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Showing posts with label Mitt Romney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mitt Romney. Show all posts

Honey, I shrunk the President


By JAMES TARANTO


Maybe there's something to be said for clean living after all. Although Mitt Romney is closer in age to the venerable Jim Lehrer than to the callow Barack Obama, it was the Republican nominee who came across in last night's debate as energetic and vigorous. And if Obama looked put upon when the cameras were on, imagine what he must've come home to. You spent our anniversary doing WHAT?!
About the private reaction of Obama's wife, of course, we can only speculate. But many of his lovers went public with their devastation: "I don't know what he was doing out there," wailed Chris Matthews. "He had his head down, he was enduring the debate rather than fighting it." One expected Matthews to burst into song: "The thrill is gone baby / The thrill is gone away / You know you done me wrong baby / And you'll be sorry Election Day."
[image]
Associated Press
Even better was Andrew Sullivan: "Look: you know how much I love the guy. . . . But this was a disaster for the president for the key people he needs to reach, and his effete, wonkish lectures may have jolted a lot of independents into giving Romney a second look. Obama looked tired, even bored; he kept looking down; he had no crisp statements of passion or argument; he wasn't there." Cue Shania Twain: "So you got the brain but have you got the touch / Don't get me wrong, yeah I think you're all right / But that won't keep me warm in the middle of the night."
We could spend hours quoting disparaging reviews of Obama's performances from journalists who were never as head-over-heels as Matthews and Sullivan, but we like to pretend as if we have space constraints, so we'll just take one representative example, also from the Daily Beast, where our friend Tunku Varadarajan writes: "My God, in the four years that we've seen him in the White House, I don't think we've ever seen the president so flaccid, so dull-brained, so jejune, so shifty, so downcast."
This columnist has to disagree. Obama's lame performance last night seemed typical to us. We can think of a few occasions in which we've seen the president less flaccid, less dull-brained, less jejune, less shifty, less downcast. But only a few.
But these qualities--or, to put it another way, this lack of quality--was harder than usual to miss last night because of the contrast with the highly effectual Romney. One reason it came as such a shock to Obama is that it was the first time in his career that he shared a debate stage with a serious opponent.
Think about it: John McCain was feeble. Alan Keyes, whom Obama beat in his 2004 Senate campaign, was crazy. All the Democrats who ran in 2008 were preposterous except Hillary Clinton, and she, as a beneficiary of nepotism, was highly overrated as a politician. He used Chicago-style dirty tricks to dispatch his original opponent in 2004, as well as the state senator he replaced back in the 1990s. The test he failed last night is one to which he had never been put.
But the journalists who are pointing the finger at Obama have three fingers pointed back at themselves. Instead of challenging the president, the press corps--with a few honorable exceptions, like ABC's Jake Tapper and the guys from Univision--have spent the past four-plus years puffing him up and making excuses for him. The American Spectator's Jeffrey Lord explains:
The great James Taranto . . . long ago posited what is called the "Taranto Principle." In short, it means that the liberal media so coddles liberal politicians that they have no idea how to cope outside that liberal media bubble. . . .
Barack Obama has been so totally coddled by the liberal media that he looked absolutely shell-shocked in this debate. Stunned, unhappy, angry, sour--and at some points genuinely incoherent.
Romney has had nowhere near that kind of treatment. He had serious opponents in the primaries--all of whom in their own way forced him to confront his ideas in a serious fashion. Conservatives were on his heels. The Obama media never let up. The man went through the political equivalent of boot camp.
Tonight, the Taranto Principle kicked in. Big time.
Outside the liberal bubble--forced to be alone on a stage with a very serious, very prepared candidate--Barack Obama was in trouble. Big Trouble.
One quibble, on a point of personal privilege: "Great" is not the right adjective. Isn't "inimitable" in the Spectator stylebook?
Otherwise, though, Lord is right. What we saw last night was the real Obama--a bright but incurious and inexperienced man who four years ago was promoted well beyond his level of competency. The Obama that guys like Matthews and Sullivan expected instead was a character in a fairy tale--a fairy tale written by guys like Matthews and Sullivan.
Oh well, at least there are more debates. The last one, on Oct. 22, is on foreign policy, which is Obama's strong suit. Then the handsome prince killed Osama bin Laden, and the ambassador lived happily ever after.
National Journal's Ron Fournier deserves some sort of ironic award for this postdebate commentary:

Call it the curse of incumbency. Like many of his predecessors, President Obama fell victim Wednesday night to high expectations, a short fuse, and a hungry challenger. . . .
To be fair, the deck was stacked against Obama, who came into the debate with a lead over Romney plus the baggage of incumbency.
First, voters expect sitting presidents to win debates and, indeed, polls showed that Obama was favored Wednesday. That benefits a challenger like Romney who grows in stature simply by standing next to the president.
Second, challengers have more time to prepare than do busy presidents. Romney was ready. Finally, incumbents aren't used to being challenged. Obama's thin skin showed more than his Hollywood smile.
Fournier's premise is arguable, if banal; he cites other examples of presidents who've performed weakly in debates (Jimmy Carter in 1980, George H.W. Bush in 1992, George W. Bush in 2004).
But as we noted in 2007 and again in 2008, it was Fournier then with the Associated Press, who invented something called "accountability journalism." In an internal AP newsletter, he wrote:
We can be provocative without being partisan. We can be truth-tellers without being editorial writers. We can and we must not only tell people what happened in politics today, but why it happened; what it might mean for our readers and their families; and what it might reveal about the people who presume to be our leaders. Sometimes, they're just plain wrong.
Among his examples was this lead paragraph from a Sept. 2, 2005, piece about Hurricane Katrina:
WASHINGTON (AP)--The Iraqi insurgency is in its last throes. The economy is booming. Anybody who leaks a CIA agent's identity will be fired. Add another piece of White House rhetoric that doesn't match the public's view of reality: Help is on the way, Gulf Coast.
This is atrocious journalism in its own right, for reasons we explicated back then. But if Fournier were consistent he would have put those 2005 problems all down to "the curse of incumbency." Well, if he were consistent in his journalistic philosophy as opposed to his partisan loyalty.
  • "Obama never mentioned the regressiveness of Romney's budget plan. . . . He never mentioned Bain Capital, or Romney's 47 percent talk, or Romney's 'carried-interest' tax loophole. Obama allowed Romney to talk about replacing Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act without demanding that Romney be specific about what he'd replace and why. And so on."--Robert Reich, Puffington Host, Oct. 4
  • "Obama won on substance."--same article
"Which brings us to tonight's debate. There are so many experts invested in the idea that Romney has no chance against Obama that it will be almost impossible for much of the post-debate analysis to be fair. Even if the Obama in the [racially inflammatory 2007] video linked to above were to reappear in Denver, he would be pushed out of the way to accommodate the hero his sympathizers and apologists want to see. The debates matter, but for many who will be commenting after-the-fact, Obama has already won."--Ed Rogers, Washington Post website, Oct. 3

A reader sends along a column from the Daily Princetonian, an Ivy League student newspaper, with the comment: "She has a future as a New York times columnist with this self-absorbed drivel." That seemed harsh, but our curiosity was piqued, so we clicked through. Here's how the piece, by sophomore Susannah Sharpless, starts:

It is the year 2004 in Indianapolis, Ind., and my friend Ian and I are standing on the playground in the shadow of the monkey bars, yelling at the enemy camp set up behind the tetherball pole.
"My parents are voting for Kerry!" I shout. "We HATE George W. Bush!"
Ian, a little hyperactive, throws a handful of mulch up in the air.
My classmates holler back, "Well, we're voting for Bush! Kerry's bad!"
And just like that, I learned how to talk politics.
There are other gems, such as her observation that "my conservative friends aren't all that soulless or fascist or even really that racist," and this penetrating observation about an Urban Outfitters advertising campaign: "At its core, this is an advertising campaign."
We suppose it's unsporting to make fun of college students, but we never claimed to be sporting. Here's another astonishingly infantile piece:
Imagine a kindergarten with 100 students, lavishly supplied with books, crayons and toys.
Yet you gasp: one avaricious little boy is jealously guarding a mountain of toys for himself. A handful of other children are quietly playing with a few toys each, while 90 of the children are looking on forlornly--empty-handed.
The one greedy boy has hoarded more toys than all those 90 children put together!
"What's going on?" you ask. "Let's learn to share! One child shouldn't hog everything for himself!"
The greedy little boy looks at you, indignant. "Do you believe in redistribution?" he asks suspiciously, his lips curling in contempt. "I don't want to share. This is America!" . . .
That kindergarten distribution is precisely what America looks like. Our wealth has become so skewed that the top 1 percent [blah blah blah] . . .
Only that didn't appear in a college newspaper or even in a high school newspaper. It was written by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. Our reader was on to something after all.
"Last night's debate was a bloodbath. . . . We were not seeing 30-second soundbiteshand-picked for us by Obama's journalism cheering squad, or teleprompter-assisted speeches, or dueling press conferences where Romney is grilled but Obama is treated with kid gloves. Up until now, the mainstream press has allowed this president to sit in a bubble, largely unchallenged. Their narrative is that he's likable, he's smooth, he's amazingly cerebral. As for Romney, he's been branded as stilted, out-of-touch, and phony. Amazing how that conventional wisdom collapses when you peel away theselective lenses and the outside chatter, leaving two men alone on a stage, armed with just their own words."--Alana Goodman, Commentary website, Oct. 4

"Don't Blame Jim Lehrer"--headline, Slate.com, Oct. 4

"Al Gore Blames Obama's Poor Debate Performance on High Altitude"--headline, Twitchy.com, Oct. 4

"Obama's 5 Best Debate Lines"--headline, Politico.com, Oct. 3

"i can't believe i'm saying this, but Obama looks like he DOES need a teleprompter"--tweet, @billmaher, Oct. 3

"Mitt Romney Wins a Reprieve at Presidential Debate"--headline, Politico.com, Oct. 4

"Obama, Romney Didn't Consider Hispanics in Debate, Experts Say"--headline, El Paso Times, Oct. 4

"Romney: 'I love Big Bird' "--headline, Yahoo! News, Oct. 3

"Tribe Profitable With Las Vegas Management Team"--headline, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oct. 3

"After Colombians, Police Deal Blow to Nigerian Cocaine Trafficking Ring"--headline, Malta Today, Oct. 4

"L'Oréal Seeks Women in Unlikely Place: On Xbox"--headline, AdAge.com, Oct. 4

"Why Was a Sheep in a Seattle Police Car?"--headline, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Oct. 3

"Seamus McGraw: For Democrats, It's a Dismal Post-Debate Morning"--headline, FoxNews.com, Oct. 4

Questions Nobody Is Asking
  • "What Do the Amish Think of a Mormon Presidential Candidate?"--headline, The Economistwebsite, Oct. 3
  • "Is Climate Change the Sleeper Issue of the 2012 Election?"--headline,TheAtlantic.com,Oct. 3
  • "What Does It Feel Like to Be a Smart Person?"--headline, Slate.com, Oct. 2
"Romney's Strong Debate Showing Puts Europe on Edge"--headline, Reuters, Oct. 4

"CHART OF THE DAY: Solar Power Has a Long, Long Way to Go to Be Competitive"--headline, BusinessInsider.com, Oct. 3

"Pelosi's Troops Not Measuring the Drapes"--headline, TheHill.com, Oct. 4

"A uniform-free 'dress-down' day at Charles Carroll High School in Port Richmond turned into a public dressing down for a student who chose to wear a pink T-shirt supporting Mitt Romney for president," reports the Philadelphia Inquirer. Port Richmond is a neighborhood not far from Fishtown:

Samantha Pawlucy, a sophomore at Carroll High, said her geometry teacher publicly humiliated her by asking why she was wearing a Romney/Ryan T-shirt and going into the hallway to urge other teachers and students to mock her.
"I was really embarassed and shocked. I didn't think she'd go in the hallway and scream to everyone," Pawlucy said. "It wasn't scary, but it felt weird."
Pawlucy said she decided to wear the shirt after researching the candidate and President Obama and concluding that she's a Romney supporter. Her father, Richard Pawlucy, said she was especially interested in Romney's opposition to partial-birth abortion. . . .
During the incident, Samantha Pawlucy said the teacher told her that Carroll High is a "Democratic school" and wearing a Republican shirt is akin to the teacher, who is black, wearing a KKK shirt.
That explains why Barack Obama is always saying he wants to raise "an army of teachers."
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Ed Lasky, T. Young, Eric Jensen, Paul Dyck, Michele Schiesser, Hillel Markowitz, James Trager, Evan Slatis, Greg Bandy, Jared Silverman, Pat Rowe, Dan Goldstein, Steve Thompson, Randy Smith, Norman Lauver, John Williamson, Rand Costich, Keith Cummiskey, Rod Pennington, Joel Engel, Abraham Oseroff, Philip Ellison, Jeryl Bier, Michael Smith, David Fortney, John Bobek, Michael Britton, Taryl Giessel, Ethel Fenig, Tim Vande Zande, Arlene Ross, Keith Pennock, Jonathan Spetner, Michael Nunnelley, Mike Galiger, Kyle Kyllan, Miguel Rakiewicz, Mark Finkelstein, Bruce Goldman, Michael Throop, Tristan Pinnock, Mark Nicholas and Dan Tracy. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
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The Night Liberalism Died

By Roger L. Simon
PJ Media
October 3, 2012


It was a bad twentieth wedding anniversary night for Barack and Michelle Obama. Twenty-five should be better. No irritating debates to deal with. It won’t even be an election year. Maybe they can celebrate with a Mai Tai or two in their new beachfront home on Oahu.
All the networks agreed last night, even the court eunuchs on MSNBC, as did the polls and the focus groups, that Romney won the debate. Obama looked like a warmed-over version of Richard Nixon, shifty and evasive in his answers. But Nixon was always infinitely more prepared than our current president and considerably more informed.
The fuddy-duddy liberal choir of the mainstream media looked shell-shocked. But secretly some of them may actually be relieved. Anyone with an IQ in triple digits knows that Romney would be a better president than Obama with the country and the world in the situation they are. And that probably includes Obama himself, considering the level at which he debated.
If Romney is elected, dad would be back and they (the media) would get to be kids again, living la vida loca while protesting until blue in their collective faces everything Romney does in the coming years. They get to be “against the man” once more. They don’t have to defend the man, such as he is.
A few of these media folks may even subtly throw Obama under the bus – a just deserts since he has done that favor to so many others. We’ll have to see. It did seem to me while watching the debate that even moderator Jim Lehrer, try as he might to help the president, was starting to realize Romney was the better man. Even Ed Schultz and Bill Maher apparently tweeted that Romney had won, not that they would ever change their views short of a waterboarding — or even then.
But, in defense of Obama, there is a more significant reason he did so badly in the debate than his own relative ineptitude and dyspepsia. Liberalism, his ideology, is economically indefensible. It doesn’t work. He had, in reality, no response when confronted by Romney’s positions. When it comes to liberalism, there’s no there there (hence the outcry on the Left that he should have insulted Romney more, about the 47% etc.).
If Obama and/or his minions begin to think or realize that, they are really doomed. This will not be a normal election. Their world will be upended. But if they do continue and win, it will be even worse, because the country, and even Western civilization, will unravel quite quickly thereafter.
But I am more optimistic. What we may have witnessed on October 3, 2012, is the death of liberalism. And it deserves to die because it is a greedy and self-centered ideology masked under the pretense of generosity and guarded fiercely by wannabe media potentates like Chris Matthews who had the next thing to an aneurysm at the performance of his onetime idol.
Liberalism will come back, of course, under one or more of a million names. But for now Mitt Romney has administered it a serious body blow.
For much of the debate he seemed to be teaching the basics of economics to a recalcitrant and not particularly bright undergraduate.
This is not entirely surprising to those who remember 2008, when Obama seemed so clueless when queried about taxation and the Laffer curve by Charles Gibson of ABC.
Next debate will probably be different. Humiliations this extreme don’t happen often in politics and rarely twice in a row. But the first blood drawn between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama will most likely be remembered above all.
One suspects the electorate wearies of these things fast. The first half hour of the first debate is usually about as much as most people can take, especially that odd and sought after group known as the “undecideds.”
We know who won that. For now the Peggy Noonan naysayers can go back in their holes. Mitt Romney is riding high. Let’s hope he stays there.
UPDATE:
Bigger Winners from Bebate: Bibi Netanyahu, Chris Christie.
Big Losers: Innocent citizens of Libya. Watch out below!
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Romney left Obama on the ropes

By Jeff Jacoby
http://www.townhall.com
October 4, 2012


BARACK OBAMA hasn't been in a high-stakes, nationally televised presidential debate in nearly four years. Mitt Romney was in plenty of them over the past 18 months. Last night, it showed.

Heading into yesterday's encounter at the University of Denver, polls showed that voters by a wide margin were expecting Obama to win the three debates that he and Romney have agreed to. But not only did the president fail to knock out his challenger last night, there were long stretches when it wasn't even clear he had remembered to lace up his gloves. On issue after issue, in exchange after exchange, Romney was focused, clear, interesting, and engaged, while Obama repeatedly came across as distracted, irritated, and vague. The former Massachusetts governor was plainly enjoying himself. The president seemed to want nothing more than to run out the clock and bring a painful evening to an end.

I didn't hear any devastating zingers, but Romney came equipped with memorable lines. The Obama economic philosophy, he said early on, amounts to "trickle-down government." The tens of billions of dollars the administration has sunk into failed "green" energy companies, he quipped, shows that "you don't pick winners and losers, you just pick the losers." To the president's repeated claim that Romney's tax proposals would inevitably result in higher taxes on middle-class earners, the GOP nominee replied affably that as a father of five sons, he was used to people saying something untrue over and over in the hope that repetition would make it more convincing.


When asked for examples of federal spending he would like to cut, he cheerfully cited subsidies for PBS. "Sorry, Jim," he smilingly told moderator Jim Lehrer, who is practically a PBS icon. "I like PBS. I like Big Bird – I even like you!" A humorless Obama, by contrast, snapped at Lehrer when he thought the moderator had cheated him out of five seconds of response time.


Romney channeled Muhammad Ali last night, floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee. He left Obama on the ropes.
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Feeling sorry for Maureen Dowd

By Roger Kimball
PJ Media
September 3, 2012

I wonder whether the New York Times provides psychiatric coverage for its employees. I wonder this because it seems clear that poor Maureen Dowd has finally lost it.  I say “finally,” but I should acknowledge that I am not a regular reader of her column. I long ago concluded that Dowd was one of those writers whose hectoring hysteria was bad for my digestion. You open the paper to the page where her column appears and it seems as if someone is screaming at you. The fact that she appears to think she is being cute adds a slightly macabre and pathetic element to the effect, as if an aging Miss Havisham decided to go into business as an editorialist.
As regular readers of “Roger’s Rules” know, about the only time I encounter the Times in all its physical wood-pulp glory is when visiting friends in Northwest Connecticut. That may soon come to end, too, since they have given up on the weekday edition in exasperation. They still get the Sunday paper, though, and while visiting yesterday I was presented with the Sunday Review section, which contained Dowd’s column. “Have you seen this?” my friend asked in tones of wonder, pointing to “Cruel Conservatives Throw a Masquerade Ball,” Dowd’s report on the Republican National Convention that convened in Tampa, Florida, last week.
The column is so weird, and so at odds with reality, that innocent readers, unacquainted with the rhetorical eructations of Maureen Dowd, might wonder if she had been drinking or smoking something contraband while composing it. The combination of snarling bitterness and juvenile name-calling certainly suggests a mind distracted from itself. The convention, she said, was “a colossal hoax.” Paul Ryan’s speech was “a shimmering mirage, a beckoning pool of big, juicy lies.” Mitt Romney was “a native alien” who is “unlike the vast majority of Americans in every respect.”
Now, accusing Paul Ryan of “lying” has become a meme of the moment. Anyone interested in teasing out the truth — that is to say, the utter lack of truth — behind the charges might want to ponder “Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers,” a summary of the tendentious misrepresentations circulating about Ryan’s speech and legislative record. For her part, Maureen Dowd doesn’t actually name any “big, juicy lies,” contenting herself instead with the assertion that that “Ryan’s lies and Romney’s shape-shifting are so easy to refute,” that the wily Republicans resorted to “mythmaking” and “artifice” in order to conceal “their authentic ruthless worldview.” (“Ryan’s harsh stances toward women, the old and the poor,” she said darkly, but without elaboration, “are on record.”)
What can one say?  Does anyone outside the orbit of The New York Times  actually believe Dowd’s repulsive caricatures? Republicans, according to Dowd, are “harsh” and heartless, greedy and grasping. They don’t like women, the poor, blacks, Hispanics, the elderly, or “the environment.” At the convention she saw people in “cowboy hats and cheeseheads,” “economically wounded capitalists in shades from eggshell to ecru,” and “blindingly white older male delegates.” She somehow missed the many blacks, women, Asians, Hispanics, etc. who filled the conventional hall and spoke from the podium.  Well, she didn’t miss them, exactly, it’s just that her twisted perspective requires that she regard them as part of that “colossal hoax” and “masquerade” Republicans supposedly are perpetrating on an unwary country.
Dowd’s problem — it’s Obama’s problem, too — is that reality tells a very different story. Leftists are all about promoting big government solutions to social problems. Unfortunately for Leftists, big-governments policies are usually disastrous. They tend to have an effect more or less opposite to what they were designed to accomplish. Welfare, for example, has not alleviated poverty, it has institutionalized it. (It has also institutionalized the bureaucratic apparatus which administers the welfare, which gives politicians a vested interest in its perpetuation.) Obama’s spread-the-wealth-around economic policies have also been disastrous.  Median household income has dropped nearly 5 percent since he took office. The federal debt has exploded by more than 50 percent, to $16 trillion. Unemployment, which Obama predicted would by at 5.6 percent by now, is 8.3 percent: that’s 23 million people out of work. And on and on.
The truth is that Democrats are great at the rhetoric of compassion, but their policies produce bureaucratic entanglement and economic immiseration. To hear Maureen Dowd tell it, Mitt Romney is heartless plutocrat.  Yet he contributed some 16 percent of his not-inconsiderable income to charity (Obama gave 1 percent of his) and the convention was full of accounts of his personal generosity and kindness.  The effort to demonize Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan must confront one insuperable obstacle. Both are kind, generous, loving men who have devoted themselves to their families and their communities.  According to Maureen Down, “even when [Mitt Romney] looks genuine, he still seems false.” Except that he doesn’t. What he seems like is a straight-shooting business man, not a utopian who thinks that because he has promised something he has therefore performed it. The Democrats have spent a lot of time and money attempting to tarnish the reputation Bain Capital, the company Mitt Romney founded.  The trouble is, the record shows that Bain has been a tremendous force for good. It helped many worthy companies, from Staples to Bright Horizons to Steel Dynamics, one of the most successful steel companies in America.
Maureen Dowd pretends that the Republican platform is “harsh” because it favors individual and local initiatives over the centralizing “solutions” of big government. She never pauses to ask which approach actually helps people more. For her, the pretense of benevolence trumps the reality.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama, stung by Clint Eastwood’s brilliant “empty chair” routine, has complained “There was a lot of talk about hard truths and bold choices [at the Republican Convention], but no one actually told you what they were.” I can help him out with that. All he needs to do is fire up his Blackberry and head over to the Romney-Ryan web site. There he will find a plethora of specific hard truths, bold choices, not to mention common-sense policy proposals. On the issue of taxes, for example, among the proposals are:
  • Make permanent, across-the-board 20 percent cut in marginal rates
  • Maintain current tax rates on interest, dividends, and capital gains
  • Eliminate taxes for taxpayers with AGI below $200,000 on interest, dividends, and capital gains
  • Eliminate the Death Tax
  • Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT)
  • Cut the corporate rate to 25 percent
  • Strengthen and make permanent the R&D tax credit
On the issue of health care, Romney has promised that on his first day in office he will “issue an executive order that paves the way for the federal government to issue Obamacare waivers to all fifty states. He will then work with Congress to repeal the full legislation as quickly as possible.” His goal is to “give each state the power to craft a health care reform plan that is best for its own citizens.” Take a look at the web site to appreciate the thoughtful alternative to ObamaCare he has proposed.
One of the themes of the Republican Convention was that President Obama had promised much but delivered little. It would be difficult for any candid  observer to disagree. Even many Democrats understand this. They don’t dispute that Obama has failed (though they do not, of course, put it that way). Instead, they blame someone else for the failure. Stock in George Bush as a scapegoat is showing signs of weakness but there is still “the Republican Congress” and “Europe.”  The problem for team Obama is that their leader is making the same promises now that he did four years.  Do you think I exaggerate?  Take a look at this eerie collage comparing Obama in 2008 with Obama in 2012:
YouTube Preview Image
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Clint Eastwood's Finest Hour

By Claudia Rosett
PJ Media
September 1, 2012

Lucky for Clint Eastwood that he has a sense of humor. He’ll need it, if he tries to wade through some of the zanier criticism inspired by his appearance at the Republican National Convention. From the left, he’s being mocked as rambling, strange, and obsessed with empty chairs. The L.A. Times is wondering “Did Clint Eastwood tarnish his film legacy?” Among folks not otherwise dedicated to supporting Mitt Romney, Eastwood also seems to have aroused a lot of oddly charitable concern, that he distracted attention from the candidate, or detracted from the seriousness of the occasion, or wasted valuable Republican airtime.
So far, I’d say the standout bizarre critique is a New York Times piece by a professor of medical ethics, Jonathan Moreno, on “What the Chair Could Have Told Clint.” Moreno begins by claiming that Eastwood, in interviewing an empty chair as a stand-in for President Obama, was appropriating a psychotherapeutic technique developed by Moreno’s psychiatrist father, about a century ago. Moreno goes on to suggest that Eastwood, instead of lampooning the absent president, should have put himself in the chair, and tried to see things from Obama’s point of view. By not doing that, writes Moreno, “Mr. Eastwood wasted an important educational and therapeutic moment from which our deadlocked political system could benefit; putting himself in the role of the other person of whom he is critical and coming to understand that person’s point of view ‘from inside.’”
We can now entertain ourselves by imagining what Dirty Harry would say to that.
Which brings me to the main point. Clint Eastwood has built a film career in which the most iconic moments — those for which he is most often invoked, and acclaimed — involve a character who takes a beating for doing what he sees as the right thing, from Dirty Harry to Gran Torino‘s Walt Kowalski. When Dirty Harry defies the craven officials of City Hall to chase down a killer — “Do ya feel lucky?” — a lot of us cheer him on because with all his gritty, in-your-face unorthodox ways he appeals to something basic in the human instinct for justice. Likewise, when he points that gun and says “Make my day.”
Clint Eastwood’s appearance Thursday on the national political stage had many of those same elements. There’s no dearth of Hollywood celebrities willing to air their political views, but most of them are securely on the left. Surely aware of the opprobrium and ridicule that would come from a press corps that largely tilts left as well, an 82-year-old Hollywood legend steps up to the podium, and in his own way, with grit and (shock! horror!) humor, tells the country what he thinks is right.
He doesn’t have to do it. He’s a giant of the film industry, replete with a long, successful career. People from both parties have enjoyed his movies for decades. He could have stayed home. But he goes and does it anyway, because he believes there’s something important at stake. And in a country sinking under government spending and debt and ever more smothered in regulatory edicts, he reminds Americans of a basic verity — that it is we, the people, not the politicians, who own this country. “Politicians are employees of ours.” Were that a scene in a Clint Eastwood movie, it would be a good one.
But this wasn’t a movie. Unlike the fictitious Dirty Harry, who can walk off into the sunset as the credits roll, this was the real Clint Eastwood, speaking to the real world, despite the furies that were sure to descend. Make what you like of his improv comedy with the chair — a display of humor which in the no-holds-barred world of politics was actually pretty mild stuff, and something from which even the most traumatized members of the viewing audience will probably recover. In terms of a man standing up for his convictions, putting himself on the line, never mind the critics, this was his finest hour.
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Romney's Presidential Pick

Romney’s presidential pick

By , Published: August 12

When, in his speech accepting the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, Barry Goldwater said “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” a media wit at the convention supposedly exclaimed, “Good God, Goldwater is going to run as Goldwater.” When Mitt Romney decided to run with Paul Ryan, many conservatives may have thought, “Thank God, Romney is not going to run as Romney.”
Not, that is, as the Romney who 12 months ago, warily eyeing Iowa, refused to say a discouraging word about the ethanol debacle. Rather, he is going to run as the Romney who, less than two weeks before announcing Ryan, told the states — Iowa prominent among them — that he opposes extending the wind energy production tax credit, which expires soon.
This may seem a minor matter, as well as an obvious and easy decision for a conservative. The wind tax credit is, after all, industrial policy, the government picking winners and losers in defiance of market signals — industrial policy always is a refusal to heed the market’s rejection of that which the government singles out for favoritism. But ethanol subsidies also are industrial policy. And just a few days after Romney got the wind subsidy right, more than half of the 11 Republican senators on the Finance Committee got it wrong, voting to extend it. So even before choosing Ryan, Romney was siding with what might, with a nod to Howard Dean, be called the Republican wing of the Republican Party. For Romney, conservatism is a second language, but he speaks it with increasing frequency and fluency.
Romney embraced Ryan after the sociopathic — indifferent to the truth — ad for Barack Obama that is meretricious about every important particular of the death from cancer of the wife of steelworker Joe Soptic. Obama’s desperate flailing about to justify four more years has sunk into such unhinged smarminess that Romney may have concluded: There is nothing Obama won’t say about me, because he has nothing to say for himself, so I will chose a running mate whose seriousness about large problems and ideas underscores what the president has become — silly and small.
He on whose behalf the Soptic ad was made used to dispense bromides deploring “the smallness of our politics” and “our preference for scoring cheap political points.” Obama’s campaign of avoidance — say anything to avoid the subject of the country’s condition — must now reckon with Ryan’s mastery of Obama’s enormous addition to decades of governmental malpractice.
Obama is, by now, nothing if not predictable, so prepare for pieties deploring Ryan’s brand of “extremism” that has supplanted responsible conservatism. Goldwater, quoted above, infuriated the sort of people who, regardless of what flavor of conservatism is in fashion, invariably purse their lips and sorrowfully say: “We think conservatism is a valuable thread in our national fabric, etc., but not this kind of conservatism.” Goldwater’s despisers did not recognize his echo of words by Martin Luther King Jr. 15 months earlier.
In his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” King wrote, “You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. . . . But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love. . . . Was not Amos an extremist for justice. . . . Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel. . . . Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”
Remember this episode when you hear, ad nauseam, that Ryan is directly, and Romney now is derivatively, an extremist for believing (a) that “ending Medicare as we know it” will be done by arithmetic if it is not done by creative reforms of the sort Ryan proposes, and (b) that the entitlement state’s crisis cannot be cured, as Obama suggests, by adding 4.6 points to the tax rate paid by less than 3 percent of Americans.
When Ryan said in Norfolk, “We won’t replace our Founding principles, we will reapply them,” he effectively challenged Obama to say what Obama believes, which is: Madison was an extremist in enunciating the principles of limited government — the enumeration and separation of powers. And Jefferson was an extremist in asserting that government exists not to grant rights but to “secure” natural rights that pre-exist government.
Romney’s selection of a running mate was, in method and outcome, presidential. It underscores how little in the last four years merits that adjective.

georgewill@washpost.com

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The Medicare Distortion

By Yuval Levin
http://www.nationalreview.com
August 13, 2012

It is simply a fact that the United States government is now on track for an unprecedented fiscal disaster — with debt quickly surpassing the size of our GDP and reaching twice that size in the coming decades, crushing any chance for robust growth. It is also a fact that the rising cost of Medicare is at the very heart of that disaster. The program has been growing far faster than the rest of the federal budget for decades, and the trend is only set to accelerate.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, Medicare spending as a share of the economy is five times what it was in 1970, while all other federal spending combined (excluding interest) is 1.1 times what it was. By 2035, CBO expects Medicare costs to be nearly twice what they are today as a share of the economy, while all other federal spending combined will actually decline somewhat as a share of the economy. The debt problem is a Medicare problem. There is no way to avert fiscal disaster without significantly reining in the growth of that program. Even President Obama has acknowledged that no other solution, and certainly not his symbolic class-warfare tax proposals, could be sufficient, saying last July that “if you look at the numbers, then Medicare in particular will run out of money and we will not be able to sustain that program no matter how much taxes go up.”
And yet, even though he acknowledges this fact, the president has chosen to do nothing, and indeed to stand firmly in the way of doing anything meaningful to solve the problem. Obamacare’s Medicare cuts and its board of price controllers aren’t a solution — the CBO debt and Medicare growth numbers cited above already include them, and the agency (along with Medicare’s actuary, who works for the president) has said they are very unlikely to work. What is needed is a structural reform of the program, to enable it to deliver coverage to seniors far more efficiently by driving more efficient delivery of care. But seniors who are now in the program don’t want to hear that it’s going bankrupt, and don’t want to think about changes to it, so the politics of Medicare argue strongly against any kind of solution. The president and his party have chosen to make the most of that political reality, quietly raiding Medicare to fund Obamacare but otherwise leaving the program to its sorry fate. They have denied the need for reform. It would take real political courage to do otherwise.
To their enormous credit, congressional Republicans over the past few years have decided that they cannot leave Medicare to collapse and take the government’s finances (and the nation’s economic future) with it, and so they must address the problem despite the standing threat from the left to demonize anyone who tries. Thanks to the creativity, tenacity, and flexibility of Paul Ryan in particular, they have worked through several different versions of a market-based reform of the system, and earlier this year they arrived at one that effectively addresses the key concerns of past critics of such “premium support” reforms — an idea that could dramatically improve the efficiency of Medicare (and so reduce its cost) without increasing risks or out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries.
Because Mitt Romney (to his own enormous credit) has endorsed that reform, and because Paul Ryan (its architect) is now Romney’s running mate, this idea will come under blistering attacks in the coming weeks and months. Medicare will not be the central issue of this fall’s campaign — economic growth and jobs are far more important to voters. But President Obama and his supporters seem intent on distracting voters from the failed economic policies of the past four years by scaring them about the Romney-Ryan Medicare reform. And it is already perfectly clear that their criticisms of that reform are based on either a misapprehension or an intentional misrepresentation of the actual proposal, and of the very significant ways in which it differs from past Medicare-reform ideas (including those proposed by Ryan in the past). So it is worth taking a moment to understand the proposal — generally known as the Ryan-Wyden reform after its originators, Paul Ryan and Democratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon — and to see what its critics are missing or misrepresenting.
At first, the idea seems rather similar to past “premium support” reforms, which have basically proposed to transform today’s “defined benefit” Medicare system (in which the government decides on a set of insurance benefits and then pays health-care providers a price the government defines for providing each of those covered services) into a “defined contribution” system (in which the government decides on an amount of money to provide to beneficiaries and then lets them use that money to choose from an approved set of competing private insurance plans that each offers all those benefits at whatever cost it is able or willing to offer). Such a system would use the power of intense competition among insurers seeking Medicare dollars to increase the efficiency of health-care provision and drive down costs. But the foremost criticism of this sort of defined-contribution reform is that if the amount provided to seniors to buy coverage were too low, or if its annual growth did not keep up with the growth of health-care costs, seniors would be left to make up the difference out of their own pockets, and those who didn’t have the money wouldn’t be able to afford insurance.
The Ryan-Wyden idea solves that problem through a clever combination of defined-contribution and defined-benefit insurance. The federal government would still define a package of required benefits that would constitute comprehensive insurance coverage — the same benefits that Medicare covers today. But each year, private insurers as well as a federal fee-for-service insurance provider (akin to today’s Medicare program) would submit bids to the government to provide that comprehensive coverage at the lowest cost they could manage. The government would then provide seniors in each region of the country with a premium-support payment equal to the second-lowest bid in that region or to the bid of the federal fee-for-service option, whichever was lower. That way, every senior would be guaranteed to have at least one comprehensive coverage option that cost no more than the premium-support payment he received (and thus involved no more out-of-pocket costs than Medicare does today), and would also have other options that cost more (whether because the offering companies could not manage to be as efficient in working with their provider networks or because they offered more benefits than the required minimum and thus charged a higher premium).
The market itself, rather than Medicare’s administrators, would set the level of each year’s premium-support payment, which would ensure that the payment was sufficient to pay for comprehensive coverage. A senior who chose a plan that cost less than the premium-support payment would get to keep the difference (deposited into a tax-free health savings account to use for future out-of-pocket health costs), and a senior who chose a plan that cost more than the premium-support payment would pay the difference out of his pocket. Poorer, older, and sicker seniors would get somewhat higher premium-support amounts than the rest.
Such a system would include the key advantages of defined-benefit insurance without its key drawbacks (since there would be a guaranteed comprehensive insurance benefit just as in today’s Medicare, but without the open-ended spending to provide it), and the key advantages of defined-contribution insurance without its key drawbacks (since the federal payment would be set, and so would drive intense competition for consumer dollars among insurers and providers, but, because the set payment would be determined by an annual bidding process, no gap would open up between the cost of coverage and the amount available to seniors to pay for it). It is based on the premise that intense competition in a genuine market could dramatically reduce the cost of Medicare without cutting the actual insurance benefit provided to seniors. And it puts the burden of proving that premise on the government, not the beneficiary: If costs in fact go down, then the cost of Medicare will decline and the government’s fiscal crisis would ease; if they do not go down, then the cost of Medicare will not decline and the fiscal crisis will remain, leaving reformers to find other solutions. Either way, Medicare beneficiaries will have the same comprehensive, guaranteed insurance coverage they have now.
There are some very good reasons for believing competition would indeed dramatically reduce costs. The way markets work in the rest of the economy offers one powerful kind of evidence, of course. But recent research into the Medicare system itself offers another. For instance, on August 1, three Harvard researchers published a study in theJournal of the American Medical Association (you can find it here, but it requires a subscription) that used data from the Medicare Advantage program (a much more limited experiment in insurer competition in Medicare) to consider how the Wyden-Ryan reform would have worked if it had been in effect in 2009. They found that, “nationally, in 2009, the benchmark plan under the Ryan-Wyden framework (i.e., the second-lowest plan) bid an average of 9% below traditional Medicare costs (traditional Medicare was equivalent to approximately the tenth-lowest bid).”
In other words, even under the very constrained competition of Medicare Advantage, in which prices are set by Medicare’s bureaucracy, the Ryan-Wyden approach would have reduced per-beneficiary spending by 9 percent in a single year while still providing seniors with the same comprehensive insurance coverage. With real competition through a bidding system, the reductions in the rate of the program’s growth over time could be enormous. And if those savings don’t in fact materialize, we would just end up where we are today — which is where Democrats seem to want to end up anyway.
In order to be scoreable by CBO, the Wyden-Ryan reform also has a kind of backup: a requirement that Medicare’s growth not be faster than 0.5 percent more than GDP growth per year. That is, not by coincidence, the same maximum rate of growth set in President Obama’s budget. Neither maximum rate is really all that meaningful — it’s a scoring convention, not a reform; if it were exceeded, Congress would almost certainly just suspend it, as it has when past maximum growth rates (like the one in place since 1997) have been exceeded. So in this respect, too, if Ryan-Wyden’s competitive system didn’t keep costs down, we would just be in the same place the Democrats want to end up. It is not the maximum growth rate but the mechanism for remaining below it — the bidding process that allows for the transformation of Medicare into a new kind of intensely competitive insurance system with both a defined benefit and a defined contribution at once — that is the real key to the Ryan-Wyden reform.
The proposal would also have this reform begin only ten years from now, and affect only new entrants into Medicare, so that all current seniors and everyone now over 55 would be left entirely untouched for the rest of their lives, unless they chose to enter the new system. Thus, today’s seniors have no reason to complain about the proposal, since it would not affect them, and tomorrow’s seniors have essentially nothing to lose by it, since they would still be guaranteed a comprehensive benefit at only today’s out-of-pocket costs.
Essentially all of the criticisms of the Ryan-Wyden(-Romney) proposal ignore its innovative combination of defined-contribution and defined-benefit insurance — directing themselves instead to older versions of the premium-support idea — and ignore the fact that it would leave all current seniors and near-retirees untouched. Thus just minutes after Paul Ryan was announced as Mitt Romney’s running mate, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in a statement that Ryan’s Medicare plan would “end Medicare as we know it by turning it into a voucher system, shifting thousands of dollars in health care costs to seniors.” Some Democrats even put a particular dollar figure on that supposed cost shift — $6,400. That figure comes from a (rather rough) CBO calculation regarding a prior version of the premium-support idea, not the Ryan-Wyden proposal that Romney has endorsed. CBO would certainly not claim that the figure applies to what is now the Romney-Ryan plan, or indeed that any such shift would occur under that plan.
The Democrats continuing to make such charges either do not know about the difference between Ryan-Wyden and past premium-support ideas or are knowingly lying. And those who argue that “Medicare as we know it” is the alternative to the Ryan-Wyden proposal are also either ignoring or denying reality. The fact is that Obamacare cuts Medicare by $700 billion over its first ten years to fund other programs and imposes a board of price controllers — the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) — over Medicare to cut costs in ways that (particularly by driving providers out of the business of serving Medicare patients through inadequate payment rates) would reduce the access of both current and future seniors to care. And without further reforms, the Medicare program will soon run out of funds in ways that would either require dramatic benefit cuts or would drive the government bankrupt.
Medicare as we know it is thus not an option. The choice is between, on the one hand, a reform that leaves current seniors untouched for life and offers future seniors a guaranteed comprehensive benefit and more choices about how to get it or, on the other hand, cuts that affect both current and future beneficiaries and yet are still likely to fail to avert the program’s fiscal collapse. Mitt Romney offers the first — a plan for saving Medicare without increasing the risk to seniors. Barack Obama offers the second — a plan for raiding Medicare and watching it crumble.
The only way for Democrats to avoid the political consequences of this painful fact is to deny it, and to insist that the opposite is the case: that Romney and Ryan seek to arbitrarily cut Medicare and increase costs for seniors. In the wake of Paul Ryan’s selection as Mitt Romney’s running mate, some of them have seemed downright giddy at the prospect of unleashing that lie, and perhaps even building their entire fall campaign around it. Many of them surely don’t even know it’s a lie. But it is, and a strategy based on a lie can work only if it is left unchallenged. Romney, Ryan, and their supporters must not leave it so.
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Romney's Gutsy Choice

By Roger Scruton
PJ Media
August 10, 2012

Mitt Romney did something that a lot of supposed wise men said he wouldn’t — pick a vice presidential candidate who is more charismatic than he. In choosing Paul Ryan, Romney took the risk he would be outshone, but he did America a favor. He selected the brightest young politician we have.
He also underscored his best line of the campaign so far, “It’s the economy – and we’re not stupid!” No one in Congress has thought more creatively or acted with more determination to solve the great economic problems we face than Ryan. He has virtually stood alone among higher elected officials in the battle for serious entitlement reform, being criticized by none other than Newt Gingrich for recommending remedies that were, if anything, too mild for the monumental fiscal crisis confronting us. But at least Ryan has tried to do something about it. Few others have had the courage to attempt it.
Through nominating Ryan, Romney has signaled that his campaign is going to be about the economy, the economy, and, yes, you guessed it, the economy (with healthcare thrown in as an aspect of the economy). It is not going to be about immigration, marriage, the legalization of marijuana, whether candidates cause cancer, who has a dog on his car, or even who was born where. It’s going to be about the one thing America is obsessed with, the one thing that if we don’t correct nothing else is possible…. Okay, I won’t say it again, but you certainly know.
In choosing Ryan too, he has certainly gone for a candidate with personality, unlike some I could mention. (Why do it now? That’s over.) He also, I suspect, has chosen a man who can dish it out and in an articulate manner. Many of us can recall Ryan testifying in front of Obama regarding the dubious budget for the president’s healthcare legislation and making Obama highly uncomfortable. It looked as if O. had met his match and knew it.
Ryan v. Biden will probably be the hottest ticket among the coming debates. Definitely worth watching.
Of course none of that means that Romney/Ryan will win anymore than it would Romney/Whoever. We are in a high-stakes game now in which democracy and ideas go out the window in favor of vicious attacks orchestrated by David Axelrod, et al. The Chicago crew will do anything possible to push the discussion away from the economy with as many distractions as possible. The compliant media can be trusted to be their more-than-willing executioners in this endeavor.
It will take a great deal of skill and hard work for Romney to keep the election focused on the issues. So far he has not been completely successful. But in this regard, putting Ryan by his side seems a particularly smart move. This guy usually has something to say and, for a politician, something remarkably substantive. The fight has been joined.
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