Why Obama Will Lose in November

By Alan Caruba

I received a campaign letter from Michelle Obama the other day. This is especially surprising because I am a registered Republican; hardly a likely prospect to contribute to her husband’s reelection efforts.

“Every day I learn about the challenges and the struggles—the doctor bills they can’t pay or the mortgage they can no longer afford,” said the text. The “fairness” theme, a socialist meme, was expressed. “American prospers when we are all in this together, when hard work pays off and responsibility is rewarded, when everyone—from Main Street to Wall Street—does their fair share and plays by the same rules.”

The fact is, however, America has not been prospering for the last four years during which Barack Obama has been President. And everyone knows it. The U.S. sovereign debt rating was downgraded for the first time while he occupied the Oval Office. Federal spending (25% of GDP) is the highest since World War Two. Federal debt (67% of GDP) is the highest since just after the end of World War Two, and the nation has experienced, not only the longest recession, but the highest unemployment since the 1930s.

In the first nineteen months of his time in office, Obama added more federal debt than was amassed by all U.S. Presidents from George Washington to Ronald Reagan.

I have two theories about the November 6 election. (1) That it will be an overwhelming defeat for Obama or (2) that it will be so close we could see a situation comparable to the Bush-Kerry election in 2004. Had Kerry won, the vice president would have been John Edwards who was carrying on an affair during that campaign and who currently faces jail for misuse of campaign funds.

Obama’s Achilles’ heel is, of course, Obamacare. As Robert Bluey of The Heritage Foundation notes, recent polls indicate that 53% of Americans favor repeal and more than half (57%) say that the Supreme Court should strike it down as unconstitutional. Fully 60% of physicians believe the law will have a negative impact on overall patient care.

The Congressional Budget Office revisited Obamacare this past week and concluded that 20 million Americans could lose their employer-sponsored health benefits and 49 million more Americans could become dependent on government-sponsored health care. Projecting through 2022, Obamacare could cost as much as $2.134 billion and the employer-mandate penalties could hit $221 billion.

There’s another reason why Michelle Obama was writing to me last week. As Karl Rove noted in a Wall Street Journal March 14 commentary, “Many of Mr. Obama’s 2008 donors are reluctant to give again” to his campaign. “As the Obama campaign itself reported, fewer than 7% of 2008 donors renewed their support in the first quarter of his re-election campaign, well below the typical renewal rate.

The Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee are burning through current donations so fast that the White House has told this year’s congressional candidates that they will not receive any funding support for their campaigns because Obama needs all the money.

While Obama’s 2012 campaign is already showing signs of stress, other issues will impose great pressure. Unemployment affects most American families either directly or because some member of the family or a friend is unemployed. Even the unemployed vote!

The price of gasoline continues to rise and there is nothing the White House can do to reduce it. Releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that exists for use only in an emergency will not do it and Americans are well aware that this administration has opposed or thwarted every effort to drill for more oil on federal lands. The failures of “green energy” companies that have cost Americans billions in loan guarantees are well known. A President who hypes “algae” as an energy solution will be seen as a fool and/or a complete charlatan.

Recent polls indicate how close the 2012 election may be. Obama has lost ground among female voters. In a head-to-head match-up with Mitt Romney, women voters back Obama 49%, but that is seven points lower than 2008. A Rasmussen poll found that 59% of likely voters asked whether Obama is more liberal or more conservative than they are answered that he was more liberal. Of these likely voters, 65% who are also union members thought Obama was more liberal than themselves.

Polling firms have been asking Americans to self identify themselves as conservative or liberal for decades. In February 2012, Gallup polling revealed “that in every single state with the exception of Massachusetts” conservatives outnumbered liberals. The Battleground Poll conducted by George Washington University in collaboration with Democrat and Republican polling organizations found that 58% of Americans described themselves as “very conservative” or “somewhat conservative”, while only 37% described themselves as “very liberal” or “somewhat liberal.”

A conservative campaign message will win in 2012 and this explains why the Republican primaries are all about candidates striving to describe themselves as a “true conservative.”

Even the mainstream media show indications of less Obama support. When even The Washington Post rejects Obama’s lies about U.S. oil reserves, as it did on March 15th, it suggests there may be a growing, wider level of disenchantment with the man they embraced in 2008.

Obama will lose in November. It may be a very close election or it may be an overwhelming rejection, but the polling numbers and the state of the economy will be the deciding factors.

Memo to Michelle Obama: The “fairness” message is not working. The appalling failures—“stimulus” anyone?—of Obama’s first term will ensure that there will be no second term.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

America's Dark Mood

By Alan Caruba

It is possible for an entire nation to suffer depression? Not the financial, but the emotional kind.

I have not spoken to anyone, however, that has expressed any optimism about the state of the nation and the air is full of conspiracy theories regarding what new action Barack Obama might take. The most popular of these is that he will declare “a national emergency” in order to assert powers that would put him in control of the nation without reference or consultation with Congress.

I would have dismissed such a notion in the past, but Obama genuinely scares me and a lot of other people as well. An example of this was the great surge in gun sales that led up to Christmas. Guns are not generally regarded as the kind of gift you find under the Christmas tree unless you’re a hunter or shooting sportsman.

I cannot shake off the memory of the march on Washington in 2009 when an estimated million Americans gathered there to peacefully protest the pending passage of Obamacare. The President’s chief political advisor, David Axelrod, dismissed the gathering saying, “They’re wrong.” That’s beyond arrogance. It signals contempt for the way a democracy works.

They were not wrong and the Supreme Court has scheduled a hearing in March in response to 26 U.S. State Attorney Generals who filed suit to have Obamacare declared unconstitutional. The manner in which the then-Democrat controlled Congress forced the bill through to passage was scary, along with then-Speaker Pelosi’s statement that we just would have to read the bill “to find out what’s in it.” It was apparent that none of members of Congress who voted for it had bothered to do that.

What’s scary, too, is that Congress has provided the presidency with all manner of virtually dictatorial powers that were intended to be evoked only in the event of a major, national crisis. Even following 9/11 these powers were not used to hamper news coverage, freedom of travel, and other aspects of our lives. 9/11, however, was followed by the Patriot Act and many of us continue to have grave misgivings about some of its provision.

A more recent piece of legislation that permits the President to authorize the seizure, arrest and imprisonment of anyone deemed an enemy of the state is scarier still. Obama says he would not use such powers but modern history is filled with examples of dictators that did.

So, yes, America is in a very dark mood these days. New Hampshire’s citizens are poised to vote for a Republican to be that party’s candidate for the presidency. Adopted in 1945, at the end of World War Two, New Hampshire’s state motto is “Live free or die.” It is my hope that other Americans feel the same way.

Suffice to say that Barack Hussein Obama is not like any other President in the history of the nation. It is more than a little frightening that this unknown quantity was so carefully “packaged” that, along with a mainstream media that were literally enthralled with him, enough voters were found to elect him.

A lot of those voters were young and likely unaware of U.S. history, the Constitution, and the principles by which the nation is intended to be governed. A lot of those young voters, now a bit older, looking for jobs that don’t exist, living at home still, and perhaps also saddled with huge college loan debt may not vote at all or vote for anyone but Obama.

The other group that was instrumental in his victory was African-Americans and one wonders if a majority among them have had a change of heart. I doubt it. A third group was union members and the civil service unions and others have benefited greatly from his Administration despite growing opposition at the state level.

It is worth keeping in mind that there is a hard core of 25% to 30% of voters who are blindly liberal and utterly immune to facts or reality. The “Occupy” movement drew from this group and they quickly wore out their welcome wherever they gathered. If enough liberals are disheartened by their personal situation, they too may not turn out in large numbers to vote.

As for the GOP, it has become fractionalized by its libertarian segment, its evangelical Christian segment, and by what was a cohesive Tea Party conservative segment. They need to set aside their differences to elect a candidate who can defeat Obama and I am inclined to believe that the closer we get to Election Day, they will.

As with any depression, one has to shake it off and find ways to turn dark moods in to bright tomorrows. That’s America’s job. We have done it in the past and we can do it again.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Lawyers Rule

By Alan Caruba

If one looks back over the history of the members of Congress, the occupation that dominates is lawyers. It is reasonable to assume that those in charge of making laws would attract those who practice it to public office.

I got to thinking about this while considering the current 112th Congress, one that has imposed Obamacare on an unwilling majority of the population with former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, telling us that Congress had to pass this abomination in order to find out what was in it.

President Obama is a former lawyer with zero experience in the world of business and commerce. His current obsession is with “millionaires and billionaires.”

According to data from the Congressional Research Service, the dominant profession of Senators is law, followed by politics—also called “public service.” In the House, most members come from business, followed by public service, then law.

In the Senate, 49 had previous service in the House. In the House and Senate, 81 members were educators. There are two medical doctors in the Senate while the House has 15, plus two dentists, one veterinarian, one ophthalmologist, and one psychiatrist.

In the entire Congress, there is only one physicist, one chemist, six engineers, and one microbiologist.

Given the appalling financial condition of the nation, there are only seven accountants in the House and two in the Senate.

There are only five current members of Congress who served in the military Reserves, three in the House and two in the Senate. Four are current members in the National Guard; three in the House and one in the Senate. Four Representatives and one Senator are graduates of the U.S. Military Academy. Two Senators and one Representative are graduates of the U.S. Naval Academy.

In the 112th Congress, the Senate has a former comedian.

The 112th Congress has tossed aside its primary function to address the financial stability of the nation by authorizing a “super committee”, equally divided between Republicans and Democrats despite the fact that Republicans control the House where the authorization of all funding is a Constitutional mandate and the Democrats control the Senate by a bare majority of one vote.

There is extreme partisanship in both houses of Congress because the nation is sharply divided along liberal and conservative political preferences regarding its proper governance.

The 2010 elections moved the House in the direction of conservatism. For forty years Democrats controlled the Congress until the 1994 elections gave power to Republicans. It has seesawed back and forth since then, but both parties did little to address the issue of “entitlements”, Social Security and Medicare, or the looming housing mortgage crisis that imploded in 2008.

The 2008 election gave the nation its first president who, despite flowing rhetoric about bringing together the opposing factions in Congress, has not served from a center-left position, but has plunged totally into a far Left takeover of large portions of the nation’s economy from health to auto manufacturing to financial services.

For those who despair of the present and future, it is worth noting that the Founding Fathers created a Constitution that was designed to deliberately slow down the process of legislation with checks and balances that included presidential veto powers and a Supreme Court to determine issues of constitutionality.

The last time the nation was this divided, it fought a Civil War over the issues of slavery and states rights. This time, Americans are patiently waiting for the 2012 national elections to vote in a new president and rearrange the seating charts in Congress to favor conservative legislators. Who says so? All the polls.

The Tea Party movement was the direct result of the rejection of Obamacare which has been repealed in the House and is headed to the Supreme Court. The uncertainty surrounding it continues to have a profound and negative affect on the economy.

Like moths to a candle, the power vested in Congress has drawn lawyers as the group most interested in holding high office. That remains the case today and raises the question of how a group of men and women trained to lie on behalf of their clients can be trusted to make informed and intelligent decisions about the conduct of the nation’s affairs.

“It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried”, said Winston Churchill. In a private moment, he is quoted as having said, “Americans can always be relied upon to do the right thing — after they have exhausted all other remedies.”

We have been exhausted by the socialism of past Congresses and the remedies that President Obama has tried to impose on an unwilling nation. It is time to do the right thing.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Conservative's Wishful Thinking

By Alan Caruba

One of the themes running through conservative forums and blogs these days is the question of just when Barack Obama will resign from the presidency.

Secondarily, the concern is that he would do this before or after the November midterm elections, thus leaving the nation in the hands of Joe Biden, a longtime Washington insider and goofball.

The thinking of grass-roots conservatives is that Obama is just so over-whelmed and under-equipped to deal with the daily events, foreign and domestic, that he will run home to Chicago to work on yet another autobiography.

This is not going to happen. Obama is the casebook study of a pathological narcissist and everything that happens is always about him and is always somebody else’s fault.

This is what makes the BP oil disaster so delicious at the same time it is so awful. Like a giant oil slick from which he cannot free himself, this event will indelibly stain his presidency. He was too slow to respond to it and, during his belated press conference, strove to both assert that he was in charge “from day one” and that it was up to BP to solve the problem.

Compounding his problem is his announcement a month before the rig blew up that he favored offshore drilling. In politics, timing is everything and Obama’s is astonishingly slow and tone deaf. His announcement managed to anger a big part of his base, the Greens who hate oil everywhere except at the pump when they fill up their tank. Where that gasoline comes from remains a mystery to many of them who think it is a biofuel product made from soy beans and corn.

If you look closely, you will see quite plainly that Obama’s hair is turning white. He’s been in the Oval Office for a year and a half and he is aging before our eyes. This should surprise no one because he has never really had to deal with the challenges that tend to toughen up ordinary people.

Any president’s job is a daily series of domestic and foreign crisis. The skill-set most needed is leadership, followed by management. Americans know it when they see it and, so far as Obama is concerned, they are not seeing it.

What they have seen is one big mess after another made even bigger by a president who thinks big government is the answer to every problem. Most people, except for the 30% hard core of extremist liberals, have long ago concluded that big government is the problem.

A Marxist, Obama’s instinctual response was to nationalize every sector of the economy he could. Along with fellow Marxists, Nancy Pelosi in the House and Harry Reid in the Senate, the long-sought goal of a Democrat-controlled Congress was too golden to pay any attention to the people who showed up at town hall meetings or who gathered in the hundreds of thousands outside the Capitol building.

This is why there will be a heedless rush to impose an increase in every kind of tax imaginable before they are turned out of office and political control returns to the Republican Party. The GOP lost power precisely because it too jacked up the cost of government. They have some good people in office who, after the midterm GOP victory, will take the painful steps to save the nation. Just like Bill Clinton, Obama will take the credit.

Consider this, however. President Bush ran $2.9 trillion in deficits in the wake of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. On top of that, he was fighting two difficult wars in the Middle East. In his first twenty months in office, President Obama’s spending exceeds Bush’s one hundred months in office. Obama is spending $5 for every $1 Bush spent.

The U.S. government under President Obama has spent or lent $12.8 trillion to date and the annual GDP of the nation is just about that amount or, in other words, equal to the value of everything the United States produced last year.

As noted in a recent book, “Killing Wealth”, “the private sector comprises five million companies and 115 million employees, while the public sector comprises 89,000 taxing authorities and twenty million public servants. Private sector employees earned an average $49,935 in 2008, while federal civilian employees earned 50 percent more---$79,197 for the same kind of work.” Some would argue that it really isn’t the same kind of work because making a profit is not part of the equation.

Others might point out that Obama has surrounded himself with people who are academics or full-time government employees who have never, like himself, had to run a business, meet a payroll, or satisfy investors. They are totally ideological. They are totally clueless.

Some weeks back, I asked if the United States of America was “too big to fail?” The answer is no. Greece is close to default and Spain and Italy are not far behind. The European Union is likely to dissolve as the only nation member that has any money or the prospect of making any is Germany. Bailing out the others is not a popular option for Germans and the French will not want to either.

Bailing out the United States will eventually become an equally bad idea for China, Japan, and other sovereign investors in our treasury notes unless Congress can or will staunch the insane borrowing and spending that has characterized the past decade.

Conservatives will get their wish about Obama when the 2012 elections roll around. Until then, he’s not going away.

(a) Alan Caruba, 2010

Glenn Beck, Performer and Provocateur

By Alan Caruba

I watched Glenn Beck mesmerize the audience at the CPAC meeting that had begun so well with serious conservative speakers such as former Vice President Dick Cheney. However, it ended as a libertarian fun fest and Beck strikes me as the clown prince of libertarianism.

I find it beneficial when a conservative can demonstrate a sense of humor as he or she discusses the great issues of our day, but I also find it uncomfortable when someone like Ann Coulter presents a “speech” that is more a series of one-liners than a coherent examination of current events.

Watching Coulter forever adjusting her long tresses behind one ear or the other makes me a little crazy because she does it non-stop. Like Beck, she constantly skates between being a serious commentator and a contestant in a state beauty contest.

Beck is, above all, a performer. He made his bones on talk radio, migrated for a while to CNN, and then to Fox News where he is enormously popular. His manner is that of the smart kid in high school who secretly wishes he was the captain of the football team, but has to settle for being able to keep the other kids laughing because he can devilishly imitate Mr. Brown, the math teacher, to perfection.

He’s all googly-eyes and deep sighs. He’s in near constant motion even when he is seated. Every time he starts to choke up and/or tear up, I want him to man up.

He tells us, too, that he was formerly an alcoholic, was once totally broke, and only attended one class for one semester of college. Give him credit for rising above all that, but remember, too, that his primary talent in life is to sit behind a radio microphone or stand in front of a television camera and “perform.”

His specialty these days is to expose the slimy characters surrounding President Obama and that is almost too easy to do. I give him credit for doing what the mainstream press has failed to do from the day Obama, an unknown Illinois Senator, announced he was running to be President after having barely begun his first term in office.

Talk about “audacity”! Obama had written two memoirs before the age of 45, nobody knew who he was and there was literally no paper trail to say where he was born, what schools he attended, etc! But he could deliver a heck of a speech.

Beck, too, is a skilled speaker. On a purely personal level, it gives me the creeps to hear his greeting at the beginning of each show, “Hello, America”, as if all of America was waiting for him to explain communism, capitalism, and the issues that many others are also explaining on air and in print.

His on-air personality is more akin to a tent-show evangelist skillfully working up the crowd to a frenzy so that they will find salvation. I have been to those tent revivals and they are great entertainment, but as a character in the movie, “Elmer Gantry”, says, “I have been saved many times” meaning he has relapsed and attended such meetings many times.

Beck’s followers get to attend five days a week with repeats on the weekends.

Who, though, am I to argue with the enormous popularity of Beck’s books or the sold-out performances of his shows? My problem is that the late great comedian, George Carlin, also sold out entire theatres and wrote a number of bestselling books. But Carlin never pretended to be anything other than a comedian.

Beck turned the final day of CPAC into an orgy of accusations in which Democrats, Republicans, independents, progressives, and everybody else were to blame for the terrible state of the nation. In this deeply conservative event, Beck determined that everyone was the problem. In that, he was and is deeply mistaken.

The nearly million people who showed up in Washington, D.C. on September 12, 2009 to protest Obamacare are not the problem. They were the cure. There are plans for another march on Washington and this time it will be to demand that Barack Hussein Obama quit. That’s right. They will demand he resign!

That is so quintessentially American you just want to cheer!

I only occasionally watch Glenn Beck these days. He's on during my dinner time.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

An American Billboard

This billboard is on I-75 just south of Lake City, Florida. It cost $6,500 and will be up for 10 months where an estimated one million drivers will see it each month. Anyone who thinks Americans are going to lie down and roll over for the liberals in the White House and Congress is seriously mistaken.

Obama is "Carter Redux"

By Alan Caruba

Redux as in “brought back” or repeated.

We need to recall that, in terms of the votes cast in the 2008 election, President Obama did not win by a great majority. It was not a landslide. He had no real “mandate” to restructure the American government or its economy. He offered only vague promises of “change” and “hope”. Now, barely three months into his administration, as a recent Wall Street Journal article headlined, “Obama’s Poll Numbers Are Falling to Earth.”

The reasons are too obvious. He is a liar. He is a Socialist. He would bankrupt the economy and impose huge deficits unto the second or third generation. He is the political return of former President Jimmy Carter, a loony liberal desperate to embrace all the regimes that hate America and wish us dead.

Despite the endless reports in the largely liberal mainstream media, the Republican Party remains the only alternative in the 2010 elections and the odds are Americans will return control to it as was the case in 1994 when President Clinton proved to be a disappointment to so many.

The horrid legislative initiatives that have been passed or are being proposed may have the support of liberals, but there are more self-described conservatives (on fiscal and/or social issues) than liberals in America. An estimated 60% of Americans regard themselves as moderate to serious conservatives.

While one must take care not to assume that all of one group or another are conservative, it is worth noting that there were, as of 2005, 24.5 million veterans in America, of whom by the way, 1.7 million were women.

There are approximately 1,436,640 Americans on active military service, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard.

There are 90 million gun owners in America and you can be pretty sure that 95% or more of them did not vote for Obama, nor are they thrilled with plans to take their guns away or make it impossible to buy new ones, plus ammunition. Indeed, the first response to Obama’s election was a dramatic rise in gun sales!

As of 2005, 48% of all adults in America said they had been “born again.” That is to say they are Evangelicals. They numbered approximately 69.5 million Americans.

As to homeowners—people who are paying their mortgages—68.9% of the population fit this description. They are not happy that Obama wants to distribute $75 billion in taxpayer’s money to people who have defaulted on their mortgages in order to keep them in homes they could never afford in the first place.

There are an estimated 90 million Americans who can be called investors. They have 401.K plans or they invest directly in the market. You may have noticed that Wall Street has rapidly lost any confidence in the Obama administration.

Simply stated, there are more real conservatives in America than liberals. There are, in addition, Democrats who regard themselves as conservative. Many voted for Reagan in the 1980s.

What the Republican Party failed to do in 2008 is give these people a real conservative for whom to vote. The best the party offered was the squishy John McCain, ever eager to “cross the aisle” and ally with Democrats. McCain is one of the loony global warming enthusiasts. It is little wonder that millions of Republicans decided to stay home on Election Day.

What these numbers represent now, however, is the vast bulk of Americans who are growing increasingly unhappy with Barack Obama with every passing day. “Polling data show that Mr. Obama’s approval rating is dropping and is below where George W. Bush was in an analogous period in 2001,” reported the WSJ article.

There is a significant Democrat Party propaganda campaign under way to paint Republicans as the “Party of No.” Saying no to the Obama administration and its plans for America is precisely what is required to save the nation.

For Republicans, the job at hand is to circle Election Day 2010 and to make sure to vote!