On the menu today: A reminder about all of the excellent midterm-election coverage you’re missing if you’re not subscribing to NRPlus; CNN reports that the White House is “panicking” about the price of gasoline and potential price hikes in the near future; Florida governor Ron DeSantis gets some red-hot new polling numbers; and why authors don’t mind if the feedback on their work isn’t always 100 percent positive.
First, Why You Need NR Plus . . .
Yes, this ties into this week’s subscription drive, where NRPlus is 60 percent off the regular price. . . .
Do you ever get the feeling that some news organizations are trying to serve you more red meat than you need?
By “red meat,” I mean news and analysis that is what you want to hear, that generates a brief dopamine rush of unexpectedly good news for your side or unexpectedly bad news for the other side, and that may be just speculative or wish-casting.
For example, a few days ago the New York Post offered what seemed like a huge scoop: “Ex-Clinton adviser: Hillary setting up 2024 presidential bid with ‘open borders’ critique of Biden.” Yikes! Hillary Clinton challenging Biden for the Democratic nomination? That would be wild, the most significant primary challenge to a sitting president since Ted Kennedy ran against Jimmy Carter in 1980.
And then you read in the article: “veteran political consultant Dick Morris said in a new interview.” Oh.
Now, I love the New York Post. It is everything that a big, brassy New York City tabloid should be. But come on, guys. Morris hasn’t been tied in with the Clintons since 1996 and has a notorious record of making outlandish predictions that don’t pan out. He can be fun to listen to, but you don’t bet the mortgage payment on his tips.
News organizations want headlines to be eye-catching and dramatic, but they shouldn’t be misleading. And I’ll bet you’ve encountered more than your share of bait-and-switch headlines over the years. Think of the sheer number of times The Hill would write a headline like, “Conservative columnist: I want Democrats to take over Congress” and then you’d see that the “conservative columnist” was Max Boot, who has been denouncing Donald Trump and any Republicans who supported him since the 2016 general election.
I’d like to think that at National Review, we give you just the right amount of red meat. Sometimes Democrats are just the worst and deserve every lambasting they get. Sometimes, a Democratic candidate, held aloft by a far-too-credulous and enthusiastic press corps, comes crashing down to earth, and you and I can gleefully declare that we told them so. But sometimes, things don’t look so hot for a Republican candidate, and you deserve to know how the campaign is progressing, good or bad.
You see this just-right dynamic in our coverage of the ongoing midterm cycle, which features Ryan Mills reporting from Georgia, Luther Ray Abel reporting from Wisconsin, John J. Miller reporting from Michigan and from Nevada, and Nate Hochman reporting from Texas while keeping a close eye on his home state of Oregon.
We’ve tackled the big issues, with Yuval Levin laying out how Republicans need a concrete agenda for their potential congressional majoritiesl; John McCormack showing what a continued Democratic majority would do in office; Ramesh Ponnuru discussing how Republicans should handle the abortion issue moving forward; Rich Lowry writing on the legitimacy and importance of Republicans’ campaigning on the issue of crime; and Dan McLaughlin talking to pollster Robert Cahaly of Trafalgar about what the surveys may be missing this year. Also, McCormack and Brittany Bernstein launched a new newsletter focused entirely on the midterm elections entitled, The Horse Race.
If you’re not an NRPlus subscriber, you’ve probably missed out on a lot of this. Some of this stuff has to stay behind the paywall. The Morning Jolt will always be free — at least, as long as I have any say in the matter — but if you’re not reading my colleagues, you’re missing out on a lot, and pound-for-pound, the best coverage of the midterms, you’ll find anywhere. So I hope you’re a subscriber, and if you aren’t, this is just the right time to start: We’re offering 60 percent off the regular price right now.
CNN: ‘Panic’ at the White House over Rising Oil Prices
It’s now almost cliché that the Democrats want the 2022 midterms to be about abortion, January 6, and Donald Trump, while Republicans want voters to focus upon inflation (particularly high grocery prices and energy prices), the broader economy, illegal immigration and the border, crime, and education (particularly in the context of controversial curriculum choices and parents’ rights).
On the economy, the president’s go-to move is to point to the low unemployment rate, insist that the economy is growing — the U.S. GDP numbers indicate otherwise — and argue that inflation “for the last several months, it hasn’t spiked. It has just barely — it’s been basically even.” (Never mind that we’re enduring the highest inflation rates we’ve seen in four decades.)
On Monday, this newsletter pointed out that the issue of high gasoline prices had either returned or never really gone away. Yesterday, CNN reported that the Biden administration is “panicking” — their reporter’s words, not mine! Notice the link to the transcript! — that OPEC is about to enact a production cut that will send the price of oil soaring even further:
JAKE TAPPER: Election Day just five weeks away, the Biden administration working overtime to keep gas prices from skyrocketing with a new plan to try to stop Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries from cutting oil production.
CNN’s Alex Marquardt and Matt Egan joining us.
Alex, you are reporting that White House officials are, quote, taking the gloves off. That is my least favorite metaphor from White Houses. But anyway, according to one U.S. official, to stop this from happening. So, tell us what you’re hearing what they’re planning.
ALEX MARQUARDT, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Well, that same U.S. official said that the White House, in fact, it’s panicking, that this is something that they desperately do not want to happen. Cutting oil production means higher oil prices, means higher gas prices. That, of course, is something that the Biden administration does not what happening right now.
So, tomorrow, there’s a meeting of the oil producing countries, this cartel known as OPEC, is ostensibly lead by Saudi Arabia. Russia is also a member.
The U.S. is not a member. What we have learned, myself and our colleagues, Natasha Bertrand and Phil Mattingly, is that there is this furious last-ditch, wide scale effort to lobby the OPEC plus oil-producing countries not to cut oil production, that senior members of the Biden administration are reaching out to members of the cartel, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The cartel could cut as much as one million dollars a day in production, that would be the biggest cut since the beginning of the pandemic. [Emphasis added.]
CNN reporter Matt Egan said that if OPEC went ahead with the production cut, it could increase the price of oil by between $13 to $20 per barrel. It was late August when publications such as The New Republic, Politico, and Bloomberg contended that high gas prices were no longer a serious issue in the midterm elections.
In other economic news, ignoring the national debt is now a thoroughly bipartisan pastime, but ignoring a problem does not make it go away. This morning the New York Times notes that not only has the U.S. national debt surpassed $31 trillion, but that higher interest rates mean it will increase faster, even if the government were to alter its runaway spending habits:
Higher rates could add an additional $1 trillion to what the federal government spends on interest payments this decade, according to Peterson Foundation estimates. That is on top of the record $8.1 trillion in debt costs that the Congressional Budget Office projected in May. Expenditures on interest could exceed what the United States spends on national defense by 2029, if interest rates on public debt rise to be just one percentage point higher than what the C.B.O. estimated over the next few years. . . .
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that Mr. Biden’s policies have added nearly $5 trillion to deficits since he took office. That projection includes Mr. Biden’s signature $1.9 trillion economic stimulus bill, a variety of new congressionally approved spending initiatives and a student-loan debt forgiveness plan that is expected to cost taxpayers nearly $400 billion over 30 years.
Remember, it isn’t just that inflation is greatly exacerbated by the federal government’s throwing more and more money into the economy, faster than the economy can produce goods; it’s that the federal government is borrowing almost all of this money and promising that our children will pay it back.
We will learn the unemployment numbers for September on Friday. Perhaps more significantly, we will get our last pre-Election Day update on the inflation rate and consumer price index on October 13. The state unemployment numbers are released October 21. And this month’s jobs numbers will be released November 4, four days before Election Day. (Keep in mind that by then, a lot of Americans will likely have already voted early.)
The Margin Matters in Florida
Very few serious political observers think Democrat Charlie Crist has a shot at winning the Florida governor’s race this year. The real question is whether incumbent Republican governor Ron DeSantis wins by a big margin or a small margin, and whether that generates a lot of momentum for an expected 2024 presidential bid or not much momentum at all. Florida has turned red over the past 20 years, but often the Republican margin of victory in key statewide races is pretty small. Donald Trump won by one percentage point in 2016, and by three points in 2020. DeSantis won by four-tenths of a point in 2018. Rick Scott won his 2010 gubernatorial race by 1.1 points, and was reelected in 2014 by one point. He won his Senate bid in 2018 by about one-tenth of a point.
Mason-Dixon, a pretty darn reliable pollster, completed a survey in the state just as Hurricane Ian was making landfall: It had DeSantis leading Crist, 52 percent to 41 percent.
If DeSantis blows Crist out of the water, that will supercharge the “DeSantis 2024” talk. (And I suspect some Florida Democrats will wonder if Nikki Fried would have performed that much worse than Crist.)
ADDENDUM: It’s been a while since I’ve nagged you about Gathering Five Storms. Believe it or not, I love reader reviews that are not entirely positive — although I obviously prefer if people enjoy the novel! Book-writing is a lonely process. You can try to get feedback from friends and test readers, but you never really know how the audience as a whole is going to react until the book is in people’s hands. Not every idea works, not every joke lands, and sometimes that characterization comes across different than intended. Every response provides important lessons for the next effort.
Susan writes:
I read the 3-book series — well worth the money and time. But do your reading in chunks to avoid information overload at times.
My mostly thumbs up judgments:
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Good enough ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ plot with GREAT embedded recaps of history tied to today’s political polarization — stuff we forgot or never followed deeply the last 2+ decades. (Cf, The Cypriot airport/abandoned plane in the early book. In this book — Hellfire missile precision kill description — THAT’S what it does? . . . ewww.)
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Clever humor of 2 or 3 kinds, touch-and-go verbal play, clever cultural allusions, and plot-related or irony fun.
3. Okay character depiction within a type-cast-clique role framework, my favorite being Alec. I’m still laughing about Alec’s diverting the Mexican thug clobbering him in the jungle via quick-thinking: “Has she paid you yet?” And yes, a married couple as sexy skilled players=A+. Pregnancy emotion stereotyping — meh. -
C-minus level sentence too-hasty editing in Kindle version. A minor but intrusive annoyance. (ex: If you change A to Some or The, cut the A!)
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Love it that Geraghty doesn’t toy with delaying conclusions. We get plenty reader clues to next steps, but the unfolding is the joy. The last pages signal a next book’s likely direction and confirm what most readers would have intuited.
An unidentified Amazon customer with a verified purchase writes:
Bottom line: if you liked Between Two Scorpions and Hunting Four Horsemen you will LOVE this book. If this is your first read of Jim Geraghty, you’ll want to go back and get the aforementioned first two as well. Intrigue, intensity, emotional appeal, national security worries, and big moral questions, along with even better snark to go with the dangerous action- you’ll be glad you picked this book to read!! Do yourself a favor and get it NOW!
And Leonard writes, “Excellent thriller. I could not put it down near the end. All plot lines were wrapped up. I am looking forward to the next book.”
As always, and in all forms, thanks for reading.