Category: Mitt Romney

A Note on Bill Kristol’s
Arrogant and Stupid Blog Post

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In general, the whooping and hollering over a GOP presidential candidate’s gaffe is done by Democrats.

Also David Brooks and David Frum.

So it was rather shocking to see Bill Kristol come out with a blog post using the phrase “stupid and arrogant” to describe Romney’s remarks.

I like Bill Kristol.

Perhaps more importantly, my wife likes Bill Kristol. So why he would put the words “stupid and arrogant” next to Romney’s name, I don’t know, but now at least he knows how it feels.

Don’t do that again, please, sir.

On the Romney Video: ‘The Q&A Didn’t Turn Out as Well as He Had Hoped’

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Let’s begin by nominating Jimmie Bise Jr. for the Pulitzer Prize for Humorous Understatement. That there’s funny, I don’t care who you are.

Meanwhile, in the Real 1% — the pro-Obama media — the latest furor is over a second clip from the same secret (and possibly illegally recorded) video in which Romney criticizes talk of Mideast peace based on the “two-state solution.” Ed Morrissey explains that Romney is right:

What Romney actually says is that peace isn’t possible because the Palestinians won’t accept a two-state plan as a permanent solution … a point that has been obvious ever since Yasser Arafat walked away from a carefully-crafted deal at the end of the Clinton administration and called for another intifada.  With Hamas now in the mix and their parent group Muslim Brotherhood taking control of Egypt, the Palestinians have even less incentive to accept a permanent state of Israel.

Nick Gillespie has the headline of the day:

Secret Romney Tape Means
We Can Finally Stop Talking About
Obama’s Failed Foreign & Domestic Policy! 

It’s important not to be distracted by the media’s narrative framing of events. It takes a strong mind to be able to resist their propaganda.

That’s why I Watch MSNBC So You Don’t Have To:

 

 





 


Hyperbole Help For The Telegraph: ‘Romney Singularity Threatens Space-Time Continuum’

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by Smitty

The spectacular implosion of Mitt Romney means a no-choice US election, emphasis mine:

It is impossible to imagine Ronald Reagan saying, or thinking, that 47 per cent of Americans should be written off. He would have wanted to try and persuade those overly reliant on the state that they could be liberated, and the lives of their families improved, if they voted for him. His creed was essentially positive and aspirational.
The tragedy is that America and the Western world needed this year’s election to be a proper contest. Obama has been a deep disappointment as President and the country’s finances are in a mess. Britain and the world need a strong American recovery, but Obama seems to have no idea how to help create the climate in which it might happen. In contrast, Mr Romney does have an understanding of business growth and free-markets, although he was far from being the perfect candidate.
Now, with Romney having ruined himself, it becomes a no-choice election. This is quite extraordinary when one considers the tumultuous nature of events since the financial crisis and the need for solutions to be implemented which go beyond the centrist corporatism which dominates the landscape.

Oh for crying out loud in the dark: Romney made a realpolitik appraisal. What’s really occurred here is that the press has soiled itself. Again. At least the press are consistent infantile whiners. Like the non-income taxed portion of the electorate whose attitude Romney appraised.

What promises to be interesting is whether Mitt can make (and deliver) tax reform. There is nothing wrong with the IRS code that could not be fixed with pliers and a blowtorch. If not likely to deliver tax reform, #OccupyResoluteDesk can point to Romney and say “Mitt’s just playing the game, like me.”

VIDEO: ‘A Prairie Fire of Debt’

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“A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across the nation. And every day we fail to act, that fire gets closer to the homes and the children we love. And rather than putting out the spending fire, President Obama has been feeding it. He has spent more and borrowed more. The time has come for a president who will lead out of this debt and spending inferno.”
— Mitt Romney

Ambush: Media Exploit Obama’s ‘Clear Advantage’ Narrative Against Romney

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Protesters at U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012

Many people were shocked by the hot-mike incident Wednesday, in which reporters were overheard coordinating their questions before a Mitt Romney press conference, planning to question the candidate about whether he regretted his statements about the Libyan attack that killed four Americans, and how his “answer is continuing to sound.”

What has perhaps been forgotten was that the day before the eruption of Muslim riots in Libya and Egypt, the Obama campaign had already dictated its foreign-policy narrative to the media. This was the message already packaged and delivered on the eve of the annual 9/11 commemoration. An article at BuzzFeed posted early Tuesday morning had this headline:

Obama’s Plan To Use National
Security To Beat Romney

The article included explicit comments like this:

“For the first time in a very long time, a Democrat has a clear advantage on national security issues,” Michele Flournoy, a national security campaign advisor and former Defense Department official said. “This is a real significant shift in our political system.”
Voters, Flournoy went on to say, “consistently prefer President Obama over Mitt Romney on this issue by double digits.”

It was therefore pre-determined by the Obama campaign that the 9/11 remembrance would be the occasion for emphasizing the Democrat’s “clear advantages” on foreign policy.

No “Swiftboats” allowed!

One might have thought that the sudden onslaught of Islamic violence that left the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans dead would have been perceived as an unfortunate reminder that the “clear advantage” wasn’t really so clear.

However, inside the pro-Obama bubble that seems to envelop much of the political press corps — evidently including of Ari Shapiro of NPR and Jan Crawford of CBS — no contradictory facts can be permitted to disturb the precious narrative: Obama is winning, Romney is losing, and everything must be conformed to that storyline.

Toby Harnden of the London Daily Mail is evidently outside that bubble, and saw the attacks in Egypt and Libya for what they actually were:

 The Obama administration is engulfed in a full-blown foreign policy crisis just two months before the presidential election after the murder of the US ambassador to Libya and three other officials and amid fierce criticism from his opponent Mitt Romney.

These incidents, occurring as they did in two nations where Obama had sided with radical insurgents who overthrew their governments in the “Arab Spring” uprisings, clearly raised questions about the wisdom of the administration’s policy. But for pro-Obama reporters, the attacks had to be interpreted within the “clear advantage” narrative, and so whatever Mitt Romney said or did, the Republican challenger’s response had to be portrayed as insufficient, inadequate or otherwise wrong.

By daring to criticize the Obama administration, Romney was contradicting the press-corps consensus, as John Podhoretz says:

The murders of US diplomats in Libya and the attempted storming of the US Embassy in Cairo took place 56 days before the election of America’s next president.
Apparently, it is the view of much of the mainstream media and foreign-policy establishment that discussing these horrific events in the course of the presidential campaign is monstrous.
One might think that these custodians of the public good would wish the discussion to be of nothing else. The United States and its representatives abroad have been attacked, and in a manner that threatens to spread like wildfire. You’d think everyone would agree it’s time to talk foreign policy.
Oh, no. In the precincts of America’s Most High, the worst evil done [Tuesday] was Mitt Romney daring to broach the subject and use it to criticize President Obama’s foreign policy. . . .

Read the whole thing, as Podhoretz describes how the attacks on Romney started with explicitly left-wing Talking Points Memo and then dispersed throughout the media. The real outrage, in the minds of the pro-Obama media, is not that savages destroyed our consulate in Benghazi and killed four Americans, but rather that a Republican would dare describe this tragedy as a consequence of Obama’s failed policies.

 

 


Obama’s ‘Bounce’ That Wasn’t

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“To put it as bluntly as possible, the economy sucks, and the attempt by Democrats to exculpate Obama for this situation — to place the blame on Republicans, or to say that the economy would suck even worse if Romney were elected — is perhaps more difficult than Nate Silver’s statistics suggest.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “Omens of Doom,” The American Spectator, Sept. 10, 2012

The media’s effort to manufacture the appearance of a decisive shift toward President Obama — not merely a predictable post-convention “bounce” in the polls — dismayed, discouraged and enraged Republicans who were not psychologically braced for it.

When people are attempting to manipulate your perceptions, your awareness of their effort is your first defense. Your second defense is your knowledge of the underlying reality. Long experience in following campaigns and polls would forewarn you that (a) all presidential campaigns get a poll “bounce” from their conventions, (b) the liberal media’s enthusiasm for Obama would make his “bounce” larger, and (c) none of this changes the underlying reality that the economy sucks.

Americans are not as stupid and gullible as the liberal media would like to think, and so the coordinated effort to turn Obama’s “bounce” into a decisive shift in the campaign has predictably failed:

Last week’s Democratic National Convention helped President Obama improve his standing against Republican Mitt Romney, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, but did little to reduce voter concern about his handling of the economy.
The survey shows that the race remains close among likely voters, with Obama at 49 percent and Romney at 48 percent, virtually unchanged from a poll taken just before the conventions.
But among a wider sample of all registered voters, Obama holds an apparent edge, topping Romney at 50 percent to 44 percent, and has clear advantages on important issues in the campaign when compared with his rival.

What does this tell you? Even after a week of the media’s giggly schoolgirl gushing during the Democrat convention, the most active and engaged citizens — “likely voters” — harbor such profound doubts about Obama’s economic policies that it is still a dead heat. Whatever actual edge Obama has over Romney occurs among the “low-information voters” who aren’t even sure they’ll vote.

Yesterday’s CNN poll that produced such indignation — showing Obama leading 52-46 — was a  statistical outlier, a dot far outside the main cluster of the scatter chart.

The idea that the electorate shifted a full six points in the span of a week (the same CNN poll had the race tied at 48% a week earlier) is absurd. People do not suddenly change their minds that way, merely because of speeches at a convention — especially a convention where the incumbent seeking re-election is less popular than President Blowjob.

This is not to say that media manipulation is irrelevant or harmless. John Nolte rips Politico today for its transparent effort to create an “Inevitability Narrative” for Obama:

[Politico editors John] Harris and [Jim] VandeHei and their team of shameless JournOlisters don’t give a damn about the jobless or the poor or the middle class or the concept of objective and honest reporting — all Harris and VandeHei and their team of shameless JournOlisters care about is dragging Their Precious One over the finish line.
Obama-hugger gets more attention than 368,000 people dropping out of the workforce.
Romney not mentioning the troops in his speech gets more attention that Obama blowing his speech entirely.
Democrats booing God and Israel at their convention gets 1/50th the attention Clint Eastwood received.
Ryan’s marathon brag gets more attention than middle class incomes falling.
Romney’s tax returns get more attention than the increase in poverty.
Ryan being branded a liar for telling the truth about that GM plant in Janesville gets more attention than manufacturing contracting three months in a row.
And over the next 57 days, the dishonest, corrupt Politico will only get worse.

The “news” at Politico is all about gloomy clouds for Romney, while the sun is always shining in Obamaville.

Do not be deceived, and do not be discouraged.

The economy still sucks.

 

 

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Obama Campaign Fundraising Claim Deserves More Than a Few Grains of Salt

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August was not yet over when word got around during the Republican convention in Tampa that Romney and the GOP had raised more than $100 million in August — their third consecutive month of nine-digit fundraising. The Democrats had nothing to say in reply at that time. You could hear the crickets chirping at Obama HQ in Chicago.

OK, so overnight the Romney campaign announced a specific figure — $111.6 million — for August and immediately the Democrats answered with the claim that they’d raised $114 million, resulting in a blitz of headlines like this:

Obama beats Romney
in August fundraising
— Washington Post

Obama fundraising edges
out Romney in August
— CBS News

This news contributes to the sense of a shift toward Obama, but permit me to offer an important caveat: We won’t get the official Federal Election Commission reports for another 10 days, and the official numbers on those reports may add up to different totals than those announced by the two campaigns. There isn’t any law that requires campaigns to tell the truth in their public statements about fundraising, and if you think Democrats wouldn’t fudge the numbers in order to gain a 10-day advantage in the media narrative of the campaign, you have a far higher estimate of Democrat probity than I do.

Be that as it may, however, even if we take the total fundraising numbers at face value, there remains the question of “burn rate.”

Ever since May, we’ve seen the Democrats burning through campaign cash faster than they can bring it in. The Obama campaign has built a very expensive infrastructure, with high fixed costs for staff salaries, and they launched an early ad blitz this summer in key swing states, at a time when the Romney campaign was hoarding its resources in preparation for the fall season. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air calls our attention to this detail from a Politico reporter:

Romney’s campaign, including the RNC and state parties it raises money through, have about $168.5 million cash on hand. The Obama camp has not announced how much they have.

Right. Some readers may remember how angry I got toward the Gingrich campaign in March, when Newt was acting like he was still Mitt’s chief GOP rival at a time when it was obvious to me — and to any experienced observer — that his campaign’s burn rate was out of control and that they were running up huge debts with no chance to win, thereby hurting Santorum’s chance to stop Romney.

Manipulating perceptions is part of the game in politics, largely because so many people are swayed by bandwagon psychology and susceptible to confirmation bias, believing what they want to believe. If you aren’t braced to expect these manipulations, you can be misled. This was why the Romney campaign felt obliged to issue a warning against panic in the face of the post-convention media blitz suggesting that Obama’s already won the election. And this was also why I felt the need to remind readers of a campaign that faced an even worse blitz of slanted media coverage:

Sixty-four days remain in the 2012 presidential campaign. Election Day is nine weeks from tomorrow, both party conventions are now in the rearview mirror, and Mitt Romney’s uphill battle to unseat President Obama has reached its most crucial phase. Everything that happened before today was merely prelude to this, the heart of the fall campaign season, and no “expert” can confidently predict today what the final result will be on November 6.
These basic facts are important to establish at the outset of any discussion of the current state of the race, because there are many influential people who would like you to believe that the outcome of the election has somehow already been determined, and that they have clairvoyant insight on what that outcome will be. But why bring Nate Silver into this?
Silver is the poll-analyzing guru of the New York Times, whose reputation as a wizard was developed in crunching baseball statistics before being applied to political campaigns. On Saturday afternoon, Silver published an analysis which asserted that Obama now has a nearly 80 percent chance of winning the election, with 317 Electoral College votes and 52 percent of the popular vote. All of which is very interesting — and very important, if true.
However, baseball isn’t politics, and public-opinion polls are not batting averages or on-base percentages or any other such metric of past performance. Readers of Michael Lewis’s bestseller Moneyball may appreciate this distinction, especially if they have any extensive experience in following polls and election campaigns. For myself, to cite just one example, I recall the Sunday in October 2010 when I arrived in New York’s 25th Congressional District and was greeted by a Syracuse Post-Standard headline proclaiming that Democrat Rep. Dan Maffei had opened up a 12-point lead over Republican challenger Ann Marie Buerkle with barely two weeks remaining until Election Day. There was a mood of grim determination at the Buerkle campaign events I attended that Sunday and Monday, and I was far from certain that she could pull off an upset. On Election Night, the vote was “too close to call” and it was only after an extended recount that Buerkle was declared the winner — two days before Thanksgiving — by a margin of fewer than 600 votes. . . .

Please read the whole thing at The American Spectator.