Welcome, President Mitt Romney

Welcome, President Mitt Romney
By Quin Hillyer on 11.5.12 @ 6:10AM

GOP team will win tomorrow.

Mitt Romney will be the next president of the United States. Paul Ryan, as vice president, will be breaking lots of 50-50 tie votes in the Senate. Bank on it.

Here's the big picture for the presidency: Romney will win the entire South, including "swing" states North Carolina, Florida and Virginia, plus all the usual solid-red states of the inland West. That gets him to 248 electoral votes. From there, he will need only one state from each of the next two conglomerations of three. He will need to win either Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Michigan, plus either Colorado, Wisconsin, or Minnesota. He will indeed take two of those six in the right combinations, and he will be president. And that doesn't even include New Hampshire (an absolute tossup), Iowa (I think it will go for Romney), or Nevada (probably an Obama state), or the lone elector from the Second Congressional District in Maine, which will go for Romney, too. And it doesn't include still theoretically possible longer shots Oregon (actually, it's doable) and New Mexico (probably not). Any of those states could help form other combinations that bring Romney to the 269-269 tie that he needs to carry the day -- or better.

What it boils down to is that it is Obama, not Romney, who really has to "run the table" in order to eke out a victory. But he won't. Romney will win, 284 Electoral Votes to 254 for Obama.

Romney will also win the popular vote, but with a plurality rather than a majority. I have it at Romney with 49.8 percent, Obama with 48.6 percent, and Gary Johnson/Virgil Goode/others at 1.6 percent. (Ignoring the fallacy of misplaced concreteness/misplaced specificity, and just to have some fun, I'll peg Romney's total votes at 64,576,316, Obama's at 62,982,965, and all others combined at 2,135,802.)

In the Senate, as indicated above, Republicans will pick up three seats, for a 50-50 tie. (In a bit of a surprise, the Senate race in Maine will remain in doubt well into the wee hours of Wednesday morning maybe even longer with Republican Charlie Summers giving "Independent" fraud Angus King all he can handle, and with Democrat Cynthia Dill well behind but still pulling far more votes than expected. And in one other longshot possibility, if it is clear early enough in the evening that Romney has won, then Republican Linda Lingle might eke out a victory in Hawaii, which would give the GOP a chance at a 51st Senate seat.) George Allen will win Virginia, by the way, thus resuming a career interrupted in 2006 by the Washington Post.

In the House, Republicans will easily hold a majority; in fact, they will lose a net of only two seats, ending with a majority of 239 to 196. Of particular interest to knowledgeable conservatives, Conservative Opportunity Society co-founder Dan Lungren will indeed hold on in California's hotly contested, redistricted Seventh District. And in Utah, Republican Mia Love will rush past incumbent Jim Matheson.

All of which would, of course, be mere assertions if there weren't some method to the predictive madness. Of course, there is such a method. (For my past record at this, please, please consult this, with 2006 being the only year that marred my record.) We start with a bad economy (unemployment higher than when Barack Obama took office; household net worth down hugely, the dollar terribly devalued, etcetera). We add the fact that 55 percent of those polled by the Washington Post say the country is "on the wrong track" (vs. 43 percent on the "right track"), and that by a 50-46 margin, voters think Romney can do a better job with the economy than Obama can. (The sample size is a reasonable Democrat +3 -- one that probably understates what the actual Republican turnout will be, but not by as much as many other polls.) These are not numbers that re-elect a president, nor ones that re-elect a Democratic Senate in a year in which Democrats are defending more seats, and more vulnerable seats, than Republicans are. They are especially not numbers that re-elect a president when tremendous intensity is on the side against him, while many of his own supporters remain somewhat disenchanted or dejected. Moreover, Romney also leads by a couple of points in the Real Clear Politics average of "net favorable" ratings, and leads by a huge margin in Rasmussen's crucial "intensity of favorable/unfavorable" ratings when compared to Obama.

Anecdotal reports from Ohio, Virginia, and especially Wisconsin and Pennsylvania agree that enthusiasm is strongly on Romney's side. The Republican "ground game" is light years better than it was in 2008, and probably even better than the superb effort put forth under Ed Gillespie's leadership in 2004. Plus, more outside groups on the right are doing more of the smart political tasks than ever before, by a long shot. Pro-life groups, the National Rifle Association, Tea Party groups, Catholics and others motivated by religious freedom, and sharp upstarts such as American Majority Action are doing wonders with voter identification and mobilization. Plus, of course, Romney and supportive Super-PACS have raised and spent multiple times more money than anything Republican presidential efforts have even dreamed of in the past.

Against all this, Barack Obama has had four years to hone an organization that did, after all, garner an astonishing 69 million votes four years ago, plus has had the significant advantage of the most slavishly and hypocritically unprofessional "establishment media" this nation has ever seen. Those twin assets have been enough to keep him close -- but they aren't enough to overcome the remaining good sense of an American public where just enough people still have a wisely inculcated value system that rejects the weakness, failures, and leftist claptrap that animates Obama's worldview.

With super-storm Sandy having interrupted Romney's momentum last week, however, I found myself as late as Thursday night convinced that the former governor and turnaround specialist would barely squeak through in a 269-269 electoral vote tie, lifted by a 27-state majority in the U.S. House, and with West Virginia's Joe Manchin breaking with fellow Democrats to cast the deciding Senate vote making Paul Ryan vice president. Significant civic unrest would have marred the transition, but it would have faded out in time for the inauguration due to the innate decency and common sense of the American people.

Thank goodness we probably won't be relegated to such a scenario. Barack Obama has lost his magic, and his troops are a bit enervated. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, has made up for a campaign-long spate of forgettable TV ads with a stretch-run personal performance worthy of the office he seeks. His stump speech has been sharper, his demeanor uplifting, his personal decency on display, and his deep love of these United States abundantly clear. And his running mate, Paul Ryan, has demonstrated knowledge, competence, can-do optimism and, yes, compassion, throughout an impressive first run on a national ticket.

For all those reasons, conservatives and independents who want a new and promising direction for the country they love can join Ryan in saying, yes, indeed, "we can do this. We can do this. We… can do this, now."
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To read another article by Quin Hillyer, click here.

One Last Chance to Kill Obamacare

One Last Chance to Kill Obamacare
By David Catron on 11.5.12 @ 6:09AM

The only remaining hope of finally killing this monster lies in a Romney victory.

Barack Obama's promise to cure the ills of our health care system was obviously an important factor in his 2008 victory over John McCain as well as that year's Democrat gains in the House and Senate. Most of the electorate favored some legislation that would slow rising medical costs and increase access to care. However, when Obamacare finally slogged out of the congressional slough, it was greeted with consternation and outrage. Instead of the reform they were promised, the voters got a grotesque government behemoth reeking of corruption. They were not amused. They appeared en masse at town hall meetings to harangue their representatives, organized a series of public protests and finally marched on Washington.

All for naught, of course. The President and his congressional accomplices ignored the voters, patronizing them with the assurance that they would learn to love "reform" once they understood it. But the electorate still regards the thing with fear and loathing. A recent Rasmussen survey showed that 54% of likely voters favor repeal, the precise percentage who opposed the law when it passed. Nonetheless, if the President is re-elected, ObamaCare will become a permanent feature of the entitlement landscape. The Supreme Court has demonstrated that it won't protect us from the beast's depredations, and a high priority of a second Obama term will be full implementation of his most important domestic "achievement."

The only way to kill this monster is full repeal. And, for all intents and purposes, tomorrow offers the last chance to set that process in motion. The need to take advantage of this opportunity is made manifest by a review of what the President and the Democrat Congress wrought in the name of "reform." It isn't possible to cover all of Obamacare's flaws in one column, but the point can be made by a brief summary of its worst provisions. Among these are mandates that restrict individual liberty and freedom of conscience, tax increases totaling more than $800 billion, the creation of perverse economic incentives that will kill millions of jobs, and the creation of a rationing board whose power will be virtually unchecked.

Obamacare contains a variety of arbitrary and harmful mandates, including one that requires insurance companies to provide health policies that meet federally defined "minimum standards." This is a very bad idea with a long track record of driving insurance premiums up. But the law's most egregious mandates are the "minimum coverage provision" that requires you to buy health coverage regardless of your desire or need to do so, and the HHS contraception mandate that requires all employers -- including Catholic hospitals and universities -- to provide employees coverage for abortion pills, contraceptives, and sterilization procedures. Combined, these mandates constitute a brazen assault on our most basic liberties.

The "minimum coverage provision," more commonly known as the individual mandate, forces you to buy a service from a private company approved by the government. This is the first time in the history of the republic that such a law has been passed by Congress. And, contrary to the claims of its supporters, it isn't comparable to state laws requiring drivers to buy auto insurance. Such requirements are imposed as a condition of owning and operating a large and dangerous machine. You can avoid those mandates by utilizing public transportation. The individual insurance mandate, on the other hand, is imposed on you merely because you exist. Thus, you can only avoid it by dying or paying a fine to the government.

The HHS contraception mandate is arguably worse than the insurance mandate. It is an outright attack on the religious liberty of Catholics and countless other people of faith. As it is phrased on the website launched by the Archdiocese of Washington in conjunction with a series of lawsuits filed against the government over this issue, the contraception mandate is "an unprecedented attack by the federal government on one of America's most cherished freedoms: the freedom to practice one's religion without government interference." And Obama's token accommodation is a cheap charade. It provides a very limited set of exemptions for a tiny group of religious employers that does not include Catholic hospitals and universities.

In addition to its attacks on individual and religious liberty, Obamacare contains a gigantic tax increase. The Heritage Foundation identifies 18 new taxes in the law, totaling $836.3 billion. Some have already been implemented, including a tax on drug manufacturers that will total $34.2 billion. Its largest tax increase will fall on individuals. Couples earning more than $250,000 (and single filers making more than $200,000) will pay additional taxes totaling $317.7 billion over the next 10 years. Beginning in 2014, individuals who decline to buy health insurance will begin paying taxes that will total $55 billion. Also lurking in the law is a new tax that will siphon $29.1 billion from the pockets of medical device manufacturers.

This medical device tax is a good example of the perverse incentives that will kill so many jobs. It obviously raises the cost of doing business for the affected companies, and businesses respond to such increases in ways that bode ill for employees. Sometimes employers abandon expansion plans that would create new jobs. Last July, an Indiana-based medical equipment manufacturer did just that: "Cook Medical… said it's nixing plans to open five new plants in the next five years -- claiming the [Obamacare] tax will cost between $15 million and $30 million a year." Other companies respond with layoffs. Boston Scientific, which manufactures defibrillators and pacemakers, announced last year that it plans to eliminate 1,200 jobs.

Another job killing feature of Obamacare is the exemption of companies employing fewer than 50 full time workers from the tax that larger companies must pay if they fail to provide health insurance. This provision is behind the huge number of part-time jobs that were included in the October 6th report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and it explains why the November 2nd BLS report shows double-digit percentages of underemployed workers in many states. For purposes of Obamacare, the IRS defines a part-time employee as someone working less than 30 hours per week. As Robert Samuelson succinctly explains, "Employers have a huge incentive to hold workers under the 30-hour weekly threshold."

Incentives to avoid creating full-time jobs, combined with huge tax increases and mandates that threaten our basic liberties, are certainly enough to put Obamacare on what the President would no doubt call a "kill list." But no catalogue of this law's many outrages would be complete without a word or two about the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). IPAB is the committee of unelected officials whose ostensible purpose is to control costs. In reality, it will supervise the rationing of care to seniors. The board's fifteen unelected members will decide what procedures and services are "appropriate" for Medicare patients and how hospitals, doctors, and other health care providers will be paid for those services.

This power to ration care is such an integral part of Obamacare that the Democrats tried to inoculate IPAB against repeal. David Hogberg reports in Investor's Business Daily, "Congress is only able to repeal IPAB during a roughly seven-month window in 2017. First, both the House and Senate must in 2017 introduce a joint resolution for the purpose of repealing IPAB. However, they have to introduce the resolution no later than Feb. 1, 2017."This, according to legal scholars, is unconstitutional because no Congress possesses the power to impose such limits on future Congresses. Sadly, we have recent evidence that the Supreme Court is not always willing to uphold constitutional limits on congressional power.

IPAB, to borrow a phrase from the immortal P.G. Wodehouse, puts the tin hat on it. ObamaCare has got to go. The monster must be slain -- now. And the only way that will happen is if Mitt Romney is sworn in as President in January and the Republicans have majorities in the Senate and the House. Romney has his flaws, but he will probably keep his pledge to repeal and replace Obamacare. If Barack Obama is re-elected, his unnatural and corrupt creation will have four more years to intertwine its tentacles throughout the U.S. health care system. By the end of a second Obama term, it will be virtually impossible to disentangle them. If we want to get rid of Obamacare, tomorrow is our last chance.
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To read more about Obamacare, click here.
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To read another article by David Catron, click here.

Romney's Upbeat and Optimistic Closing Ad

Romney's Upbeat and Optimistic Closing Ad
By Guy Benson
11/5/2012

The message: Much is at stake, America can and do "bigger and better," our best days lie ahead, and we're serious about the challenges we face, but remain cheerful and excited to tackle them. Join us:

On the other side of the ledger is Barack Obama, who's closing on "revenge" while accusing Romney of fear-mongering. Even David Brooks -- the Obamaphile center-right New York Times columnist -- laments that the incumbent's re-election effort has been staggeringly bitter:

Four years ago, Obama went to the White House with a Team of Rivals — big figures with big voices. Now the circle of trust is much smaller and political. The mood has contracted. The atmosphere of expansive hope has often given way to a mood of aggrieved annoyance. He seems cagier, more hemmed in by the perceived limitations of his office. The man who ran on hope four years ago is now running one of the most negative campaigns in history, aimed at disqualifying his opponent. Most of all, the vision has contracted.

This is one of the consequential undercurrents of the election. If Obama prevails, it will send a message that a failed incumbent can run an almost exclusively slash-and-burn campaign, offer no real solutions or big ideas for a second term...and win. What a dreadful precedent that would set. Chalk it up to reason number 4,562 to toss him out of office tomorrow.

Are Democrats Paying Attention to Trends in Illinois?

Are Democrats Paying Attention to Trends in Illinois?
By Laura Hollis
11/5/2012

I had the opportunity to be in the western Cook County suburbs of Chicago late last week. I have never seen so many political signs in my life. Signs EVERYWHERE: homes, businesses, parking lots, churches, farms. That stunned me.

What stunned me more? I saw not one sign for Obama.

That originally inspired me to write a column positing the possibility of a Romney victory in Illinois, but given that virtually every poll shows President Obama carrying his home state of Illinois again this year by a wide margin, my sage and sensible editors recommended against it. So here are some related thoughts about what this year’s presidential election might presage in Illinois more generally.

Conventional wisdom considers Illinois to be reliably Democrat. Recent history is certainly on the side of that interpretation: Illinois’ electoral votes have gone to the Democrat presidential candidate every year since 1992. But Illinois’ electorate has switched back and forth, voting for Democrat candidates for presidents 22 times since 1828, and Republican candidates 24 times. And from 1860 to 1988, Illinois voted more reliably Republican for president than Democrat.

Thus, the pendulum can swing. And a review of the past five presidential elections – as well as activity within the state this year – reveal some very interesting trends that Illinois (and national) Democrats ignore at their peril.

In 1992, Illinois went BIG for Clinton. A county-by-county review shows the state overwhelmingly blue. Out of slightly more than 5M votes cast, Clinton won a plurality of 2.4M votes. (Ross Perot pulled votes away from incumbent Republican President George H. W. Bush.) Clinton won Cook County by 58.2%, and these 1.2M votes represented 50.9% of the total votes Clinton received in Illinois.

In 1996, Illinois was distinctly less blue. Running as an incumbent against the soporific Bob Dole, Clinton received 2.3M out of 4.3M votes. 1.1M of these came from Cook County, where he got 66% of the total vote. Cook County represented 49.2% of the total votes Clinton received in Illinois.

In 2000, Illinois was now definitely trending red, with only 23 “blue” counties of 102 total. Al Gore won Illinois with 2.5M of 4.7M votes cast. Gore took 68.6% of the votes in Cook County - slightly less than 1.3M – and these accounted for 49.4% of the all the votes Gore received in Illinois.

In 2004, Democrat John Kerry also won Illinois. But by 2004, Illinois looked like a very different state. Only 14 counties were any shade of blue. Of those, only 7 went for Kerry by a margin of greater than 2 – 3%. Kerry got only 54.8% of the total vote – about 2.9M – to George Bush’s 44.5% (2.3M). But Kerry received fully 70.2% of the votes from Cook County – 1.4M – higher than any Democrat in the past 20 years, other than Barack Obama. Cook County represented 49.7% of the total votes Kerry received in Illinois.

Obama won Illinois handily in 2008, receiving 61.8% of the vote. But only 48.4% of Obama’s votes came from Cook County. Though he won in fewer counties than Bill Clinton in 1992, and did not do particularly well downstate, Obama took all of northern Illinois, and most of western Illinois.

So, for tomorrow and thereafter, there are some discernible trends worth noting:

1. It’s clear that winning Cook County has historically been the key to winning Illinois. But as my foray into the western suburbs showed, Cook County is not monolithic. It has also seen a sharp decline in population over the past decade. Thus, Cook County’s percentage of the total votes cast in Illinois is also declining.

In 1992, Cook County represented 42.5% of the total votes cast in Illinois.

In 1996: 40%

In 2000: 39.3%

In 2004: 38.8%

In 2008, it ticked up slightly to 39.3%. But this does not negate the general trend, as Chicago is Obama’s adopted hometown, and he had staggering local (as well as national) popularity.

All signs point to a continuing decline in Cook County’s impact on Illinois electoral votes. When all the Illinois votes are tallied, expect Cook County’s percentage to slip lower again this year.

2. This means the impact of northern Illinois, western Illinois, and downstate Illinois votes in statewide and national elections is that much greater. Those regions have been trending red for two decades. By way of example, while many of these counties went for Obama in 2008, it is highly likely they will not this year. A number of downstate Illinois newspapers have endorsed Romney. Romney was much more popular in Illinois in 2008 than was John McCain, and his supporters are much more motivated to vote than they were in 2008. Even with Obama winning Illinois’ 20 electoral votes, it will be interesting to see how the county-by-county votes shake out, relative to 2008.

3. More important to Illinoisans’ than the presidential election (believe it or not) are the state’s fiscal woes, which are the worst in the nation. This cannot be laid at the feet of any president, to be sure. But Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Governor Pat Quinn are both Democrats, and the legislature is controlled by Chicago, via long-time Speaker of the House Michael Madigan. Illinois has seen two consecutive governors convicted of and imprisoned for corruption: Democrat Rod Blagojevich and Republican (from Chicago – same thing) George Ryan, a collapsed state pension system, a credit downgrade, and a very public defeat of Mayor Emanuel by the teachers’ union. Going forward, it seems likely that the voting population of Illinois is going to be much more inclined to fault Democrat policies than Republican ones, with corresponding effects at the polls.

4. Just as “RINO” Republicans did until the Tea Party emerged, Democrat leadership tends to take the party loyalty of Democrat voters for granted. But increasingly (if the Democrat National Convention is any indication), the national leadership of the Democrat Party is leaving the traditional Democratic voters behind, and they see it. The AmVets guy who owned his own small business, and who has always voted D because his father and grandfather voted D is not happy about a party whose leadership sounds, frankly, anti-business, anti-America, and anti-American values. The most pressing issue facing the Democrat Party today is making Catholics pay for some woman’s birth control pills? It’s hard to square a party which once stood for patriotism, strong families, and a stalwart work ethic with the modern-day Democrat Party that seems to exist for the benefit of Sandra Fluke and the Vagina Monotones, Occupy-and-Defecate-Wherever, and Leaving Our People Behind in Benghazi.

Illinois Republicans, conservatives, independents, Libertarians, and moderate Democrats tend to conclude their votes don’t matter. But – as is being observed in other reliably “blue” states like Pennsylvania -- the electoral dynamics in Illinois are changing.

Obama will probably take Illinois’ electoral votes tomorrow, as all the pundits predict. But I think Romney is going to win the overall election, and by a significant margin. Either way, after the dust from presidential politics settles, Illinois Democrats may be assuring themselves that Obama’s pickup of Illinois’ electoral votes signals their ongoing dominance in Illinois politics.

I’m not so sure.
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To read another article by Laura Hollis, click here.

Victory or Defeat?

Victory or Defeat?
Monday, November 5, 2012
by Burt Prelutsky

I’m seated hereat my computer on Thursday, November 1, 2012, five days before the most important presidential election of my lifetime and very likely, the nation’s.

According to most polls, it’s a dead heat. Frankly, I don’t believe the polls. I believe that in spite of crooked voting machines, dead voters and third party candidates who will draw anti-Obama votes away from Mitt Romney, Romney will win.

To some people, that will sound like wishful thinking. I won’t deny I have a rooting interest. But I have believed all along that Romney would win the election once people who had been bombarded with Obama propaganda saw and heard the man unfiltered through the media. That happened during the first debate. What some Democratic partisans fail to acknowledge is that Obama didn’t lose his advantage because he appeared to be in a coma, but because millions of voters got to see how much better off they and the ship of state would be with Romney at the helm.

Some folks have been turned off Gov. Chris Christie in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. The sight of that very large dog wagging his very large tail so ecstatically at the mere sight of Obama has them grateful that he didn’t respond to Ann Coulter’s beseeching him to go for the GOP nomination.

Frankly, I never understood why Christie had so much support in conservative circles. It was nice to see him face down the school teacher on that video that went viral, but in most ways and on most issues, he is a rather typical northeastern politician. And whereas it matters whether people have an (R) after their name in the House and Senate, where such things determine which party controls the agenda and committee chairmanships, it matters far less when it comes to governors.

In Christie’s defense, it figures that he would now sit up and beg Obama for a pat on the head. After all, New Jersey requires a ton of federal dollars for the massive clean-up the state faces. On the other hand, one would have hoped that Christie didn’t feel compelled to slobber quite so much while licking Obama’s hand. It got so bad, I kept wondering if Michelle was going to send Barack one of two four word telegrams: “It’s him or me” or “Rent a room, guys.”

If nothing else, the soaring gas prices should do in Obama. It’s not that the president, whoever he is, generally has much control over such things. But this time is the exception. That’s because Obama has waged continuous war against the oil industry. He not only cut oil leases on federal land, placed a moratorium on off-shore drilling and nixed the Keystone pipeline, but sent two billion dollars to help finance Brazil’s oil industry, simply because his puppet master George Soros is heavily invested in it.

If only Obama held such strong feelings against Muslim jihadists that he has when it comes to our oil and coal industry, America would be a lot better off.

There are several reasons I am betting that Romney wins the election. For one thing, Obama did not win in a cakewalk back in 2008, when so many people fell for his line of bull. In the intervening four years, they saw that Hope and Change translated into record-setting unemployment; a war on the middle class; power grabs involving health care and the automotive industry; a racist attorney general; capitulation to private and public sector unions; the fomenting of politically-motivated divisions between blacks and whites, women and men, young and old; the rich and poor; and an agenda that begins and ends with increasing job-killing environmental regulations, the number of federal bureaucrats and taxes.

On top of everything else, Obama has saddled us with a vice-president -- the fellow we’re always reminded when we have a Republican in the White House who is a mere heartbeat away from the presidency -- who gives every sign of either being a confirmed boozehound or suffering from the onset of Alzheimer’s. How else to explain that, even aside from his spooky teeth-baring performance during the debate with Paul Ryan and his promising blacks that Romney’s election would have them back in chains, he has recently referred to Senate candidate Tim Cain as Tom Cain, yakked about a 500 trillion dollar saving for rich people under Romney’s tax plan, twice misidentified the state in which he was speaking and just recently hailed an editorial in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which he referred to as “one of the major papers in this state” while campaigning in Florida.

It’s one thing for Biden to remind us all of the tipsy uncle who shows up for Thanksgiving and falls asleep with his head in the mashed potatoes, and quite another to be reminded that he could wind up as the president and commander-in-chief.

Obama, whose political ambition led to the murder of our ambassador to Libya and three other gallant Americans, promises us that there is an ongoing investigation of the Benghazi massacre. He promises us full disclosure the week after the election. But anyone who is pinning his hopes on that promise probably also believed him when he said he would let us know who leaked all those national security secrets to the New York Times last summer.

The main reason I believe that Romney will win in spite of everything the Democrats can do to turn America into a banana republic is because, even with all the cheating we can expect to take place, Romney will simply get more votes honestly than Obama gets the Chicago way. My reasoning is that Obama didn’t exactly bury McCain, who ran a lousy, under-funded, campaign that culminated in a financial crash that was brought about by the Democrats but blamed on George Bush. Under those optimum conditions, Obama still only garnered 53% of the vote.

Does anyone seriously expect him to do as well among Hispanics, Catholics, single women, college students and guilt-ridden white voters, this Tuesday? Heck, thanks to the unemployment rates among minorities, and Obama’s coming out in favor of same-sex marriages, he won’t manage to get as many black votes as he did last time.

Even among my fellow Jews, thanks to his limp-wristed policy towards Iran and his obvious contempt for Bibi Netanyahu, he stands to lose 5-10% of the Jewish vote.

My faithful Arizona correspondent, Don Melquist, shared a piece of election trivia I found fascinating. Over the past 152 years, only six presidential elections have taken place on November 6th. In 1860, Abe Lincoln defeated Stephen A. Douglas; in 1888, Benjamin Harrison defeated the incumbent, Grover Cleveland; in 1900, William McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryan; in 1928, Herbert Hoover defeated Al Smith; in 1956, Dwight Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson; and in 1984, Ronald Reagan creamed Walter Mondale.

In other words, six elections have taken place on that date and in each case, the Republican won; three times by overwhelming margins.

My advice to Obama is that he get cracking on his memoirs, and I’d suggest that Michelle find out if that job at the University of Chicago Hospital is still open.
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To read another article by Burt Prelutsky, click here.

The Next President and the Supreme Court

The Next President and the Supreme Court
By Edwin Meese III

Every vote counts. And this year, it could count double. One vote could decide both the immediate election and the course of constitutional law for decades to come.

Just ask the senior federal officials responsible for our security immediately after 9/11 who were sued years later by Javaid Iqbal. During the investigation into the attacks, FBI officials identified Iqbal as a suspect of high interest and detained him in New York. He sued alleging that high government officials, including Attorney General John Ashcroft, personally ordered that he be discriminated against on the basis of religion, race, or national origin.

Iqbal provided no facts in support of his conspiracy theory. When his case finally reached the Supreme Court, five justices properly, but narrowly, rejected his speculative claims that would have cleared the way for plaintiffs’ lawyers to embark on fishing expeditions in hopes of winning windfall damages from current and former federal officials. Only a single vote in the high court kept Iqbal and countless others with no proof of any wrongdoing outside their own imagination from subjecting government officials to depositions and other harassing litigation tactics. Though the chance of hitting a punitive-damages jackpot is small, the prospect of such an award would have ensured a steady flow of rapacious court challenges.

Americans naturally consider many issues in casting their vote for President. But they should remember how important their votes will be in deciding the nation’s constitutional course. Neither presidential candidate has made his criteria for judicial nominations much of an issue during this campaign, but whom we select as President may well determine the viability of the rule of law for the foreseeable future.

The right approach was best articulated by Ronald Reagan. As he said on the day that Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Antonin Scalia were sworn in:

[Our Founders] settled on a judiciary that would be independent and strong, but one whose power would also, they believed, be confined within the boundaries of a written Constitution and laws. The framers of our Constitution believed…that the judiciary they envisioned would be “the least dangerous” branch of the Government, because, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, it had “neither force nor will, but merely judgment.” The judicial branch interprets the laws, while the power to make and execute those laws is balanced in the two elected branches. And this was one thing that Americans of all persuasions supported.

Justice Felix Frankfurter put it this way: “the highest exercise of judicial duty is to subordinate one's personal pulls and one's private views to the law."

Sadly, too few judges today understand their proper role. Rather than exercising judgment, they impose will. This form of judicial activism substitutes personal preferences for the command of law. The rule of law is not an infinitely flexible tool that allows the bench to impose its policy choices on the citizenry. Rather, it is a defined set of boundaries derived from the text of the Constitution and accompanying statutes.

The meaning of those texts was fixed at the time of adoption; any other approach rejects democracy for oligarchy. Words, in context, have real, binding meanings. Even if reasonable people disagree about some hard cases, judges should aim to discern and apply the original public meaning of the text at issue rather than what they want it to mean.

In recent decades, judges have made many decisions unconstrained by the rule of law. Far too often the Supreme Court itself, by a 5-4 vote, contorts the text of the Constitution or a statute to reach a preferred policy result, substituting its own judgment for that of the legislature or the Framers.

Consider a small sampling of recent decisions where a single, misconceived vote mattered.

In McCreary County v. ACLU, the 5-4 majority held that the display of the Ten Commandments in a county courthouse violated the Establishment Clause because it was supposedly not sufficiently integrated with a secular or historical message.

In Kelo v. City of New London, a thin majority decided that a city may take private property—including people’s homes—and give it to a big corporation, supposedly to generate more tax revenue. This decision ignored the clear constitutional requirement that property be taken only for “public use.”

In Massachusetts v. EPA, the Court usurped a political question from the legislative and executive branches and jumped into the middle of the global warming regulatory debate. In so doing, it overturned the Environmental Protection Agency’s reasoned decision not to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and required the EPA to adopt a regulation.

And no discussion of controversial 5-4 decisions would be complete without mentioning the Court’s decision in NFIB v. Sebelius last June. There, a bare majority upheld the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act under the guise of reading its individual mandate as a tax.

As Americans go to the polls this month, they should ponder President Reagan’s words: “Those who sit in the Supreme Court interpret the laws of our land and truly do leave their footprints on the sands of time. Long after the policies of Presidents and Senators and Congressmen of any given era may have passed from public memory, they'll be remembered.” Every vote does, indeed, count.

Edwin Meese III, the former U.S. Attorney General, is the Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy and Chairman of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
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To read another article by the Heritage Foundation - The Morning Bell, click here.

Pennsylvania and the Reagan Pivot

Pennsylvania and the Reagan Pivot
By Jeffrey Lord on 11.1.12 @ 6:12AM

Is the Keystone State doing what it did in 1980 -- and is it alone?

HARRISBURG, Pa. -- The Reagan Pivot. What is it? How to recognize it? What happens when it shows up in a presidential election?

The place to look this last week before the election is Pennsylvania.

Suddenly, Pennsylvania is in electoral fashion.

This commercial has now begun to pop up in a state that until the other day was barren of Romney commercials.

Starting yesterday, Pennsylvania is suddenly being flooded with TV ads from both Romney and Obama, as noted yesterday here. In fact, the money noted is a drop in the bucket. The updated figure has Romney SuperPAC Restore Our Future and a second GOP-leaning SuperPAC, Americans for Job Security, together kicking in a $3.2 million ad buy -- and that doesn't count the $600,000 mentioned above from Crossroads or the $120,000 from the Romney campaign itself. Nor does it count the $1.5 million being dropped now by Americans for Prosperity with this commercial and this commercial.

All told that's almost $5.5 million in television ads suddenly inundating the state for a mere six days.

Of particular note is the Obama money -- some $650,000 abruptly being pumped into the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh TV markets. In the case of Philadelphia this covers the Democrats' base in Philadelphia and the four (read: Republican) suburban counties of Bucks, Montgomery, Chester and Delaware. Said a clearly nervous Obama campaign manager Jim Messina in a conference call with reporters:

"We're not gonna take anything for granted and make sure we're doing what we need to do on the ground. We're (also) gonna go up in Pa. They understand they're not gonna be able to win Ohio, so now they're getting desperate."

A brand new Franklin and Marshall poll (full disclosure I am an F&M graduate) has Obama dropping an eleven point 50-39 lead from September to a 48-44 October lead, with 5% undecided. The F&M poll is run by Dr. Terry Madonna and is "produced in conjunction with the Philadelphia Daily News, WGAL-TV (South Central PA), Pittsburgh Tribune Review, WTAE‐TV (Pittsburgh), WPVI‐TV6/ABC (Philadelphia), Times-Shamrock Newspapers, Harrisburg Patriot‐News, and Lancaster Newspapers." For the non-Pennsylvanians in the audience, this is a fairly representative sample in four of the five media markets in the state -- Northeast (Wilkes-Barre, Scranton), Southeast (Philadelphia and the suburbs), Central (Harrisburg, Lancaster, York), and West (Pittsburgh.) The fifth, Erie and the Northwest, are not represented although Pittsburgh media can cover in some cases.

So. Why now? Why the sudden influx of cash, why is the Obama campaign clearly in such a panic over Pennsylvania that they are dumping $650,000 in media markets where they are playing to the home crowd?

The polls said a Romney victory wasn't in the cards.

But were the polls wrong? Is the first sighting of Romney commercials and the sudden flush of cash in the Keystone State a sign that the polls have missed the Reagan Pivot?

Have they missed the Reagan Pivot as well not just in Pennsylvania but states like Virginia, North Carolina, Florida and yes, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Iowa?

And what is the political phenomenon that is the Reagan Pivot?

How does the Reagan Pivot show itself? How does it hint, nudge and elbow itself to a victory that wasn't anticipated by all the polls and all the experts?

Let's do the Pennsylvania Polka with that elusive, alluring political attraction known as the Reagan Pivot.

In 1980 Jimmy Carter was supposedly wiping the floor with Ronald Reagan. Nationally the Gallup Poll in October gave Carter an 8 point lead of 47%-39%. On October 10, the New York Times/CBS poll reported that while Reagan had a 2 point lead over Carter in Pennsylvania Reagan was actually not doing well. Reagan's Pennsylvania fundraising was weak, insisted the Times, which in turn meant the $700,000 budget for the Reagan phone bank operation had to be shaved to $400,000. Not to mention Reagan was trailing Carter in union households and getting absolutely whomped in Philadelphia 52%-15%.

Reagan's anemic numbers in Pennsylvania were having an effect on Arlen Specter's Senate race as well. The Times noted Specter was far behind Democrat Pete Flaherty, trailing by 11 points at 47%-36%.

What happened?

On Election Day Reagan carried Pennsylvania -- by seven points. Specter won as well -- not to be defeated for re-election for 30 years.

Which is to say, somewhere along the line there was a "Reagan Pivot" in Pennsylvania.

A definable point that was unseen and unmeasured in the polls -- both in Pennsylvania and nationally. The Gallup October poll that had Reagan losing nationally 47%-39% had, by election day, turned into a 50.7%-41% Reagan rout.

Pennsylvania is frequently cast these days as a "blue state" -- and that is wrong. The late Senator Arlen Specter -- he who was written off in that 1980 October poll and who was no slouch at understanding the state he represented in the Senate for five terms (the longest serving U.S. Senator in the state's history) -- once insisted to me that Pat Toomey could not possibly win a Senate seat in the state because he was "too conservative." Specter was wrong, with Toomey not simply driving the Senator from the Republican Party but going on to defeat Democrat Joe Sestak for Specter's Senate seat.

Pennsylvania is not simply repeatedly competitive. There is a politically structural reason for that competiveness. As the Wall Street Journal's Matthew Kaminski noted yesterday, of the state's 67 counties, 52 are controlled by the GOP. Ditto 12 of the 19 congressional districts, both the State House and State Senate, plus the governorship and Specter's old Senate seat now held by Toomey. It is instinctively and historically conservative, even when electing Democrats. Toomey's Senate seatmate from Pennsylvania is the pro-life Robert P. Casey, Jr., son of the late governor who was once denied a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention because of his conservative -- read Catholic -- views on abortion.

A look back at the last five decades of presidential politics in Pennsylvania -- 13 presidential elections -- is instructive.

Rule Number One? Philadelphia always votes for the Democrat. Once upon a time Philadelphia was a Republican city -- a Civil War-era fact of life that vanished in the 1940s. From JFK to Barack Obama the city has gone for the Democrats 13 out of 13 times.

But the key question is: by how much? The fact of presidential political life in Pennsylvania is that regardless of its size and its overwhelming tilt to Democrats, Philadelphia in fact is more enamored of some Democrats running for president than others. This goes double for the rest of the state, which has one million more registered Democrats.

When that lack of enthusiasm is manifest in the numbers, in the turnout -- Republicans can carry the state in a blink.

And when a Republican candidate has a particular appeal to Philadelphians, regardless of their party registration they will abandon their party.

While I call this the "Reagan Pivot" -- in fact this problem for Democrats began to emerge not in 1980 with Ronald Reagan but in 1972. The year Richard Nixon was challenged by the now-recently-deceased South Dakota Senator George McGovern.

Richard Nixon -- who lost Pennsylvania to John F. Kennedy in 1960 and to Hubert Humphrey in 1968 -- accomplished a stunning feat in 1972. Nixon carried 66 of Pennsylvania's 67 counties -- a feat that has not been replicated by any GOP nominee since. While doing this, Nixon also opened a sizable hole in the Democrats' Philadelphia electoral firewall that Reagan enlarged. A hole that has also been blown in smaller firewalls in places like Northeastern Pennsylvania (Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Hazleton) and Western Pennsylvania.

Go through the 1972 Philadelphia results ward by ward and the damage inflicted by the nomination of George McGovern is quickly evident.

Here are once staunchly Democratic wards where Nixon trounces McGovern 61% to 38% (in South Philadelphia) or 56% to 43% (Grays Ferry) or again 61% to 38% (Manayunk) or 59% to 40% (Kensington). And so on.

Nixon didn't win Philadelphia. But it is safe to say that George McGovern and the far-left politics he espoused -- and that now hold the Democrats firmly in its grip -- ruined the idea of Philadelphia as some sort of working class firewall protecting Democrats against a Republican Party dominated by the proverbial country club Republican. Philadelphia Democrats were having trouble carrying their own wards, much less serving as some sort of bulwark against the Nixon tide.

Nineteen seventy-two was arguably the moment the "Reagan Pivot" first showed itself on a considerable scale.

Aside from his isolationist pitch to "Come home America," domestically McGovern had campaigned on the idea of giving a $1,000 to every single American. The "thousand dollar giveaway," as it was quickly dubbed, was the 1972 version of Obamanomics. Redistribution of income. To McGovern's shock, his pitch didn't play in working class South Philly. This was the part of Philadelphia that a few years later would be identified with Sylvester Stallone's iconic boxer Rocky -- filled with blue collar workers who understood instinctively that such a redistribution of income would ultimately be aimed at them.

It didn't work in blue collar Scranton, either. The very same Scranton that was the childhood home of Joe Biden. Scranton is at the center of Lackawanna County -- and Lackawanna County, a smaller version of Philadelphia with its dominance by Democrats, went for Nixon.

On top of this the McGovern campaign began the emblematic branding of the modern Democrats as home to a far-left culture that one Nixon commercial tartly summed up as "amnesty, acid and abortion." Which is to say, it took the party of America's first Catholic president, JFK, and began re-branding it as anti-Catholic. At the time, an unidentified Democratic Senator told columnist Robert Novak:

"The people don't know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot. Once Middle America -- Catholic Middle America, in particular -- finds this out, he's dead."

The irony? That Senator was later revealed to be Missouri's Thomas Eagleton -- who was briefly McGovern's running mate before being dumped because of his controversial medical history.

McGovernites took the party of Baptist Harry Truman and re-branded it as the cultural party of anything goes when it came to sex. They took the party of the strait-laced Hubert Humphrey and re-made it in the image of a party that winked at drug use.

By 1980, the collection of these issues took Nixon's opening and made of his support from Democrats the "Reagan Democrat." And the polls were somewhere short of blind and deaf to this new phenomenon. Why? Because in many cases the pollsters and most importantly the journalists doing the campaign reporting were themselves McGovernites, if not in a literal political sense then certainly in a cultural sense. As many in the base recoiled at McGovern -- and later at Jimmy Carter in 1980 -- journalists began defiantly taking the side of the far-left. Making it almost impossible for them to understand in an objective fashion what "Reagan Democrats" were communicating to them. Making them tone-deaf as they reported on polls or political data.

A telling example of this appeared at the very end of the New York Times October 10 story on the New York Times/CBS poll of Pennsylvania. The very poll that produced a 2 point Reagan lead, a lead that was pooh-pooed by the Times. What did the Times say at the end? This:

One negative reason [meaning an anti-Carter vote] that did not turn up in the telephone poll but came up repeatedly in door-to-door interviews was the hostage situation in Iran.

And how was the "hostage situation" in Iran seen by Americans in places like South Philly? These were people who are intensely patriotic. They fly flags. Stand at attention for the national anthem when the Phillies or the Eagles are having opening game ceremonies. These are people who not only have served in the military themselves -- they are sending their own sons and daughters to do the same. And proudly. The day-in-day-out images of Americans being held hostage by Iranian Islamic radicals did not sit well.

Yet note that sentence again from the Times (bold emphasis mine): The "negative reason" to vote against Carter "that did not turn up in the telephone poll but came up repeatedly in door-to-door interviews was the hostage situation in Iran."

So what do we have in Pennsylvania this year? What are the Reagan Pivot points that are appearing across the state?

• Northeastern Pennsylvania: As Congressman Paul Ryan pointed out to a momentarily speechless Joe Biden, the Scranton unemployment rate was 8% when Obama and Biden took office -- and it's now 10%. In 2010, the head of the Catholic Mercy hospital in Scranton (where Joe Biden was born) was momentarily candid enough to admit to a local TV reporter that the passage of Obamacare was the reason why three area Catholic hospitals including Mercy were being sold. The two pro-Obamacare Democrats representing the area lost their re-election bids shortly thereafter.

• Philadelphia: With a 44% black population and a black mayor, the unemployment level for this key Obama constituency is 13.3%. In the words of the local Urban League's president: "The economic landscape for Black Philadelphians is particularly bleak."

On top of which is the Benghazi episode -- which features vivid stories of a White House ordering potential rescuers to "stand down" as four Americans were brutally murdered by Sharia-loving Islamic supremacists is doubtless quietly resonating. In other words, exactly the kind of issue that resonates with Reagan Democrats in places like South Philly -- but was not seen as important by the Times in 1980.

• Western Pennsylvania: This Democratic stronghold was the bane of Obama's fight against Hillary and later McCain. Specifically, as our friends at PoliticsPA, noted, in 2008 Obama had an "undervote" problem. There were Democrats who walked into the polls -- and while not voting for John McCain simply refused to vote for Obama. In the words of the Franklin and Marshall poll's Terry Madonna:

"The first point is that most, not all, [of the undervote is] in culturally conservative counties which we would call many of the Democrats there 'Reagan Democrats,'" he said. "Some are in rural counties. As you know, the President has problems with blue collar working class voters. He had that in 2008 and he faces the same problem now. That may not get better with his support for gay marriage and immigration reform. Also these are areas that tend to have higher unemployment which does not help.

• Central Pennsylvania: Central Pennsylvania, like those four Philadelphia suburban counties, is historically Republican turf. The enthusiasm for Romney here is powered not by racism, as Democrats love to charge -- but by Obamanomics, Obamacare, and cultural issues. The latter of which is shared by Reagan Democrats.

Not to be overlooked in all of this is the hard-core belief that Obama is anti-fossil fuels. To be seen as anti-coal and anti-fracking is a considerable problem in a state where coal mining jobs and the jobs that flow from the fracking for the natural gas of the Marcellus Shale are the bread and butter of many Democrats.

So.

What do we have here? What induces Reagan Pivots away from a liberal Democrat?

A culturally conservative state. A state where energy sector jobs are seen as life's blood. A state with a lot of Catholics. And an Obama Administration that is seen as being culturally far-left, anti-coal, anti-fracking, anti-Catholic and that has produced an abysmal jobs climate.

Does this mean an enthusiastic embrace of Mitt Romney? Yes -- among Republicans. The so-called "intensity factor" is hard at work here. Among Democrats? It means the same thing -- in reverse. The magic of the fall, 2008 campaign for Obama is gone. They have been replaced by a series of Reagan Pivots. The black community in Philadelphia struggles. Jobs are the issue everywhere. The long allegiance between Democrats and coal miners is ruptured. Pennsylvania doctors are furious. Catholics are insulted and angry.

And so on. And on.

The way this is working itself out in the polls is captured by that Franklin and Marshall poll just released yesterday. In a state with all these Democrats, Obama is dropping…dropping…dropping, the F&M poll showing an Obama 11-point lead from September cut to 4 points. A Susquehanna poll actually had Romney in the lead 49%-45% .

The Pennsylvania Poll, published by the liberal Philadelphia Inquirer, records an Obama drop and a Romney gain from September, with an Obama September lead of 50%-42 cut by two points to 49%-43%.

And heaven knows what the internal polls of the Obama and Romney campaigns are showing.

But clearly, they are showing Pennsylvania in play. Romney has that "intensity factor" going for him here. The Republican base is energized. Team Obama is surely disturbed by the very same factor in reverse -- the "no-intensity factor" if you will.

No one suggests the black vote will go for Romney. But could a portion of that black vote -- jobless and disillusioned -- pivot and just not vote? Yes. No one is suggesting the alliance between labor and Democrats is over. But are coal miners in Western and Northeastern Pennsylvania going to flock to Obama? Not a prayer they won't pivot away. All those angry Catholics in Northeastern Pennsylvania who turned on their Democrats in Congress in 2010 for voting for Obamacare? Are they going to run to the polls and vote for Obama? Who since then has managed to antagonize the entire hierarchy of the American Catholic Church with his HHS rules mandating the Church to provide services on abortion and contraception the Church fundamentally opposes? Hardly. Another pivot point.

These individually are Reagan Pivot points. And doubtless they and others are stirring out there in states like Michigan and Minnesota, not to mention Florida, Virginia and -- yes -- Ohio.

In 1980, unseen and overlooked by pollsters and liberal journalists alike, there were enough of these pivot points to cause the entire state of Pennsylvania to do a Reagan Pivot. Making Pennsylvania part of a stampede and turning what the New York Times called a "tight, seesaw contest" into a 44-state Reagan landslide.

Is Pennsylvania doing a Reagan Pivot yet again? Are there enough of these individual pivot points forcing the issue for the entire state to pivot as it did in 1980?

There is about $5.5 million in television ads that are suddenly flooding this state for Mitt Romney. With a $650,000 defense from Obama's campaign.

So what do you think?

Obviously, both sides see Pennsylvania pivoting away from Obama.

Can Mitt Romney win Pennsylvania?

To borrow a phrase: Yes he can.

And Chicago knows it.
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To read another article by Jeffrey Lord, click here.

The Morning After the 'War on Women'

The Morning After the 'War on Women'
By Daniel Allott on 11.1.12 @ 6:10AM

A partial transcript from November 7.

ROBIN ROBERTS, Good Morning America Co-Anchor: Good morning and hello to you on this Wednesday, November 7th. I'm Robin Roberts, and for those of you who went to bed early last night, it appears that Mitt Romney has won the presidential election.

Romney's victory is sending shock waves across the country. It certainly surprised many political analysts. What's most interesting is that exit polls show the decisive votes were cast by women voters.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, Good Morning America Co-Anchor: That's right, Robin, it seems hard to believe now. Back in 2008, Barack Obama captured 56 percent of female voters -- more than any Democratic presidential candidate since 1996.

And by Inauguration Day, his approval rating stood at 71% among women.

But that support was nowhere to be found yesterday, as Mitt Romney narrowly won the female vote, and with it the election.

For a look at what went wrong for President Obama, here's Jake Tapper in Washington.

JAKE TAPPER, ABC Senior White House Correspondent: Even as the election results continue to sink in, there seems to be an emerging consensus among political strategists that Democrats erred badly in their strategy with women.

Without the economy to run on, Democrats based their appeal to women voters on abortion and birth control, and it clearly backfired.

Throughout the campaign, abortion rights groups and the Democratic Party claimed that Republicans and the Catholic Church wanted to take away women's birth control and that it constituted a "war on women." A Planned Parenthood ad charged that "Mitt Romney would turn back the clock for women."

At the height of the hysteria, Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee said, "I think the next act will be dragging women out of patient rooms into the streets and screaming over their bodies as they get dragged out of getting access to women's health care."

The Obama campaign also embraced the "war on women" theme. Health And Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius accused Republicans of wanting to "roll back the last 50 years in progress women have made in comprehensive health care in America."

On its official Tumblr, the Obama campaign posted an electronic greeting card that said, "Vote like your lady parts depend on it. Because they kinda do."

Another Obama ad showed a woman saying, "It's a scary time to be a woman."

Many of you remember Georgetown Law student and abortion activist Sandra Fluke, who complained at a congressional hearing that her Catholic school would not pay for her friends' birth control. She became a central component of the Democrats' campaign, even earning a prime speaking slot at September's Democratic National Convention.

Democrats seemed not to notice that their allegations just didn't ring true to many women or men, who don't equate women's health with abortion. And most voters understood that the real debate with the Obamacare mandate was about religious freedom, about whether religious institutions should be forced to pay for their employees' birth control and abortion-inducing drugs.

The public also saw politics in the controversy. In March, a public opinion poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that half of respondents said they believed the mandate debate was "mostly being driven by election-year politics."

Many Democratic strategists failed to understand that the idea that women don't have access to or can't afford birth control just didn't measure up with reality of a society swamped with free and cheap contraceptives.

But President Obama inexplicably continued to make the false allegation. In mid-October, he told a crowd at a campaign event at George Mason University, "I don't think a college student in Fairfax should have to choose between text books or the preventive care that she needs."

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So, Jake, if I may interrupt, why the obsession with abortion and contraceptives?

JAKE TAPPER: That's a good question, George. These scare tactics certainly brought in a lot of money to abortion groups and energized their base. But Democrats seemed oblivious to polls that found abortion and birth control ranked last among issues most voters cared about.

A Pew Research poll found abortion and birth control ranked next to last on a list of 18 voter priorities.

A Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that less than one percent of respondents mentioned women's health or birth control as top election issues.

In the closing weeks of the campaign, Fluke and Planned Parenthood's Cecile Richards were campaigning full time on behalf of Obama but drawing sparse crowds. One event with Fluke drew just 10 people.

By mid-October polls began to show that the scare tactics just weren't working. The 20-point lead Obama enjoyed among women for much of the campaign quickly evaporated and polls began to show the race a dead heat.

Exit polls from yesterday showed Romney won among women because women cared about the same issues as men, most of all the economy. That spelled defeat for a president whose term saw the number of unemployed women rise by 450,000 and the poverty rate for women rise higher than at any time in 17 years.

Romney, meanwhile, kept his attention on the economy. But he was careful not to back off his pro-life position. A key part of Romney's pitch was that he would repeal Obamacare, including its contraceptive and abortion mandate. And only a few weeks ago, the president-elect reiterated his pledge to defund Planned Parenthood "immediately" upon entering office.

Robin and George, the Democrats' scare tactics on women's issues will be looked back on by political historians as one of the biggest strategic blunders in recent American political history.

Yes, the Democrats became defined by their preoccupation with abortion and birth control, and they paid a high political price for it. Some Democrats are already suggesting that the party enter a period of soul-searching about the wisdom of taking a position on abortion that's increasingly out of step with the electorate.

Back to you in New York.
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To read another article by Daniel Allott, click here.

The Secretary of Business

The Secretary of Business
By: John Hayward
11/1/2012 10:00 AM

So you want to start a business? Let me introduce you to your partner.

In a recent interview with MSNBC, President Obama wistfully dreamed of adding another incredibly expensive layer of bureaucracy to his Titanic Government model, perhaps forgetting that he’s supposed to be pretending to care about the deficit. ”I’ve said that I want to consolidate a whole bunch of government agencies. We should have one secretary of Business, instead of nine different departments that are dealing with things like giving loans to SBA or helping companies with exports,” he sighed, toying with his hair as he dreamed of Evil Businessmen kneeling before his latest almighty czar, while the Czar of All Czars beams radiantly in the background, waving off the intelligence officers who keep trying to pester him with national security briefings.

This is a remarkably clear window into the Obama mind, which sees no problem that cannot be solved by funding an even more powerful and unaccountable bureaucrat to control it. Notice that it does not even briefly occur to the President that maybe the real problem is the federal government sucking huge sums money out of the private sector and redistributing it, whether it be through nine different departments or one Orwellian “Secretary of Business.” Not only is government spending completely unrelated to the federal deficit in Obama’s thinking, but it’s not high enough. As he famously observed, “the private sector is doing fine,” and should be paying even more to shivering, malnourished Washington. His plans haven’t worked, so his solution is even bigger plans, enforced by a more powerful commissar.

Also, it evidently did not occur to the MSNBC crew to ask Obama why he hasn’t already proposed this wondrous “consolidation” of “a whole bunch of government agencies,” since he’s been the President for almost four years already, and conspicuously lacks reticence about using executive power when he wants to. He’s been heard to daydream about closing Guantanamo Bay, too, once he replaces the useless jerk who kept America’s Cuban concentration camp running for the last few years. With Barack Obama, it’s always about what he’ll do someday, never about what he’s already done, or failed to do. He just has to kick that incumbent Empty Chair out of Oval Office, and the good times will roll.

Is there really anyone in America who still thinks “consolidation” under higher levels of unaccountable power actually saves the taxpayers money, or improves government efficiency? Creating the Department of Homeland Security was supposed to improve communication among the many agencies tasked with national security… but here we are, over a month after a deadly attack on American soil that killed our ambassador to Libya, and the entire Administration is waving its hands and insisting that nobody knows anything about what happened, the State Department doesn’t really talk to the White House intelligence team, and (according to Vice President Joe Biden) the White House isn’t really part of the Administration. Who wants to bet Obama’s “Secretary of Business” would be better informed, and more forthcoming, than his Secretary of State was?

The last thing we need is a more powerful, less transparent conveyor belt for the bags of taxpayer money Obama loves to toss to his big contributors. The last thing we need is a heavier boot coming down on the businesses Obama doesn’t want to “win,” and a more generous hand writing checks to his favorite losers. The last thing this moribund economy needs is an accelerated process of Solyndraficiation. The problems with this Administration do not include an insufficiently vast host of czars. The chief business of the American people is business, and how we conduct it is none of Obama’s business.

The Romney campaign built an ad off the “Secretary of Business” nonsense, but no freedom-loving American who really cares about economic liberty and robust growth should need to hear more than the words “Secretary of Business” to run away from this Halloween horror story.

Click here to watch ad:
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To read another article by John Hayward, click here.

Voter fraud is no myth — it’s more common than you think

Voter fraud is no myth — it’s more common than you think
By: John Fund
11/1/2012 10:16 AM

Patrick Moran claims he was just joking about encouraging voter fraud. But he nonetheless resigned last week as field director for the campaign of his father, Virginia Congressman Jim Moran.

Guerrilla videographer James O’Keefe caught Patrick Moran on tape offering advice on how to commit in-person voter fraud. The scheme involved forging utility bills that would satisfy Virginia’s non-photo ID law, and then casting ballots in the name of others — relying on the help of Democratic lawyers stationed at the polls if there were any problems. Some joke.

Last April, a 22-year-old O’Keefe associate showed how easy it is to vote in someone else’s name if no ID is required by being offered the ballot of Attorney General Eric Holder simply by mentioning his name to a Washington, D.C. poll worker. Now O’Keefe has shown just how easy it is to commit in-person voter fraud in states that have loose non-photo ID laws

But opponents of voter ID dismiss worries about our voting system’s vulnerability. The liberal Advancement Project claims “you’re more likely to get hit by lightning than find a case of prosecutorial voter fraud.” I guess the Advancement Project missed these recent lightning strikes:

–A Democratic nominee for Congress had to resign in Maryland last month because she had voted in two states at the same time.

–An Arkansas state legislator resigned from office after pleading guilty along with a city councilman and police officer to committing voter fraud.

–In Iowa, a Canadian couple and a Mexican citizen were put in jail for illegally voting in U.S. elections.

–The guilty plea in California of a Mexican drug dealer who fraudulently voted in the 2008 election while in this country illegally.

Our chaotic voter registration rolls make it too easy to commit voter fraud. A February study by the non-partisan Pew Center on the States found one in eight voter registrations were invalid or contained major errors. Some 2.8 million people were registered in two or more states, and 1.8 million registered voters are dead. That’s an open invitation to fraud and mischief. The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, ruling in 2007 in favor of photo ID laws, found there was “an extreme difficulty of apprehending a voter impersonator” if no ID was required. In other words, we have no idea how much fraud could be out there.

We should clean up our voter rolls, require those casting absentee ballots to provide a driver’s license or Social Security number and make photo ID mandatory at the polls. Photo ID will not just stop the voter impersonation liberals claim doesn’t exist, but will cut down on multiple voting, non-citizen voting, people voting in the wrong precinct, out-of-state voting and voting in the names of fictitious people.

Former Democratic Congressman Artur Davis says he stopped opposing photo ID laws because he knows of too many instances of voter fraud in his Alabama district. “The worst kind of voter suppression today is the wholesale manufacture of ballots in African-American neighborhoods,” he told me.

Indeed, a 2012 Rasmussen poll found 64 percent of Americans think voter fraud is “very” or “somewhat” serious. African-Americans (64 percent) and those earning under $20,000 a year (71 percent) agreed.

The Supreme Court has backed that concern. In 2008, it found states have the right to pass photo ID laws in an opinion written by liberal Justice John Paul Stevens. In a unanimous 2006 decision reinstating Arizona’s voter ID law, the court stated: “Voter fraud drives honest citizens out of the democratic process … Voters who fear their legitimate votes will be outweighed by fraudulent ones will feel disenfranchised.”

Former Democratic Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut put it simply when he co-authored the Help America Vote Act in 2002: “We should make it easy to vote, and hard to cheat. We can do both.” We should get to work to do just that.

John Fund, a National Review columnist is co-author of “Who’s Counting: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote At Risk.”
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To read about more democrat's Voter Fraud, click here.

Obama Lies to America Again About al Qaeda

Obama Lies to America Again About al Qaeda
By Katie Pavlich
11/1/2012

At a campaign event today in Wisconsin, President Obama once again misled the country about the status of the terrorist group al Qaeda.

"Al Qaeda has been decimated," he said to the crowd.

This statement is simply not true.

Recently, "al Qaeda is on the run" was dropped from Obama's campaign trail stump speeches due to the fallout over the 9/11 attack in Benghazi which was carried out by al Qaeda terrorists. That move by the campaign doesn't change the fact that al Qaeda has not been "decimated" and is not "on the run" as President Obama suggested to the American people for months.

In Libya alone, al Qaeda has had a strong presence, especially in the Benghazi area, since the beginning of this year. Congressional testimony given by State Department officials both on the ground in Libya and in Washington revealed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and other officials repeatedly requested more security for the consulate in Benghazi and all of their requests were denied. In July, Stevens received a death threat from al Qaeda on Facebook and even sent a request for more security on 9/11, the day he was killed. While the State Department denied more security, they did increase the amount of "hardship" pay officials in Benghazi received.

Overall, al Qaeda has regained strength in many sensitive areas of the world. Some say al Qaeda is stronger than ever. More on that from Bloomberg:

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, he said, is using ransom money to expand its reach and influence, and as of earlier this year was expected to provide hundreds of thousands of dollars to other extremist groups in Africa.

Cohen said the two, as well as other terrorist groups in the Philippines, Pakistan and elsewhere use ransom money to help finance all their activities, “including recruiting and indoctrinating new members, paying salaries, establishing training camps, acquiring weapons and communications gear, staging deadly attacks,” and “helping to support the next generation of violent extremist groups.

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2012/11/01/obama_lies_to_america_again_about_al_qaeda

Obama says al Qaeda has been "decimated" when it is politically convenient. It's too bad he wasn't willing to face the reality of al Qaeda getting stronger before four Americans were killed in Benghazi.
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To read another article by Katie Pavlich, click here.

Obama's political disease

Rosen: Obama's political disease
11/01/2012 12:01:00 AM MDT
By Mike Rosendenverpost.com

The Denver presidential debate was a crucial turning point in this year's election. There have been many signs of desperation in the Obama campaign since then, both big and small.

The belligerent attitude of Joe Biden and Barack Obama in the subsequent debates is a prime example. That may have stirred the animal spirits of Obama stalwarts, but it's been a turn-off for moderate swing voters, especially women. It was already well known that Biden is subject to clownish episodes and overblown behavior, but presidential debates two and three particularly revealed Obama's petty and nasty side. And even liberal "fact checkers" exposed some of his false claims.

The luster and the novelty have worn off. Beneath a cool veneer, Obama is a brutish politician tutored in the Chicago School, not Mr. Nice Guy. On the other hand, now that more voters are seeing Mitt Romney up close and personal for themselves — as compared to the Obama campaign's portrayal of him in its barrage of negative ads — they're growing to like him.

A recent "unofficial" Obama campaign ad directed at young women displays desperation of a more squalid nature. The ad features Lena Dunham, who created and stars in the HBO series "Girls." (The show is the female version of the clichéd genre of raunchy guys doing stupid things. In "Girls," it's a circle of hip, twenty-something gals having a go at it in New York.) Lena, not very subtly, likens the act of voting for Obama with that of a young-woman voter having sex. "Your first time shouldn't be with just anybody. You want to do it with a great guy ... someone who really cares about and understands women." She goes on to urge these first-time voters to discard their inhibitions and surrender their political virginity to Obama. If someone asks you if you've voted, she implores, don't say, "No, I wasn't ready." The creators of this ad no doubt thought it was clever. Maybe it is, but it's also tawdry. And the style of it betrays a low regard for the intelligence of the young women it's targeting. Apparently, Obama partisans will stoop to any depths to pander for votes.

Since the Obama ad has brought sex (not to be confused with gender) into the campaign, I'll extend their analogy. STDs are a serious problem for unmarried sexually active young women. But there's an even more serious problem for them and the nation: PTDs. By that I mean politically transmitted diseases, the worst of which is life-long dependency on government handouts. This is what Democrats have been spreading for decades, ever since FDR and the New Deal, to expand their voting base. Barack Obama is now their primary carrier.

PTDs can drain you of ambition, breed idleness and sloth, inflict an allergic reaction to private enterprise and productive activity, generate resentment toward the success of others, and degrade your rational auto-immune system's resistance to political demagogues. Societally, PTDs can lead to an epidemic of government deficits that bankrupt the nation under a plague of debt.

In his four years as president, Barack Obama has been a bad chief executive, lacking in managerial experience or ability and ineffective in getting along with others — like Republicans in Congress — to forge public policy compromises. At heart, he's still a community organizer. And his organizational model is torn from the pages of Saul Alinsky's leftist schematic, "Rules for Radicals."

The centerpiece of the Obama campaign, which started the day he took office, has been class warfare and the politics of envy. Obama himself has an inherent distrust of private enterprise and business along with unbridled, though unmerited, faith in the proficiency and benevolence of government. He confuses ambition with greed, success with exploitation, and covetousness for the property of others with entitlement and social justice. He should come with a Surgeon General's warning.

Freelance columnist Mike Rosen's radio show airs weekdays from 9 a.m. to noon on 850-KOA.

The higher road in public persuasion

The higher road in public persuasion
11/01/2012 12:01:00 AM MDT
By Krista Kaferdenverpost.com

It's not your imagination; you really are being bombarded with negative campaign ads. A stunning $42 million has been spent in Colorado on television ads on the presidential race alone.

Scare tactics work. Campaigns wouldn't waste time demonizing opponents if there weren't dividends at the ballot box.

Research is showing, however, that campaign commercials aren't the only way to influence Americans' political preferences. In fact, a person's economic literacy is heavily linked to his or her support for political ideas and candidates. Moreover, when people gain knowledge about key facts, their preferences have been shown to change. Those who are interested in more than just the outcome of any particular election should take note: A television ad with a grainy, unattractive snapshot, brooding music, and a plea to "Call Candidate X and tell him to stop being evil" may get immediate results, but it is unlikely to yield long-term benefits in influencing how people approach political issues and elections generally.

That's the conclusion reached by the Independent Women's Voice (IWV), an educational advocacy organization that has been investigating the relationship between economic literacy and policy preferences. Here's how the IWV recently tested this theory in Colorado: IWV surveyed 800 registered independents on their economic literacy. They were given true-or-false questions such as, "The national debt of the United States is greater than $16 trillion," and, "The top five percent of income earners in the U.S. pay 60 percent of all federal income taxes collected." In both of these examples, the answer is "true," according to government sources.

IWV's sister organization, Independent Women's Forum, then conducted a one-week educational initiative using mailers, phone quizzes, and Internet outreach to 20,000 independent Coloradans. None of the materials mentioned a candidate or a political party, and the message was crafted for independents, since research shows that how information is presented is critical to making information stick and building economic literacy. IWV followed up with a second survey to assess the education campaign's impact.

The results are fascinating. Take, for example, the question regarding the tax burden of the top 5 percent of American income earners. About half of all of the participants in the original survey answered correctly. Getting this question right was heavily correlated with one's political preference: Only 26 percent of Barack Obama supporters knew the correct answer compared to 66 percent of Mitt Romney supporters. On the question about the share of income taxes paid by the bottom half of earners (3 percent), the results were more pronounced: 76 percent of Romney supporters answered correctly compared to just a quarter of Obama supporters.

The week-long education effort succeeded in increasing the number of independent voters' economic literacy.

The gains in economic literacy were also associated with a shift in support for a presidential candidate, which at this juncture in the political conversation is the best proxy for overall support for less or more government intervention in the economy. Romney held a 2 percent lead in the first survey and among the control group in the second survey, but an 8 percent lead among those who received information through the education campaign. Again, none of the outreach mentioned a candidate. Learning more about the economy simply encouraged many Coloradans to reassess their political support.

Certainly Americans would benefit from a greater awareness of basic economic facts about the current state of our economy and how the system works. Since knowledge changes political perception, this could change how campaigns reach out to voters. Instead of the low road of a negative propaganda blitz, they might take the higher road of persuasion through real education.

Krista Kafer is director of the Colorado's Future Project.

Pastor and Obama Ally: All Whites Are Going to Hell

Pastor and Obama Ally: All Whites Are Going to Hell
Guy Benson Political Editor, Townhall.com
Nov 01, 2012 10:34 AM EST

It appears as though Jeremiah Wright isn't the only unhinged, race-hustling pastor in our president's rolodex. Rev. Joseph Lowery, who delivered the benediction at Obama's 2009 inauguration, says he believes all white people are going to hell:

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, a patriarch of the civil rights movement and close ally of the president, said at a weekend rally in central Georgia that the “level and hatred and bitterness” borne of this election had made him a believer that whites were going to hell. Lowery said, according to the Monroe County Reporter, it was the same belief he held at the height of the civil rights movement. Eventually he mellowed, believing that not all whites, rather only “most,” would get their brimstone comeuppance. “Now,” the local newsweekly reported, “he is back to where he was.”

Lowery also opined that he's mystified by any black person who would not vote for Obama, using a racial slur to punctuate his point:

He also said he could not imagine any African American not voting for the president’s reelection. “I don’t know what kind of ni**er wouldn’t vote with a black man running,” the frail 91-year-old said, according to the paper. “Nobody intelligent would risk this country with Romney.”

I'm sure I'll be accused of race-baiting simply for pointing out someone else's rank, disgusting race-baiting, but whatever. This is an absolutely vile sentiment. If a white pastor said the same thing about blacks, he would he pilloried and shunned -- and rightly so. I recognize that Lowery lived through a time and faced discrimination that I cannot imagine, but that does not excuse these comments. A man who faced down so much racism in his time appears to have become a racist himself. How sad.

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To read more about democrat race-baiting, click here.
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To read another article by Guy Benson, click here.