The Choice

The Las Vegas Review Journal crucifies Obama

The Obama administration sat by doing nothing for seven hours that night, ignoring calls to dispatch help from our bases in Italy, less than two hours away. It has spent the past seven weeks stretching the story out, engaging in misdirection and deception involving supposed indigenous outrage over an obscure anti-Muslim video, confident that with the aid of a docile press corps this infamous climax to four years of misguided foreign policy can be swept under the rug, at least until after Tuesday’s election.

. . . .

These behaviors go far beyond “spin.” They amount to a pack of lies. TO RETURN TO OFFICE A NARCISSISTIC AMATEUR WHO SEEKS TO RIDE THIS NATION’S ECONOMY AND INTERNATIONAL ESTEEM TO OBLIVION, like Slim Pickens riding the nuclear bomb to its target at the end of the movie “Dr. Strangelove,” would be disastrous.

Candidate Obama said if he couldn’t fix the economy in four years, his would be a one-term presidency.

Mitt Romney is moral, capable and responsible man. Just this once, it’s time to hold Barack Obama to his word. Maybe we can all do something about that, come Tuesday.

I was conceding Nevada to Obama.  I think this puts if back in play.  Back in 2008 the Review Journal gave a grudging endorsement to Senator Barack Obama.   

Oh, how the mighty have fallen

He (Obama) faced big problems—an economic crash, two wars—but those crises gave him broad latitude. All of his stars were perfectly aligned. He could do anything.

And then it all changed. At a certain point he lost the room. 

Books will be written about what happened, but early on the president made two terrible legislative decisions. The stimulus bill was a political disaster, and it wasn't the cost, it was the content. We were in crisis, losing jobs. People would have accepted high spending if it looked promising. But the stimulus was the same old same old, pure pork aimed at reliable constituencies. It would course through the economy with little effect. And it would not receive a single Republican vote in the House (three in the Senate), which was bad for Washington, bad for our politics. It was a catastrophic victory. It did say there was a new boss in town. But it also said the new boss was out of his league.

Then health care, a mistake beginning to end. The president's 14-month-long preoccupation with ObamaCare signaled that he did not share the urgency of people's most immediate concerns—jobs, the economy, all the coming fiscal cliffs. The famous 2,000-page bill added to their misery by adding to their fear. 

And Obama kept going…

It is one thing to think you're Lebron. It’s another thing to keep missing the basket and losing games and still think you're Lebron. 

And that really was the problem: He had the confidence without the full capability. And he gathered around him friends and associates who adored him, who were themselves talented but maybe not quite big enough for the game they were in. They understood the Democratic Party, its facts and assumptions. But they weren't America-sized. They didn't get the country so well.

It is a mystery why the president didn't second-guess himself more, doubt himself. Instead he kept going forward as if it were working. 

I think this explains the Las Vegas Review Journal’s endorsement.  Peggy Noonan is softer, but explains why people are so frustrated. 

Why Nate Silver is wrong

My thesis, and that of a good many conservative skeptics of the 538 model, is that these internals are telling an entirely different story than some of the toplines: that Obama is getting clobbered with independent voters, traditionally the largest variable in any election and especially in a presidential election, where both sides will usually have sophisticated, well-funded turnout operations in the field. He's on track to lose independents by double digits nationally, and the last three candidates to do that were Dukakis, Mondale and Carter in 1980. And he's not balancing that with any particular crossover advantage (i.e., drawing more crossover Republican voters than Romney is drawing crossover Democratic voters). Similar trends are apparent throughout the state-by-state polls, not in every single poll but in enough of them to show a clear trend all over the battleground states. 

If you averaged Obama's standing in all the internals, you'd capture a profile of a candidate that looks an awful lot like a whole lot of people who have gone down to defeat in the past, and nearly nobody who has won. Under such circumstances, Obama can only win if the electorate features a historically decisive turnout advantage for Democrats - an advantage that none of the historically predictive turnout metrics are seeing, with the sole exception of the poll samples used by some (but not all) pollsters. Thus, Obama's position in the toplines depends entirely on whether those pollsters arecorrectly sampling the partisan turnout….

…We can't know until Election Day who is right. I stand by my view that Obama is losing independent voters decisively, because the national and state polls both support that thesis. I stand by my view that Republican turnout will be up significantly from recent-historic lows in 2008 in the key swing states (Ohio, Wisconsin, Colorado) and nationally, because the post-2008 elections, the party registration data, the early-voting and absentee-ballot numbers, and the Rasmussen and Gallup national party-ID surveys (both of which have solid track records) all point to this conclusion. I stand by my view that no countervailing evidence outside of poll samples shows a similar surge above 2008 levels in Democratic voter turnout, as would be needed to offset Romney's advantage with independents and increased GOP voter turnout. And I stand by the view that a mechanical reading of polling averages is an inadequate basis to project an event unprecedented in American history: the re-election of a sitting president without a clear-cut victory in the national popular vote.

Perhaps, despite the paucity of evidence to the contrary, these assumptions are wrong. But if they are correct, no mathematical model can provide a convincing explanation of how Obama is going to win re-election. He remains toast.

If Obama is really ahead, why are liberals so freaked out?

Some of the polls call the election for BHO and others give him a lead in swing states, so why then does the left seem to be coming apart and the right seem confident?

Has Media Bias hurt Obama?

Certainly, Obama's voter turnout operation can be impressive and cannot be underestimated. But while it can perhaps squeeze the same relative amount of juice from a smaller orange,it can't make the orange bigger. 

Ironically, the media that helped make Obama, may well be what unmakes him on November 6. It may have been masking the true level of Romney's support all along. If so, it may have inadvertently influenced how Obama and his campaign addressed this election. 

Had they known this race was already close, would Obama's ill-fated first debate performance have been prepared for differently -- as it was after-the-fact when it became clear that Obama had a fight on his hands? We will never know. But on Election Day we all may get a surprise -- most especially the media that did the most to create it. 

Obama has alienated too many voters

Most political predictions are made by biased pollsters, pundits or prognosticators who are either rooting for Republicans or Democrats. I am neither. I am a former Libertarian vice presidential nominee and a Vegas oddsmaker with one of the most accurate records of predicting political races.

In December I predicted — before a single GOP primary had been held, with Romney trailing for months to almost every GOP competitor from Rick Perry to Herman Cain to Newt — that Romney would easily rout his competition to win the GOP nomination by a landslide.

I also predicted the presidential race between Obama and Romney would be very close until Election Day. But that on Election Day Romney would win by a landslide similar to Reagan-Carter in 1980.

Four Reasons Obama will lose

Here’s one of the four.

Early Voting: In 2008, Barack Obama crushed John McCain in the early voting by a 55-40 margin. This was something his campaign was counting on doing again. Instead, both Pew and Gallup are finding that Mitt Romney is winning early voting by a 7 point margin. In state after state, like Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin, the evidence suggests that Obama's numbers are way down. This is very significant because Republicans tend to outperform Democrats on Election Day. So, without that edge in the lead up to November 6, Democrats usually lose.

Obama crowd’s not impressive

In a tweet from NY Times White House Correspondent Mark Lander admitted Obama crowds in Green Bay and Nevada weren’timpressive.  Green Bay the President drew only 2,600 and in Las Vegas only 4500.  Not impressive especially in the last week of the campaign.

 

 George Will:  Obama’s empty campaign

All politicians are to some extent salesmen. But Obama, having devalued the coin of presidential rhetoric by the promiscuous production of it, increasingly resembles a particular salesman, Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman:

“For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that’s an earthquake.”

Why the empty stridency of the last days of Obama’s last campaign? 

Perhaps he feels an earthquake’s first tremors.

Voting on Principle—help or hurt 

Is a vote for Gary Johnson an act of principle or a wasted vote?

Fred Thompson calls Benghazi the biggest cover-up ever

And for those who don’t know it, Thompson was a part of the Watergate investigation.

Closing the barn door after the cows got out

It appears the US has deployed classified military units near Libya since 9/11.

Reid won’t cooperate with President Romney

Today, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pledged to stonewall any attempt by Mitt Romney to pass his agenda if elected. “Mitt Romney’s fantasy that Senate Democrats will work with him to pass his ‘severely conservative’ agenda is laughable,” spat Reid. Of course, when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) suggested two years into President Obama’s presidency (after the stimulus package and Obamacare) that Obama’s failures to lead in bipartisan fashion made his defeat his first political priority, the left went insane; they still cite the line as evidence that McConnell wouldn’t let Obama get anything done. But Reid is doing it before Romney even takes office.

Said Reid: “Senate Democrats are committed to defending the middle class, and we will do everything in our power to defend them against Mitt Romney’s Tea Party agenda.”