Category: Mitt Romney

Be Ye Not Dismayed

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Smitty jumped on Dave Weigel for his “trolling” article, and I’ll let that stand, except to add that Weigel seems to be advocating that mainstream journalism adopt an even more stringently pro-Democrat “message discipline” — as if, for example, having Soledad O’Brein literally reading liberal blogs on the air at CNN is insufficient proof of their abject partisanship.

Really, Dave? I mean, is it the professional duty of journalists to ensure the re-election of Barack Obama? As part of that duty are they obligated not to allow themselves to be distracted by those “trolling” conservatives who aren’t in sync with that mission? Are you saying that the re-election of Obama is — as a neutral objective fact — such a good and necessary thing that journalists and broadcasters can in good conscience ignore any contradictory evidence?

Speaking of contradictory evidence, the economy sucks: After the anemic jobs report Friday, the dollar slumped, gold rose to $1,740 an ounce and Brent crude went to $114 a barrel.

C’mon, Dave: You worked for Reason magazine, so surely in your libertarian heart you understand economics enough to know that we’re seeing further proof of the failure of Keynesianism — as if further proof was needed. Whatever your cultural or policy differences with the GOP, you can’t believe that, in terms of pure fiscal/economic policy, a second Obama term would produce anything other than a further descent into the helpless slough of ’70s-style stagflation.

It’s still the economy, stupid, and it’s not the Republicans who are “trolling” with distractions to avoid that subject. Hell, for an entire week leading up to the GOP convention, the Democrats and their media pals were trying to persuade the nation that Republicans were preparing to nominate Todd Akin for president. And then the convention coverage was a weeklong blizzard of “fact-checking,” much of it of highly dubious neutrality.

RYAN LIED! RYAN LIED! RYAN LIED!

Good Lord, Dave, after that elaborate pompom-and-cartwheels partisan cheerleading routine by the MSM, you expect to convince us that a one-day flap over the Democrat platform is proof that the media are too easily distracted by GOP-friendly memes?

Anyway, this is only relevant insofar as it pertains to a discussion about media bias that Ali Akbar and I were having on our drive back from the convention in Charlotte. Except for one day at home last Monday, Ali and I have spent two weeks in Convention Hell together, a sort of Oscar-and-Felix pairing — “The Odd Couple Do Politics,” with me playing the slobby sportswriter and Ali as the fastidious photographer. Our perspectives are different: Ali’s background is as a partisan operative who was actually on staff at the 2008 GOP convention, while I come from a background where, as Mencken said, “The only way a reporter should look at a politician is down.”

Despite my political enthusiasms (an ex-Democrat, as I briefly explained four years ago), I view journalism from the inside out in a way that Ali does not. And so at one point as we were driving somewhere near Danville, I emphasized that criticisms of liberal media bias should be aimed at the bias, and not at the media, per se.

This was the point of an argument I had with Melissa Clouthier a couple of years ago: Conservatives do not help themselves by fomenting a generalized hostility toward journalism as a profession, and must realize that many of the worst offenders in terms of liberal bias are not actually professional journalists:

In case you didn’t realize it, the only claim [Chris] Matthews has to being a journalist is that he is a partisan Democrat. Matthews never worked a day as a reporter, never covered a city council meeting or a homecoming parade. After evading the Vietnam-era military draft by enrolling in the Peace Corps, Matthews moved to Washington and worked on the staff of various congressional Democrats before unsuccessfully running for Congress as a Democrat, later joining the White House staff as a speechwriter for Democrat Jimmy Carter, then spending the Reagan years as a top aide to Democrat House Speaker Tip O’Neill. Somehow, this ultra-political background as a partisan operative qualified Matthews for the job of Washington bureau chief for the San Francisco Chronicle. Such is the biography of the man who has been employed for the past 15 years as a “journalist” by NBC, hosting his own show on the network’s little-watched MSNBC cable franchise while appearing regularly on the broadcast network during coverage of major political events.

For his ludicrous imitation of a newsman — Ted Baxter had more credibility — Matthews is reportedly paid a salary of $5 million. It is a disservice to hard-working journalists who toil for comparative peanuts to scapegoat them for the sins of overpaid TV political hacks like Matthews or George Stephanopoulos.

Much of the bias in coverage we have seen in the current election cycle is a transparent attempt at bandwagon psychology, with major news organizations generally exaggerating the likelihood of Obama’s re-election, so as to persuade the low-information “swing” voter who tends to vote for the candidate he perceives as the likely winner. Beyond its effect on swing voters, this kind of coverage has the effect of encouraging Democrats and demoralizing Republicans, which probably explains Stanley Kurtz’s gloomy assessment:

To the extent that Republicans dismiss this convention as either a failure or relatively meaningless, however, I think we’re fooling ourselves.
This election could go either way. If Obama squeaks by, he will have done so with the help of a Democratic party that has taken a large, open, and disturbingly leftist turn. I think we’re missing the significance of that. It is completely accurate to say that the Democrats are pushing a bogus reformulation of the American way of life — slapping a bunch of flags on their Julia ad and turning classic conceptions of civic and religious community into covers for a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Unfortunately, this way of thinking is becoming the new normal in this country, and Obama and his convention have only helped to cement the change.
Conservatives can puncture these arguments all we like, but we can’t cut through the media filter.

I disagree. I do not believe that lies can so easily triumph over truth, no matter how willing the major media are to repeat the lies. At some basic level, amid all the controversy and spin, the truth is self-evident — even to those idiotic swing voters and, yes, even to liberal journalists themselves. It is not due to any sudden eruption of right-wing sentiment in the press corps that Obama’s Thursday night speech was almost universally panned by the media. If Obama’s lost Michael Tomasky . . .

Professional journalists, whatever their political biases, have a career interest in locating and reporting the truth. Their credibility is at stake, and there is a competitive advantage to being right. Despite their partisan sympathy for Obama, when he gave a lousy convention speech, reporters and TV talking heads were smart enough to realize they couldn’t portray this flop as a triumph.

The economy sucks — this is a neutral objective fact, and Obama’s attempt to explain this fact takes three forms:

  1. It would have been worse if not for his policies;
  2. It’s getting better; and
  3. Blame Bush!

Will voters accept these excuses? Given what Rush Limbaugh calls the “uncanny” resemblance between Obama’s speech and Jimmy Carter’s 1980 convention speech, I’m skeptical of any assertion that Obama’s excuse-making will easily carry the day, no matter what obstacles to truth the “media filter” creates. The latest polls showing a significant convention “bump” for Obama — both Gallup and Ipsos/Reuters now showing Obama ahead by 4 points — are certainly discouraging, but not entirely unexpected.

Look at the Real Clear Politics national poll summary and you see that between Aug. 16 and Sept. 3, a series of eight polls showed the race in a range between Obama +2 and Romney +1 — an 18-day neck-and-neck horserace — and now, in the immediate aftermath of the Democrat convention, Obama appears to be opening a lead.

Is this a temporary phenomenon, or a decisive break in the trend of a virtual tie? Probably the former, but only time will tell.

Polls are not the only metric of campaign success and, with 65 days remaining until Election Day, the Romney campaign has advantages that have not yet been fully exploited. When the Romney campaign announced it raised $100 million in August, the response from the Obama campaign was . . . crickets chirping.

Whatever amount Team O raised in August, past evidence suggests that they’re deep into a negative “burn rate,” spending money faster than they can raise it, creating the possibility that Romney might blow them out of the water with a massive ad blitz in the final weeks of the campaign. Democrats are seriously worried about that possibility.

The other thing I keep thinking about is the debates. The three debates in October will be the big chance for Romney to leap over the “media filter” and defeat Obama mano-a-mano, and I think those Republicans like Stanley Kurtz who are currently discouraged may be underestimating Romney’s chances of a decisive victory there.

Having been at the January GOP debate in Jacksonville, Florida, where Romney demolished Newt Gingrich — cleverly drawing Newt into a forensic ambush — I don’t doubt Mitt’s potential to score a debate knockout. If Romney brings his A-game and Obama doesn’t, the campaign might break sharply toward a GOP landslide.

In our brief interview Wednesday, Joe Trippi discounted the likelihood of the debates having a major impact on the race:

RSM: My thought is, it’s going to be about the debates. Do you feel that way?
TRIPPI: I don’t think so. I mean, if somebody makes a mistake in the debates, that’s gonna be pretty costly, but I think a lot of the — once you get into this kind of a polarized campaign, what tends to happen is that each side’s folks watch and cheer their guy on. There aren’t a whole lot of undecideds out there left to move in a debate, and so I a contrarian. I don’t really think the debates are going to matter unless somebody gaffes.

Well, OK, then: Republicans should pray for an Obama gaffe, and trust in the Almighty to deliver the “pretty costly” mistake that will take Joe Trippi by complete surprise. In the meantime, at least one Republican seems utterly undaunted — a guy named Mitt Romney, who just released this podcast message:

This week, Democrats met in Charlotte to re-nominate Barack Obama for President. They tried to recapture the spirit of 2008, when then-candidate Obama stood in front of Greek columns and made a lot of promises about how he’d make life better for Americans.
He was elected, but things did not get better. Under President Obama, we’ve endured the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression.
This week, after another Democrat convention filled with nice words and a lot of promises, Friday’s jobs report once again brought this administration back down to earth. The unemployment rate has now been above 8 percent for 43 straight months.
Nearly 47 million Americans are on food stamps – an all-time record high, and 15 million more Americans than when President Obama took office.
Nearly 60 percent of the jobs that have been created after the recession was officially over are low-wage jobs, and they pay less than $14 an hour.
And our national debt recently reached a staggering $16 trillion, an increase of almost $6 trillion under President Obama.
Americans are hurting, they’re paying a heavy toll for these years of drift and disappointment, trying hard to hang on for a brighter day. But when we looked to Charlotte this week for signs of hope from the party in power, what did we see?
We saw a party completely out of ideas. We didn’t hear one new idea for throwing a lifeline to the struggling middle class. Instead, we heard a stubborn defense of policies that haven’t worked.
We saw a president who once promised to unite us, double-down on the politics of fear and division. Four years ago, he said, “If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.” That was Candidate Obama describing the strategy that is now at the heart of President Obama’s campaign.
A couple days ago, the President was asked to grade his economic performance.
Words like “disappointing” and “dismal” come to mind. But instead, he chose “incomplete” – because that’s the best he can do as he asks the American people for a second term.
President Obama is hoping you’ll let him advance with an “incomplete.” But on November 6th, Americans should hold him accountable. I’m asking you to vote for the ticket that’s offering real solutions for the middle class, with a plan to create 12 million jobs over the next four years.
A weak economy and unprecedented debt may be the best President Obama can do – but it is not the best America can do. I commit to you that I will be the president this moment demands. Join our cause, and help us deliver a better future for all Americans this November.

Facts matter, and the fact of Obama’s failure is a truth too large to be easily concealed by any “media filter.”

 





 

 


Kimberlin-Rauhauser Axis Targets Romney Campaign Staffer Bill Murphy

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Brett Kimberlin could have been sentenced to 230 years in federal prison

Brett Kimberlin’s non-profit 501(c)4 Velvet Revolution is part of an apparent effort to destroy Mitt Romney’s online rapid-response team by targeting Bill Murphy, a young Internet operative who has helped improve the campaign’s social-media presence.

In an item posted Saturday on the Democratic Underground site, Velvet Revolution promoted an article accusing Murphy of “fraud” for his role earlier this year in the National Bloggers Club.

Formed in February at the annual “Blog Bash” during the Conservative Political Action Conference, the club honored Andrew Breitbart with one of its first awards and has helped defend bloggers targeted by Kimberlin’s lawsuits and other harassment. During last week’s Republican National Convention, the club co-sponsored a “Blog Bash” that featured former RNC chairman Haley Barbour and a guest list that included Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), Michael Barone of the Washington Examiner, Amy Kremer of Tea Party Express, author Katie Pavlich and CNN contributor Dana Loesch.

Kimberlin, who spent 17 years in federal prison for his role in a weeklong bombing spree that terrorized an Indiapolis suburb, has gained renewed notoriety for his “lawfare” harassment of conservative bloggers. In May, Kimberlin and his associate Neal Rauhauser were among those identified by Patrick “Patterico” Frey as suspected of being involved in a “SWATting” hoax that sent police to Frey’s residence.

In June, 85 Republican members of Congress signed a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder requesting an investigation of the use of “SWATting” as a political intimidation tactic:

Investigators have concluded that the majority of SWAT-ting cases utilize voice over Internet (VOIP) connections between the suspect’s computer and a distant telephone network, and then dialing 911. This enables the suspect to falsify their identifying information, such as their telephone number and address, and make it nearly impossible for emergency dispatchers to identify or track the true origin of the call, or even pin-point calls from VOIP connections.
Some of these calls involve embellished schemes, including armed suspects and hostages, and in some instances, the caller claims that he has just killed someone. Moreover, the caller knowingly uses the identifying information of another person, who is usually an adversary of the caller. This elaborate hoax is all done with the goal of having law enforcement swarm the home of the caller’s foe, which only incites fear in and tarnishes the reputation of an innocent person.
Even worse, SWAT-ting is quickly becoming a scare tactic used against political bloggers, essentially stifling those bloggers’ First Amendment rights. Just last month, a popular blogger in the state of Georgia, Erick Erickson, became the latest victim of SWAT-ting. During the Erickson’s family dinner, sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to Erickson’s home after receiving a 911 call reporting an accidental shooting that appeared to have come from Erickson’s address.

In 2010, Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution non-profit launched an “Indict Breitbart” campaign, accusing the Internet news entrepreneur of criminality. Breitbart fired back with a 3,600-word article by Mandy “Liberty Chick” Nagy that exposed Kimberlin’s criminal past as a major drug smuggler who became notorious as Indiana’s “Speedway Bomber.”

In 1981, Kimberlin was sentenced to 50 years in federal prison, but served only about a third of that sentence before his release in 2001. Within four years, Kimberlin had formed two non-profits — Velvet Revolution and the Justice Through Music Project — that have collected more than $2 million in donations, including contributions from the Tides Foundation, the Barbra Streisand Foundation and the Heinz Foundation.

Last year, Kimberlin’s online efforts were augmented by his alliance with Neal Rauhauser, a consultant to Democrat candidates who was a speaker at the 2010 Netroots Nation conference sponsored by the liberal Daily Kos site. Rauhauser has described his role as “solving problems in the social media work space for political campaigns and causes.” Several conservatives have begun to suspect that Kimberlin and Rauhauser are part of a Democrat-backed attempt to impede conservative New Media efforts in the 2012 election cycle, replicating in many ways the 2010 online harassment campaign against Tea Party activists that became notorious as “TwitterGate.”

Rauhauser has a habit of promoting farfetched conspiracy theories. When Democrat Rep. Anthony Weiner was caught in a cybersex scandal last year, Rauhauser (writing at Daily Kos under his “Stranded Wind” alias) claimed that Weiner was the victim of an Oklahoma-based “Christian Infowar Militia.”

More recently, Rauhauser has accused Kimberlin’s critics of being part of elaborate conspiracies. In February, Rauhauser sent to law enforcement agencies a massive cache of documents with a summary article titled, “Breitbart’s ISR Cell?” That article alleged that Andrew Breitbart and others, including Frey, were part of an organized plot involving the security firm HBGary.

In June, Rauhauser sent a series of e-mails to a Republican congressional staffer asserting that the SWATting of conservative bloggers were part of a “complex fabrication from the Breitbart camp.” Rauhauser accused Breitbart.com contributor Brandon Darby of being the “true source” of the illegal fake 911 calls. Rauhauser subsequently forwarded those e-mails to some of Darby’s associates, along with a thousand-word document that outlined a bizarre conspiracy theory involving Darby as well as the GOP consulting firm Hynes Communications.

Raushauser’s mention of the firm, run by conservative New Media strategist Patrick Hynes, was apparently an effort to involve the Romney campaign in a smear against Darby and others on Rauhauser’s enemies list. This connect-the-dots tactic has now been extended to Murphy, who joined the Romney campaign in June after working for two months as a volunteer with the National Bloggers Club.

The article highlighted Saturday by Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution was written by Alex Brant-Zawadzki, a Huffington Post blogger and graduate student at the University of San Francisco. Brant-Zawadzki has frequently assailed the Tea Party movement as “neo-Nazis” and “teabaggers.”

Brant-Zawadzki’s article (“Romney Staffer Committing Charitable Fraud“) refers to the American Liberty Alliance, a Tea Party-oriented project launched by Eric Odom in 2009 that was subsequently dissolved, as well as the National Bloggers Club, as points of association between Murphy and Ali Akbar, a conservative New Media strategist who is president of the National Bloggers Club. Brant-Zawadzki’s claim that the club is a “fraud” appears to be based entirely on the fact that the non-profit has not yet filed its first report with the Internal Revenue Service. Yet as Akbar has explained, the club was only organized in February of this year, and has up to one full year to report its activities to the IRS.

Brant-Zawadski has multiple online connections to Neal Rauhauser, and his article about Murphy was based in part on research by Ron Brynaert, who accused Brant-Zawadski of “ripping me off.” Brynaert, along with Kimberlin and Rauhauser, was named by Frey as suspected of complicity in Frey’s July 2011 SWATTing.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

 


RNC Hangover: You Gotta Believe

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Last guy in the Press Filing Center, 1 a.m., Friday, Aug. 31, 2012

“There was never enough time. Every deadline was a crisis. All around me were experienced professional journalists meeting deadlines far more frequent than mine, but I was never able to learn from their example.”
– Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

TAMPA, Florida
Garrett Quinn of the Boston Globe walked over to the empty row where I was still working on my column and said, “I knew that was you, banging away. I’d recognize that sound anywhere.”

Ask anyone who’s ever shared a workspace with me — and this now includes hundreds of reporters who came to Tampa for the Republican National Convention — I hammer the hell out of a keyboard. That’s why I always carry an external keyboard, because otherwise I’d destroy the laptop keyboard in a matter of months, and the thing would be useless in those emergencies when I actually need it.

People ask me if I learned to type on a manual typewriter, which of course I did, but there are other old guys who’ve learned to tap lightly on the keys, while I continue my brutal keyboard-destroying methods and go through the $9.99 things at the pace of one or two a year.

Hard-hitting journalism. Literally.

So Quinn took the picture of me as the last holdout in the Press Filing Center, struggling to complete today’s column for The American Spectator, which was kind of emotional:

The polls showed a dead heat as Mitt Romney took the stage Thursday night to accept the Republican Party nomination, but the polls could not begin to capture the wild chances of improbability in what is sure to be a hard-fought campaign this fall. And the man who introduced the GOP presidential nominee Thursday night was the surest testament to how miracles happen in America.
Marco Rubio wasn’t supposed to be there. In May 2009, more than 15 months before the 2010 Republican primary in Florida, the GOP establishment endorsed Rubio’s opponent, then-Gov. Charlie Crist, believing him to be the “safe” choice as their party’s Senate nominee. Crist had statewide name recognition and a strong fundraising base, and so he was endorsed not only by the state party chairman, but also by the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. One poll showed Crist leading Rubio by 37 points.
Crist had every tangible advantage, but what he did not have was the support of the conservative grassroots, which were just then coalescing into the Tea Party. Crist had embraced President Obama’s $800 billion “stimulus” plan, and his endorsements from the GOP Establishment proved to be the kiss of death, rallying a nationwide movement behind Rubio. And so the young senator who introduced Mitt Romney on the closing night of the Republican National Convention was a living embodiment of the miraculous power of the American dream.
Rubio spoke of that dream, describing how as a nine-year-old boy in 1980 he watched the GOP convention with his grandfather, a refugee from Cuba’s communist dictatorship. “As a boy, I would sit on our porch and listen to his stories about history, politics and baseball while he puffed on one of his three daily Padron cigars,” Rubio told the thousands of Republican delegates gathered inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum. “I don’t recall everything we talked about, but the one thing I remember, is the one thing he wanted me to never forget. The dreams he had when he was young became impossible to achieve, but there was no limit to how far I could go, because I was an American.”
The crowd went positively wild with cheers and applause, and when they calmed down, Rubio continued: “For those of us who were born and raised in this country, it’s easy to forget how special America is. But my grandfather understood how different America is from the rest of the world, because he knew what life was like outside America.”
What Rubio was describing was a doctrine known to political philosophers as “American exceptionalism,” and the 41-year-old senator went on to describe its foundation in religious belief, that America is “special because we’ve been united not by a common race or ethnicity. We’re bound together by common values. That family is the most important institution in society. That almighty God is the source of all we have.… Our national motto is ‘In God we Trust,’ reminding us that faith in our Creator is the most important American value of all.”
Words can scarcely describe the enthusiasm that swept through the auditorium at that moment. In a skybox suite five floors above the stage, where I was a guest of the Republican State Leadership Committee, I found myself wiping tears from my eyes. They were neutral, objective tears, because I remembered when Marco Rubio was 37 points down in the polls, and here in Tampa I was watching an honest-to-God miracle. If it had been up to the party leadership, Charlie Crist would have been up there on stage. Instead, Crist is now disgraced and discredited, an unpopular loser who will speak at next week’s Democratic convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. . . .

Please read the whole thing. Man, I need to go back to bed.

 

 

PREVIOUSLY:

 


COMPLETE TEXT: MITT ROMNEY’S SPEECH TO THE GOP CONVENTION

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TAMPA, Florida:
Text provided by the Romney campaign:

Mr. Chairman, delegates. I accept your nomination for President of the United States of America.
I do so with humility, deeply moved by the trust you have placed in me. It is a great honor. It is an even greater responsibility.
Tonight I am asking you to join me to walk together to a better future. By my side, I have chosen a man with a big heart from a small town. He represents the best of America, a man who will always make us proud – my friend and America’s next Vice President, Paul Ryan.
In the days ahead, you will get to know Paul and Janna better. But last night America got to see what I saw in Paul Ryan – a strong and caring leader who is down to earth and confident in the challenge this moment demands.
I love the way he lights up around his kids and how he’s not embarrassed to show the world how much he loves his mom.
But Paul, I still like the playlist on my iPod better than yours.
Four years ago, I know that many Americans felt a fresh excitement about the possibilities of a new president. That president was not the choice of our party but Americans always come together after elections. We are a good and generous people who are united by so much more than what divides us.
When that hard fought election was over, when the yard signs came down and the television commercials finally came off the air, Americans were eager to go back to work, to live our lives the way Americans always have – optimistic and positive and confident in the future.
That very optimism is uniquely American.
It is what brought us to America. We are a nation of immigrants. We are the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the ones who wanted a better life, the driven ones, the ones who woke up at night hearing that voice telling them that life in that place called America could be better.
They came not just in pursuit of the riches of this world but for the richness of this life.
Freedom.
Freedom of religion.
Freedom to speak their mind.
Freedom to build a life.
And yes, freedom to build a business. With their own hands.
This is the essence of the American experience.
We Americans have always felt a special kinship with the future.
When every new wave of immigrants looked up and saw the Statue of Liberty, or knelt down and kissed the shores of freedom just ninety miles from Castro’s tyranny, these new Americans surely had many questions. But none doubted that here in America they could build a better life, that in America their children would be more blessed than they.
But today, four years from the excitement of the last election, for the first time, the majority of Americans now doubt that our children will have a better future.
It is not what we were promised.
Every family in America wanted this to be a time when they could get ahead a little more, put aside a little more for college, do more for their elderly mom who’s living alone now or give a little more to their church or charity.
Every small business wanted these to be their best years ever, when they could hire more, do more for those who had stuck with them through the hard times, open a new store or sponsor that Little League team.
Every new college graduate thought they’d have a good job by now, a place of their own, and that they could start paying back some of their loans and build for the future.
This is when our nation was supposed to start paying down the national debt and rolling back those massive deficits.
This was the hope and change America voted for.
It’s not just what we wanted. It’s not just what we expected.
It’s what Americans deserved.
You deserved it because during these years, you worked harder than ever before. You deserved it because when it cost more to fill up your car, you cut out movie nights and put in longer hours. Or when you lost that job that paid $22.50 an hour with benefits, you took two jobs at 9 bucks an hour and fewer benefits. You did it because your family depended on you. You did it because you’re an American and you don’t quit. You did it because it was what you had to do.
But driving home late from that second job, or standing there watching the gas pump hit 50 dollars and still going, when the realtor told you that to sell your house you’d have to take a big loss, in those moments you knew that this just wasn’t right.
But what could you do? Except work harder, do with less, try to stay optimistic. Hug your kids a little longer; maybe spend a little more time praying that tomorrow would be a better day.
I wish President Obama had succeeded because I want America to succeed. But his promises gave way to disappointment and division. This isn’t something we have to accept. Now is the moment when we CAN do something. With your help we will do something.
Now is the moment when we can stand up and say, “I’m an American. I make my destiny. And we deserve better! My children deserve better! My family deserves better. My country deserves better!”
So here we stand. Americans have a choice. A decision.
To make that choice, you need to know more about me and about where I will lead our country.
I was born in the middle of the century in the middle of the country, a classic baby boomer. It was a time when Americans were returning from war and eager to work. To be an American was to assume that all things were possible. When President Kennedy challenged Americans to go to the moon, the question wasn’t whether we’d get there, it was only when we’d get there.
The soles of Neil Armstrong’s boots on the moon made permanent impressions on OUR souls and in our national psyche. Ann and I watched those steps together on her parent’s sofa. Like all Americans we went to bed that night knowing we lived in the greatest country in the history of the world.
God bless Neil Armstrong.
Tonight that American flag is still there on the moon. And I don’t doubt for a second that Neil Armstrong’s spirit is still with us: that unique blend of optimism, humility and the utter confidence that when the world needs someone to do the really big stuff, you need an American.
That’s how I was brought up.
My dad had been born in Mexico and his family had to leave during the Mexican revolution. I grew up with stories of his family being fed by the US Government as war refugees. My dad never made it through college and apprenticed as a lath and plaster carpenter. And he had big dreams. He convinced my mom, a beautiful young actress, to give up Hollywood to marry him. He moved to Detroit, led a great automobile company and became Governor of the Great State of Michigan.
We were Mormons and growing up in Michigan; that might have seemed unusual or out of place but I really don’t remember it that way. My friends cared more about what sports teams we followed than what church we went to.
My mom and dad gave their kids the greatest gift of all – the gift of unconditional love. They cared deeply about who we would BE, and much less about what we would DO.
Unconditional love is a gift that Ann and I have tried to pass on to our sons and now to our grandchildren. All the laws and legislation in the world will never heal this world like the loving hearts and arms of mothers and fathers. If every child could drift to sleep feeling wrapped in the love of their family – and God’s love — this world would be a far more gentle and better place.
Mom and Dad were married 64 years. And if you wondered what their secret was, you could have asked the local florist – because every day Dad gave Mom a rose, which he put on her bedside table. That’s how she found out what happened on the day my father died – she went looking for him because that morning, there was no rose.
My mom and dad were true partners, a life lesson that shaped me by everyday example. When my mom ran for the Senate, my dad was there for her every step of the way. I can still hear her saying in her beautiful voice, “Why should women have any less say than men, about the great decisions facing our nation?”
I wish she could have been here at the convention and heard leaders like Governor Mary Fallin, Governor Nikki Haley, Governor Susana Martinez, Senator Kelly Ayotte and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
As Governor of Massachusetts, I chose a woman Lt. Governor, a woman chief of staff, half of my cabinet and senior officials were women, and in business, I mentored and supported great women leaders who went on to run great companies.
I grew up in Detroit in love with cars and wanted to be a car guy, like my dad. But by the time I was out of school, I realized that I had to go out on my own, that if I stayed around Michigan in the same business, I’d never really know if I was getting a break because of my dad. I wanted to go someplace new and prove myself.
Those weren’t the easiest of days – too many long hours and weekends working, five young sons who seemed to have this need to re-enact a different world war every night. But if you ask Ann and I what we’d give, to break up just one more fight between the boys, or wake up in the morning and discover a pile of kids asleep in our room. Well, every mom and dad knows the answer to that.
Those days were toughest on Ann, of course. She was heroic. Five boys, with our families a long way away. I had to travel a lot for my job then and I’d call and try to offer support. But every mom knows that doesn’t help get the homework done or the kids out the door to school.
I knew that her job as a mom was harder than mine. And I knew without question, that her job as a mom was a lot more important than mine. And as America saw Tuesday night, Ann would have succeeded at anything she wanted to.
Like a lot of families in a new place with no family, we found kinship with a wide circle of friends through our church. When we were new to the community it was welcoming and as the years went by, it was a joy to help others who had just moved to town or just joined our church. We had remarkably vibrant and diverse congregants from all walks of life and many who were new to America. We prayed together, our kids played together and we always stood ready to help each other out in different ways.
And that’s how it is in America. We look to our communities, our faiths, our families for our joy, our support, in good times and bad. It is both how we live our lives and why we live our lives. The strength and power and goodness of America has always been based on the strength and power and goodness of our communities, our families, our faiths.
That is the bedrock of what makes America, America. In our best days, we can feel the vibrancy of America’s communities, large and small.
It’s when we see that new business opening up downtown. It’s when we go to work in the morning and see everybody else on our block doing the same.
It’s when our son or daughter calls from college to talk about which job offer they should take….and you try not to choke up when you hear that the one they like is not far from home.
It’s that good feeling when you have more time to volunteer to coach your kid’s soccer team, or help out on school trips.
But for too many Americans, these good days are harder to come by. How many days have you woken up feeling that something really special was happening in America?
Many of you felt that way on Election Day four years ago. Hope and Change had a powerful appeal. But tonight I’d ask a simple question: If you felt that excitement when you voted for Barack Obama, shouldn’t you feel that way now that he’s President Obama? You know there’s something wrong with the kind of job he’s done as president when the best feeling you had was the day you voted for him.
The President hasn’t disappointed you because he wanted to. The President has disappointed America because he hasn’t led America in the right direction. He took office without the basic qualification that most Americans have and one that was essential to his task. He had almost no experience working in a business. Jobs to him are about government.
I learned the real lessons about how America works from experience.
When I was 37, I helped start a small company. My partners and I had been working for a company that was in the business of helping other businesses.
So some of us had this idea that if we really believed our advice was helping companies, we should invest in companies. We should bet on ourselves and on our advice.
So we started a new business called Bain Capital. The only problem was, while WE believed in ourselves, nobody else did. We were young and had never done this before and we almost didn’t get off the ground. In those days, sometimes I wondered if I had made a really big mistake. I had thought about asking my church’s pension fund to invest, but I didn’t. I figured it was bad enough that I might lose my investors’ money, but I didn’t want to go to hell too. Shows what I know. Another of my partners got the Episcopal Church pension fund to invest. Today there are a lot of happy retired priests who should thank him.
That business we started with 10 people has now grown into a great American success story. Some of the companies we helped start are names you know. An office supply company called Staples – where I’m pleased to see the Obama campaign has been shopping; The Sports Authority, which became a favorite of my sons. We started an early childhood learning center called Bright Horizons that First Lady Michelle Obama rightly praised. At a time when nobody thought we’d ever see a new steel mill built in America, we took a chance and built one in a corn field in Indiana. Today Steel Dynamics is one of the largest steel producers in the United States.
These are American success stories. And yet the centerpiece of the President’s entire re-election campaign is attacking success. Is it any wonder that someone who attacks success has led the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression? In America, we celebrate success, we don’t apologize for it.
We weren’t always successful at Bain. But no one ever is in the real world of business.
That’s what this President doesn’t seem to understand. Business and growing jobs is about taking risk, sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding, but always striving. It is about dreams. Usually, it doesn’t work out exactly as you might have imagined. Steve Jobs was fired at Apple. He came back and changed the world.
It’s the genius of the American free enterprise system – to harness the extraordinary creativity and talent and industry of the American people with a system that is dedicated to creating tomorrow’s prosperity rather than trying to redistribute today’s.
That is why every president since the Great Depression who came before the American people asking for a second term could look back at the last four years and say with satisfaction: “you are better off today than you were four years ago.”
Except Jimmy Carter. And except this president.
This president can ask us to be patient.
This president can tell us it was someone else’s fault.
This president can tell us that the next four years he’ll get it right.
But this president cannot tell us that YOU are better off today than when he took office.
America has been patient. Americans have supported this president in good faith.
But today, the time has come to turn the page.
Today the time has come for us to put the disappointments of the last four years behind us.
To put aside the divisiveness and the recriminations.
To forget about what might have been and to look ahead to what can be.
Now is the time to restore the Promise of America. Many Americans have given up on this president but they haven’t ever thought about giving up. Not on themselves. Not on each other. And not on America.
What is needed in our country today is not complicated or profound. It doesn’t take a special government commission to tell us what America needs.
What America needs is jobs.
Lots of jobs.
In the richest country in the history of the world, this Obama economy has crushed the middle class. Family income has fallen by $4,000, but health insurance premiums are higher, food prices are higher, utility bills are higher, and gasoline prices have doubled. Today more Americans wake up in poverty than ever before. Nearly one out of six Americans is living in poverty. Look around you. These are not strangers. These are our brothers and sisters, our fellow Americans.
His policies have not helped create jobs, they have depressed them. And this I can tell you about where President Obama would take America:
His plan to raise taxes on small business won’t add jobs, it will eliminate them;
His assault on coal and gas and oil will send energy and manufacturing jobs to China;
His trillion dollar cuts to our military will eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs, and also put our security at greater risk;
His $716 billion cut to Medicare to finance Obamacare will both hurt today’s seniors, and depress innovation – and jobs – in medicine.
And his trillion-dollar deficits will slow our economy, restrain employment, and cause wages to stall.
To the majority of Americans who now believe that the future will not be better than the past, I can guarantee you this: if Barack Obama is re-elected, you will be right.
I am running for president to help create a better future. A future where everyone who wants a job can find one. Where no senior fears for the security of their retirement. An America where every parent knows that their child will get an education that leads them to a good job and a bright horizon.
And unlike the President, I have a plan to create 12 million new jobs. It has 5 steps.
First, by 2020, North America will be energy independent by taking full advantage of our oil and coal and gas and nuclear and renewables.
Second, we will give our fellow citizens the skills they need for the jobs of today and the careers of tomorrow. When it comes to the school your child will attend, every parent should have a choice, and every child should have a chance.
Third, we will make trade work for America by forging new trade agreements. And when nations cheat in trade, there will be unmistakable consequences.
Fourth, to assure every entrepreneur and every job creator that their investments in America will not vanish as have those in Greece, we will cut the deficit and put America on track to a balanced budget.
And fifth, we will champion SMALL businesses, America’s engine of job growth. That means reducing taxes on business, not raising them. It means simplifying and modernizing the regulations that hurt small business the most. And it means that we must rein in the skyrocketing cost of healthcare by repealing and replacing Obamacare.
Today, women are more likely than men to start a business. They need a president who respects and understands what they do.
And let me make this very clear – unlike President Obama, I will not raise taxes on the middle class.
As president, I will protect the sanctity of life. I will honor the institution of marriage. And I will guarantee America’s first liberty: the freedom of religion.
President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. MY promise…is to help you and your family.
I will begin my presidency with a jobs tour. President Obama began with an apology tour. America, he said, had dictated to other nations. No Mr. President, America has freed other nations from dictators.
Every American was relieved the day President Obama gave the order, and Seal Team Six took out Osama bin Laden. But on another front, every American is less secure today because he has failed to slow Iran’s nuclear threat.
In his first TV interview as president, he said we should talk to Iran. We’re still talking, and Iran’s centrifuges are still spinning.
President Obama has thrown allies like Israel under the bus, even as he has relaxed sanctions on Castro’s Cuba. He abandoned our friends in Poland by walking away from our missile defense commitments, but is eager to give Russia’s President Putin the flexibility he desires, after the election. Under my administration, our friends will see more loyalty, and Mr. Putin will see a little less flexibility and more backbone.
We will honor America’s democratic ideals because a free world is a more peaceful world. This is the bipartisan foreign policy legacy of Truman and Reagan. And under my presidency we will return to it once again.
You might have asked yourself if these last years are really the America we want, the America won for us by the greatest generation.
Does the America we want borrow a trillion dollars from China? No.
Does it fail to find the jobs that are needed for 23 million people and for half the kids graduating from college? No.
Are its schools lagging behind the rest of the developed world? No.
And does the America we want succumb to resentment and division? We know the answer.
The America we all know has been a story of the many becoming one, uniting to preserve liberty, uniting to build the greatest economy in the world, uniting to save the world from unspeakable darkness.
Everywhere I go in America, there are monuments that list those who have given their lives for America. There is no mention of their race, their party affiliation, or what they did for a living. They lived and died under a single flag, fighting for a single purpose. They pledged allegiance to the UNITED States of America.
That America, that united America, can unleash an economy that will put Americans back to work, that will once again lead the world with innovation and productivity, and that will restore every father and mother’s confidence that their children’s future is brighter even than the past.
That America, that united America, will preserve a military that is so strong, no nation would ever dare to test it.
That America, that united America, will uphold the constellation of rights that were endowed by our Creator, and codified in our Constitution.
That united America will care for the poor and the sick, will honor and respect the elderly, and will give a helping hand to those in need.
That America is the best within each of us. That America we want for our children.
If I am elected President of these United States, I will work with all my energy and soul to restore that America, to lift our eyes to a better future. That future is our destiny. That future is out there. It is waiting for us. Our children deserve it, our nation depends upon it, the peace and freedom of the world require it. And with your help we will deliver it. Let us begin that future together tonight.

– –


RNC DAY 1.5: Baseless Speculation
UPDATE: Romney Officially Nominated as Republican Presidential Candidate

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TAMPA, Florida
OK, we’ll count Monday as a half-day, and I apologize for the late start today, but schmoozing and socializing with colleagues and sources is part of the job. There will be actual news here momentarily, I promise, but first: Baseless speculation from Jim Geraghty!

Buried deep in the convention schedule released Monday is a vague reference to a mystery speaker scheduled for the event’s final evening. “To Be Announced” has a prime speaking slot late in the Thursday program. . . .
I have no inside information (yet), but at dinner with my NR colleagues, last night, I pointed out that Palin is glaring by her absence from the program . . .

Right, Jim. And while I likewise have no inside information (yet) my strong suspicion is . . . Donnie and Marie Osmond.

It’s so obvious and logical.

UPDATE: To eliminate all possible confusion:

The RNC provides these convenient “You Are Here” signs to assist liberal reporters who fail to realize they are in Tampa in 2012 and instead believe they’re in Nurmberg in 1934 — which reminds me that I’ve got a column today in The American Spectator:

The Republican Party has spared no expense to accommodate the hundreds of journalists who have come here to write dishonest stories aimed at preventing the GOP from winning this year’s election.
If you’ve been following major media coverage of the Republican National Convention, you know that the party’s presidential candidate is Todd Akin, who will campaign this fall on a platform of undiluted hatred and evil, with the able assistance of his running mate, Martin Bormann Jr. The Akin-Bormann ticket was personally selected by RNC Chairman Rush Limbaugh and endorsed by Karl Rove after consultation with a secretive cabal of right-wing Mormon billionaires. The Republican delegates who are assembling this week in Tampa are mere dupes hired by the Koch brothers to provide the superficial appearance of a “political convention” debating a platform and nominating candidates.
Such is the narrative subtext of most of the GOP convention coverage, which is provided by a political press corps that is overwhelmingly composed of people who would never vote for any Republican under any imaginable circumstance. . . .

Please read the whole thing.

UPDATE II: Wherever you find Democrats, you find drunk Democrats: Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley was reportedly seen in an extreme state of intoxication in an Ybor City bar last night. Fortunately, no campaign aides were drowned — that we know of.

UPDATE III: Rules committee drama? We’ll see. Right now, I’ve got to get over to the Sheraton for an important meeting.

UPDATE IV: The meeting at the Sheraton has been delayed. Meanwhile, I dropped over to the “Liberty Plaza” site to catch a screening of Stephen K. Bannon’s new documentary, The Hope and the Change, about disillusioned former Obama voters. Excellent film.

Meanwhile — and, hey, this is actual news, if not particularly surprising — Mitt Romney is now officially the Republican Party presidential nominee. The roll-call vote put him over the top, clearing the 1,144 votes needed for a majority, at 5:40 p.m. ET, when the New Jersey delegation cast all of its 50 votes for Romney.

UPDATE V: While at the Sheraton, I ran into an old friend — a guy from Texas I interviewed last October:

They’ll soon be calling him Senator Ted Cruz.

UPDATE VI: A few photos from today:


Why do you hate Liberty, huh?


Notice the pro-Israel protester next to the Ron Paul activists.


Stephen Bannon and Larry O’Connor of Breitbart.com broadcast from Radio Row.

NPR’s idea of Republicans: David Brooks and David Gergen are interviewed by a TV crew.

UPDATE VII: Just got back from the Tampa Bay Times Forum and got this photo from the nosebleed section:

I worked my way around to Suite 557 — the vice-chairman’s suite — where I had expected to find Javier Manjarres of the Shark Tank. He wasn’t there, but I got to stay and listen to Rick Santorum’s awesome speech.

 





 

PREVIOUSLY:

 


Cheryl Voted for Obama in 2008, But …

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. . . this time in New Hampshire? Not so much:

Governor Romney challenged each member of the crowd to speak to one Obama voter to convince them to change their minds this time around.
The visuals were excellent and it seemed hard work of the volunteers paid off. My interviews after the event suggested an energized crowd, but the most significant moment was an interview with a newly retired schoolteacher named Cheryl from Nashua New Hampshire.
Cheryl was an Obama voter, a former teacher who had never gone to a Romney event before. She left as a Romney voter. I asked her per, Gov Romney’s challenge, what she would say to a fellow 2008 Obama voter to persuade them to change their vote her answer was telling:
“All they have to do is listen carefully, there is so much negativity and there is no message in negativity.”
Her dissatisfaction, more than any successfully staged event is the greatest danger to the election prospects of this administration.

Read the rest of Da Tech Guy’s column at the Examiner.

When the Truth Goes Viral

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‘Occupy the Truth’ rally in Cleveland, Ohio, Aug. 18, 2012
Photo by Pat Dooley (Hat-tip: Instapundit)

Iowahawk’s observation — “Paul Ryan represents Obama’s most horrifying nightmare: math” — is well on its way to becoming world famous, and may yet become the final epitaph on Obama’s presidency. As I remarked Thursday:

If voters can be made to focus on the numbers — including the administration’s record deficit spending and historically high unemployment — it seems unlikely that the Democrat incumbent can be re-elected. And polls indicate that the “Ryan Effect” may already be making a difference. Not only does the Romney-Ryan ticket now lead both the Gallup and Rasmussen national tracking polls, but the latest Ohio polls also indicate a bounce for the Republicans since Ryan was announced as Romney’s running mate.

The Democrat-Media Complex has expended a lot of effort trying to convince us that Mitt Romney made a bad choice, and that the selection of Paul Ryan is a mistake. But the bold truth is always better politics than a timid evasion, and telling the truth — that Obama’s policies are actually a threat to the Medicare benefits of current retirees — is what the Ryan pick is all about. Evidence of the “Ryan Effect” includes the huge enthusiastic crowds that have begun showing up at GOP rallies, including Saturday’s unprecedented turnout at The Villages in Florida:

I have no idea how many people were there, I’ve never seen a crowd that large at any of the events I’ve attended at The Villages, and the crowd was not disappointed.

Instapundit: “These guys don’t seem to be following the script that the Dems and media had written for them.” Exactly so. One of the great secrets to clear-thinking conservatism is being able to tune out the disinformation emanating from the liberal media — and from Republicans who have internalized a negative self-image based on the liberal worldview. The idea that retirees in Florida are so ignorant and so vulnerable to the Democrats’ “Mediscare” demagoguery that they will automatically reject any attempt at entitlement reform is part of the GOP’s negative self-image that cannot be defeated unless it is directly confronted.

Democrats succeed by distractions and distortions, and we have become so accustomed to this that we often don’t even notice it. Generic promotional boilerplate from ABC News:

Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter and Romney campaign senior adviser Kevin Madden face off on the latest battles in the 2012 presidential campaign, Sunday on “This Week.”
Mitt Romney and his new running mate Rep. Paul Ryan hit the campaign trail this week, looking to gain momentum with just over one week before the Republican convention in Tampa. Has Ryan’s selection energized the ticket and galvanized conservative supporters for the fall? Or will continued scrutiny of Ryan’s Medicare proposals and Romney’s tax returns hurt their campaign for undecided voters?

The alternatives presented here are dishonest to the point of being counterfactual, and give us a glimpse into the liberal mindset.

First of all, there is no question — none at all — that Ryan’s selection has “energized the ticket.” I don’t need any polls or pundits to tell me this, because I’ve seen it with my own eyes, live and in person, in the thousands of fired-up Republicans who flocked to see Romney-Ryan in Manassas, Romney in Chillicothe and Ryan at Miami (Ohio) University. The fact that ABC News poses this as a question can only be understood as a bizarre attempt to confuse readers.

The second alternative presented by ABC News, of factors that might “hurt their campaign for undecided voters,” is actually a repetition of Obama campaign talking points. It is only Democrats, and their friends in the media, who believe that “Romney’s tax returns” are a legitimate issue, or that “Ryan’s Medicare proposals” are a liability with “undecided voters.” The “continued scrutiny” of which ABC News speaks is coming entirely from journalists who are echoing and amplifying the Democrats’ message.

Where is the ABC News story about the threat to Obama’s re-election posed by “continued scrutiny” of the Fast and Furious scandal?

(Crickets chirping.)

At some point, blatant dishonesty from the media loses its effectiveness for the simple reason that people just aren’t as stupid as the media think they are. Once people start figuring out they are being scammed and hustled, once they see for themselves the yawning chasm between the media’s misrepresentations and the actual truth, the media constructed illusion rapidly collapses.

The White House’s attempt to defend Joe Biden’s “chains” remark is doomed to fail for this very reason: People can see for themselves what Biden said — how he said it, and to whom that “y’all” was directed — and it is impossible to evade the self-evident truth.

Two weeks from today, Sept. 2, Romney’s lead in the polls will be a solid fact that the media won’t be able to ignore. Then we’ll see a lot of stories about how Team Obama plans to mount a comeback — casting Democrats in the underdog role, even though anyone can go back and see that, in early August, the same media were trumpeting polls that allegedly showed Obama a shoo-in for re-election.

On Aug. 12, the Real Clear Politics average of national polls showed Obama leading by 4.7 points. That lead has now narrowed to 3.4 points, despite all the confusion caused by the disinformation emitted from the Democrat-Media Complex.

We are still a week away from the Republican National Convention in Tampa and, by the time that concludes on Aug. 30, we will see a steady stream of polls that show the Romney-Ryan ticket moving ahead. So when the Democrats convene Sept. 3 in Charlotte, Obama will be on the defensive, trailing in the RCP average for the first time all year. And what then? An avalanche of lies.

Democrats will unleash smear-and-fear tactics in a campaign of raw dishonesty unprecedented in American political history. The only question is to what extent the liberal media will cooperate in Team Obama’s attempt to decieve their way to re-election. During the final 10 weeks of this campaign, journalists will find themselves forced to choose between their political loyalty to the liberal cause, and their professional obligation to the truth.

The Democrat-Media Complex would be unwise to risk what remains of their credibility on politically convenient falsehoods.

Liars cannot succeed, when the truth goes viral.

Update (Smitty): Thank you, Instapundit, for not pussyfooting around. Except for when you do:

 

 

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