Monday, July 9, 2012

More unraveling for the Obama Campaign



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 he seems to have been left with little to say….

…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?

Obama’s second largest fundraiser is John Rogers, the CEO of investment giant Ariel Capital Management. He has raised more than $1.5 million for Obama’s reelection campaign. Bully for him, except for one thing: Ariel Capital Management owns a $48.6 million stake in Accenture, which just happens to be, according to the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals, the nation’s “Best” outsourcer.

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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