Corzine Goes Down In Ball of Flames!

The forces of good are afoot in New Jersey. The voters have spoken with a loud, resounding voice. "Devil be gone! Satan misses you. Get thee back to hell."

And with the victory in Virginia, I think it's fair to say that conservatism isn't dead. Not by a long shot.

Memo to the GOP: Take a page out of McDonnell's Campaign

As a current resident of Virginia, I'm already biased toward commenting on the recent VA gubernatorial campaign. That being said, I think that it would behoove the national GOP to take a close look and study the McDonnell campaign in light of Tuesday night's victory. The McDonnell folks ran the kind of campaign that resonated with Virginians, who are results-oriented voters.

The McDonnell campaign stuck to its message of jobs and economic prosperity for Virginians. While McDonnell himself is a conservative all the way, they stayed away from social themes in most (if not all) of their campaigning and avoided any distraction from the hot-button that is the economy. They also stayed away from attack ads, and persevered with a positive message of economic prosperity. In the end, Bob looked like the smart, nice, "can-do" politician, while Deeds was the bumbling, unsure, and tax-hike embracing alternative.

They also embraced new media, and my brief encounters with their staff leads me to believe it also had a fair amount of youth volunteers.

All in all, when planning campaigns for swing states like VA (see: Ohio), the national GOP should consider putting giving a call to the McDonnell campaign manager.

Keynesians Live!

640,000 jobs were created with stimulus spending of $164B as of September 30, 2009. That's $256,250 per job. That kind of cash could have supported a family of four for two years had we just gifted them the money. The jobs that were created didn't pay nearly as much as the money spent to create them. I used to think all Keynesians were dead until Geithner came rolling up.