The Final Days

Measuring Enthusiasm in the final days 

Steve Wonder concert for Obama comes up short

Legendary performer Stevie Wonder this morning expressed his love for Cleveland during a get-out-the-vote rally at Cleveland State University.

His love went largely unrequited.

Fewer than 200 people showed up towatch Wonder perform a handful of his hits at the early voting event in support of President Barack Obama.

Cleveland sees 5% of turnout for Obama’s last visit to Cleveland vs 2008

 

Last night, in the cold and with long lines, 30,000 people showed up in Ohio to see Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. That same day, Obama attracted a meager 2,800. But enthusiasm for President FailureTeleprompter can be judged by more than comparisons with Romney. In 2008, at his last stop in Cleveland, a Democrat stronghold, Obama attracted 80,000. This morning, at his last 2012 stop in that same city, Obama could only attract 4,000.

Team Obama will spin, as they have throughout the campaign, and tell their stenographers in the Corrupt Media that they've intentionally chosen smaller, more personal venues. But does anyone honestly believe that if President WaterParter could attract crowds even half as large as the ones we saw in 2008, he wouldn't? 

Besides, even if that was the case, in that exact same Cleveland venue, according to the RNC,  McCainwas able to attract a bigger crowd in 2008 than Obama did yesterday. Yes, that's correct, Obama's attracting crowds smaller than John McCain did in 2008 but the polls are telling us he's going to best or beat his D+5 2008 turnout advantage.

Wisconsin comes out for Romney

Friday morning Governor Mitt Romney held a rally at the county fairgrounds. Despite the frosty temperatures, over 1500 people who could not get in attended the “overflow rally” outside the event.

The energy was enthusiastic and upbeat for Romney supporters. Female voters spoke to me about the most important issues to them this coming Tuesday. The overwhelming response was jobs, the economy, and a better future for their children and grandchildren.

Colorado’s last Romney event:  18,000 enthusiastic supporters

This is one I was at.  We arrived 3 ½ hours before the event to long lines.  The crowd was made up of voters of all ages and we all pumped up despite the cold weather.  It was fun to talk with the people near us.  They all were “broken glass” voters, that is, they would be willing to crawl over broken glass to vote for Mitt Romney in this election.  And the enthusiasm is for Romney.  Mitt closed comparing Obama’s call for “revenge” vs his call for “love of country.”  The crowd went wild.  

In the meantime, the Obama team struggles to explain the revenge remark.  

Six Reasons to be optimistic in the final days of election 2012

Here’s one I hadn’t heard before:

The Washington Post has updated its Congressional projections, now calling for House Republicans to roughly maintain their current majority margin in the next Congress -- if not expand on it.  Ed Morrissey makes a good point: If it took an evenly-split electorate (in terms of party ID) to build the 2010 red wave that swept Republicans back into a substantial House majority, how could they possibly hold or enlarge their advantage if 2012's electorate will besignificantly more Democratic, as many pollster are assuming?

This is a very good point.  It’s like predicting a famine when other predictions show bumper crops. 

Another reason to be optimistic:  Desperate religious ad

Socialism disguised as religious faith. 

Desperate ad or simply imbecilic ad—you be the judge

A vote for Barack Obama is a vote for a vagina???? 

New York Daily News endorses…. Romney

“Four years ago, the Daily News endorsed Obama, seeing a historic figure whose intelligence, political skills and empathy with common folk positioned him to build on the small practical experience he would bring to the world’s toughest job. We valued Obama’s pledge to govern with bold pragmatism and bipartisanship. The hopes of those days went unfulfilled. . . . The regrettable truth is that Obama built a record of miscalculations and missed opportunities.”

Obama Administration admits cannibalizing likely voters

Obama’s early voting strategy is to get less likely voters to vote early, but it appears their efforts may have cannibalized likely voters in early voting. 

Gallup expects +3 Republicans in this election

This will explain a lot of things on Wednesday such as how could the polls have been so wrong?   Most of the polls have +5 to +9 Democrats. 

Minnesota moves into toss up category

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are separated by just 1 point in Minnesota, effectively making the race there a toss-up, according to polling taken for the conservative American Future Fund.

Romney takes 46 percent of the vote to Obama's 45 percent in the poll, which was conducted by the GOP firm NMB Research and shared with POLITICO. The Republican presidential nominee is up 13 points among independents, ahead of Obama 49 percent to 36 percent.

Pennsylvania is in-play also

President Obama and Republican Mitt Romney entered the final days of the presidential race tied in a state that the campaigns only recently began contesting, a Tribune-Review poll shows.

The poll showed the race for Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes locked up at 47 percent in its final week. Romney was scheduled to campaign in the Philadelphia area on Sunday, and former President Bill Clinton planned to stump for Obama on Monday. The campaigns have begun to saturate the airwaves with millions of dollars in presidential advertising.

“They’re both in here because of exactly what you’re seeing” in this poll, said Jim Lee, president of Susquehanna Polling & Research, which surveyed 800 likely voters Oct. 29-31. Most of the interviews occurred after Hurricane Sandy inundated Eastern and Central Pennsylvania. The poll’s error margin is 3.46 percentage points.

If they are really tied at 47, Pennsylvania should go for Romney.  The undecided will go for Romney.

Michigan: Romney and Obama tied

Who are you most likely to vote for in the Presidential election - Democratic President Barack Obama, or Republican Nominee, Governor Mitt Romney, another candidate, or are you undecided?

Republican Nominee Mitt Romney 46.86%
President Barack Obama 46.24%
Another candidate 4.94%
Undecided 1.96%

Tied this late probably means this will go to Romney.

Axelrod:  Romney is going to Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota because they are in deep trouble

David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama's reelection campaign, dismissed on Sunday the notion that Mitt Romney is making Pennsylvania competitive as the GOP presidential nominee heads there later in the day. 

"They understand that they're in deep trouble," Axelrod said on "Fox News Sunday." "They've tried to expand the map because they know in states like Ohio… they're behind and they're not catching up at this point."

Reminds me of when I was a kid.  I was fighting with my younger brother and had my hands around his throat.  My mother came and pulled me off him.  He looked at me and said, “It’s a good thing mom saved you.” 

Thomas Peterffly’s YouTube Ad

If you grow up in a socialist country you tend to be a very good Americans and conservative.

Who will Navy Seals vote for?

Hint, he isn’t in office now.

NAACP takes over polling station

Yesterday a group of NAACP personal came into a polling station in Houston Texas and proceeded to break election law.  They gave out free water and moved people from the back to the front of the line as they saw fit.  

Green energy: 

Wind farm noise causes “clear and significant” damage to people’s sleep and mental health, according to the first full peer-reviewed scientific study of the problem.

One week to go

Early Voting Result

When you consider the fact that the CorruptMedia's been talking for weeks about how Obama's crushing Romney in early voting, you would think Gallup proving that Narrative a big fat phony lie would be news. Instead, though, they bury this explosive news at the bottom of a piece headlined: “In U.S. 15% of Registered Voters Have Already Cast Ballots.” Sounds like a nothing story, right?

Except waaaaay at the bottom we learn this:

Thus far, early voters do not seem to be swaying the election toward either candidate.

Romney currently leads Obama 52% to 45% among voters who say they have already cast their ballots. However, that is comparable to Romney's 51% to 46% lead among all likely voters in Gallup's Oct. 22-28 tracking polling.

A sign of the times

Minnesota moves from safe Obama to leans Obama.  What’s going on? 

Who will take Ohio?

The Romney campaign is pinning its hopes on Ohio's independent voters. "The last five major statewide races in Ohio, the candidate who won independents won the race," Jennings explained. "Rob Portman, John Kasich, Sherrod Brown, Ted Strickland, Barack Obama -- they all have one thing in common. They won independents."

Pollster Rasmussen agrees. "I expect the partisan breakdown in Ohio to be fairly even, roughly the same number of Republicans as Democrats," he said in an email exchange. "If that's the case, whoever wins Independent voters wins the election."

NPR survey:  Romney up by one

By the way, it’s also interesting to note that among independents, Romneyleads by 12 points, 51 percent to Obama’s 39 percent.

The Most Vile Ad in This Election

Michael Moore and Moveon.org may think they are being funny, but they aren’t.  Having old people make outrageous threats shows you that the Democrats are desperate and unworthy of ruling this country. 

The Best Sixteen Second Ad in This Election

It’s that simple.

Politicizing a scandal

Comparing Benghazi and Plame gate we find when it comes to politicizing it we need to look at the last item on the list, the number of times the scandal was on page one of the NY Times.  Plamegate leads in that regard 90 to 0. 

The Benghazi Story Refuses to Die, And It’s Hurting the President

We still don’t know exactly what happened between the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA and the White House as Americans in Libya requested support for Ambassador Stevens and his team in their final hours, and we almost certainly won’t before the election.

But that doesn’t do the administration much good. As various departments and officials leak to save their careers and retaliate against rivals, grenades keep getting lobbed and emails and memos keep getting leaked. The result is that theattack in Benghazi isn’t fading out of the news. As the last undecided voters make up their minds, the media outlets following this story with the greatest attention keep getting enough ammunition to keep the story alive and force the rest of the media to acknowledge the story, and that doesn’t help a White House simultaneously wrestling with a close election and a massive mutant storm hurtling at the East Coast.

Benghazi:  An October surprise or simply news?

This isn’t an “October surprise” foisted on the media by opposition research; it’s news.

This story raises precisely the sort of “big issues” the media routinely claim elections should be about. For instance, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said last week that the “basic principle is that you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on, without having some real-time information about what’s taking place.” If real-time video of the attack and communications with Americans on the ground begging for assistance doesn’t constitute “real-time information,” what does?

This is not to say that Fox News is alone in covering the story. But it is alone in treating it like it’s a big deal.

Panetta’s remarks remind me of the quotation, “A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.”  The US Military is ready to aid Americans in distress whenever, and wherever. 

Two Americas

John Edwards was correct, there aretwo Americas.  One is represented by Lena Dunham and the other is represented by Tyrone Woods.  Which America are you part of?

Are we going to see an undertow election?

Romney's operational prowess is second to none, and getting out the vote isn't a question of strategy but operation. Even given that the state Republican parties are shouldering much of this effort, and even given all the advantages Team Obama was likely to have in that arena, if Team Romney could end up close to matching them in this respect, we could be looking at an undertow election like none we've seen before. This would reflect not so much a groundswell as a cave-in, one where independents did not shift to Romney but away from Obama, where the bottom truly drops out of the Obama effort, and the story the left focuses on for the next year is why in the world those people stayed home.

If this happens, it won't be a late night after all. 

 

Obama’s Campaign Death Rattle

As a veteran of numerous national, state and local campaigns, I can tell you that each race and each campaign has its own life cycle. The 2012 presidential contest is no exception. As polls tighten, and especially since Mitt Romney’s decisive performance in the first debate, Team Obama and the president himself are showing signs of what I term a campaign’s “death rattle.”

GOP contender Rick Santorum withdrew from this year’s Republican primary within three days of my declaration that his campaign was in the final stages of “death rattle.” The phenomenon has three distinct stages.

In Stage One Death Rattle, the candidate veers sharply off-message, seemingly desperate to change the subject.

Osama’s dead and GM’s alive—Or is he?

I guess its okay to ask if Osama bin Laden is actually dead since he’s listed as a contributor to Obama’s campaign.  Now there’s someone who doesn’t hold a grudge.  And the Obama campaign took the donation, twice actually.    

Abortion—the other side of the story

"Hearing the words from Richard Mourdock, I was actually relieved."

So says Monica Kelsey, a woman conceived in rape, speaking in a web video put out by the Indiana Right to Life PAC. The video is responding to a Democratic Senatatorial Campaign Committee advertisement for Joe Donnelly, who is running against Richard Mourdock in Indiana's U.S. Senate race. The race experienced a new twist after Mourdock suggested a child conceived in rape was still a gift from God.

"I don't think that anyone should deserve the death penalty simply for the acts of their father," says Kelsey in the video.

Richard Cohen: A President who doesn’t seem to care

One of the more melancholy moments of the presidential campaign occurred for me in a screening room. The film was Rory Kennedy’s documentary about her mother, Ethel — the widow of Robert F. Kennedy. Much of it consisted of Kennedy-family home movies, but also film of RFK in Appalachia and in Mississippi among the pitifully emaciated poor. Kennedy brimmed with shock and indignation, with sorrow and sympathy, and was determined — you could see it on his face — to do something about it. I’ve never seen that look on Barack Obama’s face.

Instead, I see a failure to embrace all sorts of people, even members of Congress and the business community. I see diffidence, a reluctance to close. I see a president for whom Afghanistan is not just a war but a metaphor for his approach to politics: He approved a surge but also an exit date. Heads I win, tails you lose.

Does Envy Explain Liberal Thinking? 

For some, especially those who are well-educated and well-spoken, a sort of irrational furor at “the system” governs their political make-up. Why don’t degrees and vocabulary always translate into big money? Why does sophisticated pontification at Starbucks earn less than mindlessly doing accounting behind a desk? We saw this tension with Michelle Obama who, prior to 2009, did not quite have enough capital to get to Aspen or Costa del Sol, and thereby, despite the huge power-couple salaries, Chicago mansion, and career titles, felt that others had far too much more than the Obamas. “Never been proud,” “downright mean country,” “raise the bar,” etc., followed, as expressions of yuppie angst. The more one gets, the more one believes he should get even more, and the angrier he gets that another — less charismatic, less well-read, less well-spoken — always seems to get more.

So do not discount the envy of the sophisticated elite. The unread coal plant manager, the crass car dealer, or the clueless mind who farms 1000 acres of almonds should not make more than the sociology professor, the kindergarten teacher, the writer, the artist, or the foundation officer. What sort of system would allow the dense and easily fooled to become better compensated (and all for what — for superfluous jet skis and snowmobiles?) than the anguished musician or tortured-soul artist, who gives so much to us and receives so much less in return? What a sick country — when someone who brings chain saws into the Sierra would make more than a UC Berkeley professor who would stop them.