About the win by the community organizer
Mitt Romney’s analysis of why he lost the election is itself an explanation of why he lost the election: He’s clueless.
Romney says that there were too many primary debates, and the debates resulted in lots of gaffes and gave ammunition to Democrats. But who forced Romney to raise his hand and swear he wouldn’t raise taxes even one dime in exchange for spending cuts. Who forced him to offer a $10,000 bet. Who….oh, never mind.
Romney shot himself in the foot, then reloaded and shot himself in the other foot, then reloaded and tried to shoot some varmints, and now he wants to blame somebody else for his loss.
Romney also thinks the president gave gifts to Latinos and minorities. He said, for example, that these groups liked the promise of health insurance. But weren’t Republicans vociferous in pointing out how unpopular Obamacare was? How can people be bribed with something they supposedly don’t want? And a health insurance policy won’t be free to most people, including the majority of minorities, who work and will have to pay something toward their coverage.
Then there is the president’s support of the Dream Act, which hasn’t been passed, and the president’s decision not to deport immigrant children who have no legal status. These may be popular decisions in the Hispanic community in general, but the people who benefit directly from the president’s decision aren’t voters. They’re not even old enough to be voters yet.
Most important though is that the president’s position on the problem of undocumented people isn’t any kind of financial gift but rather a ray of hope to be permitted to be a citizen and have the opportunities only America has.
But the ultimate irony from my perspective is this: During the campaign, Obama was derided because of his experience of being a community organizer. Romney was held out as a financial guy who was good with analyzing numbers. As it turned out, the community organizer showed the value of understanding how to organize people. The Obama campaign had an incredible ground game that was built out over the last four years. Obama’s team got the voters to the polls.
And, at least in part, it was this ground game that increased the number of minorities and young people who would be a “likely voter” in the election, and this was reflected in the accurate polling results of the public polls. Yes, the polling results the Romney campaign didn’t believe and continued not to believe until late on the day of the election.
In the end, Romney and his people weren’t very good at getting people to volunteer and get organized at the local level. His campaign relied more on advertising funded by big money. The Obama team organized the people and counted the votes accurately.
In the end, the Obama team worked better with people and with numbers. And poor Mitt still doesn’t get it.
But some Republicans are getting it, and that gives some hope that they’ll be good enough with numbers to know that the budget talks now proceeding can’t reduce the deficit without revenue increases as well as budget cuts. Some Democrats are pretty obstinate, too, about recognizing the need for a balanced approach to deficit reduction.
The president has been saying this repeatedly for a long, long time. Romney may have known it, too, but he never had the courage to say it.
That’s his problem, and now it’s time for sincere negotiators to get down to business.
JR Beillenhouser
7 months agoGeorge - old news. How about an article on Bengazi, or better yet how about one about the secret EPA email addresses, or how about the middle east going to hell (because they sense the weakness), or how about one about the Weimer Republic. Yeah, why don’t you contrast history to what we are seeing now. You know that old axiom and history, and failing to learn from it.
Let’s just tax the rich 1 percent 100% of everything they make, then you guys will be happy. It won’t solve our problem, but who cares, it is the principal that matters, isn’t it?
Learn some math, and then come back and write an article about the truth.
http://www.redstate.com/standardcandle/2011/07/14/understanding-how-class-warfare-fails-to-solve-our-u-s-debt-problems/
Nothing is going to stop the train now.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/16/us-usa-debt-rand-idUSBRE8AF1EF20121116
We have a president who has chosen to continue to spend us into oblivion. Just keep kicking the can down the road. Actually taking on entitlements is something the dems will never do.
But at least when you are eating beans out of can and living in a tent down by the river you’ll have fond memories about the total joy you got from the election. LOLOL
George Harris
Kansas City
7 months agoJ.R., below is your post to my column two weeks ago in which I discussed why I thought the poll results were predicting an Obama win. You weren’t so good with the math. You might want to be a little less certain that you know the truth about everything, too, or at least show a little humility when you are so very wrong about something.
As for my post, the point is pretty simple: The president is a pretty smart guy who is pretty good with numbers himself, and he’s approaching the deficit problem seriously.
“As usual, a liberal assumes that he knows the facts. I’m an engineer by training, and I never trust anyone to do the research for me, I do it myself. I look at data and then analyze it, it has nothing to do with intuition. You believe Silver, who is a partisan. He is taking garbage data in and producing garbage data out. Silver did great predicting the 2008 election. He faltered in 2010. This election cycle will either show him to be a great statistician or just a hack who happened to be lucky once.
Why will Romney win?
http://www.gallup.com/poll/158399/2012-electorate-looks-like-2008.aspx
(Under demographics of likely voter)
Therefore samples of +5 to +11 for democrats are complete BS. The sample size for a correct poll should be at least even. Many pollers continue to use a +8 Dem from 2008….
Silver takes every poll and coverts them to +8 as well to simulate 2008. But this is not 2008.
Romney is winning the independent vote by double digits. This group decides the election. That Quinnipiac/New York Times/CBS News poll listed above shows Romney with a 21 point advantage with independents in Virginia.
Where the candidates appearing and where are they putting their money is a key to determining what their internal polling is saying. In 2008 Obama had the swing states in hand and started to increase his influence to states like Indiana. This election cycle, he is being forced to states such as Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. It was expected that he would have these states well in hand. Romney, on the other hand, is trying to increase his lot in this states that should be blue. In addition, he is polling well in these states. He will not win all of them, but I expect that he will win Iowa and one more.
In the next few days, you are going to finally see what the rest of us already know, as pollsters will now be concerned with their reputations and will try to get as close as possible to a correct result of the election. Obama is in big trouble.
This election will be either a close win by Obama or a blow out by Romney.
Come election day, you may just find out that you didn’t have the facts, but rather the intuition.”
JR Beillenhouser
7 months agoYes George, I was wrong about the election, as were many people. If the election had been held prior to the hurricane, it is very probable that Romney would have won (as has been stated by pundits on both sides of the aisle). Additionally, ORCA was a failed program that may have affected the election (you didn’t even mention this)
I guess I didn’t get the rulebook that I’m supposed to call and personally apologize to you when I make an error in a post.
However, there is no denying the math that 1. We are on the road to bankruptcy if we don’t do something quickly. 2. Obama had four years to do something about it and instead put us 6 trillion more in debt. 3. Obama did not talk about entitlements at all and how to fix the system in the build up to the election. 4. Food Stamps have grown in use astronomically in the past four years. 5. Increasing taxes is not going to solve the problem unless entitlements spending is dramatically clipped. This is just a class warfare tactic. 6. Obama is not good with numbers, by his own admission http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2012/10/25/Obama-Admits-He-Cant-Do-Math-Above-7th-Grade-Level
Johnathon Busby
7 months agoJunior; you sound bitter. But putting that aside for a moment:
About your math you claim there’s no denying: 1) Give me a candidate who can both balance the budget, and also believes in full legal equality, and you got my vote. 2) Obama had four years, but also had an opposing party who made it their admitted, stated, #1 priority to make Obama a 1 term president (and they couldn’t even manage that, you note). 3) He didn’t talk about entitlements because there is no public will to change them. 4) If you suddenly took away those food stamps, do you believe the people who use them would food suddenly materialize from some other source? 5) A deficit is revenue less expenses; either of them affects the deficit. You absolutely can increase revenue and by doing so decrease a deficit. 6) Obama’s good enough with numbers that Willard lost, hard. So at a bare minimum, he’s better with numbers that Willard is.
Mark Hastert
7 months agoRomney’s comments to his donors this past week left no doubt that his earlier 47% comments were the real Romney and a reflection of the real Republican right wing; mean spirited, spiteful, fearful. and bitter. The very fact that they consider programs like student loans, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and other middle-low income programs “gifts” is proof enough that they believe that own the country and feel entitled to own the government. Now they can’t accept loss with any grace.
Keep a copy of your predictions JR and we’ll check back in two years to see if you’ve been right about anything. I’ll bake you up a crow souffle. By now you must be acquiring a liking for it.
George Hunsucker
Northland
7 months agoFor all you libs, just be sure you hang around when the economy implodes due to your community organizer’s genius economic skills…
At least our gold won’t depreciate like the U.S. dollar is under the bigger zero…..
Johnathon Busby
7 months agoGeorge; Gold, like any commodity, exists primarily to offset inflationary risk in a portfolio. That said, given it’s volatility (due largely to the human fascination with the material) if you’re looking for that kind of risk-diversification, I might recommend other hard assets, like copper, hard manufacturing stocks, or oil stocks. And it’s a supplement, a risk diversification method, not a wealth driver.
Mark Hastert
7 months ago“After the Bush tax cuts of 01 and 03, 8 million jobs were created, record Treasury revenues came in from o5 -07, and tax payments by millionaires more than doubled from 132 billion in 03 to 273 billion in 07.”
Yes indeed and that was because the rich got lots richer, the rest of us? Not so much. As to the jobs created? Slowest job growth since WWII. To anyone but a true believer than would be seen as a failure, or at least mediocre.
The table below shows job growth during the Clinton vs Bush Presidencies, not a pretty picture.
Bill Clinton D 1993–1997 109,725 111,360 121,233 123,418 +11,507 +12,060 +2.52% +2.60% Bill Clinton D 1997–2001 121,231 123,418 132,466 131,524 +11,233 +8,106 +2.24% +1.60% George W. Bush R 2001–2005 132,466 131,524 132,453 134,240 -13 +2,716 -0.00% +0.51% George W. Bush R 2005–2009 132,453 134,240 133,561 129,734 +1,108 -4,506 +0.21% -0.84%
Here’s the kicker, your gonna love this. Job creation under Obama will exceed the Bush years!
So if that’s success to a conservative then get out of the way.
Johnathon Busby
7 months agoMark Robertson: When one hurls around that many numbers, sources are helpful for the reader.
Moving on, I believe the theory that “Dems are bad for the economy” was floated by Willard about three years ago, when he first launched his run for the presidency. Yet, I seem to recall that by the end of the campaign he had completely abandoned the economic attack angle. …because things are (at least perceived to be) improving. Now, you can argue numbers, claim the economy actually is not improving, but a majority felt good enough about the Obama economy to re-elect him.
Further, your argument references Reagan frequently; but he hasn’t been in office for more than 23 years. How about comparing Obama to the most recent GOP administration?
Phil Cardarella
7 months agoThe base voters of the GOP required that Romney kowtow to their craziest positions. If he could have run as Mass. Gov. Romney — pro-choice, not anti-gay, praising Obamacare as really Romneycare — he could have won.
Of course, that would have been as much an act as the “severely conservitive” one. Fact is, Mitt has no core beliefs beyond believing he would like to be president.
Fittingly, the guy who led a bunch of bullies to pick on a gay classmate in high school, and who made a fortune killing and outsourcing American jobs ended his campaign in a spectacularly chickens**t fashion by cutting off the credit cards of his campaign workers even as he gave his concession speech to them — leaving those poor, credulous peasants with no way to pay for a cab home or gas out of Boston!
Good riddence. The Republic dodged a bullet.
George Hunsucker
Northland
7 months agoWe may have dodged a bullet in your mind phillie, but instead we have a missle heading for America with the spendthrift libs…
Oh well, at least we have our gold….
Mark Hastert
7 months ago“Oh well, at least we have our gold……”
Willing to wager a few ounces on the future GH? I’ll bet that nearly none of your predictions come true. I’ll bet that the Prez and Boehner make a deal. We’ll avoid the cliff, raise taxes on you wealthy folk, make reforms in the tax code and progress on the deficit. I’ll bet we get 6-8 million jobs in the next four years. I’ll bet we move to save your SS, Medicare, and Medicaide. In other words, I’ll bet against everything you believe.
Mark Hastert
7 months agoOh yeah…. I’ll bet your gold is worth 25% or more less than it is today.
Phil Cardarella
7 months ago“Spendthrift libs”?????
Like Bush/Chaney who put two wars on credit cards while reducing taxes — even for the wealthiest 2%? While those supposed job creators didn’t?Or W — who insisted Congress spend a trillion or so — with no strings — to bail out the Wall Street Casino that was holding all of us hostage?
The GOP talks a good game — but spends like drunken sailors.