I also note that the Costas mayoralty hasn’t been a “success” in terms of teaching his supporters how to spell the word.

    Third and lastly, I don’t particularly care how much support there was in Valpo for a smoking ban. I also don’t particularly care that William F. Buckley responded to a lifetime of smoking and looming death from it by deciding that the government should have banned smoking to keep him from that fate. How will Costas smoking ban advocacy, and the rather anti-conservative line of thought behind it, be manifested in the AG’s office?

    And how well do you think that having an AG candidate that implemented the state’s most stringent smoking ban and a governor that hiked cigarette taxes being on the same ticket together will go over in southern Indiana, where people grow tobacco and many conservative base voters are smokers?

    Just trot out the two of those things together, coupled with some very untimely quotes by the Governor about potential support for a statewide smoking ban, stir in a southern LG candidate from Jill Long Thompson, and you’ll lose the southern part of the state entirely.

    Simply because what Jon Costas did with regard to the smoking ban and other issues were popular in Valpo does not mean that they will be popular in many other areas of the state. Indeed, that sort of platform will be met with vehement opposition elsewhere, because this sort of “Jon Costas Valpo Republicanism” isn’t something that Republicans elsewhere in the state will take to very well.

    Posted by Scott on May 26th, 2008 at 12:08 am |

  3. Have you all seen the Jon Costas video on YouTube?

    http://www.youtube.com/JonCostas2008

    I received a DVD copy in the mail. I do like the fact that Jon Costas is not afraid to publicly share his faith in Christ. Too many politicians only pay lip service to it. My hope is that Costas’ faith will help guide him to make good, moral, and ethical decisions if he is elected. That would include the fact that strong-armed tactics and political cronyism are neither good, moral, or ethical.

    I did cringe when I found out that Costas promoted a smoking ban in his city. That goes against my libertarian grain. Hopefully, he’ll grow to understand that it’s not the proper role of government to care for us from the cradle to the grave, not to mention the fact that it infringes on the rights of property owners.

    It is the proper role of the AG’s office to put a stop to one of the biggest tax scams against public schools in Indiana history. There’s new evidence that I’ve uncovered in that scam, and you can read about it here. The trail that I followed leads to the statehouse. Andy Horning has also weighed in on my blog with some very interesting comments.

    http://diana-vice.blogspot.com/

    So far, the current AG has shirked his responsibility to taxpayers and has allowed this outrageous abuse to continue. That’s why I’m leaning toward a change in that office.

    Posted by divi1960 on May 26th, 2008 at 7:24 am |

  4. divi, thanks for your support here and on your site for Mayor Costas. I don’t personally understand all the nuaces in the tax scam – public schools issue you have raised, but it sure sounds like the AG office should have done more to respond to your concerns.

    I heard today that some departments of the state are actually hiring their own attorneys because the AG office just can’t seem to provide the service we’ve hired them to do. This on top of Zoeller’s suggestion that he’s personally hired 120 attorneys, I guess I wonder what they’re all doing with the $25 million the taxpayers have handed them each year?

    If the AG’s job is to provide legal work for the state, then what exactly are all those attorneys doing?

    Posted by daltonsbriefs on May 26th, 2008 at 3:09 pm |

  5. Thanks, dalton. If you want to understand what is going on with the multi-million dollar tax scam, here’s a link to my blog where I’ve copied my testimony to the Senate Education Committee about this scam. It will give you a general overview of what’s going on. Here’s the link:

    http://diana-vice.blogspot.com/2008/01/address-to-senate-education-committee.html

    It was bad enough that the AG’s office ignored our concerns, but it appears they may have thwarted our efforts. Maybe there’s a reason that “people” from Washington are repeat “customers” to my blog site.

    There is a serious problem with conflicts-of-interest going on at the statehouse. The senior Senator that I was working with assigned a legislative attorney to the task of finding out what laws had been broken and also to help write legislation to prevent it from happening again. At first, those of us involved could not understand why the job wasn’t getting done. It wasn’t until after it was accidentally discovered that the state-contracted attorney was also an attorney for the same lawfirm that Tremco used to sue Indiana citizens that we began to understand that there was “something rotten in Denmark”. I’m just thankful that there was one senator in the legislature with intregrity enough to resist the lobbying attempts of Ice Miller attorneys.

    Thanks to Senator Weatherwax there are a group of people assigned to the task of reworking the state’s bidding and public works laws for the purpose of putting an end to the type of abuse that I’ve helped to expose in this state.

    Tremco’s lawsuit against individual taxpayers and a tax watchdog group backfired!! Their attempts to silence us had the reverse affect, and now people throughout the state and country are watching.

    Posted by divi1960 on May 26th, 2008 at 7:16 pm |

  6. Interesting and very sad at the same time. I took a couple days off to enjoy the weekend and came back to these attacks. If Costas was such a good pick, then why the affidavits or oaths? Why the threats from his campaign manager that if you don’t support Costas the Governor will remember? Why are people fired if they don’t support Costas? Why is Tom John appointing Governor staffers, his campaign people and relatives of them to vote for Costas? Will he be appointing his wife or his neighbors next? Why are so many people coming out against Costas in favor of Zoeller unless he is a good candidate? So many questions with clear and obvious answers but here they are: 1) because noone knew Costas and they forced him on Marion County people; 2) because that scares the outer counties so they forced Costas on them; 3) because bad people run the Marion County party; 4) because they misunderstood the will of the people and so they are rigging the convention; 5) Probably unless he fires them too; 6) some people are just not scared and are in elected offices because they have courage. I could care less about your tax lawsuit or smoking ban issues or the way a small city was or was not run, I do care about how this campaign has been handled. People have wrongfully compared this to the Godfather, it is more like Tonya Harding trying to win this event.

    Posted by tinman200 on May 26th, 2008 at 10:11 pm |

   
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