How About [YAWN] Those Thrilling [YAWN] Primary-Night Results?

Today on NRO JONAH GOLDBERG: "Trigger warnings" are the latest trend in political correctness — and they're madness. Trigger Unhappy. KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON: The "night-watchman state" remains a wiser choice than politics-as-expression. The Signifying State. AMITY SHLAES: We've long known the economic case for eliminating the minimum wage. The humanitarian case is even stronger. Repeal the Minimum Wage. JILLIAN KAY MELCHIOR: Eddie Joffe was murdered in Jerusalem 45 years ago. Today his terrorist killer is lionized. Death in the Supermarket. SLIDESHOW: Little-League Pitcher. Morning Jolt . . . with Jim Geraghty May 21, 2014 How About [YAWN] Those Thrilling [YAWN] Primary-Night Results? It would be easy to say something snarky or derisive about Matt Bevin, jumping into a primary challenge against Mitch McConnell and largely failing to get any traction, winning only 35 percent to McConnell's 60 percent. Yes, he made a bunch of missteps along the way. Yes, he was an imperfect-at-best messenger for an anti-TARP message. But he got in the arena, made his case, stood up for what he believed in, and took his lumps. That's what America's system of free elections is all about, and the country -- and the conservative movement -- will need more people willing to do that in the years to come. And as much as Tuesday night's results must have disappointed Bevin and his supporters, it's worth remembering that the McConnell campaign treated him like a serious threat -- because he had the potential to be a serious threat. The boss . . . doesn't quite agree: To no one's surprise, Mitch McConnell won handily tonight, a testament to his sure-footedness in Kentucky politics and to the folly of the groups that invested so much in defeating him. Those groups ran a weak candidate with probably only a long-shot chance to win at best and ended up, in effect, making a large in-kind contribution to the Alison Lundergan Grimes campaign -- largely because they were bent on pursuing a vendetta with deep roots in the Senate cloakroom, consequences be damned. I'm glad that, as Pat notes, the groups are now endorsing McConnell, but this was a primary challenge that started out dumb and ended up dumber. Note that last night Grimes got . . . 76 percent up against a trio of no-names in the Democratic primary? Hmm. Nearly 100,000 Kentucky Democrats voted for one of the other guys. In Georgia's Senate primary, David Purdue and Jack Kingston advanced to the runoff, as expected. In Pennsylvania . . . maybe the Clinton endorsement isn't so golden after all: "State Rep. Brendan Boyle won the Democratic nomination to succeed Rep. Allyson Schwartz in Pennsylvania's 13th Congressional District Tuesday and is overwhelmingly favored to take over the Democratic-leaning district, after besting Clinton in-law and former Rep. Marjorie Margolies in the primary." Quick point on Oregon, where we can expect the rest of the campaign to revolve around this: An employee of the Democratic Party of Oregon was the first person to request the April 2013 police report of timber baron Andrew Miller accusing Republican Senate candidate Monica Wehby of "stalking" him after a break-up. For Republicans, there's some delicious satisfaction of accurately accusing Democrats of snooping around in a woman's personal life, and accusing them of a war on women. But are those of us who don't know Monica Wehby sure the voters shouldn't think about this accusation? Maybe not enough to disqualify herself from the U.S. Senate, the august institution that includes Al Franken and used to include Ted Kennedy, Robert "Sheets" Byrd, Ben "Cornhusker Kickback" Nelson, Bob Torricelli . . . This is from her victory speech last night: When I was going through the process of deciding to get into this race it was my son who first said, "Mom, why would you leave a job that you love, that you trained until you were 35 years old to do, where everybody loves you, to take a job where people say all kinds of mean things about you on the internet?" And I told him about a brain-tumor patient of mine who had made a full recovery and came back to my office to give me a card that I treasure to this day. The card read, "If we're not here to make life better for one another, then what's the point?" Over the last several days, in the face of vicious, ugly, and hurtful attacks, I've thought a lot about both my son's question and my patient's words of wisdom. And now more than ever I take those words to heart. I am running for Senate because I want to help [us] make life a little better for each other. Look, Lord knows I'm not perfect. I am like countless other Oregonians. I'm a working mom who balances a career that I love with children that I adore and would do anything to protect. I try my best, but in my life I've made some mistakes. And when I do, I'm no different than any of you in that when I've fallen short, I have gotten up and tried to do better. I promise that as your senator, I will do the same. My message to the Democrats who are willing to shred my family for their own political gain is that people are tired of your dirty tricks. The best way to defeat a bully is to stand up to them, and that is exactly what we are going to do. Tonight, we are sending a message that this Senate race will not be decided by the ugly kind of politics that people in Oregon and across the country are sick of. That time is over. I'm exactly the person capable of changing things. You see, I'm not a career politician, but I am a doctor, a mom, and someone very familiar with my opponent's playbook. As president of the Oregon Medical Association, I ran our state's tort-reform campaign -- that was my first experience with hate mail. In 2009 I put my professional reputation on the line by appearing in television ads that ran nationwide warning people about the dangers of Obamacare -- that was when I had to change my home phone number. In 2011 I ran and was elected to the board of trustees at the American Medical Association as a conservative change agent, to try and move that organization in a more balanced direction. I say this not just to give you a bit of my biography, but to let you know that I have a long history of standing up for what I believe in. Game on, Oregon. Jill Abramson, and Why Most Women Should Cut Themselves Some Slack A quick thought or two on Jill Abramson. . . What it takes to reach the top spot is often quite different from what it takes to stay there. Barack Obama learns, and re-learns, that campaign skills don't translate to effective governing. Newt Gingrich was a masterful leader of the House Republicans in the minority, but encountered and faced a harder time with a whole new set of obstacles, challenges and headaches as speaker. A lot of bands' second albums flop, as they put their whole lives' worth of learning and into creating the first one, and only a year or two into the second one. Jill Abramson looks like another one of those examples. Raw determination, blunt directness, hiding information from others within the organization, an unwillingness to take "no" for an answer -- all of those may be fantastic skills for an ambitious figure aiming to rise to the top of the New York Times or any other organization. But those qualities may not be so swell in a leader who has to manage a large staff and keep morale up. Abramson's salary complaints -- as the NR editors said, "everybody should have Ms. Abramson's million-dollar problems" -- spurred folks like Felix Salmon and his editors at Vox to write that salaries shouldn't be secret, contending that the secrecy of salary numbers is one reason women get paid less. They argued that women sometimes don't know what amount is fair or on par with their peers and/or predecessors. Strangely, in a piece calling for widespread salary disclosure, I couldn't find the salaries of the author and the Vox editors listed anywhere on the page. Everybody's unnerved by the thought of being significantly underpaid compared to their peers in the field, and similarly unnerved by the thought of being significantly overpaid compared to their peers in the field. A couple of basic premises to keep in mind in all future "equal pay" stories: People have good reasons to want to keep their salary private. The employee has every right to try to get the best deal possible. Employees will have different ideas of what constitutes "the best deal" -- for some it may be the highest possible pay, for others it may be time flexibility, benefits, time off, a particular title or duties, telecommuting or working from home, etc. The employer has every right to try to get the best deal possible -- the best caliber or highest amount of work for the amount of money and benefits they're paying the employee. When there's a disagreement, no one is automatically the villain. Everyone's just looking out for their interests, and hopefully negotiations remain cordial, because at the end of the process, everyone has to work together. Sure, some employers are tightwads or run sweatshops where the pay is maybe half that of other wire services and paychecks bounce and you are your own tech department so when the friggin' computer that was bought in 1982 and runs software written in the original Sanscrit goes down and erases everything you've written and then you have to send your copy to the editor across town by carrier pigeon -- er, whoa, sorry about that, I had a flashback. As I was saying, employers are people ("Corporations are people, my friend!") and there will be good ones and bad ones. The bad ones tend to have karma bite them in one way or the other -- most often by watching their best, or perhaps most motivated talented employees leave to work elsewhere. I'd argue very few Americans really benefit from buying into Democrats' (and the New York Times'! ) preferred simplistic, demagogic narrative that America's workplaces are a Kafkaesque, dystopian landscape of nasty male bosses conspiring to pay their female employees less. This viewpoint may in fact hold women back. If you perceive your boss as a sexist, conniving shyster who's out to rip you off, then it's going to be hard to show up every morning and do your best work. And whatever your circumstances, you'll probably benefit, directly or indirectly, from doing your best work. Preface for everything that follows: I'm a guy, and thus, my ability to completely understand the experience of a working woman is going to be limited. So as usual, take everything with as many grains of salt as necessary. . . There is a booming industry of authors and pundits -- mostly successful women -- assessing other women's abilities to balance work and everything else: "Lean In." "The Confidence Gap." "Knowing Your Value." "The Tiger Mom." "Thrive." Sometimes the theme is subtle, sometimes it's explicit: American women, you're doing it wrong! Read my book to learn how to do it right! I am speaking broadly, and generalizing when I make this next statement: Men do worry about this sort of thing, but they don't talk about it. They're generally less likely to obsess about it, and/or publicly beat themselves up about it. There are not nearly as many bestsellers about the struggles of working fathers, magazine covers asking "Can Men Have It All?", daddy blogs with passionate arguments and comments sections aflame, etc. For the most part, for better or worse, men get up and go to work and just deal with it. Any choice they make is going to have trade-offs. They will probably never be the workers they want to be and the spouse they want to be and the father they want to be, and the friend they want to be and all of the other roles simultaneously. That last word is important. The stoic male approach may not necessarily be for the best; I remember an article that suggested modern society had women who talked with their girlfriends about work, relationships, raising kids, how to get ahead, and all kinds of useful subjects, and men who talked with their guy friends about sports. The result was women quickly improved various life skills, while men learned a lot about sports. But it certainly is an approach that involves less angst, self-doubt, and self-flagellation for failing to live up to some preconceived notion of how all of those roles should be fulfilled. There's a school of thought that argues that true "work-life balance" is impossible, at least on a daily basis, and that the more realistic approach is longer-term balance -- i.e, some days, or weeks, you're going to end up devoting more time to your work, and some days or weeks you're going to end up devoting more time to your family, personal health, or other concerns. That's not a perfect solution. But nobody promised us a perfect solution. The Next Big Fight: Dismantling Democrats' 'We Want to Fix Obamacare' Claim Phil Kerpen of American Commitment and Sean Noble of American Encore have some thoughts to share: Polls consistently show extremely low support for Obamacare as it presently exists. However, the same polls also show large support for "fixing the law," and appealing to that larger group is the principal Democratic public-relations strategy for surviving the constant bad news about the law's implementation.  At the same time, the Democratic legislative strategy remains to block all changes to the law in the Senate, without allowing committee consideration, amendments, or votes. This disconnect creates a huge opportunity to expose "we want to fix it" as yet another Obamacare lie, from precisely the same people who claimed "you can keep your plan" as recently as last year, and therefore are not to be trusted. This would force Obamacare supporters to choose between reopening the law for genuine wholesale reconsideration or losing all credibility on their "fix it" claim. . . While core criticisms of Obamacare are effective, they are inadequate if we fail to also undermine the credibility of the "fix it" message. We must drive the message that Obamacare supporters actually believe it is working as-is and does not need to be fixed. This has the virtue of being true, as proven by the deliberate refusal of the Senate, controlled by Democrats who wrote and passed the law, to even consider any legislative changes. The 58 percent support Kaiser found for "improve the law" in April was up from 49 percent the month before -- because they no longer even asked if respondents supported keeping the law as-is. Indeed, the previous two months, support for the law as-is was a miserable 8 percent in February and 10 percent in March. The Senate Democrats who support Obamacare simply cannot be believed when they claim they want to "fix it" because: They broke it. They told us we could keep our plans. The do-nothing Senate does nothing on health care. They often admit they love Obamacare as-is. As evidence for this, consider Senate inaction on over 40 House-passed bills fixing the worst elements of the law and that fact that it has passed no bills of its own. Even the handful of Democratic senators who have introduced bills (including Hagan, Begich, and Manchin) have exerted no real pressure on their leadership to schedule a vote. Moreover, adding a "copper plan" with even higher deductibles will appeal to exactly zero consumers and do nothing to fix the real problems millions of Americans are suffering. . . We are launching an aggressive paid and earned media effort to spotlight the utter lack of credibility when Obamacare supporters claim they intend to "fix it." We are committing an initial $100,000 to this effort, and we urge those with deeper pockets to join us. The first $100,000 of that effort will be used to distribute this web ad: ADDENDA: Over on NRO's homepage, I have an update on the quite modest record of San Antonio mayor-turned-expected HUD Secretary nominee, Julian Castro. Thanks to all who have pre-ordered The Weed Agency. The big "Everybody Buy My Book on Amazon" Day will be June 3, but if it's easier, or you don't want to wait a few days after that day for delivery, go ahead and pre-order now. I'm scheduled to appear on the panel on On the Record with Greta Van Susteren tonight. To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com Why not forward this to a friend? Encourage them to sign up for NR's great free newsletters here. Save 75%... Subscribe to National Review magazine today and get 75% off the newsstand price. Click here for the print edition or here for the digital. National Review also makes a great gift! 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