What’s New Today
Story #1 talks
about Obama’s negative advertisement strategy and how it is being accepted by
Democrats but not without some misgivings.
#2 talks about some of the drawbacks to negative campaigning. Obama needs people who are pretty well off
votes. #3 looks at the lack of coverage
of the Wisconsin recall. #4 tells of
Newport Beach billing the Obama campaign for a political fundraiser and the
expenses they incurred to protect the president. #5 relates how the NYTimes is looking into
Ann Romney’s horseback riding. It seems its
front page news on the old senile gray lady.
#6 is great news for America and in fact all the Americas, but not for
the anti-oil people.
Today’s Thoughts
With the deluge of
negative ads coming from the Democrats, Obama
is being shown to be simply another politician and one with a terrible
record at that.
Newt Gingrich on Romney’s
chances, “given
this economy, this level of deficits, this level of debt,” he is confident
that Romney could “pull away” this fall.
Despite the fact that the newspapers tell us that
the majority of babies under that age of one are minority babies, that doesn’t
mean whites will soon be in the minority.
It seems minority includes race
and culture (Hispanic of which ½ are identified as white). Right now 72% of babies under the age of one
are white.
Chris Hayes, of MSNBC's says he's uncomfortable
ascribing valorous terms to fallen military because it's "rhetorically
proximate to justifications for more war." I’m
uncomfortable calling Mr. Hayes a journalist because it gives justifications
for his stupid remarks.
1. Democrats
approve of Obama strategy recognizing the risks
The Democratic leaders, in numerous interviews over the last week, said they are hearing little or no resistance among the party faithful in their states to a strategy that Republicans have characterized as anti-capitalist. And Obama has no plans to back off; his campaign will roll out more stories in the coming weeks that advisers said will again show Bain Capital as a corporate menace that protects profits at the expense of people and jobs….
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/democratic-leaders-back-obamas-bain-strategy-vs-romney-acknowledge-risks/2012/05/27/gJQAJBH1uU_story.html
Obama has to go that way because it is the only thing he’s got. The problem is that even if it worked well out of the gate (which it hasn’t) six months of negative Obama will hurt him much more than Romney.
2. Obama needs affluent voters to win
The ham-handed Barack Obama campaign
attack ads on Mitt Romney's former firm Bain Capital have drawn a lot of ire
from other Democrats.
And not just because they were
sloppily fact-checked (the ads hit Romney for layoffs long after he left Bain)
and because a leading Obama money bundler is a Bain executive himself.
Chiming in with various degrees of
disapproval were Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker ("nauseating"),
former Rep. Harold Ford, Obama car czar Steven Rattner, Sen. Mark Warner and
former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell.
There are other signs of unease
among Democratic elites. Obama contributions from Silicon Valley and Wall
Street have failed to match 2008 numbers.
But what about the voters? Will the Bain ads help Obama? Or could
there be some Bain backlash at the polls?
Start with the fact that class
warfare themes have less appeal than some people think. The last Democrat elected president on a class warfare platform was
Harry Truman in 1948.
One reason is that affluent voters are
turned off by demonization of the successful. Back in Truman's day, affluent voters outside the South voted
Republican by huge percentages. There just weren't enough of them to elect
Thomas Dewey.
Today, there are a lot more affluent
people. The 2008 exit poll told us that
26 percent of voters had household incomes over $100,000. Half of them
voted for Obama. He needs those votes again…
This is what happens when you don’t have a record you can
run on. You have to demonize the other
guy and in doing so you risk a lot.
3. What
ever happened to the Wisconsin Recall?
The Wisconsin recall is a
farce—a childish, union-sponsored tantrum that will cost the state’s
taxpayers an estimated $18 million. Perhaps the greatest irony is that
Democrats rarely discuss its ostensible cause: collective bargaining. Tom
Barrett, the mayor of Milwaukee who is seeking to replace Walker, did not use
the phrase in the speech he gave celebrating his victory in the Democratic
primary earlier this month. Graeme Zielinski, spokesman for the Wisconsin
Democratic party, told Mother Jones: “Collective bargaining is not
moving people.” A recent poll of Wisconsin Democrats found that just 12 percent
of those surveyed said “restoring collective bargaining rights of public employees”
was the most important reason to remove Walker, well behind three other
choices.
There’s a reason the
governor’s reforms have gone from being the center of the anti-Walker movement
to a talking point to be avoided. They’ve worked. Walker took office with a
projected deficit of $3.6 billion, and in two years he’s erased it. The
Wisconsin Department of Revenue projected last month that the state will have a
budget surplus of $154 million by the summer of 2013…
…One sign
that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is likely to win the election on June 5 is
the sudden disappearance of national media attention to the race. The
networks and newspapers that gave wall-to-wall coverage to protests in the
streets of Madison in the spring of 2011 and excitedly reported on the drive to
collect signatures to force a recall have gone relatively quiet as a succession
of polls show Walker leading by 5 points or more. State Democrats are
complaining that national Democrats aren’t devoting the time and resources
necessary to defeat Walker; national
Democrats are whispering to reporters that they’d warned their Wisconsin
counterparts against a costly recall effort. David Axelrod has made
comments in recent days downplaying the significance of the recall beyond
Wisconsin. Obama himself, who once promised to walk the picket lines with his
union backers when their interests were threatened, seems to want no part of
the recall—or at least not a high-profile part…
Things
are not looking good for the Democrats in Wisconsin or nationally. I think rather than worrying about winning in
November, the Democrats will be moving to damage control rather quickly. It’s
not a question of will they lose. It’s a
question of how bad it will be.
4. Newport
Beach Bills Obama
The overwhelmingly Republican, exceedingly wealthy
Southern California beach town of Newport Beach has slapped the Obama campaign with the bill for its February
fundraising visit to the Corona del Mar neighborhood. The affluent
community's City Manager Dave Kiff is behind the unprecedented billing, arguing
that since the visit was
campaign-related, not official presidential business, the Obama campaign should
pay for the increased security, as would any private event. The bill's due
date of June 9 is fast approaching, but there has been as yet no response from
the Obama campaign offices in Chicago.
Seems
fair to me? What do you think?
5. NYT—the
gray lady is going senile
Leave it to the New York Times to greet its vast audience of Sunday edition readers with a front-page hit job on Ann Romney. Everyone knows that Mitt Romney’s wife, along with his flock of sons, is one of his greatest strengths. Ann Romney is beautiful, smart, a great campaigner, and an all-around asset to Mitt Romney’s campaign for the presidency.
So what does the old “paper of record,” as it used to be called before everyone realized it is a left-liberal rag that regularly fails to separate outright propaganda from its news stories, do to tarnish Ann Romney?
It does the only thing possible. Run a story to prove what we already know: The Romneys are rich, they are part of the hated 1% (to use OWS lingo), and Mrs. Romney is someone who engages in a horse sport called “dressage.” Yes, it is so rare that you undoubtedly never heard of it before.
The Times informs us in the second paragraph that the sport attracts “wealthy women” in particular; that the horses who are in it cost “seven figures”; that Ann Romney goes on horse buying trips to Europe; and that Ann and Mitt floated a loan of $250,000 to $500,000 to one Jan Ebeling, Ann’s tutor in the sport and a horse scout….
http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2012/05/27/the-new-york-times-runs-a-hit-job-on-ann-romney-why-arent-i-surprised/
So Obama’s connection with Bill Ayers isn’t an issue we should look at, but Ann Romney’s “dressage” is something that should be on the front page of the NYT.
6. Here’s
Hope and Change we can believe in even if Obama won’t
From Canada to Colombia to Brazil, oil and gas production in
the Western Hemisphere is booming, with the United States emerging less
dependent on supplies from an unstable Middle East. Central to the new energy equation is the United States
itself, which has ramped up production and is now churning out 1.7 million more
barrels of oil and liquid fuel per day than in 2005.
“There are new players and drivers
in the world,” said Ruben Etcheverry, chief executive of Gas and Oil of
Neuquen, a state-owned energy firm that is positioning itself to develop oil
and gas fields here in Patagonia. “There
is a new geopolitical shift, and those countries that never provided oil and
gas can now do so. For the United States, there is a glimmer of the possibility
of self-sufficiency.”
Oil produced in Persian Gulf
countries — notably Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and
Iraq — will remain vital to the world’s energy picture. But what was once a
seemingly unalterable truth — that American oil production would steadily fall
while the United States remained heavily reliant on Middle Eastern supplies —
is being turned on its head…
