Over at Maggie’s Farm, Bruce Kesler provides a partial list of the nearly 500 retired senior military officers who are placing an ad Monday in the Washington Times indicating their support for Mitt Romney’s White House bid. And that is not the entire universe of military leaders backing Mitt. Kesler knows “two former top Admirals who wanted to sign but were not reached”.

Still, he reports that this is the “largest assemblage” ever of retired top military leaders organized to back a presidential candidate. By contrast, only 5 former generals and admirals are backing Obama.

That’s almost a 100 to 1 margin.

Active duty military also prefer the Republican. According to the Washington Free Beacon, “a Military Times survey revealed that active duty, National Guard, and military reserve members support Romney over Obama by a two to one margin.”

A recent poll from the American Future Fund rates Minnesota, the only state not to vote for Ronald Reagan in 1984 as a “toss-up“, with Mitt Romney enjoying a one point edge:

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.

That is consistent with what we’ve seen in polls across the nation, Romney enjoying a leading among independents. Given Obama’s negative closing message — and Romney’s upbeat one – it seems that those yet to decide are more likely to break for the challenger.

Via Alexander Marlow at Breitbart who reminds us that “Democrats felt it necessary to send top-surrogate Bill Clinton to the Land of 10,000 Lakes earlier this week, and [that] Paul Ryan will be campaigning there tomorrow.

Via Instapundit.

Perhaps the main reason former Clinton aide Gigi Georges has bucked her party’s nominee to back Mitt Romney is that the incumbent Democrat doesn’t learn from his mistakes as Bill Clinton did.  As Peggy Noonan put it in her column yesterday:

He doesn’t do chastened. He didn’t do what Bill Clinton learned to do, after he took a drubbing in 1994: Change course and prosper.

He made a number of mistakes from the get-go, pushing his health care overhaul even though people were more concerned about “jobs, the economy, all the coming fiscal cliffs”

The Democrat seemed to have a huge chip on his shoulder, confident that his presence alone will serve to accomplish the change he seeks to effect:

Because he had so much confidence, he thought whatever he did would work. He thought he had “a gift,” as he is said to have told Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He thought he had a special ability to sway the American people, or so he suggested to House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

But whenever he went over the heads of the media and Congress and went to the people, in prime-time addresses, it didn’t really work. He did not have a magical ability to sway. And—oddly—he didn’t seem to notice. (more…)

Having voted for George W. Bush in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008, Ann Althouse often serves as a kind of a barometer of the well-educated, high information swing voters are leaning.  Yesterday, she blogged that she had come for Mitt Romney.

This morning, she weighed in on the contrast between Barack Obama asking us to vote for “revenge” and Mitt Romney asking us to vote for love of country, saying it

neatly embodies a reason why I believe Romney will win. He feels like optimism, and Obama — who once owned the word “hope” — seems petulant, divisive, and ungrateful.

Read the whole thing.  (It’s short.)

UPDATE:  Observing Romney’s rally in West Chester, Ohio, Byron York concludes that the Republican “sounds like a winner.“

Make sure to check below the jump as I’ll be updating with pictures as Clayton sends them.

Two hours before the Mitt Romney rally is supposed to begin in Denver, our reader Clayton who is sitting on the stage e-mails us this picture of the crowd:

Looks like the crowd is already bigger than each of Obama’s recent Ohio rallies. Many polls try to measure enthusiasm by asking respondents about the excitement.

The real gauge, however, is not in questions answered, but deeds performed. If people are willing to give up an afternoon — or a day — to attend a political rally then that shows real commitment and suggests they represent a groundswell for their candidate.

We certainly saw that for Obama in 2008; we seem to be seeing that for Mitt Romney this week.

(more…)

Our reader Kyle Raccio alerted us to a story perhaps indicating a preference cascade toward Mitt Romney. Gigi Georges, a long-time aide to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, has announced her support for Mitt Romney.

For most of her life, George said she has been “an active Democrat” and is “proud to have worked for President Bill Clinton and then-Senator Hillary Clinton“:

. . . during that time, I saw firsthand what can be accomplished by strong, bipartisan leadership. I know what it means to work across the aisle on issues that are important to the American people. And that’s why I am supporting Mitt Romney. Governor Romney has a plan to restore the prosperity this country deserves and expects. He will work with people of good will no matter what their party, and he will pursue the policies that are in the best interest of our country, no matter who proposes them. That’s what President Obama promised to do four years ago. But like so many of his promises, bipartisan cooperation is just another one he has broken. We can’t have four more years of failed policies and two parties that can’t work together. We need the change Mitt Romney is offering.

Prominent Democratic woman backs Mitt Romney. Wonder if this is a sign that others might follow — or might already be souring on their fellow partisan.

From his first appearance on the national stage, his key-note speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama has cast himself a post-partisan figure who could transcend the polarized politics of the past dozen years or so.  That image was central to his appeal in his 2008 bid for the White House — and likely caused many wavering centrist voters to shift their support to him in the campaign’s closing days.

They might not share his politics, but they did like him as a man, at least as the man he projected himself to be.  He has not governed as he campaigned, first pushing a “stimulus” bill crafted by Democratic legislators — without Republican input — in the back rooms of Capitol Hill.  When a Republican Senator questioned him about the bill, instead of meeting that challenge in a civil fashion, the Democrat retorted, “I won.”

This was the first of his many partisan retorts.  And the partisan pugnacity that defined his presidency would define his reelection campaign.  At least since August 2011, his campaign aides made clear that their reelection strategy would focus on destroying the then-likely (and now-current) Republican presidential nominee.

Obama is closing the campaign the same way he began it  – on a negative note.  Parts of his speeches sounds like they’ve been recycled from the 2008 campaign, as if he’s still running against George W. Bush, only he has sharpened his attacks. He attacks his opponent as a stand-in for the former president, strongly suggesting that, nearly four years after the Texas Republican left office, he’s still responsible for incomes which declined and deficits which increased under Obama’s watch.

And then yesterday, he asked his supporters to vote, not out of love for country but out of revenge.

“If Obama wins,” John Nolte writes, “I don’t know how he plans to govern after running the nastiest and most divisive presidential campaign in memory. He’s looked nothing like a president during this campaign and everything like a nasty, Chicago union thug.” (more…)

I agree with Jim Geraghty who doesn’t “know how those few remaining undecided voters will react to this ad… but it strikes me as just the right tone, and contrast, to end this campaign.”

A number of right-of-center bloggers have linked/embedded this, but I hat tip Jim on this one as I first saw it on his Campaign Spot.

A friend recently posted this on Facebook and with his permission, I re-post it here for your perusal:

I wish my moderate gay friends would be honest. They all say they’re voting for Obama because of his overtures on gay rights (tenuous and empty as they are), and they disagree with his economic or foreign policies. Fine. Then Look me in the eye, speak with a level clear voice, and say “My emotional satisfaction means more than your ability find a job, the security of our diplomats abroad, your right to make your own healthcare choices, your right to pass your estate in full to your beneficiaries, the economic future of your youth, and your right to the fruits of your own labor.”

——
*and individual liberty.

In West Chester, Ohio yesterday, the local Fire Chief estimated that over 30,000 supporters gathered to hear Mitt Romney offer his pitch for real change.

That roughly three times the combined total (10,600) at Obama’s three rallies in the Buckeye State yesterday.

Ace and Twitchy have more images from the rally.  And each of these 30,000 Ohioans had to arrive early at the rally and pass through security, that is, their presence there showed an incredible amount of commitment.

And this, John Hinderaker reminds us, is par for the course for the Romney/Ryan ticket:  ”They draw large, excited crowds pretty much everywhere they go.”  ”The enthusiasm gap,”, as John puts it, favors the GOP.

An AP reporter, Stacy McCain reports, is trying to lowball the crowd size.  A more honest journalist reported that he didn’t “even know how to take a picture of” the crowd because it was so big.

Hopefully, local news will provide more reliable coverage of the rally.

UPDATE:  From his perch at Instapundit, Ed Driscoll reports:

CHANGE: Obama Attracting Smaller Crowds than McCain in 2008.

UPDATE: Obama’s Cleveland Rally Attendance 20x Lower than 2008.

UP-UPDATE:  There were 4,000 this morning at Obama’s Cleveland rally, meaning the tally at four of Obama’s Ohio rallies combined was less than half that at one Mitt Romney Ohio rally.

“Ohio, we’ve tried our ideas and they work,” President Obama said yesterday in Lima, Ohio

We’ve tried the other folks’ ideas. They don’t work. The eight years before I took office, we tried their ideas. What did we get? We got falling incomes, record deficits … and an economic crisis that we’ve been cleaning up after ever since.

Falling incomes? Record deficits? Sounds like what we got those things when we tried Obama’s ideas.

So, please tell me exactly how Obama’s ideas worked.  Federal debt increased more in his (still uncompleted) first term than it did in both George W. Bush’s terms.  The unemployment rate is higher than it was the day he took office.  And much higher than the rate forecast by his team of economists when they pitched his “stimulus.”  The economic recovery is the slowest since the Great Depression.

It’s as if the neophyte challenger running against an incumbent president.  He’s not running on his record; he’s still running against George W. Bush.

And if George W. Bush is still responsible for today’s problems, then, well, Mr. Obama hasn’t been a very effective chief effective. . .

Here’s how Mitt Romney answered Obama’s comment today that “Voting is the best revenge.”