INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: 5 Big Stories The Press Will “Discover” After the Election.
Archive for 2012
November 7, 2012
KRAUTHAMMER: Obama Won, But Has No Mandate.
UPDATE: Ira Stoll: The Morning After.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Cory Doctorow: “Amazing to think that I’m relieved at the victory of the pro-wiretapping, pro-extrajudicial-assassination, anti-whistleblower candidate.” May he have joy of the next four years.
RICK MORAN: In Defeat, Mia Love Still Shines. She’ll be back, I expect.
IT’S A BIG COUNTRY, BUT THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE: Election Day Voter Fraud, Bullying Widespread.
WALL STREET JOURNAL: Hope Over Experience: A divided country gives Obama a second chance.
Mr. Obama’s campaign stitched together a shrunken but still decisive version of his 2008 coalition—single women, the young and culturally liberal, government and other unions workers, and especially minority voters.
He said little during the campaign about his first term and even less about his plans for a second. Instead his strategy was to portray Mitt Romney as a plutocrat and intolerant threat to each of those voting blocs. No contraception for women. No green cards for immigrants. A return to Jim Crow via voter ID laws. No Pell grants for college.
This was all a caricature even by the standards of modern politics. But it worked with brutal efficiency—the definition of winning ugly. Mr. Obama was able to patch together just enough of these voting groups to prevail even as he lost independents and won only 40% of the overall white vote, according to the exit polls. His campaign’s turnout machine was as effective as advertised in getting Democratic partisans to the polls. . . . There are few permanent victories or defeats in American politics, and Tuesday wasn’t one of them. The battle for liberty begins anew this morning.
Read the whole thing.
JOEL POLLAK: Courage For The Long War Ahead. Be Breitbart. “As Andrew Breitbart often reminded us, the most important battles must be cultural ones, because culture and media inevitably shape the political choices we make together.”
NOT IF THEY SPEND THEIR TIME WORRYING ABOUT BIG GULPS AND TRANSFATS: Will Cities Be Ready For The Next Sandy? And you don’t have to be a global-warming “climate change” alarmist to think that they should be doing more.
PROFESSOR JACOBSON: “We had a chance to stop the decline, and we didn’t.” Plus thoughts on what to do next.
TWO ESTABLISHMENT MODERATES IN A ROW HAVE LOST: The GOP needs modernization, not moderation.
MICHAEL BARONE: I was wrong–where it counted. “Remember that none of us wants to live in a country where one party wins every election even though we tend to wish our party would win every time, and so disappointment is a necessary attribute of living in an electoral republic.” Yeah, but I would’ve kinda liked to win this one.
Also: Was Hurricane Sandy the game-changer? If so, it was with eager assistance from the press.
UPDATE: Reader W.P. Zeller writes: “The real victor in yesterday’s election was the legacy media. It gathered itself up for a massive win, smashing the many prognostications of its imminent demise. We learned the MSM is alive, well, and effective as hell.”
It isn’t exactly well, but yeah, even in its decline it’s still very powerful.
READER STEPHEN JOSEPH WRITES: “Front page of today’s Sun mocking Mormon religious garments. How many people just couldn’t / didn’t vote for the Mormon, but aren’t saying?” I don’t know. It was close enough that it wouldn’t have taken many.
UPDATE: A reader emails:
Oh I’m the type who has been on the receiving end of quite a lot of disdain from GOP conservatives, tea party types, and faux libertarian neoconservatives. I voted for Gary Johnson. How could have I? And why did Romney lose? While I don’t discount the possibility of a permanent and large dependency class in blue states (and I was rooting for Romney emotionally), I think last night’s election may have as much been because of problems within the GOP as it might have been about the communist heart of urban America.
I offer the “Ron Paul” perspective here, not out of a nasty I-told-you-so spite, at all, but because now is the time to consider all the things that might have to change on the right to save America from socialism or disintegration. So here’s why Romney was intolerable for me to the point where I was willing to risk seeing Obama reflected and voted for someone else:
1) Wars – face facts, the right blogosphere has been inundated with anti-Muslim fear mongering. I know that sounds juvenile to say, it is, but the country is sick of war, still, after Bush, and Romney was literally almost campaigning on invading Syria and/or Iran. Okay, he wasn’t, but to the public it sure seemed like it. At least, it seemed like Romney was not averse to fomenting big Bush-style conflicts. Point: tea party libertarian GOP types still lust for global military intervention. They may have a point, but the public is sick of war and voted that way (when Obama’s wars remain one area where he is actually weak). GOP voters have to realize this or the GOP will continue to lose.
2) Crony Capitalism – for all of Obama’s socialist nastiness, Romney was a preeminent scion of the status quo. It wasn’t ONLY Fannie and Freddie that caused the recent meltdown, nor Obama’s regime uncertainty causing depression. I love free market capitalism, and Wall Street ain’t it. The GOP has to acknowledge the corruption there if it’s going to be credible as a free market party. And for those familiar with Austrian economics: remember the central role the Fed has played. All in all Romney may have cut taxes or talked about a balanced budget, but he would have done little and his advisors would have been the same bought and paid for by Wall Street cronies that worked with Bush. They are who got us in the economic mess, no through free market principles but through financial manipulation via the Fed, and yes, ‘they’ are cronies that meld government and finance. Whether accurate or not, the public voted against Mr. Wall Street – who really could have done little to save us from the coming dollar bubble anyway.
3) Social issues – this is the biggest weak spot for the GOP. I am somewhat socially conservative myself, and so the whole issue saddens me. However, while social conservatism has proximate and temporary popularity (sometimes), it has no staying power and is hopelessly polarizing. In other words, just let gay people marry. Half of new born children born out of wedlock and in the welfare state public school leviathan is infinitely more damaging to our social/moral fabric than a few funny looking families. To me, that’s all there is to it. People might be against gay marriage on average, but when these issues are all the GOP has going for it this is what happens: voters buckle under pressures of being called hateful (and don’t have the economic literacy to vote on economic issues), moreover the GOP becomes increasing recognized as the party of hate. It’s frustrating, but an effective strategy against a party that must retrench against real changes to cultural mores. Just let it go GOP. Focus on devolving power to the states and win the social issues there.
So there you have it. Big weaknesses of Romney that probably dissuaded voters. The thing is, the antidotes are free markets, federalism, and non-interventionist policy. These are all powerfully American policies, and the GOP could theoretically become the champion of them. In fact these three principles could be their whole platform. I know you and most readers would disagree, but I’m here to offer my perspective for enlightenment’s sake. If the right blogosphere can acknowledge that the ‘Ron Paul’ approach is basically something they need to seriously look at (without sensationalist attacks) then maybe they can start helping the GOP to start winning.
Seriously, we can’t even beat the worst leftist president we’ve ever had? With all the crap he’s done? Well, not with crappy alternatives. Here’s the silver lining: when the meltdown occurs, at least the public will know whom to blame.
(Please keep me anonymous I’m in the military, and I’m a regular instapundit reader not a fly by paulista, I’m trying to help here).
Thanks.
MICHAEL GREVE ON the meaning of “proper” in the “Necessary and Proper” clause.
“WHEN ANGRY, REDISTRIBUTIONISTS TEND TO PLOT REVENGE.” And they’re always angry.
PETE STARK (D-CA) LOST, to his fellow Bay Area Democrat: “Stark, D-Fremont, won office 40 years ago by beating a seasoned Democratic incumbent whom he painted as out of touch with the times and his constituents — just as challenger Eric Swalwell, 31, a Dublin councilman and Alameda County prosecutor, described Stark, 80, this year in the newly drawn 15th Congressional District,” The San Jose Mercury reports. “At shortly after midnight, returns showed Swalwell leading Stark by about 6 percentage points.”
No word yet which of his former constituents’ answering machines Stark will call next to shout obscenities into.
TEA PARTY FAVORITE MIA LOVE ALSO LOST LAST NIGHT: “Jim Matheson claims victory over Mia Love in very close 4th District race,” Utah’s Deseret News reports. “After a seesaw battle all night long, Matheson bested Love 49.34 percent to 48.06 percent, a 2,818-vote difference, according to unofficial results.”
Love remains mayor of Utah’s Saratoga Springs though, if I’m reading the Deseret News article correctly.
THE COMING TWO YEAR “WE TOLD YOU SO” MOMENT: Near the end of his six hour election-palooza radio show on Tuesday night, Hugh Hewitt commented:
I look back at 1984, and say, when Ronald Reagan won a huge reelection, it was an affirmation of his policies. That did not happen here [in 2012]; there is no mandate, because it’s not 1984. However, people have to lay down those markers, and make an argument, beginning tonight, that “we told you so.” This is going to be the two-year “we told you so” cycle. When the currency crisis comes, when the national defense crisis comes, when the Islamists hit us again, it is a “we told you so” moment, and Republicans can’t be afraid of that.
More from Hugh on last night, on his blog: “With A Deep Sadness And No Little Fear.”
RELATED: More from Ron Radosh: “Why Obama Won — and What Conservatives Must Do.”
ALLEN WEST LOSES REELECTION BID: “Despite outraising Murphy nearly 5-1 and launching biting attacks on the Democrat, the freshman Republican fell by just over 1,000 votes, with 97 percent of Florida’s 18th District reporting, according to MSNBC,” The Hill reports.
OBAMA VICTORY COMES WITH NO MANDATE, writes veteran former AP hand Ron Fournier at the National Journal:
Barack Obama won a second term but no mandate. Thanks in part to his own small-bore and brutish campaign, victory guarantees the president nothing more than the headache of building consensus in a gridlocked capital on behalf of a polarized public.
If the president begins his second term under any delusion that voters rubber-stamped his agenda on Tuesday night, he is doomed to fail.
Mandates are rarely won on election night. They are earned after Inauguration Day by leaders who spend their political capital wisely, taking advantage of events without overreaching. Obama is capable—as evidenced by his first-term success with health care reform. But mandate-building requires humility, a trait not easily associated with him.
“The mandate is a myth,” said John Altman, associate professor of political science at York College of Pennsylvania. “But even if there was such a thing as a mandate, this clearly isn’t an election that would produce one.”
Meanwhile, ZeroHedge warns: Next Steps: Fiscal Cliff.
RELATED: “Dems believe US dramatically undertaxed. Obama means to change that,” JimPethokoukis tweets.
AP: Obama aide: Romney concedes to Obama in a phone call.
UPDATE: From BreakingNews on Twitter: Live video: Mitt Romney speaks to supporters in Boston – @NBCNews.