Delusional Democrats

What’s New Today

Story #1 asks who is really living in the past, the D’s or the R’s.  #2 goes on to ask who really is Barack Obama.  #3 talks about campaign contributions.  #4 conjectures about Obama and is he deluding himself.  #5 looks at all the delusions going on with the left.  

Today’s Thoughts

News greenies don’t want to know.  A cotton/cloth canvas bag user does over twice the damage to the environment that a plastic bag using grocery shopper who throws away every plastic bag they get immediately after each shopping trip.

Congratulations to President Obama.  He just played his 100^th round of golf. 

1.  Who’s living in the past?  

The 1950s and 1960s — taxes were high, unions were strong, incomes more equal. And the U.S. economy grew by 3.7% a year. So, Obama seems to suggest, let’s just dial up the economic Way Back Machine — raise taxes on the rich, reregulate industry, boost union power – and we can go back to the future.

But there’s no going back, Mr. President. The post-World War II decades were affected by a host of unique factors, not the least of which was that they came right after a devastating global war that left America’s competitors in ruins. A National Bureau of Economic Research study described the situation this way: “At the end of World War II, the United States was the dominant industrial producer in the world. … This was obviously a transitory situation.”

And as former Bain Capital executive Edward Conard notes in his new book, Unintended Consequences, the size of the U.S. labor force was constrained during those decades by both the 1930s baby bust and casualties from the war. So a surge in jobs and a restricted supply of labor produced fat wage growth. Hoping for a return to that era is futile, Conard concludes…

http://ricochet.com/main-feed/It-s-Obama-Not-Romney-Who-s-Stuck-in-the-1950s

Liberals look back to the 1950s and idealize the economic situation while condemning the social status.  Unfortunately, they don’t seem to understand either situations. 

2.  Who is Obama, really?

Watching President Obama flop around like a fish out of water, careening from gaffe to desperation to dishonesty, I find myself searching for ways to put his troubling behavior into historic perspective.
Is this The Unmaking of a President? Or is it The Unmasking? Perhaps we are witnessing an American Tragedy. Or maybe we’re seeing final proof his election was The Great Mistake.
All those fit the facts, and lead to a shared conclusion. So far, the 2012 election has almost nothing to do with Mitt Romney. Even the GOP doesn’t love its choice, but the race is a dead heat because Obama is so disappointing.

His fall from grace does more than merely confirm the conventional wisdom that elections are a referendum on the incumbent. Notwithstanding White House efforts to make the race about something or someone else, Obama remains the straw that stirs the drink….

…And now comes more unsettling information, thanks to a new biography by David Maraniss, a Washington Post writer and editor.

Earlier excerpts of “Barack Obama, The Story,” made headlines, with one showing Obama as a total pothead and another revealing that a key scene in one of Obama’s own books involved a composite character.

That was just the start. An early review of the full book suggests it will shatter much of what we thought we knew about him. It seems Obama’s memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” is chock full of characters he created to fit his narrative. Not once or twice, but virtually every time he wanted to explain breakthroughs in his celebrated search for identity….

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/invents_own_legend_R8P1Yi1RX5jxywOCAJICoL#ixzz1y2qPmIiY

Obama basically is a fictional character even if you are inside his skin.  He doesn’t know who he is so how in the world could the rest of us know? 

3.  Smart Money vs Angry Money 

There has been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth as, in the spring, it appeared that forces supporting Mitt Romney would be able to raise about as much money as those supporting Barack Obama. There's even more now that it seems likely that the pro-Romney side will raise and spend more money than the pro-Obama side.

Four years ago, the Obama forces heavily outspent those supporting John McCain. The Obama campaign had enough money to target -- and carry -- heretofore Republican states like North Carolina and Indiana.

That experience made the Democrats spoiled. The prospect that the other side would have as much money as they do struck them as a cosmic injustice. The prospect that it would have more -- heaven forbid!...

…What's really interesting is that, if current projections are right, this will be the third election in a row in which the party holding the White House will be outspent by the opposition….

…Now, despite the clout any incumbent president has, Democrats are likely to be outspent by Republicans….

…In effect the Court said that you can abridge First Amendment rights in order to limit "smart money" contributions. Smart money, by definition, goes only to incumbents and candidates with a good chance of winning.

But in our last two presidential elections and apparently in this one, the smart money going to the party in power has been outweighed by "angry money" going to the party out of power.

The billionaires and the many, many others fueling the anti-Bush coffers in 2004 believed that the 43rd president had lied America into an unjustified and probably unwinnable war. I didn't agree but, hey, it's a free country and people should be free to try to elect the candidate of their choice.

In 2008 Barack Obama raised a lot of "hope" money and, since it looked like a Democratic year, a lot of smart money. But angry money from Bush haters helped propel his total take to record levels.

This year there's no doubt that the billionaires and the many, many others contributing to the Romney campaign and pro-Romney super-PACs are angry about the Obama Democrats' policies and believe they will be harmful to the nation.

In sum, angry money seems to be trumping smart money in American politics these days.

http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/angry-money-gives-funding-edge-gop-and-romney/603471

With the coming election looking to break all records for the money that will be spent, the Democrats will rail against Citizen United.  But in actuality, it will be citizens united that will overcome Obama’s built in fund raising advantage. 

4.  Obama Deludes himself

The U.S. has never before had a President who thinks so little of the American people that he imagines he can win re-election running on the opposite of reality. But that is the reality of President Obama today.
Waving a planted press commentary, Obama recently claimed on the campaign stump, “federal spending since I took office has risen at the slowest pace of any President in almost 60 years.”
Peggy Noonan aptly summarized in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal  Journal the take away by the still holding majority of Americans living in the real world:

“There is, now, a house-of-cards feel about this administration.  It became apparent some weeks ago when the President talked on the stump – where else? – about an essay by a fellow who said spending growth [under Obama] is actually lower than that of previous Presidents.  This was startling to a lot of people, who looked into it and found the man had left out most spending from 2009, the first year of Mr. Obama’s Presidency.  People sneered: The President was deliberately using a misleading argument to paint a false picture!  But you know, why would he go out there waiving an article that could immediately be debunked?  Maybe because he thought it was true.  That’s more alarming, isn’t it, the idea that he knows so little about the effects of his own economic program that he thinks he really is a low spender.”

What this shows most importantly is that the recognition is starting to break through to the general public regarding the President’s rhetorical strategy that I’ve have been calling Calculated Deception.  The latter is deliberately using a misleading argument to paint a false picture.  That has been a central Obama practice not only throughout his entire presidency, but also as the foundation of his 2008 campaign strategy, and actually throughout his whole career.

Rest assured, Ms. Noonan, that the President is not as nuts as he may seem at times.  He knows very well that he is not a careful spender.  His whole mission is to transform the U.S. not into a Big Government country, but a Huge Government country, because only a country run by a Huge Government can be satisfactorily controlled by superior, all wise and beneficent individuals like himself…. 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2012/06/14/president-obama-the-biggest-government-spender-in-world-history/

Mr. Obama is either bi-polar or he is a desperate politician willing to say anything to try to get reelected.  You be the judge. 

5. Democrats Delude themselves

Licking their wounds after their attempted recall of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was soundly rebuffed by the Badger State’s voters, Democrats and their public-sector union allies have embraced the underdog mantle. In their dejected telling, the recall’s defeat is entirely attributable to the flood of outside cash to support Mr. Walker. All the standard left-wing scourges - “billionaire” Republicans, the libertarian Koch brothers, the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United - have been trotted out to support this lament. Even the Obama administration has gotten in on the act, with campaign manager Jim Messina alleging that “corporate and special-interest” spending “swung the election” in Mr. Walker’s favor. Democratic strategists despair that the left simply lacks the financial resources to compete with the right on an equal footing.

We can appreciate the allure of this narrative, which exempts the left from any serious reflection about the appeal of its political agenda or the flaws of its recall strategy. Indeed, there is a small kernel of truth to it: While the much-cited media claim that Mr. Walker outspent his Democratic rival, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, by a margin of 7-1 is almost certainly inflated, - the real ratio appears to have been closer to 3-1 - it is true that Mr. Walker was able to raise and spend more than his opponent. But the reasons for Mr. Walker’s spending advantage were unique to the Wisconsin race and are in no way indicative of the balance of spending power between the left and the right. Conventional wisdom and left-wing mythology may cast the GOP as the “party of the rich,” but as we document in our new book, “The New Leviathan,” the facts are closer to the opposite.

The governor’s funding advantage had less to do with the presumptive financial advantage of the right than with the intricacies of Wisconsin’s election finance rules. Those rules allowed Mr. Walker to solicit unlimited contributions from individuals after the recall petitions were filed last November, but they capped the individual contributions his challengers could accept at $10,000. Mr. Walker did not make those rules, though he did use them to his benefit. Counter to the left’s contention, however, the money he raised had nothing to do with the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in the case of Citizens United. That decision overturned a ban on federal election spending and did not apply to state election rules. Mr. Walker would have been able to collect the contributions he did even before the court overturned the federal ban. Even if it had applied, the fact is that the court’s decision freed unions as well as corporations to spend money during elections.

Moreover, it’s far from clear that money was decisive in the recall’s defeat. Polls showed that 88 percent of Wisconsin voters had made up their minds about how they would vote even before May, long before campaign spending on last-minute advertising blitzes had a chance to influence the electorate. Discomfortingly for Democrats, the ranks of those decided voters included union members who decided that whatever their disagreements with the governor, they were not in favor of evicting him before the end of his term. Exit polls later showed 38 percent of voters from union households voted for Mr. Walker. Not least, there is the fact that Mr. Walker’s reforms limited unions’ ability to compel political support from their members. Once Mr. Walker’s budget reform bill made union membership optional, unions such as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees saw their membership plummet by 45 percent. Of course, it’s easier to invoke the specter of corporate spending than to consider why the state’s public-sector unions have fallen out of favor with traditional union members and supporters….

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jun/15/defeated-in-recall-democrats-cry-foul/

Truth and facts are not strong points for the political left.  You should always double check anything the left contends to be the case.  Four times out of five you will find that there is only a small germ of truth, if there is any at all.