Couple that with a harsher Washington Post piece published in full online (“The party of Ron Paul?” May 24) — which labeled recently adopted planks in the Iowa Republican Party platform “wacky” and “nutty” and gleefully anticipated “a few highly visible fights” erupting over “Paulite positions in the national platform” — and it’s evident the Strib is a more than a little confused about what the Ron Paul revolution is all about.

Let me do what I can to clarify.

First, let’s understand what a “movement” or a “revolution” is. All movements — the Pat Robertson Republican coup in the 1980s, gay rights, women’s suffrage, civil rights and, yes, the Ron Paul movement — follow a common pattern.

Movements all begin at the margins with people who have little or nothing to lose. Unsuccessful movements never expand beyond the sloganeering fringe. Successful movements — those with an intellectual and moral basis — mature to attract a mainstream following.

The gay-rights movement is a great example. Shirtless hunks in leather tutus and motorcycling “Dykes on Bikes” are no longer the point of the gay-rights spear. It’s the gay lawyer/gay accountant, lesbian legislator/lesbian physician — same-sex couples with kids and fundamental concerns about faith, family and freedom — who are now the face of the movement.

Focusing commentary on the remnants of the gay-rights fringe is something the media would never do. But focusing on the fringe of the Ron Paul movement is exactly what the Strib and WaPo commentaries actually do.

Libertarians today are on that cusp between being all about the T-shirt and all about ideas. I was a libertarian before it was cool and a Republican when it wasn’t cool.

As a political force in the 1970s, libertarians had little to lose. They were the folks who couldn’t be Democrats because they believed their money was theirs to spend; but they couldn’t be Republicans because they wanted to spend it on drugs and prostitutes.

Times have changed.

Libertarians today are less about provocative issues and more about reversing the expanding scope of government. Government expansion is bad in itself, but the future consequences are worse: Without defined limits on government, our liberties, our American republic, are truly at risk.

But, says the Washington Post, Americans aren’t buying that argument. If it were, Ron Paul would get more than 15 percent of the primary vote.

The Strib offers its caucus-questioning advice to an implied majority of “voters who believe government remains a useful tool for improving people’s lives.” Unfortunately, that glass-half-empty perspective on the Ron Paul revolution misses a significant point.

In Ron Paul, you have a charisma-challenged old white guy who, without pandering or pushing prejudice, inspires young people with the always sexy message of monetary policy.

A viable presidential challenge built by sticking to principle, not telling people only what they want to hear, is a political story the Strib and the Washington Post would shout from the rooftops — if only the message were a message they wanted to hear.

The power of an idea, personal freedom, doesn’t lie in manufactured popularity.

What about that Paul-inspired “wacky,” “nutty” “constitutional fundamentalism” found in Republican Party platforms?

Sure, abolishing the Department of Agriculture and the Federal Reserve is not going to happen even under a President Paul. But a political party that seriously considers abolishing cabinet-level departments and unaccountable government entities is a political party that probably won’t advocate for a new cabinet-level “Department of the Internet” and is serious about monetary policy.

It’s a party that stands for something.

That brings us to the WaPo admonition that “Paulites” learn to compromise, lest, says the Strib, the philosophical gulf “that’s already proving difficult to bridge by those seeking to govern this state” grows even wider.

One does not compromise principle. It’s a cliché and a fallacy that, given two diametrically opposed points of view, the “truth” must necessarily lie somewhere in the middle.

The Republican problem is buying into the “compromise is good” argument and declaring victory for every move to the left that “could have been so much worse.”

Paulites won’t make that compromise.

Ron Paul delegates to the RNC will support the nominee. However, integral to that support is holding the candidate and the party to the fundamental principles of limited government and personal and economic freedom. Constancy to principle is the ultimate loyalty.

All that said, I urge our media friends to examine the default position that government is good and invite them to think for themselves. The Ron Paul revolution offers the media, the Republican Party and America that opportunity. Take it.

——–

Craig Westover is a Republican activist and a Ron Paul delegate to the Republican National Convention. Follow him on Twitter: @CraigWestover and Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/craig.westover.

This article originally appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune May 26. 2012.

Where the Campaign Must Win to Win

In assessing the electoral power base, the campaign should always keep in focus the major goal of the campaign. It is not to acquire at least “50% plus one” of the votes cast in the fall for Mitt Romney. It is to secure at least 270 electoral votes. Thus, properly targeting the states forms the key strategic element in winning the presidency. These target states are listed below. It is important to note, that not only must the campaign play in formerly Bush 2004 states, it must also expand into areas which President Bush lost in 2000 and 2004. 290 electoral votes should not be a ceiling for this campaign. If the campaign goes well and things break its way, a victory of over 300 electoral votes is not out of the realm of possibility.

Governor Romney starts the election with a solid base of 16 states (West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah) and 131 Electoral Votes (EV).  He can also be fairly confident of capturing (in degree of confidence) South Carolina, Georgia, Montana, Arizona, Missouri, and Indiana for an additional 60 EV. This gives Governor Romney a fairly safe starting point of 191 EV to rely on (although I would keep an eye on AZ, MO, and IN just in case, but if things go right, he won’t have to worry much about them).

That leaves 79 EV short of  the magic 270. President Obama has been said to have a solid blue wall. Sean Trende has pointed out that the wall is not as strong as some would have you to believe. However, barring a collapse of epic proportions, President Obama can safely count on 10 states (Hawaii, California, Illinois, New York, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware, Massachusetts) and the District of Columbia for a total of 149 EV. Add to that in order of safety Washington, Maine (excluding the 2nd District), Oregon, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Minnesota, President Obama can safely rely upon 200 EV (remember Maine’s 2nd District leans D and isn’t likely D).

So what’s up for grabs? I have identified 12 states/districts that can be won with varying degrees of possibility. In all honesty, it is difficult to say at this point whether more states will be winnable when things develop further. The states are in order of likelihood of turning from blue to red along with my current assessment as to where they are leaning:

1. North Carolina (15 EV)-Lean R
2. Florida (29 EV)-Tossup/Lean R
3. Ohio (18 EV)-Tossup
4. Virginia (13 EV)-Tossup
5. Iowa (6 EV)*-Tossup
6. Wisconsin (10 EV)-Tossup
7. New Hampshire (4 EV)-Tossup
8. Colorado (9 EV)-Tossup
9. Pennsylvania (18 EV)-Tossup/Lean D
10. Maine 2nd District (1 EV)-Lean D
11. Nevada (6 EV)-Lean D
12. Michigan (16 EV)-Lean/Likely D

Some notes on these rankings. The way things are going now, I believe that Governor Romney will win North Carolina and probably Florida too. However, I am not confident enough to put them in the Governor’s column just yet, though North Carolina is fast approaching that point. Also, I’d be willing to bet that Missouri and Indiana are just as much in play as Nevada, Michigan, and Maine 2 are. The only reason Michigan is on this list is that Governor Romney has close ties to the state and Michigan just elected a Republican governor. Otherwise, I would put the state in President Obama’s column as a likely. In fact, if it weren’t for Governor Romney’s ties to Michigan, I would rate Minnesota as a more likely pick-up opportunity. In 2008, McCain lost Michigan by 17 points, but Minnesota by a little over 10 and according to the Trende article, Minnesota has been quietly trending more Republican over the years, while Michigan has been going the opposite direction.

Also, if you wanted to be really focused on targeted states. I would reduce the list from 12 to 9. I am fairly confident that Governor Romney will win North Carolina, and I am doubtful, but still hopeful about his winning ME 2, Nevada, or Michigan. If one wants to move those states to their respective columns, I see Governor Romney with 23 states and 206 electoral votes and President Obama with 18 states and D.C for 223 EV. 9 states and 109 Ev will probably decide this election.

Just a couple of notes on using campaign resources. If the campaign notes significant movement in New Jersey, Minnesota, or Maine 2, then diverting campaign resources to those areas could have high marginal utility. New Jersey has a popular Republican Governor and the Romney campaign will be reaching South Jersey through its ads in the Philadelphia media market. Minnesota is right next to Wisconsin and if their is movement there, additional investment can be done without too much trouble. Maine 2 is right next to New Hampshire, where campaign resources will already be used. Thus, barring an unforseen catastrophe on either side, I see Governor Romney with a realistic ceiling of 315 EV and a maximum plausible ceiling of 362 EV. I don’t see President Obama eclipsing his performance in 2008 and thus given the EV shifts, I see his max ceiling as 380 (his 2008 totals minus electoral college shift plus Arizona and Missouri).

So many ironies, so little time/space….

As Ed has already pointed out, the Times has no problem highlighting Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, so why are they having a case of the vapors over a PAC pointing out the linkage between Wright and Obama? Especially when, it turns out, the proposal to run ads with the Wright-Obama connection was, well, just a proposal. A proposal that apparently wasn’t received well by the PAC leaders, who wanted to focus on fiscal issues, in particular overspending.

Brian Baker, president of the PAC (Ending Spending), was on MSNBC this morning explaining that the PAC had solicited proposals for ads focusing on cutting spending, the PAC’s mission. One of the proposals they received focused on Jeremiah Wright, the radical preacher whose inflammatory anti-American sermons surfaced during the 2004 election and caused candidate Obama to distance himself from his pastor.

The proposal, Baker said, even acknowledged that it wasn’t on point to what the PAC had requested. Baker seemed sincerely troubled by the animus this story might be generating against the Ricketts family (Joe Ricketts, founder of Ameritrade and owner of the Chicago Cubs, is a driving force behind the Ending Spending PAC) and wanted to set the record straight. On the show at the same time was Romney campaign adviser Dan Senor, who made the point that there are a “million hare-brained ideas” floating around any campaign and 99 percent of them don’t go anywhere. He called it a “faux issue.”  In other words, this is a dog-bites-man story. Romney has repudiated the ad strategy, so he’s in the clear, and now the PAC itself has declared it a nonstarter. Here’s the MSNBC clip:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Forget for a moment the motivations behind the story — why the New York Times ran it, why they chose to give it prominence. Think instead of the average guy and gal, busy with their lives, seeing this unfold in their peripheral vision. What’s their reaction when hearing/watching/seeing the story?

My guess is something like this: “Oh, yeah, I remember that Jeremiah Wright. What a jerk.”

In other words, what might have started as a conservative-gotcha piece by the Times has probably ended with people being reminded of the distasteful Wright and his association with Obama. Mission accomplished….but for whom? Maybe the company that made the original proposal?

I’m not sure we’ll ever know, but it is a delicious bit of campaign gamesmanship, with the Times, I believe, holding the losing pieces. They were played by someone, in my estimation, and they took the bait.

—-

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

Meet the Candidate:

watch?v=droDXGJ7Dz8

As White House Dossier correctly points out, the RNC should look at the potential here, particularly against the (apparently) non-insane Wolfe.  The challenge comes at an awkward time for the Obama campaign, on the heels of last week’s West Virginia fiasco in which The One was unable to break 60 percent against a federal inmate.  I see enormous potential for mayhem here, especially after the awesome clowning that was Juddmentum.

There’s little to no risk, now that the rest of the GOP field has tapped out.  Think about it, Arkansas Republicans…it’s like a hashtag hijack, only funner!

Crossposted at El Tercer Riel.  Tweeting out of @BonillaJL.

U.S. Senatorial candidate Jeb Bush III Stole Milk Money in Kindergarten

by Jedidiah Horowitz, Jr.

ORLANDO, Fl. — Jeb Bush III entered kindergarten in 2019 to begin his education at the prestigious Snobby Evil Rich Kids Only Private School. Arriving on the handsome campus, studded with gold-leaf-encrusted buildings and diamond-decorated shrubs, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried smart phones while firing people in their fathers’ employ. Jessica Smith, a chubby five-year-old with a knockoff Vera Wang lunchbox in one hand and her milk money in the other, skipped joyfully to the classroom, unaware of the malicious intent of the young Republican candidate-in-training….

Presidential Candidate Jeannette Boehner Tripped Toddler in Play Group

by Roberta Woodward

CLEVELAND, Oh – Jeanette Boehner entered a toddler play group in 2024 eager to interact with fellow residents of the Ultra Rich Exclusive Gated Community Enclave where servants were as plentiful as dandelions in spring and parents refused to allow their children to use plebian laptops instead of exclusive Macs. But she spotted someone who didn’t seem to belong—a dark-haired, dark-complected child who frowned as the young Jeanette came through the door. The plot was hatched, say anonymous friends who have been haunted by the incident ever since, when young Jeannette saw the other girl take two cookies instead of one from the gilt-edged tray offered by the immigrant maid….

Supreme Court Justice Nominee Samuel Alito IV Stuck Out Tongue In Vitro

by Carlita Bernstein

FALLS CHURCH, VA – Samuel Alito IV was a smirking fetus in his designer-clad mother’s pampered womb when a handicapped sonographer of mixed parentage saw the youngster stick out his tongue at her during a routine sonogram…

–

Libby Sternberg is a novelist who occasionally writes romantic comedy.

The media has covered a smorgasbord of articles ranging from birth control to women to gay marriage in 2012. Leftists have denounced the GOP’s supposed “War on Women” in recent months for their opposition to the birth control mandate and support of personhood laws in a growing number of states. Meanwhile, liberal groups throughout the county decried George Zimmerman’s “racial motives” for shooting Trayvon Martin before he got his day in court. Zimmerman might very well be guilty as sin but what happened to innocent until proven guilty? Then, in a “surprise” (and by surprise I mean, no surprise at all), President Obama came out in support of gay marriage just after North Carolina banned the practice and Gallup reported that just over 50% of Americans support the practice. How convenient.

Strangely, most of the biggest news stories in the US in the months leading up to the 2012 election have been social, not economic, issues. The Obama administration’s focus on these issues is not one of genuine concern. Rather, it is nothing but a political ploy. First, social issues tend to be the most contentious. Supporters and opponents of gay marriage, abortion, contraception, etc. tend to be far apart on the political spectrum and the interests groups are generally well-ensconced in their own opinions. Bringing up these issues ignites the numbed passions of Obama supporters, many of whom have resorted to lukewarm support in the face of the President’s less-than-stellar record. This is a far cry from the passionate obsession of the Obama Zombies during the 2008 election. The Administration is looking for any way to re-ignite theses passions and get their supporters to the polls.

Additionally, the focus on social issues places the spotlight back on the Obama Administration, a spotlight that has been solely focused on the GOP contenders in the last several months. Obama is unable to run on his actual record, considering his history of economic failures. Therefore, the President and his supporters have turned the spotlight on issues which can actually garner some support from his liberal allies (all while ostracizing the right of course). It’s as if Obama woke up last week, looked at his record, and said, “Hmmm rising unemployment, falling poll numbers…OH LOOK GAY MARRIAGE…I can use that.” These social issues are merely a distraction from Obama’s abysmal record. They are also a way to refocus the spotlight on the President and sooth his inflated ego.

What this political maneuver shows is the president’s complete lack of accountability. He’s unable to answer for his faults or stand up for his decisions, even when they have failed. When all else fails and Obama cannot ignore the glaring shortcomings of his administration, he simply blames his predecessor. The economy, partisanship, turbulent world situation…all Bush. (Note: Ignore the fact that the average unemployment rate under George W. Bush was about 5%) Joe Biden took this on last week, blaming Bush for our turbulent relations with Iran. There is certainly a high degree of character deficiency in the White House right now. The President and his blind supporters are unable to take responsibility for anything, evidence of political and personal weakness. It’s tough to stand by your decisions honestly and answer for your failures. Yet, for the President of the United States, it is part of his job description. The President is not supposed to “Pass the Buck.” Unfortunately for us, our current Commander-in-Chief is more than willing to “Pass the Buck…Over there.” Oh look, a political distraction!

Well…THIS is what is going on, the Associated Press has over-weighed it survey toward Democrats. The next two charts come directly from the AP survey document.

That “none of these number may seem a bit high, that’s because it is. I assume they mean people who are members of minor parties. In the 2008 presidential election, minor parties earned 1.42% of the vote. Does the AP really believe that Americans will vote minor parties at a rate 12x larger than they did four years ago?

When you add up the Independents and None of these its comes to 31% Democrat/ 22% GOP/ 46% other, or Democrat +9

When pushed the respondents to the AP poll showed their political leanings:

I will use the totals that AP shows in bold above. However if one totals the Democratic numbers reflected in the chart above it ads to 51% not 49% (the GOP number is correct).

When you include the “leaners,” the respondents are 49% Democrat/37% GOP/14% neither or Democrat +12. Compare those party preferences to Gallup or Rasmussen and the bias becomes evident:

Putting aside the fact that one skews Democrat and the other GOP, both Rasmussen and Gallup reflects a smaller difference party affiliation preferences than either of the two versions of the AP Poll.  With the heavier weighting toward Democrats it is no surprise that the Associated results show Obama way ahead, while the other two show a much closer race and a Romney lead.

Which split is correct? Lets compare them to the results of the past two elections:

The 2008 Election was a wave election for the Democrats, the Mid-Terms were a wave for the GOP. My friend Ed Morrissey (the official research geek of the conservative blogisphere) wrote in a post on Hot Air the giant Democratic wave of 2008 resulted in a D+7 turnout and the 2010 GOP wave resulted in neither party getting a turnout advantage.

One could make a case for the Gallup D+4 as the number is in between ’08 and ’10. You could even make a case for the Rasmussen number if you assume the negative feeling about Obama’s performance will motivate  more people to switch parties and/or more Republicans to show up at the polls.

However there is absolutely no excuse for the Associated Press splits…well there is one excuse, they could trying to skew the result toward Barack Obama.

Jeff Dunetz is Editor/Publisher of the political blog “The Lid” , contributor to the Breitbart sites and PJM Tattler, as well as the political columnist for a weekly newspaper called The Jewish Star. Please visit his site “The Lid” for more reporting and commentary (and while you are there click on an ad or hit the tip jar).

ABC and Univision announced a joint venture yesterday, the contents of which should serve as a wake-up call to conservatives, and should sound an alarm to conservative media outlets.   According to ABC News:

ABC News announced this morning that it plans to join forces with Univision News to create a multiplatform news, lifestyle and information programming service aimed at U.S. Hispanics.

Both organizations promised in a statement to provide “uncompromising coverage of current events with a unique perspective” with the around-the-clock, English-language television network and digital platform. Both will cater to the country’s more than 50 million Hispanics with programming focused on news, lifestyle and culture. The television network will be staffed by journalists from ABC News and Univision News.

A website, mobile and social media content are expected to debut this summer. The yet-to-be-named television channel is expected to launch in 2013. Editorial coverage will focus on the issues most relevant for U.S. Hispanics, including the economy, jobs, health care, immigration, education, politics, entertainment, health and wellness and more.

This is huge, and a win-win for both networks.  Both networks tap into the nation’s fastest growing demographic in a complimentary manner that enhances each company’s business models.

ABC gets its own Spanish-language news operation, thus catching up with NBC/Telemundo/NBC Latino.  Furthermore, ABC gets to build upon its successes within English-language dominant Hispanics, such as Ugly Betty, the casting of telenovela stud William Levy on this season’s Dancing With The Stars, and the global success of ESPN Deportes. 

Despite all that, Univision is the big winner here.  Until now, Univision’s growth and sustainability has depended (almost) exclusively on a steady influx of non-English speaking, non-assimilated, non-cultured immigrants.   Today, Univision has set itself up for the demographic long game.  By partnering with ABC, Univision is able to hold onto the children of their core viewers (who faithfully tune in to Sábado Gigante, and the telenovelas, and Jorge Ramos’ newscasts).  Essentially, there is now no outgrowing Univision.

We’ve always known that the mainstream media is playing the Institutional Left’s long game, and they have now secured a venue with which to mainstream the immigration grievance narratives that are the backbone of Univision News (lest anyone have lingering doubts, I give you Exhibits A and B).

Fox Latino is not the answer, as it bears a closer resemblance to People En Español than to an actual news outfit.  MundoFox is still a ways away, and still a question mark…especially with regard to its news division. 

Thus, the question needs to be asked:  How serious are conservative media outlets when it comes to countering the memes and narratives of Hispanic mainstream media?  I can’t even begin to frame the effect of an unabated Univision/ABC venture on the electoral landscape…not just in 2012, but in 2016, and beyond. 

It’s time to wake up.  Clear Channel, Salem, TRN, NewsCorp…I’m looking right at you.  All of you. 

Crossposted at El Tercer Riel (The Third Rail).  You can follow me on twitter @BonillaJL. 

Greece’s continued access to bailout funds from the IMF, EU, and European Central Bank, could be in danger, if the austerity measures currently in place in Greece do not continue. As of right now (7:55 CST on May 6th), the Nikkei is down over 2% on the news of the election results. Needless to say, if the Eurozone starts to feel rumbles due to Greek instability, how long before any of that instability spreads to the U.S.?

As I’m sure many of you are aware, the current economic situation in the United States, is far from peachy. It probably wouldn’t take a lot to knock the U.S. back into recession. If I’m at the White House, I would probably start taking some Tums right about now. President Bush still tends to get more blame for our economic condition than president Obama, but if we enter a new recession, how long do you think those numbers will remain that way?

At least the White House can always look at the bright side, if a recession hits, gas prices will drop… probably.

P.S.-Instead of austerity measures, couldn’t the EU demand in return for bailout funds, that all copies of My Big Fat Greek Wedding be burned and that Maria Menounos be betrothed to me? Just an idea.

Cross-posted at El Tercer Riel (The Third Rail).

I answer this question multiple times a day. The people who ask this are referring to the fact that my Dad won eleven states, over 900 counties, with over three million votes cast for him. He was Mitt Romney’s primary competition for the GOP nomination. There is often a certain sense of bewilderment when they ask this, but also of respect or even admiration. And don’t worry. I get why this amazes them. Our campaign was overwhelmingly outspent in most states (sometimes more than 10 to 1), we didn’t have the organizational machine of the Romney camp, and we spent months of the race not getting any attention from the national media. In the fall, we were sitting at two percent in the polls and running a presidential campaign with a handful of incredible, dedicated staff and volunteers.  So, is it shocking that we did what we did? Absolutely. Did I believe if anyone could make this happen, it would be my Dad? Yep. We overcame the odds in this race, which is similar to every race he’s won, beating democratic incumbents in the blue state of Pennsylvania.

“But how did you do it this time? What was your secret?”

I hear ya. I could talk about how we strategized about this or that, how we worked tirelessly, or how we stretched every dollar. Fundamentally, our success came down to three things: message, messenger and movement. These aspects are essential to every race that starts at the grassroots level.

A campaign is not simply platforms and policy; it needs a message that inspires people to act. My Dad traveled the country talking about a manufacturing plan to create jobs, a fiscal policy that would lead America to prosperity, ways to make us energy independent, the looming threat of a nuclear Iran, and the importance of the family. He also talked about the importance of our founding documents, that the loss of liberty was the fundamental issue of this race.

My Dad’s message excited the base of the party and spoke to a middle America that was hungry for, well, a kid from a steel town who knows how to work hard. He visited every county in Iowa before the caucus, worked nearly 24/7 with only five days off throughout the entire campaign, and held over 800 town hall meetings nation wide. Americans still value hard work and a real person who is courageous and honest.

With that type of a messenger, we began painting our vision for America. And as any good teacher will tell you, when you begin anything, you talk about what you know. So, we started our campaign out talking about our stories – our immigrant family, our vision for the country, how we got conservative things done in DC, and how we believe in the founding principles that made America great. Then something wonderful began to happen. Our supporters and volunteers believed in the message and that belief turned into action. Money can’t buy that type of genuine enthusiasm. The campaign became about the stories of all the people who came into our lives on this journey. A movement began.

In Iowa, a guy named Chuck volunteered to drive my Dad around to all of his events in a Dodge Ram pickup truck. Chuck is a straight shooting, salt of the earth guy who loves Iowa and its caucus. Even though he’s a top politico in the state, as he’s the former director of the state party, he put the rest of his life on hold to drive the Chuck Truck for our campaign. He believed we could pull off the impossible: a win in Iowa. Hundreds of miles later, his faith was rewarded.

Wendy Jensen was the smallest wisp of a woman with one of the biggest hearts I’ve ever known. In spite of her disability, she made over 5,000 phone calls for the campaign in Iowa and passed away right before caucus night. I know she’d be proud of what we all did, together, in Iowa. That night was for Wendy.

In Oklahoma, we met our best volunteer whose name was Nathanial. He had spina bifida. Nathanial made thousands of phone calls from home for the campaign. Yet as we thanked him for his huge contribution, he thanked us for representing his voice.

While in Missouri, a woman came up to my Dad after an event and handed him eight dollars. These were her daily tips from her job as a pet groomer. She told him this was her contribution to protect freedom.

For each of these stories there’s a thousand more. People all across the nation rose up and made big things happen. We even had a song written for us, called “Game On.”

I remember several months ago when a Romney surrogate claimed that all the significant Republicans in the country had spoken about who should be the GOP nominee. There was outrage among Republicans across America, especially among the half of the country who had not voted yet. A trend started on twitter, a hashtag that said #IAmSignificant. This went viral as everyday Americans “endorsed” my Dad for president because, after all, they were significant too. When I heard the comment myself, I couldn’t help but think of Chuck, Wendy, and Nathanial. To us, these everyday Americans were significant. In fact, they were invaluable.

So when people ask me how we ran a grassroots campaign for president and re-wrote the history books on how presidential races are run, well, the answer is simple: we did it together, against all the odds. But, who doesn’t like a good underdog story? Thank goodness for the Ricks, Rockys and Rudys of this world who remind us of what’s really significant and that all things are possible.

Recent thumbs down have gone to Liberty Mutual with its “Responsibility, what’s your policy?” ads that, to me, are like an ancient codex I’ve yet to decipher. “I don’t know what you mean!” I want to scream at the flat screen. “Are you saying you crack down on insurance fraud? Is that what you mean by responsibility? And your Goody Two-shoes scenarios – all those people helping each other—are you trying to make me feel bad? Am I not doing enough to help my neighbor? Is that what you’re telling me—I’m not responsible enough? For the love of God, stop hectoring me, Liberty Mutual. ”

Also on the feces roster (can I say that here?) is Ally Bank, which seems to think it can woo customers by showing a mean man cruelly teasing children, promising them ice cream or ponies or something before rescinding the offer. This is supposed to demonstrate that Ally isn’t like that. The association left in my feeble brain, though? Ally Bank/mean man who taunts innocent children. But perhaps this was the intent of some sly Mad Man, eh? Someone injured in the mortgage meltdown, wanting to give Ally its true due? If so, well played, advertising director. Well played.

Big thumbs up go to DirecTV’s latest series in which cable users experience a domino effect of bad outcomes when they get angry with bad cable service. The punch line for one: “Don’t reenact scenes from Platoon with Charlie Sheen.  Get rid of cable…” It’s a must-see.

My criteria for giving an ad a high five are: it has to keep me from muting it; it has to work even if I do mute it; it has to not infuriate me; it has to entertain me; and, while entertaining me, it has to sell me its product/service in a way that I remember it.

You’d be surprised how many good ads don’t get that last part right. They’re so focused on being clever or funny that they forget to mention who they are and what they’re selling in such a way that you recall the brand. (Some ads achieve this magnificently, though. Target, for example, has developed a distinctive ad style that has me recognizing the company long before I see the logo or store name appear on the screen.)

So, with this experience and years of thoughtful analysis behind me, I am about to offer my opinion of the latest ad produced by Karl Rove’s PAC, American Crossroads. First, the ad:

Now, the analysis. I have to agree with Donald Trump on this one, in spirit if not in degree. I think the ad fails in the last in my criteria for an effective promotion: it doesn’t adequately sell me on its message. As Trump stated, it makes President Obama look “great.”

He’s right. It fills a full 27 of its 45 seconds with clips of the president being “cool.” By the time you get to the “buy” message with its quick roundup of Bad Things Happening Now, it feels as if the Mean Bank Guy has come to take the pony away, and Liberty Mutual has shown up to scold you for wanting the pony in the first place.

Everyone wanted to believe in that hopey-changey stuff four years ago, after all, and reminding them of that warm, fuzzy feeling they had for Obama back then is something you’d expect from his team, not an opponent’s.

I understand it’s tricky trying to design effective ad messages to unseat an incumbent. One rule surely has to be: you don’t want to communicate in any way that you thought folks were stupid for voting the guy in before. The Crossroads ad tries to get around this with a subtle “you were hypnotized by his Svengali-like performances” message. But instead, with so many of those “cool Obama” clips, they risk, well, hypnotizing everyone with his Svengali-like performances.

I don’t have enough failed campaigns under my belt to qualify as a campaign adviser, but I do know this: don’t spend the majority of your message time reminding folks why they liked your opponent. Articulate our anger and despair, sure, at being disappointed. But at heart, Americans like optimists. It was part of Obama’s appeal last time around. Winning messages focused on defeating him should contain at least a soupcon of the American can-do outlook that got him elected in the first place.

____

Libby Sternberg is a novelist who watches too much TV.

Expanding on this demonstration, he’s started sending voters into polling places to request ballots in the names of well-known people, usually ones who oppose Voter ID laws. Recently, one of these incidents involved the ballot of Alicia Menendez, a contributor at NBC Latino.

Here’s how it went down: one of O’Keefe’s workers went into a DC polling place and requested a ballot as Ms. Menendez…but was asked for ID because Ms. Menendez had already cast a ballot. So the poseur left, ostensibly to get her ID, and never returned. O’Keefe’s point was made, nonetheless: requesting ID from the voter was a good idea in this case, n’est ce pas?

Menendez, as you can imagine, was not amused. She wrote a column about the piece and also appeared briefly on an MSNBC show late morning where she made a variation on this point:

…there are already systems in place to assure that this type of thing (voter fraud) can’t happen. If two Alicia Menendez’s (sic) showed up at the poll, the second to arrive would have been given a provisional ballot, and only the real vote would have counted.

In the MSNBC interview, she phrased this slightly differently, saying that her real vote would have canceled out the phony vote. (Not really. If both votes were counted, the phony one would cancel the real one.)

But what if the scenario had been: the phony voter cast her ballot first, and Menendez was the “second to arrive?” Then, presumably, the real Menendez is given the provisional ballot while her identity is verified. Once it is, how would the poll workers know how to delete the phony vote to ensure “only the real vote would have counted?” Is Menendez saying that poll workers can go back through all the votes cast and remove a vote they deem “unreal”?

If so, I’d say that’s more a threat to democracy than Voter ID laws.

____

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

If, as the old saw goes, personnel is policy…then it is clear that the Obama machine (campaign and labor) has decided that its primary Hispanic outreach target is Central Florida.  Accordingly, they have dispatched their best general to the field.

On Monday, José Delgado (Washington D.C. correspondent for El Nuevo Día) published a piece which featured the Democrat Hispanic outreach key players in Central Florida (Google-translated version here).  I was familiar with some of the names cited (such as Franceschini, who has been active for years, and Acevedo, who is the public face of the Hispanic campaign in the I-4 corridor)…but one name, in particular, was not at all known to me (my translation):

“This is where the battle royal will be fought”, said labor leader José La Luz, whom the AFL-CIO has assigned to work on voter mobilization in Central Florida.

Since the name didn’t ring a bell, I started digging.  It turns out that La Luz is not only a labor legend, but a “proud socialist” with a track record and radical pedigree going all the way back to the ’70s.  Had he shifted to academia, as did many of the radicals of that time period, he’d undoubtedly be one of those “silver ponytails” that Andrew Breitbart alluded to at CPAC.  Instead, he stayed in the field and became a master organizer.

La Luz got his start as a member of the now-defunct Puerto Rican Socialist Party (which had extensive ties to the Castro regime, according to Congressional testimony), and was active in that party’s Connecticut branch.  By 1976, he rose to become a part of the PSP’s Central Committee, and attended the National Hard Times Conference (under the auspices of Prairie Fire and the Weather Underground).  Shortly thereafter, La Luz left the PSP and joined the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, where he became Chairman of its Hispanic Commission, prior to the merger that led to the formation of the Democratic Socialists of America.  After spending most of the ’90s in Chicago, La Luz officially retured to Puerto Rico as Executive Director of the local AFSCME branch, and successfully oversaw the multi-union organization of 150,000 government workers, and their (successful) campaign for collective bargaining rights.

Fast forward to 2007, and we begin to see how La Luz’ unique experience and skill sets come into play over the course of the past and current election cycles.  Shortly after that particular speech, La Luz (who was, at the time, director of the AFSCME Leadership Academy) became chairman of Latinos For Obama.  As such, La Luz worked in Colorado and New Mexico, driving registration, educating, and mobilizing voters until Election Day.  A month and half before the 2008 general election, he had this to say to People’s World Weekly:

“We are showing how the companies and outfits that exploit Latino workers are the people behind McCain,” said Laluz. Between now and Nov. 4, Laluz said the Obama campaign is registering voters in New Mexico and Colorado and developing lists of tens of thousands of Latino supporters for Obama. “Those lists will constitute the people we bring out on Election Day,” he said.

By now we know that the strategy clearly worked, given that Obama gained 67% of the Latino vote in 2008.  This strategy focused specifically on racial and economic grievances.

La Luz has remained active in the DSA, serving as vice-chair as recently as 2009, and adressing the DSA conventionin 2011 (watch the whole thing if you can spare the time, but if not, then definitely go to 24:11).  In particular, the calls for a tax increase pledge, and the Occupy Spring Offensive bring special insight into what we can expect to see in Central Florida.

If you read through the Nuevo Día piece, you’ll see that La Luz is savvy enough to recognize that the immigration argument might not play as well in Central Florida, but the other elements of the strategy would.

Given the importance of the Hispanic vote along the I-4 corridor, and its national repercussions (let there be no doubt that FL-9 is now the Mother Of All Bellwethers), there was always an expectation that the Institutional Left would go all out.  We also know that the muscle is never far from the smiling face, and the iron is fist never far from the velvet glove.

It is clear that Central Florida’s hispanic battleground (the most important in the nation) is a must-win for the regime, and it has sent its best general to the field.

Stuff just got real.

A Spanish-language version of this post is available at El Tercer Riel (The Third Rail).

Via RCP:

Chris Matthews: Let me ask you about something which is not in the polling, but I want you as experts — Barack Obama is the first African-American president, okay. Is there going to be a reluctance on the part of the voters and the political community that talks politics as we get into November about dumping the first African-American president? Is there going to be something that just wretches people? ‘Wait a minute here, this guy is going to knock out the first guy who got aboard?

Follow the link, where you’ll see Howard Fineman arguing that Obama is held to a higher standard because of his skin color, and you’ll watch as Chuck Todd posits that a Republican To Be Named Later backed out of the race for that very reason.

I respectfully submit that we witness, yet again, the absolute validation of Andrew Breitbart’s final thesis, to wit: that the ambiguous themes of “Hope” and “Change” were really nothing more than ideological beards for the class warfare and racial strife at the heart of Obama’s ideology and subsequent governance.  May I remind you that John McCain run the kind of “submission to history” campaign that Obama so easily crushed in 2008, and which Matthews seems to evoke.

Given the self-evident lack of accomplishment of this regime, there is nothing more left to offer or sell to the American electorate.  There is nothing left but guilt projection.  Whether it’s the fake #WarOnWomen or the economically risible Buffett Rule, the intended result is the same…to shame us into submission.  And now this.  Having abandoned all hope, the leg thrill has now yielded to the guilt trip.

Not only is this tactic useless, but it lacks any factual or historical basis.  May I remind you that after an equally disastrous term, New York City passed judgement on its first African-American mayor.

Bear in mind that New York’s electorate is much more forgiving (and progreeeeesiiiive) than that of the nation as a whole.  Given those realities, I don’t see too many people buying into this phony race guilt meme.  If this is what the media is going with at this juncture, I’m liking our chances.

A Spanish-language version of this post is available at El Tercer Riel (The Third Rail).

But FDR said some things in his previous election battle that Republicans would nod their heads to today, and the campaign that springs to my mind when I view the 2012 contest is the 1932 match-up between challenger FDR and incumbent Herbert Hoover. Republicans could learn some things by studying it.

This parallel first occurred to me when Newt Gingrich was riding high after some great debate performances. When Gingrich became Speaker of the House in 1995, he referred to FDR several times, in complimentary tones. For good or ill, FDR was a man of big ideas, and it’s no surprise that Gingrich, no slouch in the ideas department, should admire the Depression-era president.

It struck me that, if Gingrich became the nominee, we could see a Bizarro World rerun of the 1932 election, with Gingrich as the FDR figure, criticizing the stick-in-the-mud Democrats and their feckless leader, President (Herbert Hoover) Obama, while offering a “happy days are here again” optimism along with a dizzying list of ideas for how to get us out of the Recession.

Of course, this was before Gingrich started acting more like “BMR” (Bertha Mason Rochester) than FDR, except without the convenient attic.

But now that the dust has settled and Mitt Romney is on a glide path to nomination victory, the FDR/Hoover parallels resurfaced for me. And I believe Romney is in the ideal spot to play the FDR role, albeit in a Semi-Bizarro World universe where some, but not all, things are opposite.

Mitt could, for example, embrace this snippet from FDR’s nomination speech of 1932:

“I know something of taxes. For three long years I have been going up and down this country preaching that Government–Federal and State and local–costs too much. I shall not stop that preaching. As an immediate program of action we must abolish useless offices. We must eliminate unnecessary functions of Government–functions, in fact, that are not definitely essential to the continuance of Government. We must merge, we must consolidate subdivisions of Government, and, like the private citizen, give up luxuries which we can no longer afford.

“By our example at Washington itself, we shall have the opportunity of pointing the way of economy to local government, for let us remember well that out of every tax dollar in the average State in this Nation, 40 cents enter the treasury in Washington, D. C., 10 or 12 cents only go to the State capitals, and 48 cents are consumed by the costs of local government in counties and cities and towns.”

To be clear, this bit of FDR’s speech was preceded by some anti-corporate greed ranting that President Obama’s speechwriters channel relentlessly in the current campaign. But these “small government,” “lower taxes” words were coming from the mouth of a man considered today to be a demi-God in the Democratic pantheon. Make them your own, Mitt, and tell folks who said them first!

Forget that FDR ended up bloating government. Remember instead that FDR was campaigning in 1932 against a fellow who’d failed to bring the country out of the Depression because he’d done a lot of things that Democrats of today fancy: supporting free trade restrictions and higher taxes, among them.

Romney would be wise to point this out, that just like Herbert Hoover, Barack Obama thinks that taxing the wealthy will lead to more economic progress. And, oh yes, Obama is the president who’s not been keen on worthwhile projects like the Keystone Pipeline, instead preferring crony capitalist ventures like Solyndra—you know, the smoke-filled backroom deals (except, perhaps, in this case, the smoke might have come from New Age incense).

Ironically, Romney could also position himself as the savior of one of FDR’s greatest accomplishments. FDR might have introduced and won passage of Social Security, but it’s members of his party today who stand in the way of reforming the program so that it stays healthy for future generations. And it’s Republicans who are also offering ideas for putting Medicare on a more secure footing, while the president’s health care plan included cuts to Medicare.

The list could go on, demonstrating how Mitt and Republicans are the true progressives (in the sense of those embracing progress on thorny issues instead of clinging desperately to old ideals because “we’ve always done it that way”) in this campaign.

Oh, there’s one other way in which Romney parallels Roosevelt. Romney, like FDR, comes from a wealthy family.

Hmm…maybe someone should suggest a cigarette holder and jaunty fedora for Mitt?

On second thought, scratch that.

___

Libby Sternberg has a vivid imagination, which is why she’s a novelist.

President Obama must believe he can’t close the deal with Latinos, because during his Friday interview on Univision he resorted to lying about Mitt Romney’s stance on racial profiling. Obama implied that Romney’s approval of the Arizona illegal immigrant was an indication that he approved of racial profiling. What he was actually doing was trying to deflect attention away from how bad his administration has been for the Hispanic community.

Host Enrique Acevedo asked Obama if he would make immigration reform a priority during the first year of a second term:

Per the Daily Caller:

Rick Santorum’s withdrawal was supposed to have signaled the beginning of the general election, and the end of this cycle’s silly season.  However, there is still an open spot on the Republican ticket, still news cycle to be filled with speculation, and still deadlines to be met…come rain, hail, sleet, or snow.

Until now, I had seen no need to address this fantasy indulged by the D.C.-and-New York-bassed kommentariat, which seems intent on pushing the Governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Fortuño, for the Vice Presidential nod.  Despite this insistence, I don’t think Fortuño so much as cracks the short list.  Such pieces as these, most recently from The Hill, are not just purely speculative media mind-dealing, they also serve to expose the ignorance of those who are supposed to deliver fact-based analysis.

There is no doubt, given Fortuño’s track record, that Gov. Mitt Romney is right to call him “a solid conservative and a firm leader.” However, I don’t think that neccesarily builds Fortuño’s case for running mate.

The end of any seriousness in The Hill’s piece begins with the notion that Fortuño’s presence would help the party’s Hispanic outreach efforts.  As I’ve noted previously, the coveted “Hispanic vote” is not a monoblock that can be reached with a single message.  Those who think so are usually the ones that have been clamoring for Marco Rubio’s addition to the ticket, as well (despite his continual rejections of the VP nod).  In theory, Fortuño’s impact would likely limit itself to the I-4 corridor, which would be redundant given John Quiñones’ run in FL-9 (and, to a lesser extent, Col. E.J. Otero’s run in Tampa).  In the Northeast, Hispanic voters are used to (and used to voting against) Hispanic candidates.  In the West, there is no factual basis with which to assume that a Hispanic conservative would necessarily bring substantial votes, especially now that Gov. Susana Martínez has tapped out from VP consideration (other than maybe Rubio, I can’t see it).

Fortuño’s executive and Congressional experience best qualifies him to lead Puerto Rico through its particular self-inflicted fiscal challenges, but isn’t a good fit for the Vice Presidency at this crucial historical juncture.  Romney’s running mate is going to have to be able to hit the lame-duck session on the run, and this lame-duck is big enough to choke a horse.  There will be ObamaCare SCOTUS fallout, regardless of the ruling.  In addition, there is a transition whichc hands off the winding-down of two wars…and oh, by the way, Taxmageddon is looming.  This particular transition requires a mastery of the tax and budgeting process that I’m not sure whether Fortuño has attained as Resident Commissioner in Washington, and Tourism Secretary and Governor of Puerto Rico.

Any other election cycle, and Fortuño is definitely on the short list.  But not this one.  Given the magnitude of the mess that is going to need cleaning up, and the need for a clean vetting, I think Romney will play it safe and go with three budget nerds on his short list.  Of these, I expect Jindal to show, Ryan to place, and Portman to win.

A Spanish-language version of this post is available at El Tercer Riel (The Third Rail).

Alan Grayson is the only candidate to announce for the Democrats.  His national fame (or infamy) has given him a natural fundraising advantage, which translates to about $2 million to date according to Sunshine State News.  His finances, the 9^th District’s demographics, and his access to the Obama machine would make him a nigh-unstoppable candidate in any other cycle, and against any other opponent.  But, perhaps, not this one.

FL-9 covers southeasternOrangeCounty, all of Osceola county, and a sliver of Polk County known as Poinciana.  Those who know Central Florida know that this part of town is heavily Hispanic, and that half of that Hispanic population is of Puerto Rican origin.  This is where Democrat math begins to crack up.

 About 40% of FL-9’s voting-age residents are Hispanic, and it’s no secret that Hispanic voters tend to favor Democrats, more so, Puerto Rican voters.  However, most ofCentral Florida’s Hispanics are registered independents, and tend to swing-vote.  Quiñones has a proven track record of appealing to these voters, and has won multiple elections on what is otherwise hostile ground for Republicans.  With a Puerto Rican on the ballot (especially one with Quiñones’ profile), I am hard-pressed to believe that Grayson (who does not currently live in FL-9 but owns a home there) can get the overwhelming majority of Hispanic votes that he’d need in order to return to Congress.  

 The mere possibility of a fifth Puerto Rican in Congress (along with Serrano, Velázquez, Gutiérrez, and Labrador) would potentially dry up any fundraising on the island, and would spook any local politicians looking to come over and stump for Grayson (as did Resident Commissioner Pedro Pierluisi last cycle).  For many Puerto Ricans, ethnic identity trumps political affiliation (Exhibit A: Sonia Sotomayor), and they tend to coalesce around “one of their own”, right or wrong.

 A Quiñones run in FL-9 could throw a wrench into national electoral calculations, as well.  Quiñones would likely affect Hispanic outreach and turnout all along the vaunted I-4 corridor, and could well help oust both President Barack Obama and Senator Bill Nelson.

Marco Rubio’s rise to the Senate proved that (A) Florida is a unique electoral market, and (B) that its Hispanics do not readily respond to Democrat national messaging.  Quiñones’ candidacy would necessarily focus the debate on Grayson, and hog-tie his record to Obama’s, and would rob Democrats of the opportunity to raise the specter of Hispanic racial grievance within the I-4 corridor.

For generations, Democrats have lived by the sword of racial polarization and grievance, and I am thrilled at the prospect that they may now die by it.  If I’m either the RNC, the RNCC, the Florida GOP, or Mitt Romney’s people…I’d look into wrapping my arms (and checkbook) around this guy yesterday.

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ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. At midnight EST Townhall.com publishes Kevin McCullough’s weekly column this week that focuses on President Obama’s statement from the Rose Garden yesterday and asks the important question of whether or not the ‘O’ministration is being purely politically exploitative by weighing in on the Trayvon Martin shooting. From the matter that an eye-witness now seems to back Zimmerman’s original story, to the fact that while President Obama found “his own son’s identity” at stake in the Martin shooting, but seems uninterested in equally harsh crimes committed in reverse. Let’s just say there are plenty of questions about the entire thing. From your perspective: 888.340.3373.

2. Stephen Baldwin, ran across a story this week that seems to indicate a psychologist was aware of Jerry Sandusky’s odd habits years ago, but never revealed anything, and as a result more kids were injured. Stephen’s question is, when do we break that barrier of confidentiality, confidence, trust, in order to do a greater good?

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

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Baldwin/McCullough *LIVE* – Hr 1/Hr 2

Where can you find the radio station nearest you to hear Baldwin/McCullough? Simple enough… Click here! Where can you go to see it on television? Check your local listings, or on-screen guide:

And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. Gloria Allred today called for an arrest of the Icon of Talk Radio–Rush Limbaugh. On message boards, chat rooms, facebook and twitter, the call for Limbaugh to be fired, boycotted, etc, still rings out. All the while President Obama is sending the man he most trusts to be on shows that make far worse objects of women. And get this–Obama’s guy this week did a hit job on Romney and Santorum for not denouncing Rush stronger. Keith Olbermann explained it this week–summarized, “If you’re a liberal man, saying insulting things to conservative women… is NOT misogyny.” BTW… How misogynistic is the new ABC television network’s show “Good Christian Bitches?” Agree? From your perspective: 888.340.3373.

2. The Oministration making all sorts of friends this week: Defense Secretary telling Congress that International “Permission” trumps U.S. Congressional “permission.” Additionally, the February deficit was $229,000,000,000. (That’s how much money Obama spent ABOVE what he HAD!) Thoughts: 888.340.3373. But he did have enough time, energy and money to make a pitch to Hollywood.

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Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

A key feature 1996 and 2012 have in common is that, as of today’s date (4 March), the primary elections have delivered one outright win (50% or more of the vote) to any candidate.  In 1996, Bob Dole won Puerto Rico with 98% of the vote before Super Tuesday.  In 2012, Mitt Romney has won Nevada with 50% of the vote.

Otherwise, the assumed frontrunners in both elections remained in the 30-40% region throughout the early primaries.  Bob Dole faced Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes, and Lamar Alexander, whose combined “not-Dole” popular-vote total up through 4 March 1996 was 593,472 to Dole’s 443,381.

Assumed frontrunners are, of course, commonly beaten by the combined “not-frontrunner” vote total in the early primaries of a competitive year (i.e., when a party’s sitting president is not running).  That is the case this year, with Romney at a vote total of 1,812,418 so far, and the combined total of Santorum, Gingrich, and Paul at 2,049,303.

In 1980, Reagan’s early vote total through 4 March – there was no “Super Tuesday” then – was at least 1,240,068, while his competitors combined had racked up 1,528,937.  (The 1980 vote total for Alabama is unavailable at this writing, due to a server problem at the state government website.)  In 1988 – a slower-starting primary year – Bush Sr.’s 4 March vote total was 224,871 to his opponents’ combined 401,377.  In 2000, George W. Bush was sitting on 1,614,355 votes by 4 March, while John McCain had gotten 1,712,991.

But by 4 March, in each of those years, there had been more outright primary victories (by any candidate) than in 1996 or 2012.  The following table covers Republican primaries in competitive, non-incumbent years back to 1980:

Elec. Yr         No. Voting Primaries/             No. Primaries won by 50%

                        Binding Caucuses                   or more (any candidate)

1980                       5                                             2

1988                     12                                             5

1996                      11                                             1

2000                     11                                             8

2008*                  40                                          20

2012                     12                                             1

* Super Tuesday was 5 February in 2008; entire primary schedule was heavily front-loaded

(All primary/caucus totals include District of Columbia and trust territories; totals do not include non-binding primary/caucus votes)

Obviously, there are multiple dimensions for comparison between years, and on other scores we may distinguish 2012 from 1996.  The sitting president in each year is a Democrat who is popular with the media and gets good press, but in 1996 the US economy was in better shape and President Clinton was getting comparatively high marks for his handling of it.

In 2012, the economy is in unusually bad shape, with one key indicator – labor force participation – at its worst reading since the recession of 1982, and another – the price of gas at the pump – at its highest level ever.  Meanwhile, President Obama’s handling of national security gets lower marks from poll respondents as the months go by.  Bill Clinton famously tacked toward the center for the 1996 election; Barack Obama has tacked leftward, with socially divisive rhetoric and socialist talking points, and thus has major negatives that Clinton did not have.

So it is entirely possible that Obama will beat himself in November; we should not despair over the parallels between 2012 and previous years.  That said, the quality of the assumed GOP frontrunner and the relative lack of enthusiasm for any of the candidates may give us pause.  On reviewing this table of popular vote tallies for the presidential elections of the last 40 years, we must hope that the fear of Obama is greater than anything else, for GOP voters and GOP-leaning independents:

1972                29,173,222                  47,168,710

1976                40,831,881                  39,148,634

1980                35,480,115                  43,903,230                     5,719,850 (Anderson)

1984                37,577,352                   54,455,472

1988                41,809,074                  48,886,097

1992                44,909,806                  39,104,550                   19,743,821 (Perot)

1996                47,401,185                    39,197,469                     8,085,294 (Perot)

2000                50,999,897                  50,456,002

2004                59,028,444                  62,040,610

2008                69,456,897                  59,934,814

Naturally, one of the key factors in 2012 is likely to be whether there is a third-party candidate with significant vote-getting power.  At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be one on the horizon, which is good news for Mitt Romney and the fortunes of the GOP in the general election.

But the decline in enthusiasm for the GOP candidate from 2004 to 2008 was marked, if not as precipitous as the decline between 1988 and 1992, or 1972 and 1976.  There is reason for concern as to whether a candidate with Romney’s record of comfort with big government is the man to lead a GOP resurgence.  The drawbacks of his limited appeal suggest that a Republican victory in November is likely to be a narrow one, perhaps on the order of Jimmy Carter’s victory in 1976 or even Bush 43’s in 2000.

One additional factor has to be considered.  Pundits speak with absolute certainly today about the economy being the main – possibly even the sole – driver of the voters’ decision in November 2012.  And it may be, but there are 8 months to the general election, and a big world out there.  Whatever drives the election will almost certainly be related to the economy in some way – but it won’t necessarily be what we can see or imagine on 4 March.

Note:  Primary election/caucus information from Wikipedia, Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, and selected state government websites.  General election vote totals from Wikipedia and Dave Leip’s site.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

I know why “Mitt’s Knickers” are in a wad this morning.

He’s getting an end-around run against his overly priced campaign that has outspent is biggest opponent 40 to 1 in his home state and he still may lose.

He’s expressing this morning his “outrage” and “disgust” at a concept that signals something very important to anyone watching the race from a general election perspective.

Earth to Mitt, Earth to Mitt: There are not enough pure Republican voters in the country for you to win a general election. Reaching out to Democrats isn’t only the savvy thing to do from a campaign strategy in the primary, it also makes a heck of a lot of sense in laying the groundwork for disaffected Democrats and Independents in the general election.

Mitt’s team feels sucker-punched because they have had almost no forethought on the Michigan race almost from the get-go. They weren’t paying attention when they lost Iowa. They weren’t paying attention when they lost Minnesota. They weren’t paying attention when they lost Missouri. They’re not paying attention now that they may lost Michigan, or that they are running a huge risk in possible losing Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The Team Romney scorched-earth, spend big, and no-one-challenge-us, mentality has not brought about an especially strong argument for why people should vote for their candidate.

Meanwhile, Santorum is talking about the current administration’s war on people’s freedom of religion, he is talking about the need to reinvent the American manufacturing capacity, he is talking about reducing the imposition of the federal government in to the intrusion of the life of the every day American, and he is blasting Obama on the governmental universal take-over of a person’s independent right to choose health care options. (Something Mitt can’t do with any genuine credibility.)

Santorum is increasingly connecting with people.

Heck he had a car with his name circle the Daytona track for a hundred laps and six hours worth of television last night, while Mitt fell into another “richie rich who can’t relate to the average joe” black-hole on the matter.

Mitt should be mad, but not at Santorum.

Santorum is doing exactly what any serious Republican should WANT to do in this election cycle–grow the number of people who vote for Republicans.

And as the economy has plenty of evidence of, this election cycle disaffected former Obama supporters should be ripe for the picking!

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THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH PODCAST:
Baldwin/McCullough *LIVE* – Hr 1/Hr 2

Where can you find the radio station nearest you to hear Baldwin/McCullough? Simple enough… Click here! Where can you go to see it on television? Check your local listings, or on-screen guide:

And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. In a nation as blessed as the United States of America, why is it/or does it just seem this way, that the left it less naturally enthusiastic about supporting the military? What is your take on it? Kevin McCullough has some first person stories to relate and has drawn some observations as it relates merely to the film release this weekend of ACT OF VALOR. From your perspective: 888.340.3373.

2. If there is time a disturbing new trend is worth discussing: Girls who ask the internet if they “think I’m pretty.” Why so helpless. Why such a sad route to solving the problem and what are they actually attempting to satisfy? Thoughts: 888.340.3373.

Brought to you tonight in part by:
Are you looking to make a major difference in the success you can experience in business, promotion, marriage, or life? Then you owe it to yourself to discover the secrets of Dani Johnson and her transformational seminar First Steps to Success. These events sell out quickly, and many come away getting promoted, starting businesses, or earning a 6 or 7 figure income for the first time in their lives. Dani Johnson… committed to your TOTAL SUCCESS check out First Steps now!

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

Conservative voters who are alarmed about the direction of government recognize that procedural mechanisms and ephemeral election-year sentiment can’t fix it.  They perceive that our problems with government can only be addressed with moral decisions: difficult decisions made when much is at stake and there are deeply compelling interests in competition with each other.  Moral courage exists for such scary things, and doing the right thing when all of the choices at hand will break someone’s china requires a kind of moral courage that rarely sounds soothing to the ears of a harassed public.  It is more likely to resonate as trenchant, annoying, or painfully necessary.

Many of the voters are down for that this year.  A growing number of them are less put off by the sting of astringent than they are afraid of what will happen if America tries to avoid it.  They aren’t irritated by “moral talk”; they are interested and primed for it.

As regards Santorum’s suitability to this mood, however, a question in my mind is whether moral courage for the hour has to sound particularly theological, oddly detailed, or hectoring.  Along these lines, William McGurn offered Santorum good advice in a column on Tuesday:

[W]hen Mr. Santorum discusses [social] issues, he needs to fold them into his larger narrative about the free society. …

There is, however, one area where Mr. Santorum needs to demonstrate a discipline it’s not yet clear he has. That is the ability to resist the efforts to drag him out of the public questions into the weeds of theological debate.

I would go a bit further and suggest Santorum take a page directly from Ronald Reagan’s book.  This would entail a pivot in emphasis.  John Podhoretz has nicely identifiedwhat we might call Santorum’s “presentation” problem: his tendency, at least in his non-campaign speeches from the past, to dwell on rebuking a fallen America.

The point is central, because rebuke of the past is not a guide to policy for the future – and the “rebuke” theme gets old quickly, as demonstrated by a similar tendency in the current president.  Something like Santorum’s now-infamous “mainline Protestants” comment may get vigorous agreement from a lot of evangelical Protestants, but it isn’t the basis for an action plan or a useful source of vision for national government.  Granted, Santorum made that remark in what was essentially a religious speech at a Catholic college.  But when you’re running for president, your memorable comments need to have a more positive and visionary emphasis.

Fortunately, there’s a lot to be positive about in the American tradition Santorum invokes.  It is also an excellent source of vision.  And one of Reagan’s greatest strengths was in defining and celebrating the important elements of that political tradition: the trademark American idea of government that is limited, constitutional, and federal.

Reagan saved his rebukes for left-wing ideology and policy.  He didn’t approach the American people as a sick society in need of exhortation, even though America was putting up plenty of soft targets in that regard in the 1970s.  Rather, he predicated his political approach on expecting the best of the people.  He spoke often about liberty and small government in terms of their unique power to unleash the people’s virtues.  He couched his message in positive terms, speaking far less about the evils of welfarism, for example, than about the benefits of liberty and opportunity.

With his positive approach, Reagan was unusually convincing on an essential principle: that the people do better with less government.  Santorum may embrace that principle, but it’s not readily associated with him, because he spends so much time talking about things like the societal problems that arise when contraception is considered a cheap “out” from moral decisions about sex and procreation.  He may have good points on that and other topics, but as a practical matter of communication and point-making, those essays in forensic pessimism don’t really advance the argument for political liberty.

Republicans this year should emphasize encouraging the people with reminders of what America was constituted to do right, and what Americans have done right with their freedom.  In 2012, it may be necessary to speak in some explicit detail about the moral principles behind American liberty.  Today’s voters are less likely to have been reared on them than the voters of 1980 were.  But if there’s one thing this primary season has shown, it’s that the voters want that discussion.

That is a tremendous opportunity.  Santorum can seize it best by concentrating on what we’ve got going for us and why we can turn this thing around.  If our focus is on social negatives, and if we are discouraged as to whether we will do good things with liberty and small government, it’s hard to make the case that those conditions frame a better future for the country.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

• For Rick Santorum, the Obamunists plot to smear him as a religious fanatic who wants to erect a theocracy on American soil, and as an ultra-social-conservative lunatic who wants to disenfranchise the entire female sex, burn gays at the stake, and reinstate official government racism, if not the return of slavery itself.

  Alas, Santorum plays right into this strategy by his increasingly hysterical denunciations of Obama as “not a Christian;” he may well not be a Christian — I think his religion is Progressivism; but as electoral strategy, attacking your opponent as irreligious is not calculated to reassure the mushy middle that you’re fit to serve as POTUS.

• For Mitt Romney, their scheme is both simpler and more complex: The Kingpin of gangster government intends to “smear” Romney for being a wealthy man.

  This is simpler, in that nobody can deny that Mitt Romney would be the richest GOP presidential nominee of all time (that is, since the Republican Party was founded in 1854); he’s worth between $190 and $250 million. (JFK — Kerry, not Kennedy — is probably the richest nominee ever; but he doesn’t count as a counterexample, since he’s a Progressivist Democrat, hence by definition busy saving the world, man!)

  But the strategy is also more complex, in that Obama must show not only that Romney is rich, but that there is something disreputable about this; and he must convince tens of millions of voters who are not already “Occupiers” and “99 percenters.”

I don’t really care about Santorum’s response to the inevitable Obamic attacks; I doubt he’ll be the nominee; and if he is, having seen him in action now, I believe he’ll win only if the economic climate is such that any Republican would win… a pious hope, but unlikely.

Thus, Obama will be forced to pivot his slanderous traducements from “evil conservative!” to “one percenter!”, and he’s stuck with trying to explain to the American people why multi-millionaire Republicans like Romney are inherently unfit to command, while multi-millionaire Democrats like Al Gore and John Kerry (and Barack Obama) are inevitably great leaders.

And that last is the chink in Obama’s playbook, meaning no disrespect to Jeremy Lin; it lies within Romney’s power, if not within his will, to utterly destroy that meme of attack — or better, to drive it right back into Obama’s court with an overhead smash. He can! But will he?

Will a Capitalist nation (sort of) implicitly reject anybody who’s rich? Egad, I hope not; I can only hope that America has not sunk so low that it treats wealth itself as suspect, and sees liberal Fascism as its cure. Rather, I believe Americans admire achievement; and I believe they understand that wealth “inequality” is precisely what drives the economy, while enforced income equality would kill it… just as water that is all at the same level can do no work: Hydraulics requires some of the water to be higher than the rest; that’s what makes the waterwheel, or the turbine, go round and round.

Romney need never apologize for his wealth; instead, he needs to say something along these lines:

My opponent accuses me of being successful and wealthy — “rich” is the term he uses, I believe. All right, I confess; I am wealthy; I am rich. And you now how I got to be that way? By following the American dream.

My friends, I inherited a lot of money from my dad, George Romney, who worked for decades in the automobile industry in Detroit, Michigan. I also inherited a first-rate education. I kept the education, but I gave my entire inheritance to my alma mater… not because there’s anything wrong with money or with parents passing along the fruits of their labors to their kids, but because I wanted to be my own man, to see what I could accomplish on my own. So I can honestly say I’ve earned every dollar I have.

Unlike my opponent, nobody gave me a suspiciously huge book contract when I was an obscure law student at Harvard; when I was an obscure law student at Harvard, I was simultaneously an obscure business student at Harvard; and I didn’t have time to write a dream book about my father, anyway… or put my name on some radical professor’s book, as the case may be.

I also never got a sweetheard land deal from a lobbyist and campaign fundraiser who was later convicted of fraud, bribery, and money laundering. So you see, I didn’t have the advantages growing up that my opponent did.

Instead, I worked hard, played by the rules, and kept faith with my family, my friends, my competitors, and my God. And I succeeded, as so many others have done before and after, some more, some less. I thank God everyday for the United States of America, for liberty, and for the Capitalism that allows not only the privileged but the downtrodden to rise to heights limited only by their own talent, drive, persistence, and their refusal to accept artificial limits on achievement. Just ask Justice Clarence Thomas.

My opponent is a great believer in limiting achievements. Four years ago, all he could talk about was vague “hope and change,” and how his presidency would heal the Earth, calm the oceans, and how the lamb would lie down with the lion. A pocketful of stimuluses, ObamaCares, and trillions of wasted spending later, not too many folks think they’re better off now than four years ago. Except the lion, who got a nice rack of lamb on the deal.

This time, all my opponent can talk about are the few minor things he did that more or less worked, tiny islands in a vast sea of failure, diminished expectations, and a long, steady collapse of the American dream and of America itself… if we let him.

Let’s not.

Yeah, I’m rich. And I want all of you here, everyone hearing these words, to become rich too — or to write the great American novel (without a ghostwriter), or invent a molecule-sized computer, or design the most beautiful shopping mall ever built, or become a Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Whatever your dream happens to be, never be ashamed or apologetic about succeeding. Be joyous! Be proud! I’m proud of the companies I helped save when I worked at Bain Capital and made a pile of money; and I kick myself for the companies that we couldn’t save.

But that’s Capitalism: In order to earn the right to succeed, you must accept the right to fail. Failure can be painful, but it teaches us to do it better next time.

There have been times I’ve failed, and times I’ve succeeded. On the whole, I like winning better than losing, not just for me but for everybody.

I guess that makes me both a Republican and an American!

All right, all right, I got a little carried away; but I was having fun cheering and defending achievement, wealth, and Capitalism with joyous abandon; I never apologize for anything but not doing my best.

Barack Obama is my political antiparticle, forever begging forgiveness for the achievements of his betters.

I reckon that makes him a liberal.

Cross-posted on Big Lizards…

…Listen LIVE: 9-11pm EST…

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**UPDATED MONDAY MORNING**
THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH PODCAST:
Baldwin/McCullough *LIVE* – Hr 1/Hr 2

Where can you find the radio station nearest you to hear Baldwin/McCullough? Simple enough… Click here! Where can you go to see it on television? Check your local listings, or on-screen guide:

And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. In a nation as blessed as the United States of America, Stephen Baldwin wants to have a very blunt conversation tonight. Has America become a place where people believe they should be taken care of? Is it beyond the point of no return? Or do you believe America still sees herself as the land of greatest opportunity? The responsibility of the individual or the responsibility of the collective, what is the future for America? From your perspective: 888.340.3373.

2. Rick Santorum is going right at the heart of Obama on the issue of moral decision making. Kevin McCullough wants to ask your opinion… smart move? Thoughts: 888.340.3373.

Brought to you tonight in part by:
Are you looking to make a major difference in the success you can experience in business, promotion, marriage, or life? Then you owe it to yourself to discover the secrets of Dani Johnson and her transformational seminar First Steps to Success. These events sell out quickly, and many come away getting promoted, starting businesses, or earning a 6 or 7 figure income for the first time in their lives. Dani Johnson… committed to your TOTAL SUCCESS check out First Steps now!

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

Time has called out Rick Santorum for “wanting to ‘fight the dangers of contraception’.”  Matt Lewis at The Daily Caller sees electoral danger for Santorum in his insistence on discussing social issues and registering committed opinions on them, rather than parrying such questions with a kind of unifying boilerplate.

Lewis isn’t necessarily wrong on the point about electability.  But I see much more danger for America’s future in the fact that so many Americans are now apparently unable to make important distinctions about the operation and functions of government.

Consider the method by which Michael Scherer presents the video of Santorum’s interview with the evangelical blog Caffeinated Thoughts in October 2011.  Scherer includes in his article a transcript of the comments he wants to discuss, and helpfully tells readers to start watching the video at the 17:55 mark.

I decided to watch from the beginning (in spite of the awful audio quality).  Out of context, Santorum’s remarks sound like he might have a plan to “fight contraception” the way Democrats always want to fight something: that is, outlaw it, impose fees and penalties on it, sue the bejeebers out of it in court, sic the IRS and all the other federal agencies and commissions on it, demonize it in the media, teach children in the public schools that it is associated with hate, racism, violence, and fascism, and make movies in which the left’s point of view about it is validated by George Clooney.

But in context, it turns out that Santorum has no plan to do anything with federal law other than ensure that ObamaCare is repealed and that federal money is not used for contraception or abortion.  (Federal money is currently used to fund both.)  Santorum was speaking in October in the Caffeinated Thoughts video, before the contretemps over the ObamaCare insurance mandate for contraceptive services; otherwise, he would presumably have referred to that as well.

To appreciate the context in which his remarks were made, it is necessary to start no later than the 10:00 hack.  The overall discussion is about various social issues (e.g., fatherlessness), and the theme Santorum emphasizes is that a president can shape a national debate on these topics, which profoundly affect the social health of our communities.  He repeats the word “debate” quite a few times.  His examples of positive intervention in such issues come from the local level and involve community groups and local governments.

He says explicitly in the 16:00-17:30 timeframe that laws in Congress are just a small part of what he’s talking about, and his examples of working through federal law – there are only two – are ensuring that no federal funds are going to abortion, and repealing ObamaCare.   He is also explicit, if fleeting, about the federal government not being the right level at which to actually deal with social issues by adopting government policies.

Santorum isn’t coming after your contraception.  He does consider it an issue that affects the health of society, and his hope is to foster a debate on that and other social topics, a rhetorical power he ascribes – along with millions of other observant Americans – to the president.

Many readers will think it’s misguided of Santorum to want to use the bully pulpit of the Oval Office to spark a national discussion on contraception.  But let’s make the minimal effort required to at least understand what Santorum’s position actually is, and oppose it for what it is, instead of taking cherry-picked soundbites from him and reading into them the themes of governmentalism popularized by the left over the last century. The left doesn’t own the idea of “government” and what it’s supposed to do to and for us.

Regarding contraception itself, as it happens, I hold the fairly typical Protestant view that our virtue does not depend on things like contraception being proscribed to us, and that while the unborn child is a human being, his or her human status before conception falls in the category of what Paul calls “disputable matters” (see Romans 14).  Protestants frame the argument about contraception a bit differently from Catholics, although I have sympathy for the Catholic Church’s viewpoint on the larger issue of sex, procreation, and human life.

Ultimately, I don’t know how much social good a national debate on contraception would do, if it were promoted by the president.  I view the federal government, including the presidency, as too compromised and suspect an entity to honestly broker such a debate under current conditions.  (I am very happy for the churches to foster the debate, and indeed, to see the Catholics sticking to their guns.)

But what I do believe is that the government – and the federal government in particular – should have no policy on ensuring the distribution of contraception.  Santorum is right that the federal government should neither fund contraception nor subsidize its advocates’ prowling the land in various guises, encouraging young women to resort to it.  It should not be the policy of the state to subsidize or promote the avoidance of pregnancy, any more than it should be the policy of the state to prohibit contraception.  A government that interests itself in this matter is too big.  It needs to be slapped down hard.

The more things government subsidizes – and therefore promotes – the more likely it is that the actions of government will become topics of religious and moral dispute.  Americans can handle this one of two ways.  We can take the bait every time, getting into knock-down-drag-out fights over the issues as if the only solution is for one side to end up with the weight of government and the taxpayers’ money behind it.

Or we can take the issues out of government’s purview, and let reality, nature, and people’s consciences decide.  We can also reduce the weight of government, so that the cost when government decides to endorse a position – an act that should be rare, and exceedingly so in the case of the federal government – is not unacceptable to those who may lose the argument.  “Tolerance” does not mean “obligation to subsidize,” for example, nor does “unwillingness to endorse” mean “intolerance”; these creeping inversions only make sense to the narrow mind in the context of an all-encompassing government – a context that is unnecessary and avoidable.

I would like to hear from Rick Santorum what his philosophy of government is.  I don’t disagree that the executive has a hortatory function, although I would define the scope of it pretty narrowly.  The problem with wanting to engage the people from the Oval Office on the topic of contraception is that there is so much water under the bridge now:  the mode in which government approaches social issues has been established as overweening “big-governmentism,” on the model exemplified by FDR, Lyndon Johnson’s social legislation, decades of judicial activism, and the geometrically expanding activism of the executive agencies created by both parties since 1952.

What we chiefly need is to disestablish that very convention.  It distorts, often decisively, all our public dialogue on contentious topics.  Can Rick Santorum articulate a philosophy of government that defies this model, to which so many Republicans and conservatives are justly opposed?  Does he want to?

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The major goal of everyone who is to the right of center for the upcoming election should be to take as many people with us to the voting booth in November… right?

Yes there are two “teams” on the field. But there are thousands in the stands, and watching at home that haven’t decided whether they cheer for red or blue.

My challenge to any who would listen at CPAC2012 was… “Make no mistake, our methods will speak as loudly as our substance.”

What say you?

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**UPDATED MONDAY MORNING**
THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH PODCAST:
Baldwin/McCullough *LIVE* – Hr 1/Hr 2

Where can you find the radio station nearest you to hear Baldwin/McCullough? Simple enough… Click here! Where can you go to see it on television? Check your local listings, or on-screen guide:

And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. Whitney Houston DEAD at 48. What is the measure of a life well lived? Two very personal WWII vets gone in the past two weeks that had immeasurable impact on KMC’s life can be contrasted by comparison… Plus breaking developments. 800.345.9622.

2. How do you feel about the fact that President Obama tried to force his view of contraception on people of religious convictions. Thoughts: 800.345.9622.

ALSO: We’re BACK! CPAC 2012… we report…!

Are you looking to make a major difference in the success you can experience in business, promotion, marriage, or life? Then you owe it to yourself to discover the secrets of Dani Johnson and her transformational seminar First Steps to Success. These events sell out quickly, and many come away getting promoted, starting businesses, or earning a 6 or 7 figure income for the first time in their lives. Dani Johnson… committed to your TOTAL SUCCESS check out First Steps now!

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

“Drain the Jacuzzi!”

“This government isn’t too big to fail, it’s too big to succeed.”

“We don’t want an economy built to last, we want an economy built to grow.”

“This is Obama’s Washington.”

I wonder, however, if one of the points she hammered throughout the speech really registered with her audience.  Her signature line in this speech was “The door is open.”  She meant that political conditions are becoming conducive to a renewed commitment to small government and liberty.  People’s mindsets are changing.  We are not governed by the “rules” of political seasons past; the door is open to choosing our candidates and charting our nation’s future on a different basis.  The door is open to not accepting a continuation of the false compromises of previous decades.

(As I go to press, I see that Tina Korbe picked up on this theme.)

I have referred to those false compromises – “compromises” in which the conservative, small-government side gave up virtually everything – as the “old consensus.”  I see it losing, bit by bit, in this primary season.  People are no longer obediently making their political choices within the parameters defined for them by the professional political class.

This doesn’t mean that the voters have ideal candidates with whom to make their statement against the old consensus.  Santorum and Gingrich both have their drawbacks, as Paul always has.  But a critical mass of voters has recognized that Romney is the old consensus, and they are rejecting it.  The CPAC vote was remarkable for Romney’s 38% — because it wasn’t bigger, because Santorum got 31%, and even Gingrich, in a conclave of the politically connected, got 15%.

Everyone outpolled Ron Paul at CPAC, even though he has regularly won the CPAC vote in the past.  This signals a change in the mindset of politically active conservatives – not merely a new perspective that it’s overwhelmingly important to defeat Obama, but a perspective that the core of the conservative movement is shifting, and we need a serious mainstream candidate because it is a life-or-death matter to be effective in the political process.

That obviously doesn’t mean the CPAC voters think we need a “moderate,” leadership- and media-approved candidate.  If it did, they would have gone for Romney, rather than voting 46% for the mainstream candidates who are not Romney – and who are perceived, in many if not all cases correctly, as less satisfied with and enthusiastically “managerial” about the matter of big government.

But the point to take away is that voter sentiment, as it relates to the meaning of different candidates and the basis of government, is changing.

And that, I think, is about half the reason why Sarah Palin didn’t throw her hat in the ring for this campaign cycle.  Her evaluation of political conditions is remarkably accurate and prescient:  she saw, long before most of the voters did, that the game of expectations itself needed to change, and that only we could do it.

What strategic value was there for Palin in participating in the Cynical Media Slime-fest and All-Out Kick-em-in-the-Nads, mud-slinging, business-as-usual, expectations-on-autopilot primary season?

Six or eight months ago, the sea change in the voters’ sentiments and propensities might have been foreseeable, but it hadn’t happened yet.  Those who think Palin could have won lots of primaries on the basis of pre-primary voter sentiments are wrong, I think.  After all, the business-as-usual approach – Karl Rove tells everyone how bad a candidate is, the media magnify his or her every quirk or mistake, the media and some (not all) of the other candidates pile on with allegations that range from hostile spin to outright falsehood – has so far felled our most conservative candidates.

But in the process, the voters have been changing.  That’s what Palin saw before others did.  Do I think she is counting the days to a brokered convention?  No.  There is no one who could reasonably adopt that as a “plan.”  She won’t run this year; that’s my rational assessment as well as my gut feeling.  (I could of course be wrong, although I think some big conditions will have to change more for that to be the case.)

But if she does run, it will not be because she has changed, but because we have.  There are political conditions in which she could run successfully, and conditions in which she couldn’t.  The latter have constituted our political environment up until the last couple of months.

If the conditions are changing now, I believe that is largely because voters are having to wise up to the flaws in our own thinking by going through this ugly spectacle.  We already knew that the media have no intention of giving our candidates a fair shake, and that many in the GOP leadership want to submarine the small-government conservatives.   What many voters didn’t understand is that if we want to select leaders of character, we have to graduate from high school, and overlook the vicissitudes of “presentation” that sometimes make good people look like buffoons to those who see without humility, mercy, or discrimination.  We have to see with better eyes.  We have to think independently of the jeers embedded in the media narrative.  We have to be wiser citizens, placing in political leadership only the hope that is appropriate to free men and women.

We can’t have a candidate who sounds like Mitt Romney, but will lead the way a small-government conservative would.  That’s not an option.  What we’re doing in this primary season is coming to grips with that reality.  I think Palin knew instinctively that we would have to, before it would make sense for her to jump back into the electoral fray.

But, as I said, I think that’s only about half the explanation.  The other half is that Palin is an evangelical Christian.  She believes God has a plan for her life, and that He gives her a certainty in her spirit about the big choices she has to make.  I suspect she has had a peaceful certainty that joining the campaign as a candidate for 2012 was not something she should do.  If she were to analyze it, she might say that God knows better than any of us how the voters’ concerns and expectations are going to change.

Meanwhile, the door is open.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Who is to be congratulated for the elimination of Cain, Perry, Bachmann, and Huntsman?  The voters.  That’s right.  Sure, the candidates made some mistakes.  The media did everything possible to prejudice voters against them, and that was a crying shame.  But voters didn’t have to let the media or the contrived, somewhat artificial debate process make their decisions for them.

There is good news in all this.  First, the voters really are making the decision.  Second, the voters are starting to think for themselves.  It would have been nice for that to happen earlier, but there’s no time like the present.

Third, with the voters thinking for themselves, candidates who are focused on liberty issues are still on the ballot, and the party dialogue on those issues continues.  I know a lot of people don’t see it this way, but they’re wrong:  the most important thing the GOP can possibly do in 2012 is decide what it is and what it wants.  Self-identified “conservative” voters may be in a national majority according to the surveys, but it has been more than 20 years since we were all pulling together.

The bottom line is that the GOP is not agreed on what the problem is. We’re fighting that out right now – and it’s healthy, if annoying.  One faction says the problem is Obama; the other faction says it’s the way we now govern ourselves, which – no matter who is in charge – cannot avoid oppressing the people with regulation, debt, and crony-enrichment schemes at the people’s expense.  The latter faction is divided between those who see enough prospect for change with one of the candidates still in the race, and those who don’t.  Those who see even Gingrich and Santorum as too reflexively “big government” in their thinking are a growing voice.

The good news is that we are having the debate in a way that matters.  That is very good news.  Never underestimate the power of ideas.  They stick with people, even when it seems they haven’t, and they are the only thing that can motivate people to unite and make positive changes.

The mainstream media don’t depict it that way, of course.  They labor to depict the GOP primary season as a turkey shoot run by Keystone Kops.  But Americans have a choice as to whether they let the mainstream media distribute their opinions to them, like thematic gift baskets, and more and more Americans are choosing to just say no.

I wrote last year about Rick Perry as a candidate of the “old consensus” – my term for the modus vivendi adopted over the last 60 years by Democrats, who were increasingly taken over by progressive statists, and Republicans, who fought a rear-guard action to keep statism from getting too big and expensive.  Under the old consensus, Republicans were largely focused on the monetary and economic expense of statism, and the tacit agreement was that the right would accept as much statism as we could “afford.”  As long as we were growing economically – so this consensus went – we could afford a fairly heavy burden of statism.  Perry, I thought (and still do think), was on the Reagan end of the consensus rather than the Rockefeller end.

But what I see happening in the Republican primaries is an awakening of conservative voters to the disasters invited by the old consensus.  The loss of fiscal integrity and loss of liberty for America are products of the old consensus, and they have proceeded in lockstep: we are losing as much of the latter as we are of the former.  I believe 2012 is the year in which a critical mass of GOP voters has awoken to the reality that the old consensus is a destructive path and is in any case unsustainable.  Voting to continue down it on any basis is voting to remain on course for destruction.

I urge GOP voters not to be discouraged about this.  Ideas outlast everything else.  The idea of individual liberty and limited government cannot be killed.  America has not had a fundamental dispute over basic ideas for a very long time; we have become conditioned to the foggy stasis of bumper-sticker slogans and complacent, rarely-visited idea-sets.  It feels unsettled and strange to truly be debating the relationship of man and the state: to be breaking up those idea-sets and repudiating things supposedly bought into decades ago.  But a movement of ideas is a force of remarkable power, and one that no state power arrangement has ever ultimately withstood.  America’s burgeoning movement of ideas will not expire ignominiously.

The future of liberty on earth depends on what happens in America in the next decade.  If there is any nation on earth that can navigate peacefully back from the brink of statist implosion and loss of liberty, it is the United States. In 2012, GOP voters can rejoice in having alternatives, imperfect as they are, to a big-government statist candidate.  Voters can choose to affect the political process – and possibly the outcome in November – by casting their votes on principle.

Some words to live by as we go forward.  The president doesn’t make us, we make him.  The integrity and character of the people are paramount.  The only sure way to lose a battle is to stop fighting.  America has beaten the odds every time.  We will beat them again.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

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THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH PODCAST:
Baldwin/McCullough *LIVE* – Hr 1/Hr 2

Where can you find the radio station nearest you to hear Baldwin/McCullough? Simple enough… Click here! Where can you go to see it on television? Check your local listings, or on-screen guide:

And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. What if there was a single moment in which one of the Presidential candidates pretty much LOST the race because of a very poor choice of words? What if that person had the infrastructure to win the nomination? But what if we knew that that single phrase was going to kill off any hope for someone to run a thoughtful campaign against Obama? Well I think Mitt Romney pretty much did all of that and more this last week… The great con being that Mitt just had a stupid use of words. But Obama’s policies have actually wrecked this nation beyond recognition, especially the very poor. 800.345.9622.

2. Best selling author Steve Brown says God gives us three free sins… which ones are they? Why does it matter?  Thoughts: 800.345.9622.

ALSO: We’re BACK! CPAC 2012… make your plans to join us!

Are you looking to make a major difference in the success you can experience in business, promotion, marriage, or life? Then you owe it to yourself to discover the secrets of Dani Johnson and her transformational seminar First Steps to Success. These events sell out quickly, and many come away getting promoted, starting businesses, or earning a 6 or 7 figure income for the first time in their lives. Dani Johnson… committed to your TOTAL SUCCESS check out First Steps now!

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

So, is Adelson’s money buying Newt’s support of Israel?

Not hardly. One of my readers did a little research and sent me a few helpful links. (Thanks!)

Look at this article from 1998 in the San Francisco Jewish Weekly, titled Resignation of Newt Gingrich means Israel is losing a friend. For those of you readers who can’t do difficult math, that article was written more than 13 years ago, which means Sheldon Adelson’s money played no part in Newt’s opinion on Israel. So far, the best the Forward can come up with is Adelson’s money contributed to Gingrich’s group in 2006. Whoops. That’s eight whole years after we read this:

A Jewish Democratic politico said of Gingrich’s pro-Israel credentials, “I don’t think Newt is acting. I’d like to say he’s full of it, but he isn’t. Yes, he was trying to out right-wing the right-wing Jews, but he’s a true believer. Livingston may say what AIPAC wants to hear, but it’s not in his kishkes. He’s not a true believer.”

Really? A Democrat called Gingrich a right-wing Israel supporter in 1998?

But wait. There’s more! In 1998, Gingrich also called Jerusalem “the united and eternal capital of Israel”

Oh, pshaw. There must be some way Adelson’s money influenced Gingrich’s opinion. Maybe he’s so rich, he has a secret time machine and he went back in time to convince Newt to support Israel?

Or maybe Newt’s been a supporter of Israel for decades. (Also, Newt is pretty damned close to getting the Yourish.com cherished Master of Juvenile Scorn™ designation.)

Speaker Newt Gingrich said today that the White House was trying to blackmail Israel by pushing it toward the negotiating table, but President Clinton said he was only trying to bring about fruitful talks on Mideast peace.

”It’s become the Clinton Administration and Arafat against Israel,” Mr. Gingrich said at a news conference. ”The Clinton Administration says: ‘Happy birthday. Let us blackmail you on behalf of Arafat.’ ”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The Forward itself discussed Gingrich’s ties to Israel in the 1990s (buried, of course, in page two of an article using the Gloom-and-Doom Machine profiling his ties to Adelson). On the first page, they date the Adelson-Gingrich relationship back to 2007. This, kiddies, is how you get away with saying that your article is objective because it mentioned the recent and more distant relationships. It is also what is known as “slanting.” But the most important takeaway here is just what I wrote the other day: The only reason the liberal media is jumping all over the Gingrich-Adelson relationship is because Adelson is a Jew who is supporting a conservative Republican, rather than the liberal media-slash-Jewish establishment’s approved causes–which would be liberal Democrats.

Haim Saban influencing Bill Clinton? Not a problem. Sheldon Adelson is contributing to Newt Gingrich’s campaign? OMG, he’s a conservative, somebody stop him!1!!

Your objective media, exposed.

Cross-posted.

It’s a great message, isn’t it? And it fits in quite well with Team Obama’s 2012 strategy. There’s just one little problem, and it’s found lurking in Warren’s past in the private sector. The title of this piece by Holly Robichaud in the Boston Herald pretty much sums it up. Insurance past should sink Lizzy.

While Marsha Coakley and Lizzy Warren share the same personal flaws of being out of touch with the Massachusetts middle class, the Harvard professor also has a potential deadly political sin in her background. Maybe it is the reason President Obama didn’t nominate her to head up the consumer agency. It is not a secret that his administration believed Lizzy couldn’t survive the Senate confirmation process.

One of the Harvard professor’s many well-com-pensated part-time gigs included consulting for Travelers Insurance. I know that it is hard to believe that on one hand, Democrats would be bashing an industry, and on the other hand they are making money from it. To be a Democrat is to be a hypocrite.

What did Lizzy do to earn $44,000 in compensation from the insurance company? She made it harder for claimants to collect.

Now, I’m no expert here, but that doesn’t really sound very consumer protectiony to me. According to the article, Warren lent her expertise to Travelers to help them develop a strategy to structure a bankruptcy deal where they could avoid making millions of dollars in payments to patients exposed to asbestos. The total lawsuits amounted to something in the range of $500M.

Say… would those be some of the same “factory owners” and their insurers who never got rich on their own and owed it to society to give something back because of the social contract? If you’re basing your entire candidacy on being the Defender of the Little People, this doesn’t exactly do anything for your credentials, does it?

If the voters weren’t silly, they would understand that it has to be Mitt Romney, because, well, primary voters were silly and picked Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell over Mike Castle in Delaware, not to mention running with that goofy Sharron Angle in Nevada, and look how that turned out.  You can’t get California and you probably can’t get New York, if you’re the GOP nominee.  But you have a good shot at Pennsylvania and Ohio, Michigan and maybe even Illinois, if you’re Mitt Romney.  Newt Gingrich?  Forget it.  Gingrich can’t even win Georgia.

And the truth is, this analysis isn’t necessarily wrong.  If I had to make a bet, I’d bet that a Newt Gingrich nominated to run for the GOP in November would implode on the campaign trail.  He’d still make a better president than Obama, but his “sticking it to the media” shtick in the debates would lose its luster when he faced Obama.  He comes across as easily annoyed; the feistiness that resonates with voter sentiment in the primaries would weather time and tides poorly.  As between an irritable Gingrich and a cool, scripted Obama, I would predict without hesitation that the latter’s jokes during a debate would come off better.  All things being equal, that is.

As with the O’Donnell-Castle primary outcome in 2010, however, it’s not the voters who are silly.  They know that all things aren’t equal in 2012.  The voters who put Gingrich over the top yesterday believe that we can’t keep going down the same political path in the United States – and that that holds for Republicans at least as much as for Democrats, if not more.  Their perception is that the GOP leadership is invested in the current path of government: that it doesn’t want change; it is not committed to restoring liberty and limited government, but instead is comfortable with the growth of regulatory intrusiveness, and seeks merely to broker pragmatic accommodations to leftist activism as a sort of rear-guard action.

Considering that the GOP has been doing this for most of the last 80 years, the voters aren’t wrong.  They aren’t wrong about Mitt Romney: his record of enthusiastic accommodations to the left is a set of rusty, clanking weights tethered to the back of the Mitt-mobile.  Gingrich and Santorum both have some ‘splainin’ to do as well, but Gingrich has specifically repudiated some of his earlier faux pas (such as the snuggle-up with Nancy Pelosi on combating “global warming”).  He also speaks trenchantly on the issues that exercise the most voters:  federal debt, health care regulation, regulation in general, government intervention in the economy, illegal immigration.

It does matter to primary voters, moreover, that Gingrich “takes it to” the media by rhetorically denouncing the questions posed in the GOP debates.  Voters on the right perceive the one-sided political attitude of the media to be a significant problem for American politics.  And while I don’t get as excited as others do about Gingrich’s little rhetorical broadsides in the debates –responding with broadsides isn’t, per se, a component of leadership – this is another thing the voters aren’t wrong about.  Media bias is a problem, not only in politics but for our public life in general.  People believe a lot of things that aren’t so today because of the particular narratives favored by the major media.  The perception of public assent generated by the media’s formulations produces an environment for government taking actions that jeopardize our liberties.

Many voters are determined not to be ruled by federal executive agencies whose agendas are approved by MSNBC and the New York Times.  These voters are voting for the candidate they deem most likely to reverse America’s slide into precisely that method of government.  That they see such a candidate in Newt Gingrich speaks more loudly about the general state of the GOP than about anything else.  Voters are seeking to break the inertia and conventionalism of the Republican Party; this is, in fact, a power struggle, and one in which I would not bet against the voters.

The famous salvo from South Carolina in April 1861 precipitated a shooting war under old conditions that no longer prevail.  The Union had all the material advantage in that war, as it had the moral advantage in being determined to preserve the national union while ending slavery.

But today’s South is no longer under such a disadvantage.  A political salvo from the South is a different portent now.  Likewise, the Republican Party doesn’t hold a Union-like advantage over its members, nor is there any valid reason for our federal government to hold such an advantage over a law-abiding people.  Today’s “rebel” GOP voters in South Carolina aren’t the slave-regime old guard, they’re the abolitionists.  We need not be deceived that wanting to reverse the encroachments of the federal government, and defeat the plantation mentality in Washington, is evidence of irresponsibility or lawlessness.  The truth is closer to the opposite.

The people have one tool – the vote – by which to express the sentiment that things have to change.  In 2008, Mitt Romney didn’t look all that different from George W. Bush.  The Obama tenure has been a wake-up call that has put Romney in a new perspective: in 2012, he doesn’t look as different from Barack Obama as conservative voters would prefer.  Obama is less an outlier than the end-gamer of the same big-government principles embraced by both major parties over the past 80 years.  We have now seen with our own eyes where those principles lead, and the voters don’t want to go there.  It’s not the voters who need to wise up; it’s the Republican Party.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Share

**UPDATED MONDAY MORNING**
THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH PODCAST:
Baldwin/McCullough *LIVE* – Hr 1/Hr 2

Where can you find the radio station nearest you to hear Baldwin/McCullough? Simple enough… Click here! Where can you go to see it on television? Check your local listings, or on-screen guide:

And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. The votes have been cast in South Carolina and we will hear from each of the candidates. If it’s close and Romney loses, he will feel as though he narrowly escaped. But his winning streak will be over. If Newt Gingrich wins–and wins big–it turns the entire race on its head. Should Rick Santorum stay in the race if he finishes 3rd? Why will Ron Paul stay in the race if he finishes dead last? We will do nothing but take your calls on all of these topics tonight *LIVE*: 800.345.9622.

2. Do black people prefer food stamps to jobs? One of the presidential candidates said they shouldn’t and he was promptly labeled racist. But why? How this has been twisted is absurd, but still amongst African Americans there is a verbal whisper campaign talking it up, most likely especially due to Newt’s win tonight. Thoughts: 800.345.9622.

Are you looking to make a major difference in the success you can experience in business, promotion, marriage, or life? Then you owe it to yourself to discover the secrets of Dani Johnson and her transformational seminar First Steps to Success. These events sell out quickly, and many come away getting promoted, starting businesses, or earning a 6 or 7 figure income for the first time in their lives. Dani Johnson… committed to your TOTAL SUCCESS check out First Steps now!

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

What I know now is, as part of its regular polling and surveying of NEA members, officers and activists, NEA asked respondents whom they preferred in the Presidential race. Obama won by a “substantial” margin, and Mitt Romney was the highest-ranking Republican candidate. The survey was taken in November 2011 or earlier, and so did not reflect the results of the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries.

I’ll leave it to the political pundits to determine whether this helps Romney or hurts him. As an organization, NEA only supports Republicans it considers to be moderate, and then usually only in primaries against more conservative opponents. However, NEA Republican members cover the full ideological spectrum, so their preferences don’t necessarily have to run toward the center.

Historically, the GOP Presidential nominee picks up about one-third of the NEA vote, without very large deviations from candidate to candidate. It’s possible that general disillusion among teachers about Obama, coupled with support for Romney, could alter the usual calculus, but Mike Huckabee’s experience from 2008 would argue against it.