Josh Orum

A common theme during this primary season is the importance of the upcoming 2012 election. Will Obama be elected again, or will the Republicans find someone who can challenge him in the general election? When I listen to the Republican candidates, or pay attention to nearly any right-wing media outlet, or talk to my Republican friends and family, I come away convinced of three things. First, Obama is a socialist nutcase and if he’s re-elected, he’ll ruin the country. Second, given that, this is the most important election of all time!! Third, all of the current Republican candidates are woefully inadequate for the task at hand.

With this in mind, I savored this quote in a recent WSJ article surveying the Republican field:

Finally, there are the men not in the field: Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Haley Barbour. This was the GOP A-Team, the guys who should have showed up to the first debate but didn’t because running for president is hard and the spouses were reluctant. Nothing commends them for it. If this election is as important as they all say it is, they had a duty to step up. Abraham Lincoln did not shy from the contest of 1860 because of Mary Todd. If Mr. Obama wins in November—or, rather, when he does—the failure will lie as heavily on their shoulders as it will with the nominee.

My guess is that the A-Team decided not to “step up” for two reasons, neither of them having anything to do with their spouses.

First, it’s actually not the most important election of all time. Hyperventilating aside, Obama is a relatively middle-of-the-road President pursuing a relatively middle-of-the-road policy platform. He wants to raise taxes slightly – to levels in line with those during the Clinton administration, which were already low in an historical context. He authored a Heritage Foundation-inspired health care plan well to the right of HilaryCare. He has pursued a militarily aggressive foreign policy, and has instituted a far tougher anti-illegal immigration policy than ever before. GOP candidates are campaigning against a version of Obama that wants to raise taxes to historically high levels, nationalize healthcare, is an “appeaser” when it comes to foreign policy, and has a lax immigration policy. That strawman doesn’t exist, the GOP A-Team knows it, and knew that their policy platform would actually not be much different than Obama’s.

Second, the Republican party has changed dramatically over the last decade, change that has accelerated over the last three years. What has changed? Well, the party has splintered, held together only by its hatred of all things Obama. As Matt Steinglass, writing in the Economist puts it:

Republicans’ disenchantment with their current presidential candidates is not an incidental characteristic of this crop of candidates. It’s a structural feature of a contemporary Republican Party whose pieces don’t hang together.

Steinglass  describes the different factions, then writes (with my emphasis):

These factions have been glued together over the past three years by the intensity of their partisan hatred for Barack Obama, and all of the underlying resentments that antipathy masks. Republicans have buried their differences by assaulting everything Mr Obama supports, and because Mr Obama is a pretty middle-of-the-road politician, that includes a whole lot of things that many Republicans used to support.

Only Romney and Gingrich have been willing to disavow their entire past in order to appeal to the current Republican base. And they are paying for it – everyone dislikes them. I think the Republican A-Team took one look at the current environment, one look at their records, and reasonably decided that running with their records in this environment would be political suicide. Gingrich was already politically dead, so he’s playing with house money (or Sheldon Adelson’s money). And Romney, already the presumed front runner, apparently decided several years ago to totally disown his previous persona. Ron Paul and Rick Santorum are both consistent, but neither are serious contenders.

In the end, this is an important election year. But it’s only important because the Republican candidates are so extreme in their views, and the Republican base is so incoherent.

Ugh. I don’t write much here, but I’d like to write more. Might as well write about the Forty-Niners, who just lost to the Giants. This is what I saw as our problems:

1. Special teams turnovers were the biggest factor this game. Their normal returner (Ginn) wasn’t in the game, and the replacement returner turned the ball over twice. A turnover on a kick-off is especially crushing, since you almost automatically give the opposing team amazing field position. In the end, each of these two critical turnovers led directly to scores, and were the largest reason we lost, but not the only reason.

2. Alex Smith. Our offense in general sucked. It couldn’t move the ball at all. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I’m pretty sure we were something like 1-10 on third down conversions. I think we have a number of offensive problems – mediocre receivers, a porous offensive line, but one of our glaring weaknesses is our quarterback. Against the Saints, Alex appeared to redeem himself somewhat, but I don’t think his performance was actually that impressive – he played well, but it’s only impressive because he so rarely plays well. Yes, he got us into the NFC Championship, but by making passes that Tony Romo, Eli Manning, and any number of other decent quarterbacks make every game. The Niners are making a mistake if they view a couple lucky fourth down drives against the Saints as evidence of Alex Smith’s transcendence as a quarterback, and against the Giants, he showed why.

3. The play calling. What was up with the play calling? I wasn’t there, I don’t know the field situation, but it sure seemed like we threw a lot of big passes, ran some, and didn’t throw many short-distance passes. I’m pretty sure we got where we were by running and throwing short passes. What happened? Did Harbaugh suddenly believe the hype that Smith was a good quarterback?

4. The offensive line. I noticed this against the Saints, as well as all season, but for all his faults, Smith gets hit an awful lot. Now, some of that has to lie on him – other QBs scramble around and make plays happen. When rushers are coming at him, Smith does scramble around, and will occasionally run for it (and he’s a decent runner), but rarely makes plays happen, rarely throws it away, and often gets sacked. However, it feels like he never has much time to do anything before the defense closes in. Really, where are his linemen?

The nice thing is that the defense is young, and will be back next year. Hopefully we can make some improvements in the off-season, and have another great season.

I get soo much comment spam, it blows my mind. Seriously my mind is blown. This is not a big blog. I don’t get a ton of traffic, and I rarely post things. But I get thousands of spam comments. So, I’ve done two things. First, I disabled comments on blog posts older than two weeks. That’s pretty much everything. Second, I activated “Akismet”, Automatic’s built-in anti-spam program. We’ll see how it does. If I log back in and don’t have any comments awaiting moderation, I’ll know that it did my job.

While we’re on that note, I’d like to make another note on comment moderation: please leave a comment, but if it’s not germaine, useful, helpful, or interesting, it’ll probably not get through moderation. Not that this matters, since I get about two non-spam comments a year, and they are from me. But the truth is that I’ve seen many other bloggers do this, and people cry out that this is against their free speech! What idiots. Really? Me not providing you a platform where you can spew hate or ignorance is abridging your freedom of speech? Sure, it’s abridging your free speech – that is, your ability to use platforms and tools to spread your ideas for free – but it’s not abridging your freedom of speech – your ability to spread your ideas without going to prison.

Just like the static site, I want to test a live database-driven staging to production process.

We were recently approached about creating a website that could be managed via a CMS, but wanted to keep the files in “portable HTML” – that is, if everything went to hell in a handbasket, the files would still be accessible and readable, without having to recreate the entire environment. Whether this is a feasible strategy is debatable, since even a static website still needs to be configured correctly, but either way, this was the requirement.

I found a plugin for WordPress called “Really Static” that allows you to export your entire WP site to a different server as static files. I’ve tried it out here, and I’m adding this post in an effort to test it. For now (not sure how long this will be the case), http://josh.orum.com hosts a completely static version of this site.

Supporting files had to be copied over by hand (css, js, images), and interactive things like comments don’t work, but in general it worked as expected.