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For the better part of the year, even as President Obama enjoyed a modest lead in most polls, I wondered why his campaign was acting so desperate, perhaps because his approval remained below 50% or perhaps because rarely topped that number in head-to-head match-ups against Mitt Romney.

I’m not alone in noticing this.  On Friday, commenting on the biased media coverage of this campaign, RedState’s Erick Erickson titled his post, Not the Behavior of a Winning Campaign. (Via Ed Driscoll.)

Finding the tone of the “fundraising emails” he has “received from Barack Obama or his surrogates” increasingly desperate, John Hinderaker wonders “how bad must Obama’s internal polling be, to cause him to whine and beg in such pathetic fashion”.

I’ve wondered the same thing, but now I have another thought  – perhaps the Democrat’s internals track closely with the national polls and show that the $120 million he spent over the summer “in hopes of”, as John put it quoting an Obama advisor, “killing Romney,” hasn’t been as effective as they hoped.  The ads may have pushed Romney’s numbers down, but haven’t made him an unacceptable alternative to a failed incumbent.

Indeed, the polls are tighter now than when Obama began his anti-Romney advertising barrage.  And perhaps that’s what’s making the Obama team sound so desperate. Their strategy isn’t working.  They had hoped to have knocked Mitt Romney out by now, perhaps in the hopes of running a more upbeat fall campaign. (more…)

For the better part of this year, even though he lead in the polls, Barack Obama has not seemed a very confident candidate as did previous presidents running for reelection, particularly Bill Clinton in 1996 and Ronald Reagan in 1984.  And he seems far less secure than did George W. Bush in 2004 to which campaign his current bid is often compared.

In many ways, as I have suggested in previous posts, the incumbent seems like W’s father, George H.W. Bush, an incumbent seeking a theme, a reason to justify his reelection  in 1992.  Incumbents often highlight their record — even W did that.  Obama has seemed to highlight his opponent’s deficiencies — even making up deficiencies as the campaign rolls along.

Would be fascinating to see what percentage of the $120 million Obama spend this summer went to campaign ads attacking Romney (that amountmore than his prior opponent’s entire fall campaign budget).  Of the Obama ads I have seen here in Los Angeles, none have touted his accomplishments, all have sabotaged the former Massachusetts governor.

In an insightful piece in the British Daily Mail, Toby Harnden compares the crowds Obama drew four years ago to those he draws today.  Not only do fewer people show up, but

More significantly, the mood of the crowds is different. There is a sullenness, even resentment, that was not present in 2008. Ask an Obama supporter about their man and as often as not you will get a few words about him and then a demeaning attack on Romney or Ryan. (more…)

(Not to mention “irresponsible”.)

In his post on the looming $16 Trillion Debt, up from “$10.6 trillion on Inauguration Day” 2009, Jim Geraghty shares this video from the 2008 campaign:

On March 19 of this year, CBSNews reported:

The National Debt has now increased more during President Obama’s three years and two months in office than it did during 8 years of the George W. Bush presidency.

The Debt rose $4.899 trillion during the two terms of the Bush presidency. It has now gone up $4.939 trillion since President Obama took office.

Wonder if any reporters have asked Mr. Obama about that in recent days.

Instead of covering the dire economic situation our nation is facing, “ the media,” Jennifer Rubin writes, “following like lemmings behind the Obama parade, are still fixated on Todd Akin.”  It’s not just that they’re fixated on Todd Akin, it’s that they’re eager to tie the Republican Party to the Missourian, conveniently forgetting that nearly every prominent Republican has criticized his crazy comments on rape, the candidates himself contending he misspoke and having apologized.

Mrs. Boxer accused her partisan opponents of a “sickness” and not liking their mothers.  And no one is calling the three-term Senator to apologize nor attempting to tie her fellow partisans to her.*

Our media, however, are obsessed with Akin, with “the three news networks – ABC, CBS, and NBC – [giving] Akin’s gaffe four times the coverage they gave to Vice President Joe Biden’s overtly racist comments last week in Virginia.” Let’s see . . .  one is the elected Vice President of the United States and the other is a candidate for elective office from a state with just 2% of the nation’s population.  And the candidate’s gaffe gets more coverage.

How many episodes of his show did Piers Morgan devote to Biden’s gaffe?

It’s not just the networks.  The Associated Press reports:

Meet the newest campaign issue for House Democrats: Todd Akin.

From Colorado to New Hampshire to Illinois, Democrats already are using the incendiary comments about rape made by the Missouri congressman and Republican Senate candidate as a political bludgeon.

(Via HotAir headlines.)  They’ve even attacked Republicans who have asked for Akin to exit the race.

In many ways, the Akin affair says more about the Democrats than it does the Republicans.**  It shows their desperation in this campaign and their determination to use whatever issue at their disposal to demonize Republicans. (more…)

When I caught footage of the president making an issue of Mitt Romney’s tax returns yesterday in a White House press conference, I wondered if any of his predecessors had ever, from inside the White House, speculated about the their opponent’s personal financials. Given the question (about his negative campaigning) the president could have just avoided the tax issue and left it to his minions and allies?

Charles Krauthammer contends that Obama is focusing on such picayune matters because if the election is decided “on the issues”, Obama “loses”:

Via Noah Glyn @ The Corner.

“Even the media’s had enough“, reports Politico’s Kevin Cirilli:

The race for the White House has grown so toxic that it’s become a top topic among reporters and analysts covering the contest — and some are even calling on President Barack Obama and presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney to call a truce.

The media have had enough? You mean, the media that have parroted Democratic talking points about Mitt Romney’s dog, asked his neighbors for dirt on him and sough information about his high school years from classmates on the opposite side of the political fence?

Geez, wasn’t Mr. Obama supposed to elevate the tone of American politics?  And which candidate was it whose team first raised issues unrelated to his opponent’s ability to lead the country?  ”You have“, writes Commentary’s Alana Goodman

a Democratic campaign that’s painting its opponent as a felon, a tax-dodger, a dog-abuser, and a killer who will bring back slavery. On the other side, you have a Republican campaign that’s responding to these attacks as “hateful” and “inappropriate.” The media spin? Both sides need to tone down the “toxic rhetoric”

She reminds us that (more…)

“In 2008,” wrote the Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein soon after “Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., introduced himself to a national audience as Mitt Romney’s vice presidential running mate“,

. . . the central component of Obama’s meteoric rise was that politics had become too cynical and small, and that it was important to have a more substantive debate on the pressing issues facing the nation.

Obama was going to be a new kind of politician who did not engage in the petty politics of the past, a leader who showed respect for opposing viewpoints, who treated his ideological adversaries with dignity.

In contrast to his rhetoric in 2008, Obama today is running for reelection by waging perhaps the “lowest, meanest most negative campaign in history“.  George Will delineates the striking contrast between the Democrats’ negative campaign today with Barack Obama’s lofty rhetoric of 2008:

He on whose behalf the Soptic ad[*] was made used to dispense bromides deploring “the smallness of our politics” and “our preference for scoring cheap political points.”

Obama is trying to win by going to gutter, by leveling shameful, dishonest attacks on his Republican rival.  And yet the crux of his 2008 appeal was that he would be a new kind of politician, elevating our political discourse.  If the Democrats wins this year, he wins by playing that old kind of attack politics.

So much for hope and change.

* (more…)

Yesterday, I linked Victor Davis Hanson’s piece about “selective transparency” where that historian reminded us that “neither Jimmy Carter nor Ronald Reagan released more than one year’s [tax] returns. The reformist John McCain released just two“:

True, the 2004 Democratic candidate, John Kerry, offered some 20 years of returns; but that gesture meant almost nothing because his billionaire wife, Teresa, supplied the vast majority of the funds that fueled Kerry’s opulent recreational lifestyle — and she kept largely quiet about where her money was banked and invested.

So, when your Democratic and independent friends parrot the Obama campaign talking point, ask them whether they were calling for Mrs. Kerry to come clean about her taxes — and if they speculated what her husband might have been hiding in his wife’s returns.

And also ask them if they were aware of how long the Obama team had been clamoring for Mitt Romney to release his, not so much because they wanted the presumptive Republican nominee to be open about his finances, but because they wanted to find little details they could use against their partisan rival.  ”Soon after Obama For America opened its campaign headquarters at One Prudential Plaza in Chicago in the spring of 2011,” reports BuzzFeed’s Michael Hastings: (more…)

“On August 28, 2008,” The Washington Free Beacon’s Matthew Continetti reminds us, when Barack Obama

. . . officially accepted his party’s nomination and launched [that] fall['s] campaign, he said his presidency would break from the “politics of the past,” diminish the “cynicism we all have about government,” and change “the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other’s character and each other’s patriotism.” Politicians who “use stale tactics to scare voters,” who say an opponent is “someone people should run from,” and who “make a big election about small things” had held the American people hostage for far too long. Obama would be different.

Well, he doesn’t seem to have succeeded.  Yesterday on CBS “Sunday Morning,” the Democrat acknowledged that “Washington ‘feels as broken as it did four years ago,‘”:

He says he’s most frustrated by the inability “to change the atmosphere” in the nation’s capital “to reflect the decency and common sense of ordinary people” who want their leaders to solve problems. . . .

Reflecting on more than 3 ½ years in office, Obama said, “I think there’s no doubt that I underestimated the degree to which in this town politics trump problem solving.”

So, we elected a man who had served in the United States Senate and remained clueless as to the way the city worked?

With a bit of snark, Howard Portnoy reminds us that the president acknowledged his own naivete instead of responding to the question whether he “he was on the list of those deserving some of the shared blame“:

So, when Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.) raised an objection in January of 2009 to the idea of a tax credit for people who don’t pay income taxes, the president’s haughty response—”I won. So I think on that one, I trump you”—did not in his view fan the flames of resentment or hostility.

Do wonder if anyone can detail what precisely Obama has done to to fulfill his campaign promises to change the tone in our nation’s capital?

Just caught his via Yahoo!:

Undeterred by independent fact-checkers that have debunked the thrust of their claims, the Obama campaign is redoubling attacks on Mitt Romney as an “outsourcer” in a new TV ad airing in eight battleground states.

The 30-second spot — titled “The Problem” — claims Romney condoned the Chinese “taking our jobs and taking a lot of our future.”

“He made a fortune letting it happen,” the narrator says, focusing on Bain Capital outsourcing to China, a country Romney has vowed to challenge as president.

It’s the latest in a steady drumbeat of negative attacks on Romney’s record as a corporate buyout specialist, alleging he profited off of deliberately bankrupting companies and sending jobs overseas.

What ever happened to hope and change?

Do hope the Romney campaign — or the presumptive Republican nominee’s SuperPAC defenders — fire back with ads wondering why the incumbent is running a relentlessly negative campaign, actively misrepresenting the Republican’s record.

Seems the only way Obama can win is by repeating repudiated attacks on his Republican rival.

In his piece this morning in the National Review, Jim Geraghty takes on another media narrative, that of the supposed “Republican advantage in super-PAC spending”. Seems the president’s allies are outspending their adversaries’. And they’re doing it by attack the presumptive Republican nominee, not promoting the Democrat:

What’s more, the advertising and other efforts by Obama’s allies have been relentlessly negative. Every expenditure by every independent group must be filed with the FEC (usually within a matter of days) and must be classified as in support of or in opposition to a particular candidate. The amounts range from millions of dollars for advertising campaigns to $12.50 for “staff time” spent on a press release or e-mail to support or oppose a candidate. Overall, in addition to the $35.3 million and $9 million mentioned above, independent groups have spent $7.7 million on ads and efforts classified as in support of Romney, while they spent only $961,854.62 in support of Obama.

. . . .

In fact, the president’s allies run the single biggest-spending and most negative super PAC of all: Priorities USA Action, founded by Obama’s former deputy White House press secretary, Bill Burton; Sean Sweeney, the former chief of staff to Rahm Emanuel; and Harold Ickes, who was deputy chief of staff to President Bill Clinton. This super PAC has spent $13.5 million in opposition to Romney so far, outspending all the super-PAC efforts opposing the president combined. While Priorities USA Action is often described as a “pro-Obama” super PAC in news coverage, it has yet to spend a single penny that it categorizes as “supporting” President Obama; all of its spending is classified as “opposing” Mitt Romney.

Emphasis added. Read the whole thing. Seems the Democrat has gone from hope and change to attack and distort.

Just shy of three-and-one-half years ago, Barack Obama entered the Oval Office with more good will perhaps than any newly-elected president since Jimmy Carter. He had vowed to change the tone in our nation’s capital, a vow welcome after sixteen years (with a brief hiatus just after 9/11) of polarized politics.

And yet a year after Obama’s inauguration, Gallup reported that the Democrat’s approval was the most polarized for any “First-Year President.”

I recalled that abrupt shift yesterday when following the link Jay Cost’s insightful piece on “Obama’s dilemma” (more on that in my next post) to Sean Trende’s article from the previous day “about what Obama could have done differently in 2009“.  That article also merits your time — and attention.

Trende approaches the topic from a slightly different perspective than I did when considering the swift drop in Obama’s approval.  Trende considers the different policy approaches the president should have taken.  Instead of a constant re-pivot to the economy, the Democrat, Trende contends, could have kept his focus on the economy.  I wondered about the incumbent’s tone, whining about the problems he inherited, blaming Republicans for obstruction (or being beholden to the politics of the past).

On one major point, however, Trende’s thinking (approximately) parallels my own:

the president would have been much better off breaking the stimulus up into five or six pieces, spread out over his first 100 days. His presidency would have had a very different narrative attached to it if the first major piece of legislation passed by his administration had been $275 billion in tax cuts — or even better, two or three pieces of tax-cut legislation, grouped by subject — followed a week later by the unemployment compensation, followed a week later by the infrastructure spending, followed a week later by health care and education assistance, finished off with a miscellaneous bill.

For one thing, the headlines would have been dominated by the tax cuts, aid to the unemployed and to education, and so forth. Instead, there was a massive, amorphous “stimulus” with a $787 billion price tag for people to digest.

Quite frankly, Republicans would have supported at least some of the measures — in fact, the “mini-stimuli” approved throughout late 2009 and 2010 almost all passed with substantial Republican support. So it would have been with a “pure” tax-cut bill that kicked off the president’s term.

If he had insisted on breaking up the stimulus, the president would instead of needing to rally his own party for one big vote, would have constantly been reaching out to Congress, likely forging different coalitions for each bill — working with Republicans on several.

We would see him working energetically — over a period of weeks — on measures to stimulate the economy.  And that energetic image would likely have become impressed in Americans’ minds.  They may not supported his every policy, but at least appreciated his constant effort. (more…)

Caught this in a piece reporting that nearly “90% of the Americans who gave $200 to Obama’s 2008 campaign haven’t re-upped this year“:

Interviews with dozens of those drop-off donors reveal the stories of Democrats who still plan to pull the lever for the president, but whose support has gone from fervent to lukewarm, or whose economic circumstances have left them without money to spare. The interviews and the data are the substance of an “enthusiasm gap” spurred by the distance between the promise of the campaign and the reality of governing, one that has begun to deepen Democratic gloom about this November’s election.

Via HotAir headlines.  Emphasis added.

Many of these folks will still end up voting for Obama this fall, but without the enthusiasm they showed in 2008.  And less enthusiastic, they are less likely to sway wavering friends and neighbors, uncertain about the Chicago Democrat.

UPDATE:   Commenting on the same article, Ed Morrissey observes, “The change that Obama has brought to their doorsteps mainly involves a lower economic status“.

I had been planning a post on Obama’s claims to be a skinflint, but other bloggers have easily disposed of the disingenuous claim that the Democrat has “has presided over slower growth in federal spending than any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower.”

Funny how he makes that claim when my Obama-supporting friends defend their guy, claiming we needed a macroeconomic stimulus to jumpstart the economy.  ”I thought,” writes Victor Davis Hanson,

. . . one Obama swore to us that borrowing $5 trillion was vital — Keynesian pump priming, stimulus, averting 8 percent–plus unemployment, and all that. But now another Obama claims that his serial $1 trillion deficits are proof not of “growth” of the sort that improved GDP and reduced unemployment, but rather of fiscal discipline that stopped reckless Republican spending. So Obama over the last four years brought both austerity that checked wild Bush spending, and also Keynesian growth that snapped us out of the Bush lethargy? Spending is saving? Record deficits are record fiscal restraint?

“These people are Keynesians“, quips one blogger, “Why can’t they say so?”

Maybe because part of Obama’s appeal in 2008 was that even as he reassured his liberal base by offering new spending plans, he reassured independent voters and libertarian Republicans dissatisfied with the spending record of the then-incumbent administration.  They’re finding it difficult to admit that Obama can’t be all things to all people. (more…)

On Saturday, Michael Barone linked a Weekly Standard piece by Yuval Levin which he described as a “must read”, adding that “the Romney campaign should definitely read the whole thing, and act on it.” Having read the lengthy essay, I agree.

Yuval offers a sound means for Romney to approach the issues facing the country in the current campaign and to advocate for real reform (some might call it to put forward his hopes for change).

And Levin offers a sharp critique of the incumbent’s sustained support for Washington’s sclerotic status quo:

His express objectives are to protect our existing entitlement system from structural reforms, to increase the tax burden on investment and employment, to further empower and liberate regulators, and to bring more of our economy into the public sector. His economic policy is unimaginative in the extreme—combining early-20th-century social democratic theory with mid-20th-century pork barrel politics. His answer to the government’s fiscal woes is to squeeze the military and the taxpayer to buy a few more years of denial. In every respect, he stands for stagnation and stasis, for defensive consolidation rather than aggressive growth. He thinks the best we can do is to manage decline.

Simply put, President Obama has no interest in a new way of thinking about America’s prospects, and therefore essentially nothing to offer to assuage the public’s growing anxiety. All he can do is try to direct that anxiety away from himself. He is at best irrelevant, at worst a great impediment, to the effort to keep America growing in the new economic order we are entering.

Like Barone, I urge you to read the whole thing.

Interesting how today, both gay conservatives and leftists see through President Obama’s pander yesterday on gay marriage, coming as it did following a week when the Democrats was facing questions for his stand on gay marriage.

The president may claim that Vice President Biden’s recent comments on gay marriage forced the timing of the announcement, but the real question is why he didn’t announce his change of heart when it could have made a difference, especially given, as Ed Morrissey reports that, in his interview yesterday, Obama claimed “he’d made up his mind to change his position some time ago“:

And for all of those who cheered this flip-flop, here’s a question: wouldn’t it have been more effective in North Carolina had Obama made this announcement before Amendment One went to the polls?  According to Obama himself, he’d already changed position on same-sex marriage.  An announcement last week or the week before that, with a personal plea to African-American voters, might have made a difference.  Instead, Obama hid, the White House fibbed, and Amendment One won easily in a state that Obama carried in 2008.  Regardless of whatever else this might be called, leadership isn’t among the terms that come to mind.

Ad the Yahoo! online survey indicates, it does seem most people see through the president’s pandering move, with more than two-thirds of respondents saying they see his policy shift as based on campaign politics.

This may help rally the base and generate some more campaign cash, but could well end up being a net negative for the president, not on the merits of the issue, but on his approach.  Expect more people to realize Obama is just another politician for whom political calculation matters more than principle.

UPDATE:   Seems Obama consulted his political advisors to reach the decision he announced yesterday: (more…)

Yesterday, Ann Althouse, reminding us that his predecessor gave up golf when he was chief executive, wondered as the president’s latest effort to appear cool:

Does a slow jam with Jimmy Fallon send the wrong message? Or do we not think about the mom whose son may have recently died anymore? (Obama has no Cindy Sheehan dogging hounding him bothering him… at least not that we see in the news.)

Why is Obama immune from the criticism that normally befalls a President? Back in 2008, running for President, Obama pushed back the press one time with “Why is it that I can’t just enjoy my waffle?”

It’s like that was a really hard question — why is it that he can’t just enjoy his waffle… and his multiple vacations and his golf and his rock concerts in the White House and his slow jam with Jimmy Fallon?

The answer is: Because you have a job. You applied for it. We hired you. Make us believe you’re doing it.

Via Instapundit.  Seems he’s more interested in the perks of office than its responsibilities.

It’s not just that we’re still at war, it’s also that the nation has big problems, many exacerbated by the president’s policies in his first three years in office.  Our debt is skyrocketing, entitlements face insolvency and the president has neither pushed his fellow partisans in the Senate to vote on his budget nor put forward solutions to reform Social Security or Medicare.

Perhaps, his attempt to be “cool” is part of his campaign strategy.  In Commentary, Peter Wehner observed that:

Given his inability and unwillingness to run on his record, the Obama strategy appears to rest on achieving three things: (1) energizing the turnout of his base (minorities, young voters and liberals); (more…)

Earlier today, Jim Hoft linked this telling excerpt from the president’s recent Rolling Stone interview:

Frankly, I know that there are good, decent Republicans on Capitol Hill who, in a different environment, would welcome the capacity to work with me. But right now, in an atmosphere in which folks like Rush Limbaugh and Grover Norquist are defining what it means to be a true conservative, they are lying low. My hope is that after this next election, they’ll feel a little more liberated to go out and say, “Let’s redirect the Republican Party back to those traditions in which a Dwight Eisenhower can build an interstate highway system.”

Can you recall Mr. Obama’s immediate predecessor ever attacking his liberal critics by name, particularly, say, the folks at Moveon.org when they actively worked to frustrate and eventually succeeded at blocking the then-president’s efforts to reform Social Security?

(To name but one effort when liberal group’s worked to block that Republican’s agenda, even before the election of  a Democratic Congress in 2006.)

* (more…)

As the president focuses on his campaign for reelection, he seems less focused on doing his job than he is on attacking his partisan adversaries.  He hasn’t put forward plans to address the nation’s pressing fiscal problems, the burgeoning federal debt and the coming insolvency of entitlements.

And he hasn’t really specified what he plans to do in his second term.  In a post on this topic four months ago, I included a “tidbit Ed Morrissey pulled out of the [then-]recent CBSNews poll“:

Even while Obama keeps fanning the flames of class warfare, no one is sure what Obama intends to do with a second term anyway.  Two-thirds don’t have a clear idea on his second-term goals (32/66) — and that includes a majority of Democrats (46/52) along with more than two-thirds of independents (29/69).

Now, even a liberal pundit is taking notice.  Jeffrey Toobin who, more often than note, repeats the conventional wisdom of Beltway insiders wonders what Obama has planned for his second term:

The President and his campaign have been strikingly quiet about plans for a second term. As a rule, all incumbents, of whatever office, run for reëlection on their records rather than on their future promises, but Obama appears to have taken the strategy to an extreme.

The showpiece (to date) of the Obama campaign is “The Road We’ve Traveled,” a seventeen-minute video directed by Davis Guggenheim. It’s an entirely backward-looking production, featuring the President’s efforts to extricate the country from the financial crash, the bailout of automobile manufacturers, and the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Although Toobin once questioned Michael Barone’s sanity, his commentary on the campaign film seems almost a summary of the “review” Barone offered last month, its visuals “oddly antique for a president who promised hope and change.”

Toobin does note that the president has offered one “promise for the future [,] his embrace of the “Buffett rule” for tax rates—to ensure that millionaires pay a greater percentage of their income than their secretaries.”

It would be nice if the president could offer more than just a plan to increase taxes.  It would also be nice if more pundits than just Mr. Toobin called the president out for his paucity of ideas.  And perhaps as well for attacking his rivals instead of offering solutions.

On Monday at the Washington Examiner, Charlie Spiering provided a clip from then-Senator Barack Obama’s speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination not quite four years ago:

In 2008, he derided the very strategy he would adopt four years later. proclaiming that

. . . if you don’t have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone that people should run from. You make a big election about small things. And you know what it’s worked before — because it feeds into the cynicism we all have about government. When Washington doesn’t work, all its promises seem empty.

Democrats declaring a Republican “war on women” because they disagree with the GOP’s opposition to federal health care mandates sounds like an attempt to paint the opposition as individuals people should run from. That kind of distortion feeds into the cynicism we all have about government.

Now the president is busy scaring voters about the Ryan budget without presenting a one capable of securing a single Democratic vote in the House (indeed without insisting the Democratic Senate pass a budget).  He may be scaring voters about Republican reforms, but still has not put forward a plan to address our growing federal debt or the coming insolvency of Medicare and Social Security.

“As president,” Peter Wehner writes, “Obama has not only discarded” the commitment he made in 2008 to “rediscover our bonds to each other and get out of this constant, petty bickering that’s come to characterize our politics”,

. . . he has turned it on its head. Republicans aren’t simply people with whom he has philosophical disagreements; they are members of the “Flat Earth Society” and have embraced a budget that demonstrates their “Social Darwinism.” (more…)