Category: Mitt Romney

How to Deal With Biased Media Liars (and Other Such Worthless Scalawags)

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“My God, Scarlett O’Hara! When I start out to cut somebody up, you don’t think I’d be satisfied with scratching him with the blunt side of my knife, do you? No, by God, I cut him to ribbons.”
— Tony Calvert, in Gone With the Wind

Well, that’s merely an analogy — a colorful literary allusion — and my concern for the First Amendment requires that I condemn anyone who might contemplate dealing with even the most dishonestly biased journalist in the manner by which hot-tempered young Calvert dispatched his villainous hellbound foe.

No, not even Chris Matthews.

“When I start out to cut somebody up,” therefore, I’m limited to such damage as can be done by words, but I’m pretty handy with a rhetorical knife. With that in mind — and thinking what might possibly pain the conscience of even the most shameless liberal hack — please read my latest column at The American Spectator.

And be sure to read it all the way to the end.

Do You Believe the Ohio Polls?

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McDonald’s sign in Galion, Ohio, offers congratulations to local
high school football players David Nay and Nathan Cass.

GALION, Ohio
A recent series of three polls — by the Washington Post, Quinnipiac and Fox News — show Mitt Romney getting blown out of the water in Ohio, and those of us who are skeptical about these numbers (c’mon, 10 points?) are being derided as “poll denialists.”

It is worth pointing out that these polls were all taken in the immediate aftermath of the “secret video” uproar, and all of them are now at least five days out of date. The Fox poll was taken Sept. 16-18, the WaPo poll was taken Sept. 19-23 and Quinnipiac’s poll was taken Sept. 18-24.

There has been no new public polling since Monday, which is significant in that Paul Ryan and Romney spent three days this week campaigning in Ohio — Lima, Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, Cleveland and Toledo. We must ask: Do polls matter more than the campaigns themselves? Do the national media control the narrative to such an extent that 4,000 people turning out for Romney in Toledo can be dismissed as irrelevant? Is all the grassroots effort by Americans for Prosperity moot?

We’re still four days away from the first debate, Wednesday in Denver, and yet we are being told that Obama’s headed for a landslide victory in Ohio, and thus re-election Nov. 6.

Really? Reports of declining Democrat registrations don’t justify even a tiny smidgen of doubt about this allegedly foregone conclusion? Let’s consult another poll:

A new survey by Gallup asked Americans how much trust and confidence they have in the mass media — newspapers, television and radio — when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly: a great deal, a fair amount, not very much, or none at all. The result shows that “trust” disappeared long ago. Trust becomes disgust.
Gallup has been taking this measurement over the past decade or so, and the erosion of trust has been consistent and steady since at least 1998. Twelve years ago, 53 percent of Americans told Gallup that they had “a great deal” or at least “a fair amount” of trust in the media. By this year, only 40 percent of Americans put their trust in newspapers, television and radio to tell them what’s going on in the world. A remarkable 60 percent said they had “not very much” trust or “none at all.”

How do underdog candidates — and let’s admit Mitt is the underdog at this stage of the campaign — cut through the media filter? On Wednesday, for the first time, Americans are going to get a chance to see Romney and Obama on the same stage, head-to-head, and if you think that debate is going to be a walkover for Obama, you don’t remember the Jan. 26 debate in Jacksonville, Fla., where Mitt fatally lacerated Newt Gingrich.

Keep in mind that Romney doesn’t have to be declared hands-down winner of that debate in order to “win.” All he has to do is to “look presidential,” avoid gaffes and get in a couple of good zingers and everything that happened before will be forgotten.

Should that happen — if Mitt scores at least a draw in the first debate — the narrative changes and, by the time Paul Ryan meets Joe Biden in the Oct. 11 vice-presidential debate, we’ll be hearing about a race that is a neck-and-neck horse race.

Yet there are those Ohio polls, and there are those who are willing to take the polls as evidence that the campaign is all but over. Doug Ross lists some of the improbable beliefs necessary to buy into this argument:

[Y]ou have to believe that the Tea Party never organized or simply disappeared into thin air
[Y]ou have to believe that Obama’s act of adding $6 trillion — 60 percent — to the national debt, which has resulted in the country’s first credit downgrade, is wildly popular . . .
[Y]ou have to believe that the 2010 tidal wave election never happened

You don’t believe that, do you? No, of course not.

Frankly, despite all the certainty of the pollsters and pundits, I don’t think most people in Ohio (or anywhere else) are paying much attention to the campaign at this point. In the parking lot of this McDonald’s in Galion, there is not a single car with a bumper sticker for either Obama or Romney and, driving around the state this week, I haven’t seen a lot of yard signs.

Obama may be ahead in Ohio right now, but the campaign is far from over, because many voters haven’t yet made up their minds. The attempt by the Obamaphile media to create the appearance of an early decision — with the help of the polling firm of “Madoff, Marist, Quinnipiac and Ponzi” — ought to be rejected as the propaganda ploy it really is.

Understand that most Ohioans are currently more concerned with Ohio State football (the Buckeyes beat Michigan State 17-16 today) than they are with the upcoming election. These sensible Midwesterners, who two years ago elected Republican John Kasich govern0r and Republican Rob Portman to the Senate, are unlikely to buy into a lot of media hype going ’round.

 



 

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ROMNEY RALLY IN TOLEDO:
Huge Crowd Stands in Line in the Rain!

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TOLEDO, Ohio
OK, if you believe the polls, Mitt Romney’s 10 points behind in Ohio. But then there are those people — THOUSANDS of people — who stood in line in the rain to get in to see Mitt this afternoon in downtown Toledo:

QUESTION: Do you believe in the polls, or do you believe in the people?

UPDATE: Here’s a look at the crowd inside the rally:

UPDATE II: Still waiting for Mitt to take the stage here. A few linkbacks while we wait:

UPDATE III: Mitt keeps hammering on the national debt, saying Obama has added “about $6 trillion” to the debt, and later saying that, if Obama is re-elected, the U.S. national debt will reach $20 trillion by 2016.

UPDATE IV: There were times during this rally when the crowd just went wild cheering and began chanting “Mitt! Mitt! Mitt!” People who say Mitt isn’t “exciting” should attend one of these rallies. I’ll have some video in a minute.

UPDATE V: As promised, here is the video of the end of Romney’s speech. Listen to the crowd cheering at the end — excitement!

Gotta hit the road and go file my column for tomorrow’s American Spectator.

The Most Biased Question, Ever

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DAYTON, Ohio
Jim Acosta of CNN got an exclusive one-on-one interview with Mitt Romney yesterday in order that he could ask Mitt this ridiculous question:

“African-Americans have a tremendous sense of pride that there is the first African-American president in the White House. If you were to somehow beat the first African-American president, what would you say to the black community to assure them that you would be their president also?”

Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters says Acosta “should be ashamed of himself,” but what shocks me is that, instead of punching Acosta in the face, Romney politely answered the question:

“I want to be the president of all the people of America. I want to help all the people of America. You don’t get into a race like this with myself and my family and do the kind of work and commitment that we’ve put forward without the passion to help all of America. And the people who really need the help right now are the people in the middle class, people who have fallen into poverty. I know how to get them help. The president doesn’t.”

Show of hands: How many of our readers would like to see Mitt Romney punch out a network reporter on live TV? 

Yeah — it’s unanimous. Do it, Mitt.

 


Polls: Self-Fulfilling Prophecies?

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DAYTON, Ohio
By the time you read this, I expect to be on the road to the Columbus suburb of Westerville, where Mitt Romney will have a rally with a special guest, golf legend (and Ohio native) Jack Nicklaus. Doors open at 6 a.m. for the event that begins at 8 a.m. and a recent poll shows 47 percent of readers believe I’ll be driving 90 mph to get there.

Why should we care what the polls say? Why has second-guessing polls become such an obsession of Republicans in recent weeks? That’s a main theme of my American Spectator column today:

Nearly 4,000 people turned out Tuesday to cheer Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan at an airport rally here, their numbers and enthusiasm contradicting polls that show President Obama leading by a wide margin in the Buckeye State. This contradiction inspired me to conduct my own poll, although my methodology might not have been entirely scientific: I walked up to the crowd behind the barricade and shouted, “Does anybody here believe the polls?” The crowd shouted back in unison: “No!”
Perhaps my survey wasn’t based on a random sample, but I’m pretty certain of the conclusion: Republicans here are profoundly skeptical of polls indicating Obama on the verge of walking away with Ohio’s 18 Electoral College votes. Nor is this skepticism limited to Ohio. A Web site devoted to examining sources of bias in polls, UnskewedPolls.com, has become increasingly popular among Republicans. The site’s proprietor Dean Chambers echoes many in pointing out how “the weighting and/or sampling of Democrats, Republicans and independents in each survey” can produce numbers wildly at variance with the likely results on Election Day. Many of the polls that show large advantages for Obama also show a “skew” in party identification toward Democrats – over-representing them compared to their numbers in previous elections — which can be “enough to make the results unreliable,” as Ed Morrissey of HotAir.com says.
What causes conservatives to complain about these skewed polls is that so many journalists seem more interested in covering the polls than in reporting about the actual campaign. This produces headlines and TV coverage that seem intentionally designed to demoralize Republicans and persuade undecided “swing” voters — who have a tendency to vote for the candidate they perceive as the likely winner — to support Obama. The polls which most favor Obama, including a Washington Post poll released yesterday that showed Obama leading by 8 points, get hyped by the media and are incorporated into a pre-fabricated media narrative that depicts Romney as hapless, ineffective and “out of touch.” That such poll-driven coverage could function as a self-fulfilling prophecy — in fact creating the result it pretends to predict — is an increasing worry for conservatives. . . .

Please read the whole thing.

SCENES FROM ROMNEY-RYAN RALLY

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Mitt Romney speaks while Sen. Rand Paul (left), vice presidential
candidate Rep. Paul Ryan and Ohio Sen. Rob Portman listen.

DAYTON, Ohio
I blogged about the huge crowd for today’s rally at the Dayton Airport Expo Center in Vandalia, including singer Lee Greenwood, and someone on Twitter replied demanding photos, but I couldn’t get photos to upload on the available WiFi at the airport.

OK, so here it is, along with some other photos (click to enlarge any of them) showing the size of the crowd and other scenes from the event.

He’s proud to be an American — aren’t you?

This wide-angle shot (and I urge you to click and see it full-size) gives you a partial idea of how big the crowd was. The crowd wrapped around on both sides and behind the camera riser from which the photo was taken.

Ohio Sen. Rob Portman is interviewed by a TV crew after the rally.

Romney adviser Kevin Madden answers questions during an informal press “gaggle” after the rally.

A button vendor displays his wares after the event. I chatted briefly with him and he explained that he travels all over the country — it’s a full-time job — selling this merchandise at Republican rallies. So I guess Mitt Romney has already started creatings jobs and he’s not even president yet!

 



 

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ROMNEY-RYAN AT DAYTON AIRPORT

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VANDALIA, Ohio
Awaiting the arrival of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan at the Dayton Airport Expo Center, an outdoor rally under gray overcast skies. There is a cool wind — it’s about 65 degrees — and intermittent drizzle.

A huge crowd of several thousand people here who don’t believe the polls. Seriously, I just conducted a non-random survey of the crowd, shouting out, “Is there anybody here who believes the polls?” A resounding “no.”

UPDATE: The Romney plane just taxied to a stop here. The hottest site on the Web today is UnskewedPolls.com.

UPDATE II: Paul Ryan: “After four years of getting the runaround, it’s time for a turnaround.”

UPDATE III: Mitt mentions that Rob Portman spends his weekends playing Barack Obama in debate practice. “He’s good at it, too. When it’s over with, I want to kick him out of the room.”

Here’s an article about Team Romney’s pushback against the skewed polls.

UPDATE IV: Talking about the importance of small businesses, Mitt just told the story of a guy named Jimmy who graduated second from the bottom of his high school class. Jimmy started out making sandwiches in his family’s garage. “And now Jimmy John’s . . . employs 60,000 people.”

UPDATE V: Event is over. Official attendance was 3,800. There was just a brief press gaggle with top Romney campaign adviser Kevin Madden, who said: “We don’t make any decisions in this campaign based on what public polls say.” He said it’s a close race, and he expects it to remain “close all the way to November.”

I’ve got photos, but for some reason can’t get them to upload here, so I’ll get those up in a subsequent post when I get back to the motel.

Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Worldwide Headquarters of Crazy, Inc.

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My plans to get to Ohio and cover the three-day Romney-Ryan Buckeye State bus tour that begins tomorrow have thus far been thwarted.

It’s one of those long complicated stories you don’t want to hear, but if there is any conservative in the Mid-Atlantic region willing to make the run, please contact me on Twitter. I’ve offered cash money to friends who tell me, alas, they’ve got more important things to do, and I’m half-tempted to drive this broken-down KIA (in dire need of major repairs) as far as it will take me, abandoning it if it breaks down, then trying to hitchhike my way along the campaign trail. The situation has become that desperate and, as I keep telling myself, Woodward and Bernstein never had to deal with this kind of crap.

Also, Woodward and Bernstein never had to deal with crazy people on Twitter. Without further explanation . . .

Twitter wars with topless starlets and psycho terrorists make it hard to keep in mind that I’m supposed to be covering a presidential election.
 





 

UPDATE: In a comment on yesterday’s post about Kimberlin associate Neal Rauhauser, Bill Hoge cautioned that he is not a psychologist in offering this information:

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition (DSM IV-TR), defines antisocial personality disorder as follows:

  • A) There is a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others occurring since age 15 years, as indicated by three or more of the following:
    1. failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest;
    2. deception, as indicated by repeatedly lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure;
    3. impulsiveness or failure to plan ahead;
    4. irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults;
    5. reckless disregard for safety of self or others;
    6. consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations;
    7. lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another;
  • B) The individual is at least age 18 years.
  • C) There is evidence of conduct disorder with onset before age 15 years.
  • D) The occurrence of antisocial behavior is not exclusively during the course of schizophrenia or a manic episode.

Yeah, I’m not a psychologist either, but if Crazy-Evil Disorder (otherwise known as Kimberlin-Rauhauser Syndrome) isn’t listed in the DSM-IV, it should be in the next update.

UPDATE II: Trying to get my mind off the craziness and back onto the presidential campaign, my Tweet of this video has been re-Tweeted more than 130 times: