Under The Hammer

Where was Johnny Reid Edwards at the Democratic National Convention last week?

There was a lot of talk about the convention eight years ago when a young Barack Hussein Obama was introduced to the American people, but it appeared the Democrats have forgotten who the vice presidential candidate was eight years ago. The man who they chose to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. A man who they agreed would make a great second in command for this nation. Edwards may have had some difficulties since then but it does seem a little cruel for the party to just turn its backs on such a fine candidate – a man who eight years ago they worked hard to get elected vice president.

Of course, former President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton, the only elected president of the United States to be impeached, was a big star. Clinton, who lost his law license for committing perjury, has been forgiven by the Democrats. After all he was only trying to cover up the fact that he had been having sex in the Oval Office with a White House intern. A school teacher would be fired for similar behavior, but according to the Democrats it is acceptable behavior for a president.

No doubt Edwards, who was never impeached and was allowed to go home rather than to jail after his trial, will be back. All Edwards did was have an affair with a woman who he then hired to be his campaign videographer. It's a good lesson – keep your friends close and your videographer closer.

Edwards used money from donors to pay the expenses of his mistress, which amounted to millions of dollars. But because he didn't run the money through his campaign account, he evidently is allowed to spend money from donors however he wants. The campaign laws are absurd, but at least they are absurd for both sides.

Regardless of the outcome of this election, the Democrats are going to be looking for a candidate in 2016 and Edwards will be rested and ready.

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The pundits generally agree that Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention was flat. Even the true believers seem to have had difficulty finding something good to say about it. Most pundits seemed puzzled at the flatness and lack of cohesiveness of the speech. This is, after all, a man who is president in a large part because of a speech he gave eight years ago at the Democratic National Convention.

Now he is in trouble as president and you would expect him to come in and wow the crowd. People were expecting a fire-and-brimstone barnburner of a speech where he explained just why the economy was still so bad, so many people were unemployed and why he had orchestrated all of this. Instead, Obama gave a speech that was at best mundane. It appeared his attitude was – They say I have to give a speech tonight, so here is a speech, now can I go home and play golf?

The question Thursday night, Sept. 6, was, "Why is he so despondent?" The answer appeared in the news on Friday: The unemployment rate is down, but only because things are worse. There were fewer jobs created in August than in June and July, and fewer in June and July than first reported. So the economic news is bleak.

We found out on Friday. But Obama knew what the figures were on Thursday. He knew that he needed a good jobs report to have a chance at getting reelected.

I thought when he appeared on the stage he looked like a man coming out to give a concession speech. Candidates have a similar look when walking out for that speech. They know they have to stand up and say they lost and they are all hoping that an aide will stop them and say that they miscounted the votes. But that rarely happens.

Obama walked out like he knew he was facing his last months as president. Watch the speech again and don't listen to the words – just look at his expression. When he walked out I thought he looked like he knew he had lost and the whole little scene with Michelle Obama at the podium didn't appear to me to be two people on top of the world but a wife encouraging her husband to do his best, even though he wasn't enjoying what he was doing.

What he didn't talk about was as telling as what he did. He didn't talk about his stimulus package, where he trumpeted that $1 trillion would be spent largely on shovel-ready projects to get the economy going, only to much later discover that there is no such thing as a shovel-ready project.

He also didn't talk about Obamacare because most Americans don't like Obamacare. Obama had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and plenty of votes in the House, which meant he could pass anything that he could get his fellow Democrats to agree to. But Obamacare is so radical that he spent months getting together Democratic votes to pass it. Now he may be wishing that he had agreed to go along with something a little less radical that would have been easier to get through Congress and he could have worked on other projects that might have been more popular.

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At the Democratic National Convention, in the video shown before Obama spoke, he kept referring to the American people as "they," not "we," which is very telling. It is once again a campaign mistake, not necessarily an Obama mistake. People get pronouns wrong all the time. But Obama should never refer to Americans as "they." It is grammatically incorrect and politically foolhardy.

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I hope that no one believes the Democrats left God and Jerusalem out of the party platform by accident. If you have your doubts you should go back and watch the press conference with White House Press Secretary Jay Carney where he is asked what the capital of Israel is according to the White House. Carney is asked the same question repeatedly by two reporters and he refuses to answer. If the White House believed that Jerusalem was the capital then that would be easy to say.

Think about this for a moment. Is there another country in the world that doesn't get to pick its own capital? Does Obama try to tell France that they can't call Paris their capital? Does he try to tell Great Britain that London is not the capital, but rather Manchester is? The answer is that every other country in the world gets to choose its own capital, but Obama doesn't believe that Israel should have that right. And for some reason the Democrats thought they could sneak it into the platform. Once again a campaign staff mistake. Somebody should be paying attention and stop stupid stunts like that before they happen.

If you don't want to watch the video of the press conference, just go back and watch the video of the vote at the Democratic National Convention on putting God and Jerusalem back in the platform. If they had been left out because of an oversight then the vote to put them back in should have been nearly unanimous. It was a voice vote so it's hard to tell exactly, but it sounds pretty evenly split. It certainly doesn't sound like two-thirds of the people voted to put God and Jerusalem back in the platform. Fortunately for the Democratic Party, the chair has wide discretion in such cases and he simply ruled that it was two-thirds who voted in favor.

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According to the Obama campaign and its friends in the mainstream media, North Carolina is still in play. It's a great way to judge whether or not someone is actually analyzing the campaign or just regurgitating the spin from the Obama campaign. Obama won North Carolina four years ago by 14,000 votes, a tiny margin, which if the state had mattered would have certainly been challenged.

It's not scientific but it's pretty telling. I know a number of people who voted for Obama four years ago who are not going to vote for him this time around. I don't know anyone who voted for Sen. John McCain four years ago who is going to vote for Obama this time. It was easy to believe in "Hope" and "Change," but it is difficult to believe in what Obama has done in the past four years, regardless of your political affiliation.

Four years ago Obama had no trouble filling Mile High Stadium in Denver for his acceptance speech. This year the campaign had to move the acceptance speech from Panther stadium in Charlotte, which was set up to hold 80,000 people, to Bobcat arena, which holds 20,000. If you believe it was because of he weather, which was nice that evening, then you probably also believe that God and Jerusalem got left out of the platform because of a typo. The event at Charlotte Motor Speedway at the beginning of the convention was also moved to a far smaller venue because all of those empty seats don't look good on television and there was no way they were going to come close to filling up the stands at the race track.

It's not just there. Obama is not drawing the crowds that he was four years ago. One reason is he is not as popular with students. He is now the man sending their friends to die in Afghanistan, and he gets the blame for there not being any jobs for students when they graduate.

Even Obama doesn't think he has done a very good job as president. When asked to grade himself he gave himself an "incomplete." His term will be complete in four months. The people elected him for a four-year term and he has almost finished it. An incomplete at this point is pretty close to failing, and that is the grade that he has given himself.

Go back and take a look at Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in 2008 and then watch his acceptance speech last week. There was a great deal of excitement in the air at Mile High Stadium when Obama accepted the nomination promising "Change you can believe in."

Watch his speech in Charlotte. Even Obama isn't excited. Maybe because even Obama can't figure out what "Forward" means.

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Obama doesn't like Israel or Great Britain, two of our most important and most loyal allies. Obama once snubbed Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by going upstairs to the White House residence to eat supper, leaving Netanyahu to cool his heels on the first floor. It would be incredibly rude in business; in international diplomacy it is an unheard of affront.

But now Obama is going one better. Obama is simply refusing to meet with Netanyahu when the Israeli prime minister will be in New York later this month. The White House excuse is that Obama and Netanyahu won't be in New York at the same time. But because the Israelis know about air travel, Netanyahu offered to meet with Obama in Washington.

Obama doesn't want to meet with Netanyahu and must have told Netanyahu he was going to be washing his hair that evening, so even if he were in Washington they couldn't meet. Obama knows that Netanyahu is going to demand that the US do something about Iran and its continuing progress toward building a nuclear weapon. This is one instance where Obama is probably secretly hoping that he doesn't win the election and the whole Middle East crisis will be Mitt Romney's problem and he can go play more golf.

While Obama doesn't have time to meet with Netanyahu and help avoid a nuclear war in the Middle East, Obama does have time to be on the Late Show with David Letterman. It is all a matter of priorities. Obama's priority is rewarding a talk show host who is fawning in his support of Obama, not to try and work with the prime minister of a country he doesn't like in order to avoid its annihilation.

Another huge US ally in the Middle East, Egypt, doesn't appear to like us too much anymore, either. It used to be that Egypt and the US were big buddies. But this week the Egyptian people mobbed the US embassy, climbed over the wall, tore down the American flag and burned it. That is not how friends treat each other's embassies. You have to wonder where the Egyptian troops were that should have been protecting the embassy.

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Obama is a huge supporter of unions and they are huge supporters of Obama. But it doesn't appear as if the Chicago Teachers Union is interested in helping Obama because the strike is emphasizing just how out of touch government unions are with the real world. The average Chicago teacher's salary is $76,000 for a six-hour teaching day, and the teachers turned down an offer of a 16 percent raise.

Not to mention that the Chicago schools by any measure are failing. So you have overpaid teachers and failing schools, and the teachers go on strike for more money and a shorter workday. This is the world that Obama wants us all to live in. Fortunately in North Carolina government employee unions are not allowed to negotiate contracts. But there was a move in Washington early in the Obama administration to change that. If Obama gets reelected and the Democrats control Congress, it will probably happen. Obama cannot say no to the unions.

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I love the spin the mainstream media put on the Obama administration. They write about how many jobs have been created during the administration, and whatever number they use sounds like a lot. But it doesn't make any difference what number they use because the truth is it hasn't been nearly enough. If the policies of the Obama administration had created enough jobs then the unemployment rate would not be over 8 percent. The only reason the unemployment rate has dropped is that people have given up looking for work.