Category: Paul Ryan

SCENES FROM OHIO ‘ALL-STAR’ RALLY

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A Romney supporter in West Chester, Ohio, Nov. 2, 2012 (Photo by Ali Akbar)

BLUE ASH, Ohio
Friday night’s event at Union Centre in West Chester has been called a Republican “all-star” rally, the largest so far for the Romney campaign, as the Cincinnati Enquirer reports:

The presidential race returned to Ohio for the final push Friday as GOP challenger Mitt Romney held a massive rally in the Republican heartland north of Cincinnati and President Barack Obama cut a swath through central Ohio.
“The question of the election comes down to this: Do you want more of the same or do you want real change?” Romney said Friday night in West Chester Township. “I promise change, and I actually have a record of achieving it.”
Romney spoke to a crowd of 30,000, according to West Chester Fire Chief Tony Goller – making it the largest rally of the campaign, said Romney spokesman Chris Maloney.

The fire chief is cited by name, whereas I have not yet seen any official’s name attached to the false claim that the crowd was only 18,000, promoted by Associated Press’s DNC operative, Steve Peoples, among other lying swine in the press corps. But enough about that, for now. Unquestionably, the highlight of the evening was what CNN called a “fiery” speech by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani:

With new numbers showing the unemployment rate had ticked up to 7.9%, Giuliani said the Obama administration should be “ashamed of themselves” for framing the figure as a positive sign. . . .
“He should resign! He told us he would resign if he did this poorly,” Giuliani said, referring to a 2009 interview in which Obama vowed to turn the economy around in three years, otherwise there would be a “one-term proposition.”
Giuliani continued to fire off: “He lied. He has been a disaster. The worst president for our economy in our lifetime. He doesn’t want a second term. He wants a second chance, because he screwed it up the first time.”
The former mayor, who also ran for president in 2008, pivoted to Romney’s business experience, saying it should be considered a strength and blasted Democrats for making it a target on the campaign trail.
“They tried to humiliate him because of that. You know something, if Governor Romney can have the success for America that he had for Bain Capital, Thank God! Our people would be working again,” Giuliani said . . .
Giuliani received perhaps his biggest applause of the night when he focused on the Benghazi consulate attacks, which killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, in September. . . .
“Maybe if we had a president who was paying attention, we wouldn’t be going through all this investigation of what’s being covered up about Libya,” he said.

Here are more photos from the rally by Ali Akbar (click on any photo to see full-size):

The Next President of the United States, Mitt Romney.

America’s Comeback Team takes the stage in West Chester.

Mitt Romney greets the cheering crowd.

Supporters wave Ohio and U.S. flags over the crowd-control railing.

America’s Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, slams into Obama’s record of failure.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

Dave Weigel of Slate amid the crowd, interviewing a Romney supporter.

House Speaker John Boehner speaks at the rally in his home district. Butler County just happens to be the largest Republican county in Ohio.

The next Vice President of the United States, Paul Ryan.

Myself and Ali Akbar with Michael Zak, who blogs at Grand Old Partisan and is author of Back to Basics for the Republican Party. Zak is in Ohio as a volunteer with the RNC’s get-out-the-vote operation, and has been walking precincts and knocking on doors for the GOP.




 

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SCENES FROM ROMNEY-RYAN RALLY

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Children cheer Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney in Marion, Ohio

MARION, Ohio
Last night I was on deadline and didn’t have time to upload photos from the Romney-Ryan “Victory Rally” at the Marion County Fairgrounds Coliseum, so here they are:

Paul Ryan addresses the crowd while Mitt Romney, Rob Portman, and Janna Ryan listen.

“Campaign Carl” Cameron makes his live broadcast for Fox News.

A little girl shows her support for Mitt Romney.

A vendor sells Romney-Ryan campaign buttons outside the event.

Romney rocks ’em at the rally.

Republican Senate candidate Josh Mandel is interviewed by an Australian TV reporter. Have they ever heard of “Rule 5” in Australia?

Romney senior adviser Kevin Madden is interviewed by Zeke Miller of BuzzFeed.

Ali Akbar poses with @FairTaxNancy.

For the worry-wart poll-watchers: Republicans are winning this state, and are winning nationally. Headline on today’s Pew Poll:

Presidential Race Dead Even;
Romney Maintains Turnout Edge

Tonight, Ali and I are going to meet with some Republican operatives in Columbus. Please hit the tip jar.




 

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FROM OHIO: Schedule Scrambled; Obama, Romney Cancel Campaign Events

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MARION, Ohio
Looks like Hurricane Sandy has already caused major damage to my plans for the next couple of days, as both Mitt Romney and President Obama are canceling campaign events because of Hurricane Sandy’s impact on the East Coast. By the way, this storm is so large we’re getting effects as far inland as Ohio.

UPDATE: I’ll be uploading photos from last night’s rally here, but meanwhile here’s the report:

Paul Ryan stood onstage Sunday evening and told a fired-up crowd of nearly 5,000 supporters, “As Ohio goes, so goes America.”
Few would argue with the Republican vice presidential candidate. Of the 11 states rated as “toss ups” by Real Clear Politics, none is more fiercely contested than the Buckeye State, whose 18 Electoral College votes appear destined to decide this election. And the latest poll, commissioned by a consortium of Ohio’s eight largest newspapers, shows the state a dead heat, with 49 percent each for GOP challenger Mitt Romney and President Obama. Perhaps more important, the poll conducted Oct. 18-23 by University of Cincinnati’s Institute for Policy Research, showed Romney has gained three points — and Obama has lost two points — since September, when Obama led 51-46 in Ohio.
This net five-point shift in the Ohio newspaper poll substantially mirrors a general trend, as Romney has improved his standing in the RCP average for the state by a net 3.5 points since Sept. 30. And while Obama still leads most Ohio polls (by an average 2.1 points), “The trendline is going in our direction,” senior Romney campaign adviser Kevin Madden said Sunday night during the rally at the Marion County Fairgrounds Coliseum. . . .

Read the rest at The American Spectator.

UPDATE II: Of course, when a crisis hits, nobody answers their phones, so I’m still scrambling to get specific details from Romney’s campaign, which has yet to issue an “Updated Media Advisory” on their schedule. Probably everybody’s on conference calls right now. Meanwhile, the lobby of this hotel is full of guys who look a lot like Secret Service agents and there’s an SUV in the parking lot with Virginia tags and a Romney/Ryan bumper sticker — probably a campaign staffer. Here’s the latest poll talk from Fred Barnes at The Weekly Standard:

The bipartisan Battleground Poll, in its “vote election model,” is projecting that Mitt Romney will defeat President Obama 52 percent to 47 percent. . . .
While Obama can close the gap with a strong voter turnout effort, “reports from the field would indicate that not to be the case, and Mitt Romney may well be heading to a decisive victory,” says pollster Ed Goeas. . . .
The poll’s election model takes into account variables including voter intensity, age, and education, and voters who are certain in their vote. The race “remains very close in the surface,” Goeas said, “but the political environment and the composition of the likely electorate favor Governor Romney.”

UPDATE III: Went out to the nearest convenience store and grabbed a copy of the local newspaper, the Marion Star which — historians will note — was once published by a guy named Warren G. Harding. The front page of the paper today is dominated by two stories covering Sunday’s rally:

Romney, Ryan rouse crowd

Audience comes away
filled with enthusiasm

This is from the second story:

MARION – Energized and pumped up was how the crowd left Veterans Memorial Coliseum Sunday night after attending the “Victory In Ohio” rally for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
There are nine more days until there will be a change, Romney emphasized, encouraging people to get out and vote early or on Nov. 6 for him and his running mate, Congressman Paul Ryan.
Sara Lawhon and her daughter, Erin, came over from Mount Vernon.
“I’m excited,” Sara said. “It’s fun to be in the same room with people cheering for the same thing and feeling the same way you do.”
Erin, 14, still has four more years before she will be able to vote, but she shared her mother’s excitement.
“I thought he was honest and truthful,” she said. “He went by the heart because he believes in it.”

Mount Vernon is in adjacent Knox County. Just got this via e-mail from a friend on the Romney campaign staff: “Daveport is on today, but all other events today and tomorrow are cancelled. Will update with details when we have them.”

UPDATE IV: Hot Air headline on story from Katie Pavlich at Townhall:

Obama campaign warns against politicizing
hurricane as Bill Clinton politicizes it

UPDATE V: Thanks to Finrod in the comments for the news that Rasmussen’s latest Ohio poll has Romney 50, Obama 48.

Of course, Nate Silver has raised Obama’s re-election chances to 74.6%, because . . . Objectivity!




 

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America, Don’t Be Distracted!

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The next vice president of the United States wants Americans to keep focused on the important economic issues confronting our nation. So I felt kinda guilty when I was distracted by the smiling redhead standing behind Paul Ryan during his speech in Ohio:

“And look at where we are right now: 23 million Americans struggling to find work. You know, we had a discussion about how women are faring in this economy last night. Five-and-a-half million women are still struggling for work in this economy. A half-million women more are unemployed today than when President Obama was sworn in. Twenty-six million women are trapped in poverty today. That’s the highest rate in 17 years. We need to get people back to work. We need to get this economy turned around. The American idea is there. It hasn’t gone away. But we have the wrong people and the wrong policies in place, and if we clear the way and go forward with the proactive, pro-growth solutions in the agenda that Mitt Romney is talking about, we will get people back to work. We will get people out of poverty, back in the middle class, we’ll get back onto reaching their vision of the American dream.”
— Paul Ryan, Berea, Ohio, Oct. 17, 2012

You know Democrats must be discouraged: Republicans have the best economic policies and the pretty redheads? Winning!

Does This Explain Something?
UPDATE: What a Cover-Up Looks Like

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Why is Obama still leading Mitt Romney in Ohio, but trailing in Florida? This puzzle might be explained by the early blitz of attack ads the Obama campaign laid down against Romney in Ohio back in May and June, which created a sort of “opinion deficit” that Romney has had to try to make up during the past four months.

Yet Obama also hit Mitt early in Florida, and Romney has bounced back pretty strong there in the past two weeks.

Is it Libya? And is it possible that the deadly Bungle in Benghazi has raised concerns about the administration’s Middle East policy among a key constituency in Florida? A friend on Twitter called attention to an article by my American Spectator colleague Jay Homnick:

MIAMI — The Jewish outreach of the Romney campaign leaves a great deal to be desired, about which more on another day. One good thing this wing of the overall effort has been doing is involving Ambassador John Bolton in presenting to Jewish groups. His powerful pro-Israel record and reputation make his name a good draw in the circles of the more knowledgeable Jewish voters. It does not hurt that he has astonishing breadth of knowledge, pristine clarity of thought, and crystalline clarity of expression.
Sunday night he appeared here in Miami at a synagogue bordering the two communities of Surfside and Bal Harbor. The biggest concentrations of Jews in the Miami area are not near that spot, but its equidistance from Miami Beach and North Miami Beach situate it perfectly for such events.
The room was packed to the rafters, and there were no hecklers or provocateurs. The crowd listened raptly and applauded lustily. It is difficult to extrapolate from this to voting patterns on Election Day, but this much was clear: there is a strong Romney-Ryan contingent among both the religious and secular Jews of Florida. . . .

Go read the whole thing. And while we’re at it, remember during last week’s debate, when Joe Biden laughed while Paul Ryan talked about the seriousness of the Iranian nuclear threat?

Biden’s dismissive attitude toward the danger of a nuclear Iran, accusing Republicans of reckless warmongering for taking that threat seriously — how did that play with Jewish voters? Biden’s bulldozing aggression against Ryan may have cheered up demoralized Democrats, but the unseriousness of Biden’s attitude hurt Democrats among undecided voters. Jim Geraghty examines a poll that found the Republicans gained a 3-to-1 advantage from last week’s debate.

But why trust the polls, when we’ve got the word of the Lord?

“And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee . . .”

You never want to get on the wrong side of a thing like that.

UPDATE: The big problem with the scandal now becoming known as “BenghaziGate” is that the Obama administration evidently decided to tell The Big Lie from the start, and so many officials repeated that lie so often that, once it became obvious they were lying, coming up with a plausible new lie was difficult. Ultimately, however, their problem is not their shifting lies, but rather the ugly truth of the administration’s failure. Even such a master of deceit as David Axelrod can’t hide from the facts:

Q. How soon after the attack did the President meet with the National Security Council, with people from state, with people from the…, the Director of National Intelligence, with all of the various people to try to sort out what happened in Benghazi?
A. Look. We are sorting out what happened there. Understand that the President the day after the attack called it an act of terror and charged everyone with responsibility for getting to the bottom of what happened. . . .
Q. Yes, the president made a statement and then he went to a fundraiser in Nevada. Question: Before he went to the fundraiser in Nevada, did he meet with his National Security Council to try to sort out the shifting stories. Because State says they never said it was a spontaneous demonstration; Intel, you are quite right, did. Did he meet with the National Security Council before he went campaigning in Nevada?
A. Chris, I assure you that the president was in contact with all those who had information and responsibility in the national security chain about this incident.

Via Memeorandum.

 

 

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VIDEO: Somebody’s Serious About Fiscal Discipline (Hint: It’s Not Joe Biden)

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The Romney-Ryan campaign’s latest ad:

“We can’t keep spending and borrowing like this. We can’t just keep spending money we don’t have. . . . Did they come in and inherit a tough situation? Absolutely. But we’re going in the wrong direction! Look at where we are. The economy is barely limping along. . . . Don’t raise taxes on small businesses, because they’re our job creators. . . . Leaders run to problems to fix problems . . . Mitt Romney is uniquely qualified to fix these problems.”
— Paul Ryan, vice presidential debate, Danville, Kentucky, Oct. 11

PAUL RYAN SCORES CRUSHING VICTORY OVER BIDEN IN DEBATE

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UPDATED 10:22 p.m. ET: Headline from John Nolte:

MEDIA HAMMERS BIDEN:
‘STOP SMIRKING!’ ‘WEIRD,’ ‘JERK’

UPDATED 10:19 p.m. ET: A few more thoughts from Twitter:

I’m going to have to start putting together my column for the American Spectator.

UPDATED 10:03 p.m. ET: It’s clear that Biden was advised to be aggressive, to bulldoze, interrupt and filibuster, to treat Ryan with contempt. The astonishing thing (or, maybe not) is how moderator Martha Raddatz is enabling that strategy.

UPDATED 9:39 p.m. ET: VodkaPundit is drunkblogging. Biden is drunkdebating.

UPDATED 9:35 p.m. ET:

UPDATED 9:12 p.m. ET: Biden interrupted Ryan’s second answer to accuse Ryan of “malarkey” — because Joe’s an expert on “malarkey”!

* * PREVIOUSLY 8:30 p.m. ET * *

This is rather a bold headline, consdiering that it’s now 8:30 p.m. ET and the debate in Danville, Ky., doesn’t even begin for another half-hour, but I’ve been saying for the past week that Ryan would make mincemeat of Biden, so there’s little additional risk in going all-out balls-to-the-wall with my headline.

Ace, on the other hand, is trying to tamp down expectations for reasons that are entirely factual and logical, which is OK, if that’s how you roll.

Me, I’ve got no problem going big. Dave Weigel asks, “Can Joe Biden Save Barack Obama?” And I say, “RAAAAACIST! How dare you say Obama needs a white man to save him?”

Anyway, consider this your Official Vice Presidential Debate Thread. There’s an NFL game on tonight, if you’d rather watch that, then check back here later to see exactly how Ryan stomped Biden.

EXPECT UPDATES . . . .

Benghazi Breakdown: Team Obama, Liberals Now in Full Freak-Out Mode

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First, the headline:

Mother of Slain State Dept. Official Tired of Being
Lied To and Stonewalled by Obama Administration

Next, the video, which got the AOSHQ Flaming Skull Alert:

Now, we point out that Stephanie Cutter has doubled down on her outrageous claim that the terrorist attack on our consulate in Benghazi is only the subject of controvery because — wait for it — Republicans “politicized” the issue. This is the kind of harmonic convergence of self-serving bullshit unprecedented since the days when LBJ lied America into a shooting war in Southeast Asia.

And it reminds me of something else:

Let anyone who watched the moonbat brigades in action during that era testify to their own memories, but I recall it this way: It started with the 2002 mid-terms. Democrats had been expecting to make the usual congressional gains that the party out of power makes in the next election after losing the White House and, instead, the Republicans actually gained seats. This completely demoralized the Left and within a few months, we invaded Iraq.

OK, so the Left then mounted its typical anti-war movement, with the Netroots latching onto Howard Dean as their Gene McCarthy/George McGovern peacenik presidential candidate. Dean melted down in Iowa, and instead the nomination went to Vietnam-era peacenik hero John Kerry who got “Swiftboated” (a term that means “unfairly telling the truth about a Democrat”) and Bush got re-elected in 2004.

The absolute nadir for the Left was when the exit polls showed that Bush had won Ohio because of so-called “values voters” who had turned out in droves to vote for a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. This was a horrid shock to the Left to learn that their two favorite issues — treason and sodomy — had been rejected by the American people, and so they vowed revenge against those damned flag-waving homophobic heartland Republicans.

As I say, this was the Golden Age, with the Left so completely discredited, disempowered and disconsolate that their pitiful crusades — “Indict Karl Rove!” — were fodder for endless mockery by conservative bloggers, who could laugh at the madcap antics of the Kossacks back then.

That era ended when Democrats won the 2006 mid-terms (thank you, Jack Abramoff, and thank you, Mark Foley) and the painful shoe of despair was on the other foot after Obama got elected in 2008. But it seems the karmic wheel is now beginning to turn.

Notice Nate Silver’s slo-mo walkback, his Forecasting Model™ now giving Romney a 32.1% chance of victory, and Nate compelled to pretend there are “a couple of rays of hope” for Democrats.

Whistling past the graveyard much, Nate?

They’re trying to stave off complete panic, and if Paul Ryan does well in tonight’s debate with Joe Biden — my prediction is that Ryan will stomp Joe the way Godzilla stomped Tokyo — we’re likely to see one of the most memorable freak-outs in the history of liberal freak-outs.

Sully’s liable to be on suicide watch if the polls keep trending this way another week, and if analysts ever start moving states like Pennsylvania and Michigan into the “toss-up” category . . .

Oh, it will be epic.

UPDATE: Top thread at Memeorandum, with reaction by Gateway Pundit, Phil Klein, Da Tech Guy, The Lonely Conservative and this memorable response by Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom:

Good lord. It’s long past time to vote these scumbags out: it’s time to tar and feather them and put them in stocks so that we can all take turns throwing rotten vegetables at their ugly treasonous faces.

Once these things start going sideways — with mainstream outfits like CNN sniffing the scent of Fear and Loathing — it’s gonna be hard for the White House to put Humpty-Dumpty together again. Yet we must maintain momentum to maximize the impact.