“[E]ven among Obama voters,” writes Heather Long in Friday’s Guardian, reflecting on a variety of factors, including the number of scandals coming to light, “there should be genuine disappointment. This not the President Obama we voted for, not even close.”

She talks about the excitement and exhilaration people felt in 2008 when Obama was elected:

It was mostly young people marching – from varied backgrounds. Many of these parades ended up in front of the White House where chants of “goodbye Bush” (or some variation thereof) began. It was the same slogan heard as Barack Obama was sworn in as president in January 2009 and Bush flew away in a helicopter.

There was a belief, especially among voters in their 20s and 30s, that Obama was going to be different. That his promises to “change the culture in Washington” were real. That his administration wouldn’t be beholden to lobbyists and conduct executive power grabs.

Interesting how part of their celebration relates to the departure of the much (and usually wrongly) maligned immediate past President of the United States.

What evidence, beyond the candidate’s rhetoric, did they have that Barack Obama was an agent of change?

They were clearly not aware, as many conservatives reported in 2008, that the great Democratic hope had always been a loyal foot soldier in the Chicago Democratic machine.  In his twelve years as an elected official based in that city, Barack Obama failed to challenged its authority — as he failed to root out corrupt practices and cronyism that defined its government.

His record, as we have pointed out repeatedly, was at odds with his rhetoric.

We (that is, conservative and libertarian bloggers and pundits) told you that back in 2008.  We told you that you were voting for an image crafted by political consultants and projected onto a charismatic Chicago politician with a mellifluous speaking voice.   But, you were so eager to see George W. Bush replaced that you trusted the words of man who delighted in maligning that Republican, but about whom you knew very little.  And are only now seeing as he is today — and was back then.

Some news reports just speak for themselves.

In the Weekly Standard today, Daniel Halper writes:

NBC’s Lisa Myers reported this morning that the IRS deliberately chose not to reveal that it had wrongly targeted conservative groups until after the 2012 presidential election . . .

The IRS commissioner “has known for at least a year that this was going on,” said Myers, “and that this had happened. And did he share any of that information with the White House? But even more importantly, Congress is going to ask him, why did you mislead us for an entire year? Members of Congress were saying conservatives are being targeted. What’s going on here? The IRS denied it. Then when — after these officials are briefed by the IG that this is going on, they don’t disclose it. In fact, the commissioner sent a letter to Congress in September on this subject and did not reveal this. Imagine if we — if you can — what would have happened if this fact came out in September 2012, in the middle of a presidential election? The terrain would have looked very different.”

Via Ace. Barack Obama’s much vaunted commitment to transparency notwithstanding, that Democrat is more interested in winning elections than in opening the books on his administration.

RELATED: Worse and worse: IRS claimed in 2011 that there were no documents related to scrutiny of tea-party groups

Why did the IRS keep the scandal quiet until after the election?

“To believe“, Bruce tweeted last night, “that no one in @BarackObama White House knew about IRS scandal is to, in words of @HRClinton ‘willingly suspend disbelief’.”  Perhaps, I was in too generous of a mood last night when I read that, aware that there was as yet no evidence linking top Obama officials to the scandal.

Though given the information asked of Tea Party groups — and the fact that the IRS was approving liberal groups while leaving Tea Party ones “in limbo”, it is pretty clear that some political appointee had a say in that. Once again, who decided to ask for all this information from the Tea Party folk?

Seems the IRs was interesting not just in gleaning information about the organizations, but also about learning the names of citizens participating in the organizations. Why would they need know the names of all the group’s members and its donors?

Was their goal to get those names? And for what end?

Seems there was more to this than just string out the process.

And now Breitbart is reporting that an Obama campaign co-chair was attacking Romney with leaked IRS documents. (And that co-chiar just happens to be a Mr. J. Solmonese.)

Maybe we should be asking these questions, “What did David Axelrod know? And when did he know it?”

UPDATE: Even the names of high school and college kids?

UP-UPDATE: Sounds like David Axelrod is acknowledging Obama’s incompetence, the president’s unfitness to preside over the executive branch?

UP-UP-UPDATE: The answer could be nothing and never, but one’s gotta wonder how Obama’s political allies manage to get copies of confidential forms his ideological allies filed with the IRS.

1. It’s a presidential election. It’s not close; the Democrat has way more popular support. A few of his dumb zealots break into Republican headquarters to spy needlessly. No person is injured, but it’s still unacceptable. The more so, because the president and his crew then lie to obstruct official investigations.
2. A Republican president was recently re-elected. A philanderer and “family values” hypocrite, he has an affair with his White House intern. It would have no public significance, except that it becomes a subject of testimony in lawsuits over his other affairs. And he lies about it, under oath. He, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, has now lied to a court.
3. A Democrat president must deal with a certain Third World dictator who has attacked four neighboring countries over a period of two decades, costing hundreds of thousands of lives. World intelligence agencies, and Republican leaders in Congress, are nearly unanimous that the dictator would be happy to launch yet another war, has been developing nuclear weapons, and may have nukes already. Acting on that consensus, the Democrat president gets legal approvals from Congress and the U.N. to invade (along with 40 other nations) and remove the dictator. The invasion works, but at a cost of several thousand American lives (including the occupation, afterward). It turns out that the dictator only had chemical weapons, plus some nuclear weapons research (no nuclear bombs, yet). That’s embarrassing, but multiple official investigations clear the President of any intentional wrongdoing.
4. A Republican administration pushes thousands of guns into Mexico, causing the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans. Republicans claim the administration only did what the previous Democrat administration did. But that is not true: the previous operations had controls to minimize deaths and maximize the intelligence-gathering on Mexican drug cartels, controls that the Republican effort abandoned (for reasons unknown). The GOP Attorney General does everything he can to obstruct Congress’ investigation, and eventually is found to be in contempt of Congress. He does not resign.
5. It’s a presidential election. It is going to be close; the Republican incumbent, plagued by four years of economic failure, is not way ahead. But he has been successful, he claims, in fighting terrorism. A month before the election, Islamist terrorists attack a U.S. consulate and kill an American ambassador, plus three others. The Republican administration had warnings and permitted the attack to succeed (through negligence or perhaps for reasons unknown). They lie to the American people about it, implying that it was not a terrorist attack, that they could not have stopped the attack, that the attack was somehow really a protest caused by a YouTube video that nobody ever heard of, etc. The lies work: the Republican wins re-election.

(more…)

Earlier this morning, caught a good piece from Byron York on why winning the Hispanic vote would not be enough to secure a GOP presidential victory.  Here’s the crucial paragraph:

But here is the real solution. Romney lost because he did not appeal to the millions of Americans who have seen their standard of living decline over the past decades. They’re nervous about the future. When Romney did not address their concerns, they either voted for Obama or didn’t vote at all. If the next Republican candidate can address their concerns effectively, he will win. And, amazingly enough, he’ll win a lot more Hispanic votes in the process. A lot from other groups, too.

Read the whole thing.  Did recall reading something about a year ago on Mitt Romney’s failure to appeal to working class votes disaffected from the incumbent administration.  York is right; the next Republican candidate needs to effectively address their concerns.

Part of the answer, ironically enough (given the premise of York’s piece), lies in a piece Jill Lawrence published last week in the National Journal, a piece on Republicans’ challenges with Hispanic voters.  Lawrence cited a focus group whose participants . . .

liked what they heard about Medicaid, immigration, economics, and education in clips from speeches by some prominent party figures. But the people they listened to—New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush—are unusual in how they talk about these issues and seemed like anomalies to the focus-group participants. (more…)

The title is Jonah Goldberg’s. Apologies for forgetting who/what tipped me off to his recent speech. It wanders, but covers much interesting ground.

• On the 2012 election: Romney is a good man, but was a poor candidate from a poor field. His consultants’ disdain for ideas and making conservative arguments led to Romney often sounding like nothing more than a right-wing greeting card. This let Obama paint him (however wrongly) as a rich, greedy prude and to win voters on the basis of “who cares more about people like me”.
• On the 2016 election: It’s rare for a party to win a third term, and we can be sure the Democrats won’t do it with Vice President Biden. Meanwhile, the Republicans will have a stronger field.
• On the GOP’s long-term prospects: The GOP has the right ideas, the ideas that work, but a huge ‘persuasion problem’. Democrats are better at deploying the language of community – such as “government is the one thing we all belong to”, or Clinton’s remark on the politics of “you’re on your own” vs. the politics of “we’re all in it together”. This is a pity, because in real life, conservatives tend to be better involved in their families, communities and causes larger than themselves.

(more…)

In an article posted today on the Natonal Review’s website, Mona Charen quips that there “are two major parties in the United States: the party that wishes to govern, and the party that wants only to campaign.”

And to show that the latter party is that of the incumbent President of the United States, one need not turn to the commentary on various conservative blogs, but instead to the reporting of the left-of-center Washington Post:

After delivering his election victory speech in November, Obama walked off the Chicago stage and made two phone calls related to his political plans — one to Israel and one to Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), the last Democratic House speaker.

Israel said Obama told him “how focused he would be on winning a House majority for the Democrats,” many of whom complained that the president did not do enough during his first term to help members on the Hill.

In other words, in the immediate aftermath of his election victory this past November, the president already started looking ahead to the next election.  Since the people didn’t elect the Congress he wanted, he chose to start focusing on electing that Congress, even if the 2014 elections were two years hence.

No wonder he is blaming the sequester on the current Republican House even though he made little effort to work with the leaders of that chamber after it passed the “fiscal cliff” legislation at the end of the last Congress, delaying the sequester until last week.

RELATED: GOP accusation confirmed: Obama out to break it

Dan did a post a few days ago, but I wanted to re-invite our friends in the Los Angeles area to join me and him for “Meatless Monday” by enjoying a hearty steak dinner at Outback Steakhouse in Glendale, Calif. The official event invite is here on Facebook.

And since I’m also new Vice Chair of GOProud, I’ll be talking about our new efforts at chapter development and outreach.

For those not familiar with “The Great Steak Dinner Bet,” here’s the video from CPAC 2010.

-Bruce (@GayPatriot)

I’m late on this news, but still think it’s worth noting.

Fewer than four-in-10 Americans (39 percent) rate the US in a positive manner – the most negative feedback the country has produced since 1979.

A new Gallup poll finds that Americans are as negative about the country’s prospects as they have been in more than three decades…[whereas] fifty-five percent of Americans say the state of the nation five years ago was positive…

…The three previous points in time when ratings were as low as or lower than the 2013 rating were in August 1979 (34 percent), April 1974 (33 percent), and January 1971 (39 percent).

Where were these people, last Election Day? If they voted for Obama (and we know that some must have): What were they thinking?

Of course, a lot of them were/are deluded um, “low information voters”:

Seventy-five percent of Democrats gave positive reviews of how the nation will be five years from now…

A few days ago, Kurt posted on this speech by Daniel Hannan. I agree that it’s brilliant, in how much it packs into a short space.

Kurt’s angle was, Who are our Hannans? But I would like to get into the substance of what Hannan said.

You may disagree, but I find that any of Hannan’s major points (summarized below) could be expanded into a worthy discussion.

• The 2008-9 bailouts, and the money-printing which continues today (another form of bailout), are an ethical crime. In effect, they transfer wealth from the poor and middle class to the largest banks.

(more…)

I admit the ‘word cloud’ technique is a pretty sketchy way to analyze a speech. Still, it can be fun. Zero Hedge gives us an example. From their analysis of a few speeches:

• Reagan 1981 [inaugural speech]: – ‘believe’, ‘freedom’, and ‘government’
• Schumer 2013: – ‘America’, ‘Today’, ‘Finished’, ‘People’
• Obama 2013 [inaugural speech]: “America People Must Believe”

Got it, America? You must believe!

But the main point, for me, is simply the prevalence of “must” in Obama’s speech. As others have remarked: In his vision of the world, no one who opposes him ever does so in good faith. Whatever he believes is an imperative.

UPDATE: A cloud on Hillary’s Benghazi hearing. “People think know committee SEC”… Huh? It sounds like they spent much of that hearing on the question of what people knew or thought when, but why would the SEC pop into it?

LIke many conservatives — as well as good number of independents — who follow politics, I’ve struggled to understand how, after four years of near-constant failure, Barack Obama could have won re-election as President of the United States.  He didn’t put forward a plan to improve the economy or addressing the burgeoning debt.  He had not shown much willingness to work with his partisan adversaries in Congress.

In the ended it seems, low-information voters, together with those more concerned about matters other than the economy and our government’s shaky fiscal state, tipped the scales for the Democrat.

Michael Barone thinks that Obama “was helped by widespread feelings that it would be a good thing for Americans to elect a black president and a bad thing to reject him.”

Calling Obama “born orator backed by a flawless machine, whose personal rise from a difficult childhood is a true inspiration, and whose achievement in breaking the ultimate color barrier is gift to us all“, Noemie Emery considers a notion we have addressed on this blog

People like the idea that Obama is president. As a politician and president, he has only one failing — he is the wrong man at the wrong time to be leading this country. He is out of sync with his age and its crises. There is more proof every day — here and abroad, in nation-states, states and even some cities — that his political theories will lead to disaster, and do so every time they are tried.

The Democrat may not have any ideas on how to fix the nation’s problems, but people do like the idea of Barack Obama, the post-partisan healer who can bring people together.

In his first four years in office, he governed in a manner quite different from his 2008 campaign rhetoric — and from the media-endorsed image of his character, but some people who don’t follow politics as closely as do we.  And in whatever little bit of time they pay attention to politics, they see a less tarnished version of that image than do those more familiar with current events. (more…)

Although Barack Obama saw his support among twentysomethings decline from 2008 to 2012, he still won a solid majority of those voters.

Their support seems based more on a blind faith in the incumbent than in an appreciation for his accomplishments. “The overall unemployment rate for 18-29 year olds for November 2012 is 10.9 percent“, with one out of every eight young Hispanics out of work and nearly one in five young African-Americans out of work.

Obama did much better among young Hispanic- and African-Americans than he did among white Americans.

The study linked above showed that the unemployment rate for twentysomwethings “would rise to 16.4 percent” if nearly two million young voters hadn’t dropped out of the workforce:

The declining labor force participation rate has created an additional 1.7 million young adults that are not counted as “unemployed” by the U.S. Department of Labor because they are not in the labor force, meaning that those young people have given up looking for work due to the lack of jobs.

That the Democrat’s support slipped among young voters suggests that at least some have woken up to the reality of Hope and Change™.

In 1980, Jimmy Carter narrowly edged Ronald Reagan among voters under 30, with the Gipper scoring just 44% of the twentysomething vote. Four years later, the Gipper ]increased his share of the youth vote to nearly 60%.

And while Barack Obama did just as well among young voters last month as the Gipper did in 1984, his share of the young vote has declined since his initial election.  Young voters grew to appreciate Reagan for his accomplishments; they seem more enchanted with Mr. Obama’s image.

Some seem to think that that the Republican’s current poor showing among young voters suggests the party could lose an “entire generation”  to Democrats.  But, this notion assumes that voters party identification remains fixed.  And that is hardly the case.  How will these young voters feel about Mr. Obama and his Democratic policies when the job market for their generation continues as it has these past for years?  Come 2016 (even 2014), they could be quite open to a Republican message expressed in terms similar to those offered by Reagan in the 1980s.

That said, the GOP today doesn’t so much have a youth vote problem as it has an ethnic problem.  Ben Domenech reminds us that

Mitt Romney won white voters under 30, even winning white women under 30. The youth voter barrier to the Republican Party is really the same barrier as it is for all age demographics: an ethnic barrier which concedes black, Hispanic, and Asian voters to Democrats.

(Read the whole thing even as the piece’s focus is on a different issue than this piece.)  If Mitt Romney could have made, as Ronald Reagan did, a pitch to all Americans, he likely would have done much better among young voter of all backgrounds.

And that must be the task of future Republican contenders.

In perhaps the best short critique of Mitt Romney’s “47%” comment, outgoing Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels offers that Mr. Romney

. . . was right about the origin of his problem but wrong about its essence. Without doubt, we have a significant number of Americans for whom dependence and something for nothing have become a way of life. But they were far from 47% in number, and would have voted for the incumbent President under any circumstances.

. . . .

that Mr. Romney “was right about the origin of his problem but wrong about its essence. Without doubt, we have a significant number of Americans for whom dependence and something for nothing have become a way of life. But they were far from 47% in number, and would have voted for the incumbent President under any circumstances.”

(Via Powerline picks.)  Read the whole thing.  Now, Romney was right to address the dependency issue, but he did so in a manner at odds with the dominant strain today of conservative thought.

A real conservative would worry about the growing culture of dependency, but express his belief that most Americans would embrace free-market opportunities should they be made available.  A Republican needs to be able to talk, as Ronald Reagan did, as Jack Kemp did, how conservative policies increase those opportunities and so reduce dependency, but in terms which can really command the assent of people who do not devote much attention to politics, even if they are currently dependent on a federal check for their subsistence.

*crickets*

-Bruce (@GayPatriot)

Readers of this blog know that I have long been a fan of Jeb Bush, having favored the accomplished former Florida Governor as my candidate for 2012 at least since November 2010.

And while it is still too early to start planning for 2016, when you google that good man’s name, look at what comes up:

Our reader Kyle alerted me to an article that shows that Jeb understands an aspect of modern American conservatism that Mitt Romney failed to articulate.  ”Jeb Bush,” writes Mark Silva . . .

. . . the former Florida governor who based a political career on school reform, today called for a “restoration” of lost American values and economic mobility based on educational accountability.

With the gap between the impoverished and privileged in the U.S. widening, the solution lies in a regime of school and teacher evaluation, national standards and more “school choice” in alternatives such as charter schools, he said.

“We have these huge gaps in income,” Bush said at the start of a two-day Washington conference sponsored by his Foundation for Excellence in Education, “with people born into poverty who will stay in poverty.” He said: “This ideal of who we are as a nation — it’s going away, it’s leaving us,” adding: “There is one path that can change this course.”

Emphasis added.  Economic mobility, his belief that people born in poverty, reared in dependency, don’t have to stay in that condition and can rise about their circumstances.

It frustrated many Reagan-Kemp conservatives when, right after the Florida primary, Mitt Romney said because of the “safety net,” he wasn’t concerned about the very poor.

Reagan conservatives, however, have long been concerned about the poor because that safety net sometimes traps them in a cycle of dependency.   And we want to create the opportunities that will help them find the means to move up into a better economic situation. (more…)

I’m not sure if any of you are following the completely maddening fraud being discovered in the election of US Rep. Allen West (R-FL) vs. Democrat Patrick Murphy.

Here’s a brief insight courtesy of John Fund at NRO’s The Corner.

Congressman Allen West, an outspoken tea-party favorite whose district was pushed into largely new territory by redistricting, is claiming that massive voter irregularities are robbing him of his seat.

Democrat Patrick Murphy, who leads West by some 2,000 votes, is trying to stop a full recount of controversial early ballots cast in St. Lucie County. His current victory margin is just large enough to avoid triggering an automatic recall of all precincts and all votes.

Then there is Gertrude Walker, the 32-year-veteran election supervisor of St. Lucie County, who has spent much of the last two weeks explaining why her office completely botched the count. She admitted that her office had acted in “haste” in issuing election results, and that “mistakes were made.” Among her mistakes was failing to count 40 of the 94 precincts under her jurisdiction on Election Night — and then counting the other 54 twice. Indeed. On Friday, her office announced it had “discovered” 304 additional early votes left in a box. None had been counted.

But Walker wasn’t available for comment. She has been hospitalized for unknown reasons.

The news was one reason that Florida’s secretary of state has dispatched a team of experts to audit St. Lucie’s procedures. The St. Lucie Election Canvassing Board voted to approve a complete recount of all the early ballots. It began the recount on Saturday but stopped it at 8 p.m. because the county building’s security system was set to be switched on later that night. Some people complained that the alarms have been switched off in the past to allow county business to continue after hours, but their complaints were ignored. The recount resumed on Sunday morning, but it missed the noon deadline to submit the county’s final returns to Florida’s secretary of state.

So, on Sunday, the previous results—the ones showing Democrat Murphy ahead—were sent to Florida’s secretary of state for certification.

Additionally, reports from St. Lucie County yesterday had 900 votes cast in a precinct of only 7 registered voters.  I am not sure how it is possible that there IS a precinct of 7 registered voters, but West’s attorney was the source of this report.

Remember, Democrats invent a storyline (pushed by the media) that Republicans are somehow “suppressing the vote” all across the United States.  There is never ever any evidence to support this — just wailing by the likes of Al Sharpton.  But when we have ACTUAL vote fraud, such as the kind being exposed in the West-Murphy case…. well, it just gets swept under the rug; deadlines run out; people vanish to the hospital.  And if you suggest voter ID as one solution — well look out!  You are a racist!

If this type of behavior happened in one county in a swing state — I think this calls for a larger look at all of the votes cast.  Many Americans of various political persuasions have lost confidence that every vote is counted, and every vote is equal to another.

If this scale of fraud could happen so blatantly in St. Lucie County, FL…. what about Philadelphia County, PA?  What about Cuyahoga County, Ohio? What about Dane County, WI?

This is sickening to think about.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

A blog posts and a Wall Street Journal op-ed remind us that last week’s election was as much a battle of personalities as it was one of ideas. Bookworm links (and builds upon) Abe Greenwald’s insight into “how conservatives misread the election outcome”:

Obama got reelected because he enjoys a degree of personal popularity disconnected from his record. No modern president has ever been returned to office with employment figures and right-track-wrong-track numbers as poor as those Obama has achieved. . . .

The president’s reelection is not evidence of a new liberal America, but rather of the illogical and confused experience that is infatuation. For multiple reasons, Americans continue to have a crush on Barack Obama even after his universally panned first term. No longer quite head over heels, they’re at the “I know he’s no good for me, but I can change him” phase.

Read both whole things.  Like Greenwald, Andrew Kohut also thinks we are misreading the election returns:

. . . most observers are overstating the gravity of the GOP’s problem. In particular, they are paying too little attention to how weak a candidate Mitt Romney was, and how much that hurt Republican prospects.

Here is what the exit poll found. Mr. Romney’s personal image took a hard hit during the primary campaign and remained weak on election day. Just 47% of exit-poll respondents viewed him favorably, compared with 53% for Mr. Obama. (more…)

Michael Barone frequently reminds us that the the “Millenial” generation, today’s twentysomethings is a generation where individuals relish the choices new technologies and new ways of interaction allow. This, he wrote in one of his election post-mortems, is a “generation that likes to create its own world is not in sync with policies that treat them as tiny cogs in giant machines.”

The Obama campaign played into that through its micro-targeting campaign, offering different messages to different audiences.  The great irony is that Obama’s big government schemes favor a more one-size-fits-approach.

They have developed an individualized approach to campaign and it works.  They have developed a trickle-down version of government and, well, we’ll soon be seeing how well that works. . .