Freedom Line Blog

Newsmax.com reports:

The gross costs of the national healthcare law rammed through Congress by President Barack Obama will reach an estimated $1.76 trillion over 10 years – nearly twice the amount originally projected.

The figure, which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revealed on Wednesday, is bound to cause embarrassment to the administration as it comes just as debate on ‘Obamacare’ is starting to heat up again, two weeks before the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on whether the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.

Truth be told, nearly everyone already knew that the cost estimates used to sell ObamaCare to the American people were part of the White House shell game to get it passed.  That much is understood by both supporters and opponents of ObamaCare.  What is embarrassing is the administration’s response to the latest CBO estimate.

‘The bottom line is clear: the Affordable Care Act will reduce our deficit, control health costs and make health care more affordable,’ Jeanne Lambrew, deputy director of the White House office of Health Reform, wrote on the White House blog.

Remember, this is the same White House trying to convince you that algae is the answer to rising gas prices.

Though you won’t hear much about it in the press, tomorrow will be a big day for the Tea Party movement. That’s because it will be the day that Republican voters caucus throughout Utah to pick their delegates to the state convention — delegates who, in turn, will choose which candidates to put on the Beehive State’s June primary ballot.

This is momentous because there’s a big push by Tea Partiers — with FreedomWorks leading the charge — to unseat incumbent Republican Senator Orrin Hatch and replace him with a more conservative alternative. This is how Politico frames it:

The group’s tactics are the latest chapter of the debate still hounding Republicans as they try to win a majority on Capitol Hill this November: Should they purge their own to find fresh blood who will be less willing to seek bipartisan compromises by straying from conservative principles? Or should they unite behind the most electable candidate and train all their fire power on Democrats?

Allow me to answer both of those questions: yes.

It’s all a matter of political prudence. One of the lessons of the 2010 midterm senate races was the importance of finding the right candidate for the right jurisdiction — and that means different things in different places. In Utah, for instance, which is the most Republican state in the nation, it was utterly sensible to replace incumbent Bob Bennett (not exactly a liberal, but not really a constitutional conservative either) with Tea Party darling Mike Lee, knowing that Lee could easily carry the general election in the fall. The Tea Party was similarly shrewd in getting behind Marco Rubio in Florida, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, and Rand Paul in Kentucky.

There were a few missteps, however. The hyper-conservative Sharron Angle was a poor choice for the swing state of Nevada, where either Sue Lowden or Danny Tarkanian (both of whom would have voted as conventional conservatives) would have stood a better chance at defeating Harry Reid. Even less suited for her contest was Christine O’Donnell, the conservative firebrand running in deep-blue Delaware. O’Donnell’s primary opponent, the moderate-to-liberal Republican Mike Castle, would doubtlessly have taken many votes as a U.S. Senator that would have made conservatives squirm — but fewer than the eventual winner, Democrat Chris Coons, who Castle likely would have beaten had he been the nominee.

So what does this principle mean for Utah? Hatch, like Bennett before him, has been an able public servant, who has, most of the time, been in conservatism if not exactly of conservatism. Were he from a swing state where moving to the right could be an electoral death sentence, then that would probably be a sufficient argument for retaining him. That’s not the case in Utah, however. And the state’s conservatives are going to have a hard time turning down the opportunity to elect another senator as consistently principled in his defense of limited government as Mike Lee.

It doesn’t help either that the best argument against Hatch comes from Hatch. I’ll let Politico have the final word:

In Utah, FreedomWorks distributed a 44-page brochure to 37,000 potential convention-goers, highlighting Hatch’s positions over the years on earmarks, the bank bailout and deals with Ted Kennedy over a child health care law.

On the inside page of the brochure is a quote from Hatch during his first campaign in 1976 against 18-year incumbent Sen. Frank Moss: “What do you call a senator who’s served in office for 18 years? You call him home.”

Reuters explains how a new Health and Human Services regulation announced today on the state-directed health insurance exchanges lays the groundwork for a total government takeover of the healthcare industry.

In a 642-page final rule, the government provides guidance on how states should establish exchanges, qualify health plans for participation and determine the eligibility of both individuals and small businesses that want to use exchanges to provide health coverage to their employees.

Industry and consumer groups welcomed the regulations, saying they provided states with the flexibility necessary to meet consumer needs for choice and quality protections. They also said the regulations shift policy focus to the state level, where the new rules must be implemented.

That is, until States drown in a sea of future regulations interpreting and implementing this “final” rule.  At that point, States will be happy to cede control over policy details to federal bureaucrats so long as the money keeps flowing.

As an example, just look at the rush by States to accept extra-legal requirements like the Common Core curriculum standards from the Department of Education in exchange for No Child Left Behind waivers.  Implementation of ObamaCare will be no different.  Unless the law is repealed, elements like health care exchanges and IPAB will eventually turn over all healthcare decisions to central planners; first in state capitols, then in Washington, D.C.

Oh, those champions of free expression on the left. From the Daily Caller:

Three stalwarts of the feminist movement — Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan — have added their voices to the calls to take radio giant Rush Limbaugh off the air.

The co-founders of The Women’s Media Center put pen to paper over the weekend to request that the public complain and urge the Federal Communications Commission to revoke the licenses of stations that carry “The Rush Limbaugh Show.”

…

“This isn’t political. While we disagree with Limbaugh’s politics, what’s at stake is the fallout of a society tolerating toxic, hate-inciting speech,” they wrote. “For 20 years, Limbaugh has hidden behind the First Amendment, or else claimed he’s really ‘doing humor’ or ‘entertainment.’ He is indeed constitutionally entitled to his opinions, but he is not constitutionally entitled to the people’s airways. It’s time for the public to take back our broadcast resources.”

It’s amazing, isn’t it? The left — which see McCarythism around every corner — instinctively turns to government force to squelch the opinions of those they despise. And as for “toxic, hate-inciting speech” … well, Limbaugh wasn’t the one cheering on the Viet Cong, Ms. Fonda.

Here’s some more deservedly bad news for the Energy Department bureaucrats that brought us at least 12 multi-million dollar loser loans like the $535 million sinkhole known as Solyndra — a damning indictment from the Government Accountability Office summarized by The Hill:

The Government Accountability Office, in a new report, said it took Energy Department staff more than three months to provide data on the status of its loan guarantee applications.

“Because it took months to assemble the information required for our review, it is also clear that the [Energy Department’s loan office] could not be conducting timely oversight of the program,” the report says.

With typical understatement, the GAO also concluded that the Energy Department’s failed accounting for billions in taxpayer money “is not consistent with one of the fundamental concepts of internal control”.  Sounds like it’s time for Congress to exercise some external control to get things back to normal.

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal‘s Stephen Moore had an instructive and inspiring piece on the economic boom occurring in North Dakota as a result of the Peace Garden State’s (yes, that’s their actual nickname) aggressive development of oil resources.  More depressing, however (especially for this Golden State resident), was the contrast Moore drew with California:

In 1995, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated 150 million “technically recoverable barrels of oil” from the Bakken Shale [in North Dakota]. In April 2008 that number was up to about four billion barrels, and in 2010 geologists at Continental Resources (the major drilling operation in North Dakota) put it at eight billion. This week, given the discovery of a lower shelf of oil, they announced 24 billion barrels. Current technology allows for the extraction of only about 6% of the oil trapped one to two miles beneath the earth’s surface, so as the technology advances recoverable oil could eventually exceed 500 billion barrels.

Now contrast this bonanza with what’s going on in another energy-rich state: California. While North Dakota’s oil production has tripled since 2007 (to more than 150 million barrels in 2011), the Golden State’s oil production has fallen by a third in the past 20 years, to 201 million barrels last year from 320 million in 1990. The problem isn’t that California is running out of oil: In 2008, when the USGS estimated four billion barrels of recoverable oil from the Bakken, it estimated closer to 15 billion barrels in California’s vast Monterey Shale.

As Moore elaborates later (and as I’ve written at length both here and elsewhere), California’s failures are the byproduct of a governing class that regards traditional (read: viable) energy sources with suspicion at best and contempt at worst, prohibiting many efforts at energy exploration, setting renewable energy mandates, and enacting a statewide version of cap and trade.

One statistical contrast tells the whole story. The resources in California’s Monterey Shale are nearly four times as great as those in North Dakota’s Bakken. Meanwhile, California’s 10.9 percent unemployment rate is more than three times as high as North Dakota’s 3.3 percent rate. This is not fate. This is the result of choices made by California’s policymakers. The state’s voters should judge them accordingly.

Unlike Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich doesn’t do much to alter his basic speech from event to event — but, judging from the comments all around me, he still manages to hold the interest of, or even entertain, his audience.

Speaking last night at an antique car museum in the heart of the (white) blue-collar area of Mobile, AL, Gingrich used the backdrop to make the obvious point that gasoline sure was a lot cheaper back when those cars were on the road. He then moved into what already is becoming a familiar, but instructive, litany of Barack Obama’s transgressions against reasonable energy policies — including Gingrich’s favorite new target, namely Obama’s recent embrace of yet another new form of bio-fuel:

“I don’t think [the museum owner] has a single algae car!”

Gingrich told a humorous story about when oil shortages in the late 1970s briefly created rationing systems in which drivers could buy gasoline only on certain days, depending on whether their license plates ended with an odd number or an even one. He said his friend  (and mine) David Bossie, now president of Citizens United, remembers being 13 years old and having his father send him out each morning with a screwdriver to switch the license plates back and forth between the family’s two cars, depending on which one needed gas.

Gingrich said conservatives and liberals naturally react differently to “laws so dumb that fathers enlist 13-year-old sons to break them” (that’s actually a very close paraphrase; I didn’t get the exact words of the quote). Conservatives, Gingrich said, would naturally want to get rid of such a dumb regulation. Liberals, he said, would insist we need to hire some license-plate police.

Gingrich moved on from energy to foreign affairs long enough to say that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta “should resign tonight” if Panetta really believed that a U.S. administration need more “permission” from foreign powers than from the U.S. Congress when deciding whether to use American force.

He blasted Barack Obama for having, in the same fortnight, apologized to Afghanis for mistaken Koran burnings even after Afghanis killed innocent U.S. troops — in other words, showing outsized deference to radical Islam — at the same time he was moving ahead with violations of religious liberties (especially of Christians) within the United States via his mandate on insurance coverage of abortifacients. He accused the administration of being “disrespectful and bigoted… about [against] Christianity…. We are tired of you denigrating our culture, our religion, our beliefs.”

Back to energy, Gingrich went on at great length (as Santorum had earlier in the day in Mobile) about the vast new energy supplies found in North Dakota — and he noted that Barack Obama in his recent press conference spent lots of words denigrating “drilling” as a solution for energy problems, only to shortly thereafter  claim credit for great new supplies of natural gas. But, asked Gingrich rhetorically, how does Obama think the new gas was found?

The answer, of course, is drilling — in areas that would never even have been explored had Obama succeeded in an attempt he made as a senator in 1987 to end the U.S. Geological Survey’s task of keeping and developing an inventory of fossil fuel potential. “This is a case study,” said Gingrich, “in cognitive dissonance.” (AND, whispered my wife, “cognitive dissidence too!”)

Finally, Gingrich moved onto the political outlook for his presidential campaign. He belittled Mitt Romney’s sales pitch about the importance of a businessman’s managerial ability in the Oval Office. “You don’t need a manger in the White House,” said Gingrich. “You need a visionary leader…. As it says in Proverbs, “without vision, the people perish.”

Upon taking office in 2009, the Obama Administration projected that its unprecedented government spending “stimulus” would prevent unemployment from exceeding 8%, which would occur all the way back in October 2009 and be down to approximately 6% today.

Instead, with today’s announcement from the Labor Department, unemployment held steady at 8.3% last month.  That makes 37 consecutive months above the 8% mark the Obama Administration said we wouldn’t exceed at all, the most since the federal government began keeping records.  Moreover, the number of new jobs added is barely enough to tread water, despite Obama Administration celebrations to the contrary.  Whereas unemployment quickly plummeted from 10.8% to 6.7% following implementation of Reagan’s tax cuts, it has increased under Obama from 7.8% to over 10% and three straight years over 8%.

With gas prices at record highs for this time of year, CFIF’s Renee Giachino uses facts to dispel President Obama’s myth that his administration is committed to an “all of the above” energy policy that includes increased development of domestic oil and gas.  Giachino’s message to the President: “Stop the dreaming. Start the drilling.”

In an interview with CFIF, Phil Kerpen, Vice President for Policy at Americans for Prosperity, discusses his latest book, Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America – and How to Stop Him, about how the Obama Administration is disregarding the restraints on federal power to impose the president’s agenda.

Listen to the interview here.

At the public dinner in Mobile Thursday night for the Alabama Policy Institute, a terrific state think tank, Rick Santorum gave a cogent and thoughtful explanation of his “JFK/throw up” line that got him in so much trouble last week when talking about separation of church and state. A woman sitting next to me had voted for Obama in 2008, but she said she thought he handled the question very very well. He self-deprecatingly and with good comedic timing said “the language that I used was, at a minimum [HIS emphasis], inarticulate.” He said his overstatement came from “years of frustration” with the establishment’s enshrinement of “absolution separation of church and state” (in Kennedy’s formulation) as sacrosanct. That said, he said he agreed with much of what JFK said in his famous Houston speech on the subject in 190, that it “resonated very well with me.” But he said JFK’s “absolute” language amounted to “a reversal of the concept” originally planned by the founders. They meant not to protect the state from the church, but to ensure the free exercise of all religions and no religions in the public square. Madison said that giving everybody an equal chance to be heard in the public square, to freely exercise their consciences, was “the perfect remedy” for “how we shall live together. Kennedy, he said, “went too far” by saying he would not even take advice from people that was rooted in faith.

On other topics, Santorum repeatedly blasted federal interference with local education (and thus very memorably blasted the federal hijacking of the Common Core state standards initiative); he pledged to increase trade and improve relations within the Western Hemisphere, promote manufacturing,and  “put constraints on the judiciary that thinks it is pre-eminent.” On the latter, he rejected the idea that we have a “living Constitution” :  “Living and breathing are done by people, not by documents.”

He spoke at length about his signature achievement in the 1990s in leading the fight to reform the Aid to Families with Dependent Children welfare program. Noting that the reforms saved a on of money for the feds and significantly reduced the welfare rolls, he insitsed that those two achievements alone do not define success. “Poverty rates fell to the lowest levels in history. A drastic change occurred not just in the budget of Washington but also in the lives of millions of Americans.”

Other topics: Also on judges, he spoke of having worked really hard with Bama’s Sen. Jeff Sessions to help confirm controversial (but superb) Judge Bill Pryor to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, and spoke again of passing a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution that includes a spending limit.

But all of that came in Q and A with a local panel. His 15-minute speech focused very strongly on the overarching theme of liberty. All those at my table said he spoke eloqently on the subject. Alas, my notes cannot do justice to his speech, because I was not scribbling fast enough to capture the best sense of it. One of the best lines: “A limited government… means unlimited opportunity for everybody in our society.”

There: Those were the highlights.

Rick Santorum spoke in Mobile tonight at a dinner for the Alabama Policy Institute. I got a private five-minute interview with him before the dinner. Here’s how it went:

Q: “This is narrowcasting. You look at the [exit] polls and you are doing great among some groups but you are not doing well among two groups: single women, and people making over $100,000 and a lot of them are just over 100 thou, small businesses, not manufacturers but retailers. What do these groups not understand about your economic message that you would like them to understand?”

Santorum: “My economic message is, we’re cutting corporate taxes for everybody to a flat tax at 17 /12 percent, we allow complete expensing — a very very simple and fair tax code that allows the small business guy and the large guy to pay the same rate at the same simple tax form that they have to fill out. That to me is about as pro-small business — and the same thing is, we cut the top rate [on individuals] to 28 percent so those who are not corporations but file under the individual returns will have a tax rate of just 28 percent. Make it a very very simple tax code as far as deductions are concerned, just five deducations. Again: simplicity, predictability, all of those things are very growth-oriented and with lower rates. I’ve also pledged in this campaign that I’ll repeal every single one of Barack Obama’s high-cost regulations that cost over $100 million…..

[segue: crosstalk about single women and “media narratives”]…

I am about equal opportunity. If we give people the opportunity to rise in society, then people will be able to rise by themselves. We’re talking about lower taxes and less regulation and a society that is nurturing. And people say, ‘well, you’re just for families,’ well, families are important to our country, families are important so we have stable communities where moms and dads are together raising children — and that’s a good place for people to live, not just those families but single women and others.

—-

Q: “The second narrowcast question is, is there anything that people on the Gulf Coast might want to know about you, any national interest you’ve perhaps that might have particular local relevance to people in Mississippi and Alabama?”

Santorum: “Energy is obviously a very important issue. We believe the Gulf is an area that has tremendous promise, underutilized, all sorts of opportunities out there for expansion of oil and gas exploration; and the administration has not opened up and has not supported  opening it up. And that’s opportunity for jobs, here along the Gulf Coast.

You know, I think one of the other things that I know is important here is national security. And I’m the only person in this race who has said I will not cut the Defense Department. Flat-out, absolutely no way. In fact, it’s the only department I pledge will have an increase in spending, because we want to make sure that the benefits and salaries for men and women in uniform continue to go up as they should be with inflation…. and assuming no nuclear Iran, we are looking at a defense budget that is going to go up, modestly, and we’ll invest in making sure we will be the best trained, best equipped, and the best led military in the world — by far.”

Philip K. Howard, author of Life Without Lawyers, has a thought-provoking essay in the Atlantic about how to repeal old laws in order to make room for new policies that will unleash American ingenuity and discretion:

Fixing what ails America is impossible, indeed illegal, without a legal spring cleaning. The goal is not mainly to “deregulate” but to restate programs in light of current needs and priorities.

As a practical matter, this requires Congress to authorize special commissions to make proposals, area by area. Using the base closing commission model, these proposals would be submitted to Congress for an up or down vote.

Going forward, Congress should incorporate sunset provisions in all laws with budgetary impact. The goal is not to end good programs but to impose a discipline that is essential for a functioning democracy that must constantly make tough tradeoffs.

Howard’s point about including sunset clauses into all new laws with budgetary impact would be a HUGE step in the right direction.  In Texas government, where I once worked as a legislative staff member, every state agency is subject to elimination pending the outcome of a once-a-decade review.

Each session the legislature is given the option to continue, modify, or eliminate state agencies falling within a policy area (e.g. all agencies having jurisdiction over education).  In practice, very few agencies are eliminated completely, but the many are consolidated and streamlined.  In every case, legislators get a chance to think through issues like whether the agency is meeting its mission; if not, why not; and if so, is there a better way?

There’s a case to be made that reforms that do little more than add to the existing body of law are, in practice, de-forms of public policy.  We don’t need more laws; we need less of the ones we have, and better versions of those.

Today, the United States Senate voted 56-42 in favor of building the Keystone XL pipeline terminated by President Barack Obama in January.  But unfortunately, since this is the U.S. Senate, losing 56-42 is actually a win for the Democratic Senate Leadership whipping votes in opposition, since the proposed law needed 60 votes in order to pass.

Sure, there’s reason to bemoan the artificially high number of yes votes needed to get legislation passed – or judicial nominees confirmed – but there is a silver lining here for conservatives.  Every Republican Senator present voted for the pro-Keystone bill, and the two that were absent, John Thune (SD) and Mark Kirk (IL), would have been yes votes.  That puts the real tally at 58-42.

But wait?  Are there 58 Republicans in the U.S. Senate?  No, 11 Senate Democrats also voted for passage.  That means that the replacement of only two ‘no’ Democrats with ‘yes’ Republicans in this year’s election would get the necessary 60 votes.  Of course, conservatives should go after as many seats as possible since at least a few of the Democrats that voted for the pipeline probably did so knowing the bill would fail, and used the vote to shield themselves from a political challenge in November.

In the meantime, Republicans in Congress should press ahead with another vote to make Keystone XL approval a 50 vote simple majority, instead of the 60 vote supermajority.  Whichever of the 11 Democrats balk can rightly be seen as using today’s vote for electoral window-dressing.

H/T: Politico

Last month, we recalled Barack Obama’s false promise in February 2009 “to cut the deficit we inherited by half by the end of my first term in office.”  Instead, the nation’s deficit went from $455 billion in 2008 to $1.4 trillion in 2009, $1.3 trillion in 2010, $1.3 trillion in 2011, and now another projected $1.3 trillion for 2012.   Today, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just announced that the February 2012 deficit of $229 billion is the single largest monthly budget deficit in American history.

A $229 billion deficit would probably be close enough to make good on Obama’s promise to cut the $455 billion 2008 deficit in half as he approaches the end of his “first” term.  Except that it turned out to be for one month, not one year.

In my new column this week, I profile President Obama’s manifest weakness in responding to Syria and Iran — a weakness that belies the reputation for hawkishness that he seems to have been cultivating in the press for the last week.

If the president is in the market for a foil to make him look like a saber-rattler by comparison, he couldn’t do much better than the United Nations, as the Washington Post reports today:

A UNESCO panel on Thursday avoided tackling the issue of whether Syria should be ousted from a committee that deals with human rights.

Instead, the commission of the executive board of the U.N. cultural agency voted 35-8 Thursday to condemn the crackdown on civilians in the Arab state.

The U.S. and several other countries want to unseat Syria from the Committee on Conventions and Recommendations, which has a strong human rights component. But there apparently is no precedent to remove a nation from a UNESCO committee.

Syrian President Bashar Assad’s crackdown on an opposition movement has left thousands dead in the past year.

So beware, Syria, the UN is unsheathing its weapon of choice: parchment.

The depths of intellectual and moral dishonesty in the United Nations would be funny if the subject matters to which they are applied weren’t so gravely serious. The body can’t oust Syria from a human rights committee? This is the nation where the Assad regime stacks political prisoners in shipping containers and dumps them at sea.

It’s a good thing the UN is intrinsically powerless. Otherwise it’d be an accessory to murder.

Daniel Henninger has an absolutely superb column today at the Wall Street Journal about how Rick Santorum finally is hitting consistently on, and doing well with, a central theme of freedom. As readers here know, this (freedom, not Santorum’s embrace of it) has been my theme as well. As in:

If ObamaCare is allowed to stand, Cuccinelli said, “The government’s power to intrude on our lives for our ‘own good’ will be virtually unlimited. Some may be willing to put up with that now, when the government is doing something they like. But what happens when it starts to impose things on them that they don’t like? Then, it will be too late…. In 1788, James Madison spoke of the need for the Constitution. He said, ‘There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations.’ Yes, parts of our health care system need to be fixed…. But there are better solutions than giving up our freedom.”

Actually, way back in 2007 I was arguing the same thing — and even back then, it was the argument against the individual mandate that spurred my “theme is freedom” insistence:

The other day on MSNBC, the inimitable Tucker Carlson was being berated by some guests who were incredulous that he could even think to oppose the health-insurance mandates that are central to the newest version of Hillarycare.

At first sounding almost apologetic, but by the last word sounding more firm about it, Carlson mounted what actually is the perfect defense. “Look,” he said, “I just happen to believe in freedom.”

Ah, yes, freedom. At my Episcopal grade school, we were accustomed to singing a guitar hymn in chapel whose refrain included these lines: “The thought it was so dear to me, the daring possibility, of freedom. (Oh, oh, freedom. Oh, oh, freedom. Oh, oh, oh.)”

Conservatives would do well to remember that freedom is indeed a daring possibility, and our best defense against almost every big-government, nanny-state, Washington-knows-best scheme of the left. In one sense, it is the answer to all questions, the solution to almost all problems of statecraft, the ideal to which all other civic ideals must bow.

All too often, we conservatives get lost in the weeds of complex arguments and wonkish debates — when all we really need to remember, both to better ground ourselves philosophically and to win political debates in the minds of the American voters, is that the theme is freedom.

I know nothing about this guy running for Senate from Rhode Island, and I don’t care. This is an absolutely fantastic ad! You gotta watch it! (Five-year-olds of the world, unite!)

Last week, I posted about how the defection-masquerading-as-retirement of Maine’s liberal Republican Senator Olympia Snowe set back the GOP’s hopes for winning back the Senate by putting an open seat in a deep-blue state into play for this fall’s elections. The results of some new polling in another contest halfway across the nation, however, should tamp down some of Democrats’ more enthusiastic expectations for Election Day.

Ever since the Senate’s most conservative Democrat (a designation akin to being the MVP of a Pygmy basketball league), Nebraska’s Ben Nelson, announced just after Christmas that he would be retiring with the end of his term this year, the party has been distraught. Nelson’s situation is almost a mirror image of Snowe’s. Considered an ideological apostate, he is little loved by his party’s base. His personal popularity, however, has kept safe a seat that would otherwise fall easily into the opposition’s hands (Nebraska is just as safely Republican as Maine is Democratic).

Democrats thought they had cut the Gordian Knot by recruiting former Senator Bob Kerrey back from his new stomping grounds in New York City (after quite a bit of hemming and hawing) to contend for the open seat, with many analysts believing (quite plausibly, I might add) that Kerrey was the only Democrat with the potential to hold the seat.

According to some new polling from Rasmussen, however, the dream seems to have been premature. The results show Kerrey (who is a known commodity in Cornhusker State politics, having spent four years as Governor and 12 years as a U.S. Senator) trailing the Republican front-runner, Attorney General Jon Bruning, by 22 points. State Treasurer Don Stenberg, who has earned the endorsement of Senator Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund, is up 18 on Kerrey. Thus far, it looks like the Democrats’ hopes that a single transformative figure could lead them to the promised land were quixotic. If only there were an example from recent history that could have warned them of that possibility …