op ed review 11/11
THE OP-ED REVIEW 10/11
Number 640
"We should never despair, our Situation before has been
unpromising and has changed for the better, so I trust, it will again. If new
difficulties arise, we must only put forth new Exertions and proportion our
Efforts to the exigency of the times."
-George Washington
"All that for nothing. It was the billion-dollar
election that did not decide one single thing. ... 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. ... 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."
-Charles Hurt
"At times like these, after a bitter and hard-fought
election, it's customary to talk about burying the hatchet, reaching across the
aisle -- pick your metaphor. It dawns on politicians that the public is sick of
division and wants them to work together for the good of the country. This time
is different, at least from our vantage point. Had Mitt Romney won the
election, he would be reaching out to the other side already, without being
told to. But Barack Obama is not that kind of politician or man. He thrives on
division and reflexively demonizes his opponents. ...The American people, by a
slim majority, have chosen to go through four more years of a presidency that
doesn't seem to have a clue about bipartisanship…..Another four years of
gridlock brings national bankruptcy that much closer. Then there's the dead weight
of ObamaCare, which will soon hit the economy with full force. The next four
years would be challenging even for a popular and politically masterful
president. Obama is neither, and his nasty campaign has only made his job
harder. ... The election left the House firmly in Republican hands. Until that
changes, the GOP can block the advance of Obama's progressive agenda (at least
that part of the agenda requiring laws rather than executive orders). ... Obama
will have other reasons to drive the GOP from its last beachhead. He owes his
base some favors for its work in dragging him across the finish line. Unions
will want another try at card check. Environmentalists will push for
cap-and-trade and a tighter clampdown on coal. The left wing of his party will
want to gut defense and ramp up social spending; he'll be happy to go along, if
he can. ... The Republican Party must be willing to compromise when it is truly
in the national interest to do so, but it also should be ready to fight for the
Constitution, free enterprise and individual liberty."
-Investor's
Business Daily
"My counsel to you tonight: Please, do not be
bitter. Do not fall prey to the Beltway blame game. Do not get mired in small
things. Do not become vengeful creatures like our political opponents who voted
out of spite instead of love of country. We still have boundless blessings to
count -- and to secure. I remain a proud, unrepentant believer in the American
Dream. And I know you do, too. Freedom will endure because we will keep
fighting for it. We can't afford not to, friends."
-Michelle Malkin
"There are two important lessons imbedded in
last night's debacle. We are losing the votes of young people. We are losing
the votes of women. Why? The simple answer is that both groups have a
disproportionate number who believe that the purpose of government is to
'supply my needs.' ... It would be astonishing that young people would go to
government schools, then graduate to government colleges, or attend private
colleges on government subsidies and come out with any conclusion other than
'the purpose of government is to provide for my needs.' Women are vulnerable to
the siren call of 'government services' because of the sexual promiscuity of
men. Men use, abuse, and abandon women. Divorced women and single moms abound
because of the sins of men. We have more unmarried adults than married adults
for the first time in American history. This fact has enormous political
consequences."
-constitutional lawyer Michael
Farris
"Americans missed an opportunity to change
course. And now the years ahead will be bitter and difficult. Our politics will
be a zero-sum game, where benefits for some mean cuts to others, and a president
who promised unity will inaugurate a new era of division. But it need not be an
era without hope. The same principles that built this Republic can save it
again. Indeed, those timeless principles are the only solution, the only
vision. Our fault, as a nation, was to forget the lessons of our own success.
Having triumphed in a global, decades-long struggle against collectivism and
totalitarianism, we refused to celebrate that victory, failing for twenty years
to teach its lessons to the next generation. And as Andrew Breitbart often
reminded us, the most important battles must be cultural ones, because culture
and media inevitably shape the political choices we make together. That war
must begin anew. And it begins now…"
-Joel B. Pollak
“Romney was the only one remotely presidential, and he was
the logical candidate. But think of
those who didn’t run. There’s of course, Paul Ryan who I think will be a leader
in the party. You have a whole rising young generation — Kelly Ayotte, you’ve
got Bobby Jindal, Nikki Haley, Ted Cruz, the new senator from Texas, Marco Rubio,
this whole generation who just a year or two short in their careers from
running this time are all going to be in the fray next time. And I think they
are the future. And all the soul-searching about what ideology we are going to
pursue is going to come from them. And I think it will be a fairly Reaganite
and conservative one. I think the future of the party is quite bright.”
-Charles Krauthammer
“Romney received two million fewer votes than McCain in
2008…..Why were seasoned conservative campaign experts completely wrong in
their predictions of a big Romney win?.....what none of the A-team could see
was Romney's grassroots deficit. Like Mitt Romney, these erstwhile analysts
were, and remain, unwittingly insulated from the reality of grassroots America.”
-Mark Alexander
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
President Obama won one of the narrower re-elections in
modern times Tuesday, eking out a second term with a fraction of his 7.3%
margin of 2008, in a polarized country with the opposition GOP retaining and
still dominating the House.
Rush: “Conservatism,
in my humble opinion, did not lose last night. It's just very difficult
to beat Santa Claus……In a country of children where the option is Santa Claus
or work, what wins? And say what you want, but Romney did offer a vision
of traditional America.
In his way, he put forth a great vision of traditional America, and it was rejected. It
was rejected in favor of a guy who thinks that those who are working aren't
doing enough to help those who aren't. And that resonated.”
Sean Hannity: “maybe
America is no longer the center-right country that it once was…..you can’t lose
an election like yesterday and not be concerned…….The reality is that America is
changing…the allure and the appeal of socialism and redistribution of wealth
has taken hold with about half the electorate.”
Ann Coulter: “If Mitt
Romney cannot win in this economy, then the tipping point has been reached. We
have more takers than makers….”
“This was a presidential election that the GOP should have
won…….Here are some reasons that Romney didn't prevail: 1. RomneyCare =
ObamaCare. 2. Romney was the best of the B Team 3. A challenger needs to fight back the
minute the incumbent starts attacking him. 4. Romney took a hard line on
immigration in the primaries, which enabled Obama to get a bigger percentage of
the Hispanic vote than he won in 2008. The best that can be done now is to
learn from the mistakes and make changes for 2016.”
“The most immediate lesson that can be learned from
this is that the Obama-Axelrod ground game is very very very good. It had four
years to build out its infrastructure and it is much stronger than anyone,
including most Democrats, anticipated. Despite the lousy economy and his
flagging personal popularity, Obama’s team turned out his vote everywhere he
needed it, and he won. Republicans will fight about whether a more vocally
conservative candidate could have won or whether Romney could have provided a
sharper contrast with Obama, but organizational superiority may have had more
than anything else to do with this result. Republicans will have to study that
ground game and find a way to beat it just as the football world had to study
and defeat the flex defense. That’s not a job for ideologues, but for
tacticians who understand ideology and communication………..The tilt in favor of
Democrats, and especially Obama, in how our media culture processes what comes
out of politicians’ mouths may have finally become too much for Republicans to
overcome. Every campaign going forward is a one-false-move minefield for
Republicans, while a Democrat can get away with corruption (Claire McCaskill in
Missouri) and allegations of relationships with prostitutes (Bob Menendez in
New Jersey) and covering up a terrorist attack that killed four Americans
(Obama himself). Massachusetts
turned out a perfectly serviceable moderate Republican in favor of a dishonest
ideologue with no experience outside academia. One likely result of all this is
that Republicans are likely to become more programmed than they already are,
and less confident about articulating stands on social issues. The media is
emboldened to pounce on every Republican syllable, confident that every gotcha
can keep another seat in Democrat clutches. Perhaps all Republicans should just
switch parties at once, confuse the world and render the media toothless for a
while.”
Radosh: So
what happened? Those conservatives
who assured us with statistics, theories, and arguments about Romney winning
the White House, even in a landslide, should be eating their hats……First,
the Obama campaign’s decision to frighten women worked……..Second, there is the
hurricane factor. The nation saw Obama in his bomber jacket, accompanied by
Republican keynoter Gov. Chris Christie as he visited the devastated areas of New Jersey hit by
Hurricane Sandy. For the Democrats, it became the perfect storm that allowed
the nation to believe what it wanted desperately to think — that Barack Obama
had become a leader whom even the conservative governor of New Jersey worked with and praised for his
leadership….” Third: the Latino vote. Fourth:
Republicans cannot count on winning national elections and to be a national
majority party if they count only on the votes of a diminishing white
working-class and on the votes of Southern states alone. Five: Romney did not
convince voters, as Florida and Ohio voters said to the
press who asked, that he cared for people like them. Finally, it is essential that
conservative intellectuals…..wage a war of position on the cultural front and
to do all possible to challenge the ascension of a failed intellectual liberal
ideology, whether it be in the form of Progressivism, liberalism or
socialism…..we all have our work cut out for us.
“In this election the Republican Party ran two wholly
inoffensive blue state Republicans on a platform of jobs at a time when the
economy was everyone’s chief concern and the incumbent had absolutely failed to
fix the economy. And they lost. The Monday — or Wednesday — morning
quarterbacks will have a fine time debating what Mitt Romney should have done
differently. The red Republicans will say that he should have been more
aggressive and should have hit Obama on Benghazi.
The blue Republicans will blame a lack of outreach to Latinos……”
“Two-thirds of Americans have consistently said the country
is on the wrong track. So, naturally they opted to stick with a stinking status
quo they've whined about for years now.”
“Throughout the very long presidential election cycle, two
trends remained consistent. The media lauded Obama no matter how horrendous his
record, and they savaged Obama’s Republican contenders as ridiculous
pretenders. From the start of the Republican race in 2011, every candidate who
took the lead then took an unfair beating. They even slimed Sarah Palin in case
she decided to run. Martin Bashir announced she was “vacuous, crass, and
according to almost every biographer, vindictive too.” Newsweek mocked Michele
Bachmann on its cover…….”
The auto bailout - and the Obama campaign's attacks on
Romney over his opposition to it - appeared to be key factors in the
president's victory in the crucial battleground state of Ohio, where 1 in 8
jobs is connected to the auto industry…….. likely gave Obama a critical boost
in just the right place.
“But with a record that should have made a second term
nearly impossible, conservatives should be asking ourselves how the Obama camp
got close enough to a majority vote to win the election…..One conventional
answer is that most of the news media were in the tank for Obama, that they
kept the lid on scandals like the deadly Benghazi fiasco and the subsequent
White House cover-up, and that they got their talking points from the White
House. True though that answer may be, it leaves unanswered a more
fundamental question: why would the electorate tolerate such partisan bias from
the news media, let alone allow it to influence their votes?
Another conventional answer is that this election occurred
at a political tipping point at which almost half of the people voting in the
election pay no federal taxes, and that many in this group were likely to vote
for Obama regardless of his record…..But again, the deeper question should be
how the American electorate ever allowed such a situation to develop in the
first place. Surely an educated and informed electorate would recognize and
reject liberal bias in the media and would never allow our government to be
turned into little more than a vending machine that dispenses favors in return
for votes. Educated and informed voters would see through the hollow,
sweet rhetoric of the left to the tyrannical core just beneath the
surface. And there is the painful answer.…..As long as the left has
controlled the schools, time has always been on their side. We lost the
Republic in the classroom long before we lost it in the voting booth.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/11/why_we_lost_the_republic.html#ixzz2BYOvXJRG
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/11/why_we_lost_the_republic.html#ixzz2BYOvXJRG
“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.
Five ways the mainstream media tipped the scales in favor of Obama….”
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/11/07/five-ways-mainstream-media-tipped-scales-in-favor-obama/#ixzz2BYE6qp9N
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/11/07/five-ways-mainstream-media-tipped-scales-in-favor-obama/#ixzz2BYE6qp9N
Dick Morris, who predicted a Republican
landslide: “I think that the reason the
prediction I made was wrong is that I was criticizing the polling because I
said it reflected the same turnout model as there was in 2008. And I said that
I thought that was a one-off affair and that it would not continue and it would
not be the permanent turnout model for the United States. What this is saying is this is the new America. This
isn’t your father’s America……The
percentage of single women, minorities and voters under 30 is so large at this
point that unless the Republican Party fundamentally changes its appeal to
those voters, it can never win an election.”
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee appeared on Fox News
Channel on election night where he slammed the Republican party for doing what
he considers a “pathetic job” of reaching out to minority voters
Deepening Racial Divide:
Obama managed to win again, despite securing only 39 percent of
white voters.
LOOKING FOR SILVER LININGS
North Carolina
voters elected their first Republican governor in two decades. When all the ballots are counted, Republicans
could have as many as 33 governorships — the most since the 1920s and one more
than they had in the 1990s.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/nov/6/republicans-look-to-increase-edge-among-governors/#ixzz2BYSJyfl6
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/nov/6/republicans-look-to-increase-edge-among-governors/#ixzz2BYSJyfl6
Michigan
voters rejected a controversial measure to enshrine collective bargaining in
the state Constitution. The union-backed measure mustered only 42 percent
support with most precincts reporting.
Arkansas Republicans took control of at least one chamber of
the state legislature and captured all of the state's congressional seats for
the first time since Reconstruction.
Eyman initiative passed:
Washington
voters will continue to require the Legislature to get a two-thirds majority
vote to raise taxes. Charter schools also passes.
Even a dead Republican beat a Democrat in the GOP's sweep of
Alabama. A
Republican nominee who died almost month before Election Day beat the
Democratic incumbent for a seat on the Bibb County Commission on Tuesday. Maybe we should all move to the South……
GOP firebrand Rep. Michele Bachmann appeared to be squeaking
out a victory over DFL businessman Jim Graves in a race that is so close it
could be heading for a recount.
U.N. Election Observers are shocked: “Why Don't These People
Have to Show ID to Vote?”
________________________________________________________________________________
How Romney Lost
The realities of the electoral
map meant that the Romney campaign really had no choice but to bet big on Ohio, and that bet was a
loser. In addition to some critical on-the-ground specifics — Ohio is not hurting as badly as the rest of
the country — there were three main reasons for that.
1. Ohio likes crony
capitalism. The automotive bailout is popular in Ohio, and not just among self-interested
workers and investors in that industry. Putting General Motors on federal life
support is economically daft and morally dubious, but it gave the Obama
administration a powerful tool for convincing middle-class workers that the
president is on their side. He might be doing something silly and destructive, but
to be seen as doing something is politically useful. That it was General Motors
and Chrysler was critical: Americans have a particularly romantic attitude
toward automobile manufacturers, probably because Americans have a particularly
romantic attitude toward automobiles. The (mostly mythical) image of the
blue-collar homeowner supporting a four-person family in comfort by spending 40
hours a week on the assembly line is up there with mom and apple pie in the
pantheon of American sentimentality. If President Obama had associated himself
with the bailout of, say, Eastman Kodak — which will cease providing health
care and other benefits to 56,000 retirees as part of its bankruptcy — it would
not have imbued him with quite the same glow. And that is a specific instance
of the more general and lamentable fact that . . .
2. Class warfare works. It is juvenile and it is economically
illiterate, but a fair number of Americans worked themselves up into a lather
over Mitt Romney’s paying a relatively low tax rate. Taxing capital gains at a
lower rate than wages has been for a long time a mostly uncontroversial
economic policy with fairly wide support across the partisan and ideological
spectrum. When Bill Clinton signed into a law a reduction in the capital-gains
tax rate, there was no mutiny on the left. More broadly, most voters do not
have anything like the economic sophistication even to understand what Romney
did at Bain Capital, much less how such private-equity firms provide real
economic benefits. These are the citizens Bastiat had in mind when he wrote
about what is seen and what is unseen: They can see outsourcing and declining
manufacturing employment, but they cannot see (at least not very clearly) the
benefits associated with integrated global supply chains or increases in
manufacturing productivity. It may not be possible to be too thin, but it is,
apparently, possible to be too rich, at least for an electorate that can be
swayed by envy.
3. Repealing
Obamacare was not a deal cincher in Ohio.
A number of people I spoke to in the state suggested that the Romney-Ryan
ticket paid too much attention to repealing Obamacare without spelling out an
alternative that was sufficiently simple and attractive to voters who are not
committed conservatives. One veteran of the Reagan and George H. W. Bush
administrations argued that while Ohio
voters may not be crazy about the Affordable Care Act, neither are they burning
partisans of the campaign to repeal it. As with the GM bailout, many voters
regard Obamacare as an example of the administration’s trying to do something
for them, even if they are not entirely sold on the particulars.
There is not much in
this to comfort conservatives. The lessons of Ohio are that Barack Obama is a skillful
demagogue, that the ancients were wise to number envy among the deadly sins,
and that offering Americans a check is a more fruitful political strategy than
offering them the opportunity to take control of and responsibility for their
own lives. This is what Oakeshott had in mind when he wrote that liberty was
something that many people simply are not equipped to “enjoy as an opportunity
rather than suffer as a burden.”
For many years,
Republicans have relied on Jude Wanniski’s “Two Santa Claus” theory, the
strategy of using the promise of tax cuts to compete with Democrats’ promises
of cash and other benefits. In part as a consequence of that strategy, a great
many Americans pay little or no federal income taxes, while many of the other
federal taxes they pay are indirect or partly hidden. Mitt Romney was right:
You can’t use tax cuts to buy off people who are net recipients of tax
transfers. Figuring out what we can offer them that is consistent with our
principles is the task of conservatives between now and the next election.
The greatest satisfaction
today over the re-election of Obama is not being felt in the Democratic Party.
It is not being felt among the media, who are no longer objective observers but
have turned instead into corrupt partisans who ruthlessly censored the truth
about Obama and helped peddle his demonising propaganda about his opponent. It
is not being felt among the gloating, drooling decadents of the western left
who now scent a great blood-letting of all who dare defy their secular
inquisition. No, the greatest satisfaction is surely being felt in Iran. With four
more years of Obama in the White House, Iran can now be sure that it will
be able to complete its infernal construction of a genocide bomb to use against
the Jews and the west. World War Three has now come a lot closer…….Britain
and the Europeans love Obama because they think he will end American
exceptionalism and turn the US
into a pale shadow of themselves. What they don’t realise is that, all but
lobotomised by consumerist rights, state dependency, victim culture,
sentimentality, post-religion, post-nationalism and post-Holocaust and Empire
guilt, Britain and Europe are themselves fast going down the civilisational
tubes.
_____________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
“Our newly re-elected, incompetent President is good at one
thing: Chicago
style politics. Kill your opponent by character assassination and promise
freebies to your base. That's exactly how he beat Mitt Romney, a good and
decent man, a man of substance, who would have been a great president to turn
our economic mess around. Instead the community organizing, empty-suit incumbent
won by pandering to the Democratic base and defaming and distorting Romney into
an evil caricature.”
“Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and
youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or
that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead. The swooning
frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States
must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy
ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation…….”
Interesting article:
“How I rigged the Democrats' vote”
Depressing: Why
Hispanics don’t Vote for Republicans
________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
Election results map:
_______________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
"I cannot and
will not stand by and see this great country destroy itself. Our leaders
attempt to blame their failures on circumstances beyond their control, on false
estimates by unknown, unidentifiable experts who rewrite modern history in an
attempt to convince us our high standard of living, the result of thrift and
hard work, is somehow selfish extravagance which we must renounce as we join in
sharing scarcity. I don't agree that our nation must resign itself to
inevitable decline, yielding its proud position to other hands. I am totally
unwilling to see this country fail in its obligation to itself and to the other
free peoples of the world."
-Ronald Reagan
________________________________________________________________________
The Op-Ed Review is a compilation of the week’s news and
opinions of interest to the conservative activist. I follow a variety of news sources and note
what I think are the important events of the week that may be underreported in
the mainstream media. I also read about
50 syndicated op-ed columns each week and reprint part of what I think is the
best one. The goal is to help the reader be a more effective activist for the
conservative cause. If you would like to receive this as an e-mail each
weekend, click here to drop me a note.
mailto:garyfoss3@comcast.net
Gary Foss
47th District Republicans
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