Charles C. Cook Despairs on the Election

Cook is one of the most admired analysts of the American political scene. Here is his post-mortem on The American Dream:

I was born in England in 1984, two days before Ronald Reagan was elected to a second term. As a small child, I watched the Space Shuttle take off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. I had an Apollo 11 lunchbox. With varying levels of awareness, I saw the United States defeat Communism, come to Kuwait’s aid in 1991, and rise to hyperpower status. During the 1990s, I watched in awe as Silicon Valley revolutionized the world. Once, my father told me that the difference between the average Briton and the average American was that a Briton looks at a man driving a Ferrari and thinks, “What a b*****d,” while an American thinks, “I’ll be him one day.” This my father considered a great virtue — as do I. By the time that I was ten years old, I didn’t just think that America was the world’s great hope, I knew it.

On frequent visits across the pond, I saw little to disabuse me of these notions. America was just different: There was no crushing class system, and it had a genuine and unique scope for immigrants to integrate fully, and the virtue of living under the protection of the greatest constitution in the history of the world. There was opportunity, too. Christopher Hitchens, by no means short of talent, once wrote that he had been compelled to move to America because “life in Britain had seemed like one long antechamber to a room that had too many barriers to entry.” Britain treated me well in a great many ways, but I understand what Hitchens meant: America is mercifully lacking in gatekeepers. Inevitably, this translates into politics. British elections are mean-spirited and meretricious affairs that reveal what the country has become in its post-imperial form. In them, the focus flits between mercenary discussion of what the government is going to give the people and petty bickering over inconsequential details such as which schools the candidates went to and how much money they have. Few principles are at stake because classical liberalism is largely dead, so debates ultimately boil down to the question of who is going to run the welfare system more efficiently. The candidates’ arguments are full of nebulous, slippery words, such as “fairness” and “investment” — and the never-ending substitution of the word “community” for “government.” You would never hear Kennedy’s famous “Ask not what your country can do for you” line in a British political context because nobody would understand what he was talking about. Only in America. Anyone can make it there!

But, consider this: A president of the United States just ran a reelection campaign based on the promise of government largess, exploitation of class division, the demonization of success, the glorification of identity politics, and the presumption that women are a helpless interest group; and he did so while steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the looming — potentially fatal — crisis that the country faces. And it worked.

After a searing analysis of Obama as "Narcissus masquerading as Demosthenes," Cook examines some of Marco Rubio's sober nationalism.

[Obama] makes big speeches packed full of little ideas, and he is applauded wildly for it. His, says Marco Rubio, “are tired and old big-government ideas. Ideas that people come to America to get away from. Ideas that threaten to make America more like the rest of the world, instead of helping the world become more like America.” I will vouch for the verity of these words. I have watched how these sorry ideas play out in the real world, and it is not pretty: They make people’s lives worse, and yet simultaneously convince them that any reform will kill them — a fatal combination. Americans should avoid this path sedulously, for that way lies decline.

Rubio is correct in another assessment. How small Barack Obama’s politics are! How deficient and outmoded are his ideas; how limited his understanding of America’s value; how dull his magniloquence. The president has an ample library of ideas from which to choose, and yet he raids the Old World. Compare Barack Obama’s entire oeuvre to a single line from Thomas Jefferson or Emma Lazarus or Frederick Douglass — or even Ronald Reagan. Does it stand up? Only in a society that has lost touch with the ancient and is reflexively in love with the new could such a man be considered to be an inspiration.

And yet, he has now won twice. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to elect such a man once may be regarded as a misfortune, but to elect him twice looks like carelessness. (Or, rather, criminal negligence.) This year, certainly, was not the perfect storm of 2008. Then, novelty and redemption played a role; this time, an insipid bore ran on an openly statist platform and won the day in a country that is supposed to be “center right.” Maybe it no longer is. In 1980, when faced with a set of policies that demonstrably hadn’t worked and a president who wanted to take America leftward, America chose a different path; in 2012, it doubled down. That says a lot about a people. The central problem, then, is not that Obama will be president for the next few years, but that the American people — knowing him — chose to reelect him. Even if this is put down to a failure of Romney’s turnout operation or Hurricane Sandy or Obama’s brilliant targeting, it does not say much for their commitment to classical liberalism that a significant group of Americans stayed away from the fight because they didn’t like Mitt Romney. That this was not a clear-cut repudiation of the president should sound the alarm.

Obama as insipid bore might be strong. But as a man-child amateur playing big-boy games might be better, for he occasionally turns in a good speech.

Many had hoped that Tuesday would be 1980 revisited. It was not. Instead, in its effects at least, it was more like 1945 in Britain, in which year the Labour party was elected and began to put into place the foundations of a government-owned and -run health-care system that would quickly displace the established church as Britain’s national religion. (If you question the believers’ zeal, take a look at the frenzied NHS worship at the Olympic opening ceremony.) As Mark Steyn has correctly observed, in Britain as elsewhere, the National Health Service paved the way for a “permanent left-of-center political culture” that obtains regardless of who wins office. Obamacare will now go into effect, and Americans will soon feel entitled to its fruits. Those who doubt that this will have a deleterious effect on American republicanism have clearly never been bribed with their own health care. Almost certainly, Obamacare will fail. And then, as always, it will be replaced by something even further left. For the model, see Obama’s record on student loans.

Charles quotes Reagan and Thatcher to this effect.

Economic gravity will prevail, as it always does, and it will eventually yield another conservative president. Indeed, the nature of the two-party system all but guarantees it. But this won’t do much good in and of itself. The growth of the state is a one-way ratchet, and its size and intrusion are almost never retrenched. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1788 that “the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.” “A government bureau,” added Ronald Reagan, “is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” How true these words are. Mrs. Thatcher, fittingly lionized by those on the right, certainly achieved a lot. But she could do nothing about Britain’s creaking welfare system or its antediluvian National Health Service. Nobody can. Nobody would even try. (Consider what an Augean task it is even to get people seriously to discuss Medicare’s disquieting trajectory.) Mrs. Thatcher’s party is well named: They are, quite literally, the “Conservatives,” and their role now is simply to run the government better than the socialists. Britain once had an Empire that stretched across one quarter of the globe; it provided the world with a common language, many of its institutions, global trade, and cricket; we did Great Things at home and abroad. Now, we wrangle over whether state spending should be 39 or 40 percent of GDP, and we hold the prime minister personally responsible for hospital conditions hundreds of miles from London. It’s debilitating.

Cook has a nice encomium for the USA at the end of his wonderful NRO piece:

I quite earnestly believe in all of the stuff that I’m not supposed to. I believe that America is exceptional; that it is an objectively better nation than any other that has ever existed; and that it is, as it was explicitly designed always to be, the last, best hope for mankind. As Winthrop’s sermon poetically put it, America is the “Shining City upon a Hill,” there so that men without liberty have somewhere to turn and a light that they might follow. I followed that light — 3,500 miles from my friends and my family — because I believed that my life would be better here, because I wanted to be free, and because I felt that under American liberty I would be able to be myself more honestly and more fully. There is nowhere else I could have gone.

But the sad truth he then denotes in his last paragraphs reminds us of Recessional by Rudyard Kipling on the occasion of the Queen's Golden Anniversry, Victoria's, that is!

Alas, there is nothing written in the stars that says that America will always be America. “Rome,” as Joseph Heller brutally reminded us, “was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was destroyed, Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do you really think your own country will last? Forever? Keep in mind that the earth itself is destined to be destroyed by the sun in 25 million years or so.” There will be little virtue in America if it becomes a larger version of Britain, but with free speech and the right to bear arms.

Cook finishes on why his despair is so biting:

On Tuesday, America took another giant leap away both from its revolutionary mission and from the classical liberalism that it has successfully incubated for so long. This is a rotten thing for America, and also — though it might not realize it — for the world; for, like Anthony Blanche, Evelyn Waugh’s “aesthete par excellence,” should the United States descend into the mire, it will “take something away with it.” If America ceases to be America, it will “[lock] a door and hang the key on a chain.” And then? “All [its] friends, among whom [it] had always been a stranger,” will realize they need it. I know I do.

I'm so happy I don't have to listen to the usual optimism of the "Tomorrow is another day..." during the mandatory period of mourning for a great nation losing its way.

Salon Article by Andrew O'Hehir Counsels Lib Restraint

O'Hehir's liberal slant isn't absent from this article entitled "Hey Liberals, You Haven't Won the Cultural War."

Mark Steyn on After American Decline & Fall

Mark says it better than anyone else. Here's his post-mortem analysis in full:

Amid the ruin and rubble of the grey morning after, it may seem in poor taste to do anything so vulgar as plug the new and stunningly topical paperback edition of my book, After America — or, as Dennis Miller retitled it on the radio the other day, Wednesday. But the business of America is business, as Calvin Coolidge said long ago in an alternative universe, and I certainly could use a little. So I’m going to be vulgar and plug away. The central question of Wednesday — I mean, After America — is whether the Brokest Nation in History is capable of meaningful course correction. On Tuesday, the American people answered that question. The rest of the world will make its dispositions accordingly. In the weeks ahead, Democrats and Republicans will reach a triumphant “bipartisan” deal to avert the fiscal cliff through some artful bookkeeping mechanism that postpones Taxmageddon for another year, or six months, or three, when they can reach yet another triumphant deal to postpone it yet again. Harry Reid has already announced that he wants to raise the debt ceiling — or, more accurately, lower the debt abyss — by $2.4 trillion before the end of the year, and no doubt we can look forward to a spectacular “bipartisan” agreement on that, too. It took the government of the United States two centuries to rack up its first trillion dollars in debt. Now Washington piles on another trillion every nine months. Forward! If you add up the total debt — state, local, the works — every man, woman, and child in this country owes 200 grand (which is rather more than the average Greek does). Every American family owes about three-quarters of a million bucks, or about the budget deficit of Liechtenstein, which has the highest GDP per capita in the world. Which means that HRH Prince Hans-Adam II can afford it rather more easily than Bud and Cindy at 27b Elm Street. In 2009, the Democrats became the first government in the history of the planet to establish annual trillion-dollar deficits as a permanent feature of life. Before the end of Obama’s second term, the federal debt alone will hit $20 trillion. That ought to have been the central fact of this election — that Americans are the brokest brokey-broke losers who ever lived, and it’s time to do something about it. My Hillsdale College comrade Paul Rahe, while accepting much of my thesis, thought that, as an effete milquetoast pantywaist sissified foreigner, I had missed a vital distinction. As he saw it, you can take the boy out of Canada but you can’t take the Canada out of the boy. I had failed to appreciate that Americans were not Euro-Canadians, and would not go gently into the statist night. But, as I note in my book, “a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two.” Tuesday’s results demonstrate that, as a whole, the American electorate is trending very Euro-Canadian. True, you still have butch T-shirts — “Don’t Tread On Me,” “These Colors Don’t Run” . . . In my own state, where the Democrats ran the board on election night, the “Live Free or Die” license plates look very nice when you see them all lined up in the parking lot of the Social Security office. But, in their view of the state and its largesse, there’s nothing very exceptional about Americans, except that they’re the last to get with the program. Barack Obama ran well to the left of Bill Clinton and John Kerry, and has been rewarded for it both by his party’s victory and by the reflex urgings of the usual GOP experts that the Republican party needs to “moderate” its brand. I have no interest in the traditional straw clutching — oh, it was the weak candidate . . . hard to knock off an incumbent . . . next time we’ll have a better GOTV operation in Colorado . . . I’m always struck, if one chances to be with a GOP insider when a new poll rolls off the wire, that their first reaction is to query whether it’s of “likely” voters or merely “registered” voters. As the consultant class knows, registered voters skew more Democrat than likely voters, and polls of “all adults” skew more Democrat still. Hence the preoccupation with turnout models. In other words, if America had compulsory voting as Australia does, the Republicans would lose every time. In Oz, there’s no turnout model, because everyone turns out. The turnout-model obsession is an implicit acknowledgment of an awkward truth — that, outside the voting booth, the default setting of American society is ever more liberal and statist. The short version of electoral cycles is as follows: The low-turnout midterms are fought in political terms, and thus Republicans do well and sometimes spectacularly well (1994, 2010); the higher-turnout presidential elections are fought in broader cultural terms, and Republicans do poorly, because they’ve ceded most of the cultural space to the other side. What’s more likely to determine the course of your nation’s destiny? A narrow focus on robocalls in selected Florida and New Hampshire counties every other fall? Or determining how all the great questions are framed from the classroom to the iPod to the movie screen in the 729 days between elections? The good news is that reality (to use a quaint expression) doesn’t need to swing a couple of thousand soccer moms in northern Virginia. Reality doesn’t need to crack 270 in the Electoral College. Reality can get 1.3 percent of the popular vote and still trump everything else. In the course of his first term, Obama increased the federal debt by just shy of $6 trillion and in return grew the economy by $905 billion. So, as Lance Roberts at Street Talk Live pointed out, in order to generate every dollar of economic growth the United States had to borrow about five dollars and 60 cents. There’s no one out there on the planet — whether it’s “the rich” or the Chinese — who can afford to carry on bankrolling that rate of return. According to one CBO analysis, U.S.-government spending is sustainable as long as the rest of the world is prepared to sink 19 percent of its GDP into U.S. Treasury debt. We already know the answer to that: In order to avoid the public humiliation of a failed bond auction, the U.S. Treasury sells 70 percent of the debt it issues to the Federal Reserve — which is to say the left hand of the U.S. government is borrowing money from the right hand of the U.S. government. It’s government as a Nigerian e-mail scam, with Ben Bernanke playing the role of the dictator’s widow with $4 trillion under her bed that she’s willing to wire to Timmy Geithner as soon as he sends her his bank-account details. If that’s all a bit too technical, here’s the gist: There’s nothing holding the joint up. So Washington cannot be saved from itself. For the moment, tend to your state, and county, town and school district, and demonstrate the virtues of responsible self-government at the local level. Americans as a whole have joined the rest of the Western world in voting themselves a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. The longer any course correction is postponed the more convulsive it will be. Alas, on Tuesday, the electorate opted to defer it for another four years. I doubt they’ll get that long.

Petraeus Resigns DCI Job

David Petraeus was perhaps the most talented and competent Flag Officer that the USA has had since the Korean War [MacArthur] and the news of his resignation due to marital infidelity calls to mind the many Democrats who have NOT resigned because they were caught in the nookie jar.

Petraeus, 60, has been married to Holly, née Knowlton, since 1975, after they meet when he was a military cadet at West Point and she was the daughter of the academy's superintendent. When he was sworn in as director of the CIA by Vice President Joe Biden, Holly held the Bible on which he swore his oath of office. Mrs Petraeus is head of the Office of Servicemember Affairs, a department of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which is responsible for ensuring members of the military are not taken advantage of by banks and other financial businesses. The official offered his resignation to Obama on Thursday, and the President accepted the offer on Friday. Obama issued a statement thanking Petraeus for his 'extraordinary service', saying he had 'served with characteristic intellectual rigour, dedication, and patriotism'. The President added: 'Going forward, my thoughts and prayers are with Dave and Holly Petraeus, who has done so much to help military families through her own work. I wish them the very best at this difficult time.'

The fact that Petraeus refrained from supporting Obama's bobbing and weaving after Benghazi may have had something to do with the unexpected resignation, especially since he was scheduled to testify in front of a skeptical Congress on Thursday next week.

Romney Big-Data ORCA app-web Crashes on Election Day

ORCA was billed to Romney's 30,000 election day get-out-the-vote regiments as state of the art. Just read Computerworld and Ace-of-Spades to realize how a "small-government" ticket lost perhaps a million votes by betting on HUGE software that crashed all over the USA...!!!

And all over the USA, there were something like 67 Obama regional centers in Iowa to 14 for Romney; 140+ in Ohio versus about 25 for Romney.

It's what Obama called "ground game" and it won him several battleground states when the ORCA fuck-up is brought into consideration.

Marco Rubio Steps Up to the Plate

Marco was a good soldier during the Romney campaign, speaking at over 60 events in states with big Latino minorities. Now McCain Campaign Chief in 2008 Steve Schmidt says

“He is without question a world-class political talent with the ability to lead the party into the 21st century … a party that has become synonymous with intolerance and loons to too many swing voters,” said Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, who ran Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.

But there are pitfalls in rushing out of the box too early.

“You know the media and the party — everyone is looking at this lifeboat with Marco written on the side of it and everyone wants to jump in,” said GOP political strategist Alex Castellanos. “We better be careful or we’re gonna sink it. We’re going to take one of our greatest assets and pigeonhole and typecast him. We need to move the conversation to the next generation, and he’s one of the people who understand that we have to be the party of hope.” Rubio and his advisers are well aware of the risks: He must thread a needle as he tries to portray an open, tolerant party while not incensing the ultraconservative base who want tall fences, closed borders and nothing that looks like amnesty for illegal immigrants.

Not only will the Democrat Party try to outflank Rubio by offering another amnesty travesty like the Reagan affair of 1986, which Dems like the lying fatboy Teddy the Dead said would never effect America's demographics and would stifle further immigration. How'd that work out?

Rubio seems likely to approach potential immigration talks from a biographical standpoint. The son of working-class, Cuban-born parents, the bilingual senator often speaks of how his mom and dad toiled for decades as a hotel maid and bartender after moving to America, longing for a better future for their children. “He is well-positioned to be a leader on this issue — but it will take courage and he can’t do it alone,” said Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles.

And the Tea Party anti-immigration people are watchful and warn Marco about this: “This is a very, very dangerous area for Rubio if he has national aspirations,” said Roy Beck, head of the anti-immigration group Numbers USA. “You’ve had Republicans trying to do this in the past that really lost their status in the party once they did it.”

Another problem besides status if that the two biggest enchiladas in the GOP Senate are up for re-election:

Rubio also has a potential problem inside the Senate. Two of the top Senate Republicans — Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and John Cornyn of Texas — are up for reelection in 2014 and have to be worried about a tea party primary challenge if they fire up the base on immigration.

Rubio is savvy enough to have more than one egg in his Latino basket, however.

In an interview with POLITICO last summer, Rubio made clear that he would like to move past immigration reform so that he can relay a broader message to the Latino community about his party. “If we could just get past that gateway issue of immigration policy and what it means about us as Republicans, I think we have a very compelling story to tell about how our economic policies are better for the Hispanic community than the Democrats’ economic policies,” he said. “I think it’s a gateway issue, [which] in many ways, sends a signal about how a political movement, a candidate or a group of individuals feels about another group of people.”

The numbers behind the 2012 election tell the story of the party’s demographic challenge. President George W. Bush, who was a strong voice for comprehensive immigration reform, won 44 percent of the Latino vote in 2004 and 35 percent in 2000. Romney took only 27 percent Tuesday. “What I urge my Republican colleagues to do is to understand we have a demographic problem, the rhetoric around immigration has led to our reduction in Hispanic votes,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told POLITICO. While Rubio will most likely be the GOP’s point man on immigration on the Hill, Bush’s brother, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, also is expected to help bridge the gap with Hispanics. “They both have the stature and the credibility, and they both have the messaging talents to deal with an issue that has been a difficult issue for our party to drive consensus,” said Al Cardenas, chairman of the grass-roots American Conservative Union and a close friend of both men.

And a quick anecdote: Salvador from Mexico who's been resident in the US 21 years told Rush that the Mexican illegals are simply used to an all-powerful government along PRI & PAN lines. This crushes their individual aspirations and makes them aspire simply for a place under the milk spigots of the huge tyrannical octopus of Mexico City even if it's only hind teat. Other Latinos come here with similar governments and their attitudes are the same, said Salvador. He thinks the GOP has a good antidote to the socialist poison of the Democrats and their tyrant-cousins in Latin America.

Groundhog Day in America or

AA lore has the old adage: "insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." That's how Victor Davis Hanson ends his piece on Nov 8th. Here's more:

Obama’s win did not really reflect affirmation of his first term, given that the president made only halfhearted efforts to defend Obamacare, the stimulus, huge Keynesian deficits, and his attempts to implement cap-and-trade. So if there is a second-term agenda, even Obama supporters don’t quite know what it will be. Unlike the hope-and-change campaign of 2008, Obama’s theme this time around was that George W. Bush had been awful and Mitt Romney would be far worse. The Obama campaign spent almost $1 billion to brand the latter as a veritable felon who callously let people suffer without health insurance. In textbook community-organizing fashion, Obama won the election by brilliantly cobbling together factions with shrill warnings of supposed enemies everywhere. Young women were threatened by sexist Neanderthal males. Minorities were oppressed by neo-Confederate tea partiers. Greens were in danger from greedy smokestack polluters. Gays were bullied by homophobic Evangelicals. Illegal aliens were demonized by xenophobic nativists. And the 47 percent were at the mercy of the grasping 1 percent. Almost any American could fall into the category of either an Obama-aligned victim or a Romney-aligned oppressor.

While calling Romney a liar through his surrogates, the First Fraud hung back behind the curtain making his Oz-like pronouncements and letting Joe Biden stumble and fumble the ball and then BHO would come out and look relatively good.

How, then, can a reelected President Obama put the fractured American Humpty Dumpty together again after it has been shattered by such a nasty campaign? Certainly, it will no longer work for the president merely to wax eloquent on the need for more civility. Instead, his congressional opponents will expect more hardball Chicago politics and will probably reply in kind. Yet Obama is going to need bipartisan help to solve a number of menacing crises. His $1 trillion deficits cannot continue for another four years without wrecking the country. A staggering national debt of nearly $17 trillion must also be reduced before our currency is rendered worthless and the interest on the vast borrowing overwhelms the budget. Sequestration looms, with massive cuts in defense and entitlements on the immediate horizon, reminding us that we can live neither with the disease of massive borrowing nor apparently with the medicine of radical cuts and higher taxes. If most Americans are willing to consider allowing paths to citizenship for law-obeying illegal aliens who were brought here as children, then they should be equally adamant about deporting illegals who have committed felonies or have become wards of the state. But does anyone believe such a balance will really be the basis for compromise?

Hanson lives on a raisin farm in the Central Valley and sees thousands of illegals on a weekly basis traveling the backroads of California and turning what was once a relative jewel into a soiled wasteland.

The dread of Obamacare has already helped to spike insurance premiums. No one yet quite knows how the massive wave of new regulations will affect patients, doctors, and hospitals. Nearly three years after the bill’s passage, the public is still not happy with even the idea of it. Abroad, most believe that Iran will become a nuclear power unless it is stopped during Obama’s second term. Obama’s choices are bad versus worse: a nuclear-armed Iran bullying the Middle East with a sword of Damocles permanently suspended over Israel’s head, or a preemptive war to defang the theocracy, leading to an almost certain wave of terrorism in the Middle East and a flaming Persian Gulf. There must be truth-telling soon over the terrorist killing of our ambassador and three other Americans in Libya. A mostly pro-Obama media — in fear of endangering the president’s reelection bid — postponed questioning the preposterous administration narrative of a spontaneous demonstration gone awry over an obscure video. But the facts of the worst terrorist attack on Americans since 9/11/01 remain stubborn things and won’t go away. Al-Qaeda has not been dismantled, but is still killing Americans. Libya is not a model of a democratic Arab Spring, but mired in tribal chaos. Key administration officials — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, especially — will have to explain why prior warnings from Libya were ignored, with fatal consequences. Others, like Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, U.N. ambassador Susan Rice, Vice President Joe Biden, and perhaps the president himself, must tell us why for so long they claimed that the violence was spontaneous, when they knew, or should have known, it was preplanned terrorism.

VDH ends on an upbeat note, but notice that he never even mentioned Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan in the above lists. The Arab Spring is getting effed-up just as I predicted many times. However, I am an Arabist, and the language is a door to an empty room.

Michigan Referendum Crushes Union-Led Coup Attempt

Michigan is where I went to school on a Fellowship at the University in Ann Arbor and where I first got interested and involved in politics. Here is a heartening sign that Michigan could become another right-to-work state:

Unions went for broke in Michigan and they lost big time. Michigan voters soundly defeated a measure that would have given public-sector unions a potent tool to challenge any law -- past, present or future -- limiting their benefits and powers. It would also have permanently barred Michigan from becoming a right-to-work state where payment of dues is no longer required as a condition of employment in unionized companies. Will this defeat now open the right-to-work floodgates? Although both sides raised a whopping $20-plus million for their campaigns, ultimately the proposal lost by a wide margin because of opposition across the political spectrum. Both the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press, the state’s flagship conservative and liberal papers respectively, counseled a “no” vote. The Free Press, usually an ardent supporter of collective- bargaining rights, concluded: “Michigan just can’t afford those kinds of limitations in an era when debt from pension and health obligations to current and retired employees are pushing many local governments to the brink of insolvency.” All of this would have rung the death knell for the last two years of fiscal reforms by Governor Rick Snyder, a moderate Republican, paving the way for future tax increases on individuals and businesses. This would have been economically devastating for Michigan, which went into a recession several years before the rest of the country -- and is only now beginning to post a slow recovery. Its unemployment is still about a point above the national average. The unions may wish they had never overplayed their hand in this battle. They were field-testing a strategy to take back existing right-to-work states that allow legislative action through ballot referendums. If anything, however, they hurt their cause. Ever since Indiana became the first right-to-work state in the Rust Belt earlier this year -- and 23rd in the country -- Governor Snyder has been under tremendous pressure from his party, which controls both legislative chambers, to push a right-to-work law in Michigan as well. Snyder resisted because he wanted to concentrate on tax and regulatory changes and avoid a distracting fight with unions. But conservative lawmakers are going to interpret the resounding defeat for the ballot proposition as essentially a mandate for a right-to-work law in the state. It is now unclear whether Snyder will have the will or the clout to hold them at bay.

Current union greed is killing the Michigan economy.

High labor costs are the biggest obstacle deterring manufacturers from setting up shop in Michigan, depressing employment. If Michigan had been a right-to-work state, according to research by economist Hari Singh of Grand Valley State University, the auto industry, for example, would have seen a 25 percent gain in jobs since 1965. Instead, it lost 56.6 percent just from 2002 to 2009, shrinking its work force by 165,777. Even before the collective-bargaining measure, polls showed that 50 to 60 percent of Michigan residents supported a right- to-work law. That number will no doubt be even higher now. If Michigan goes that route, it will become difficult for non- right-to-work states to resist and remain competitive.

The biggest hope for an economic recovery will be state's pushing right-to-work laws through their GOP legislatures.

Harry Reid: Filibuster Reform Will Be Pursued In The Next Congress

Reid is an ancient fossil who stirs up animosity while Obama & Romney are seeking to dampen their mutual dislike and Boehner pledges to work with the President. Maybe Obama can press the ancient fossil to pass a budget, given that it's been over 1000 days since this specimen of silliness has deigned to perform his duties as Senate Majority Leader.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

The GOP has elected four more governors to increase its total to 33 among the 50 states [not counting the Republican in Puerto Rico].

How the Media Virtually Sewed Up a Victory for Obama.

Here are FIVE ways the Media Tilted for the First Fraud.

Fox News and other media outlets have projected that President Obama has been reelected to a second term. If, in celebrating his victory Obama wanted to give credit where credit is due, he might want to think about calling some of America's top journalists, since their favorable approach almost certainly made the difference between victory and defeat. Reviewing the 2012 presidential campaign, here are five ways the media elite tipped the public relations scales in favor of the liberal Obama and against the conservative challenger Mitt Romney: 1. The Media’s Biased Gaffe Patrol Hammered Romney: The media unfairly jumped on inconsequential mistakes — or even invented controversies — from Romney and hyped them in to multi-day media “earthquakes.” Case in point: the GOP candidate’s trip to Europe and Israel in late July. A Media Research Center analysis of all 21 ABC, CBS and NBC evening news stories about Romney’s trip found that virtually all of them (18, or 86%) emphasized “diplomatic blunders,” “gaffes” or “missteps.” Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer blasted the news coverage in an August 2 column, calling the trip “a major substantive success” that was wrapped “in a media narrative of surpassing triviality.” Similarly, when the left-wing Mother Jones magazine in September put out a secretly-recorded video of Romney talking to donors about the 47% of Americans who don’t pay income taxes, the networks hyped it like a sensational sex scandal. Over three days, the broadcast network morning and evening shows churned out 42 stories on the tape, nearly 90 minutes of coverage. The tone was hyperbolic; ABC’s "Good Morning America" called it a “bombshell rocking the Mitt Romney campaign,” while ABC "World News" anchor Diane Sawyer declared it a “political earthquake.” None of Obama’s gaffes garnered that level of coverage. After the president in a June 8 press conference declared that “the private sector is doing fine,” the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts gave it just one night’s coverage, then basically dropped the story — nothing further on ABC’s "World News" or the "CBS Evening News" in the weeks that followed, and just two passing references on the "NBC Nightly News." And, when Obama infamously declared, “You didn’t build that,” ABC, CBS, NBC didn’t report the politically damaging remark for four days — and then only after Romney made it the centerpiece of a campaign speech. 2. Pounding Romney With Partisan Fact Checking: There’s nothing wrong with holding politicians accountable for the honesty of their TV ads and stump speeches, but this year the self-appointed media fact-checkers attacked Republicans as liars for statements that were accurate. For example, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter writing for PolitiFact branded VP candidate Paul Ryan’s convention speech anecdote about the closing of the General Motors plant in his hometown as “false,” even though Ryan was correct in all of his details. The slanted review became TV reporters’ talking points; the next day on NBC, correspondent Chuck Todd grumped that while what Ryan said “was technically factual, by what he left out, [he] actually distorted the actual truth.” Matt Lauer greeted Ryan the following week in an interview on Today: “There are some people who are claiming that you played a little fast and loose with the truth....” The same thing happened when Mitt Romney talked about Obama’s “apology tour” during the final presidential debate. While in 2009 Obama had, in fact, criticized the United States as “arrogant,” “derisive” and having “too often... set [our] principles aside,” the networks said to call it an “apology tour” was “false” because, as CNN’s John Berman tenuously insisted, “even if he was critical of past U.S. foreign policy, he issued no apologies.” Writing in the New York Times August 31, correspondent Jackie Calmes scolded that “the number of falsehoods and misleading statements from the Romney campaign coming in for independent criticism has reached a level not typically seen.” That’s not true, either; Romney’s team was, at worst, guilty of highlighting those facts that best illustrated their points (something done by all politicians), and the Obama campaign certainly put out their share of tawdry TV ads and dubious campaign claims. But with “truth cops” who mainly policed just the GOP side of the street, the media used “fact-checking” as another club to tilt the playing field in favor of the Democrats. 3. Those Biased Debate Moderators: Upset liberals scorned PBS’s Jim Lehrer for taking a hands-off approach in the first debate on October 3, with MSNBC analyst Howard Fineman slamming him as “practically useless” for not jumping into the debate on behalf of President Obama. Such criticism may have encouraged the activist approach taken by ABC’s Martha Raddatz in the vice presidential debate October 11, and by CNN’s Candy Crowley in the October 16 town hall debate, as both of those journalists repeatedly interrupted the Republican candidate and larded the discussion with a predominantly liberal agenda. Crowley earns extra demerits for taking the media’s penchant for faulty fact-checking to new heights when she jumped into the October 16 town hall-style debate to validate President Obama’s claim that he called the attack in Benghazi, Libya, “an act of terror” the very next morning. Crowley endorsed Obama’s story, telling Romney: “He did, in fact, sir, call it an act of terror.” Not according to the transcript, which had Obama only speaking generically about how “no acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this nation,” not assigning that label to the violence in Benghazi. Wrong though she was, Crowley became a heroine to many in the liberal media; ABC's Matt Dowd, for example, cheered: “What Candy Crowley did, I actually thought, was laudable....I hope we get to do more of that in this discourse.” Moderators are supposed to ensure both sides get a fair hearing, not pick sides. By leaping into the fray, Candy Crowley epitomized the media’s itch to tilt the scales this year — again, in Obama’s favor. 4. The Benghazi Blackout: Right after the September 11 attack in Libya, the networks proclaimed that the events would bolster President Obama — “reminding voters of his power as commander-in-chief,” as NBC’s Peter Alexander stated on the September 14 edition of "Today." But as a cascade of leaked information erased the portrait of Obama as a heroic commander, the broadcast networks shunted the Benghazi story to the sidelines. News broke online in late September, for example, that Team Obama knew within 24 hours that the attack was likely the result of terrorism. That starkly contradicted claims from White House press secretary Jay Carney, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, and President Obama himself that the attack was a “spontaneous” reaction to an anti-Muslim video posted on YouTube. Yet, ABC took nearly two days to bring this story to viewers, while CBS and NBC held off for three days. This was, shamefully, the broadcast networks’ pattern in October: New developments exposing the administration’s failure to provide adequate security, or contradictions in their public statements, were either given stingy coverage or buried completely. The puzzle pieces revealed a disturbing failure of Obama’s national security apparatus, but the networks flitted in and out of the story, never giving it any traction. Instead of an “October Surprise,” the networks engineered an “October Suppression” — keeping a lid on the boiling Benghazi story until Election Day. Who knows how voters might have reacted if the media had covered this story as tenaciously as they did Romney’s “47% gaffe”? 5. Burying the Bad Economy: Pundits agreed that Obama’s weakness was the failure of the US economy to revive after his expensive stimulus and four years of $1 trillion deficits. But the major networks failed to offer the sustained, aggressive coverage of the economy that incumbent Republican President George H.W. Bush faced in 1992, or even that George W. Bush faced in 2004 — both years when the national economy was in better shape than it is now. According to a study conducted that year by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, from January through September of 1992, the networks ran a whopping 1,289 stories on the economy, 88% of which painted it in a dismal, negative light. That fall, the unemployment rate was 7.6%, lower than today’s 7.9%, and economic growth in the third quarter was 2.7%, better than today’s 2.0%. Yet the media coverage hammered the idea of a terrible economy, and Bush lost re-election. In 2004, the economy under George W. Bush was far better than it is today — higher growth, lower unemployment, smaller deficits and cheaper gasoline — yet network coverage that year was twice as hostile to Bush than it was towards Obama this year, according to a study by the Media Research Center’s Business and Media Institute. When Republican presidents have faced reelection, network reporters made sure to spotlight economic “victims” — the homeless man, the woman without health insurance, the unemployed worker, the senior citizen who had to choose between medicine and food. But this year, with an economy as bad as any since the Great Depression, those sympathetic anecdotes have vanished from the airwaves — a huge favor to Obama and the Democrats. Given Obama’s record, the Romney campaign could have overcome much of this media favoritism and still prevailed — indeed, they almost did. But taken together, these five trends took the media’s historical bias to new levels this year, and saved Obama’s presidency in the process.

"Winning Ugly" Chicago-Style

The Wall Street Journal has an article on Obama's campaign and the blank agenda he put forward in the election.

Mr. Obama's campaign stitched together a shrunken but still decisive version of his 2008 coalition—single women, the young and culturally liberal, government and other unions workers, and especially minority voters. He said little during the campaign about his first term and even less about his plans for a second. Instead his strategy was to portray Mitt Romney as a plutocrat and intolerant threat to each of those voting blocs. No contraception for women. No green cards for immigrants. A return to Jim Crow via voter ID laws. No Pell grants for college. This was all a caricature even by the standards of modern politics. But it worked with brutal efficiency—the definition of winning ugly. Mr. Obama was able to patch together just enough of these voting groups to prevail even as he lost independents and won only 40% of the overall white vote, according to the exit polls. His campaign's turnout machine was as effective as advertised in getting Democratic partisans to the polls. Mr. Obama also benefitted from his long run of extraordinary good luck. Hurricane Sandy devastated the Northeast a week before Election Day, letting him rise for a few days above the partisanship that has defined his first term. The storm changed the campaign conversation and blunted Mr. Romney's momentum. The exit polls show that late-deciders went for the incumbent this year when they typically break for the challenger.

No Hope of Real Change

Charles Hurt has a column in the Examiner that is pretty doleful.

All that for nothing. It was the billion-dollar election that did not decide one single damned thing. Republicans control the House. Democrats control the Senate. And the White House remains in Democratic hands with absolutely no mandate whatsoever. Another four years with no hope of change. In this environment with this economy and all the gravely important matters pressing against the very existence of this country, it should have been a tsunami election. It should have been a landslide that sent President Obama into dust heap of failed presidencies. Instead, the election was about Big Bird. It was the rape election. The contraception election. The binders full of women election. It was about who was born where and whether she really could claim to be a Cherokee Indian. It was about former president George W. Bush. And it was about gay marriage. It was about the 1 percent and the 99 percent and the 47 percent. It was about dancing freaking horses, for crying out loud! Just about the only thing the election wasn’t about was the economy, which everyone agrees was the only thing voters actually cared about. People tend to really care about the economy when real unemployment reaches double digits, welfare rolls fatten by one-third, politicians rack up $16 trillion in debt and the largest tax hike in the history of the world looms just weeks away. Yet that obviously is not what decided this election. Politicians were too busy talking all about Big Bird, rape and dancing horses. The most disturbing issue of the election was how President Obama managed to win re-election in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania and Michigan by talking about the highly unpopular bailout of General Motors. By taking billions of dollars in hard-earned money from taxpayers during a deep recession and giving it to a couple of huge companies, Obama managed to buy the votes he needed to eke out re-election. Taxpayers remain on the hook to the tune of $25 billion. This is the Achilles heel of a democracy. Politicians simply tax those who do not support them and give the money to those who do. Or give the money to those they would like to have support them. It is the end of the line. Game over. The weeks to come will feature endless finger-pointing and blame about how Republicans do not know how to speak to non-white voters and women and all that nonsense.

Hurt goes on wailing and for good reason:

What happened last night is the same thing that has been happening for decades in America. Politicians deploy all this highly precise technology to slice and dice voters into little micro-groups and then talk to them all about dancing horses or Big Bird. The result is you have all these states vote for one side and all these other states vote for the other side and it all comes down to Florida and Ohio. You could have given me a lot less than a billion dollars and I could have told you that. The only way this gridlock is finally broken is when politicians grow up and decide to put away Big Bird and dancing horses and seriously address like adults the $16 trillion in debts they have racked up on our credit card.

I thought Obama's acceptance speech was great for being off the cuff, but then I found the ubiquitous teleprompter this first class fraud has to have to speak. Mitt gave his concession off the cuff, I believe. One classy note. In Chicago, at McCormick Place where I've often been, the crowd watching Mitt's gracious concession actually applauded him for his class act. Some isolated booing was loudly clapped away. At least they have some class over on that side of the street...!

Mitt Concedes and ABC Recedes.

Mitt Romney made a gracious concession speech and Obama gave both him and his father George a gracious encomium in the beginning of his acceptance speech. Meanwhile, the ridiculous ABC team of Couric and Baba WaWa & a slurred speech by Diane Sawyer suffered a blackout for roughly 30 minutes and the only thing functioning was Couric's twitter screen...!!!

If You Think The Electoral College Sucks......

Try these: Lebanon where I lived for a year. France where I lived for two years. Germany which I have visited dozens of times. Hong Kong which has a horrendous system. Myanmar which is worse than Hong Kong.

The worst---believe it or not---is Germany, so as far as screwed-up methods of voting and elections, Deutschland is still Ueber Alles...!

See the link for some comments on some other miscreants---including Russia, which keeps re-electing Fascist/Communist brute Putin, a human rights serial offender who criticizes the US for its system..!! Bosnia-Herzegovina has FOUR presidents..!! Belgium divisa est in tres partes..!!

The ABC/WashPost Poll consistently selects Dems at a 5% oversample, using fallacious methodology based on the 2008 voting and forgetting about the 2010 when the GOP had a 49-46% turnout:

901. Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as (a Democrat), (a Republican), an independent or what? Democrat Republican Independent Other (vol.) No opinion 11/4/12 LV 35 29 32 3 1

Sayonara Sucker & Don't Let the Door Hit Your Cafe au Lait A$$

Obama had his own minstrels, Jay-Z & Springsteen, serenade a half-empty Nationwide arena Monday night. Hope that's a clue. Here's another and another as the First Clown fades slowly into the sunset.

Obama Campaign: We've Contacted One Out Of Every 2.5 People In The Country

Here's a response I wrote to PhDiva when she accused me of "lacking the intelligence to understand that Obama could be doing both one thing and then its opposite without contradicting himself" or words to that effect. You can read the Puffington Host article below to look up the context.

So The Flimflammer-in-Chief isn't talking out of both sides of his mouth when he says at the beginning of the week that he opposes same-sex marriage and then changes TWO DAYS LATER, after piously intoning that he was "reconsidering" the issue, by coming out completely for this issue, and not because he needed LGBT money & other support for re-election. If you really have a PhD, it ain't cuz of high intelligence, it's because you conned your doctoral committee into accepting your dissertation. I have a Mensa level IQ, but don't condescend to those who disagree with me by saying they "lack intelligence." You lack emotional balance and are probably suffering from grandiosity as well. I also was an FSO and speak seven languages as well as know two classical languages, so I understand a bit about complexity. And those who prate about it are usual feckless pompous academics.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Obama Campaign: We've Contacted One Out Of Every 2.5 People In The Country

Obama's campaign has been so twisted up that on one day he says that he will stay the course because things are slowly getting better and then the next day he proclaims that he is still the "candidate for change." Make up your mind, Barack. And registering over a million and a half people isn't the same as what the GOP staffers have done, because the Republican demographics are skewed to older [more mature and affluent] voters who are already registered. Sam Stein overlooks this fact along with many others in his analysis.UPDATE: MICHIGAN has Romney 47% over Obama 46%!

Clinton Rushed to PA at Last Minute as Obama Panics

The Big Dog is going to campaign in Penn for four stops on Monday, in response to the frantic Obamaniacs who are pushing the panic button as Obama is being hit by a wave of Romneyite enthusiasm. Read Tony Phyrillas:

After a Saturday visit by Paul Ryan to the central part of the state and a scheduled Sunday campaign stop by Mitt Romney to the Philly suburbs, the Obama campaign wants to phone-a-friend. How worried is Obama about losing the Keystone State? Enough to call in Bill Clinton to shore up his sagging campaign in Pennsylvania. The Obama campaign announced late Saturday (I'm talking really late - nearly 11 p.m. Saturday) that Clinton would make four campaign stops for Obama in Pennsylvania on Monday. That's a lot of campaigning by the former president with a bad heart on behalf of the current occupant of the White House. President Clinton will speak at rallies for the Obama-Biden ticket in Philadelphia, Blue Bell, Pittsburgh and Scranton. Why the panic? In addition to the surprise visit by Romney to Bucks County on Sunday, the Republican National Committee announced a $3 million TV ad buy in Pennsylvania. The Karl Rove-backed super PAC American Crossroads also launched a major TV ad campaign in Pennsylvania last week. Obama's road to re-election could collapse in Pennsylvania if he doesn't carry the state on Tuesday.

Romney might outflank Obama if PA comes through, long shot though it is. UPDATE: Newest Poll puts Pennsylvania at dead heat, 47-47%

Freaks of Fortune By Jonathan Levy Harvard, 414 pages, $35 & The Founders and Finance By Thomas K. McCraw Harvard, 485 pages, $35

In 1801, Albert Gallatin, Thomas Jefferson's Treasury secretary, vowed to extinguish the public debt, then in the sum of $83 million. It would be gone in 16 years, he vowed. But 16 years later, it had grown to $127 million.

President Bill Clinton, too, produced a plan to pay down the debt in 16 years. This was in 1999, when the nation owed $3.6 trillion. Though the clock's still ticking, it looks as if 2015 will find the debt weighing in not at zero but at something like $12.9 trillion (not counting the IOUs held by the government itself), a margin of miss about 100,000 times greater than Gallatin's.  "The U.S. economy" is the name we confer on the collective efforts of 143 million working Americans. Nobody invented it, but Gallatin and Hamilton—and the Philadelphia merchant Robert Morris, among others—gave it an early constructive push. Other pioneers followed, many laboring in obscurity, including Elizur Wright, a hotblooded Massachusetts actuary who developed the American science of life insurance. Confronted today by the fiscal cliff, mounting dependency on federal entitlements and the virtual nationalization of Citigroup C -0.92% following the panic of 2008, a voter might well pause to study the words and deeds of America's economic visionaries. Surely, they didn't envision this.

The Founding Fathers had a lot to do with the shape the USA is in today. I am reading Ron Chernow's magisterial history of Hamilton & his contribution is staggering. The US today is almost literally written in the image of the man on the $10 bill.

In "The Founders and Finance," Thomas K. McCraw, an emeritus professor of business history at the Harvard Business School, celebrates the contributions of men who chose to become Americans, as distinct from those whose parents gave them no choice in the matter. Gallatin made his way to America from Geneva, Switzerland, Hamilton from the Caribbean island of St. Croix and Robert Morris from the English city of Liverpool. Each brought with him an approach to financial organization somehow lacking in the native population.

Mr. McCraw makes a good deal of this "immigrant exceptionalism"—and rightly so, for he has hit on something new. In expounding his thesis, though, he gives short shrift to the vital contributions of a fourth-generation Yankee. Marketing the speculative-grade debt of the rebellious American colonies in Europe early in the 1780s, John Adams became this country's indispensable junk-bond salesman. Morris, the superintendent of finance of the insolvent national government in Philadelphia, would routinely write checks on the balances that he hoped Adams was raising in Amsterdam. Not infrequently, the deposits didn't exist, and it fell to Adams to raise them on the fly. John Adams was no capitalist, but he saved the bacon of the emerging American money class. Morris owned as much of this bacon as anyone in the northern colonies. He was a ship owner and merchant before the War of Independence, and he continued to build his fortune even after he entered public service. Some raised an eyebrow at the spectacle of the superintendent of finance conducting a sideline business in privateering, but Morris's patriotism was above reproach. A signer of the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Articles of Confederation (1778) and the Constitution (1787), he achieved, as Mr. McCraw notes, a documentary hat trick duplicated only by Roger Sherman of Connecticut. Under Morris's financial stewardship, from early 1781 to late 1784, the broke national government stayed broke, though it did keep fighting. Lacking the power to tax, Congress could only beg. These pleadings it addressed to the states, which mainly ignored them. In extremis, Morris would reach into his own pocket, kite drafts or juggle accounts to postpone the day of reckoning. He was instrumental in the chartering of the Bank of North America, a forerunner to Hamilton's national bank. A paladin of hard money and balanced budgets in public life, Morris borrowed like Congress in private business. In the 1790s, he gratuitously risked everything on a six- million-acre real-estate speculation; he failed, landed in debtor's prison and died poor. Still, he saw as clearly as anyone the potential of the country to which he was so devoted. Let property be protected and trade be untrammeled, said Morris, and "these United States will abound with the greatest plenty of their own produce of perhaps any nation in the world." President George Washington, in need of a Treasury secretary, first asked Morris. Declining the honor, Morris suggested Alexander Hamilton. Happily for America, Hamilton accepted—"and proceeded," as Mr. McCraw rightly judges, "to turn in the most impressive economic performance in the history of American statecraft." Like Morris and Gallatin, Hamilton was a hard-money man, and he presciently warned against the discredited practice of printing dollars unballasted by gold and silver. "The stamping of paper," as Hamilton put it, "is an operation so much easier than the laying of taxes, that a government, in the practice of paper emissions, would rarely fail in any such emergency to indulge itself too far." What Hamilton couldn't know is how much easier the tapping of a computer keyboard would prove to be than the cranking of a press. "Quantitative easing," as the Federal Reserve styles today's money-materializing technique, is performed without anybody even having to raise a sweat. Well told by Mr. McCraw are the familiar stories of Hamilton's consolidation and funding of the public debt, of his incessant fighting with Thomas Jefferson, and of his final duel with Aaron Burr. "I feel a sense of obligation towards my creditors," Hamilton noted on the eve of his death, "who, in case of accident to me, by the forced sale of my property, may be in some degree sufferers." Like Morris, Hamilton had a surer hand with the nation's finances than he had with his own. Gallatin's story, though less familiar than Hamilton's or even parts of Morris's, is every bit as timely as theirs. Eager for adventure not available in the buttoned-down home of John Calvin, the 19-year-old Gallatin stole off to America in 1780. He made his way to western Pennsylvania, entered local politics, won election to the U.S. Senate (where he was denied a seat on a technicality), went to Congress, became the financial brain of Jefferson's Republican Party, and was at last appointed Treasury secretary. There he served for 13 years, a tenure that no successor has matched. Mr. McCraw shows just how different was Jefferson's party from the one doing business under the Republican banner today. Not for Gallatin the expense and ostentation of a full-service government. He wanted the bare bones, if them. Thus, he proposed, let us abolish the Navy; it cost money. And the interest on the public debt? Another extravagance. Better if there were no debt. This was the Jeffersonian line, though Gallatin, unlike his high-living boss at Monticello, was as debt-averse in private life as he was on the job. As it cost money to send his shirts to the laundry, the Treasury secretary wore them unwashed. But, notes Mr. McCraw, for neither Jefferson nor Gallatin was frugality in government an end in itself. When the opportunity to buy the Louisiana Territory from a motivated seller presented itself in 1802, the Jefferson administration seized it, borrowing the $15 million with which to double the size of the United States. Gallatin's signal contribution to this transaction is today commemorated on the American map: in Gallatin County, Mont., and in the 2.1 million-acre Gallatin National Forest, which adjoins Yellowstone National Park.

Gallatin's was an eminent, honorable and productive life, though not always a happy one. The death of his first wife cut short a "deliriously happy" marriage after just five months. He married again, but three of the four Gallatin daughters died in infancy. Public life, too, brought its share of disappointment. For all his years in America, Gallatin never lost his heavy French accent, nor, his political enemies charged, his fancy, Frenchified ways of thinking. "Still at heart an alien," Henry Clay said of the patriot. On the eve of the War of 1812, Gallatin—still the Treasury secretary, though by now under President Madison—had to contend with a public debt that stood at $45 million, the Louisiana Purchase notwithstanding. Then came the war and a relapse into the bad habits of the Revolutionary era. Insolvent, the government resorted to printing up paper dollars with which to pay its bills. Mercifully, Gallatin didn't have to watch. By this time, he was in Europe helping to negotiate a peace with Britain.

Gallatin finished his days as the president of the National Bank in the City of New York, later renamed the Gallatin National Bank. Many years later, following a merger and a few changes of name, the Gallatin Bank, or its corporate ectoplasm, entered the maw of J.P. Morgan Chase JPM -0.98% . It may interest Jamie Dimon, who seems perfectly reconciled to dollars you can conjure on a computer screen, to know that his distant predecessor hated fiat money as much as he did the public debt and that he persuasively said so in an 1831 tract, which you can Google GOOG +0.05% . It is titled "Considerations on the Currency and Banking System of the United States." In it, Gallatin condemns deposit insurance (New York state was experimenting with a "Safety Fund"), endorses the gold standard and enjoins banks not to owe more than the equivalent of twice their capital (today's bankers owe eight, nine or 10 times their capital). Mr. McCraw has little to say on the sum of these eminently sound prescriptions. I say, Gallatin is looking better every year.

Freaks of Fortune By Jonathan Levy Harvard, 414 pages, $35

While, for some of us, an insufficient attention to the principles of the founding financiers is the ultimate source of our disarranged public finances, for others the trouble is embedded in the very nature of a capitalist economy. In "Freaks of Fortune," Jonathan Levy sets himself the task of writing a history of economic and social risk in America in the 19th and early 20th centuries and, along the way, of showing that big government didn't just come from nowhere. It is an indispensable absorber, he suggests, of the shocks of the free market. Mr. Levy devotes chapters to, among other topics, marine insurance, the intersection of life insurance and race, the failure of the Freedman's Bank (a thrift institution masquerading as a government-sponsored enterprise that came a cropper when it ignored Gallatin's banking principles), farm mortgages, futures markets, and the trust movement. Yes, Mr. Levy acknowledges, America's 19th-century economy produced "hitherto unimaginable levels of economic growth and material wealth." But at the same time, "moral, productive risk-taking could pass an elusive threshold and become immoral, unproductive gambling." His narrative focuses chiefly on these perceived flaws.

"Freaks of Fortune" is a formidable work of scholarship—hats off to the author for the depth and breadth of his research—but, equally, a fatiguing one. You will learn as much as you ever cared to know about Elizur Wright and the rise of actuarial science and about the crooks and incompetents who ran the Freedman's Bank into the ground. You will learn that the author, an assistant professor of history at Princeton, is inordinately fond of the phrase "the generative insecurities and radical uncertainties of capitalism."

No doubt capitalism generates all manner of uncertainties. But so does every other system of economic organization I can think of. And so do the government's insistent attempts to meliorate uncertainty—for instance, by "stimulating" us half to death. We all take a chance—professors, monks, others—just by getting out of bed in the morning. The question is: Which risks do you prefer to run? Which would you prefer that the government hedge on your behalf? Mr. Levy's chapter on monopoly—"trusts," as they were called at the turn of the 20th century—features an Ayn Rand-type villain named George W. Perkins. A Morgan banker, Perkins sought to reorganize American business along the lines of cooperation, not competition. He declared, for instance, that there should be one big life insurance company, not a lot of little squabbling ones. "My idea," he said, "is that the businessman of this country must today, and in the future, serve the people." For Perkins, as for many another statist, World War I was an ideological godsend. "Money-making has been the one, all-absorbing occupation in this country for the last forty years," said the investment banker. But the war "is striking down individualism and building up collectivism." At about the time Perkins uttered these remarks, the founder of General Motors, GM +0.43% Billy Durant, was professing a different credo. "Competition is the life of trade," Durant declared. "I stand for competition. I am opposed to monopoly or control on the principle that it destroys initiative, curtails freedom of action, and frequently leads to the abuse of power. . . . If I controlled the motor car business, the public would very likely get what I wanted to build. With open competition, as we now have it, the public will get what they want." What does the public want? On Tuesday, many of us will register our preferences at the polling place. As for me, I am lining up—to the full extent permitted—with the ideas and principles of Durant and Gallatin, and of Morris and Hamilton.

Michael Barone Picks Romney to Win Handily

Barone is the longtime editor-in-chief of The Washington Almanac with Grant Ujifusa. Michael knows every congressional district and the changing ethnography and demographics of each state in the union. Here's his prognosis:

Fundamentals usually prevail in American elections. That's bad news for Barack Obama. True, Americans want to think well of their presidents and many think it would be bad if Americans were perceived as rejecting the first black president. But it's also true that most voters oppose Obama's major policies and consider unsatisfactory the very sluggish economic recovery -- Friday's jobs report showed an unemployment uptick. Also, both national and target state polls show that independents, voters who don't identify themselves as Democrats or Republicans, break for Romney. That might not matter if Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 39 to 32 percent, as they did in the 2008 exit poll. But just about every indicator suggests that Republicans are more enthusiastic about voting -- and about their candidate -- than they were in 2008, and Democrats are less so. That's been apparent in early or absentee voting, in which Democrats trail their 2008 numbers in target states Virginia, Ohio, Iowa and Nevada. The Obama campaign strategy, from the beginning, has recognized these handicaps, running barrages of early anti-Romney ads in states that Obama carried narrowly. But other states, not so heavily barraged, have come into contention. Which candidate will get the electoral votes of the target states? I'll go out on a limb and predict them, in ascending order of 2008 Obama percentages -- fully aware that I'm likely to get some wrong. Indiana (11 electoral votes). Uncontested. Romney. North Carolina (15 electoral votes). Obama has abandoned this target. Romney. Florida (29). The biggest target state has trended Romney since the Denver debate. I don't see any segment of the electorate favoring Obama more than in 2008, and I see some (South Florida Jews) favoring him less. Romney. Ohio (18). The anti-Romney auto bailout ads have Obama running well enough among blue-collar voters for him to lead most polls. But many polls anticipate a more Democratic electorate than in 2008. Early voting tells another story, and so does the registration decline in Cleveland's Cuyahoga County. In 2004, intensity among rural, small -town and evangelical voters, undetected by political reporters who don't mix in such circles, produced a narrow Bush victory. I see that happening again. Romney. Virginia (13). Post-debate polling mildly favors Romney, and early voting is way down in heavily Democratic Arlington, Alexandria, Richmond and Norfolk. Northern Virginia Asians may trend Romney. Romney. Colorado (9). Unlike 2008, registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats, and more Republicans than Democrats have voted early. The Republican trend in 2010 was squandered by weak candidates for governor and senator. Not this time. Romney. Iowa (6). The unexpected Romney endorsements by the Des Moines Register and three other newspapers gave voice to buyer's remorse in a state Obama carried by 10 points. Democrats' traditional margin in early voting has declined. Romney. Minnesota (10). A surprise last-minute media buy for the Romney campaign. But probably a bridge too far. Obama. New Hampshire (4). Polls are very tight here. I think superior Republican intensity will prevail. Romney. Pennsylvania (20). Everyone would have picked Obama two weeks ago. I think higher turnout in pro-coal Western Pennsylvania and higher Republican percentages in the Philadelphia suburbs could produce a surprise. The Romney team evidently thinks so too. Their investment in TV time is too expensive to be a mere feint, and, as this is written, Romney is planning a Sunday event in Bucks County outside Philly. Wobbling on my limb, Romney. Nevada (6). Democratic early-voting turnout is down from 2008 in Las Vegas' Clark County, 70 percent of the state. But the casino unions' turnout machine on Election Day re-elected an unpopular Harry Reid in 2010, and I think they'll get enough Latinos and Filipinos out this time. Obama. Wisconsin (10). Recent polling is discouraging for Republicans. But Gov. Scott Walker handily survived the recall effort in June with a great organizational push. Democrats depend heavily on margins in inner-city Milwaukee (population down) and the Madison university community. But early voting is down in university towns in other states. The Obama campaign is prepared to turn out a big student vote, but you don't see many Obama signs on campuses. Romney. Oregon (7), New Mexico (5), New Jersey (14). Uncontested. Obama. Michigan (16). Romney chose Pennsylvania, where there's no auto bailout issue. Obama. Bottom line: Romney 315, Obama 223. That sounds high for Romney. But he could drop Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and still win the election. Fundamentals.

I hope Michael is correct in his predictions.

How Far Obama Has Fallen

Peggy Noonan eviscerates the First Fraud and First Coward:

The "I" of the storm was New York's Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo. He was equally competent and effortful but took the mildly hectoring tone of a kind of leftism that is now old. It involves phrases like "As I've long said." I think this is the worst and I was appalled and when I was at HUD I handled storms and I learned a great deal and I saw we were prepared and I am relieved and I will work hard and I need you to know global warming is what I told you it was. The winning politicians of the future will not be all about I. People don't like it. They don't want to have to wade past the ego to the info. *** Which gets us to Tuesday. No one knows what will happen. Maybe that means it will be close, and maybe it doesn't. Maybe a surprise is in store. But the fact that Barack Obama is fighting for his political life is still one of the great political stories of the modern era. Look at where he started, placing his hand on the Bible Abe Lincoln was sworn in on in 1861. It was Jan. 20, 2009. The new president was 47 and in the kind of position politicians can only dream of—a historic figure walking in, the first African-American president, broadly backed by the American people. He won by 9.5 million votes. Two days after his inauguration, Gallup had him at 68% approval, only 12% disapproval. He had a Democratic Senate, and for a time a cloture-proof 60 members. He had a Democratic House (256-178) with a colorful, energetic speaker. The mainstream media were excited about him, supportive of him. His political foes were demoralized, their party fractured. He faced big problems—an economic crash,two wars—but those crises gave him broad latitude. All of his stars were perfectly aligned. He could do anything.

The Cuomo ego was and is huge, and he ain't gonna rise politically as long as he retains that arrogant Italian prince attitude. But Obama had it all. Both houses of Congress & a huge approval rating. Then he effed-up, big time.

Books will be written about what happened, but early on the president made two terrible legislative decisions. The stimulus bill was a political disaster, and it wasn't the cost, it was the content. We were in crisis, losing jobs. People would have accepted high spending if it looked promising. But the stimulus was the same old same old, pure pork aimed at reliable constituencies. It would course through the economy with little effect. And it would not receive a single Republican vote in the House (three in the Senate), which was bad for Washington, bad for our politics. It was a catastrophic victory. It did say there was a new boss in town. But it also said the new boss was out of his league.

But the ridiculous pork-barrel largesse of the $850+ billion stimulus was just the hors d'oeuvres. This amateur then allowed himself to be played like a tyro at a high-stakes poker table. Pelosi & Reid knew immediately that this sucker could be rolled, and like any greedy politicians would do, they rolled him.

Then health care, a mistake beginning to end. The president's 14-month-long preoccupation with ObamaCare signaled that he did not share the urgency of people's most immediate concerns—jobs, the economy, all the coming fiscal cliffs. The famous 2,000-page bill added to their misery by adding to their fear. Voters would have had to trust the president a lot to believe his program wouldn't raise their premiums, wouldn't limit their autonomy, wouldn't make a shaky system worse. But they didn't trust him that much, because they'd just met him. They didn't really know him. You have to build the kind of trust it takes to do something so all-encompassing. Peggy Noonan's Blog Daily declarations from the Wall Street Journal columnist. And so began the resistance, the Tea Party movement and the town-hall protests, full of alarmed independents and older Democrats. Both revived Republicans and, temporarily at least, reunited conservatives. Why did the president make such mistakes? Why did he make decisions that seemed so unknowing, and not only in retrospect? Because he had so much confidence, he thought whatever he did would work. He thought he had "a gift," as he is said to have told Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He thought he had a special ability to sway the American people, or so he suggested to House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor. But whenever he went over the the heads of the media and Congress and went to the people, in prime-time addresses, it didn't really work. He did not have a magical ability to sway. And—oddly—he didn't seem to notice.

This dude had a selective way of reading his best reviews and believing only them. The docile media would only bleat occasionally, and then plaintively. But the DC village began to notice that this magical realism streak in Obama was a feature, not a bug.

It is one thing to think you're Lebron. Its another thing to keep missing the basket and losing games and still think you're Lebron. And that really was the problem: He had the confidence without the full capability. And he gathered around him friends and associates who adored him, who were themselves talented but maybe not quite big enough for the game they were in. They understood the Democratic Party, its facts and assumptions. But they weren't America-sized. They didn't get the country so well. It is a mystery why the president didn't second-guess himself more, doubt himself. Instead he kept going forward as if it were working. He doesn't do chastened. He didn't do what Bill Clinton learned to do, after he took a drubbing in 1994: change course and prosper. Mr. Obama may yet emerge victorious. There are, obviously, many factors in every race. Maybe, as one for instance, the seriousness of the storm has sharpened people's anxieties—there are no local crises anymore, a local disaster is a national disaster—so that anxiety will leave some people leaning toward the status quo, toward the known. Or maybe, conversely, they'll think he failed to slow the oceans' rise. We'll know soon. Whatever happens, Mr. Obama will not own the room again as once he did. If he wins, we will see a different presidency—even more stasis, and political struggle—but not a different president.

This is a daunting prospect---four more years with a second-rate narcissist in charge and a half-wit as a Veep, so if Air Force One crashes, the US's decline, already rather steep, will turn into a tailspin and crash and burn. Let's hope Romney can stagger through to victory.

Could Presidential Polls Be Wrong About Obama's Battleground Edge?

This is overall a pretty good summary of the state of polling six-ten days out and Mr. Blumenthal had the good sense to leave out any polling by Quinnipiac sponsored by CBS & the NYT, which oversample Dems by 7+ almost everywhere. The fact is that in the very last few days, many voters may change their minds or make up their minds. And Karl Rove & Dan Henninger both have cogent analyses in the WSJ this AM about Ohio & its contingencies. Ohio is key, according to Chris Cilliza, and all other things being equal, will decide the election.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Was Stevens Killed by Assad Paid Operatives?

Michael Kelley of Business Insider has an interesting piece on how Amb. Stevens may have been brokering Libyan arms for Syrian insurgents. If Stevens was handling cash during this series of arms transfers, he'd be suspected by both sides of dipping his hand in the cookie jar. And the Assad a-holes would have all the reason to assassinate the gay young Ambassador.

The official position is that the US has refused to allow heavy weapons into Syria. But there's growing evidence that U.S. agents—particularly murdered ambassador Chris Stevens—were at least aware of heavy weapons moving from Libya to jihadist Syrian rebels. In March 2011 Stevens became the official U.S. liaison to the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan opposition, working directly with Abdelhakim Belhadj of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group—a group that has now disbanded, with some fighters reportedly participating in the attack that took Stevens' life. In November 2011 The Telegraph reported that Belhadj, acting as head of the Tripoli Military Council, "met with Free Syrian Army [FSA] leaders in Istanbul and on the border with Turkey" in an effort by the new Libyan government to provide money and weapons to the growing insurgency in Syria. Last month The Times of London reported that a Libyan ship "carrying the largest consignment of weapons for Syria … has docked in Turkey." The shipment reportedly weighed 400 tons and included SA-7 surface-to-air anti-craft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades. Those heavy weapons are most likely from Muammar Gaddafi's stock of about 20,000 portable heat-seeking missiles—the bulk of them SA-7s—that the Libyan leader obtained from the former Eastern bloc. Reuters reports that Syrian rebels have been using those heavy weapons to shoot down Syrian helicopters and fighter jets.

Isn't it sad that the American citizen must inform himself from British newspapers that actually do their jobs as journalists. Not Reuters nor the BBC, however. Nor the Guardian, usually, but the Independent is stocked with former MI6 types who often know this stuff before the rest of the world. My guess is that some CIA types are using the Telegraph & Times as a conduit for payback against the corrupt Obama administration. Here's more.

The ship's captain was "a Libyan from Benghazi and the head of an organization called the Libyan National Council for Relief and Support," which was presumably established by the new government. That means that Ambassador Stevens had only one person—Belhadj—between himself and the Benghazi man who brought heavy weapons to Syria. Furthermore, we know that jihadists are the best fighters in the Syrian opposition, but where did they come from? Last week The Telegraph reported that a FSA commander called them "Libyans" when he explained that the FSA doesn't "want these extremist people here." And if the new Libyan government was sending seasoned Islamic fighters and 400 tons of heavy weapons to Syria through a port in southern Turkey—a deal brokered by Stevens' primary Libyan contact during the Libyan revolution—then the governments of Turkey and the U.S. surely knew about it. Furthermore there was a CIA post in Benghazi, located 1.2 miles from the U.S. consulate, used as "a base for, among other things, collecting information on the proliferation of weaponry looted from Libyan government arsenals, including surface-to-air missiles" ... and that its security features "were more advanced than those at rented villa where Stevens died." And we know that the CIA has been funneling weapons to the rebels in southern Turkey. The question is whether the CIA has been involved in handing out the heavy weapons from Libya. In any case, the connection between Benghazi and the rise of jihadists in Syria is stronger than has been officially acknowledged.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/us-syria-heavy-weapons-jihadists-2012-10#ixzz2B0YOgBqL

Different Polls for Different Folks

Jennifer Rubin on Iowa:

The Romney team has been exuding confidence about Iowa, although public polling has been mixed. Right Turn has obtained from an Iowa Republican a copy of a campaign memo regarding the state of early voting there. As indicated by its reference to numbers as of Oct. 30, it is the most recent assessment from the Romney team’s perspective on the race in the state that launched Barack Obama’s presidential race in 2008: • DEM lead of more than 44 points (16.91 to 60.99%) on 9/28 collapsed to 12.27 points by 10/30, an improvement of nearly +32 net points on the margin by Republicans. • Republicans have already turned out 128 percent of our absentee and early voters from four years ago — nine percent more than the Democrats have done. • Republicans have cut Democrats’ historic advantage in in-person early voting by 75 percent. • At this time four years ago, Democrats led in-person early voting 70,484 to 41,927. Not only have Republicans turned out 10,000 more early voters than we did at this time in 2008, but more than 10,000 fewer Democrats have voted – a clear sign of their depressed enthusiasm and failure of their ground game to turn their voters out. • The Obama campaign is panicking, and you can see it in the way they are turning out their most reliable, most likely voters long before Election Day. They are using their highest propensity voters to pad their absentee and early vote numbers. Incredibly, half of Iowa Democrats who have voted in all four of the last four general elections have been made to request absentee ballots or vote early by the Obama campaign. • The upshot is that Republicans have twice as many reliable, high propensity voters available on Election Day. Republicans already have a natural advantage on Election Day – after all, we invented the 72-Hour Program – which will only be larger in 2012 due to our record-shattering volunteer voter contact effort and the Democrats’ foolish decision to cannibalize their most reliable voters to pad their early voting figures. • Over 1.3 million volunteer voter contacts since absentee and early vote turnout began in Iowa. • Republicans are already over-performing their share of absentee and early votes in 86 of Iowa’s 99 counties – including critical counties like Black Hawk, Cerro Gordo, Dallas, Des Moines, Dubuque, Johnson, Linn, Marion, Polk, Pottawattamie, Poweshiek, Sioux, Story, Wapello, and Winneshiek. • Republicans are even over-performing their share of ballots returned in 71 of 99 counties compared to 2004, the first time a Republican candidate carried Iowa in a presidential election since 1984, and are over-performing 2004 statewide. An Iowa Republican tells me, “I have seen polling from a third-party group, three congressionals, our state Senate campaigns and state House campaigns — all using different pollsters, and ALL of them have Romney rising, and ALL of them have Romney with a 1 to 2 point lead.”

Here's hoping the Hawkeye State keeps clarity of vision above food stamps and disability and interminable welfare payments after losing a job.

Allen West's Primary Opponent 'Embarrassed' By West, Endorses Democrat Patrick Murphy

The Democrats are terrified of a black Congressman who refuses to abide by the rules of their kept servants in their CBC plantation. These unfortunates are entitled to skim off as much money as possible without prosecution [unless, like the unfortunate LA Cong Jefferson, they take it from foreign sources] as long, that is, as they claim to be Dems & vote their way.

As for Patrick Murphy, his daddy is bankrolling this self-proclaimed CPA who isn't even registered in the appropriate offices as one. He is completely unqualified. Col. West led his unit bravely into Iraq & was railroaded by a PC-obsessed Army Command whose ridiculous charges were ultimately dismissed. Finally, the Huffpost polling is so far off the mark that RealPolitics doesn't even have this race as a toss-up, and the margin among local polling sources is closer to 10% than 1.7. But what's to expect from the biased commentary from a biased news source...?

Seasoned Vet Rove Versus Teen Tyro Silver

Karl Rove takes teen tyro Nate Silver to school:

[Romney] maintains a small but persistent polling edge. As of yesterday afternoon, there had been 31 national surveys in the previous seven days. Mr. Romney led in 19, President Obama in seven, and five were tied. Mr. Romney averaged 48.4%; Mr. Obama, 47.2%. The GOP challenger was at or above 50% in 10 polls, Mr. Obama in none. The number that may matter the most is Mr. Obama's 47.2% share. As the incumbent, he's likely to find that number going into Election Day is a percentage point or so below what he gets. For example, in 2004 President George W. Bush had 49% in the final Gallup likely-voter track; he received 50.7% on Election Day. In 1996, President Clinton was at 48% in the last Gallup; he got 49.2% at the polls. And in 1992, President George H.W. Bush was at 37% in the closing Gallup; he collected 37.5% in the balloting.

Weather will be key, as rain aids the GOP & sunny warm brings out the Dems.

One potentially dispositive question is what mix of Republicans and Democrats will show up this election. On Friday last week, Gallup hinted at the partisan makeup of the 2012 electorate with a small chart buried at the end of its daily tracking report. Based on all its October polling, Gallup suggested that this year's turnout might be 36% Republican to 35% Democratic, compared with 39% Democratic and 29% Republican in 2008, and 39% Republican and 37% Democratic in 2004. If accurate, this would be real trouble for Mr. Obama, since Mr. Romney has consistently led among independents in most October surveys. Gallup delivered some additional bad news to Mr. Obama on early voting. Through Sunday, 15% of those surveyed said they had already cast a ballot either in person or absentee. They broke for Mr. Romney, 52% to 46%. The 63% who said they planned to vote on Election Day similarly supported Mr. Romney, 51% to 45%. Furthermore, in battleground states, the edge in early and absentee vote turnout that propelled Democrats to victory in 2008 has clearly been eroded, cut in half according to a Republican National Committee summary.

So unless the GOP is lying to itself, a trick the Dems do through their MSM pollsters by giving a plus-7 edge to the Dems from its 2008 turnout, then Rove is spot on with the statistics he brings forward.

But doesn't it all come down to the all-important Buckeye State? Here, too, the early voting news isn't encouraging for the president. Adrian Gray, who oversaw the Bush 2004 voter-contact operation and is now a policy analyst for a New York investment firm, makes the point that as of Tuesday, 530,813 Ohio Democrats had voted early or had requested or cast an absentee ballot. That's down 181,275 from four years ago. But 448,357 Ohio Republicans had voted early or had requested or cast an absentee ballot, up 75,858 from the last presidential election. That 257,133-vote swing almost wipes out Mr. Obama's 2008 Ohio victory margin of 262,224. Since most observers expect Republicans to win Election Day turnout, these early vote numbers point toward a Romney victory in Ohio. They are also evidence that Scott Jennings, my former White House colleague and now Romney Ohio campaign director, was accurate when he told me that the Buckeye GOP effort is larger than the massive Bush 2004 get-out-the-vote operation. Democrats explain away those numbers by saying that they are turning out new young Ohio voters. But I asked Kelly Nallen, the America Crossroads data maven, about this. She points out that there are 12,612 GOP "millennials" (voters aged 18-29) who've voted early compared with 9,501 Democratic millennials. Are Democrats bringing out episodic voters who might not otherwise turn out? Not according to Ms. Nallen. She says that about 90% of each party's early voters so far had also voted in three of the past four Ohio elections. Democrats also suggest they are bringing Obama-leaning independents to polls. But since Mr. Romney has led among independents in nine of the 13 Ohio polls conducted since the first debate, the likelihood is that the GOP is doing as good a job in turning out their independent supporters as Democrats are in turning out theirs. Desperate Democrats are now hanging their hopes on a new Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News poll showing the president with a five-point Ohio lead. But that survey gives Democrats a +8 advantage in turnout, the same advantage Democrats had in 2008. That assumption is, to put it gently, absurd.

My millennial 23-year old daughter promises to vote for Romney.

In addition to the data, the anecdotal and intangible evidence—from crowd sizes to each side's closing arguments—give the sense that the odds favor Mr. Romney. They do. My prediction: Sometime after the cock crows on the morning of Nov. 7, Mitt Romney will be declared America's 45th president. Let's call it 51%-48%, with Mr. Romney carrying at least 279 Electoral College votes, probably more.

Obama may get a bump from looking presidential after Sandy, a factor Rove overlooks [GHWB was hurt by hurricane Andrew in '92 & the bad press from his slow reaction]. Dems hold up their morale with cheating polls & that might bring out some stragglers, but Romney still has insurgent power from his first debate & his consistent adult campaigning. UPDATE: Dan Henninger says that Billy Graham & Messrs. Land & Reed's support might bring out the 350k Evangelicals who everyone thought wouldn't vote for a Mormon...!

Obama as Passive Failure

The WSJ has a complete body slam of tiny JournOList agitator Ezra Klein's inability to escape his own ideological strait jacket:

We're not referring, except via apophasis, to Ezra Klein's constitutional illiteracy but rather to his latest attempt to make excuses for Barack Obama. Klein has been reading endorsements of Mitt Romney from newspapers that backed Obama four years ago, as well as a pro-Romney column by the New York Times's David Brooks. He seems worried (though he doesn't spell this out) that swing voters will shift to Romney for the same reasons that these writers have--because Obama has failed, as Klein puts it, "to break the gridlock and overcome the partisanship that paralyzes Washington." Is it the president's fault? Ohhhhh NOOOOO!, Klein insists: "It wasn't up to him. The minority won't cooperate with the majority unless they see it's in their interests. And the Republican minority didn't see it that way." Obama's loss of the Des Moines Register's support, and of the support of like-minded swing voters, and perhaps of the election, "all say the same thing: Mitch McConnell and John Boehner's strategy worked." "There are good reasons to endorse Mitt Romney for president," Klein concludes, a magnanimous concession if perhaps an insincere one. "But if you want the political system to work more smoothly, endorsing McConnell and Boehner's strategy over the last four years"--that is, supporting Romney on the grounds that Obama has not worked across party lines--"is folly." In Klein's account of the past four years, the president plays a completely passive role. It somehow never occurs to him that Obama had a strategy too, and that if McConnell and Boehner's strategy succeeded, that means Obama's failed. Washington's current "partisan gridlock" is the product of the clash between these two strategies, not of the GOP strategy alone. Matt Bai has a piece in the New York Times magazine that, while mostly a repetition of the cliché that Obama's problem is a lack of "narrative mojo," nonetheless manages to get at the trouble with Obama's approach to Congress:

Obama emerged from the election as only the fourth Democrat in history to break the 51 percent barrier, with Rooseveltian majorities in Congress and an approval rating above 70 percent. Both Obama's campaign strategists and his former colleagues on Capitol Hill congratulated themselves on having earned a clear mandate from the voters. And suddenly the president, rather than interpreting his approval ratings as a sign that hopeful voters were waiting to hear what he had to say, seemed to proceed as if he already had the public's enthusiastic endorsement for whatever steps he and his allies felt they needed to take.

This ignores the substantive problems with Obama's policies: Would anyone have supported the "stimulus" if his team had predicted, accurately, that its passage would lead to unemployment above 8%, and as high as 10%, for almost four years? But Bai does capture the hubris at the heart of the early Obama months. Obama thought he was an irresistible force; now, his supporters complain the Republicans are an immovable object. But as even Klein acknowledges in passing, an opposition party will cooperate if "they see it's in their interests." They would have seen it that way if the public had been on the president's side in wanting higher spending or "comprehensive health-care reform." Obama's inability to move public opinion and his unwillingness to yield to it, especially in the ObamaCare debate, made opposition a winning position for the GOP. Of course if you're in favor of Obama's leftist agenda, it makes sense to regard this trade-off as having been worth it--and to support Obama's re-election in order to consolidate those legislative victories. With major ObamaCare provisions and massive tax increases scheduled to kick in two months from now absent congressional action, a re-elected Obama would be in a strong position, at least in the short run, to force some concessions from congressional Republicans, such as limiting tax increases to the upper brackets. It's debatable whether, as Klein claims, a Romney endorsement on gridlock-breaking grounds amounts to a statement of approval for the successful McConnell-Boehner political strategy. After all, Romney has never served in Congress and has held no public office since 2007. One could argue that he is the passive beneficiary of congressional Republicans' work. But if you want serious bipartisan reform, the past four years give every reason to think Obama lacks the political skills to deliver it, and considerable reason to doubt whether he is even so inclined.

Spin Versus Spin

Jennifer Rubin on the endless campaign.

In the battle of the campaign spin the Romney camp made political director Rich Beeson, pollster Neil Newhouse and senior adviser Russ Schriefer available for a media call this afternoon. As you might expect they think they are, in Schriefer’s words, in a “very, very good place.” He and the other Romney advisers point to Romney’s lead in favorability, the intensity of Republican voters (reflected in part in early voting in Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, and Ohio) and Romney’s lead among independents. In Florida they predicted that they would triumph among Election Day voters by double digits and that combined with strength in the Panhandle, the Interstate 4 corridor and Jacksonville and among Jewish and Cuban voters Romney would win that state. Pollster Neil Newhouse insisted that it is a “stretch” consider the political environment to be as favorable to Obama as it was in 2008. He sees an intensity gap of 8 to 10 percent in Romney’s favor. Romney’s advisers implicitly acknowledged that Romney has been going easy on the president during the Sandy recovery. Schriefer nevertheless promised that tomorrow we would see him “engaging” as you would expect six days before an election. He was careful not to criticize New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s praise of the president, saying that the Republican “is doing exactly what he should be doing.” What to make of all this? Well, both campaigns are trying to put their best foot forward. Obama’s team will point to state polls. Romney’s team discounts some of these because they reflect an electoral balance seen in 2008 but not likely to repeat itself. Early voting suggests that Romney is more right than not in that regard. What we know is that some subset of public polls is wrong. The trick is discerning which ones. But in fact the race is close with enough electoral votes in play for each side to see a path to victory. Romney’s path requires that he keep his lead with independents and keep his base fired up; Obama’s hoping that lightning strikes twice and a massive Democratic surge lifts him to victory. We’ll find out who is right next week. In the meantime, Romney-Ryan are heading to Ohio, Iowa and Wisconsin this week. That’s where the race will be won or lost.