What’s New Today
Story #1 looks
at the state of the November race for President. #2 tells that Obama promised to fundamentally
change America and most Americans feel he has kept that promise, but they aren’t
happy about it. Read another reason
Obama won’t be reelected. #3 asks the
question if we are seeing signs of desperation in Obama’s behavior. #4 show the state of the left today. What if
the left gave a protest and no one came?
#5 looks at the other side of the story about Bain Capital. Was it a company of vulture capitalist or was
it a savior of many businesses and many jobs?
#6 looks at some of the supporters of BHO and their role in offshoring
jobs.
Today’s
Thoughts
The Romney campaign released the actual fund raising figures for
June. They raised $106.1 million in June and a total of $183.1 the past two
months. They now have $160 million
cash on hand. In the meantime, Obama raised $71 million making his two
month total $131 million. This gives
Romney a lead of over $50 million in the past two months.
A poll by the
Hill shows Republicans are generally
paying more attention than Democrats — 56 percent to 44 percent of the 2012
election. That is at least one sign of
intensity for who will vote.
"One legislator accused me of having a
nineteenth-century attitude on law and order. That is a totally false
charge. I have an eighteenth-century
attitude. That is when the Founding Fathers made it clear that the safety
of law-abiding citizens should be one of the government's primary
concerns." Ronald Reagan
It seems all the states the elected Republican
governors have seen a decline in unemployment. The unemployment rate in these states decline
was 1.35%, compared to the national decline of .9%. So Obama
can thank the Republicans for much of the progress the country has
made.
1. State
of the Race
Give the media enough time, and they
will spin straw into gold – for Democrats, naturally. And so it has been over
the last two weeks since the Obamacare ruling was handed down. We have seen media pundits debate whether
the ruling hurts Mitt Romney. We have seen them criticize Team Romney
for not being johnny-on-the-spot with a reaction to a ruling that virtually
nobody expected. We have seen them speculate that Team Obama’s Bain attacks are
working, despite a dearth of hard evidence and no serious indication from
the Romney campaign that they are worth responding to. And on and on it goes.
With the media consistently
confusing and obscuring the true state of the race, it is worth reviewing the key facts that will determine the
parameters of the fall campaign.
There are four, in particular.
(1)
Barack Obama is an unpopular president. You might never pick up on this if your only sources for
information are NBC Nightly News and the New York Times. But that does
not make it untrue…
(2)
… Impressions
about Obama seem mostly to be set.
Not only is the president’s job approval under 50 percent, but it has been this
way for most of the last 30 months….
(3)
… The economy is hurting the president. Unemployment
is high. Real incomes are stagnant. The industrial sector is slowing to a
crawl. Businesses are not hiring enough to keep up with population growth. The
sorts of jobs being added are not high paying jobs. And so on….
(4)
… Romney will have an opportunity to define himself. Team Obama has run hard against Mitt
Romney in the swing states for outsourcing jobs, offshore bank accounts, and
the like. Team Romney has been notably silent, not committing resources to
rebut these charges. One reason might be that the charges are not resonating.
Importantly, a new Gallup poll of the swing states shows no statistically
significant change in the preferences of registered voters since early May….
Watching what is going on reminds me of the movie Rocky III
based on Ali’s ‘rumble in the jungle.’
In both of these the hero lets the villain punch himself out and at the
end comes on and knocks his opponent out.
Romney is building up his cash reserves and bidding his time until the
country gets engaged. In the meantime,
the bad economic news is taking its toll on Obama and the Democrats. If they really think that they can make voters
think Bain Capital is the equivalent of Obama’s failed record, they are kidding
themselves.
2. Has Obama Fundamentally Changed America
Two-thirds of likely voters say
President Obama has kept his 2008 campaign promise to change America — but it’s
changed for the worse, according to a sizable majority.
A new poll for The Hill found 56 percent of likely voters
believe Obama’s first term has transformed the nation in a negative way,
compared to 35 percent who believe the country has changed for the better under
his leadership.
The results signal broad voter
unease with the direction the nation has taken under Obama’s leadership and
present a major challenge for the incumbent Democrat as he seeks reelection
this fall...
The feeling that Obama has changed
the country for the worse is strongest among Republicans, at 91 percent,
compared to 71 percent of Democrats who support Obama’s brand of change.
Strikingly, 1-in-5 Democrats say
they feel Obama has changed the United States for the worse….
If you were a football coach watching the films of the
opposing team (Obama), you would see his team is full of holes. Capitalizing on them should be no problem
because almost everywhere you look there is opportunity. Look at those numbers. If 56% of likely voters feel Obama has change
the country for the worse, how in the world do you think he can be
elected?
3. A Sign of Desperation?
“A step in the right direction.” That’s what Barack Obama said in Poland, Ohio, about
Friday’s Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment report, which showed only
80,000 net new jobs and unemployment remaining at 8.2 percent.
The thought will occur to many, not
all of them Obama detractors, that this was at best a baby step. It’s not
enough to keep up with population growth, much less to restore the low
unemployment rates of most of the 1990s and 2000s.
Another thought will occur to
professional amateur political strategists: Why did the president’s campaign schedule a two-day bus tour of
northern Ohio and western Pennsylvania to coincide with the day the
unemployment numbers were announced?
Sure, Ohio and Pennsylvania are
important states politically. They have 18 and 20 electoral votes, and Obama
carried them in 2008 with 51 and 54 percent of the votes.
And current polling shows Obama with only 46 percent in Ohio and 47 percent
in Pennsylvania when paired against Mitt Romney.
Obama’s bus tour was aimed at the
historically Democratic Rust Belt territory. Since the United Steelworkers,
United Auto Workers and United Rubber Workers organized the steel, auto and
rubber factories on Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Akron, Youngstown and Toledo, this
has been prime Democratic territory….
…But what else could he talk about?
Certainly not the Environmental
Protection Agency’s rules shutting down coal-fired electric plants. Nor his
decision blocking the Keystone oil pipeline.
He could hail the development of
fracking in the region’s Marcellus shale natural gas formation in the region,
except for the fact that regulators in
his administration seem intent on shutting it down.
He could repeat his calls for
“investment” in education, but even if you don’t regard that as a political
payoff to the teacher unions, the
dividends are going to be a long time coming in.
And calls for investment in infrastructure may lead people to recall his
chuckling admission that there are no shovel-ready projects, thanks to
regulatory and legal roadblocks.
The uncomfortable fact is that Obama
doesn’t have a convincing economic story to tell. The recovery summer promised for 2010 and for 2011 and again for 2012
has yet to arrive.
Obama needs majorities in the Rust
Belt counties to carry Ohio and Pennsylvania again. But last week’s bus tour
shows he’s having difficulty in this historically Democratic territory.
There’s not much he can say because he has done such a
dismal job. From 670,000 jobs created in
December through February, we now have 233,000 jobs created from April through
June. It definitely is not a step in the
right direction.
4. What
if the left called for a protest and no one came?
David
Koch held a fundraiser for Mitt Romney this afternoon at his
home on Long Island. At this point in the election cycle, that’s how the
candidates are spending much of their time–attending fundraisers. But leftists
thought they could make some hay out of connecting Romney to the Koch brothers,
perhaps because they assume, wrongly, that most people share their detestation
of the Kochs. So for some weeks, a
consortium of left-wing groups including MoveOn.org, Occupy Wall Street, the
Long Island Progressive Coalition, Greenpeace, Strong For All, United New York,
the Teamsters Union and others have been urging their members and supporters to
turn out for a protest at David Koch’s home. This “invitation” by the
Occupy movement was one of many that went out to liberals across the country….
…That would be a
pretty good turnout for a softball game. Newsday estimated the “crowd” at 100.
An Occupier estimated the crowd at 150, while local law enforcement gave CNN a
generous estimate of 200 protesters.
Well at least this time someone
didn’t hire the protestors. I guess the
left was getting embarrassed when right wing media asked the Rove protestors
who Karl Rove was and none of them had any idea.
5. The Real Story of Bain Capital
…For the record, I was the public relations consultant
responsible for the content, planning and execution of communications related
to the January 2005 reorganization of Ampad and the closing of its flagship
manufacturing facility in Holyoke. I was there. Romney had left Bain more than five years earlier. He had no role,
responsibility or input in the events that occurred. Yet these events continue
to be cited by the Obama camp, with either the complicity of, or disinterest in
accuracy by, many news outlets. Such lack of precision in the reporting of
other Bain examples pervades.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, then a GOP
primary rival, went so far as to call Romney and Bain “vulture capitalists.”
Both the facts and the record show nothing could be further from the truth.
In the Ampad example, employees were given months of notice
before the closing, job transfer offers, severance pay, free outplacement
assistance services and other benefits.
Successful business people do not
buy or create businesses to fail and Ampad
— on the brink of bankruptcy when Bain bought it in 1992 — operated, provided
jobs and positive economic impact for an ADDITIONAL 13 YEARS on Bain’s watch.
This is conveniently ignored, as are
findings of errors and fabrications reported by numerous third-party media
watchdog organizations.
The fact that the current head of
Bain Capital is a major fundraiser for Barack Obama is also conspicuously
absent from the dialogue.
Most honorable business people will
tell you that having to close or downsize a business is never a good day — with
few exceptions, the goal is always to grow, expand and create opportunities for
all involved.
Any reasonable assessment of Bain Capital’s record, both
during and after Romney’s tenure, reveals that nearly 80 percent of its
ventures were successful, sustained or created jobs, and did so in a lawful and
honorable way. But in the world of presidential
politics, facts are oftentimes as much a victim as are we voters who must
endure the demagoguery, zealotry and vitriol pervasive in today’s polarized
environment….
The Democrats are lying because if they told the truth they
would have absolutely nothing to argue in their own defense. What Obama has done, hasn’t worked. What Romney did in the private sector did
work---very well.
6. Are Obama’s hands covered with the blood of
offshored workers?
And that’s not all for Rogers; he stated that
he wants to intensify the trend that started with moving call centers and
factories overseas to outsourcing
“day-to-day activities” including pest control, landscaping, and secretarial
functions. And Rogers isn’t ashamed one bit:
“We’re making a very big bet right now on outsourcing. People have
generally soured on the idea, and many companies are trading at discounts to
their private-market values. But we don’t think that view accurately reflects
the powerful secular growth we’re going to see as companies and individuals
outsource more of their day-to-day activities.”
Of course, Rogers isn’t just anyone; he and
Obama were buddies in Chicago, and Rogers’ ex-wife Desiree left a $350,000 per
year job at Allstate Insurance Company to serve as White House party planner.
If Obama’s second largest fundraiser is
outsourcing jobs by the bushel, you just know his biggest fundraiser has got to
be cravenly doing the same thing, right?
Right. Obama’s
largest fundraiser, DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, who raised $2
million for the campaign and co-hosted a
$10 million Hollywood fundraiser in May,
has been trying to outsource jobs to
China by expanding his company’s work there. Why, Jeffrey has even been
investigated by the SEC for doing it….
The
outsourcing charge is going to come back to bite Obama. Perhaps that is what Romney is waiting for.
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