Obama won reelection, and the Left is utterly jubilant. Obama — jubilant himself — obviously views this as a mandate for four more years of bigger government, higher taxes, more Fed money-printing, more regulation, more war on fossil fuels, more socialization of industry, and more welfare programs.
He made this clear in his characteristically arrogant “my way or the highway” talk regarding the looming fiscal cliff, where he said that the voters have made it clear they want to soak the rich with more taxes. In his hubris, he reminds me strongly of Nixon after his reelection. And I suspect he is headed for the same fall.
Leftist “pundits” are full of advice for Republicans about how to grow beyond their “prejudices” — and embrace leftist ones! This would be convenient for the Democrats, one would think.
I want to sketch, briefly but more accurately, the reasons for the Republican loss, what it portends for the future, and some suggestions (from one on the inside) on how to fix it.
First, I am not as impressed with Obama’s victory as most of the leftist pundits are. The Electoral College totals typically overstate matters, of course. Obama won, but with fewer votes than he received last time, and there were 2 million fewer votes cast in this election than in 2008. As Michael Barone points out, every president reelected since Andrew Jackson won reelection with a greater popular vote percentage than he received in his first run, except Obama. Last time he won 53% to 46%, as opposed to 50% to 48% now. As Jim Geraghty notes, had Romney received about 407,000 more votes in as few as four of the battleground states, he could have won the Electoral College vote. Gallup and other accurate polls showed that just before the handy hurricane Sandy, Romney had a slight edge, but it was eroded by the photo ops of Obama conspicuously “caring” about the victims. It was an ill wind that blew Obama a lot of good. Considering the huge advantage any incumbent president has, the wealth of financial resources available to Obama, and the lock he had on his key voting blocks — in 59 black precincts of Philadelphia, Romney got zero votes! — Obama hardly waltzed to victory.
The markets were similarly unimpressed. They dropped 2% to 3% on the following few days. And now with the certainty that Obamacare will be fully inflicted upon the country, businesses are doing exactly what it was predicted they would: cutting their full-time workforces to avoid the costs of giving full-time workers government-mandated insurance or pay the fines, as well as the taxes that Obamacare will bring. Companies large and small are accelerating the shedding of full-time jobs in favor of part-time workers and contractors. These include: Abbot Labs; Applebee’s; Boston Scientific; Covidien; Dana Holding; Darden Restaurants; Kinetic Concepts; Kroger; Lockheed-Martin; Medtronic; New Energy; Papa John’s Pizza; Smith & Nephew; Stryker; TANCOA Janitorial Services; and Welch Allyn. As person put it, “We own a small business and we have 100 employees, we will lay off many and put many on part time status due to [Obamacare]. Ironically, many of our employees voted for the man who will put them out of a job.”
That will only accelerate in the new year, as the mandates loom.
Obama won and Romney lost for a variety of reasons, some of which the Republicans can overcome, and some of which they will have to figure out how to circumvent — if they have the will and skill. These include:
1. Obama’s massive negative campaign — really, classic negative associative propaganda. The strategist behind it was formulated by Jim Messina. He bet six months before the election that Romney would win the primary, and followed the strategy enunciated by Dick Morris: if the public doesn’t know a candidate, run massively negative ads to create an initial impression which later positive ads will not overcome. While Romney was still forced to battle primary opponents during an unreasonably long primary period, getting attacked in a seemingly endless series of debates (typically moderated by leftist Democratic “journalists”), Obama was free to start running hundreds of millions in attack ads against Romney. The ad that alleged that Romney was responsible for some guy’s wife dying of cancer, for example, was a Goebbels-like pearl of vicious mendacity. The ads bashed Romney for exporting jobs, wanting to enslave women, put blacks in chains, and so on. This wasn’t so much a Chicago-style attack campaign as a Berlin-style one. Only a man of Obama’s metastasized narcissism could gloat over such a low victory.
Every president reelected since Andrew Jackson won reelection with a greater popular vote percentage than he received in his first run — except Obama.
2. There was a concomitant campaign by the Obama-worshipping mainstream media of deliberately arousing the anti-Mormon hatred long endemic in American culture, a campaign involving dozens of articles in major publications, including Newsweek just before the election. (Romney chose not to allow his surrogates to explore Obama’s own controversial church, something I suspect Obama counted on.) Obama could have ended the deliberate enflaming of anti-Mormon prejudice with just one utterance, but he cheerfully let it proceed.
3. Romney failed to hammer home more powerfully the massive corruption of this regime. I would have run hard-hitting ads naming names and showing pictures of each of the legion of wealthy Obama campaign bundlers whose useless green energy companies received tax dollars.
4. Romney didn’t do a good job of rebutting the bogus narrative put forward ceaselessly by Obama and his media courtesans about how bad the economy was when he took office. The recession ended in 2009, and the recovery was the weakest in recent memory, not because the recession was so severe, but precisely because of Obama’s policies. The Romney campaign just took it for granted that everybody remembered the Reagan recovery, not realizing that most young people don’t. He needed to connect those dots to counter the media’s clear mission to push their false narrative.
5. True to his Chicago roots, Obama used OPM (Other People’s Money) liberally to buy votes to an unprecedented degree. Despite the recovery, Obama added 15 million new people to the food stamp program alone (hitting 47 million, or 14% of the total population). You can bet the vast majority of those became his loving supporters. And by 2011, 70.4 million people were on Medicaid — a record 22%, or one out of every five Americans. Hell, even the government-subsidized cellphone program for the poor (the “Lifeline” program) was turned into an effective vote-buying scheme. The number of people getting “free” phones rose from 7.1 million in 2008 to 12.5 million in 2012 — a 76% jump!
This is public choice lumpen theory in action. Give a cellphone — and maybe a bottle of Gallo wine! — to the voters, and then truck them to the polls. The Chicago way, indeed!
In fact, it was a thoroughly public choice theory election: give the voters enough “free” health care, “free” food, “free“ cell phones, “free” storm assistance, “free” contraceptives, “free” student loans, and they will vote for you, even if it costs them long-term in lost jobs, prosperity and freedom itself.
It would appear that we are all Greeks now.
6. Obama’s campaign of changing the subject was a classic of successful misdirection. He was able to convince many voters that Romney hated women. Here Obama was helped by the primary win of one Todd Akin, a wingnut with some loopy theories on rape. Really, this was a wonderful example of a dirty trick: Akin’s opponent, Claire McCaskill, had run ads attacking Akin's primary opponents and building him up as a strong conservative, cleverly ensuring that the sane (and stronger) candidates would lose out to the nutjob. Romney and the Republican establishment tried in vain to get this bastard to drop out, and distanced themselves from him when he wouldn’t, but they were all bashed for being closet Akinites. McCaskill coasted to victory, never having to defend her awful record in Congress.
The Romney campaign just took it for granted that everybody remembered the Reagan recovery, not realizing that most young people don’t.
It was hard to decide who was more reprehensible: Mr. Akin, because after making his ignorant remarks, he refused to do the honorable thing and resign, or “Senator” McCaskill, for her filthy trick in pushing the wingnut to become her opponent out of fear of explaining to the voters why she deserved their votes.
7. There is no way in hell that Romney or any other candidate could have won any appreciable number of black voters in this election, obviously. But he really hurt himself with Hispanics by positioning himself to the right of Gingrich and Perry on immigration (and not choosing Rubio for VP candidate). He should have thought through the issue more carefully, and articulated a more pro-immigration policy that does justice to the real, genuine concerns of immigration opponents, but one more in keeping with our national history. (I have a rather lengthy and detailed piece on this subject coming in these pages soon.)
8. Romney failed to pound home the failed policy of Obama in Libya. Bush had settled with Gaddafi, obtaining his mustard gas and nuclear weapons technology, in exchange for his not invading Libya (this was in the first week or so of the Iraq war). Obama helped overthrow the admittedly evil Gaddafi, and recently denied extra protection for our ambassador in Benghazi, while boasting of his own killing of bin Laden. The result was a successful al Qaeda attack, which Obama had the audacity to blame on some obscure video.
Can future Republicans prevail? Certainly. The Democrats recovered very rapidly after massive defeats by Nixon in 1972 and Reagan in 1984, landslides next to which this election was as nothing. But it would help things if Republicans did some reasonable things.
1. Get clear on the purpose of your party, as opposed to the purpose of your faction. In contemporary politics, the Democratic Party is the big-government party; the Republicans should be the smaller government party. Be transcendentally clear on what that means. Democrats are not (usually) communists, they just want an ever-larger government — they are neosocialists, rather than socialists. This is because the party is primarily a coalition of groups that get money from government or progressive government policies. The key constituents of the party are public employees, especially teachers; people on welfare or other forms of public assistance; attorneys who sue businesses for a living; unionized workers in private industry; and young people who get government benefits but pay little for them (in taxes).
Republicans aren’t (as Obama so often insinuates) anarchists; they just want government restrained to its most effective and indispensable core functions: defense; internal security; a fair judicial system; only such regulation as stops significant negative externalities and other market failures. And Republicans are also aware of the everpresent risk of government failures.
2. The Republicans, again, need to understand with transcendent clarity that people don’t vote their interests, but their perceived interests. People can be mistaken about these interests, and often are. In public choice parlance, this gives rise to democracy failure, or as I term it, voter failure. Indeed, in my view, this election involved a huge amount of voter failure.
So it is that many poor people vote for weakened welfare requirements, unable to see that it is their communities that will suffer the most from the expanded cycle of poverty. Many elderly people support the federal government’s taking control of healthcare, unable to see that in countries with national healthcare systems, the elderly are put at the bottom of the list for scarce procedures.
For that reason, Republicans need to hammer home cases of government failure, not just here, but elsewhere as well. That means that in the coming two years, Republicans at all levels need to keep pressing this administration about its failures, both in the past and as they mount rapidly over the next two years. Remember, the costs of Obamacare were carefully structured to occur after the 2012 election. Every Republican politician should point out every case where a business lays off workers, cuts back hours, or charges customers more, to pay for Obamacare — as an owner of a large chain of Denny’s just announced he is doing (raising prices and cutting hours to 28 per week per worker). Keep pointing out the costs of each and every new tax imposed by that law. Since the Republicans still control the House, they should run hearings on these costs, as well as (for that matter) on each crony capitalist deal from the past and going forward.
The Republicans need to understand with transcendent clarity that people don’t vote their interests, but their perceived interests.
In particular, Republicans in Congress need to resist the temptation to say of Obamacare, “Oh, well — it’s now the law of the land. Let’s try to make it better.” No — make Obama, Pelosi, and Reid own it. And do so with loud publicity.
3. The Republicans need a much shorter primary season. Romney ran short of money early in the race — right after winning the primaries — because he had to spend so much on campaigning so long. While he spent his campaign cash against Gingrich and Santorum, Obama spent his attacking Romney. When Romney finally clinched the nomination, he was virtually out of cash, and could not answer the vicious onslaught of attacks.
4. Republicans should not allow mainstream media commentators to moderate during the Republican primary debates. Pick only conservative and libertarian journalists to do that job. In the primary debate “moderated” by ex-Clinton aide and partisan Democratic hack George Stephanopoulos, he introduced the phony “war on women” meme (as he was no doubt instructed to do by the Obama team) by out of the blue bringing up birth control — the legitimacy of which none of the candidates had ever denied.
And in the general debates, eliminate the single media moderator format. In the debate that Candy Crowley moderated, she shamelessly took the side of Obama, interrupting Romney dozens of times (and Obama fewer than ten times), and at one point actually told the audience that Romney was “wrong” on the facts about whether Obama had called the Benghazi attack an act of terrorism. In fact, while Obama used that phrase in his earlier news conference, it did not clearly apply to the attack, and for the following two weeks he and his spokespeople advanced the false narrative that the assault was a spontaneous demonstration aroused by a video.
Going forward, insist on having true balance by having panels of moderators, panels that are themselves well balanced between left and right.
One final observation is worth making here. It will be hard for half of this country to watch the insufferable arrogance of the president as he continues his quest to push the country to the left. But as John Steele Gordon recently noted, most presidential second terms have been cursed by scandal, war, and battles with Congress. Obama, who has already seen all of those during his first term, will likely find things even worse in his second term.
Why? First, even his own estimates show him running the national debt up to $20 trillion — an estimate based on rosy projections. The final tab may well hit $22 trillion. Sooner or later, this will trigger inflation or increases in the interest the country must pay to service the debt. This will hurt his popularity.
Second, he will not be able to sweep the problem of Iran’s nuclear weapons program under the carpet much longer. He has claimed that his rather weak sanctions program will prevent Iran from developing nuclear capability, and that his Republican critics are warmongers. This is rich, considering that he used our military to overthrow Gaddafi, bragged openly about killing bin Laden (a boast that likely motivated the killing of the four Americans in Benghazi by the resurgent al Qaeda), and has himself said he will not permit Iran to go nuclear.
Most presidential second terms have been cursed by scandal, war, and battles with Congress. Obama, who has already seen all of those during his first term, will likely find things even worse in his second.
We’ll see. I suspect that the sanctions won’t work — without the support of Russia and China, how could they? And have they worked at all so far? Either Iran will go nuclear — in which case Obama will be revealed as having made a truly Carteresque blunder, and in the same country, allowing our bitterest enemy to achieve game-changing power which will surely lead it to expand its terrorist operations against us — or else he will use force, which will make the anti-American Left and isolationist Right bitterly angry.
Third, the effects of Obamacare will hit. If the death panels start ruling out heart valve surgery for Grandpa, there will be heat. If millions of people lose their preferred health insurance (because their employers find it cheaper to pay the fine instead of furnishing the more expensive federally mandated insurance), there will be heat. And if millions of Americans lose their jobs (or get knocked down to part-time status), there will be profound disappointment.
Finally, Obama is now pushing for $1.6 trillion in tax increases. If he shoves them through Congress, and this further chokes off economic growth, swelling the numbers of the unemployed and perhaps pushing us back into outright recession, there will be fury.
Obama, in running one of the dirtiest campaigns in history, made a deal with the Devil to cling to power. We will see what price the Devil will exact in return.
/p
