The Hugin campaign would have done better in a Democrat primary.

Bob Hugin is a great guy.  Really.  He’s a good and decent man.  It was unfortunate that he found himself in a Republican primary… this year.  The fact that he persevered with such confidence and grace makes him a heroic, somewhat tragic, figure.  

Bob Hugin could have run in the Democrat primary.  $35 million… against Bob Menendez?  Hugin had the issues right for a Democrat primary… and the media wouldn’t have pounced on a Democrat Bob Hugin the way they did a Republican Bob Hugin.  The media love rich members of the One Percent when they are Democrats (it is a capital sin when you are a Republican)… they love woke, right-on pharma folk of the proper political affiliation.  They would have forgiven him everything.

But Bob ran as a Republican, and he ran this year.  A year when the media he wanted to appeal to was working to nationalize the election – to make it about Trump.  That media ended up vouching for Bob Menendez, despite having formerly called for his resignation. That media still cuts it with the people who Bob Hugin wanted to convince:  Democrats and liberal-leaners.   

Rather than shutting down Menendez, Hugin’s attacks were used by the media as evidence that he – Bob Hugin – was a “bad” man.  Of course, this only works with those who are open to receiving a message from the likes of Tom Moran and MSNBC.  Unfortunately, they were precisely the voters that the Hugin campaign was aimed at. 

Can we put aside the myth that Republican voters will come out no matter what, and dutifully vote Republican?  That myth should have finally, once and for all, been discarded after the low turnout Assembly races in 2015, when Republicans AGAIN lost seats in the Legislature and were AGAIN provided with irrelevant excuses for having done so. 

Oh the excuses!  One year it is Christie’s fault, the next it is Trump’s, and in between, the dog ate it!  New Jersey Republicans should set up their own public relations firm specializing in excuse-making.  Excuses aside, New Jersey’s GOP establishment should understand that the days of Republicans “holding their noses” and voting are over.

Republican voters are like anyone else.  Ignore them, say you are embarrassed to be with them, that you are “different” from them… and they will reward you in kind.  As an experiment, try some of that language next time you are in public with your wife and her family (or your husband and his).  Invite them out to a restaurant, then tell the host:  “I’m a different kind of member of this family, I’m not really one of them… They are a little, umm… backward.”  And say it so they hear it.  Say it loud, like ten million dollars’ worth of loud, and see how they like it.  Go ahead, try it.  Get back to us on it.

And that’s what the whole Hugin campaign was based on, wasn’t it?

“I’m a different kind of Republican.”  They are a little backward, a little off, but I’m with it.  I am a cool Republican.  Except that there are no “cool” Republicans.  Not in the minds of the media.  They only thought John McCain was cool when he was pissing on Bush.  The moment it became about him and Obama, John McCain became a troglodyte in the minds of the media.  After the dust settled, he became cool again, especially when pissing on other Republicans… especially when pissing on Trump.  But when he needed them, the media screwed John McCain.  So why even bother with them?

President Ronald Reagan understood the media (and they were a lot more condensed, more centralized, and a lot stronger back then).  That’s why he talked past them – to the people.  He didn’t give a damn about their approval.  He fed them the diet he wanted them to eat and even when they shit it out it contained the kernels of his message.  Reagan wasn’t afraid to be a Republican and to explain what that meant.  He had a message that he tested and honed by human contact – by speaking to people, engaging them, listening for the examples that would be used in his speeches, turning them on to his way of thinking, building a movement of ideas and about issues that mattered to people.

How many Republicans today, in New Jersey, can explain why they are Republicans or what Republicanism is?  At the big Republican show put on by the NJGOP last spring in Atlantic City, two professional Republican organizers up from Washington, DC, posed the same questions to attendees.  Not only was there no apparent theme or connectivity between the responses, even the organizers couldn’t adequately provide reasons or an explanation as to why they were there in the first place.  It was kind of sad.

What that confab did showcase, however, is the top-down meddling that has become the hallmark of the establishment in New Jersey, with a congressional candidate in a contested primary receiving top billing as the event’s featured speaker.  Yes, there was resource-draining meddling in districts 2, 5, and 11 – in an effort to promote candidates who would fit seamlessly with the statewide message being promoted by the campaign of Bob Hugin.

Instead of building a grassroots coalition of Republicans and reformers – of the kind Ralph Nader wrote about in his book, Unstoppable – the Hugin campaign  actually determined that their best chance lay in targeting “soft” Democrats and culturally “left-leaning” independents.  But these are the very same voters open to arguments from left-leaning media like CNN, MSNBC, NJ.com, and the Bergen Record.  So when the Hugin campaign pushed a relentlessly negative message about Menendez, those “independent arbiters” pushed back and were listened to. 

This allowed the Menendez campaign to focus on making the link between Hugin and Trump – which the media backed up.  The more the media pressed, the more Hugin denied Trump, the more he suppressed his own base.  Meanwhile, the Hugin campaign went right on churning out GOTV communications and efforts to turn out those “soft” Democrats and culturally “left-leaning” independents who had by now been convinced by the media that Hugin was a “bad” man who was lying about Menendez.  Gagged and gagged again.

In the days and weeks ahead we will be taking a proper, in depth, examination of the Republican operation in the Garden State.  It will be a necessary, warts and all, detailed review.  So stay tuned.

For now, we will leave you with this: 

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”  - Winston Churchill

McCann campaign attacks prayer in public schools

Two operatives for candidate John McCann's congressional campaign went on a Facebook rant yesterday against the suggestion that prayer in public schools might be a helpful deterrent to school shootings.  The suggestion was made in a Fox-TV interview by Republican candidate for Congress Steve Lonegan, known as the father of the modern conservative movement in New Jersey. 

The two McCannites practically spit on prayer as a solution to anything, one writing of Lonegan that "mentally he's in Fantasyland and has been for some time."  This was a daring statement, considering his own candidate's challenges, and clearly showed contempt for cultural and religious conservatives.

It also ignores the data and the very low incidence of school shootings among, for instance, the 7,498 Roman Catholic schools in the nation.  A daily regimen of prayer does appear to work.  Although this could be merely coincidental, the suggestion should not be so rudely discounted -- and surprisingly by people calling themselves "Republicans."

While one McCann operative called John McCann a "fiscal conservative" (the same camouflage Bill Clinton used to describe himself), the other McCann operative mocked prayer as "a losing issue" and divisively wrote, "I wonder if Steve (Lonegan) would support a Muslim prayer, or a prayer in Spanish."  It goes to show where the McCann campaign's head is and makes you ask how different are these people from far-left Democrats? 

Both McCannites are affiliated with the Young Republicans organization, and one was recently active in the campaign of the Morris County Sheriff.  This leads us to wonder if the Sheriff shares these anti-prayer views too. 

More and more, this Young Republicans group in New Jersey is beginning to resemble a metro-sexual finishing school for socially-challenged post-adolescents.  Their commentary is cut and paste from the script of "Mean Girls."  Yes, Lonegan is in their "burn book."  "Oh, that's so fetch... on Wednesdays we wear pink."

Isn't it time for a little intellectual vigor?  They can start by asking themselves if they really want to be Republicans and how comfortable are they with the party's conservative platform.  Perhaps they'll discover that they're closet Democrats but unaware of it? 

It is also time for cultural conservatives to start their own public policy-centered youth organization.  There are thousands of meetings held across New Jersey by people who do believe in the power of prayer.  These meetings are attended each week by hundreds of thousands of people and the beliefs they represent are shared by millions in the state.  According to the Pew Research Center for Religion & Public Life, 67% of adult New Jerseyeans identify themselves as "Christian."  Of these, 34% are Roman Catholic, with 13% Evangelical Protestant, and 6% Black Protestant.  Mainline Protestant, Orthodox, independent Christian, Mormon, and Jehovah's Witness comprise the remainder. 

Of the non-Christian faiths (14% total), Jewish comes in at 6%, Hindu at 3%, Muslim at 3%, Buddhist at 1%, and other religions 2%.  Although so ascendant in political circles, in academia, the media, and in the cocktail parties of the one-percent -- only 2% identify themselves as atheists, with 3% calling themselves agnostic.  Apparently, the YR's are recruiting heavily from these very tiny groups. 

Oh, and the Wiccans -- that group particularly beloved of the pussy hat brigades and whose "religious" symbol is given equal billing with the Christian cross on the flags carried at rallies by Democrat Party operatives -- their actual numbers are so small (outside the aforementioned circles of politics, academia, the media, and the one-percent) that they fail to register.  Small, but as we see from the legislation they get passed, very powerful.

Yep, the nation needs all the prayer it can get.

McCann skips GOP primaries but works for Democrats

Every Republican with a pulse knows what happens in a primary.  Two or more candidates duke it out -- sometimes it gets downright nasty -- but after the votes are counted and the dust clears, all sides get together behind the winner of the Republican primary and go and beat up the Democrat and win the election in November. 

That's how it was in 2016, when a lot of good conservatives worked for presidential candidates like Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Chris Christie, among others.  They fought for their candidates and against Donald Trump, but then got behind Donald Trump once he became the Republican nominee at the convention. 

Some Republicans, like Lt. Governor Kim Guadagno, said that they couldn't support Donald Trump for President.  But at least they didn't support the Democrat ticket led by Hillary Clinton.   Later, Guadagno would be forgiven by many Republicans, including Mayor Carlos Rendo, who agreed to serve on her ticket in last year's gubernatorial race.

A very few Republicans, like candidate John McCann, continued to serve their Democrat paymasters (in McCann's case, Bergen Sheriff Michael Saudino) while Saudino was running for re-election as a Democrat on Hillary Clinton's ticket.  In our view, this is unconscionable.  Any Republican with a spine and worthy of the name should have campaigned against Michael Saudino in 2016.  He shouldn't have been taking a check from him.

But maybe John McCann doesn't understand the primary process too well because he doesn't vote in Republican primaries too often.  If his voting record is correct, McCann has showed up for one Republican primary in the last decade.  That's pretty darn lame.

Many see McCann as a Democrat straw man.  The Bergen Record has identified McCann as the "right hand man" to Democrat Sheriff Michael Saudino.  It was Saudino's feud with the Republican County Executive that undermined and ultimately lost Republicans control of Bergen County.  The coup de grace came when Saudino, a one-time Republican, joined Hillary Clinton and Josh Gottheimer on a ticket that crushed Republicans in Bergen County.  McCann remained Saudino's consigliore through all of this and ran for Congress (as a Republican) with Saudino's blessing and while still on the Democrat's payroll.

Sheriff Saudino has formally endorsed fellow Democrat Josh Gottheimer for re-election this year.  All this meddling in the Republican primary has the Democrats resembling the Russians. 

Have a good weekend.

McCann doesn't do primaries but works for Democrats

Every Republican with a pulse knows what happens in a primary.  Two or more candidates duke it out -- sometimes it gets downright nasty -- but after the votes are counted and the dust clears, all sides get together behind the winner of the Republican primary and go and beat up the Democrat and win the election in November. 

That's how it was in 2016, when a lot of good conservatives worked for presidential candidates like Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Chris Christie, among others.  They fought for their candidates and against Donald Trump, but then got behind Donald Trump once he became the Republican nominee at the convention. 

Some Republicans, like Lt. Governor Kim Guadagno, said that they couldn't support Donald Trump for President.  But at least they didn't support the Democrat ticket led by Hillary Clinton.   Later, Guadagno would be forgiven by many Republicans, including Mayor Carlos Rendo, who agreed to serve on her ticket in last year's gubernatorial race.

A very few Republicans, like candidate John McCann, continued to serve their Democrat paymasters (in McCann's case, Bergen Sheriff Michael Saudino) while Saudino was running for re-election as a Democrat on Hillary Clinton's ticket.  In our view, this is unconscionable.  Any Republican with a spine and worthy of the name should have campaigned against Michael Saudino in 2016.  He shouldn't have been taking a check from him.

But maybe John McCann doesn't understand the primary process too well because he doesn't vote in Republican primaries too often.  If his voting record is correct, McCann has showed up for one Republican primary in the last decade.  That's pretty darn lame.

For so many reasons, John McCann is a non-starter.  And this being America, we thought that we were free to express our opinion under the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution.  Apparently, there are those who believe these rights should be suppressed by political power.  To this end, the first threats have arrived, from elected officials and those who are employed by elected officials.  We will be collecting them, so please, feel free to keep sending them.

Of course, those who wish to suppress us could send along their thoughts and ideas and join in the discussion that is democracy.  We would be happy to publish their thoughts and ideas if, indeed, they have any thoughts and ideas.

Have a good weekend.

McCann adopts liberal Mario Cuomo's position on abortion

Candidate John McCann recently sent out one of the most dishonest letters in the recent history of the GOP in New Jersey.  This is the same guy who said he was running for Congress because Senator Gerry Cardinale and Scott Garrett were too conservative. 

McCann is the same guy who throughout his political career claimed to follow the policies and politics of liberal U.S. Senator Arlen Specter.  The same guy whose boss -- Democrat Sheriff Michael Saudino -- campaigned for re-election on a ticket headed by Hillary Clinton.  

In McCann's undated, mass-produced letter, he appealed for support by using the cheap lawyer's device of parsing words so that they, on closer inspection, mean the opposite of what they appear to mean on first reading.  In other words, McCann tries to pull the wool over the eyes of the reader.

For instance, McCann writes:  "I am personally pro-life". 

This is the exact language used by liberal pro-abortionist Mario Cuomo, the former Democrat Governor of New York, and it's become known as  the "personally opposed, but" position on abortion.  As everyone who is Pro-Life knows, this is the pro-abortion position used by dishonest politicians trying to have it both ways.  Bill Clinton used it.  So did the Democrat running against Senator Steve Oroho last year in LD24.  It is total b.s.

And like Cuomo did in his famous speech at Notre Dame in 1984 -- "the Catholic Church is my spiritual home" -- John McCann references his Catholic faith in an attempt to appeal to those he will be voting against, should he ever hold elected office.  McCann is just a less eloquent version of Cuomo -- a less pretty veneer trying to cover over the same liberal crap.

When McCann attended a recent fundraiser hosted by the Skylands Victory PAC, he stunned those present with a weird talk about how his wife -- an ob-gyn doctor in New York City -- did not perform "late-term abortions."  What??? 

Why would a candidate running in a Republican primary in the Pro-Life 5th District even bring that up?  But there he was, assuring everyone present of that distinction.  Did McCann take temporary leave of his senses, or did someone coach him to say it? 

It's time for John McCann and his crew to just be honest about where they stand and stop playing bait-and-switch lawyer games.