U.S. 2012 Election

[Edward Campbell]

Part 1 of 2

A not really surprising fissure has open up inside the GOP as reported in this item which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/us-election/former-gop-governors-obama-endorsement-throws-the-right-a-curveball/article4500765/

The moderate Republicans, RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) they are called by the right wing, really have little choice but to leave - before they are kicked out. But this is the Eisenhower wing of the party, which Ronald Reagan managed to keep onside, with which George HW Bush (41) identified and which even George W Bush (43) placated (by e.g. making Colin Powell his first Secretary of State), and it should not be tossed aside too lightly. If the moderate Republicans cannot accept Romney/Ryan then how will the Independents go?

More on this, in an article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from Foreign Affairs:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137287/reihan-salam/the-missing-middle-in-american-politics

The Missing Middle in American Politics
How Moderate Republicans Became Extinct

By Reihan Salam

March/April 2012

After Lyndon Johnson’s victory over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 U.S. presidential election, the once-mighty Republican Party was reduced to a regional rump. The Democrats won overwhelming majorities in the House and the Senate, which they used to pass Johnson’s Great Society legislation. Republicans, meanwhile, were at one another’s throats, having endured the most divisive campaign in modern political history. Goldwater had managed to win the Republican presidential nomination over the impassioned opposition of moderate and progressive Republicans, who at the time may well have constituted a majority of the party’s members. Moderates blamed Goldwater’s right-wing views for the defection of millions of Republican voters.

To rebuild the party, a number of moderate Republican governors banded together to form the Republican Governors Association, designed to serve as a counterweight to the Republican National Committee, which had been captured by Goldwater conservatives. Shortly after the election, the association issued a statement, sponsored by Michigan Governor George Romney and other leading moderates, calling for a more inclusive GOP and criticizing Goldwater’s campaign. Stung by the failure of many moderates to actively support or even formally endorse his candidacy, Goldwater retorted that he needed no lessons in maintaining unity, having urged party members in 1960 to look past philosophical differences and pull together to support Richard Nixon’s presidential candidacy. Goldwater wrote a letter to Romney dripping with contempt: “Now let’s get to 1964 and ask ourselves who it was in the Party who said, in effect, if I can’t have it my way I’m not going to play? One of those men happens to be you.”

Romney wrote a lengthy reply to Goldwater, warning against European-style polarization. “Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation,” Romney wrote. Worse, he added, political parties with fixed ideological programs “lead to governmental crises and deadlocks, and stymie the compromises so often necessary to preserve freedom and achieve progress.”

Romney’s words seem particularly prescient today, as polarized politics have caused the U.S. government to seize up. But what would the elder Romney, who died in 1995, have made of his own son’s embrace of a more orthodox conservatism -- the very kind of politics the elder Romney feared would damage the country?

Mitt Romney began his political career very much in the moderate mold. In 1994, running for the U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts held by Ted Kennedy, the popular liberal Democratic incumbent, Romney forcefully maintained that he had been an independent during the Reagan years. On abortion, he was firmly pro-choice. While Republican candidates across the country were rallying around Representative Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America,” Romney distanced himself from it. “If you want to get something done in Washington,” he said in a debate during the campaign, “you don’t end up picking teams with Republicans on one side and Democrats on the other.”

Romney’s defeat that year did not quite cure him of his moderate impulses. During the battle for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, Romney, as a private citizen, purchased newspaper advertisements in New Hampshire criticizing the publisher and candidate Steve Forbes’ call for a flat tax, deriding it as “a tax cut for fat cats.” And as a 2002 gubernatorial candidate in Massachusetts, Romney defeated a weak Democratic opponent in large part by touting his moderate bona fides.

Yet as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and now 2012, Romney has shifted decisively to the right, embracing the party’s anti-tax consensus, reversing his decades-long support for abortion rights, and taking a much harder line on entitlement spending. He has been careful to avoid being outflanked on his right by his various GOP rivals, attacking Gingrich and Texas Governor Rick Perry for being insufficiently tough on immigration. And he has generally cheered on House Republicans in their fierce opposition to President Barack Obama’s domestic agenda. Departing from the more decorous tone of his previous campaigns, Romney has described the president as “a crony capitalist,” a “job killer” whose policies will “poison the very spirit of America and keep us from being one nation under God.” Like so many erstwhile moderates, Romney has survived in today’s more confrontational, ideological GOP by finally picking a team.

COMMITMENT ISSUES


The dominant ideology and style of today’s Republican Party would have been utterly alien to Romney’s father. In Rule and Ruin, the historian Geoffrey Kabaservice’s vivid account of the pitched ideological battles that shaped the postwar Republican Party, George Romney is cast as the last hope of a moderate Republicanism that has all but vanished. Born into poverty in a Mormon colony in northern Mexico, Romney rose to become the chief executive of the American Motors Corporation. There, he succeeded in taking on the Big Three car companies, scoffing at their “gas-guzzling dinosaurs” and offering sleek, fuel-efficient compacts that anticipated the later triumphs of the Japanese automobile industry. Like many self-made business executives of the time, Romney felt a deep sense of moral obligation, which flowed in part from his devout religious faith. As poor African Americans from the Deep South settled in and around Detroit, Romney made it his mission to better their condition. Shortly after his election as governor in 1962, Romney pressed for a massive increase in spending on public education and on generous social welfare benefits for the poor and unemployed. During Romney’s first term alone, Michigan’s state government nearly doubled its spending, from $684 million in 1964 to $1.3 billion in 1968. To finance the increase, Romney fought for and won a new state income tax, which would become a thorn in the side of future Michigan Republicans.

What separated Romney from liberal Democrats who were similarly eager to expand government was his conviction that he was doing God’s work on earth. Today, it is entirely common for Republican presidential candidates to describe the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as divinely inspired documents, as Romney did. But in the mid-1960s, as Kabaservice observes, such religiosity was unusual, at least for a moderate Republican. Kabaservice briefly speculates that Romney’s brand of moralistic progressivism might have resonated with many Christian voters who instead embraced a harder-edged form of conservatism infused with evangelical fervor. But Romney’s political program was badly undermined by the 1967 Detroit riots, which discredited the notion, fairly or not, that large-scale social spending was the most effective route to social uplift, at least among conservatives.

Disagreements on race and the Vietnam War fueled the split in the late 1960s between the radical New Left and the liberal Democratic establishment. But the upheaval of the late 1960s also divided the Republicans. Conservatives of that era saw themselves as defending the United States’ founding ideals against communism abroad and radicalism at home. Moderates, in contrast, sought to modernize the GOP: to keep up with the baby boomers’ shifting sensibilities on social issues and to share in their embrace of a more diverse and dynamic society. Some even praised what they saw, perhaps naively, as the freedom-loving spirit of the antiwar movement.

Yet as Kabaservice relates, the moderates never coalesced into a movement with a coherent program and ideology, despite Dwight Eisenhower’s earlier attempts to build a modern party that embraced the New Deal and a vision of responsible American global leadership. This failure left moderate Republicans in an awkward position. Those who shared the Democratic faith in activist government, tempered by a desire for decentralization and fiscal rigor, found themselves gravitating to the left. Those who shared conservative skepticism of big government, tempered by a recognition that Social Security and Medicare were here to stay, found themselves gravitating to the right. There was no glue to hold the two sides together.

Ultimately, Kabaservice argues, it was this lack of coherence that doomed the centrists within the Republican Party. The absence of a rigid ideology freed them to embrace creative solutions to emerging social problems, which proved useful when they were in power. But precisely because they were so allergic to ideology, the moderates were disinclined to rally the troops or to wage scorched-earth campaigns against their political enemies. Even when they had the advantage of numbers, as they did after Goldwater’s 1964 defeat, they routinely failed to coordinate their efforts, never managing to build the kind of grass-roots fundraising network that fueled the rise of the political right.

Instead of offering a set of clear political commitments, moderate Republicans instead asked voters to trust their judgment, to have faith that intelligent, thoughtful, evenhanded leaders would govern well. After Vietnam and Watergate, however, Americans hungered for politicians with clear convictions, leaders who would never betray them. This was true on the left but even more so on the right. And the surest way to guard against betrayal was, and still is, to force politicians to commit themselves to a well-defined set of propositions. In the 1960s, that meant no recognition of communist China; today, it means no new taxes.

There is no question that such commitments reduce a politician’s room for maneuver and make legislative compromise difficult, if not impossible. But political commitments also increase democratic accountability, which is prized by many voters, especially educated ones. Although today’s political landscape might frustrate those who are eager for pragmatism and bipartisanship, there is no question that the Democratic and Republican Parties represent distinctive priorities and visions.


KEYNESIANS AND CONNALLYS

Kabaservice is searingly critical of the conservative movement that eventually triumphed within the GOP. His chief complaint is the distance between what conservatives have said and how they have governed. In a particularly vivid passage lamenting the failures of George W. Bush’s presidency, he writes that “a Republican Party without moderates was like a heavily muscled body without a head.” After Bush’s 2004 reelection, Republicans held majorities in the House and the Senate for the fifth straight election, but, Kabaservice observes, “conservatives proved unable to achieve their goals, largely because they lacked the ideas the moderates had once provided and the skill at reaching compromise with the opposition at which moderates had excelled.” The irony of the decline of the moderates is that it made the achievement of conservative goals all but impossible.

Indeed, as conservative rhetoric has grown increasingly hostile to government since the mid-1960s, the size of government has continued to expand, even when conservatives have been in power. Bush himself, having promised to restrain the growth of the government, presided over an increase in federal spending as a share of GDP from 18.2 percent in 2000 to 20.7 percent in 2008, reversing the trend under his Democratic predecessor. And between 1950 and 2009, state and local spending increased as a share of GDP from 7.7 percent to 15.5 percent. Even in states where conservatives have dominated, such as Nevada and Texas, spending has increased at an alarming rate as conservatives have aped their liberal foils, responding to a growing appetite for public services by increasing spending rather than by improving the productivity and efficiency of existing institutions. And at the federal level, conservatives have generally acquiesced to increased spending while refusing to levy taxes high enough to pay for it. In effect, this has meant delivering big government while only charging for small government -- a politically attractive proposition that has proved fiscally ruinous.

Moderate Republicans have been among those most attuned to the perils of such hypocrisy. During the late 1960s, a number of moderate Republicans -- such as those associated with the Ripon Society, a think tank that served as an incubator for centrist policies -- correctly predicted that a southernized GOP, shaped by a fusion of conservatism and populism, would “have an enormous appetite for federal subsidies in the form of defense spending, oil allowances, and agricultural supports,” Kabaservice writes. Indeed, the conservative appetite for federal spending grew ever more voracious in the decades that followed. Call it redistribution for me, but not for thee.

As president, Nixon ratified the ascendance of big-government conservatism with his embrace of John Connally, a former Democratic governor of Texas whom Nixon appointed as treasury secretary in 1971. Whereas moderate and conservative Republicans alike tended to favor the decentralization of power, competitive markets, and private initiative, Connally was a different animal. He was a foreign policy hawk and a cultural conservative but also an avid defender of subsidies and tax breaks for the defense sector and energy interests, which fueled the Sunbelt boom and further enriched hundreds, if not thousands, of wealthy conservatives. Nixon saw Connally as his natural successor, a politician who could cement Nixon’s new Republican majority by bringing the southern white working class into the fold. Although Connally never lived up to Nixon’s high hopes, he did help usher into the GOP a generation of statist southern politicians keen to channel federal dollars to favored interests in their region. Connally still casts a long shadow on the party: one can see it, for example, when a conservative governor such as Perry eagerly spends millions of taxpayer dollars on Texas’ Emerging Technology Fund, a program that a more orthodox free-market advocate would reject as an unacceptable intrusion into the private sector.

“We are all Keynesians now,” Nixon is sometimes reported to have said in 1971. (In fact, his remark was less sweeping: “I’m now a Keynesian in economics.”) But Nixon’s treasury secretary may have left a more lasting mark on the Republican Party than any economist. After decades of GOP support for subsidizing favored industries from defense to oil and gas to Sunbelt housing construction, a cynic might argue that Republicans are all Connallys now.

End of Part 1

 

[Edward Campbell]

Part 2 of 2

WEAK TEA

The rise of the Tea Party movement briefly seemed like an intriguing exception to this general drift. The movement has often been interpreted as a brand of populist conservatism virtually indistinguishable from the supply-side conservatism of the Reagan era. But supply-side economics was an optimistic creed that rejected the idea of the market as a zero-sum game and celebrated a vision of a flourishing society in which everyone should, could, and would be richer, freer, and happier if taxes were low and GDP growth robust. The Tea Party movement offers a far less sunny worldview. Far from inheriting the optimism of the Reagan-era supply-siders, the Tea Party shares more with the Old Right, the earlier form of conservatism that Reaganite supply-siders derided as “root-canal economics” for its emphasis on spending cuts -- and, in some cases, tax increases -- as instruments of hard-nosed fiscal discipline. Like the Old Right, the Tea Party conceives of the United States as divided between those who work hard and play by the rules and those who game the system, whether by engaging in petty welfare fraud or by seeking government favors through lobbying and campaign contributions.

This sentiment has not led to a compelling critique of the country’s broken financial and political systems, however. The fierce opposition of the libertarian Republican congressman Ron Paul to the Federal Reserve has earned him considerable standing among some grass-roots conservative activists. But for the most part, more realistic proposals to constrain the power of big banks and reduce the implicit and explicit subsidies that flow to them have fallen on deaf ears. Indeed, the Tea Party movement, like the conservative movement of the 1960s and 1970s, seems deeply hostile to technocratic proposals of any kind, even those that could foster a more decentralized and market-oriented society.

In The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, the political scientist Theda Skocpol and her co-author, Vanessa Williamson, draw on a wide range of sources to describe the movement’s origins and worldview. Although anchored by extended conversations with individual Tea Party activists, the book adds little to the thousands of newspaper and magazine articles that have been written about the Tea Party in the past few years, retracing an already familiar portrait. Skocpol and Williamson observe that Tea Party activists tend to be relatively affluent and middle-aged or older. The vast majority vote Republican, although some identify as conservative-leaning independents. They tend to be wary of claims of technocratic expertise and prefer citizen engagement over deference to elites. Reverence for the U.S. Constitution is an essential aspect of the Tea Party’s ideology, and members of the movement often invoke the founding documents. Skocpol and Williamson also anatomize the three main components of the Tea Party movement: grass-roots organizations; well-funded national advocacy groups, such as FreedomWorks; and a media nexus of Fox News and conservative talk radio.

Skocpol and Williamson attempt to maintain a disinterested tone. But they often cannot conceal their hostility to the Tea Party, the GOP, and conservatism more generally, as when they warn that Republicans “will continue to talk about ‘America going broke’ and the ‘need to slash spending’ and ‘cut taxes,’ without getting overly specific until just before they seize the chance -- if one presents itself -- to push through major restructurings of Medicare and Social Security.” The reader is left to conclude that Skocpol and Williamson believe that there is something sinister about trying to reduce the national deficit and that efforts to restructure Medicare and Social Security are wholly unrelated to the federal government’s fiscal woes.

Still, Skocpol and Williamson rightly diagnose a major weakness of contemporary Republican reform efforts. Because conservatives have so strenuously made the case against government and the welfare state, they have undermined their credibility as champions of reform. Scholars and voters alike are now skeptical when conservative Republican reformers, such as Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, promise that they intend to put the U.S. social safety net on a sounder footing, not to destroy it.

There is no doubt that a reliance on antigovernment rhetoric has created a troubling vacuum at the heart of the conservative project. The Tea Party movement and its rejectionism now define public perceptions of the post-Bush Republican Party. And it is true that for years, congressional Republicans have been extremely reluctant to take on issues such as tax reform and health care -- the kind of issues that consumed moderate Republicans in an earlier era -- because conservatives see them as a political and intellectual dead end. Now, however, some Republicans, led primarily by Ryan, have advanced a number of significant proposals, including a sweeping Medicare reform and a base-broadening overhaul of the tax code. Ryan has shown an openness to the ideas of the avowedly moderate Bipartisan Policy Center and even to raising tax revenues, a move that has long been anathema to conservatives. Late last year, Ryan signaled a willingness to compromise by joining with Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat, to advance a Medicare reform proposal -- one that specifically addresses Democratic objections to an earlier plan Ryan had proposed.

Around the same time, congressional Republicans experienced a sharp political reversal in a showdown with Obama over extending a temporary payroll tax cut. Republican brinkmanship, which had earlier threatened chaos during a battle over increasing the debt limit, was met with near-universal opprobrium from the voting public. After the Republicans gave in to Democratic and popular demands that the payroll tax cut be extended, Obama experienced an immediate surge in his approval ratings.

Conservative Republicans and their Tea Party supporters were chastened by this defeat, and the Tea Party’s grip on the GOP shows some signs of loosening. But moderate Republicanism will not return as a bona fide movement anytime soon, despite the efforts of right-of-center public intellectuals such as David Frum and David Brooks. The social group that contributed so heavily to the moderate movement of yesteryear -- upper-middle-class social liberals who live in big cities and their suburbs -- has shifted overwhelmingly to the Democratic Party, and it seems unlikely that those voters will ever return to the GOP. Yet the moderates’ flexibility and pragmatism are experiencing a tentative renaissance, as younger conservatives, led by figures such as Ryan, face up to their movement’s shortcomings. Moderate Republicans may no longer exist, but their legacy persists, and conservative Republicans will need to recapture the moderates’ creativity and problem-solving impulses if they ever hope to take power, hold on to it, and govern effectively.

The author, Reihan Salam is a conservative commentator. I agree with his final point: "Moderate Republicans may no longer exist, but their legacy persists, and conservative Republicans will need to recapture the moderates’ creativity and problem-solving impulses if they ever hope to take power, hold on to it, and govern effectively." The current culture wars in America need an armistice.

 

[Kirkhill]

Whyizzit that it is the right that is tasked with the splitting of the Nation?

Was it the right that was out in the streets of Detroit and Watts, emulating the Parisiens?
Was it the right calling for People Power demonstrations?
Was it the right out during the Democratic Convention in 1968?
Was it the right that spawned the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, Action Direct, and overseas the Bregata Rosso, the RAF and the Baader Meinhoff?

It seems to me that the left dragged the discourse outside of the conventional public arena and also the conventional line of thinking at least concurrently with Barry Goldwater.  If anything Goldwater was merely reacting to the rising tide of "activism" prevalent amongst the young Americans.

To which someone will no doubt raise the Ku Klux Klan.....

To which the rejoinder is the Muslim invasion of Spain was an entirely predictable consequence of the Vandals invading Carthage two hundred years previous.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Whyizzit that it is the right that is tasked with the splitting of the Nation?
...
To which the rejoinder is the Muslim invasion of Spain was an entirely predictable consequence of the Vandals invading Carthage two hundred years previous.

To your first point: the right is only being accused of splitting the Republican Party.

To your last point: Indeed!


Edit: to fix an embarrassing typo  :-[  now that displaced Scot will want me to stand him a real pint  :crybaby:

 

[tomahawk6]

I scored as an average Republican.

 

[a_majoor]

I found this test quite limiting. For other ways to think about political spectrum's, see Politics with more dimensions

 

[a_majoor]

Interesting example of narrativefail; watched some very good speeches last night on YouTube from the Republican convention, Mia Love and Dr Rice made some very good speeches. The Legacy Media (in particular NBC) cut away from showing speeches by Mia Love, Artur Davis and Ted Cruz, and the NBC page did not have these speeches posted as of last night. Might deflate the "Rich White Men" narrative...

In the mean time, here is an article from New Geography which probably goes farther to explaining what is happening in US politics than anything I have seen to date:

http://www.newgeography.com/content/003056-the-unseen-class-war-that-could-decide-the-presidential-election

The Unseen Class War That Could Decide The Presidential Election
by Joel Kotkin 08/29/2012

Much is said about class warfare in contemporary America, and there’s justifiable anger at the impoverishment of much of the middle and working classes. The Pew Research Center recently dubbed the 2000s a “lost decade” for middle-income earners — some 85% of Americans in that category feel it’s now more difficult to maintain their standard of living than at the beginning of the millennium, according to a Pew survey.

Blaming a disliked minority — rich business folks — has morphed into a predictable strategy for President Obama’s Democrats, stripped of incumbent success. But all the talk of “one percent” versus “the ninety nine percent” misses new splits developing within both the upper and middle classes.

There is no true solidarity among the rich since no one is yet threatening their status. The “one percent” are splitting their bets. In 2008 President Obama received more Wall Street money than any candidate in history, and he still relies on Wall Street bundlers for his sustenance. For all his class rhetoric, miscreant Wall Streeters, particularly big ones, have evaded big sanctions and the ignominy of jail time.

Obama enjoys great support from the financial interests that benefit from government debt and expansive public largesse. Well-connected people like Obama’s financial tsar on the GM bailout, Steven Rattner, who is also known as a vigorous defender of “too big to fail.”

The “patrician left” — a term that might have amused Marx — extends as well to Silicon Valley, where venture capitalists and techies have opened their wallets wider than ever before for the president. Microsoft and Google are two of Obama’s top three organizational sources of campaign contributions. Valley financiers are not always as selfless as they or their admirers imagine: Many have sought to feed at the Energy Department’s bounteous “green” energy trough and all face regulatory reviews by federal agencies.

The Republicans have turned increasingly to those patricians who depend on the more tangible economy. If you make your living from digging coal or exploring for oil wells, even if you don’t like him, Romney is you man. This saddles the GOP with the burden of being linked to one of America’s most hated interests: oil and gas companies. Almost as detested is the biggest source of Romney cash, large Wall Street banks. (In contrast, Democratic-leaning industries, such as Internet-related companies, enjoy relatively high public support.)

With the patriarchate divided, the real action in the emerging class war is taking place further down the economic food chain. This inconvenient reality is largely ignored by the left, which finds the idea of anyone this side of Bain Capital supporting Romney as little more than “false consciousness.”

Obama’s core middle-class support, and that of his party, comes from what might be best described as “the clerisy,” a 21st century version of France’s pre-revolution First Estate. This includes an ever-expanding class of minders — lawyers, teachers, university professors, the media and, most particularly, the relatively well paid legions of public sector workers — who inhabit Washington, academia, large non-profits and government centers across the country.

This largely well-heeled “middle class” still adores the president, and party theoreticians see it as the Democratic Party’s new base. Gallup surveys reveal Obama does best among “professionals” such as teachers, lawyers and educators. After retirees, educators and lawyers are the two biggest sources of campaign contributions for Obama by occupation. Obama’s largest source of funds among individual organizations is the University of California, Harvard is fifth and its wannabe cousin Stanford ranks ninth.

Like teachers, much of academia and the legal bar like expanding government since the tax spigot flows in the right direction: that is, into their mouths. Like the old clerical classes, who relied on tithes and the collection bowl, many in today’s clerisy lives somewhat high on the hog; nearly one in five federal workers earn over $100,000.

Essentially, the clerisy has become a new, mass privileged class who live a safer, more secure life compared to those trapped in the harsher, less cosseted private economy. As California Polytechnic economist Michael Marlow points out, public sector workers enjoy greater job stability, and salary and benefits as much as 21% higher than of private sector employees doing similar work.

On this year’s Labor Day, this is the new face of unionism. The percentage of private-sector workers in unions has dropped from 24% in 1973 to barely 7% today and in 2010, for the first time, the public sector accounted for an absolute majority of union members. “Labor” increasingly means not guys with overalls and lunch pails, but people whose paychecks are signed by taxpayers.

The GOP, for its part, now relies on another part of the middle class, what I would call the yeomanry. In many ways they represent the contemporary version of Jeffersonian farmers or the beneficiaries of President Lincoln’s Homestead Act. They are primarily small property owners who lack the girth and connections of the clerisy but resist joining the government-dependent poor. Particularly critical are small business owners, who Gallup identifies as “the least approving” of Obama among all the major occupation groups. Barely one in three likes the present administration.

The yeomanry diverge from the clerisy in other ways. They tend to live in the suburbs, a geography much detested by many leaders of the clerisy and, likely, the president himself. Yeomen families tend to be concentrated in those parts of the country that have more children and are more apt to seek solutions to social problems through private efforts. Philanthropy, church work and voluntarism — what you might call, appropriately enough, the Utah approach, after the state that leads in philanthropy.

The nature of their work also differentiates the clerisy from the yeomanry. The clerisy labors largely in offices and has no contact with actual production. Many yeomen, particularly in business services, depend on industry for their livelihoods either directly or indirectly. The clerisy’s stultifying, and often job-toxic regulations and “green” agenda may be one reason why people engaged in farming, fishing, forestry, transportation, manufacturing and construction overwhelmingly disapprove of the president’s policies, according to Gallup.

Obama supporters sometimes trace the loss of largely white working-class support — even to the somewhat less than simpatico patrician Romney — to “false consciousness.”  A recent Daily Kos article, charmingly entitled “The Masses are Asses,” chose to wave the old bloody shirt of racism, arguing that whites “are the single largest, and most protected racial group in this country’s history.”

Ultimately this division — clerisy and their clients versus yeomanry — will decide the election. The patricians and the unions will finance this battle on both sides, spreading a predictable thread of half-truths and outright lies. The Democrats enjoy a tactical advantage. All President Obama needs is to gain a rough split among the vast group making around or above the national median income. He can count on overwhelming backing by the largely government dependent poor as well as most ethnic minorities, even the most entrepreneurial and successful.

Romney’s imperative will be to rouse the yeomanry by suggesting the clerisy, both by their sheer costliness and increasingly intrusive agenda, are crippling their family’s prospects for a better life. In these times of weak economic growth and growing income disparity, the Republicans delude themselves by claiming to ignore class warfare. They need to learn how instead to make it politically profitable for themselves.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and contributing editor to the City Journal in New York. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.

This piece originally appeared in Forbes.

 

[Kirkhill]

The visible symbol of The Yeomanry:  Churchill's two fingers - evidence to the Patricians and their Clerics that the yeoman still has two fingers with which to draw the string on his bow.  The fingers have not yet been cut off by vengeful Patricians bound on disarming the independent yeomanry.

The Two Finger Salute

 

[Edward Campbell]

Notwithstanding the fact that his last paragraph is arrant nonsense, George Will's column, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the National Post, offers some very useful insights:

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/08/30/george-f-will-the-great-american-bluff-is-about-to-be-called/

The great American bluff is about to be called

George F. Will

Aug 30, 2012

Now begins the final phase of this cognitive dissonance campaign. America’s 57th presidential election is the first devoted to calling the nation’s bluff. When Mitt Romney selected Paul Ryan, Republicans undertook the perilous but commendable project of forcing voters to face the fact that they fervently hold flatly incompatible beliefs.

Twice as many Americans identify themselves as conservative as opposed to liberal. Nov. 6 we will know if they mean it. If they are ideologically conservative but operationally liberal. If they talk like Jeffersonians but want to be governed by Hamiltonians. If their commitment to limited government is rhetorical or actual. If it is, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan suspected, a “civic religion, avowed but not constraining.”

This is the problem for uneasy Republicans. The Democrats’ problem is worse because they are not uneasy about their dissonance, being blissfully unaware of it.

In “Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic” — a book more measured and scholarly than its overwrought title — Jay Cost of The Weekly Standard says the party has succumbed to “clientelism,” the process of purchasing cohorts of voters with federal favors. This has turned the party into the servant of the strong.

Before Franklin Roosevelt, “liberal” described policies emphasizing liberty and individual rights. He, however, pioneered the politics of collective rights — of group entitlements. And his liberalism systematically developed policies not just to buy the allegiance of existing groups but to create groups that henceforth would be dependent on government. Under FDR, liberalism became the politics of creating an electoral majority from a mosaic of client groups. Labor unions got special legal standing, farmers got crop supports, business people got tariff protection and other subsidies, the elderly got pensions, and so on and on.

Government no longer existed to protect natural rights but to confer special rights on favored cohorts. As Irving Kristol said, the New Deal preached not equal rights for all but equal privileges for all — for all, that is, who banded together to become wards of the government.

In the 1960s, public-employee unions were expanded to feast from quantitative liberalism (favors measured in quantities of money). And qualitative liberalism was born as environmentalists, feminists and others got government to regulate behavior in the service of social “diversity,” “meaningful” work, etc. Cost notes that with the 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act, a few government-approved minorities were given an entitlement to public offices: About 40 “majority-minority” congressional districts would henceforth be guaranteed to elect minority members.

Walter Mondale, conceding to Ronald Reagan after the 1984 election, listed the groups he thought government should assist: “the poor, the unemployed, the elderly, the handicapped, the helpless and the sad.” Yes, the sad.

Republicans also practice clientelism, but with a (sometimes) uneasy conscience. Both parties have narrowed their appeals as they have broadened their search for clients to cosset. Today’s Democratic Party does not understand what one of its saints understood — that big government is generally a patron of the privileged, a partner of rent-seekers.

When vetoing the 1832 bill to recharter the Second Bank of the United States, Andrew Jackson said, “It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” When government goes beyond equal protection by law and undertakes to allocate wealth and opportunity, “the humble members of society — the farmers, mechanics and laborers — who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government.” As Cost rightly says, “With the exception of the tea party, there is no real faction out there making the Jacksonian case for an end to special privilege.”

Human beings, said one of the wisest of them — Aristotle — are political animals and language-using animals. Americans, as you do not need to be Aristotle to know, are complaining animals. They use language to complain about politics. Mitt Romney should remind them that one function of elections is to force most voters — the winning majorities — to forfeit the fun of complaining. For example, if the swing state of Nevada, which has the nation’s highest unemployment rate (12 percent), votes for four more years of current policies, it must henceforth suffer in silence. Actually, all those who vote to continue Barack Obama’s distinctive brand of clientelism — crony capitalism — must, if he wins, become political Trappists, taking a vow to keep quiet.

georgewill@washpost.com

Washington Post Writers Group

First: Will's thumbnail history of the 'corruption' of the word liberal is instructive; he calls it “clientelism,” the idea that one could develop "policies not just to buy the allegiance of existing groups but to create groups that henceforth would be dependent on government ... liberalism became the politics of creating an electoral majority from a mosaic of client groups ... unions got special legal standing, farmers got crop supports, business people got tariff protection and other subsidies, the elderly got pensions, and so on and on." I usually call it "statism" and describe it as the (mistaken) idea that government can mimic the private sector and e.g. create jobs and prosperity.

Second: He is also correct that while "Twice as many Americans identify themselves as conservative as opposed to liberal ... we will know [on 6 Nov 12] if they mean it ... if they are ideologically conservative but operationally liberal ... if they talk like Jeffersonians but want to be governed by Hamiltonians* ... if their commitment to limited government is rhetorical or actual ... [and] if it is, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan suspected, a “civic religion, avowed but not constraining.”" My guess is that Moynihan is right and if Romney wins it will be by a very, very narrow margin.

_________
* See Walter Russel Mead Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World

 

[cupper]

So, David Koch appears to have some rational thoughts, as opposed to the party he supports:

David Koch breaks from GOP on gay marriage, taxes, defense cuts

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/80483.html?hp=f2

TAMPA, Fla. – Billionaire industrialist David Koch, who is helping steer millions of dollars to elect Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans, on Thursday told POLITICO he disagrees with the GOP’s stance on gay marriage and believes the U.S. needs to consider raising taxes to balance the budget.

Koch, who is serving as a delegate to the Republican National Convention from New York, spoke to POLITICO after delivering brief remarks at a reception held in his honor him by Americans for Prosperity, the political advocacy group he chairs and has helped fund.

The 1980 vice presidential nominee for the socially liberal – but fiscally conservative – Libertarian Party, Koch told POLITICO “I believe in gay marriage” when asked about the GOP’s stance on gay rights.

Romney opposes gay marriage, as do most Republicans, and when that was pointed out to Koch, he said “Well, I disagree with that.”

Koch said he thinks the U.S. military should withdraw from the Middle East and said the government should consider defense spending cuts, as well as possible tax increases to get its fiscal house in order – a stance anathema to many in the Republican Party.

“I think it’s essential to be able to achieve spending reductions and maybe it’s going to require some tax increases,” he said. “We got to come close to balancing the budget, otherwise we’re in a terrible deep problem.”

As for whether military spending cuts should be on the table, Koch said, “I think to balance the budget, probably every federal department has to take cuts in my opinion. We have to spread it around.”

He stressed, though, that “I’m a big fan of the military” and said “I think we’ve got to preserve our military, no question about it. And I’m not exactly an expert on how much military we need, so I have to yield to [Mitt Romney’s opinion].

“I’m more interested in economic issues than how much military we need,” he added. “But I think we should gradually withdraw from the Middle East, you know, from Afghanistan and Iraq so I believe in that. But I’m not an expert in that, so my opinion probably doesn’t count for very much.”

Despite a wave of scrutiny from the press and criticism from liberals up to and including President Barack Obama, Koch said Thursday he plans to continue his big-money political activism regardless of the results of the 2012 election.

“Yeah, we’re in this for the long haul, you know?” he told POLITICO when asked if he intended to continue being politically active if Romney loses the 2012 presidential race to Obama.

Koch also said he now considers himself a Republican first and foremost – rather than a Libertarian or a non-partisan supporter of free enterprise – despite a background in Libertarian politics and some views that are out of step with the GOP orthodoxy.

“The Libertarian Party is a great concept. I love the ideals, but it got too far off the deep end, and so I dropped out,” Koch said. “I think the Republican Party has a great chance of being successful and that’s why I support it,” he said, adding “but I believe in the libertarian principles.”

After his speech in a rented office near the arena hosting the convention to about 200 activists and politicians – including Sens. Ron Johnson, Jon Kyl and John Boozman – Koch mingled and posed for photos with a stream of well-wishers.

He asked former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, now being bolstered in his Senate campaign by Americans for Prosperity ads, how the electoral landscape looked in the Badger State. And, when one woman thanked him “for what you do for America,” he responded, “we’re going to try to do even more.”

Koch declined to comment on a POLITICO report that he and his older brother Charles plan to steer nearly $400 million ahead of the 2012 election to conservative groups, including Americans for Prosperity, which has aired millions of dollars in attack ads against Obama and his congressional allies.

He also brushed off a question about whether there’s too much money in American politics, saying, “Well, it’s a free society. And people can invest what they want.”

 

[a_majoor]

A real WTF situation here. This many people disappearing would have had huge second order effects that would have been a bit difficult to ignore. The other question is where are they now, and are the voting rolls being adjusted to reflect the changing population base? (While there is the inevitable suggestion that these people may never have existed at all, I doubt this is the answer either, after all, marketers [commercal data vendors] had them on file because real people are spending real money somewhere). The chaotic state of voter registration and inability to match people to address via drivers licence or other form of ID has probably contributed greatly to this situation, and hopefully will spur some real reforms in this area.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/victory_lab/2012/08/30/three_fifths_of_milwaukee_s_black_voters_have_vanished_without_a_trace_.html

The Case of the Disappearing Black Voter 
By Sasha Issenberg | Posted Thursday, Aug. 30, 2012, at 10:22 AM ET

RICHMOND, CA - JUNE 14: Weeds grow past the height of a picket fence in front of an abandoned house. May foreclosure filings surged 9 percent to 205,990 filings, including default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions. The spike is the first monthly increase since January. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Sixty percent of Milwaukee’s black voters have disappeared.

Democrats have feared for years that one of the particular challenges of running campaigns in 2012 would be simply locating their voters.  The party’s constituencies (young people, immigrants, minorities) tend to be among the most mobile demographic groups.  And as NPR speculated this week in an analysis of battleground-state foreclosure figures, the housing crisis will likely only have made things more difficult for Democrats looking for their supporters.

New data from Milwaukee give an indication of how dire the Democrats’ disappearing-voter problem already is. This spring, the League of Young Voters, which was created to mobilize young minority communities, collaborated with the liberal Wisconsin Voices coalition to dispatch teams of young canvassers. Starting in April, they spent eight weeks knocking on 120,882 doors across 208 of Milwaukee’s 317 wards to raise awareness of the gubernatorial recall election scheduled for June.  The doors had one thing in common: the voter file said they were all home to a registered voter whom a commercial data vendor had flagged as likely to be African-American.

But the voter file represented a fiction, or at least a reality that had rapidly become out of date.  During those eight weeks, canvassers were able to successfully find and interact with only 31 percent of their targets. Twice that number were confirmed to no longer live at the address on file  — either because a structure was abandoned or condemned, or if a current resident reported that the targeted voter no longer lived there.

Based on those results, the New Organizing Institute, a Washington-based best-practices lab for lefty field operations, extrapolated that nearly 160,000 African-American voters in Milwaukee were no longer reachable at their last documented address — representing 41 percent of the city’s 2008 electorate.  It is a staggering figure in a battleground state where Democratic prospects rely on turning out Milwaukee’s urban population, an ever more urgent cause since Paul Ryan’s presence on the ticket could help mobilize core Republican constituencies in the city’s suburbs.  Over half of those identified as displaced were under the age of 35, and thus also less likely to be reachable through traditional landline phones.

The Milwaukee data will certainly be sobering to Democrats who rely on existing voter-file records when organizing walk sheets and call lists for get-out-the-vote canvasses.  Now, those working in Wisconsin realize, they’ll have to begin the process earlier to pinpoint residents and make sure that those who have been relocated are registered to vote at new addresses.

"That scraps any traditional GOTV planning — if six in ten people that you planned on talking to are not there,” says Biko Baker, executive director of the League of Young Voters

 

[tomahawk6]

The census showed that urban dwellers moved in search of work. This is bad news for urban centers because with the loss of population they also will lose funding.

 

[Haletown]

The Democrtic Party has a long history of not being bothered by missing voters. 



  It is the reason they fight voter ID laws so vehemently.

 

[tomahawk6]

Yep even the dead vote.

 

[Edward Campbell]

An interesting analysis, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail, re: who needs to come out and vote in order for Mitt Romney to unseat President Obama:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/us-election/vote-of-alienated-democrats-key-to-gop/article4513923/

Vote of alienated Democrats key to GOP

KONRAD YAKABUSKI
TAMPA — The Globe and Mail

Last updated Saturday, Sep. 01 2012

The “pivot” came later than many outsiders anticipated. But Mitt Romney’s speech to accept the Republican presidential nomination showed that he has finally moved beyond the GOP primaries and into a full-throttle race for the middle.

By the time Democrats get to Charlotte, N.C., for their convention next week, the rival they have depicted as an out-of-touch supply-sider may already have beaten them to the centre.

At the outset of this race, Republicans figured the 2012 presidential contest would be a “base” election. They did not mean vile, though it has at times been that. Rather, they thought Mr. Romney could win on the strength of the GOP grassroots alone.

Though President Barack Obama would monopolize young voters, blacks and Hispanics, GOP strategists assumed turnout among those groups would be lower than in 2008. In turn, a more motivated GOP base would vote in larger numbers than for John McCain.

By the end of the Republican convention this week, the playbook had been much amended. The party is still counting on disaffected “Obama girls” and other 2008 supporters to stay home in November. But if Tampa revealed anything, it is that Republicans now know they need to get voters disappointed with Mr. Obama to actually cast a ballot for Mr. Romney.

“The people we’ve got to win in this election, by and large, voted for Barack Obama,” Republican guru Karl Rove told a private post-convention breakfast attended by about 70 elite GOP donors in Tampa on Friday, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

There is still palpable goodwill toward Mr. Obama among most people who voted for him, even if they are disappointed with his presidency. They are reluctant to abandon him because it would mean giving up on the powerful sentiment he inspired in 2008.

Mr. Romney’s Thursday night speech was an acknowledgment that he will not make headway among these voters without speaking to their predicament. They need to be eased into changing sides.

“Four years ago, I know that many Americans felt a fresh excitement about the possibilities of a new president. … I wish President Obama had succeeded because I want America to succeed,” Mr. Romney said. “But his promises gave way to disappointment and division. This isn’t something we have to accept. Now is the moment when we can do something. And with your help, we will do something.”

The speech was almost entirely devoid of red meat. Mr. Romney did not get to the usual GOP check list – no new taxes, the sanctity of life, traditional marriage and freedom of religion – until the end of his speech. And he ran through them almost too fast to notice.

It was perhaps a sign that Mr. Romney feels secure enough atop his party that he need not indulge the base at every turn. In that, the speech was probably the clearest indication thus far of what a Romney presidency would look like: bland and businesslike.

“The whole point of his campaign is not to be the transformational leader Obama promised to be in 2008, but rather a Mr. Fix-it sewing patches on the nation’s holes,” University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato wrote in a post-convention commentary. “Given the state of the economy, the Mr. Fix-it role might be enough if the nation ultimately decides it wants to move on from Obama.”

Studies suggest that less than 5 per cent of the U.S. electorate is comprised of true swing voters who are not predisposed to vote either Democratic or Republican. If that it is true, it helps explain why both parties spend so much time catering to their bases. (The interminable quest for donations is another big reason for the endless pandering.)

Even so, presidential elections are fought in a handful of swing states, where so-called “persuadable” voters are more numerous than the national figures suggest. There are more women than men among them. And on Thursday, Mr. Romney aimed to speak directly at them.

“When my mom ran for the Senate, my dad was there for her every step of the way,” Mr. Romney said. “I can still see her saying, in her beautiful voice: ‘Why should women have any less say than men about the great decisions facing our nation?’”

The Republican nominee continued: “As governor of Massachusetts, I chose a woman lieutenant governor and a woman chief of staff. Half of my cabinet and senior officials were women. And in business, I mentored and supported great women leaders who went on to run great companies.”

Measured against the 2008 Republican convention, this one was less successful. The television audience was down sharply. The speeches were utilitarian. And few analysts are expecting Mr. Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan to get a bounce in the polls, as Mr. McCain and Sarah Palin experienced in the wake of their convention. (It proved ephemeral, anyway.)

What’s more, on Friday, Americans were talking more about Clint Eastwood’s unusual endorsement of Mr. Romney than the convention’s the main event.

Yet, Mr. Romney emerges from the convention with much more money than his Democratic rival and allies like Mr. Rove promising to spend hundreds of millions more to help win over those “persuadable” voters.

I think the last paragraph provides some important clues to the November outcome:

1. The fact that Gov Romney has so much more money than President Obama suggests that President Obama's support has weakened, perhaps badly;

2. We know that advertising works and we also know that money buys good advertising - not necessarily "good = nice and fair" rather "good = effective which often = negative; and

3. The so called Reagan Democrats are still there, they are especially white working-class Northerners who are disappointed in President Obama's attitudes and policies and are not inclined to want, much less believe in the "change" he has on offer. They can be "persuaded" by Mr. Rover et al, and if they are then I guess it deprives President Obama of an important constituency that voted for him in 2008.

 

[Journeyman]

It is the reason they fight voter ID laws so vehemently.

Maybe they need a "functioning democracy" to help them out....you know, like Iraq or Afghanistan; start marking voters' fingers with purple dye and stuff......  :nod:

 

[a_majoor]

What few people are asking is what would a second term look like? There are many contradictory answers; Obama stated that in a second term "He would like to tackle issues such as climate change, immigration, education and filibuster reform." He told the Russians he would have "more flexibility" in a second term, and also suggested that since the bailout of GM was a "success" (by what metric?) he would like to extend the model to the rest of the American economy.  Promises such as cutting the deficit in half were ditched almost immediatly on achieving office, and his signature achievment of Obamacare is deeply unpopular with almost 60% of Americans.

The Economist asks the question:

http://www.economist.com/node/21561890

Four more years?
A president who has had a patchy first term now needs to make a convincing case for a second one
Sep 1st 2012 | from the print edition

IN DENVER four years ago, an inspiring presidential candidate announced that he would change America. Barack Obama promised to put aside partisan differences, restore hope to those without jobs, begin the process of saving the planet from global warming, and make America proud again.

Next week Mr Obama will address his fellow Democrats at their convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, with little of this hopeful agenda completed. Three million more Americans are out of work than four years ago, and the national debt is $5 trillion bigger. Partisan gridlock is worse than ever: health-care reform, a genuinely impressive achievement, has become a prime source of rancour. Businessfolk are split over whether he dislikes capitalism or is merely indifferent to it. His global-warming efforts have evaporated. America’s standing in the Muslim world is no higher than it was under George W. Bush, Iran remains dangerous, Russia and China are still prickly despite the promised resets, and the prison in Guantánamo remains open.

The defence of Mr Obama’s record comes down to one phrase: it could all have been a lot worse. He inherited an economy in free fall thanks to the banking crash and the fiscal profligacy that occurred under his predecessor; his stimulus measures and his saving of Detroit carmakers helped avert a second Depression; overall, he deserves decent if patchy grades on the economy (see article). Confronted by obstructionist Republicans in Congress, he did well to get anything through at all. Abroad he has sensibly recalibrated American foreign policy. And there have been individual triumphs, such as the killing of Osama bin Laden.

But this does not amount to a compelling case for re-election, in the view of either this paper or the American people. More than 60% of voters believe their country to be on the wrong track. Mr Obama’s approval ratings are well under 50%; almost two-thirds of voters are unimpressed (however harshly) by how he has handled the economy. Worn down by the difficulties of office, the great reformer has become a cautious man, surrounded by an insular group of advisers. The candidate who promised bold solutions to the country’s gravest problems turned into the president who failed even to back his own commission’s plans for cutting the deficit.

Were he facing a more charismatic candidate than Mitt Romney or a less extremist bunch than the Republicans, Mr Obama would already be staring at defeat. The fact that the president has had to “go negative” so early and so relentlessly shows how badly he needs the election to be about Mr Romney’s weaknesses rather than his own achievements. A man who four years ago epitomised hope will arrive in Charlotte with a campaign that thus far has been about invoking fear.

Mr Obama must offer more than this, for three reasons. First, a negative campaign may well fail. The Republicans are a rum bunch with a wooden leader; but Mr Romney’s record as an executive and governor is impressive, and his running-mate, Paul Ryan, is a fount of bold ideas. Mr Obama’s strategy of blaming everything on Republican obstructionism will strike many voters as demeaning.

Second, even if negative campaigning works, a re-elected Mr Obama will need the strength that comes from a convincing agenda. Otherwise the Republicans, who will control the House and possibly the Senate too, will make mincemeat of him. And, third, it is not just Mr Obama who needs a plan. America does too. Its finances and its government require a drastic overhaul. Surely this charismatic, thoughtful man has more ideas about what must be done than he has so far let on?

A tempting option will be to galvanise his party base, with talk of more health reform and threats of higher taxes on business and the rich. Rather than redesigning government, he could suck up to the public-sector unions by promising that jobs will not be cut. Rather than cutting entitlement programmes, he could reassure the elderly that America can actually afford them.

Such an approach would fit the pattern of too much of his presidency, and his campaign so far; but it would do America a disservice, and it might not help Mr Obama either. His victory in 2008 relied on reaching beyond the groups that traditionally vote Democratic and bringing in young voters and wealthier whites. Many of them are centrists who are suspicious of Mr Romney, but since they have to foot the bill for government profligacy, they will not vote for a president who promises more of the same.

Reach for the radical centre

Appealing to the centre is not easy for Mr Obama. His allies on the left are powerful and, in a country so polarised, the middle ground can be a dangerous place. But there are plenty of things that many on both sides of the political aisle could agree on, including tax and immigration reform, investment in schools and aid to businesses that are creating jobs. Crucially, Mr Obama could explain how he intends to cut the still-soaring debt without pretending that taxing only the rich will help in any meaningful way.

Mr Obama has a strong belief in social justice. It drove his health-care reform. But he needs to distinguish between a creditable desire to help the weak and a dangerous preference for the public over the private sector. The jobs that poor Americans need will be created by companies. Smothering firms in red tape is not the way to help them; Mr Obama should vow to stop adding to it, and to start cutting some of it away. The party faithful in Charlotte might not like centrist ideas much. But they would appeal to the voters Mr Obama needs to win over and, should he be re-elected, they will strengthen him in his dealings with the Republicans in Congress.

Incumbents tend to win presidential elections, but second-term presidents tend to be disappointing. Mr Obama’s first-term record suggests that, if re-elected, he could be the lamest of ducks. That’s why he needs a good answer to the big question: just what would you do with another four years?

 

[Rifleman62]

Especially for tomahawk6:

The Democratic Party has come up with their new sign for the 2012 Presidential election.

 

[tomahawk6]

Good one  ;D

Here's another. The empty chair Clint Eastwood talked about.

 

[a_majoor]

The census showed that urban dwellers moved in search of work. This is bad news for urban centers because with the loss of population they also will lose funding.

And since the Dems are very much against checking and correcting voter lists and verification via ID, they are now hoist on their own petrard; they cannot even find their own voters. What is odd about the story is although there were indeed people that marketers had identified due to buying patterns, the departure of so many people would have had many second order effects, some good (less traffic and fewer students at schools, allowing more resources/student) and many bad (closure of business as customer bases vanished, vastly reduced tax revenues, squatters moving into abandond properties), all of which should have been noticeable over the past four years. So there is much more to this story than is being reported.