Finding Democrats to Run Where Republicans Win

She gained statewide popularity winning three full terms to the House of Representatives, where she voted against President Obama’s health care law, for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, and against cap and trade. That is the type of Democrat who is considered able to win elections in red states.

So when Ms. Herseth Sandlin recently announced that she would not run, it not only upended Democratic plans but spurred deeper reflection over exactly what kind of candidate should represent the party — one who adheres to the party’s core principles or someone moderate, even conservative, enough to appeal to more voters?

The debate in South Dakota could set a guidepost for Democrats nationwide weighing candidates’ electability versus their ideological purity.

South Dakota is among three states where the balancing act in choosing a candidate who reflects the party’s values, yet can attract enough voters to win, could be particularly important in next year’s Senate elections. There, and in West Virginia and Montana, the Democratic incumbent is retiring, but in all three states, voters went resoundingly Republican in last year’s presidential contest, suggesting that keeping the seat in Democratic hands will be an uphill battle.

And at the same time, the Democratic incumbents who are vying for re-election in three reliably Republican states — Arkansas, Alaska and Louisiana — expect difficult challenges as well.

That makes a total of six seats — precisely the number Republicans need to retake control of the Senate.

Democrats say the split in their party between ideological activists and moderates is not nearly as pronounced as it is in the Republican Party, where some are blaming right-wing purists for the party’s disappointing showing in the 2012 elections. But as Congress and state legislatures tackle core liberal issues like gun control, health care and gay rights, Democrats are starting to engage in their own soul-searching.

Several liberal groups, for instance, have said they might find candidates to challenge the Democratic senators who voted against tightening gun background-check laws.

“There’s a substantial population of the electorate coast to coast that wishes the Democrats would elect candidates who are stronger on certain issues,” said James R. Fleischmann, who has advised several red-state Democrats including Senator Max Baucus of Montana, who is retiring. “But there’s not a powerful organized strain of purists trying to correct what they perceive to be the incorrect position of the party.”

Here in South Dakota, with Ms. Herseth Sandlin opting out of the Senate race, the only declared Democratic candidate so far is Rick Weiland, a small-business owner who has said he would fight corporate interests. Mr. Weiland also favors same-sex marriage and universal background checks for guns, and he is concerned about the weakening of Social Security and Medicare.

Mr. Weiland has the support of his onetime boss, Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader (also a South Dakota Democrat), and of the party’s more liberal base. But his candidacy has upset some in the Democratic establishment.

Many South Dakota Democrats are hoping for a centrist to compete in a state where the number of registered independents has increased nearly 20 percent over the past five years, while Democratic registration has dipped 7 percent.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the current majority leader, had said he would prefer that someone other than Mr. Weiland run, according to Mr. Daschle. A spokesman for Mr. Reid declined to comment.

Mr. Daschle said he believed that Mr. Weiland would be able to earn the establishment’s support. “I’ve been through this hundreds of times — a candidate has to prove himself or herself before they get support of the D.S.C.C.,” he said, referring to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Washington. “I believe Rick will be able to do that.”

But Jason Frerichs, a state senator who leads the Democrats’ seven-member minority caucus, said, “We are a state that comes to the center.”

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Where does the Republican Party go from here? - Fox News

By Christian Whiton

Published November 07, 2012

FoxNews.com

President Barack Obama calls Wisconsin volunteers as he visits a campaign office call center the morning of the 2012 election, Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)AP2012

Republicans lost and they lost big on Tuesday, November 6. The White House remains in the hands of perhaps the most liberal president in our history and GOP dreams of taking control of the Senate were dashed.

There is some good news and one consolation. Republicans have kept their majority in the House of Representatives, sustaining the rebuke voters gave to the Obama and Pelosi Democrats when they passed ObamaCare without a single Republican vote.  Furthermore, Obama ran on no real second-term agenda and therefore has no mandate.

The consolation is that in the United States and almost every other English-speaking democracy, when executive power switches to a different party, as it did in 2008 when Obama was first elected, that party almost always gets two terms in power.  We have had plenty of one-term presidents, but they usually follow predecessors of the same party.

The key now will be for Republicans not to form a circular firing squad, but to grasp important lessons as to why we lost.

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The sole exception in the last century was Jimmy Carter.  Amid his “malaise,” voters gave Democrats only four years in power.  Unfortunately, Mitt Romney was unable to convince voters that the economic and national security dangers brought forth by Obama were of a similar scale.

The key now will be for Republicans not to form a circular firing squad, but to grasp important lessons as to why we lost.

I wrote on these pages two years ago that Mitt Romney would lose if nominated for president based on the experience of Meg Whitman in California.  She was a rich, successful, businesswoman with few core political convictions, but who was able to pour money into the race.  Her claim was that she understood business and created jobs in the private sector, so could surely do the same as governor.

Voters knew better that business and government are inherently different. Furthermore, bedrock conservatives were unimpressed with a candidate who seemed to have no real fight in her to cut taxes and spending and take on the unions.  So it was Tuesday night with Romney, who took conservatives for granted—as did the Washington GOP establishment.

The two most successful conservatives of the last century were Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich.  Only they among their peers halted the growth of government and enacted real reform.  They did this not by pulling punches or papering over the differences between left and right, but by explaining conservatism in simple language. Reagan used stories. Gingrich used history.

As Mark Twain said, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. The next successful conservatives will differ from these men, but will follow the basic model of explaining plainly and confidently why a society that wants to survive must not punish those who play by the rules or are successful.  

They need to show how a private market allocates resources better than even smart Ivy Leaguers working for a government bureaucracy.  

They need to say that the American century only ends when we decide we’re no longer exceptional in mankind’s history, and choose the European model of decadent decline over a destiny of freedom and self-reliance.

In the end, the Republican establishment thought they had this election in the bag.  They decided to play it safe with a moderate.  They stuffed a candidate down the party’s throat who opportunistically had been on both sides of most issues and told people what he thought they wanted to hear, rather than what he believed.

Recovery begins with saying goodbye to this Beltway GOP establishment.  No more Romneys.  No more Bushes.  No more McCains.

There is a new generation of Reagans and Gingriches out there somewhere.  There are probably even more than a few of them who are Latino.  The task of conservatives and Republicans is to find them, cultivate them, and get behind them.

Christian Whiton was a State Department senior adviser from 2003-09 during the administration George W. Bush administration.  He is principal at DC International Advisory. Follow him on Twitter@ChristianWhiton.

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Column: Where are the doctors?

Women's reproductive rights were hard-won decades ago, and while there have been encroachments and threats to them over the years, they have generally been supported by the law. And women have availed themselves of those rights in large numbers.

By Brendan Hoffman, Getty Images

Abortion legislation: Five states require doctors to tell women that a link might exist between abortion and breast cancer, though studies have not found any such link.

By Brendan Hoffman, Getty Images

Abortion legislation: Five states require doctors to tell women that a link might exist between abortion and breast cancer, though studies have not found any such link.

Columns

In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes a variety of opinions from outside writers. On political and policy matters, we publish opinions from across the political spectrum.

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We also publish weekly columns by Al Neuharth, USA TODAY's founder, and DeWayne Wickham, who writes primarily on matters of race but on other subjects as well. That leaves plenty of room for other views from across the nation by well-known and lesser-known names alike.

Since the choice to terminate an unwanted pregnancy was established by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973 in Roe v. Wade, almost one in three women have had abortions. The legality of contraception was established even earlier, in 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut, and tens of millions of women use some form of artificial contraception.

But there is now an unprecedented and sweeping legal assault on women's reproductive rights. New legislation is being introduced, and sometimes passed, in state after state that would roll back access to abortion and contraception, mainly by intruding on the relationship between doctor and patient.

Women have reacted strongly, as evidenced by a growing disaffection among female voters with the Republican Party and its candidates; there is now a double-digit "gender gap." But where are the doctors? They have been strangely silent about this legal assault, even though it directly interferes with medical practice.

A lengthening list

Consider some of the new laws:

•Nine states require doctors to perform ultrasound examinations on women seeking an abortion, and to encourage women to view the images. (This requirement was justified by Alabama Sen. Clay Scofield in his deeply patronizing comment, "This bill just allows them to see the child inside of them, so it's not just out of sight, out of mind.") Three of these states also require women to listen to a description of the fetus.

•Counseling is now mandated in 35 states to dissuade women from having abortions.

•Five states require doctors to tell women that a link might exist between abortion and breast cancer, despite the fact that careful studies have not found any such link.

•Similarly, eight states require doctors to tell women that abortion could cause psychological problems, despite evidence to the contrary.

•Arizona is considering a bill that would hold doctors harmless from lawsuits if they intentionally withhold information from a woman, such as the presence of major fetal abnormalities, because they believe the information might cause the woman to seek an abortion.

In short, legislatures are ordering doctors to lie about the medical evidence, the patient's condition and their own medical judgment.

Even more regressive than obstructing the right to abortion is the recent effort to block access to contraception. The current attempt to turn the clock back nearly a half-century is cloaked in high-flown rhetoric about the rights of employers and insurers to deny coverage for contraception if it violates their conscience (it also saves them money).

But employers and insurers are not doctors, and should not be permitted to decline to pay for a category of medical services that they disapprove of. Appealing to conscience does not change the fact that employers and insurers, regardless of their own beliefs, do not belong in decisions about what constitutes good medical care.

Legislators vs. physicians

The unspoken assumption by state legislators seems to be that doctors will, of course, acquiesce with these new laws, that they are simply neutral agents who will comply with whatever the state orders. Physicians, however, have ethical commitments to patients that they cannot and should not be required by state law to set aside.

Prominent among them is the responsibility to place the welfare of their patients above all other considerations. In light of this, requiring doctors to perform procedures that are not medically indicated, or to provide false information about medical evidence, doesn't just violate women's rights. It also leaves doctors with an untenable dilemma: Violate state law, or betray their professional obligations to patients.

Physicians, both as individuals and as a profession, should stand with their patients. They should make it clear that they will not perform procedures, such as ultrasound examinations, unless they are medically indicated and desired by their patients. And they should refuse to provide inaccurate information about the consequences of abortion, or to follow any other prepared script in counseling their patients, particularly when it involves treating women like children.

Such acts of civil disobedience by individual doctors should be only the starting point. The profession as a whole, as represented by its professional organizations, needs to become involved, so that physicians are not left to fend for themselves.

It is time for the American Medical Association and, particularly, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to take a public position on behalf of the patients they are pledged to serve, and to support their members in doing so.

Marcia Angell, MD, is senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and a former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. Michael Greene, MD, is professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School and chief of obstetrics at Massachusetts General Hospital.

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Where Does the GOP Race Go from Here? (ContributorNetwork)

COMMENTARY | South Carolina Republicans have completed their "first in the South" primary by giving New Gingrich a campaign-saving victory as the Los Angeles Times reports. Throughout the last 30-plus years, South Carolina has picked the eventual Republican nominee. We will see if the trend continues. Let's take a look at each candidate and see where they stand moving forward after South Carolina.

Newt Gingrich

Gingrich is certainly the big winner. The conservatives are desperate to unite behind a "not Romney." It looks like they did that with Gingrich. The national polls are also moving toward Gingrich and away from Romney. South Carolina Republicans at least want this race to go on longer to decide a winner. If Gingrich stays disciplined and on message, he can win the nomination and beat President Barack Obama. Since we have three winners in three contests so far, Florida on Jan. 31 may be the critical primary this time to decide the nominee.

Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney looks anything but a certain nominee after South Carolina. A win here would have practically clinched the nomination. South Carolina confirmed Romney has a ceiling of 30 percent support. Now that the race has narrowed to four, it will be tough for Romney to win. When they thought about Romneycare, abortion and taxes, 70 percent of South Carolina voters (including me) could not support him. The voters in South Carolina are looking for a conservative and they know Romney is not. Romney has lost his status as inevitable front-runner. South Carolina has made sure this will be a long campaign fight.

Rick Santorum

Santorum finished a distant third. South Carolina made Gingrich the not-Romney conservative. While Santorum will head to Florida, I just do not see him becoming the "not Romney." I see his win in Iowa as a fluke given that he spent so much of 2011 there. He does not have the money and the organization to make a credible run through Super Tuesday on March 6. I do not see Santorum in the race without a win in Florida

Ron Paul

In spite of his fourth-place finish, I am pleased with my vote for Ron Paul and his campaign for life and liberty. Paul's campaign is forcing the party back to limited government. Paul, because of the proportion delegate apportionment this year, will have many delegates at the convention and will be able to steer the party platform toward his libertarian views. Paul cannot be ignored anymore; the Republicans risk losing the election by alienating Paul voters.

Republicans, buckle up for the nomination ride. It is going to be a long one.

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