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.
