Three Different Ways to Look at the 2012 Campaign
By Michael Barone

Last week, I wrote about the standings in the presidential race and said it looked like a long, hard slog through about a dozen clearly identified target states, much like the contests in 2000 and 2004. Call it the 2000/2004 long, hard slog scenario.

But I said there were other possible scenarios. I can think of three.

The 1964/1972 scenario: Challenger disqualifies himself. Barry Goldwater and George McGovern were idealistic, intelligent senators who took positions on issues that made them unacceptable to most voters in years favorable to incumbents.

This could happen to Mitt Romney this year. And it might well have happened if some of his primary opponents had won the nomination. But he doesn’t seem to be the kind of candidate who would disqualify himself. Chances for this scenario: less than 5 percent.

The 1988 scenario: Affluent voters break strongly Republican. Vice President George Bush was 17 points behind Michael Dukakis after the Democratic National Convention. But he came back to win by a 53 to 46 percent margin.

One reason is that his “read my lips, no new taxes” promise solidified his support among affluent suburbanites. His margins in suburbs enabled him to carry metro Philadelphia, metro Baltimore, metro Detroit, metro Chicago, metro Los Angeles and the surrounding states.

Since then, affluent non-Southern suburbanites have trended Democratic. And big city crime and welfare rolls — cause for complaint in 1988 — have declined.

Republicans’ conservative stands on cultural issues and the increasing Southern influence in the party repelled suburbanites. Barack Obama carried most affluent non-Southern suburbs handily in 2008.

But Romney showed particular appeal to this constituency in the primaries. Without big margins in affluent suburbs, he would have lost Michigan, Ohio and Illinois to Rick Santorum.

Romney’s proposed tax cuts and Obama’s proposed tax increases pose the sharpest contrast on the tax issue since Bush beat Dukakis 24 years ago. And economics is far more important than cultural issues this year. Chances for the 1988 scenario: maybe 20 percent.

The 1980 scenario: Late break away from the incumbent. We remember the 1980 election as Ronald Reagan’s landslide defeat of Jimmy Carter.

It didn’t look like that during the campaign. Carter led in polls much of the time. Sometimes the race looked like a 2000/2004-style long, hard slog through target states.

But Carter’s job rating was buoyed up that year by approval of his varied attempts to free the hostages in Iran. Underneath those numbers, his ratings on other foreign issues and the economy were weak.

Most voters were ready for an alternative, but were wary of Reagan, who was 69 years old and supposedly extreme conservative. He might have disqualified himself in a number of ways.

Instead, in his one debate with Carter, on the Thursday before the election, Reagan echoed a 1934 Franklin Roosevelt fireside chat, which he remembered but the press corps didn’t. “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” he asked voters.

Opinion moved quickly. Weekend polling showed an unprecedented 10-point shift from Carter to Reagan. Pollster Pat Caddell had to go to the White House Monday morning and tell Jimmy Carter that he was not going to be re-elected president of the United States.

Could something like this happen this year? It is my view that Obama was helped in 2008 by a widespread belief that, in the abstract, it would be a good thing for Americans to elect a black president. I know I felt that way myself.

This year, I sense that many, perhaps most voters do not want the country to be seen rejecting the first black president. Such a feeling might be buoying Obama’s support despite the lagging economic recovery and the widespread opposition to his signature policies.

If that is correct, it is possible that in the last days of the campaign a large number of voters will decide, quietly and out of public view, that they just don’t want any more of what they’ve had for the last four years and they will try the other guy and see if he can do better.

That’s what happened in 1980. Reagan carried 44 states and won the popular vote by 10 points, more than anyone else since. Chances for the 1980 scenario: maybe 20 percent.

So what remains for the chance of the 2000/2004 long, hard slog scenario? At least 55 percent. Still the best bet. But not the only one.

No Confidence will Kill Obama Reelection Chances
By John Ransom

While economists agonize about unemployment, jobs created, money supply, stimulus, and the budget deficit, they often ignore one number that will in all likelihood matter most to voters in November.

Consumer confidence numbers have been slipping since reaching an anemic high back in February of 2012 according to several measurements of consumer confidence, including the Bloomberg Comfort Index. .

“The index, which asks people to rate the national economy, their personal finances and the buying climate,” reports Bloomberg.com “declined for the third consecutive week. About 56 percent of people rate their personal finances negatively, up from 47 percent three weeks ago and the highest level since last November. The economy added just 115,000 nonfarm jobs in April, the smallest increase since November.”

The index now stands at -40.6.

And it has established a trend that should be worrying to the president.

Bloomberg says that the “measures for registered Democrats and independents have dropped the most over the past two weeks after both reached the highest levels in more than four years.”

Translation: After buying from the White House more of the same Hopey-slash-Changey rhetoric that “the recovery has finally started,” even supporters are recognizing that on economics, this White House hasn’t a clue.

At this point, it’s highly unlikely that even a monetary stimulus will make the type of fleeting impact that can boost consumer sentiment between now and the election. And besides: Who would listen to Obama sing Happy Times are Here Again, again?

How many times as Obama declared that the “recovery” has finally arrived?

We’ve had the same failed Recovery Summer three years in a row, and the odds are that this year will make it four.

In February of 2011, Obama bragged in his State of the Union address: “We are poised for progress. Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again.”

And indeed the economy has grown again, but then, it stopped growing and started up again, then slowed down again. The economy has a way of starting and stopping when the White House is hostile to policies, like, um- I don’t know- stable oil prices, anyone? that fosters actual economic activity.

In 2010, he made the same recovery pitch, in a different way: “But understand – understand if we don’t take meaningful steps to rein in our debt, it could damage our markets, increase the cost of borrowing, and jeopardize our recovery – all of which would have an even worse effect on our job growth and family incomes.”

Well he sure was right about that. His own myopic vision on the debt “thing” really has damaged our markets at the expense of the economic recovery

And finally, this year he’s hailing the recovery as something “built to last.”

Built to last? What? Like the Chevy Volt? Obama hasn’t even been able to make it a full year without an economic catastrophe. And that’s even if you add up the months of economic growth for his entire presidency non-consecutively.

All that stop-and-go growth hasn’t translated into, you know, actual jobs, income, housing for the rest of us.

The Conference Board, which publishes the most widely followed index of consumer sentiment, said “Consumers’ outlook for the labor market was less upbeat. Those anticipating more jobs in the months ahead decreased to 16.9 percent from 17.4 percent, however, those anticipating fewer jobs decreased to 18.0 percent from 18.5 percent. The proportion of consumers expecting an increase in their incomes declined to 14.0 percent from 15.5 percent.”

The Board’s confidence measure remains under 70 at 69.2. The century mark is considered pivotal to an incumbent president’s reelection chances.

The Wall Street Journal reports that one economist says that the confidence numbers are a good predictor of the election results for incumbent presidents. By that measure Obama’s re-election is far from assured.

“There is plenty of time for the national mood to change, but the decline in income expectations is particularly telling,” Steve Blitz, senior economist at ITG Investment Research last year told his clients according to the WSJ. “When the income up percentage is on the downswing, incumbents do not get re-elected.”

The Journal cites loss of consumer confidence and high unemployment for the defeats of incumbent presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush.

“A soft economy kept the U.S. consumer sentiment index low prior to former president Jimmy Carter’s failed re-election bid in the early 1980s and George H.W. Bush’s failed bid in the early 1990s [Eighteen months before each election it stood below 100: at 76.4 in May 1991 and at 96.0 in May 1979.],” says the Journal.

“Just like Carter and Bush senior, Obama is likely to face an unemployment rate that is higher than 7.5% in the months before the next elections.”

And while I expect the economy will enjoy a fall revival, it will, in all likelihood, not be enough to save this presidency.

Thankfully.

Elizabeth Warren Dances With Lies
By Ann Coulter

Elizabeth Warren, who also goes by her Indian name, “Lies on Race Box,” is in big heap-um trouble. The earnest, reform-minded liberal running for Senate against Scott Brown, R-Mass., lied about being part-Cherokee to get a job at Harvard.

Harvard took full advantage of Warren’s lie, bragging to The Harvard Crimson about her minority status during one of the near-constant student protests over insufficient “diversity” in the faculty. Warren also listed herself as an Indian in law school faculty directories and, just last month, said, “I am very proud of my Native American heritage.”

Except, oops, she has no more evidence that she’s an Indian than that buffoon out of Colorado, Ward Churchill.

The Boston Globe immediately leapt to Warren’s defense, quoting a genealogist who found a marriage license on which Warren’s great-great-uncle scribbled that his mother, Warren’s great-great-great grandmother, was a Cherokee. This is not part of the official marriage license. (If I scribble “Kenyan” on Obama’s birth certificate, does that make it true?)

But let’s say it’s true. That would make Warren a dotriacontaroon — 1/32nd Cherokee. That’s her claim to affirmative action bonus points? You don’t know what it’s like to be 1/32nd Cherokee, to never have anyone to talk to, spending so many evenings home alone, wondering if there was some other 1/32nd Cherokee out there, perhaps looking at the same star I was.

Soon, however, the preponderance of the evidence suggested she wasn’t even 1/32nd Cherokee. The census records for 1860 list the allegedly Cherokee great-great-great-grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford, as “white.” Also, Warren’s family isn’t listed in the Cherokee registry. (Unlike Democrat voter rolls, to be on the Cherokee list, proof is required.)

On the other hand, we have what her son scribbled on his marriage license — something, by the way, that none of his siblings claimed about their mother.

So now we’re down to Warren’s reminiscence that her great-aunt used to point to a portrait of her great-great-grandfather and call him an Indian, noting his high cheekbones.

Family lore is not proof. Proof is contemporary documentation, produced under penalty of perjury, such as a census record. My mother told me she found me under a rock, but I don’t put that on job applications.

The universities that employed Warren rushed to claim that her fake Indian ancestry had nothing to do with it. They speak with forked tongue, causing heap-um laughter. (Harvard was so desperate for diversity, it made a half-black dilettante president of the Harvard Law Review!)

To grasp what a sin against political correctness this is, consider the Jesuitical debates about blackness regularly engaged in at our universities. About the time Lies on Race Box was getting a job with Harvard as a fake Indian — valued for her fake hunting and tracking skills — a debate broke out at Northwestern University law school about whether a potential faculty hire was black enough.

One professor wrote a heated three-page letter to the hiring committee complaining that the recruit “should not be considered a black candidate,” explaining, “(n)ot all with dark skins are black,” nor should they be considered “black in the U.S. context.” (Flash to: My exact position on Obama.)

Warren has defended herself, claiming she did it only so she would be invited to powwows, or what the great white father calls “meetings,” saying she hoped “I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am.”

What on earth does “people who are like I am” mean? Let’s invite Elizabeth because she’s 1/32nd Cherokee. We really need the 1/32nd Cherokee perspective around here. Maybe she has some old recipes that are 1/32nd Cherokee!

Then, the Warren campaign claimed it was sexist to question Warren about her bald-faced lie: “Once again, the qualifications and ability of a woman are being called into question by Scott Brown … It’s outrageous.”

First, Scott Brown has barely mentioned Warren’s stinking lie.

But, second, the only people who consider it a “qualification” to be 1/32nd Cherokee are university hiring committees. Possible Warren campaign speech:

“I am a dotriacontaroon American. I want to be a voice for those who are 1/32nd Cherokee, but also 1/32nd Pequot, 1/32nd Mohawk — basically the senator for all dotriacontaroons. Isn’t it time we had a senator who was 1/32nd Cherokee?”

Now it’s beginning to look like her ancestors not only did not suffer, but caused the suffering she’s getting the benefit of. The great-great-great-grandfather married to the not-Cherokee O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford turns out to have been one of the white enforcers on the brutal Trail of Tears, helping round up Indians from their homes in order to march them to a less desirable part of the country.

What’s next?

“Yes, and my other grandfather, Theophilus Connor …”

BULL CONNOR?

“Yes, but I swear, James Earl Ray is not a BLOOD uncle. We’re related only by marriage. At least that’s what my cousin John Wayne Gacy used to always tell me.”

Warren’s lie is outrageous enough to someone like me, who isn’t a fan of race-based affirmative action programs. Still, she is a liar, and she stole the credit of someone else’s suffering.

For liberals, it should be a mortal sin: Elizabeth Warren cheated on affirmative action.

Obama Losing Rock-star Status Among Young Voters
By Michael Barone

Last week, Barack Obama delivered speeches at universities in Chapel Hill, N.C., Iowa City, Iowa, and Boulder, Colo. The trip was, press secretary Jay Carney assured us, official government business, not political campaigning.

It’s part of a pattern. Neil Munro of the Daily Caller has counted 130 appearances by the president, vice president, their spouses, White House officials, and Cabinet secretaries at colleges and universities since spring 2011.

Obviously, the Obama campaign strategists are worried that he cannot duplicate his 66 to 32 percent margin among young voters back in 2008.

Recent surveys of young people show inconsistent results. Gallup’s tracking shows Obama leading Mitt Romney 64 to 29 percent, and a Harvard Institute of Politics poll shows him leading Romney 43 to 26 percent among those who said they had an opinion.

But a March survey of 18- to 24 year olds by the Public Religion Research Institute showed Obama ahead of “a Republican” by only 48 to 41 percent. Only 52 percent had favorable opinions of Obama, and 43 percent had unfavorable opinions.

Where the surveys seem to be in accord is that young voters are less engaged, less likely to vote and less enthusiastic about Obama than in the days when he was proclaiming, “We are the change we are seeking.”

Gallup shows only 56 percent of Americans under 30 saying they definitely will vote. Among older Americans, the figure is over 80 percent. The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed only 45 percent of young people taking a big interest in the election, down from 63 percent in 2008.

Hispanics and blacks make up a larger share of the Millennial generation than of older Americans, and Obama’s support among them seems to remain high. But the Harvard survey shows that only 41 percent of white Millennials approve of Obama’s job performance, significantly lower than the 54 percent who voted for him in 2008.

Obama’s decision to campaign — er, conduct official business — on university campuses last week was not surprising. According to exit polls, there was no surge of young voters in 2008. They made up 18 percent of voters, compared to 17 percent in 2004.

But close inspection of the election returns showed that the Obama campaign did a splendid job of ginning up turnout in university and college towns and in singles apartment neighborhoods in central cities and close-in suburbs, like Arlington, Va., across the Potomac from Washington.

Consider the counties where Obama spoke last week. In Orange County, N.C., Obama won 72 percent of the vote. He did better in only one of the state’s 99 other counties, Durham, which has a large black population plus Duke University.

Obama carried Johnson County, Iowa, with 70 percent of the vote, more than in any of Iowa’s other 98 counties. He carried Boulder County, Colo., with 72 percent, a mark exceeded in that state only in Denver, one rural Hispanic county and two counties with fashionable ski resorts (Aspen, Telluride).

What Obama doesn’t seem to have done in 2008 is mobilize more economically marginal and educationally limited young people, except perhaps among blacks.

His problem this year is that there are a lot more economically marginal young people, including many who are not educationally limited.

Young people are notoriously transient, and it’s hard for political organizers to track them down. Harder perhaps this year, with many recent college graduates unable to find jobs and a rising percentage of young people moving in with their parents.

Few young Americans bothered to vote in Republican primaries, and young people’s attitudes toward Mitt Romney seem frosty. They still know little about him.

That gives him a chance to argue that Obama’s economic policies have failed and that his policies can spark an economic revival that will provide myriad opportunities for the iPod/Facebook generation to find satisfying work where they can utilize their special talents.

In his campus speeches, Obama stumped for keeping low interest rates on student loans. But young people may be figuring out that colleges and universities are gobbling up the money government pours in, leaving them saddled with debt.

It’s a side issue. The Harvard survey showed 58 percent of Millennials saying the economy was a top issue and only 41 percent approving Obama’s handling of it. Like Romney, they seem to be saying, “It’s the economy, and we’re not stupid.”

Voters Understand the Immigration Debate; Politicians Don’t
By Scott Rasmussen

As the U.S. Supreme Court wrestles with the Obama administration’s challenge of Arizona’s crackdown on illegal immigration, the overall issue of immigration remains misunderstood by both political parties in Washington.

Many Washington Republicans confuse voter opposition to illegal immigration with opposition to all immigration. Their remarks often contain an ugly tone toward those who want to come to America.

Many Washington Democrats confuse public respect for hardworking immigrants with a belief that borders and immigration laws don’t matter. Their remarks often contain an ugly tone toward those who believe the nation’s immigration laws should be enforced.

On the issues before the court, most voters tend to side with the state of Arizona rather than the federal government. Fifty-nine percent of voters nationwide, for example, agree with one of the law’s most controversial provisions, that police officers should routinely check the immigration status of those they pull over for other violations. Most voters would like to have a law like Arizona’s in their own state.

But that says more about voter respect for the law than it does about the immigration issue. Voters figure if there’s a law on the books, the government should enforce it.

That’s why, among voters who are angry about the immigration issue, 83 percent are angry at the federal government rather than the illegal immigrants themselves. It’s also why two-thirds of voters think those who knowingly hire illegal immigrants are a bigger problem than the people they employ. Simply put, most Americans are angry at those who would entice others to break the law. They’re not angry at people who are willing to work hard to provide for their families.

It’s a little bit like the public desire to go after drug pushers rather than occasional users of illegal drugs.

Still, there’s another reason for the disconnect between official Washington and the American people on immigration.

In Washington, the entire focus of the immigration debate is on how to deal with those already living here illegally. For voters, this is a secondary concern. The bigger concern is how to secure the border so future immigrants enter the county according to the rules. Routinely, in surveys for years, 60 percent or more of voters say securing the borders is a higher priority than legalizing the status of the illegal immigrants who are here now.

Once voters are convinced that illegal immigration is a thing of the past, it will be easier to address the status of those in the country already.

But voters don’t believe the federal government has any interest in securing the border. In fact, most believe the policies of the federal government are designed to encourage illegal immigration. This offends voters who want to respect the rule of law. If immigration laws — or any laws — are routinely ignored, then the government loses credibility.

If the laws are enforced, 61 percent of voters favor a welcoming policy that lets anybody come to America except national security threats, criminals and those who would live off the U.S. welfare system. All who would like to work hard and pursue the American Dream are welcome.

The bottom line is that voters remember what many in Washington often forget: America is a nation of immigrants — and of laws. The American people want both traditions to be honored.

When Administrations Implode
By Victor Davis Hanson

Administration meltdowns are hardly novel. In almost every presidency there comes a moment when sheer chaos takes hold, whether self-induced or as a result of an outside crisis.

Vietnam had effectively destroyed Lyndon Johnson by 1967. Watergate unraveled the Richard Nixon administration, as the disgraced president resigned in the face of certain impeachment. Gerald Ford could not whip inflation and was not re-elected. One-termer Jimmy Carter was undone by the Iranian hostage crisis and skyrocketing oil prices.

For a time, it seemed that Ronald Reagan’s second term might not survive the Iran-Contra scandal. George H.W. Bush could not be re-elected after he broke his promise not to raise taxes and Ross Perot entered the 1992 race. The popular Bill Clinton was impeached over the Monica Lewinsky affair and limped out of office tainted. The insurgency in Iraq and the fallout from Hurricane Katrina crashed for good the once-high poll ratings of George W. Bush.

The Obama administration over the last month has seemed on the verge of one of these presidential meltdowns.

An open mic caught the president promising Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would be more flexible after the election — as if Obama might grant concessions that would be unpalatable if known to the general public before November. That embarrassment followed an earlier hot-mic put-down of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year.

The president also unwisely attacked the Supreme Court as it deliberated the constitutionality of Obamacare. He needlessly referred to the justices as “unelected” and wrongly claimed that that they had little precedent to overturn laws that dealt with commerce. The gaffe about the court and its history was doubly embarrassing because Obama has often reminded the public that he used to teach constitutional law.

Democrats unwisely went after the Catholic Church and religious conservatives on the grounds that they did not support federal subsidies for contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs. Another gratuitous scrap soon escalated into an unnecessary fight with Catholic bishops. To widen the controversy further, Vice President Joe Biden and Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz alleged that the contraceptive fight was part of a wider Republican “war on women.”

But that new psychodrama also blew up in the administration’s face when a zealous Democratic consultant, Hilary Rosen, claimed that Ann Romney, wife of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, had “never worked a day in her life.” In fact, the affable Mrs. Romney had raised five children and had survived both multiple sclerosis and breast cancer.

That silly offensive got worse when, at almost the same time, news leaked that women working at the Obama White House, on average, made 18 percent less than their male counterparts there. Meanwhile, 11 Secret Service agents assigned to the president’s trip to Colombia were sent home for soliciting prostitutes — and then haggling over the cost. Not long before, the General Services Administration was caught wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on a junket in Las Vegas — leading to the resignation of the GSA administrator, a political appointee.

Then there was the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin shooting. After Obama’s disastrous 2009 commentary about the detention of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates — when the president alleged that police acted “stupidly” — he might have been wise to keep quiet about another explosive racial controversy. Instead, he foolishly plunged in with a puzzling comment that if he had a son, he would have looked like the deceased Trayvon Martin. That editorializing served no purpose except to remind the nation of the racial tensions simmering around the shooting.

The president also went after the rich with the “Buffett Rule,” which would ensure that millionaires like his friend Warren Buffett paid at least 30 percent in income taxes. But Obama and his wife Michelle paid just over 20 percent in federal taxes on the $790,000 they earned in 2011. And even if the bill passed, the Obama Treasury would only get new revenue amounting to less than half of 1 percent of what it borrows every year.

The effect of all these unnecessary missteps was to make the Obama administration appear inept — at precisely the time Republicans were unifying around Romney and ending their long, suicidal primary fights. Some polls even showed Romney suddenly ahead in the presidential race.

So why is the president rashly picking these stupid fights?

Apparently his team wishes to divert attention from generally bleak economic news. The economy still suffers from a dramatic spike in gas prices, chronically high 8 percent plus unemployment, sluggish growth, and serial $1 trillion annual deficits that have sent the debt soaring to $16 trillion.

These perfect storms often either destroy presidents or turn them into unpopular lame ducks. Obama should learn from the fates of his predecessors: There are enough forces in the world to destroy a presidency without needlessly creating more on his own.

Obama’s Problem? His Record
By Jonah Goldberg

“The choice in this election is between an economy that produces a growing middle class and that gives people a chance to get ahead and their kids a chance to get ahead, and an economy that continues down the road we are on, where a fewer and fewer number of people do very well and everybody else is running faster and faster just to keep pace.”

That’s Obama advisor David Axelrod on “Fox News Sunday,” explaining why people should vote for … Barack Obama.

Odds are this was simply poor phrasing. But it might not have been, given how desperately the Obama campaign wants to turn back the clock to 2008, when the choice was between hope and change or continuing “down the road we are on.”

Regardless of the spin, the simple fact is that Obama is the stay-the-course candidate stuck with a team, a record and an economy ill-suited for a stay-the-course strategy.

That’s what gives poignancy to Obama’s recently renewed love affair with Ronald Reagan, whom Obama invokes these days as a model of reasonableness and bipartisanship. He even wants to rename the “Buffett rule” the “Reagan rule.”

Even before he got the nomination in 2008, Obama said he wanted to be a “transformative” president like Reagan had been.

And last year, Time magazine featured a cover story, “Why Obama [Hearts] Reagan,” which in Time’s words gave the true story behind “Obama’s Reagan Bromance.”

There were two key elements to Obama’s man-crush. The first was the simple hope that history — or at least the business cycle — would repeat itself.

The White House’s plan was to run for re-election in 2012 with a soaring economy at its back. After an absolutely bruising recession (that was in some ways worse than the one Obama inherited), Reagan got to ride a surging economy to re-election. America enjoyed 6 percent annual growth in 1984: In three of the four quarters before Election Day, GDP quarterly growth was more than 7 percent, while inflation and unemployment plummeted.

At Obama’s back is a dismayingly anemic recovery, constantly threatening to get worse. He wants credit for “creating” 3 million jobs but insists he be held blameless for millions more workers who’ve left the job market entirely.

The other reason the White House admired the Reagan White House? According to Time: “Both relied heavily on the power of oratory.” Then-Press Secretary Robert Gibbs added, “Our hope is the story ends the same way.”

And there’s the problem for Obama. He’s sticking to his rhetorical guns on the assumption that he’s the great orator his fans have always claimed. It’s admirably Gipperesque, I suppose, but the problem is that Obama has never once significantly moved public opinion on domestic issues with his arguments. If he had that power, not only would “Obamacare” be popular today, it would have been popular when he gave more than 50 addresses and speeches on it during his first year.

Obama’s out on the stump, embracing Obamacare, doubling down on green energy, on the need for “investments” in government programs, and for the whole hodgepodge of rationalizations for hiking taxes and “spreading the wealth around.”

Asking whether Obama is as good a communicator as Reagan is like comparing boxers from different generations; there’s plenty of evidence to form opinions but no way to settle the matter.

But what must be very troubling for Obama is the mounting evidence that presidential persuasion is vastly overrated. Political scientist Brendan Nyhan has noted that Reagan’s rhetoric had little effect on the polls or his media coverage. Liberal Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein, surveying the academic literature in a recent issue of the New Yorker, found that there’s little evidence that any president has really moved the country with his rhetoric.

My hunch is that such findings are overdone and leave out some aspects of presidential persuasion.

Still, what’s undoubtedly true is that results matter far more than words. And despite Axelrod’s assertions, the fact is that Obama has been leading us down the road we are on for more than three years, and that’s what voters will have in mind come Election Day.

Obama Makes Foul Call for Economic ‘Fairness’
By Star Parker

You have got to give credit where credit is due.

President Barack Obama has laid out the core message of his re-election campaign. It is a message whose claims are blatantly false and whose point is irrelevant to what is of greatest concern to Americans today.

Despite this, there is no evidence so far that his strategy and messaging is not working and won’t be successful.

In his speech Tuesday at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, the president defined what he called “the defining issue of our time.”

This defining issue, per the president, appears to be that America is not fair.

We suffer today, Obama says, from “a shrinking number of people who are doing really, really well, but a growing number who are struggling to get by.”

Apparently the reason this is happening is because ours is not a nation in which “everybody gets a fair shot and everybody does a fair share, and everybody plays by the same set of rules.”

Now excuse me for pointing out the irony of hearing from our nation’s first black president a suggestion that America may no longer be a nation where dreams can be realized or where someone can come out of nowhere and make it.

But Obama probably would explain his unlikely success in this unfair nation as the result of his being an exceptional and extraordinary individual. Which is why, I would assume in his thinking, we ordinary folk should turn our lives over to him to determine who should have what.

Ironically, I would say that if America is unfair today, it is because politicians and government have the power to do exactly what it is that Obama wants to do: Seize control of the wealth of some and redistribute it to whomever they choose.

The Bible that I read every day calls this theft.

The president seeks to gain political support for this redistribution of wealth by tapping into the widespread dissatisfaction with our most disappointing economy.

But is our economy underperforming because some have more than others, because some succeed more than others?

At a time when Americans are looking for answers to restart our sputtering economy, our president chooses to use his time complaining about the wealthiest not paying sufficient taxes.

But according to the National Taxpayers Union, in 2009 the top 5 percent of income earners paid almost 59 percent of the funds raised by the federal personal income tax and the bottom 50 percent paid about 2.25 percent.

Yet, in the president’s remarks in Florida, he defined fairness as everybody playing by “the same set of rules.” Not only are the tax rules not fair by the president’s own definition, in the name of alleged fairness he wants to make them even more unfair.

Of course, the president’s real problem is that his policies have failed so he has to change the subject. He told us that the almost $900 billion in stimulus spending passed in 2009 would revive our economy and reduce unemployment to 6 percent. Three years later, unemployment stands at 8.2 percent.

There is no evidence that our president has a clue about what why we are not on the path to recovery. But, unfortunately, he does have a clue about how to tap into the worst instincts of people to garner political support. Inspiring blame and envy, sadly, pays political dividends.

The fairness the president obsesses about has nothing to do with fairness, nor does it have anything to do with fixing our economy.

If he really wants guidance on a fair and moral tax system, he might turn to his Bible instead of his campaign spin machine.

He can learn there that the 10 percent tithe on income applies to everyone.

Real Moms of the GOP versus White House SOP
By Michelle Malkin

The authenticity of conservative women has always been under attack by radical orthodox feminists, but perhaps not as brazenly as by someone with such direct and frequent access to the corridors of the White House message machine as Hilary B. Rosen.

The D.C. career lobbyist and Democratic media strategist took to CNN’s airwaves this week to craft a left-wing “War on Women” attack on the real moms of the GOP. Ostensibly aiming at Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for his “old-fashioned” views of women, Rosen’s mouth instead shot off in the direction of wife, stay-at-home mother of five, grandmother of 16, and cancer and multiple sclerosis survivor Ann Romney. Mrs. Romney, sneered Rosen, “never worked a day in her life” outside of the home and should have no voice on women’s issues.

President Obama never met a payroll in his life, but that hasn’t stopped him from dictating what business owners across the country should and shouldn’t be doing. But I digress.

This was no accidental rhetorical drive-by. “Progressives” from Gloria Steinem to Patricia Ireland to Naomi Wolf have derided their conservative counterparts as female impersonators, fake women and men with breasts from time immemorial. It’s SOP: standard operating procedure. In 1992, Hillary Clinton mocked women who stayed at home and “baked cookies and had teas.” In 2004, blueblood Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, sniffed that first lady Laura Bush (a former teacher and librarian before becoming a homemaker) never “had a real job — I mean, since she’s been grown up.”

Alas, if you’re a conservative mom, you’re damned if you do stay home and damned if you don’t. In 2008, Howard Gutman, a member of the Obama campaign’s national finance committee, attacked GOP vice presidential candidate and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s ability to be a good parent and have a high-powered public life at the same time. “Your responsibility is to put your family first,” Gutman lectured as he singled out Palin’s Down syndrome baby and then-pregnant teenage daughter. “The proper attack is not that a woman shouldn’t run for vice president with five kids; it’s that a parent, when they have a family in need…” should get out of the public sphere and stay home.

What’s striking about Rosen’s latest ideological sniper attack is that she is not some lone-wolf operative on the fringes of Beltway influence. She works with former White House communications director Anita Dunn at the D.C.-based strategic communications consulting firm SKDKnickerbocker. That’s the same company that promoted the anti-Palin smear movie “Game Change” and that represented liberal Georgetown law school student activist and manufactured War on Women poster woman Sandra Fluke. Smack dab at the intersection of progressive agitation and Democratic Party campaign-season maneuvering.

White House visitor logs (which nonpartisan watchdogs point out are woefully incomplete) show that “Hilary B. Rosen” or “Hilary Rosen” has visited 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. at least 35 times, including several direct meetings with President Obama (5); White House senior adviser and consigliere Valerie Jarrett; senior adviser David Axelrod; senior adviser turned 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina; and a parade of communications/media team officials in both the West Wing “surrogate booking” office and the East Wing.

Axelrod and Messina, who took to Twitter immediately Thursday night after the social networking site exploded with a conservative mom backlash, scrambled to disassociate themselves from their frequent visitor. POTUS and FLOTUS followed suit. But when you collect and connect the dots, Rosen’s role as a surrogate hit-woman for the White House is unmistakable.

Rosen was forced to issue a non-apology apology as Democratic women tossed her under the bus (or at least shoved her temporarily to the back until things boil over).

What’s changed in 2012 is the Internet revenge of thousands of conservative female activists who have played a larger role than ever in controlling political narratives. These include tea party leaders such as Breitbart.com editor Dana Loesch, national grassroots groups such as Smart Girl Politics, the proliferation of conservative female bloggers and podcasters, and the critical mass of stay-at-home moms, work-at-home moms and young conservative women flocking to Twitter.

As we’ve documented at my new Twitter curation/aggregation site, Twitchy.com, GOP moms, grandmothers and daughters have besieged White House social media efforts to paint conservatives as anti-women. They’ve torn apart hypocritical White House rhetoric about equal pay from an administration that has failed to practice what it preaches.

And as Ann Romney is now experiencing on Twitter, the women of the right are fighting their way through a hostile cesspool of misogyny that has been SOP for the feminist left.

Rosen and her media defenders dismissed “faux outrage” about her attack. But the real moms of the GOP have launched their own Occupy movement in the social media space once dominated by Obama’s army. And they’re winning.

Not So Fast There, Mr. Obama
By Michael Reagan

You told some newspapers editors last week that if Ronald Reagan were running for president today “he could not get through the Republican primary.”

I know what you were up to. You were trying to enlist Ronald Reagan in your tireless effort to get the GOP’s presidential candidates to violate their principles. You want them to defect to your side and come out in favor of raising taxes to reduce the record budget deficits you’ve created for our grandchildren with your reckless spending.

You were hoping to make Romney and company look like conservative fanatics who’d never do what my father was forced to do when faced with a growing federal deficit — compromise and propose spending cuts and higher taxes at the same time.

To some extent, Mr. President, what you said about Ronald Reagan not being able to win his party’s nomination in 2012 is true. It would indeed be almost impossible if he was running only as the former governor of California or as an actor and not on his record as president.

Would the Republican Party of today nominate a union member or the president of an actors union? Would it nominate someone who raised taxes as governor of California? Who signed a no-fault divorce bill? Who signed an abortion bill?

A former Gov. Ronald Reagan would win some primaries in 2012. But it would be a hell of a fight for someone like him to get through today’s Republican nomination process. Based on his record in Sacramento, in 2012 Ronald Reagan would be painted as insufficiently conservative and too willing to compromise with the tax-and-spenders.

But President Obama, you sly dog. You were also trying to make it seem that Ronald Reagan would support your socialist dream for America. That he would support hiking taxes to cover the deficit. That he would even support higher corporate tax rates and more government regulations on business.

That, Mr. President, is absolutely untrue. So is your insinuation that Ronald Reagan would not have supported Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which passed 228-191 while your budget plan was being laughed out of the House by a 419-0 vote.

Ronald Reagan would have been a staunch supporter of the Ryan budget. His plan slows the rates of growth in Social Security and Medicare spending. In upside-down Washington, that’s considered a spending cut. But in the real world it isn’t.

President Obama, I have a suggestion. If you really want to find the cause of your budget problems, don’t blame anti-tax Republicans. Look in the mirror. Then give Harry Reid a call over at the Senate and ask him why he hasn’t put up a budget in 1,000 days.

And, please, don’t try to make people believe Ronald Reagan would support you or any part of your failed plan to return the United States to economic health by higher taxes and more spending. He wouldn’t.

Mr. President, I knew Ronald Reagan. He was not only a friend of mine, he was my father. And trust me, he’d never be a political friend of yours.

Why Obama is a Bad President – Obamacare Edition
By John Ransom

Now that GOP has finally ended the inter-party squabble about who’s going to be the Republican nominee in November, it’s time to put in better focus why Obama is headed for an historic loss in the upcoming presidential election.

To do that, we are going to trot out our standby “Why Obama is a Bad President.”

As readers might remember, last summer Jonathan Alter asked the world why everyone thought Obama was such a terrible president, challenging us all to come up with reasons. We answered the challenge, but since it was such a stupid question to ask in the first place, we like trot it out from time to time just to remind everyone that someone had to ask it.

Look, there are just some truths that are self-evident- but not apparently to a liberal.

So, before we’re done in the next months, we’ll cover lots of ground, but for today let’s just stick with Obamacare.

Because while the administration has set a new mark for really bad ideas, none so far has been as bad as Obamacare.

Here’s legislation that won’t do what it was supposed to do- cut spending; that was passed before Congress read it and debated it; and that will probably be tossed out by the Supreme Court. And losing in court might be Obama’s best option in the opinion of Democrats.

In other words, we hired a guy for president whose biggest accomplishment so far could be getting the one thing he did (Obamacare) reversed- and that reversal will be a big relief to you, him and to me according to his supporters. And you thought not passing a budget was bad?

Even liberals seem to know what a waste of time Obamcare has been because they are hiding behind the last fig-leaf any Democrat would hide behind to make the case for Obamacare: “We love it,” they say, “because it fights the deficit.”

Ha. Double ha. Double secret ha.

Americans know instinctively that when liberals start talking about deficit reduction that’s it’s just a case of the fantods, as Huckleberry Finn would say. And say what you while about old Huck, but he knew a couple of frauds when he saw them.

No matter what liberal “Wonks” like Ezra Klein say about the historically dumb healthcare “reform” that Democrats rushed through Congress, Americans are uneasy about it.

And they should be.

The best thing- as Democrat strategist James Carville admits, that can happen for Obama, is for the Supreme Court to toss the landmark legislation that bears his name.

That’s because Obamacare supporters like Klein continue to play dirty pool when it comes to healthcare reform.

They count it as a deficit fighter, when in fact, it’s no such thing.

Unless of course you count any bill with a tax increase in it a deficit fighter. A defense contract could be a deficit fighter too, if a defense contract was designed just like Obamacare.

Here let me show you the slight of hand that liberals did to claim Obamacare fights the deficit.

Say, for example, that when we decommission the old Nimitz-class carriers we then replace them with the newer Gerald Ford class of carriers at $15 billion a clip. Let’s say, in this example, that we then raise taxes 3.8 percent on people who go over certain income limit, to an extent that we not only pay for each carrier but we also create a surplus of $100 billion that we can apply to the deficit- just as they did in Obamcare. Actually in the case of the aircraft carriers, the same tax exact tax increase that the used for Obamacare would pay for the carriers and leave a surplus of $180 billion over the same period, almost twice what Obamacare claims.

Then we could pass both the replacement aircraft carrier budget authorization and the tax increase in one bundle- just as they did with Obamacare- and call it the The American Affordable Defense Act (AADA).

Then any time someone threatens to scrap the Ford class carriers we could cry out “But getting rid of the AADA would add to the deficit!”

While the typical American doesn’t necessarily know the ins and outs of Obamacare, the same confidence game has been played on them so may times that they are wise to it.

Counting on public stupidity to see a massive new spending program, like Obamacare, as some sort of deficit fighter, because THEY SAY IT IS, just shows you how weak the original case for Obamacare was in the first place.

And only in Washington can you start off entitlement reform that’s supposed to reduce spending, by ushering in a massive new government program that will greatly grow government spending. And then pat yourself on the back for it.

Wasn’t it the same type of entitlement Ponzi scheme that gave us the problem in the first place?

Wonks and politicians may not see it, but those guys are in the process of self term-limiting out of business anyway- either by votes or by pageviews. In 2010 was just a preview, not a conclusion.

Readers know that I hate to pick on the Washington Post this way, but I don’t know anyone who would willingly call themselves a wonk in the first place. The Post’s Wonk brand is stuck in the Way-Back Machine of the 1990s.

Wonk Disneyland is exactly what gets us these kinds of political and mathematical ruses that pass for solutions these day.

Americans continue to favor repeal of Obamacare.

If anything, a Supreme Court decision throwing out Obamacare will likely reinforce the opinion that it’s a flawed piece of legislation that greatly expands government bureaucracy at a time when Americans think that government is doing too much not too little.

You can pass Obamacare as a deficit measure and throw out on Constitutional concerns -and then wonk about it all you want. But Americans know the truth.

Obamacare was just plain dumb.

And they generally vote out dumb at election time.

To Obama, Legal Precedents Are All About Politics
By Byron York

In 1996, Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act by huge bipartisan votes — 342 – 67 in the House and 85 – 14 in the Senate. President Bill Clinton signed the measure into law.

Now, the Obama administration says DOMA, which permits states to refuse to recognize gay marriages from other states and creates a federal definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman, is unconstitutional. In Boston recently, Stuart Delery, an attorney for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, urged the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals to find DOMA violates the Constitution by discriminating against gays and lesbians. “I’m not here to defend (the law) on any standard,” Delery told the court.

What was striking about Delery’s request that a federal court strike down DOMA was that at virtually the same time, President Obama was railing at the very notion that a federal court would strike down any law passed by Congress.

“I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” Obama said about the arguments over Obamacare before the nation’s highest court. The danger presented in the health care case, the president continued, is that “an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.”

Obama immediately ran into a barrage of questions. How can the Supreme Court overturning a law be “unprecedented” when the court has done it more than 150 times in U.S. history? And does the president even recognize the court’s authority to rule on the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress?

Backtracking, Obama said the next day that “the Supreme Court is the final say on our Constitution and our laws, and all of us have to respect it.” He also claimed, without convincing many people, that he called the Obamacare case “unprecedented” because it’s been awhile since the court overturned “a law that was passed by Congress on an economic issue, like health care.”

But what about that “strong majority”? When reporters pointed out that Obamacare passed the House by a narrow margin of 219 – 212, White House spokesman Jay Carney quickly revised “strong majority” to simply “majority.”

But all that backing and filling — including Carney’s claim that Obama was misunderstood “because he is a law professor” — was before the DOMA arguments made news. If the president was so concerned about a court overturning a duly constituted law passed by a democratically elected Congress, why was he urging a small group of unelected judges to strike down DOMA, a measure that won passage by a far greater margin than Obamacare?

The answer is, of course, that the administration is making a political argument for its positions, not a legal one. And perhaps counterproductively, the president’s decision to bring up Obamacare’s history in Congress could end up reminding the public of the tangled circumstances of its passage. Even with a huge majority in the House, Democrats barely passed the bill in the face of bipartisan opposition. And in the Senate, Obamacare succeeded as the result of a set of freakish circumstances that allowed Democrats to pass an unpopular measure into law.

Those circumstances included the wrongful prosecution of a Republican senator (Ted Stevens), resulting in his seat going to a Democrat; the defection of another Republican senator (Arlen Specter) to the Democrats; and a change in one state’s laws (Massachusetts) to allow a Democratic governor to immediately appoint a Democrat to succeed the late Sen. Ted Kennedy and give the Senate a 60-vote Democratic supermajority. And then there were the policy payoffs to some Democratic senators who were undecided about the bill. Even then, Democrats held a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for just 134 days before Massachusetts elected a Republican senator, Scott Brown, who ran specifically on the platform of stopping Obamacare. But in those 134 days, Democrats managed to pass an unpopular bill into law without a single vote to spare.

Now, the timing of the arguments over Obamacare and DOMA has revealed the flexibility of the administration’s arguments over constitutionality. And the flap over Obama’s remarks is just a preview of what is coming when the court issues its decision on Obamacare this June.

A decision on DOMA, which has not yet arrived at the Supreme Court, lies in the future. But if those arguments come when Barack Obama is president, perhaps DOMA’s defenders will remind the administration of the president’s respect for duly constituted and passed laws.

Barack’s Missile Message to Vladimir
By Austin Bay

As President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ended a public conference in South Korea (a nation demonstrably threatened by North Korean ballistic missiles), a still-open microphone inadvertently recorded a stunning tete-a-tete. The brief but jaw-dropping act of personal diplomacy yoked U.S. and Russian arguments over missile defense systems, a serious international security issue of long-term geo-strategic consequence, to Obama’s short-term domestic political plan to secure his own re-election come November.

The whispered exchange:

Obama: “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for him (Putin) to give me space.”

Medvedev: “Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you …”

Obama: “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”

Medvedev: “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”

Accompanying video imagery, of professionally formal faces masking noxious cynicism, is available on the Web.

Obama and his press apologists dismiss “The Missile Message,” spinning it as a minor gaffe. Balderdash. Obama and Medvedev are their nations’ top diplomats as well as leaders, so the personal diplomatic exchange, though arrogant, flamingly stupid and brazenly conniving, isn’t minor. The apologists’ agitprop disregards the men’s privileged positions and insults common sense. But then a fair inference drawn from Obama’s request for “space” is he believes he can tell the American people any jit and jot, and the rubes will believe. When he ran against Hillary Clinton, Obama opposed the individual mandate. In office, it became the cornerstone of his health care legislation.

The patron-donor of Obama’s re-election space, former KGB agent and authoritarian strong man president-elect Vladimir Putin, will soon replace Medvedev. However, like many strong men on the planet, to include his pal, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Putin confronts his own peoples’ demand for democratic change and economic revival.

Twitter-generation Russians opposing Putin know that he and his gang are the corrupt authors and beneficiaries of Russian-brand state cronyism, a vicious economic-political amalgam combining mafia greed and muscle with streaks of communism, fascism, corporatism and czarism. Charges of vote fraud and intimidation marred Putin’s suspect re-election, but to ensure his grip on power he needed space to do what he had to do. Yes, Vladimir certainly understands Barack’s request.

Losing the Cold War stung Russian pride. Putin portrays himself as the man who revived respect for Russia. As part of the act, he consistently stokes Cold War embers, to include Soviet-era anti-Americanism. The militant theater panders to hardline nationalists and distracts critics of his corruption and cronyism. Thus Obama’s quid for Putin’s quo is as obvious as it is geo-strategically foolish, for the U.S., U.S. allies and, ultimately, for Russia, as well. Barack will give Vladimir an international diplomatic triumph; its domestic political dividends will strengthen Putin’s personal power.

Missile defense is Putin’s favorite Cold War ember. In the last decade, the U.S. and NATO have built the diplomatic and technological framework to deploy an anti-missile defense designed to stop an Iranian missile volley. Turkey agreed to host a key radar site. The multilayered shield is actually rather robust, though Obama weakened it in September 2009 when he eliminated ground-based interceptors (GBI) deployment. GBIs have anti-ICBM capabilities but were no counter-force to Russian strategic missiles.

Still, Russia objected. Obama dumped the GBIs, despite howls from U.S. ally Poland.

Would Khomeinist Iran try to politically blackmail Europe with a nuclear-armed ballistic missile? Japan and South Korea decided missile defense was a sane response to North Korea’s nuclear extortion racket. Exposing London and Paris to the nuclear whims of millenarian religious nuts is utterly stupid diplomacy. Countering NATO’s shield thus puts Iran’s ayatollahs in political debt to Russia. Putin’s Moscow prefers sphere of influence to a sphere of shared security.

Obama appears to have decided his re-election, with the aid of Putin, is more important than supporting U.S. allies and pursuing responsible collective security measures against rogue regimes. Hope and change? No. A self-centered politician’s political security first. American security? Not so much.

They Call These Accomplishments?
By David Limbaugh

If you read through the Washington Monthly’s list of Obama’s top 50 accomplishments, you’ll quickly understand why my brother, Rush, properly wanted him to fail.

When Rush said he wanted Obama to fail, everyone knew he was talking about his policies, and for those few who pretended otherwise, he explained it a thousand times: He wanted his policies to fail because his policies are disastrous for America.

Obama has certainly failed to exhibit leadership at very important points, such as his taking a pass during budget negotiations and his legendary vacillation at key foreign policy junctures. But in terms of the general, statist direction of the country, he is captain of the sinking ship.

Obama wasn’t kidding when he promised to fundamentally transform America, and he has succeeded in doing so, to the everlasting detriment of the country. Four more years of this and it’s hard to imagine what kind of shape we’ll be in.

Paul Glastris, Ryan Cooper and Siyu Hu co-wrote the piece for the Washington Monthly. If you want to see just how far apart red America and blue America are, you must examine their list, recognizing that they are actually bragging about these “accomplishments.”

Let’s take a quick look at just a small fraction of these items:

–He passed Obamacare. As we’ve elsewhere noted, he represented that he would bend the cost curve down and make health care more accessible. Already we’ve discovered that the costs are double Obama’s projections, and people are losing their own plans in droves, contrary to his promises. Further calamity awaits as the law goes into effect.

–He passed the stimulus. Can you believe that Glastris, Cooper and Hu are bragging about Obama’s having spent almost a trillion dollars when America is on the financial precipice? Much of it was squandered in political payoffs and waste and dedicated to failed green projects. There were no shovel-ready jobs. Precious little was spent on infrastructure, despite Obama’s promises, and the overall result was that the American economy lost millions of jobs — even after you factor in the jobs that were allegedly “saved or created.” Obama can move the goal posts until the cows come home, but the one he set himself — that unemployment wouldn’t rise above 8 percent — has been as demonstrably wrong as any in the annals of presidential pledge breaking.

–He improved America’s image abroad. Are the authors serious? He has repeatedly offended our allies and pandered to our enemies, with the net result of alienating both groups. Professional pollsters say he is less popular on the Arab street than was President George W. Bush.

–He “kicked banks out of the federal student loan program.” And this is a good thing? He originally muscled out private banks through an abuse of federal authority in order to steal this money from the private sector to count toward Obamacare scoring when he needed to pretend it would be deficit-neutral. What did he do with this $60 billion in illusory savings? He pledged $40 billion of it to inflate student loans and used the other $20 billion to deceive the Congressional Budget Office in its scoring. Worse still, by increasing these student loans, Obama will create the opposite effect of what he’s advertising; the middle class will have to pay more for education because these increased subsidies to universities will cause more tuition inflation. The middle class will also bear the brunt of the increased number of failed loans Obama’s executive orders make inevitable, as taxpayers will subsidize the increased shortfall.

–He boosted fuel efficiency standards. Keep in mind that his Environmental Protection Agency did this through an administrative ruling when Congress would not pass his Draconian cap-and-trade bill because it would have had a crushing economic impact on the economy.

–He protected two liberal seats on the Supreme Court, which speaks for itself.

–He achieved the New START, by which he granted Russia major concessions for little in return, making us more vulnerable to other threats by unilaterally reducing our nuclear capabilities when other nations are expanding their capabilities and terrorists are in hot pursuit of these weapons.

–He trimmed our missile defense. This is just frighteningly irresponsible.

–He invested heavily in renewable technology. Solyndra, anyone?

–He killed the F-22 when China and Russia are developing their next-generation fighters. Under what sane rationale?

What has he done about the most egregious problems facing America, discretionary and entitlement spending? Absolutely nothing. And we’re headed for a colossal train wreck. I can’t quit obsessing over this, and I’m frankly shocked that everyone else isn’t obsessing over it 24/7 when our national survival hangs in the balance.

Are the Bush-hating liberals correct; are there now two Americas? Remember that these are being touted as accomplishments, not failures.

Obama is Tanking, And The Voters Know it
By Donald Lambro

The precipitous rise in Barack Obama’s job disapproval numbers stunned the West Wing Monday and shook Democratic leaders. The president is getting failing scores on all of the politically pivotal issues: from a weak economy, high unemployment and skyrocketing gas prices to trillion-dollar budget deficits.

These are fundamental bread-and-butter election issues that have stopped Obama’s momentum in his campaign for a second term and show no signs of improving anytime soon.

A nationwide Washington Post-ABC News poll revealed an angry electorate that is fed up with his presidency. Among his worst job disapproval numbers: 59 percent on the economy; 63 percent on the deficits; 65 percent on gas prices; and 52 percent on his hands-off handling of Iran’s nuclear weapons threat.

What especially stunned Obama campaign strategists this week was the president’s declining support among independents, who will likely decide who wins the election. Fifty-seven percent of them disapprove of his handling of the economy.

After that blow struck the White House in the morning, it took another big hit that night when a CBS-New York Times poll was released that said Obama’s overall job approval rating had plummeted to 41 percent. Forty-seven percent said they disapproved of the job he was doing.

It was a sharp downfall for the president. A month ago, a CBS poll gave Obama a 50 percent approval score.

Notably, the Post’s poll showed former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney defeating Obama by 49 percent to 47 percent if the election were held today.

The Gallup Poll has shown Romney leading Obama by a much larger margin for several weeks — 50 percent to 46 percent in its latest head-to-head matchup.

Obama’s shrinking approval numbers on such a wide scope of issues showed that last month’s unemployment report failed to impress voters. The reason: The massaged data coming out of Washington did not reflect the dismal job situation out in the real world.

Not only did the dubious 8.3 percent unemployment rate remain unchanged, there was significant evidence that for millions of Americans, the jobs picture had shown no improvement or had worsened.

The national news media ballyhooed the 227,000 new-jobs number, but the data behind that number showed that it was not all it was cracked up to be. Consider this dismal economic fact that The Washington Post buried in last week’s story on the monthly job gains:

“The bulk of the job growth came in professional and business services, and more than half of those positions were in temporary employment.”

Millions of discouraged workers are forced to work only part-time or fewer hours, when they need full-time jobs to make ends meet.

Americans harbor a healthy dose of cynicism about the government’s 8.3 percent average national unemployment rate, because workers do not live in the world of averages. Sixteen states, including some of the largest, suffer jobless rates of between 9 percent and 13 percent.

“Factoring in discouraged adults (who have stopped looking for work) and others working part time for lack of full-time opportunities, the unemployment rate is about 14.9 percent,” says University of Maryland economist Peter Morici. “Adding college graduates in low-skill positions, like counter work at Starbucks, and the unemployment rate is closer to 18 percent.”

Soaring gasoline prices have also fueled the public’s angst toward the president. The average price for a gallon of regular shot up 5 cents over the weekend to $3.80 — the highest it’s ever been at this time of the year.

In many parts of the country, the price of gas is more than $4, and some forecasters say the national average may climb as high as $4.25 by April.

That cuts deeply into tight consumer budgets, and for many motorists, wipes out the 2 percent payroll tax cut enacted to pump more liquidity and growth into Obama’s lackluster economy.

Obama this week reiterated his excuse that there is “no silver bullet” to quickly boost tight oil supplies that would bring down gasoline prices.

Nevertheless, he could have put oil exploration and drilling policies in place at the start of his presidency that would have boosted both oil and gas supplies and could have made us energy independent by now.

Instead, his policies and his rhetoric have been hostile to exploration and drilling, placing moratoriums on offshore oil development and killing the Canadian-U.S. oil pipeline and the thousands of oil jobs along with it.

Instead, he’s been pumping millions of tax dollars into alternative sources of fuel that are not economically viable. Obama talked recently about one project to turn algae into fuel. Newt Gingrich told voters at an energy summit in Biloxi, Miss., Monday that the “biggest issue this fall is going to be drilling versus algae.”

It is worth noting that on Dec. 31, 2008, as George W. Bush was about to return to private life and Obama was preparing to take office, the average price of a gallon of regular was $1.61.

Now, with polls showing voters are blaming him for the soaring price of gas, Obama conducted a whirlwind round of interviews Monday with eight swing-state TV stations, offering a bevy of excuses but taking no blame for his anti-oil drilling policies.

Obama’s presidency is clearly on the skids. He came into office promising to fix our biggest problems: a sick economy, $1.4 trillion deficits and energy dependence on foreign oil. Four years later, they still remain to be fixed.

Barack Obama-the Traveling Salesman
By Lurita Doan

During the past year, Barack Obama has attended over 100 fundraisers. Even in a cynical, political town, such as Washington, DC Obama is racking up some staggering numbers, with time spent out of the office leading the list.

We are a generation that is used to executives who work outside of the office using air travel, telework, video conferencing, off-site, motivational conferences, international, simulcast product launches and a host of other 21st century management techniques to enhance a worker’s performance. But in this age of out of the office “productivity” activities, the average American is a mere piker compared to Barack Obama.

Peter Drucker, the management guru, once said that an effective CEO spends his time on an organization’s priorities because “time is the scarcest resource of the manager. If it is not managed, nothing else can be managed.“

Few executives seem to spend as much time out of office as of Barack Obama, but with the recent Chapter 11 filing for bankruptcy by Fuller Brush, thoughts about door-to-door traveling salesman immediately brought Barack Obama to mind.

Consider: Barack Obama has played over 90 rounds of golf in the past 36 months, attended over 250 fundraisers (100 of them in the past 12 months),and taken 78 days of vacation.

The Presidency of the United States is, arguably, the most difficult job on the planet. Certainly, Americans want a president that is refreshed, rested and capable of making sound judgment calls on the complex issues of the day, but Barack Obama has taken more than just a few days off; he’s taken them at great cost (literally) to the America people.

In the past year, Obama has done 20 fundraisers in California alone, traveling via Air Force One at a cost of approximately $180,000 per hour flying time. While several of the fundraisers occurred on the same trip, even the President of the United States can’t change the basic rules of physics, so, Obama, on Air Force One, will still require approximately 5 hours to fly to California and 5 hours to return from California.

A modest cost estimate might show that the10 hours of air time costs, alone, for a round-trip fundraiser in California is upward of $1.8 million. Then, consider the sheer number of trips made by Barack Obama, and Americans can see that Obama’s fundraisers in California cost the American taxpayer anywhere from $7 million dollars to $30million dollars –and that’s just the travel costs to California fundraising events. Imagine then, the cost of traveling to the other 80 fundraisers this past year.

If Americans consider the President’s time spent playing golf, those numbers are also startling. A round of golf, where the course has been cleared (because he’s the President and because of security) might be able to finish in about 3 hours. Of course, usually Obama golfs in the presence of hundreds of spectators such as occurred in Nantucket this past summer or in Hawaii over Christmas—so assume in those cases that the play is a bit slower. In general, though, the average time to play a round of golf is approximately 4.5 hours. If Americans do the math, then 90 rounds of golf, averaging 4.5 hours equals about 405 hours spent golfing and several dozens more hours traveling to golf courses to play..

Then there are Obama’s vacation days. (Now, hopefully some of the golfing occurred during Obama’s vacation days—though Obama often counts golf as a work day since he golfs with other politicos.) During the past three years, Obama has taken about 78 days of vacation. Most American workers work, on average, about 2000 hours annually. Obama’s 78 days of vacation equal approx. 1872 hours, so Obama has spent almost one year of his three years in office on vacation.

And, as always, there is the travel to get to the fundraising, golfing and vacationing.

What becomes clear is that Barack Obama is traveling around—a lot—selling himself, and trying to garner perks, privileges and a second term in office, but very little work that benefits the average American taxpayer seems to be getting done with our taxpayer dollars.

It’s no surprise that President Obama rarely meets with his Cabinet—he doesn’t have time—he’s traveling. It’s no surprise that Obama has little understanding of the complexity of current, American political issues since Obama rarely meets with the opposition. Obama doesn’t have time, he’s traveling.

Consider: three years is 1096 days. Even by the most modest of estimates, with over 250 fundraiser, 90 rounds of golf and 78 vacation days, Obama has spent 40% of that time pleasure-seeking and fundraising.

Is it any wonder that Obama has no understanding of the struggles of the small business owner who spends 14-hour days, six or seven days a week trying to grow a business? The struggles of the small business owner who is being crushed under the Obama Administration’s excessive regulatory stranglehold and who has to use his personal savings to finance business growth, who has to use his home as collateral to gain access to capital and who hasn’t had a vacation in five years has more in common with aliens from outer space than with Barack Obama.

Our nation is facing big problems, and we need folks willing to work now to solve these problems now. Delaying hard decisions is a sign of weakness and will surely lead to failure. So, it’s a bit scary when Drucker warns managers against ignoring fiscal priorities in favor of “a grandiose future”, as Obama seems to have done.

Golfing. Traveling. Fundraising. Vacation. Golfing, and then more fundraising. And, oh yes, vacation. Obama has made his priorities clear to Americans. Obama is all about re-election, pleasure and re-election—as long as it can continue to be done at the expense of the American taxpayer.

The Left, Not Social Conservatives, Threatens Religious Liberty
By David Limbaugh

Now hear this: No Republicans on the national political scene, including Rick Santorum, threaten our religious liberty. Many Democrats, including President Obama and Senate Democrats, do. And they’ve struck again with the Senate’s defeat of the Blunt amendment.

President Obama, who seems to spend as much time community organizing as he does attending to his executive duties, doubtlessly conspired with his crack opposition research trolls and the liberal media to shoehorn the contraception issue into the 2012 presidential campaign.

What do I mean about Obama’s spending time community organizing? Well, he is using the office of the presidency to intimidate the Koch brothers into disclosing their donors’ names. He and his minions falsely, with malice aforethought, accused the U.S. Chamber of Commerce of receiving foreign contributions, with no evidence, and when challenged to substantiate it, they taunted that it was up to the chamber and its defenders to prove a negative. Obama’s Justice Department has taxpayer-funded employees posing as ordinary American citizens and posting pro-Obama agenda comments on various websites. His Justice Department attacks Republicans genuinely attempting to monitor actual voter fraud and protects his friends who engage in real-life voter intimidation. I could go on.

What do I mean about Democrats and their cronies shoehorning the contraception issue? I’m hardly among the first 100 people to point out that George Stephanopoulos gratuitously injected into a GOP presidential debate a bizarre question about contraception. Mitt Romney was so taken aback he was almost rendered — uncharacteristically — speechless.

In no time, talk shows and the Internet were abuzz about the issue, and a video of Rick Santorum talking about contraception went viral. Even some on the right — though not social conservatives — were apparently led to believe that if elected president, Santorum would single-handedly usher in a Catholic theocracy. It didn’t seem to matter that in that same video, Santorum expressly assured us that he would not attempt to force his views on contraception through legislation.

When you ask complainants to specify exactly how Santorum or any other social conservative represents a threat to religious liberty or would even remotely infringe on any of our constitutional rights concerning it, you get nothing but innuendo and fantastic hysteria.

Santorum and other social conservatives may well annoy those who don’t want to hear about social issues, but they do not represent any kind of threat to religious liberties, nor are they any less concerned about the cataclysmic fiscal and economic issues threatening our nation or any less determined and equipped to address them simply because they also care about social issues.

President Obama and the Democratic leadership, on the other hand, do represent a threat to religious liberty, and they invoke religion as often as Republicans — whether from the presidential bully pulpit and National Prayer Breakfast podium or in their churches.

Democrats warn that Republicans will use their governmental power to cram our religious values down their throats, but at least when we vote our values, we do so through the constitutionally prescribed democratic processes rather than through undemocratic, tyrannical judicial usurpations such as with abortion and same-sex marriage jurisprudence.

President Obama is the one who, in a flagrant breach of his numerous promises, is facilitating the federal funding of abortifacients and cramming this issue down the throats of the several states.

He’s the one forcing us — because of his “religious” values; listen to his prayer breakfast speech — to buy health insurance and telling us what types of coverage must be included in the health insurance policies we purchase, even if some of those violate our rights of religious and moral conscience and thus our religious liberties guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution.

He’s the one who, when called on this outrage, patronizingly pretended to compromise on the issue by forcing insurance companies to pay for these objectionable practices, as if those costs wouldn’t be passed through to those with conscience objections and as if the insurance companies have no conscience protections themselves.

He’s the one who, along with his Democratic majority in the Senate, tabled the amendment by Sen. Roy Blunt to allow employers to opt out of providing health care coverage that violates their conscience rights. The Blunt amendment, it should be noted, wouldn’t deny any woman access to contraceptives or even abortifacients; it would just exempt employers from being forced to subsidize them. As usual, the government compulsion proceeds from the left, not the right. Adding insult to injury, Democrats, as usual, drench their support of the coerced coverage in the euphemism of women’s health.

We social conservatives might annoy you because we sometimes talk about our faith-based values (while the left talks about its values just as much), but we represent no threat to anyone’s religious liberties. The same cannot be said about the habitually projecting political left.

‘Super Tuesday’
By Thomas Sowell

Many people are looking to the many primary elections on March 6th — “Super Tuesday” — to clarify where this year’s Republican nomination campaign is headed.

It may clarify far more than that, including the future of this nation and of Western civilization. If a clear winner with a commanding lead emerges, the question then becomes whether that candidate is someone who is likely to defeat Barack Obama.

If not, then the fate of America — and of Western nations, including Israel — will be left in the hands of a man with a lifelong hostility to Western values and Western interests.

President Obama is such a genial man that many people, across the ideological space, cannot see him as a danger.

For every hundred people who can see his geniality, probably only a handful see the grave danger his warped policies and ruthless tactics pose to a whole way of life that has given generation after generation of Americans unprecedented freedom and prosperity.

The election next November will not be just another election, and the stakes add up to far more than the sum of the individual issues. Moreover, if reelected and facing no future election, whatever political constraints may have limited how far Obama would push his radical agenda will be gone.

He would have the closest thing to a blank check. Nothing could stop him but impeachment or a military coup, and both are very unlikely. A genial corrupter is all the more dangerous for being genial.

The four remaining Republican candidates have to be judged, not simply by whether they would make good presidents, but by how well they can cut through Obama’s personal popularity and glib rhetoric, to alert the voters as to the stakes in this year’s election.

Ron Paul? Even those of us who agree with much of his domestic agenda, including getting rid of the Federal Reserve System, cannot believe that his happy-go-lucky attitude toward Iran’s getting a nuclear weapon represents anything other than a grave danger to the whole Western World.

Rick Santorum has possibilities, but can he survive the media’s constant attempts to paint him as some kind of religious nut who would use the government to impose his views on others? And, if he can, will he also be able to go toe-to-toe with Obama in debates?

I would not bet the rent money on it. And what is at stake is far bigger than the rent money.

Mitt Romney is the kind of candidate that the Republican establishment has always looked for, a moderate who can appeal to independents. It doesn’t matter how many such candidates have turned out to be disasters on election night, going all the way back to Thomas E. Dewey in 1948.

Nor does it matter that the Republicans’ most successful candidate of the 20th century — Ronald Reagan, with two consecutive landslide victories at the polls — was nobody’s idea of a mushy moderate.

He stood for something. And he could explain what he stood for. These may sound like modest achievements, but they are very rare, especially among Republicans.

Newt Gingrich is the only candidate still in the field who can clearly take on Barack Obama in one-on-one debate and cut through the Obama rhetoric and mystique with hard facts and plain logic.

Nor is this just a matter of having a gift of gab. Gingrich has a far deeper grasp of both the policies and the politics than the other Republican candidates.

Does Gingrich have political “baggage”? More than you could carry on a commercial airliner.

Charges of opportunism have been among the most serious raised against the former Speaker of the House. But being President of the United States is the opportunity of a lifetime. If that doesn’t sober a man up, it is hard to imagine what would.

Do any of the Republican candidates seem ideal? No. But, the White House cannot be left vacant, while we hope for a better field of candidates in 2016. We have to make our choice among the alternatives actually available, of which Obama is by far the worst.

Obama’s Corporate Tax Refom: Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the Titanic?
by Dan Mitchell

American companies are hindered by what is arguably the world’s most punitive corporate tax system. The federal corporate rate is 35 percent, which climbs to more than 39 percent when you add state corporate taxes. Among developed nations, only Japan is in the same ballpark, and that country is hardly a role model of economic dynamism.

But the tax rate is just one piece of the puzzle. It’s also critically important to look at the government’s definition of taxable income. If there are lots of corrupt loopholes – such as ethanol – that enable some income to escape taxation, then the “effective” tax rate might be rather modest.

On the other hand, if the government forces companies to overstate their income with policies such as worldwide taxation and depreciation, then the statutory tax rate understates the actual tax burden.

The U.S. tax system, as the chart suggests, is riddled with both types of provisions.

This information is important because there are good and not-so-good ways of lowering tax rates as part of corporate tax reform. If politicians decide to “pay for” lower rates by eliminating loopholes, that creates a win-win situation for the economy since the penalty on productive behavior is reduced and a tax preference that distorts economic choices is removed.

But if politicians “pay for” the lower rates by expanding the second layer of tax on U.S. companies competing in foreign markets or by changing depreciation rules to make firms pretend that investment expenditures are actually net income, then the reform is nothing but a re-shuffling of the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Now let’s look at President Obama’s plan for corporate tax reform.

*The good news is that he reduces the tax rate on companies from 35 percent to 28 percent (still more than 32 percent when state corporate taxes are added to the mix).

*The bad news is that he exacerbates the tax burden on new investment and increases the second layer of taxation imposed on American companies competing for market share overseas.

In other words, to paraphrase the Bible, the President giveth and the President taketh away.

This doesn’t mean the proposal would be a step in the wrong direction. There are some loopholes, properly understood, that are scaled back.

But when you add up all the pieces, it is largely a kiss-your-sister package. Some companies would come out ahead and others would lose.

Unfortunately, that’s not enough to measurably improve incomes for American workers. In a competitive global economy, where even Europe’s welfare states recognize reality and have lowered their corporate tax rates, on average, to 23 percent, the President’s proposal at best is a tiny step in the right direction.

Obama’s War on Religious Liberty
By Phyllis Schlafly

Welcome to the real ObamaCare, whereby a handful of leftists in Washington, D.C., impose the views of their big-money donors on more than 300 million Americans. If the Obama mandate for contraception remains intact, then liberals will next demand that Americans pay for other objectionable items that are not really medical care.

We can expect future mandates, under the guise of “health care,” to include sex-change operations, late-term abortions, embryonic stem-cell use and a variety of other procedures that many Americans do not support and certainly do not want to be compelled to foot the bill for. Obama’s directive for abortifacient drugs opens a slippery slope that would erode the moral authority of religious institutions in America.

Obama and the liberals have overplayed their hand. By baring their teeth, these lackeys for the Left have awakened Democratic voters to the real contempt that liberals hold for religious values.

All 181 U.S. Catholic bishops oppose Obama’s mandate, and Rasmussen polling estimates that 65 percent of Catholic Americans also oppose it. There are about 75 million American Catholics, most of whom have traditionally been Democratic voters but wouldn’t hesitate to cross party lines to defend their church leaders.

It will be fascinating to see how many Democratic politicians up for re-election this November side with Obama and against religious organizations. Liberals are just fine with throwing some Democratic incumbents overboard to advance far-left goals, just as the enactment of ObamaCare in 2010 cost many Democrats their congressional seats.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s congressional testimony made clear that the Obama administration is dug in permanently to enforce the regulation that religiously affiliated institutions must offer their employees health insurance that includes abortion drugs, sterilization and contraceptives. Of course, insurance companies price their products to make a profit, so clearly the cost will be concealed and distributed so many will pay for services that violate their religious beliefs.

Dick Morris exposed how George Stephanopoulos outed the Obama strategy behind this outrageous action. Knowing that abortion is no longer a winning issue for Democrats, Obama wanted to shift the debate to contraception.

However, his ploy has failed. He really shifted the debate to religious liberty and to how the Obama administration is planning to force Americans to pay for procedures that their religion teaches them is morally wrong.

The religious liberty issue is definitely not confined to Catholic hospitals, schools, colleges and charities. It opens up the whole attack on religion and on Christianity that is now going on in the Obama administration, the courts and even the military.

The U.S. Army Chief of Chaplains sent an email to senior chaplains telling them that Archbishop Timothy Broglio’s letter criticizing the Obama insurance rule was not to be read from the pulpit. There is no evidence that Obama personally issued this order, but the Army Chief of Chaplains must have thought he was taking a politically correct action.

Has anti-religious bigotry become so pervasive that chaplains believe they must censor their sermons to conform to Obama’s prejudices?

Just recently, the Obama administration forced the Air Force’s Capabilities Office to strike the Latin word for “God” from its logo. Since schools seldom teach Latin any more, I wonder how many realized what this meant.

At the Veterans Affairs Department, Obama’s agents banned Military Honor Details from reciting the significance of each fold of the American Flag during the burial services of our heroic men and women who gave their lives for our country. Obama says the ceremony promoted religion and therefore, the recitations had to stop.

Obama gave a speech at Georgetown University, a Catholic college. But he ordered his staff to cover up a crucifix with a giant black tarp because he didn’t want anybody to see a religious symbol while he was talking.

Obama has joined in the war against religion being waged by the American Civil Liberties Union and the atheists in the courts. We’ve all heard about the lawsuits attempting to delete “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, remove Ten Commandments monuments and crosses from every public place.

Less well known, but important in the big picture, are the judges’ decisions to ban the Westmoreland Middle School football coach in Tennesse from bowing his head during student-led prayer before a game and the decision to ban grace before supper at Virginia Military Institute.

The plan is even more far-reaching. It confirms that the ObamaCare law can impose any regulation the bureaucrats choose, such as death panels.

The firestorm over this most recent regulation is one more proof that social issues and fiscal issues are inescapably intertwined. Social-issue policy decisions determine fiscal ones.

The Heritage Foundation has just released its 2012 Index of Dependence on Government. It shows the shocking fact that 1 in 5 Americans is dependent on government, meaning reliance on government handouts for housing, health care, food stamps, college tuition and retirement assistance.