How Difficult Will It Be for Republicans to Win Ohio in 2016?
Greetings from Columbus. We all know Ohio is arguably the single-most important state in the presidential-election contest. Obama visited the state 22 times in the 2012 election cycle; Mitt Romney visited 51 times. The Obama campaign had 131 offices in this state, more than in any other. The Obama camp ran 100,674 ads; Romney ran 41,162 ads. Obama won by three percentage points, about 104,000 votes. Franklin County, which includes Columbus, went for Obama 60 percent to Romney's 38 percent. It's not that surprising that Obama won big here; Columbus is 28 percent black, is dominated by government (federal, state, local, public schools make the public sector the biggest employer in the metro area), and is home to Ohio Sta—er, excuse me, THE Ohio State University. 
If you fail to use the "THE," this guy pops out of nowhere and fines you $50. This is where John Kasich was a congressman from 1983 to 2001, and he's riding pretty high right now. Quinnpiac found him winning his home state in the presidential contest, with 27 percent; Donald Trump at 21 percent; and everybody else in single digits. Kasich enjoys a 55 percent favorable rating, his highest in their poll yet. He's at 56 percent among independents. It's easy to overstate the sense of Kasich's "momentum" or bump. He's at 4.3 percent in the national RealClearPolitics average right now. Yes, he's probably going to stay on the "top tier" stage, but he's hanging around the bottom of that top tier. One of the stranger and less-discussed phenomenon in the Obama era is the near complete collapse of the Democratic party in a state you would think no one could ignore: "Democrats are at their lowest ebb in modern history (since the one-man, one vote Supreme Court decision in 1965) in the legislature. They hold only 10 seats in the 33-person Senate and 34 in the 99-seat House." Fascinatingly, there's some evidence that the state Democrats have been way weaker than their presidential candidates for a long while now: Numbers compiled by veteran Ohio Republican strategist Mike Dawson show an amazing 44-percent drop in the number of voters who came out for the presidential election in 2012 and those who came out for the gubernatorial election two years later. There were 5.6 million votes cast for president and only 3.1 million for governor. Strategists in both parties place much of the blame on Democratic failures to recruit strong or attractive candidates for governor. In the seven gubernatorial contests since 1990, Strickland is the only Democrat to reach 45 percent of the vote. In 1994, the nominee drew an embarrassing 24.9 percent; in 2002, the nominee got 38.3; and last year, nominee Ed FitzGerald ran an inept campaign that could muster only 32.8 percent against an unpopular Kasich. And yet Bill Clinton won the state twice, Barack Obama won the state twice, and we know how close John Kerry came in 2004. Reuters: Hey, Doesn't 'Classified' Mean, You Know, Classified? Reuters takes the long route in calling Hillary Clinton's excuses a bunch of nonsense: For months, the U.S. State Department has stood behind its former boss Hillary Clinton as she has repeatedly said she did not send or receive classified information on her unsecured, private email account, a practice the government forbids. While the department is now stamping a few dozen of the publicly released emails as "Classified," it stresses this is not evidence of rule-breaking. Those stamps are new, it says, and do not mean the information was classified when Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 presidential election, first sent or received it. But the details included in those "Classified" stamps — which include a string of dates, letters and numbers describing the nature of the classification — appear to undermine this account, a Reuters examination of the emails and the relevant regulations has found. The new stamps indicate that some of Clinton's emails from her time as the nation's most senior diplomat are filled with a type of information the U.S. government and the department's own regulations automatically deems classified from the get-go — regardless of whether it is already marked that way or not. In the small fraction of emails made public so far, Reuters has found at least 30 email threads from 2009, representing scores of individual emails, that include what the State Department's own "Classified" stamps now identify as so-called 'foreign government information.' The U.S. government defines this as any information, written or spoken, provided in confidence to U.S. officials by their foreign counterparts. This sort of information, which the department says Clinton both sent and received in her emails, is the only kind that must be "presumed" classified, in part to protect national security and the integrity of diplomatic interactions, according to U.S. regulations examined by Reuters. "It's born classified," said J. William Leonard, a former director of the U.S. government's Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO). Leonard was director of ISOO, part of the White House's National Archives and Records Administration, from 2002 until 2008, and worked for both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. "If a foreign minister just told the secretary of state something in confidence, by U.S. rules that is classified at the moment it's in U.S. channels and U.S. possession," he said in a telephone interview, adding that for the State Department to say otherwise was "blowing smoke." The Clintons corrupt what they touch. They get otherwise normal government employees to insist that the law means the opposite of what it says. Two more revealing sentences close out the article. First, "Spokesmen for Clinton declined to answer questions, but Clinton and her staff maintain she did not mishandle any information." Uh-huh. Then, "The State Department disputed Reuters' analysis but declined requests to explain how it was incorrect." What Aspiring Authors Ought to Know Today I'm speaking to conservative activists and aspiring writers and authors about how to take their idea to a completed, published book. Here's a basic overview: Where should I start? There are a lot of "How to write a Book Proposal" articles, samples, outlines, and examples that you can find online. The basics would be the elevator pitch (On this last book, Regnery wanted the message of the book boiled down to 50 words), a detailed chapter outline, at least one or two sample chapters, a sense of how to market the book (or something indicating you've thought about the potential markets for it), and a detailed biography, including what you bring to the table in the ability to sell books. Do I need an agent? Probably. You get an agent because the agent has two things you probably don't have: First, knowledge of the publishing industry, and which editors at which publishers are most likely to be receptive to the proposal. Second, a familiarity with publishing contracts to ensure you're protected and you get the best deal that you can. Most agents don't require any up-front fees; the standard rate is 15 percent. It strikes me as a bargain. If you already have a lot of contacts in the publishing industry and you already know publishing contract legal language, then no, you don't need one . . . but if that's the case, have you ever thought about becoming a literary agent? How do I get an agent? Just about every literary agency has a web site with contact e-mails, but there's no point in e-mailing an agent that works with poets for your proposal for a book on the history of gubernatorial veto power. What I did with Voting to Kill was go to the bookstore and look at the acknowledgements for every book by every author that I thought was even remotely similar to me. When they thanked their agent, I wrote down the name and sent off a query. (Queries are single page cover letters introducing you and your proposal, not the full proposal.) I sent queries to 31 agents; 29 rejected it or said they weren't taking new proposals. In the long run, it doesn't matter how many doors you knock on, as long as the one that opens turns out to be the right one. What a lot of first-time authors don't know going in is . . . well, for starters, you're probably not going to make a lot of money at this. Maybe you do, and if so, good for you, and/or I hate you. But the odds are good that what you get in your last advance check is the last money you ever make from the book. You can't write a book based on an expectation of financial or critical success. You have to love the process of writing, and believe the book has value even if only ten people end up reading it. Good editors don't grow on trees. You want somebody who's going to punch holes in your arguments, who can be honest when your writing isn't good enough, and can push you to make your text the strongest it can be. Book writing is different that article writing and blogging. The publishing industry seems to have a lot of churn. On my previous two books, I've had three editors move to new jobs at other publishing houses. On the first one, the handover to a new editor was completely bobbled. Sometimes life just gives you lemons. On the second and third, it was a lot smoother. This is why, if you can, getting to know someone at the publishing house besides your editor -- anybody in the management, sales, or publicity hierarchy is good. Selling books is hard. You may have an online audience of thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions, but only a small percentage of your audience will pay money to read what you write. I don't mention this to whine, just to say that this is the way it is. I don't want to sound too negative; it is an unparalleled thrill to walk into a Borders (I'm dating myself) or Barnes and Noble and see your book on the shelf or on the table. Makes it all worthwhile. But you'll see it, and then you'll see lots and lots of people . . . walking around not buying your book. They're picking up George R.R. Martin's books from the giant display with a life-size dragon and the DVDs, and you'll be asking, "Wait, why does he get all this promotion? Doesn't HBO basically run an hour-long ad for his books ten times a year?" ADDENDA: Barack Obama's Teleprompter -- a.k.a., TOTUS -- is blogging again! | 
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