The legacy game is a tricky thing. Republican establishment frontrunner Jeb Bush is trying to show that he can be as good at running for president as his older brother. The former Florida governor is even using a similar outreach to evangelical voters to replicate George W. Bush’s 2000 success. But for Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, the question is instead how he can differ from his famous father, former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who unsuccessfully sought the GOP nomination in 2008 and 2012. As the younger Paul makes ready for his Tuesday announcement, his campaign offers a trailer-style video in which he promises to be “a different kind of Republican.” His father was certainly that. The question for the son is whether he can be more successful.
As the latest round of polls shows, Paul is in about the same spot his dad was in 2012: lots of buzz and fired-up grassroots support but with numbers in the high single digits. Can he change the trajectory and broaden his appeal without losing the core libertarian support he inherited from his father? How does Paul reach out to get in the top tier without seeing his base crumble underneath him? So far, Paul has been given remarkable latitude to reach a truce with the GOP establishment and to even modify stances on core positions, particularly with a recent call for a huge hike in Defense spending. There’s danger, though, in the form of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who has publicly feuded with Paul in the past and is now targeting the same group of voters as Paul. While Paul has latitude in dealing with ultra-hawk Cruz, Cruz will certainly be poised to hit Paul for any other perceived apostasies. Cruz’s candidacy will be a limiting reagent for Paul’s.
Paul’s best argument in the months to come will likely center on general-election viability. If his core supporters and media backers can keep Paul in the game through the early debate rounds, he can position himself as a chance worth taking for a party desperate to regain the White House. As last week’s Quinnipiac University polls show, Paul connects with the general electorate in a way that frontrunners Bush and Gov. Scott Walker struggle to do. If there is a problem at the top of the pack and Paul has maintained his viability through the first furlongs of the race, he might end up in the discussion. At the very least, Paul is poised to be near the top of the short list for running mates, particularly if Bush is the nominee. And wouldn’t that be fitting? Rand Paul would help Jeb Bush exorcise the foreign policy problems he inherited from brother while Jeb Bush helped Rand Paul unload the baggage from his famous name. -Fox News
Baseball is back. Big-league play got underway Sunday night with a shutout victory by the St. Louis Cardinals over the Chicago Cubs in an, um, inauspicious beginning of a new era for Wrigley Field. And as the rest of the teams hit the field today, we’ll get to see lots of Americana on display (WashEx offers an impressive catalogue of presidential first pitches) and baseball fans everywhere will deeply delight. But for those of you baseball haters – and we know you are legion – perhaps consider this meditation from Michael Brendan Dougherty on the virtues of the game in this era of acrimony: “Because unlike nearly every other part of American life right now, in baseball, the rules and stakes are relatively clear. At the end of the game there is no dispute over who won or lost. The teams and their fans do not get to walk away with a conflicting set of facts. The greatness of an opponent is a threat only to your team, not to your sense of self-worth, or your feeling of membership in your country.” -Fox News
In the latest sign of the bare-knuckled approach from Hilly Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee has tapped her former press secretary, Karen Finney, as her campaign’s top spokeswoman. Finney has been part of Clinton’s shadow campaign network since last year following the cancellation of Finney’s short-lived MSNBC show “Disrupt.” During her television career, Finney was famous for pulling no punches and partisan attacks. Finney once referred to “crazy crackers on the right” who opposed a comprehensive immigration bill and another time likened Republicans to the defenders of Apartheid. Clinton, who has reportedly selected a campaign headquarters, is expected to make her candidacy official in the next week or two. -Fox News
A new Quinnipiac University swing state poll of 2016 Senate contests released today shows Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio trailing lead Democrat, former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland by 9 points. Helped by independent voters, Strickland leads 49 percent to Portman’s 29 percent. The incumbent Republican In Pennsylvania, Sen. Pat Toomey, leads Democratic challenger Joe Sestak 48 - 35 percent, according to the survey. In Florida, where Sen. Marco Rubio expected to make his 2016 presidential intentions known next week, the contest looks wide open if he passes on re-election. Republican State Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater is the strongest candidate, getting 38 percent to 34 percent for Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Fla. Atwater leads another possible Democratic candidate, Rep. Alan Grayson, 42 - 32 percent. In other possible matchups sans Rubio, Murphy gets 35 percent to 31 percent for GOP Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera and Lopez-Cantera gets 33 percent to 32 percent for Grayson. -Fox News
Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, proclaims "Death to America" on March 21, 2015.
We do know two things. First, Brown and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now home to 40 million people. Second, the mandated restrictions will bring home another truth as lawns die, pools empty, and boutique gardens shrivel in the coastal corridor from La Jolla to Berkeley: the very idea of a 20-million-person corridor along the narrow, scenic Pacific Ocean and adjoining foothills is just as unnatural as “big” agriculture’s Westside farming. The weather, climate, lifestyle, views, and culture of coastal living may all be spectacular, but the arid Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay-area megalopolises must rely on massive water transfers from the Sierra Nevada, Northern California, or out-of-state sources to support their unnatural ecosystems.
Now that no more reservoir water remains to divert to the Pacific Ocean, the exasperated Left is damning “corporate” agriculture (“Big Ag”) for “wasting” water on things like hundreds of thousands of acres of almonds and non-wine grapes. But the truth is that corporate giants like “Big Apple,” “Big Google,” and “Big Facebook” assume that their multimillion-person landscapes sit atop an aquifer. They don’t—at least, not one large enough to service their growing populations. Our California ancestors understood this; they saw, after the 1906 earthquake, that the dry hills of San Francisco and the adjoining peninsula could never rebuild without grabbing all the water possible from the distant Hetch Hetchy watershed. I have never met a Bay Area environmentalist or Silicon Valley grandee who didn’t drink or shower with water imported from a far distant water project.
The Bay Area remains almost completely reliant on ancient Hetch Hetchy water supplies from the distant Sierra Nevada, given the inability of groundwater pumping to service the Bay Area’s huge industrial and consumer demand for water. But after four years of drought, even Hetch Hetchy’s huge Sierra supplies have only about a year left, at best. Again, the California paradox: those who did the most to cancel water projects and divert reservoir water to pursue their reactionary nineteenth-century dreams of a scenic, depopulated, and fish-friendly environment enjoy lifestyles predicated entirely on the fragile early twentieth-century water projects of the sort they now condemn.
It’s now popular to deride California agriculture in cost-benefit terms, given that its share of state GNP (anywhere from 4 percent to 8 percent, depending on how one counts related industries) supposedly does not justify its huge allotted consumption of state water (anywhere from 65 percent to 80 percent). But note the irony: California supplies a staggering percentage of the nation’s fresh vegetables and fruits; it’s among the most efficient producers in the world of beef, dairy, and staple crops. One can purchase an iPhone 6 or a neat new Apple watch, but he still must eat old-fashioned, pre-tech food. There are no calories in Facebook, and even Google can’t supply protein. On the other hand, I can live without an iPad. Who is to say which industry is essential and which isn’t? Insulin and antibiotic production constitute a micro-percentage of GDP, but is their water usage less important than Twitter’s? Is a biologist who studies bait-fish populations in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta really more important than a master tractor driver whose skill gives broccoli to thousands?
We’re suffering the ramifications of the “small is beautiful,” “spaceship earth” ideology of our cocooned elites. Californians have adopted the ancient peasant mentality of a limited good, in which various interests must fight it out for the always scarce scraps. Long ago we jettisoned the can-do visions of our agrarian forebears, who knew California far better than we do and trusted nature far less. Now, like good peasants, we are at one another’s throats for the last drops of a finite supply.
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