| August 23, 2012 This presidential election boils down to a fairly simple question: Do you want the country to continue moving toward socialism with bigger government that spends more and more on entitlements and plays a bigger role in the lives of more Americans, or do you want to move away from socialism toward the more capitalistic system that made our country what it is today?
For the past 70 years the government has been getting bigger and taking a bigger chunk of the economy. The percentage of people in the country receiving non-military government checks keeps increasing. And Obamacare increases the size and scope of the federal government enormously.
Some elections people say there is no need to vote because there is no choice. That is not the case in this election. If you believe that the government needs to continue to grow and more people need to receive government checks and the government needs to have more power over the people, including complete power over their health care, then the obvious choice is President Barack Hussein Obama. With Obama the country will continue quickly down the path that the Democrats have had us on since the Great Depression.
If you think the government is big enough and that the government needs to allow people to have more freedom, including the freedom to fail and the freedom to make health care decisions on their own, then the choice is Mitt Romney and Congressman Paul Ryan. They want to allow people to have more freedom, which means more individual risk. Romney and Ryan see the burgeoning national debt as a problem. Obama has increased the national debt more than all the presidents before him combined. His solution to the current economic problems is for the government to borrow more and spend more money. It didn't work during his first term. Why would it work in his second?
It is a real choice, and on Nov. 6, we will know which way the people want the country to go.
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Four years ago the stars lined up for Obama. He got into the Democratic primary in order to get name recognition and maybe a slot in President Hillary Clinton's cabinet. Then the accidental candidate won Iowa and realized that with one more primary win – South Carolina – he could be president.
Everyone loved Obama because of his unlikely story, and he gave great speeches. Some noticed that he didn't really say anything in the speeches, but those who noticed were mostly Republicans and nobody paid any attention to them.
The media went gaga. They reported only the good stuff about Obama. And the Republicans couldn't have helped more. They nominated an old worn-out, politically compromised senator who had been in Washington for so long he actually thought he could run with the same running mate as former Vice President Al Gore. Failing that he picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who, as it turned out, was a brilliant pick for about two weeks. But then McCain turned her over to the political buffoons who were running his campaign, and Katie Couric in one interview completely destroyed Palin's credibility. But there you have it, the news media stepped in and did what Obama needed to have done to make certain he would win.
Apparently this election is going to be different. Newsweek has come out with a cover that reads, "Hit The Road Barack. Why We Need A New President."
I subscribed to Newsweek for about 15 years. I stopped my subscription recently, and even when the renewals got down around $10 a year I refused to bite because I was tired of reading about the messiah who we had elected president. There was nothing that Obama could do that wasn't wonderful in the eyes of Newsweek. Since I already receive White House press releases, Newsweek seemed redundant.
Now, Newsweek has on its cover that Obama must go and it is a well-written, factual article. The very fact that Obama cheerleader Paul Krugman felt the need to instantly challenge the article is evidence of its damaging effect.
The article goes through the promises that Obama made at his inauguration and how he has failed to keep them. The economy is the big issue. But there are others, like promising no middle-class tax increase when Obamacare is a huge tax increase on the middle class, and we know it is a tax because the Supreme Court said it was.
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Usually you have to wait until after the election for the dirt to come out about campaign staffs, but there is already an e-book out about the 2012 Obama campaign and how it is beginning to fall apart.
One of the passages in the book is about how Obama doesn't make big economic decisions because he doesn't understand what he is supposed to be deciding.
Obama has no knowledge or experience that would indicate that he understands economics at an international level. Obama thought there was such a thing as a "shovel ready" government project when he signed the $1 trillion stimulus package. It was only much later when the money wasn't being spent that he found out that shovel-ready projects are a lot like unicorns, people may talk about them but you can't really put your finger on one.
If the Obama 2012 campaign kickoff is a foreshadowing of things to come it is going to be a long fall for Obama. The kickoff did exactly what a campaign doesn't want to ever do: It put the candidate in front of thousands of empty seats. Obama just doesn't have the drawing power that he did and the campaign realized too late that despite all of their efforts they weren't going to fill the arena.
It's not the way you want to kick off a campaign. A candidate is better off speaking to a crowd of 200 in an overflowing room than a crowd of 10,000 in a 20,000-seat arena. That is campaigning 101. It wasn't such a bad mistake but it is a sign that Obama's 2012 campaign is not going to be anything like his 2008 campaign.
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If you are getting your news from ABC, it's time to stop. The networks other than Fox all tilt strongly left, but ABC is willing to lie, or else is filled with total incompetence. All of us in the news business make mistakes. Last week we managed to misspell sheriff, but ABC has taken mistakes to a new level. First, it reported that the Aurora, Colorado, shooter was a member of the Tea Party. He wasn't, but someone with a similar name was. This is a huge story and you simply don't make that kind of mistake in an election year by accident. Second, when ABC called the shooter's mother she said, "You have the right person," meaning she was the mother of the young man they were asking about. ABC managed to interpret that to mean, "Yes, my son did the shooting," which is a really bizarre interpretation and sounds a lot like the leaps of faith that the News & Record makes.
Third, ABC reported that filmmaker Tony Scott, who jumped to his death from a bridge in Los Angeles, had inoperable brain cancer. He did not. ABC, sadly, is simply putting rumors and innuendo on the air as news. Any of the three mistakes could be explained away, but all three is a pattern. Nobody is watching the store.
If you get your news from ABC try Fox for a while, at least until there is a housecleaning at ABC. Until they clean house, including getting rid of the parking lot attendant and the custodial service, they are going to keep having problems.
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Obama, in answer to a question at a surprise press conference, said, "Nobody accused Mr. Romney of being a felon." Obama's Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter said in July that Romney may have committed a felony because it is a felony to lie on Security Exchange Commission documents. Perhaps Obama was out on the golf course and didn't hear about his deputy campaign manager, but it created quite a stir at the time, both because of the seriousness of the allegation and because of its falsity. Other news sources have checked out Romney's departure from Bain Capital to run the Olympics and found that he left Bain when he said he did.
The problem seems to stem from the fact that although Romney did not run the day-to-day operation of Bain, he still owned it. The Obama campaign has such little understanding of business and how businesses operate that the misunderstanding is understandable. But really, before the Obama campaign accuses its opponent of possibly being a felon, it should check things out with someone who knows how private enterprise works. Certainly the campaign could Google "capitalism" or "free enterprise" and find an article that would give it the basic facts on how people who do not work for the government or a campaign make a living. It is a strange concept to not work for the government, and clearly according to the Obama world order everyone should, but it is still true that some of us don't, and the rules that apply to us are not the same as the rules that apply to government workers. For instance, we can be fired or even laid off through no fault of our own.
It's pretty scary that Obama thinks he can simply say something didn't happen and the world is supposed to take his word that it didn't. Vice President Joe Biden doesn't know what century or state he's in, but his boss is in even worse shape when it comes to recognizing reality because he thinks he can change the past with a word. Of course, it's not all Obama's fault. The liberals have let him change the story of his life any number of times. Obama's biography put out by his publisher had him born in Kenya. It seems obvious it was done to sell books because a graduate of Harvard Law School born in Kenya is more exotic and would have more appeal than just another young guy born in the US who wrote a book about himself.
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Obama, up until that short unannounced press conference, has avoided the national press. It is a brilliant move, if you want your president to be diabolical rather than good. This is an election year. Obama is supposed to be accessible to the people, which means to the press, since most people don't have time to hang around the White House day after day hoping for the opportunity to ask Obama a question. Reporters get paid for doing just that.
But what Obama has been doing is the same thing former President William Jefferson Blythe Clinton did during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Clinton, the only elected president to be impeached, couldn't stand up to the national press, so he did interviews with local television stations. The local television reporters were so excited to get to interview the president of the United States they would agree to any ground rules the White House came up with.
Obama is doing the same thing. But isn't it interesting, Clinton had a horrible scandal on his hands, while Obama's problem is he just can't explain why the economy is still so bad, because he said he thinks the economy is "fine." He knows the national press is going to ask him about the unemployment figures that went up, not down, the last report, and the overall economy, and he has no answer that intelligent people will accept. With local television crews he can say whatever he wants.
The odds that Obama will get a tough question from a local television reporter are miniscule. Obama is also very good at taking one question and talking all around it to take up all the time available. It's a technique used with great success by the City of Greensboro at public hearings.
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Evidently The New York Times Sunday magazine is on the same page as Newsweek when it comes to our president. It had a story this week about how Obama has not used his power to help the people in the Chicago neighborhood – Roseland – where he was a community organizer.
In fact, according to the article, things are worse now than they were before he was president. The article goes so far as to note that in his memoir, Dreams for My Father, Obama writes that one of the reasons he went into politics is that he realized that with more power he could do more to help people. Now that he is the most powerful man in the world, he hasn't used that power to help those people at all. It sounds like the people of Roseland, who he cared so much about when he was there according to his book, are like his relatives in Africa that he cared so much about when he was with them, but has done nothing to help them now that he has the power to do so.
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Particularly in a presidential election year you have to be tremendously cautious about believing polls. They are far too easy to manipulate. For instance, a poll of eligible voters doesn't mean much because even in a presidential election year about 40 percent of eligible voters won't vote. However, past behavior is a pretty good indicator of future performance, so a poll of likely voters has much more validity, but only if the percentages of Democrats, Republicans and Independents polled corresponds to the percentages of Democrats, Republicans and Independents who will vote. Being off on the Democratic and Republican numbers by just a few percentage points can really skew the results.
The other thing is in the presidential race the national poll is not as important as the polls in key states. As we learned with the Bush-Gore race in 2000, it doesn't matter who wins the popular vote, the president of the United States is elected by the Electoral College, not by the people. Gore won the popular vote but George Walker Bush won the presidency.
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