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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; electorate</title>
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		<title>Steve Moore &amp; Michael Barone at Restoration Weekend</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/steve-moore-michael-barone-at-restoration-weekend/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=steve-moore-michael-barone-at-restoration-weekend</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Dec 2014 05:50:07 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[Two top conservative minds give their take on America's political and economic landscapes. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to the panel discussion “Politics and the Economy,” which took place at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/115323365" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>When I was coming into this weekend I wasn&#8217;t even fully ready because I was like, wow, what an election we just had. Wow.  Then day three of Restoration Weekend and I&#8217;m like, wow, there is so much more to be done, and it&#8217;s so funny, this is the third year that I&#8217;ve been part of Restoration Weekend thanks to David and Michael Finch, and for years and years many of my friends who are here from Orange County, Marilyn, Cathy Grimmer, Paul and Sally Bender had said, &#8220;You&#8217;ve got to go to Restoration Weekend, no matter what the outcome of the election.  We go there and we leave feeling revived and ready to fight more.&#8221;  After this particular weekend I was thinking to myself, a weekend might not be long enough.  We should maybe start, David, Restoration Week. I don&#8217;t know.  Michael&#8217;s going to kill me for saying that.</p>
<p>We have a really great panel today.  We have two of the foremost minds of the conservative movement.  Their brains are so big that I&#8217;m intimidated to be on stage with them.  I&#8217;m going to introduce them both from left to right and they don&#8217;t need introductions, you all know them so I&#8217;ll make this quick.  Michael Barone, obviously a senior political analyst for the <i>Examiner</i>, Fox News contributor and the author of the <i>Almanac of American Politics</i>.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>Co-author.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>Co-author, foremost author, right?  Then second, Stephen Moore, long-time writer and editorial writer and columnist with <i>The Wall Street Journal</i>.  Now he&#8217;s the Chief Economist of the Heritage Foundation and I think his most impressive credential, because I&#8217;m biased, is that he&#8217;s also a columnist for the <i>Orange County Register</i> so, just saying.  We&#8217;re going to start our panel off with opening remarks.  We&#8217;ll start with Steve and then we&#8217;ll move to Michael with kind of their thoughts on what&#8217;s next on politics and the economy.  Then we&#8217;ll ask a couple of questions and then open it up for you all to get your questions answered as well.  Steven, let&#8217;s start with you.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Okay, so let me give you my quick &#8212; Michael is obviously the Dean of Politics.  I&#8217;m going to give you just a quick seven or eight minute kind of sketch on what&#8217;s going on with the economy.  Some of you have seen these slides before, and I&#8217;m sorry if I&#8217;m a little bit repetitive of what I said last year, but I think this is such an important message.  Let me just start by saying this, I&#8217;m incredibly bullish on the U.S. economy.  I think we&#8217;re going to see an incredible, especially after this election, I think we&#8217;re going to see a big burst out of growth.  We&#8217;ve been stuck in this 2 percent rut on growth now for six years.  This has been an incredibly weak recovery but because of a lot of factors I talk about, I just think we&#8217;re really prepped for a big recovery.  As I said last year, but I&#8217;ll repeat this, the one industry that has really almost carried the rest of the economy on its back for the last six years has been this oil and gas boom.  It&#8217;s not a surprise to anybody in this room by now.  This is an incredible expansion we are living through.  Politics is so rich with irony.  The irony of Barack Obama&#8217;s Presidency is that he will have presided over the biggest oil and gas boom in American history and this is a president who hates the oil and gas industry.  If you look at this chart you can see what&#8217;s going on here.  The red line is all employment in every industry outside of oil and gas over the last six years, and you can see the big decline obviously in employment that happened during the great recession of 2008 and 2009 and you can see what a really flimsy recovery this has been, and it has taken us so long to get back to zero.  By the way, this goes through the end of 2013.  If it went through today, we&#8217;re right back about zero; so that is to say it took us six years but we finally recovery of every job that was lost during the recession.  That&#8217;s a pretty, pretty long and slow recovery process.</p>
<p>Now look at the blue line. That&#8217;s the oil and gas industry, and it&#8217;s interesting, I was giving a talk this summer to the Oklahoma and Texas Oil and Gas Drillers Association.  By the way, I think that may even be more conservative than this group here and so I started off my speech by saying, &#8220;Congratulations, you&#8217;re the people who reelected Barack Obama.&#8221;  They weren&#8217;t real happy but without this boom, there is no way that Barack Obama would have ever been reelected because the economy would have still been in a recession in 2012.  Now what&#8217;s interesting about this boom are a couple of things.  It is not &#8212; as you know, Michael, my mentor was the Great Julian Simon and Julian Simon taught us that natural resources don&#8217;t come from the ground or from the earth. they come from the human mind.  This boom in oil and gas is such a perfect example of what Julian talked about; that the ultimate resource is the human mind because this massive amount of energy we have in this country.  It&#8217;s not as if all of a sudden overnight God endowed America with all this oil and gas. It has been there for hundreds of thousands of years.  This is a testament.  This breakthrough is a testament to incredible technological prowess.  Wild cat or entrepreneurs, most of this energy was not found by Chevron and Exxon and so on, but smaller oil drillers just went out there and found this stuff, and it&#8217;s also a result of incredible technology.  We&#8217;re just seeing technologies that have changed this industry in such a massive, massive way.</p>
<p>Now what&#8217;s interesting about this story are a couple of things.  One is that if we get this right, and I said this last year &#8212; actually I misspoke last year.  Last year I said if we get this right within five years, the United States of America is going to be energy independent.  That is to say we are going to be selling more of this stuff than we buy and that&#8217;s true, I&#8217;m going to stick with that.  It&#8217;s quite plausible that by the Year 2020 if not before, the United States will be a net exporter of oil and gas, and as you know, that is a complete game changer with respect to our economy, and it&#8217;s a game changer, by the way, with respect to our National Security.  If we can actually sell this stuff rather than buy it; you know that you&#8217;ve been reading about this, ISIS gets about $5 million a day, $5 million a day from petro dollars.  We are funding the people that are trying to kill us so if we don&#8217;t have to buy this stuff, it changes the whole geopolitical situation, but I&#8217;ve changed my tune on this.  I would simply say this.  I kind of underestimated how big this is.  Before I said five years from now we&#8217;re going to be energy independent.  Five years from now we&#8217;re going to be energy independent.</p>
<p>My new line on this is five years from now the United States of America; this great, great, great country of ours is going to be the energy dominant country in the world, the energy dominant country in the world.  The thing that&#8217;s amazing about this, if you look at that incredible boom &#8212; just think about this ladies and gentlemen, think about how big this would be and could be if you actually had a president who liked this industry.  This has happened at a time when Barack Obama is doing everything possible behind the scenes to completely decapitate this industry.  For example, the pipeline issue is a big one and, by the  way, we don&#8217;t just need the Keystone Pipeline, obviously we do; we need pipelines all over this country to get the oil and gas that we have to every area of the country and around the world where we need it.  So that&#8217;s number one, Obama is not allowing virtually any new pipelines to be built.</p>
<p>Second of all as you know, if you look at this oil and gas boom on that chart, almost all of that, 98 percent of that boom is happening on private land.  Almost none of it is happening on federal.  In fact, I saw a statistic the other day that we&#8217;re actually drilling less today on public land than we were six or seven years ago.  If we were to open up federal lands &#8212; and I&#8217;m not talking about drilling on Yosemite or Yellowstone or the precious national parks that are environmentally sensitive; I&#8217;m just talking about drilling on forest land and so on that&#8217;s basically vacant.  If we were able to do that we could literally raise trillions of dollars of revenue of the next ten years to repay our national debt or to do other things to raise revenues.  We could practically eliminate the corporate income tax and replace that with money that we could get from drilling on federal land.</p>
<p>So that&#8217;s the second one, and the third one that&#8217;s so important and that we should all be paying attention to is these new EPA Regulations that President Obama is talking about, and this insane deal that President Obama supposedly signed with the Chinese.  Did you all follow this that the Chinese are now going to agree to reduce their carbon emissions by 25 percent by the year 2030?  That is the biggest bald-faced lie I have ever heard.  The Chinese are not going to reduce their carbon emissions.  They are laughing at us today in Beijing.  The Chinese are building a new coal burning fire plant every month in China so they are using fossil fuels. They&#8217;re going to burn this and they said to Obama, &#8220;Yeah, you go back to the United States and you cut your carbon emissions by 25 percent and we&#8217;ll do the same,&#8221; wink, wink, wink.  That isn&#8217;t going to happen.  This is just unilateral economic disarmament by the United States, and let me make another point about this because I think it is such an important issue.  I think a lot of you probably know this but can anybody in this room tell me what country of all the industrialized nations in the world, which country has reduced its carbon emissions the most over the last six years.  We have.  How many of you know that?  The United States. If you read the school books or read the newspapers you would know that.  We have reduced our carbon emissions more than any other country.  Wait a minute, how could that possibly have happened?  How could that possibly be true?  We didn&#8217;t do cap and trade.  We didn&#8217;t do, I don&#8217;t think we ever signed the Kyoto Treaty.  I don&#8217;t think we ratified it.  We didn&#8217;t have a carbon tax, all these things that all these sanctimonious Europeans said that they did.  We&#8217;ve cut our carbon emissions more than they have and I think you all know the reason why &#8212; because we&#8217;re converting electricity to natural gas.  Natural gas has become the number one source of electricity in the United States; it just surpassed coal.  Natural gas is a wonder fuel.  It is like this amazing wonder fuel.  Think about this; 1) It is abundant, we have hundreds of years&#8217; worth of natural gas in this country; 2) It is made in the USA; 3) It&#8217;s incredibly cheap; and 4) It&#8217;s a clean burning fuel.  Now why in the world would anybody be against natural gas?</p>
<p>But you know what&#8217;s amazing, the environmentalists have turned against natural gas; they&#8217;re against it even though it reduces greenhouse gasses.  Stunning, isn&#8217;t it?  I&#8217;ll make one last point about this.  If you look at electricity production today in America, because you all know this – the master resource is energy.  You can&#8217;t produce anything without energy and everything that we have, a major component of that is cheap and affordable energy.  Well if you look at our electricity today, where do we get our electricity today?  I just told you the number one source of electricity today is natural gas.  The number two source of electricity is coal.  So they don&#8217;t want natural gas, right, because they don&#8217;t want fracking.  The second source of electricity in the United States is coal.  They don&#8217;t want coal; they&#8217;re shutting down coal mines all over the country.  The third source is nuclear power.  They hate nuclear power.  The fourth source is an incredibly good, very affordable source of renewable energy, which is what?  What&#8217;s the number one source of renewable energy in American today?  I heard somebody say it. Hydropower.  Actually hydropower is a very good source of energy.  They hate hydropower too.  Why do they hate hydropower?  Because then don&#8217;t want dams, it&#8217;s going to kill the fish.  So any form of electricity production that actually works they&#8217;re against.  This leads me to an important point that I want to make.</p>
<p>You know, David, at this conference we&#8217;ve been talking a lot about the sinister elements in America today, the communists and the Jihadist and the &#8220;so-called progressives.&#8221;  I want to make a point to you that I think is really important.  I would make the argument to you that the most dangerous movement in the world today is not all of these other groups, and I&#8217;m not saying they&#8217;re not dangerous.  The most dangerous movement in the world today is the Radical Green Movement.  These people are absolutely crazy.</p>
<p>So I&#8217;m going to just kind of move on and make a couple of other quick points.  This is the crux of my argument about the economy, and this drives liberals crazy, so I want just two or three minutes to walk you through this.  If you look at this chart, the way I put it is the last 50 years there have been two great economic crises in America.  The first of course was the late-1970s and early-1980s when the United States went through what I call a mini depression.  We all remember that period.  You all remember 20 percent mortgage interest rates and 14 percent inflation and the fact that in the late-70s and early-80s America was truly deindustrializing, and if actually you read about what liberals and even a lot of conservatives were saying at that time, you remember this, Michael: America is an empire in decline, the Japanese are going to take over and actually the Soviet Model works better than ours does and so on.  That was the kind of environment that Ronald Reagan took over in and of course, in 2008 Barack Obama took office during an incredible economic crisis.  There&#8217;s no question about it.  We had lost six million jobs, the real estate bubble had burst, and half of the banks in America had collapsed.  So when Barack Obama walked into the White House, he walked into office in an incredible crisis, as he says ever speech that he gives.</p>
<p>Now here is what makes this experiment so interesting.  These two presidents used diametrically opposite approaches to dealing with the crisis, right?  So you all know the Reagan formula. It was to cut tax rates; it was to get government spending under control.  He worked with Paul Volker to slay inflation by cutting the money supply, and in a sense what Ronald Reagan did was he empowered workers and entrepreneurs and businesses to rebuild the American economy, the supply side recovery.  Barack Obama came in and did exactly the opposite, right?  Barack Obama used every single page out of the Keynesian playbook and, by the way, I&#8217;m not going to blame this just on Obama.  I would say the last year and a half or two years of the Bush Administration were a disaster too. So what did we do in response to the 2008 crisis?  Well, we bailed out big banks, insurance companies and auto companies.  We passed an $850 billion dollar so-called spending stimulus bill.  We had ObamaCare.  We had tax increases on the rich.  We borrowed $7 trillion, in six years we have borrowed $7 trillion.  This is a Keynesian&#8217;s dream, right?  We threw everything in the Keynesian playbook at that recession.  If you look at this chart, what I think is really interesting and I don&#8217;t think liberals have a good response to this.  What this chart is showing you is that the U.S. economy has grown by 2 percent under Barack Obama under his Keynesian formulation.  In fact, I think I wrote a piece on this for you guys are OCR.  You can see, so the economy has grown by 11½ percent over that period.</p>
<p>Now that&#8217;s decent but then you look at what happened under President Reagan.  Under Ronald Reagan the economy didn&#8217;t grow at 11½ percent over the recovery period; it grew at nearly 25 percent.  Now that&#8217;s a big, big difference ladies and gentlemen, that&#8217;s a huge difference.  That means, and what the number there you&#8217;re looking at, what that means, and if I updated that to today &#8212; because I don&#8217;t have the last two quarters on here. The underlying point of this chart is if the U.S. economy had grown as rapidly under Barack Obama&#8217;s recovery as it did under Ronald Reagan&#8217;s, the GDP national output and national income of this country would be $2 trillion larger today, $2 trillion.  That&#8217;s a massive number. If we were to give that $2 trillion to every single family &#8212; by the way, that&#8217;s year after year after year we&#8217;d be $2 trillion larger.  If we didn&#8217;t have that growth gap and we prorated that money to every family in America, the average family in America today would have $15,000.00 more income. $15,000.00 more income.  Now here is the amazing part about this.  The average family in America doesn&#8217;t have $15,000.00 more income in this recovery.  I think most of you know this.  The average median income family in the United States has $1,500.00 less income than when this recovery, so-called recovery, began.</p>
<p>Now why is that so important?  I think that single statistic may more than anything else explain why the Democrats had their heads handed to them a week and a half ago. Barack Obama was saying just ten days before the election, &#8220;Every single statistic shows improvement while I&#8217;ve been President.&#8221;  Well he left out the one that Americans care the most about.  What Ronald Reagan used to call &#8220;real take home pay&#8221; and &#8220;real take home pay&#8221; has been reduced and not increased over Barack Obama&#8217;s presidency, and that explains in my opinion, Michael, why 51 percent of Americans today say that the United States of America is still in a recession – because for half of the Americans it still is a recession.  When you&#8217;re losing income relative to inflation, you&#8217;re not feeling better about things; you&#8217;re feeling worse and that&#8217;s a point we have to hammer home over and over again.  One quick final point.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>Okay, real quick though.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Okay, just the states.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>Michael wants to talk about something.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>No, I know. I agreed not to be too long, but this is so important.  No, I just got to do the Texas thing.  So this is just the last point.  If you really want to understand the superiority of our ideas versus their ideas, we&#8217;ve got such a great, great experiment here in the United States, and it turns out the four largest states in America, two red states, Texas and Florida are obviously red states.  The two biggest blue states are California and New York.  Correct me if I&#8217;m wrong about this Michael but I believe one out of three Americans lives in those four states.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>That&#8217;s right.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>So those are the states that really matter and the basic bottom line here is that these red states, and this is what my book is about, the red states are incredibly outperforming the blue states.  You know this, migration pattern – there is a huge migration out of the Midwest and out of the Northeast into the South and to states like Phoenix and Utah and so on, and this is what liberals cannot, they cannot explain this because they kept saying, &#8220;Look, they want higher minimum wages, higher tax rates on the rich, don&#8217;t allow drilling, more regulation&#8221; and so on.  All of these things were supposed to create a worker&#8217;s paradise for the workers.  What they can&#8217;t explain is if that&#8217;s the case why are people leaving those states and what this chart is showing you is that over the last 15 years, for every job that was created in California and New York, three to four jobs were created in Texas and Florida.  Look, what&#8217;s the income tax rate today in Texas and Florida?  Zero.  How many in this room are Californians or New Yorkers?  Do you know what your highest income tax rate in California and New York is today?</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>Don&#8217;t remind us.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>13.5%.  This stuff matters.  I debated Paul Krugman on this about a month ago, about the economy.  I showed him this chart and I said Paul, you&#8217;ve got the Nobel Prize in economics.  Please explain to me if your ideas are so much superior to ours, what explains this, and you&#8217;ll love this, Michael. He said, &#8220;Well there&#8217;s a very simple explanation.&#8221;  He said people are leaving because of the weather, because of the weather.  Now, actually, as with everything &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>The last year that Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex had something like 90 consecutive days of triple digit weather.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Exactly, you took my &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>I&#8217;d like to have Paul Krugman mow some lawns in that weather.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>I said to Krugman, well, Paul, that&#8217;s an interesting theory, that you say you know people, and by the way, there is some truth to that. People want to live in warmer places, and I said if that&#8217;s the thing, if this is all driven by weather, Paul, you&#8217;ve got the Nobel Prize, please explain this to me, why are people leaving San Diego and going to Houston?  He had no answer.  I&#8217;m going to stop there.  Thank you very much.  It&#8217;s been a pleasure.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>Thank you Steve, and all right, Michael, ready to give us the political scoop?</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>Well I&#8217;ll try to give you my view of a couple of important things, including some reflections on the dialogues that have been going on here at the Restoration Weekend.  I can&#8217;t resist beginning with some census data because I can&#8217;t think of anything more interesting to do than to plow through historical census data, make tables and things like that.  Steve&#8217;s economic tables are no match for this and the match is my home State of Michigan versus the State of Texas.  When I was growing up in Michigan everybody said well Texas is going to progress, inevitably. They will get big labor unions and so forth.  They&#8217;ll have business corporations that will cooperate with the unions.  They&#8217;ll get big government.  They&#8217;ll have an income tax, they&#8217;ll be like us in Michigan and so forth – census date.  In 1970, Michigan had nine million people.  In 2010, 40 years later, Michigan had ten million people.  A little bit of growth over 40 years, not spectacular.  In 1970 Texas had 11 million people.  Just a little bit bigger than Michigan.  In 2010 Texas had 25 million people.  Explain that Professor Krugman.  You got cold winters in Michigan, but you sure got hot summers in Texas and you actually have some cold winters there too.  Anybody that&#8217;s moving to Texas for the weather is deluded.  So let me just make three major points here that have been to some extent inspired or amplified by what I&#8217;ve been hearing, listening and talking to people with about at the Restoration Weekend.</p>
<p>The first is about the macro economy in which I do not consider myself to be an expert by any means.  I do know that there was a congressman from New York that said if you tax something you get less of it; if you subsidize something you get more of it.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Would that be Jack Kemp?</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>Yeah and Jack had the right idea.  Obviously we want to get the macro economy growing again.  Some conservatives are saying okay we&#8217;ll just reduce rates on the high end like Reagan did and that will be fine.  I think we need something more than that.  For one thing, tax rates are not as high as when Reagan entered office.  There&#8217;s less to be cut, but I think we&#8217;ve got to do something else.  We&#8217;ve got to lower some tax rates.  We&#8217;ve got to get rid of some of the really hostile and anti-growth regulatory things and the crazed religion of the Radical Greens.  I think we also have to try to do something about family formation.  If we want to unleash human capital &#8212; and Steve has written about this recently.  I don&#8217;t know if his former colleagues at the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> editorial board are a little miffed at you, but one of the things that I think is holding us back to some extent, although it&#8217;s difficult to quantify, is family formation or the lack thereof.  All the sociological studies show that children raised in two-parent families do better by all sorts of metrics from crime to economic growth and productivity.  No, I don&#8217;t want to say anything negative about single parents and so forth.  But almost 50 years ago Pat Moynihan wrote his family report and he said that we&#8217;ve got a real crisis because 25 percent of black children are born out of wedlock.  The figure today is 70 percent.  The figure for all children is 40.  That is higher form of magnitude than what Moynihan was looking at justifiably, presciently, with alarm back in 1965, so what can we do.  The Tax Code doesn&#8217;t automatically shape behavior.  I think there are ways society can send signals.  When you look back in history people like us like to talk about declines of morals.  There are also increases in moral behavior that occur in various ways.  The United States in 1820 was a nation of drunks.  Basically alcohol consumption was cut by about two-thirds over the next 40 or 50 years.  That was an advance in human capital among other things.</p>
<p>We had senators like Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, others talking about child tax credit increase, other things to send money and signals to people to try to encourage family formation, to encourage two-parent families to give kids the advantage.  I think that there are a lot of other ways that we can think about this in terms of economics; but that&#8217;s one way to send a signal, that&#8217;s one way to give what Cass Sunstein calls a &#8220;nudge,&#8221; which in this case I think is useful.  So I think that we ought to be thinking about that and those of you who are active, and many of you are, in the voluntary sector, those of you who create organizations who work and organizations to try to foster better behavior, I think this is something many of you probably already are thinking about: how do we strengthen that kind of behavior because there&#8217;s a lot of human capital over the last generation that could have been created and wasn&#8217;t created.  That&#8217;s a problem.  We&#8217;d like to do better in the next generation, and how are we going to do this?</p>
<p>The second point I want to make is in another sense about the new generation and that&#8217;s taking a look at the election data, and this one was kind of fun to take a look at.  I was always a little dismayed at reading the number on President Romney, is to take a lot at two groups that we&#8217;ve been told are going to be a larger part of the electorate in years hence, and they are, and that we were told were going to be part of an inevitable during natural and permanent Democratic Party majority in America – the Hispanics and the Millennials.  If you made straight line extrapolations from the 2008 exit pole you might very well have thought that.  Both those groups, Hispanics, a term invented by a census bureaucrat circa 1970; Millennials, people born after 1980 or the 18 to 29 year-old-age group among voters, voted approximately two to one for Barack Obama in 2008.  They will be a larger part of the electorate.  My move to amend the Constitution to raise the voting age to 35 is barred &#8212; and permanently barring from the vote anyone born after 1980, our chances for that solution has been missed.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>I wouldn&#8217;t be able to vote.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>There you go, okay, sorry about that.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>No it&#8217;s all right, it&#8217;s all right.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>I&#8217;ll listen to your recommendation and start voting.  Those things having failed, those groups were going to go by, and you have writers like <i>National Journal&#8217;s </i>Ron Brownstein, who is a very talented guy, talking in addition about the non-white majority – divides electorate into whites and non-whites and says there will be a non-white majority.  Well let&#8217;s see how that&#8217;s working out.  Let&#8217;s start off with the Millennials.  In 2008 they voted 66/32 to Barack Obama.  Expressing that vote as a democratic margin as percentage of the total electorate.  Take the democratic popular vote margin among Millennials as a percentage of the total electorate. It&#8217;s 7 percent of the total electorate.  Barack Obama&#8217;s margin among the total electorate that year, 7 percent.  Essentially all of this popular vote margin came from them.  What has happened in years since.  Well the Millennials down there in their parents&#8217; basements have not been doing so well.  They were told that there was hope and change – that Obama was a with-it sort of person and he was cool and the other people weren&#8217;t and so forth.  In 2012 the Obama margin among Millennials goes down to 60 to 38.  That&#8217;s actually the biggest decline arithmetically among any age group so there is some decline.</p>
<p>It brings to mind the fact of the baby boomer, the fate of the baby boom generation politically, which I guess I&#8217;m part.  I&#8217;d like to say that the good news is that the baby boom generation is going to die out.  The bad news is I&#8217;m going to die about the same time.  The baby boom generation was 50/50 in the Nixon/McGovern race when the rest of the country was 63/36 for Nixon.  In 2012, 40 years later the baby boom generation voted for Mitt Romney, so people are affected by the changes and the things they see in their life as well as by some of the conservatizing forces perhaps of growing older, perhaps wiser, but in any case, the initial vote is not destiny.  Where were the Millennials in this election?  Take a look at the Exit Poll, the national vote for House of Representatives, it was 54/43 Democratic.  Express that as a percentage of the total electorate, Democratic margin as a percentage of the total electorate is 1.5 percent, 7 percent in 2008, 1.5 percent.  Millennial turnout will be higher in the general election than it was in the off-year election, so 1.5 percent translates to about 2 percent general election terms.  That&#8217;s a handicap for republicans.  They&#8217;ve got to carry their age groups by a larger margin in order to win, they did so, winning 52/45 House popular vote overall in this year in 2014 as well as 2010.</p>
<p>What&#8217;s happened to the Millennials in large part it&#8217;s a lot of human capital that&#8217;s not being achieved, that&#8217;s not finding an outlet.  I think one of the things I have felt is that there is a misfit between the Millennial generation and the way that they want to customize their own world.  Set up their own Facebook page and all this stuff, iPod list, that&#8217;s pretty antique now.  The tension between that and the centralized command and control policies of the Obama Administration. Those are policies that were initially crafted by people in an industrial age – 40,000 people worked at the Ford Rouge Plant.  You had a huge union local, it had 60,000 members.  You had a corporation that was one of the largest in the world.  The building was built in 1916 to 1918 at a cost of $1 billion which was actually a lot of money then.  I went around the Ford Rouge Plant in a car this summer – it&#8217;s 5.0 miles to drive around the perimeter of that place.  That is an artifact of the Industrial Age.  So individuals are small cogs in large machines, that&#8217;s what you do, big government, the centralized experts Jonathan Gruber will take care of you, you&#8217;re too stupid to take care of yourself, that&#8217;s the Industrial Age policies.  That&#8217;s a bad fit with this generation.  We&#8217;re not in an industrial age, we are in an information age.  The Ford Rouge Plant is a symbol of the Industrial Era, this is a symbol of the Information age.  It&#8217;s got more data in here than the Ford Rouge Plant ever processed and these policies aren&#8217;t working for them.  I think they&#8217;re waking up to that.  White Millennials are a significant Republican margin of this election.  The black under 30 voters.  Actually male blacks under 30 actually are moving towards Republicans more than their elders.  So I think that there&#8217;s some hope there. They are looking for something.</p>
<p>The Republicans have an opportunity, they sure don&#8217;t have a mandate. But they&#8217;ve got an opportunity for getting in touch with these people for policies that will enable them to find work, to earn success in ways that maximize their own special talents – their own individual interests.  The contribution that that individual uniquely can make to society.  The other side&#8217;s programs don&#8217;t give you any access to society.  The other side&#8217;s program don&#8217;t give you any access to that – you&#8217;re just a cog in a large machine.  These programs &#8212; I think conservatives can come up with a couple of programs that allow human capital to flourish in ways that are particular to the individual.  I think there&#8217;s an opportunity there.</p>
<p>Hispanics – Brownstein likes to lump together all &#8220;non-whites.&#8221;  I think this is misleading.  Hispanics and Asians, the people that fall into these categories, do not share the history experiences and heritages of Black Americans, which are, as many Black Americans will tell you, they are unique and they are absolutely correct in saying that.  They&#8217;re not behaving that way.  When Asians come to this country these days they don&#8217;t see separate drinking fountains marked off for them and they aren&#8217;t prevented from voting and in fact, what we&#8217;ve got is very different numbers.  If you look at the Hispanics, they go 67/31 Obama, 2008, 71/27 Obama, 2012.  They don&#8217;t like the self-deportation comment of Mitt Romney and so forth.  This election they&#8217;re moving in the other direction.  You look at the Exit Poll. It&#8217;s 62/36 for Democratic candidates for the House nationally.  But this aggregated by state.  One of the things you see, about 40 percent of Hispanics live in California, New York and New Jersey.  They were voting over 70 percent on average for the Democratic Party.  They are increasing Democratic margins that would exist if there were not a single Hispanic in any of those states.  If you are looking at the rest of the country, you&#8217;re seeing a different pattern.  In Rick Perry&#8217;s Texas, John Cornyn carried Hispanics 49/48, Greg Abbott got 44 percent here in Florida, Rick Scott got 38.  In Kansas and in Georgia, states with growing Hispanic percentages that some Democrats think are going to carry those states for them, Hispanics voted for the Republican, Nathan Deal, David Purdue, Pat Roberts.</p>
<p>My observation is that Hispanics are voting more like their white neighbors than their black neighbors and depending on the state they&#8217;re in.  I think that once again here are people that are looking for opportunity.  Here are people that are disproportionately in their younger years.  Here is human capital; potential human capital that is being under-utilized in this economy and these individuals are not being given an opening under this Administration&#8217;s policies so I think that once again there is significant opportunities and the idea that this is a totally non-white 90/10 democratic majority is simply factually wrong.  I could add that the Asian numbers show a flip from 73/26 Obama 2012 to 50/49 Republican.  I&#8217;m not sure that&#8217;s good data.  Sorry folks we&#8217;d love to believe it but I think that you&#8217;ve got small and potentially unrepresentative samples, but I think it&#8217;s an interesting mix and some of you are in situations like that.</p>
<p>Let me move on to my third topic that I want to talk about and that is one that I know evokes controversy or strong feelings in this room and that is immigration.  I think again there is a potential to unleash and enhance human capital in the United States, which we are in danger of missing, which people on the other side of the political fence are in danger of missing, and I think we have a set of immigration laws that have built on a system, that is built on a series of laws, 1924, passed 90 years ago, 1965, passed 49 years ago.  We inadvertently got a system that prefers extended family reunification of mostly low-skill people to admission of high skill people.  We&#8217;ve got a system now which we&#8217;ve got to lobby for declaring legalization of illegals, primarily low-skilled, and there&#8217;s an effective lobby for that.  There&#8217;s an effective lobby for increasing the number of H1BVs, as they tend to tie high-skilled people to a particular firm.  Microsoft wants you to work.  Apple wants you to work.</p>
<p>I think we should take this opportunity, the fact that it&#8217;s obvious that we need to change our immigration laws, to take a new approach and not just do patch work.  I&#8217;m not going to get into arguments here about what we do about seasonal farm workers, that&#8217;s a collateral issue.  I think that one of the things we&#8217;ve seen now, unlike 2006 and 2007, which is when the sort of design of the bill that passed the Senate in 2013 was formulated.  That&#8217;s a period when most of us thought we were going to have an unending surge of migration, especially low-skill migration from Latin America and some of us thought the best thing we can do is regularize it through some legalization.  We thought also that our high tech system was going on fine, we didn&#8217;t have any problems there and we thought that we had plenty of demand for low skill workers because the economy was growing.  Well, the surge in that migration from Mexico to the United States from 2007 to 2012 was zero, we don&#8217;t have that problem, and I think the argument is stronger today in my opinion than it was then, that says that legalization measures incentivize illegal immigration, which wouldn&#8217;t otherwise occur.  I think prior to 2007 it was going to occur anyway.  I think now we saw with the influx of Central Americans in the Rio Grande that there is an argument that undercuts the argument for legalization or at least suggests caution.</p>
<p>What I think is most important is to encourage high-skill immigration.  Steve and I disagree, I don&#8217;t think we need a lot of low-skill people right now, new people.  He thinks we always do.  I think we always need high skilled people in this country and I think if you want to maximize human capital in the United States or in the world, we want high-skilled people in this country, as many as we can get.  We&#8217;ve got a system where we admit a grudging amount of them, tied to particular firms.  I think we might do better if we let in high-skilled people, people who can demonstrate that they have high skills and abilities and let them see what they can do in something that we have here despite the effects of the current Administration, which is called the free enterprise system, a free economy and work their way up there.  I see as a model of the systems of our Anglosphere cousins Canada and Australia.  Canada and Australia have high-skill immigration.  They have point systems.  I had a chance to talk here with Senator Sessions and I said to him, let&#8217;s look at how Canada and Australia do this.  Can something like this be adapted to the United States?</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Canadians and Australians don&#8217;t want us to do this.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>Well, a Canadian diplomat in Washington said to me please, please do not adopt our Canadian immigration system.  We want these high-skilled people in Vancouver and Calgary and Toronto and Montreal.  We don&#8217;t want them going to the United States.  We want them in Canada and Australia wants them in Australia.  I have a lot of affection for Canada or Australia but I say let&#8217;s give them a fight.  I think that we should try to restructure this so that instead of extended family reunification of low-skill people we move towards high skilled people that have demonstrated their abilities and so forth in this country.</p>
<p>As I look back over the three things I&#8217;m talking about, let&#8217;s liberate the economy from high taxes, but also incentivize family behavior that we&#8217;re not sure we can fully influence but at least move people towards behavior that tends to maximize human capital.  Present opportunities to growing groups of the electorate like Hispanics and Millennials so to maximize their human capital and to exchange our immigration system and not just tinker with band aids and stuff on the 90-year-old legislation and the 49-year-old legislation but actually reframe our immigration law.  Take this opportunity to proclaim that we are a land of the free, home of the brave and we have open arms to people who come here with high skills and want to contribute to the United States and the world through becoming Americans.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>I think that, Michael, microphones are going to be going around in a second.  I&#8217;m going to ask a quick question.  Having just moved out from my parents&#8217; basement, thanks Ally and Paul, and being Hispanic and a Millennial, I&#8217;d like to talk kind of specifically about some of those policies the Republicans just took to Congress, both houses.  If you were in a room advising John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and the leadership in the Republican Party, what would you advise them they should do going out the gate in 2015 and what would you advise them not to do?</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Well the first thing, how many of you have been following this issue, this esoteric issue of corporate inversions of companies that are leaving and I say this is actually a real crisis in this country, and I don&#8217;t think a lot of the politicians quite understand what&#8217;s going on here.  If we don&#8217;t fix our corporate tax system &#8212; and most Americans have no idea about the corporate tax system and I don&#8217;t think Barack Obama understands this either.  Our corporate tax, as most of you in this room know, we have the highest statutory corporate tax in the world.  We&#8217;re at 40 percent and it&#8217;s interesting.  If you look over the last 25 years it used to be, Michael, if you go back to 1990 the rest of the world was at about 45 percent.  You know what&#8217;s happened over the last 25 years?  The rest of the world is adopting Reaganonics – Ireland, England, Canada, they are cutting their rates very sharply and so it used to be we were 5 percentage points below the world average.  Today we&#8217;re 15 to 20 percent above the world average.  That doesn&#8217;t work anymore.  I describe this as a Head Start program for every country that we compete with, right?  It&#8217;s true and I would even make the case it is unpatriotic to support a 40 percent corporate tax.  The people who are harmed by this tax are not big, rich Wall Street fat cats who own stock, although it does reduce returns to sharers, but there&#8217;s a lot of really good evidence by some of my friends at the American Enterprise Institute and some of my colleagues at Heritage, that the people that are hurt the most by this high corporate tax when companies leave is American workers.  This affects their wages and affects their job opportunities, so I would make the case by that and if I could do one thing overnight I would say, let&#8217;s just get rid of the corporate income tax, right?  Let&#8217;s just get rid of the corporate income tax and tax it to the shareholders when they earn it as capital gain.</p>
<p>But if we can&#8217;t do that there is a mandate in my opinion, there is a necessity we get that corporate tax rate down to 20 to 25 percent because if we do not do this and if we do not act quickly &#8212; you&#8217;ve seen what&#8217;s happened in the last nine months.  Think about the companies.  Burger King. Burger King is leaving the United States.  Walgreen&#8217;s wants to leave.  Pfizer wants to leave.  I could name four or five other major Fortune 100 companies that are essentially renouncing their United States citizenship and leaving the United States and as you said, going to Canada, going to Ireland.  In Ireland the highest corporate tax rate is 4½ percent.  That means you can change your location from, say, New York to Dublin, and you can cut your corporate income tax by two-thirds.  Companies have a charge to maximize their return to their shareholders so that would be the number one thing – get rid of the corporate income tax and then number two, let&#8217;s just blow up the whole income tax and start over with a flat tax.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>I agree with both of those things and I think you know that, but how to Republicans send that credibly to Obama when he spent his entire Presidency demonizing corporations and saying they&#8217;re the Devil.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Let me just make one quick comment about this.  I believe one of the biggest, one of the turning points in this election &#8212; and correct me if I&#8217;m wrong you guys because you know politics better than I do.  That imbecilic comment that Hillary Clinton made seven days before the next.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>When she was giving her Elizabeth Warren imitation?</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Exactly.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>No there is going to be a very spirited competition if those two run against each other because we don&#8217;t know who&#8217;s going to carry Salem.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>My only point in bringing that up is I do believe Brian that the big problem with the Democrats today, the Democrats today are anti-business, right?  They are anti-business.  My old boss Dick Army, you know Dick Army was the House Majority Leader, he used to say, and he said it so perfectly, liberals love jobs and they hate employers.  Liberals love jobs and they have employers.  You can&#8217;t have one without the other.  This is where I think it gets to your point about Millennials saying, wait a minute, the Democrats said they were going to create all these jobs.  When is the last time?  Just a thought I want to put in your head.  When is the last time this President in the last six years said anything good about business?  When has he said, he is the same President who said two years ago, &#8220;you didn&#8217;t build that,&#8221; so that anti-business sentiment is the ruination of the Democratic Party in my opinion.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>Well, Steve starts off right with the populist to appeal and cut the corporate income tax.  You&#8217;re absolutely right on the arguments intellectually and I think there is a political avenue to do this and an openness to do this.  There is a lot of low-hanging fruit off there – the Keystone XL Pipeline, vote on a bunch of things where you&#8217;re going to get, by the way, a bunch of Democrats, 31 House Democrats voted for the Keystone Pipeline last week and so forth, that it&#8217;s a 70 percent issue.  You&#8217;ve got a bunch of 70 percent issues, but I guess I would just reiterate my thinking on the immigration thing.  I really think that we have an opportunity to change the trajectory of incoming immigration and so forth in the world in the years ahead.  I wrote this book, <i>Shaping Our Nation:  How Surges in Migration Transformed American Politics</i> and it&#8217;s about internal migrations and it&#8217;s about immigration migrations.  We&#8217;ve had these unexpected surges of migration.  Nobody in 1965 was predicting huge migration from Latin America.  We actually imposed a limit of something like 60,000 Mexicans a year in the &#8217;65 Act, did you know that?  It didn&#8217;t turn out to be very effective because of family reunification provisions and because of illegal immigration.  Migration from Mexico was ten times that approximately between 1982 and 2007 and then it stops and that&#8217;s a historic pattern too.  You get these surges that last one or two generations, they stop.  I want the next surges to be high-skilled people from around the world.</p>
<p>One of the statistics that I saw recently and perhaps appropriate of last night&#8217;s meeting was that the percentage of people in the United States &#8212; like some of President Reagan&#8217;s statistics this may be wrong, so I want to be fact checked on this.  The data was that of people born in Africa, that doesn&#8217;t include the President, people born in African in the United States today is something like 47 percent of them have college degrees and moving on to their accounting degree and getting that and we see that in Washington, DC.  Michelle Obama, that Minnesota gets the Somalians, we&#8217;ve got the Ethiopians and it&#8217;s better for our metro area.  But anyway, that&#8217;s an interesting data point.  Let&#8217;s get the high-skilled people across the world because it&#8217;s better for our country and a more prosperous, more creative America is better for the world.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>You know Michael I was in &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>It&#8217;s better for people all over the world because they in many ways have often been free riders on advances made in the United States and the people of the United States who make advances, who have economic success are also major supporters, not only through taxes and foreign aid but much more importantly through voluntary activities that have helped people around the world.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>I was just going to say, I got in a taxi in Washington, DC about two weeks ago and the driver was an Ethiopian and he kept staring at me, and he kept looking back at me, he had this big smile on his face, &#8220;You&#8217;re on Fox News, aren&#8217;t you.  I watch Fox News every day.&#8221;  I&#8217;m like these are our kind of people.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>All right let&#8217;s go to some questions from the audience.  We have a microphone in the back.</p>
<p><strong>Rep. Michele Bachmann: </strong>Thanks.  You guys are so brilliant and I want to thank you and I just want to see me too to Steve.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Michele you are irreplaceable in the United States Congress.  We love you.  You are awesome!  We need you to run against Mark Dayton for Governor of Minnesota.</p>
<p><strong><strong>Rep. Michele Bachmann</strong>: </strong>No I just want to say how much I love and underscore exactly what you said – in my former life I was a federal tax litigation attorney, before I came to the U.S. Congress and I think again this is a plus-up area where Republicans can go on offense in the next two years against Hillary Clinton or whoever the nominee is, because this is a job creations tax.  That&#8217;s what the Corporate Tax Code is, it&#8217;s a tax on job creation and we need to frame it in such a way so that people know that what we want to do is get rid of these job killing taxes and have job creation taxes and I&#8217;ll give you one perfect example based upon inversions.  Two weeks before the 2012 Election I sat down with all of the medical device industry in Minnesota from the baby startups all the way to the King Daddy which was Medtronic and all of them could be predictive.  They saw that this could very well go the way of Barack Obama and the way of the medical device tax and so they&#8217;d been out looking in Europe and other countries to see where they could move their industries, and they were very frank.  They said if we don&#8217;t take this election in 2012, we&#8217;re out of here because we&#8217;ve got better places to go for industry and so Medtronic is one of those companies that announced an inversion and then the Treasury Department came back and was basically going to cancel all those inversions but it&#8217;s human nature.  People go where they can make the income so I think this is a target rich environment for us to go on offense and I think we&#8217;ll get Millennials.  I think that we should compete for every bit of space for every voter because it&#8217;s about every voter, their job.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Let me make a broader point because I think that what you said is so important.  Tell me if you think I&#8217;m wrong about this, Michele, but I think Republicans have an incredible opportunity right now with the old Reagan blue collar industrial union workers; because think about that.  Put it like this, Michael.  How can Tom Steyer coexist in a party with unionized blue collar workers? Tom Steyer is trying to deindustrialize America.  He wants to destroy the jobs of pipe fitters, welders, electricians – he wants to destroy the jobs of Teamsters.  Your and my party, Michele, you&#8217;re the person to do this.  We ought to be going into these union halls, I&#8217;m serious, and we should be saying, we&#8217;re the ones who are trying to save your jobs.  It&#8217;s these wacko Green Environmentalists who are trying to destroy your jobs, right?  That should be our message.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>A question from Senator Sessions.</p>
<p><strong>Sen. Jeff Sessions: </strong>Thank you, just briefly.  I recall having met with a Canadian who runs their system of immigration.  They are very happy with it. They are very pleased.  At a hearing two years ago in the Judiciary Committee, the Microsoft representative and group pushing for high-tech visas praised the Canadian system.  I said, well, Mr. Microsoft, I&#8217;ll adopt the Canadian system today.  Do you agree to that?  What do you think his answer was?  He had this rueful smile, and the reason was they made a deal.  They got their deal on the big bill.  La Raza and the businesses who want lower-skill workers and the political groups that want family reunification.  They made a partnership so that the package itself was unacceptable, in my opinion, so I guess I would say if we can break this bunch from their unholy comprehensive alliance and focus on the Canadian-type system, which gives points if you &#8212; millions of people speak English in the world.  If you&#8217;ve got two people to apply to American, why not choose the one who already speaks English?  Have we got two young people in Honduras and one has two years of college and one is a high school dropout, why not let the scholar get in?</p>
<p>We&#8217;ve got data to show that people with two years of education who come to America almost always succeed.  Data shows that people who come to American without a high school degree, without language skills, almost always remain in poverty for generations.  So I guess, Michael, I think you&#8217;re on the right track.  I also am dubious about some of the things they say.  Microsoft just laid off 18,000.  Facebook, Mr. Zuckerberg, they only have 7,000 people.  This is not a big job industry.  If you travel the state like I do, and go in to business after business, it&#8217;s incredible the amount of robotics we&#8217;ve got.  We&#8217;re going to have more widgets made with fewer people every year for the next 30 years.  So we&#8217;ve got to think about how our people can be able to take the few jobs that exist out there, and we want to have their pay go up and not down.  So anyway, I&#8217;ve gone too long.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>I think that this is a great example, Senator, that we are in an area where we need good policy instead of good lobbying.  There&#8217;s a lobby for H1Bs because they stay with my company and you got indentured servitude or something like it.  But high skill hasn&#8217;t got a lobby.  It has got to find one.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>Why don&#8217;t we get a question over here and let&#8217;s walk to this side of the room too so there are a couple of questions over here.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Yeah, one thing you haven&#8217;t mentioned and please address it, is the toll on human beings of the Green Agenda.  The world and our country came into fruition on oil, on energy.  Nothing works, no one gets a better life without the energy to propel it.  If you look at the Green Agenda, as a matter of fact I live in Austin.  We have a little tabloid that&#8217;s called <i>The Austin Chronical.</i>  Yeah you laugh, but it&#8217;s amazingly effective.  They had some smartly groomed black kids calling green the new black, displayed on the cover of last&#8217;s week&#8217;s <em>Chronical</em>.  This is a lie.  It&#8217;s all a lie.  If you take away the energy, Africa stops.  They have no chance of ever getting out from under the chains of and if you look at China, what has propelled them forward at break neck speed?  Energy, energy, energy and they take that all away and would you please address that because that&#8217;s one of the human tolls of the Green Agenda.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>So I just got back my, it&#8217;s a great point.  I just got back from Zimbabwe.  My niece is a Peace Corps volunteer in this little village really out in the middle of nowhere.  When you were talking I was thinking about this because this village, they are incredibly great people.  I just fell in love with these people but you know, they&#8217;re living almost literally like it&#8217;s the 16<sup>th</sup> Century and you know what they don&#8217;t have in this town?  Electricity, electricity. You can&#8217;t do anything if you don&#8217;t have electric power, and for our government, for Barack Obama to run around the world telling these countries they should use fossil fuels, use less fossil fuels, that&#8217;s immoral, right?  He&#8217;s basically saying he wants to keep these countries poor and that&#8217;s a message we need to get through to people.</p>
<p>Just one other quick little story: we lost our electricity last summer when we had a big storm in Northern Virginia and I wrote a piece in the <i>Wall Street Journal, </i>and it got a huge response, and I just said what happened when the Morris electricity went out.  I have three kids, two teenagers who I don&#8217;t like very much and then I have an 11 year old but my teenagers when the electricity went out, they thought the first few hours were really cool. We had a fire and we had candles and so on and I&#8217;ve got to tell you.  After the first day, because we were without electricity for 72 hours, my kids were like screaming how do people live without electricity, my God they didn&#8217;t have any screen, they didn&#8217;t have cell phones.  The point is if we let the Green Agenda go forward as these people want to do, we&#8217;re going to have rolling brownouts and blackouts in this country.  If you want to see the American people get angry, it&#8217;s going to be when that happens.  If you turn out the lights, people get pretty upset.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Good morning, two quick points.  I find myself not surprised that once again I agree with Senator Sessions.  Good morning Senator.  Alan Greenspan testified before Chuck Shumer on April 30, 2009.  It&#8217;s just two sentences, I want to read this because I think we have too many high-tech workers from foreign countries competing with American high-tech workers which disincentivizes kids from going into those fields.  This is from Greenspan&#8217;s testimony.  &#8220;Greatly expanding our quotas for the highly skilled with lower wage premiums of the skilled over the lesser skilled.  Skill shortages in America exist because we are shielding our skilled labor force from world competition.  Quotas have been substituted for the wage pricing mechanism and in the process&#8221; &#8212; this word amazes me &#8212; &#8220;we have created a privileged elite whose incomes are being supported at non-competitively high levels by immigration quotas on skilled professionals.  Eliminating such restrictions would reduce at least some of our income and equality.&#8221;  We need to get more American kids into those high tech industries, item number one.  Item number two, if you go to the UN web site you will find that they predict the two fastest ways of increasing remittances flowing from the U.S. to the Third World, sustainability, green, and in that comprehensive reform. We need to understand that our laws were based on the concept of protecting American lives and American jobs, first and foremost.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>Michael, what are your thoughts.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>I&#8217;m not sure I&#8217;m so concerned about protecting high-skill people from competition.  I think high skills are not are zero sum game.  Andrew Carnegie did not suffer because John D. Rockefeller was successful in business.  You got one immigrant and the other is the son of a confidence man.  You can make an argument I think particularly at the stage of employment that we have now.  Steve would not agree with it, but that low-skill employment is the zero sum game for the people and you let in more low-skills from other countries you drive down wages of low skill people in this country.  I think there&#8217;s something at least marginally to that.  High skill people are going to create and do things that you central planners didn&#8217;t think up.  They&#8217;re going to actually figure out new things and Andrew Carnegie figured out new things, the poor boy from Scotland.  So I&#8217;m for letting a lot of competition bloom with high-skilled people and I don&#8217;t think they ever crowd each other out.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Here&#8217;s why that&#8217;s completely wrong to say that our high-skilled workers or immigrants are taking jobs from American high-skilled workers.  There&#8217;s a very simple reason why that&#8217;s completely wrong.  It&#8217;s because 36 percent of the businesses in Silicon Valley that hire American high-tech workers were founded by immigrants.  So if the immigrants didn&#8217;t come here a lot of those businesses wouldn&#8217;t exist in the first place.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>What we&#8217;ve seen with a lot of Hispanic voters &#8212; the one seriously contested Senate race was a state with above national average Hispanic percentage, was in Colorado and in Colorado the Democrats, partly through an effort of very rich people putting together a pretty smart political operation that&#8217;s won the major offices there, they imposed a gentry liberal, my friend Joe Cochran&#8217;s phrase, a gentry liberal program: gun control.  Hispanic voters recalled one of the state senators that voted for it in Pueblo County, 42 percent Hispanic county.  They were going to have an anti-fracking referendum.  They decided to take that off the ballot because it was polling so badly they were going to get licked 80/20 or something like that.  Abortion absolutism, Senator Mark Udall became known by the liberal media as Mark Uterus, ran half his ads, the NARAL pro-choice ad said that there would be no contraceptives available in Colorado if Cory Gardner was elected to the U.S. senate.  We now have a chance to fact check that prediction since Gardner was elected and we&#8217;ll see if there are any condoms available in Colorado.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>Along with their marijuana.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>Well I&#8217;m not going to go there.  They are rejecting that agenda.  The question is do Republicans have an agenda that can go forward and that can help them maximize their human capital.  Help them achieve their dreams.  Help them earn success.  I think we&#8217;ve been trying up in the platform, a lot of you in the audience are working at this sort of thing.  Can&#8217;t give you a fast formula but I think there are Republicans working on it.  I think that we&#8217;ve got to get going and the other low hanging fruit.  What Michele mentioned, the medical devices tax.  We have these wonderful industries that produce things like prosthetics that enable wounded veterans to live full lives in a way that wouldn&#8217;t have ever been possible before and what does this crowd do? They want to tax it.  I think that there are a lot of opportunities here.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Well Michael let me just give you one, Hispanics are an obvious one but let me just put up one thought about black Americans.  Anybody in this room from Illinois?  A few.  What a great race, Bruce Rauner won one of the most important races in the country this year, and what&#8217;s interesting about Bruce Rauner, this is a near billionaire hedge fund manager.  They tried to run their own Mitt Romney campaign against him.  Here&#8217;s what interesting about Bruce Rauner.  I think every Republican in the country should take a page out of his book.  You know what he did?  Bruce Rauner spent a lot of his time going into black churches, black neighborhoods, black schools and he had a couple of messages.  One of the things he said, which every Republican should do when we&#8217;re talking to black audiences.  What have the Democrats done for you?  Really, what have the Democrats done for black American?  Nothing.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>No, I&#8217;m from Detroit and I&#8217;ve seen what happens.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>Yeah, right, exactly.  That was his point and what Bruce Rauner said is you elect me Governor of this State – I&#8217;m going to clean up your neighborhoods, I&#8217;m going to give you school choice, I&#8217;m going to clean up your schools, I&#8217;m going to give you jobs and you know what?  Bruce Ronner got 20 percent of the black vote in Illinois, so we can win a bigger percentage of black Americans with a message of economic growth.</p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone: </strong>Well, and here&#8217;s an Hispanic message.  California and Texas, we&#8217;ve been looking at the number of jobs.  Both of those states in the 2010 census were about 36 percent Hispanic.  Texas Hispanics get better test scores than California Hispanics.  Texas is non-union, non-ed run schools do a better job than California&#8217;s Teacher Union runs schools, okay?  Texas Hispanics make more money than California Hispanics.  Texas Hispanics have lower unemployment than California Hispanics.  We have a test case on whose policies help Hispanic people in American and I think also there&#8217;s a spirit of, well there&#8217;s a spirit of enterprise.  There&#8217;s also a cultural spirit.  When you go to Texas the people in Texas look at somebody that&#8217;s got stereotypical Latino features, they say that&#8217;s a Texan.  When rich Californians see somebody with that figure they hand them the keys to the car because they assume it&#8217;s a valet parking attendant.</p>
<p><strong>Stephen Moore: </strong>So the message here, folks, is we have to make America look more like Texas and less like New York and California.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>Except for the weather, except for the weather.  Thank you all very much for taking the time to listen to us and let&#8217;s give one more round of applause to our great panel.</p>
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		<title>Newt Gingrich&#8217;s Keynote Address at Restoration Weekend</title>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 29 Nov 2012 04:49:44 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[A political visionary discusses the path forward for conservatism. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>Editor&#8217;s note: Below is the video and transcript of keynote speaker Newt Gingrich&#8217;s address at the David Horowitz Freedom Center&#8217;s 2012 Restoration Weekend. The event took place Nov. 15th-18th at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida. </em></p>
<p><iframe src="http://blip.tv/play/AYOJ430C.html?p=1" width="550" height="443" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://a.blip.tv/api.swf#AYOJ430C" style="display:none"></embed></p>
<p>Newt Gingrich:  Thank you.  Thank you all very, very much.  And thank you for that introduction.  And, Louie, thank you for the suicidal moment of bravery, which I&#8217;m sure pleased John Boehner beyond belief.</p>
<p>David, it&#8217;s always great to be back with you.  And you are, in fact, an institutional and cultural warrior.  You understand exactly what needs to be done and we are thrilled to be with you once again.</p>
<p>I also want to invite all of you &#8212; we did a movie called <em>City Upon a Hill</em>, which Callista and I will introduce at 2:30, working with Citizens United.  And it really communicates the American exceptionalism which is at the heart of Callista&#8217;s two books in which Ellis the Elephant introduces four-to-eight year olds, which I thinks fits a little bit of what Robert Davi was talking about.  We have to be in the culture, communicating creatively and effectively and attractively in order to be directly competitive.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s part of the reason we&#8217;ve had such a great time now making seven documentaries altogether with Dave Bossie and Citizens United and why we&#8217;ve had a good time at Regnery introducing both children&#8217;s books, where they reopened their children&#8217;s division, and the books I&#8217;ve written with them.</p>
<p>In addition, I have a &#8212; and we&#8217;ve launched an American Legacy Book Tour, which has gone very well so far.  This is my third volume on George Washington as a biography, a<em> </em>series<em> </em>of fictional novels.  This is one is <em>Victory at Yorktown</em>.</p>
<p>Particularly I want to single out somebody who was in many, many ways responsible for us doing these three volumes.  And that&#8217;s Gay Gaines, whose leadership at Mount Vernon was just unimaginable.  If you want to see an example of fighting the cultural war effectively, go look at the Education Center of Mount Vernon and the great job they do.  And I hope &#8212; we haven&#8217;t worked out the details yet, but I hope with her help that I&#8217;ll be able to actually teach a course online from Kaplan University on George Washington from Mount Vernon on his birthday.  And I think that it&#8217;s the kind of thing where you open it up to the whole country.</p>
<p>Part of our commitment has to be that in the long run truth beats falsehood.  And the fact that we are so incompetent as a party that we can&#8217;t tell the truth as well as the other side lies is shame on us.  I mean, it&#8217;s not their fault they lie. Given their values, they have no choice.  But it is really pathetic that we can&#8217;t tell the truth more effectively than they can lie.  That&#8217;s apparently where we are.  (Applause)</p>
<p>I want to comment Robert for being here because it, frankly, takes more courage for him to be in this room, given the reception that we have back in Los Angeles, than any other single person.  And so we&#8217;re thrilled that you&#8217;re here and we appreciate you.  (Applause)</p>
<p>I also want to note that Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert were two of the five members who I called the National Security Five, because they had the courage to ask the question about influence in the State Department and the national security process.  And that took real courage.  They were assaulted for having the courage to ask good questions.</p>
<p>But, candidly, I think the same question has to be raised again.  And I may, at the risk of getting them in trouble, resurrect their letter for the following reason.  To what extent was the fundamental total dishonesty of the administration on the cause of the attack at Ben Ghazi a function of the internal influence of Islamists who refuse to concede that terrorism is from Islam?  (Applause)</p>
<p>And let me just remind you, if you stand up for the truth, you will be in a fight.  When you run into Republicans who are too proud, too organized, too courteous, wear clothing that&#8217;s too neat in order to be in a fight, you&#8217;re watching people who are prepared to surrender.  And I&#8217;m very concerned that the leadership in the House doesn&#8217;t understand that they have a President who&#8217;s going to take everything he can get.</p>
<p>And my major comment on revenues I&#8217;m doing this week, tomorrow morning, is real simple:  Let me see what Obama is prepared to bring to the table that he will endorse and deliver Democrats on fundamental reform of spending and entitlements.  And then I&#8217;ll look at a variety of things.  But this idea that we should walk in, as we did in 1982 under Reagan, as we did in 1990 under Bush, we should lead it to taxes, they should promise that at some point in the distant future maybe under certain circumstances they might conceivably eventually cut some spending as long as it&#8217;s not real.  I mean, how often do you have to be stupid to decide you shouldn&#8217;t be in the business?  (Applause)</p>
<p>Now, the other person that I want to mention who was here earlier and I think may come back is Colonel Allen West.  And I certainly hope all of you will help (applause) &#8212; he clearly needs financial support to go through the recount process and, as they&#8217;ve already discovered, entire boxes that weren&#8217;t counted, 1,000 votes that have disappeared, a variety of small, typical in a Democratic county that&#8217;s trying to win the election situation.  Allen needs your help.  He deserves it.  He&#8217;s a tremendously courageous person and a real, real asset.</p>
<p>Now, Robert Davi got me to thinking, because I thought he had a very, very useful conversation.  And, by definition, sees the world from a different angle and through a different set of experiences than virtually anybody else in the conservative movement.  Because he and a handful of very courageous people are actually conservatives in a zone where it is a very heretical thing to do and can be very dangerous for your career.</p>
<p>And I think his whole point about the incrementalism and reversing the incrementalism led me &#8212; this has been a very difficult period for me.  I was totally wrong on election night.  And Callista and I &#8212; I had been so convinced that you could not carry 7.9% unemployment, $2.00 a gallon extra for gasoline, the largest deficits in history, radical policies, dishonesty about Ben Ghazi &#8212; you couldn&#8217;t carry all that and win the election.   So I&#8217;d been fairly convinced we &#8212; I said publicly I thought we&#8217;d win with 315 electoral votes and 53% of the vote.  Because, given my understanding of the country I used to campaign in, that&#8217;s what would have happened.</p>
<p>And the first thing we knew was, frankly, was listening to Frank Luntz&#8217;s phone call about 5:30 when he read the exit poll numbers.  And the exit poll numbers were so stark and so consistent that we just kind of stared at each other when we hung up.</p>
<p>Now, I&#8217;m going to come back to this, but part of what I have concluded is, all of my career I&#8217;ve believed this is a center-right country and that essentially our job was to organize and communicate and we would win.  I believe now, because we have lost the entertainment world, the news media, and the academic world, this is, in a sense, at best a centrist country with a dominant left and we&#8217;re, in fact, fighting to reclaim lost ground, we&#8217;re not fighting to consolidate the [current.]  And I think that&#8217;s a very different strategic situation and will require deep thought.  And I&#8217;ll come back to that in a minute.</p>
<p>Let me just ask you &#8212; and I want you to think about this a minute.  How many of you thought on Election Day Romney would win?  Okay.  Raise your hands again.  I just want &#8212; just look around.  Okay.  Because I want to make a point about this.  Robert&#8217;s saying no, because he was in a different vantage point, living there.  He&#8217;s &#8212; &#8220;Are all these other people stupid?&#8221;  (Laughter)</p>
<p>Robert Davi:  (Inaudible &#8211; off microphone)</p>
<p>Newt Gingrich:  That&#8217;s right.  But it&#8217;s part of the whole thing.  Okay, so, let me just ask a couple &#8212; how many of you would have believed Tuesday morning of election that Romney would get 1.5 million fewer votes than McCain?  Think about this.  Probably with the numbers he&#8217;s down about 1.5.  But, okay, 1.5 million, 2 million &#8212; less, okay?  How many of you would have believed that he would have done worse with Asians than with Latinos?  Think about this.  How many of you would have believed that Obama could churn out &#8212; I talked to Tommy Thompson, who pointed out that in Milwaukee the turnout was 87.5%</p>
<p>Now, it raises two questions.  One is, how did they do it?  And the other is, in the five or ten biggest Republican counties, why didn&#8217;t we do it?  I mean, think about it.  And this was pretty consistent across the country.  This is not &#8212; you have to look at how big their margins are. You can say, okay, maybe Port St. Lucie has some voter fraud.  They don&#8217;t have voter fraud on that scale in every single place that they were winning big.  They had intense, focused, two-year-long organizational politics, which we are totally out of sequence with.</p>
<p>Now &#8212; so I think that we are in a challenging &#8212; and this is not a Romney problem.  This is a Republican institutional problem.  Romney&#8217;s just a symptom.  We lost North Dakota in the US Senate race.  We lost Montana in the Senate race, and I think also the governorship.  These are not states that we should have been losing.  George Allen lost in Virginia.  You just go down the list and you have to say to yourself, there is something profoundly wrong.</p>
<p>Now, I want to tell you, having been reasonably successful for most of my career in politics, when I am as wrong as I was election night &#8212; and I had, thanks to R.C. Hammond, who is here &#8212; we had brilliantly scheduled me into CNN and CBS the next morning so that I could explain the meaning of the Romney victory.  (Laughter)  And actually, with Dave Bossie and Citizens United, we ended up not going to the RNC victory party for obvious reasons, starting about 8:05 or something.  And we went &#8212; I think we closed down (inaudible) because we just kept sitting there, stunned.</p>
<p>Now, one of our people, maybe the smartest person that works for us, Vince Haley, went to bed at 9:30.  He said, &#8220;I get it.  I don&#8217;t want to deal with it.  I&#8217;m not &#8212; &#8221;  And he went to bed.  He refused to watch TV.  We weren&#8217;t that smart, we were masochists.  We&#8217;re sitting there going &#8212; and another piece of bad news comes in.  I mean, it was really &#8212; it was just amazing.</p>
<p>So there I am the next morning.  And I was about to go on CBS News first, like at 7:00 in the morn &#8211; &#8212; it was really truly one of the dumbest scheduling I&#8217;ve done in a long time.  And I thought, what do you &#8212; because obviously I had said the day before I thought we&#8217;d win the 315 electoral votes. So I walked in and I boldly took the following position:  I was wrong.  I was so wrong and so profoundly wrong that it&#8217;s going to take several months to think through just how wrong we are.</p>
<p>And I want to start with that.  I&#8217;m launching a project through Gingrich Productions with Callista and we&#8217;re going to try to raise money from about 25 people or institutions at 25 each.  We&#8217;re going to take half our staff and put them full time on going through all the data.  And not just about votes, but about campaigning.</p>
<p>We did <em>The View</em> this week as part of our American Legacy Book Tour.  They could never get Romney on <em>The View.  </em>I did <em>The Colbert Report.</em>  They couldn&#8217;t get Romney on <em>The Colbert Report</em>.  I was at the University of Texas two days ago.  Do you know how many kids walked up and said they saw me on Colbert?  Dave was telling me that his son, Griffin, who&#8217;s now nine, noticed that Romney wouldn&#8217;t do <em>Nickelodeon.</em> So you have Barack Obama, President of the United States, finds the time to be interviewed by a kid on <em>Nickelodeon</em>, but the Republican can&#8217;t, who&#8217;s the challenger who needs the votes, can&#8217;t find the time.  Why?  Because I suspect one of his staff said, &#8220;Oh, that&#8217;s not our market.&#8221;</p>
<p>And so if you have a 50 &#8212; if you have a 47% view of America, it&#8217;s amazing how many places you concede.  In fact, if you have a 47% view of America, you&#8217;re not going to be President, you shouldn&#8217;t be President, you couldn&#8217;t govern as President.  Because you have to have a 100% view of who you&#8217;re going to lead, and you have to communicate with 100%.  I mean, it&#8217;s just &#8212; period.  (Applause)</p>
<p>We have gotten into a cycle &#8212; those of you like David who are in California live through this, like Robert.  We&#8217;ve gotten into a cycle we say, &#8220;We&#8217;re not going to carry California so let&#8217;s not spend any effort in California.&#8221;  Therefore we don&#8217;t carry California.  We don&#8217;t build a party organization.  We don&#8217;t have people who are out there every day.  The only thing we do is go to California to raise money.  And the net result is guess what?  We&#8217;re not going to carry California.</p>
<p>Now if you write off the largest state in the country you hand it to your opponent.  Say, &#8220;Here.  You don&#8217;t have to campaign there.  You don&#8217;t have to spend a penny there.  You don&#8217;t have to worry about it.  We&#8217;re giving you this gift to start the day.&#8221;  I&#8217;ve been describing it as having a football coach who said, &#8220;I know there&#8217;s 53½ yard width of a football field.  But I&#8217;ve decided our game plan is to focus on 30.  And we&#8217;re going to dominate that 30.&#8221;  And then every time we go out there we find out that our opponents, who have studied the game films, on every play score a touchdown because they run in the 20 yards we&#8217;re not &#8212; that we&#8217;ve conceded.  And then we have a meeting afterwards.  They say, &#8220;You know, if our defensive backs had just been prettier.&#8221;  (Laughter)</p>
<p>And then we have these other games.  We say, &#8220;They cheat.&#8221;  They&#8217;re out in these areas they&#8217;re not supposed to be in.  If they weren&#8217;t out there they couldn&#8217;t score every time.  But it&#8217;s very hard for us to get a group in a room to say, &#8220;You know, maybe we better learn to play the whole field.  And maybe we&#8217;d better learn to fight for every inch.&#8221;  (Applause)</p>
<p>So, probably &#8212; I hope this will all going to be published by Regnery probably by June.  And it will have with it a video package.  Because you have to see some of the stuff.  You have to see the Obama ads on Spanish language media that show Romney explaining that it&#8217;s okay to deport your grandmother.  Now, I don&#8217;t care how good your argument is over economics.  When you explain to somebody in a community that we&#8217;re going to deport grandma, they kind of go, &#8220;Hmm.  Let me get this straight.  I can have a less adequate job but Sunday lunch.  Or I can have a really great job and send postcards.&#8221;  It just becomes emotionally impossible.</p>
<p>And we were doing this over and over and over.  And it&#8217;s not Mitt; it&#8217;s the entire Republican consultant class.  (Applause)  You know, you look at the amount of money that Rove-related operations spent.  You look at the philosophy behind it, the technique they used.  And you say, &#8220;You think you&#8217;re going to win? &#8221;  If we had spent 10% of that money in year one of the Obama administration competing head to head with messaging and then 10% in year two and 10% in year three, we&#8217;d have been in a battlefield that was even.</p>
<p>Instead what we do &#8212; and this is partly because of many of you &#8212; we have a donor class that gets extraordinarily excited around Labor Day, and rushes in and says &#8212; I&#8217;ve got a very smart guy who said to me, &#8220;Which counties do you think we should focus on?&#8221;  Because he drank the Kool-Aid.  &#8220;Boy, if we carry Hamilton County &#8211;&#8221;  And I said, &#8220;You know, there&#8217;s a country.&#8221;</p>
<p>The most efficient way to communicate in this country is national.  Rush Limbaugh is in 50 states.  Sean Hannity is in 50 states.  (Applause)  And that doesn&#8217;t &#8212; I know a fair amount about targeting.  But when we won a majority in 1994, we beat Danny Rostenkowski in downtown Chicago because we followed Wooden&#8217;s theory of a full court press and we wanted to compete everywhere.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s the way we&#8217;ve got &#8212; we want to serve the whole country.  We want to compete in the whole country.  We want to take the left on intellectually, but we want to learn the tools and techniques of taking them on effectively.  And if it isn&#8217;t effective we&#8217;re just wasting our time.  (Applause)</p>
<p>So what I&#8217;d like to do is open up a few minutes to questions.  I k now you guys are running late and I don&#8217;t want to keep you too long.  So David, I suspect, will give me the hook at some point.  But let me toss it open for comments, thoughts, and it&#8217;s yours.  Yes, sir?</p>
<p>Unidentified Audience Member:  Thank you for all that you do.  What can the House do relative to executive orders or EPA regulations to impede Obama&#8217;s ability to rule by fiat?</p>
<p>Newt Gingrich:  They could refuse to fund it.  They simply say, &#8220;We&#8217;re not going to pass any bill which provides any money for doing these things.&#8221;  Then the President would say, &#8220;Well, I&#8217;ll veto the bill.&#8221;  And they you&#8217;d be &#8212; you&#8217;d do what we did.  We closed the government twice.  The second time we closed the government I think it was for an amazingly long period of time.  People couldn&#8217;t go up the Washington Monument.  They couldn&#8217;t go to the Smithsonian.  Tourists were really mad at us.  The Washington Post was melting down.  And most of the country said, &#8220;Well, that&#8217;s cool.  I mean, you guys are actually serious.  You want to balance the budget.&#8221;</p>
<p>So part of it would have to be to say, &#8220;Look, we don&#8217;t live in a dictatorship.  He did not win a parliamentary election.  He can&#8217;t unilaterally do things.  Article 1, Section 1 is the House, not the Presidency.  There are two mandates, the Republican mandate and the President&#8217;s mandate and you need to negotiate somewhere in the middle of those two.&#8221;  But if we passively allow him to run over us over and over, he will learn how to run over us.  And they&#8217;ve learned a great deal in the last two years about how to govern without Congress.  And it&#8217;s very dangerous.</p>
<p>But the ultimate congressional tool is money.  It&#8217;s designed that way and if somebody wanted to &#8212; again, take somebody who&#8217;s willing to get scarred up.  You have to be prepared to go to the mat and say, &#8220;You know, we&#8217;re not going to provide you money for those purposes.  And if you are determined to do that we&#8217;re going to have a crisis because you are breaking the Constitutional framework and we&#8217;re not going to sit here and let you do it.&#8221;  But it would be that tough.  It would make the 2014 elections pretty extraordinary.</p>
<p>Yes, sir?</p>
<p>Unidentified Audience member:  (Inaudible &#8211; off microphone) In the last panel we were talking about &#8212; Paul brought up a list of on November 1<sup>st</sup> what television networks were being watched to see where we&#8217;re getting our information.  Well, my generation hates paying for TV and cable.  So what do we do?  We go to YouTube.  And guess what?  The day before the election Obama had a beautiful ad on YouTube.  It took up an entire [banner] right there underneath the search bar.  So guess what?  My generation goes to YouTube to watch the news and who do they see?  They see this man up there right there in their face before they search the video, find the news.</p>
<p>I love my generation and my generation can be brought back over to this.  How do we communicate to them?  I want to share this with you all because this is crucial.  Newt, I love what you do.  What do we need to do?</p>
<p>Newt Gingrich:  Well, that&#8217;s part of why I&#8217;m going to write this report.  Because, as I said, it&#8217;s not just about voting patterns.  It&#8217;s about the use of technology and it&#8217;s about texting.  It&#8217;s about YouTube.  It&#8217;s about Google search.</p>
<p>First of all, remember that in the 2008 campaign, one of the cofounders of Facebook was the leader of the IT effort at the Obama campaign.  So we hire a couple of consultants who come out of politics, but have studied computing.  They&#8217;re the guys who are inventing the social media we&#8217;re competing in.</p>
<p>And, as Robert said &#8212; and I learned this first with Clinton.  You know, Clinton was extraordinarily good at going to Hollywood and getting Hollywood to design the advertising.  Politics, like most movies, is about storytelling.  If you can&#8217;t tell a story, people can&#8217;t understand what you&#8217;re doing.  And we&#8217;re just in a profound mismatch across the whole system.</p>
<p>So part of what I would argue &#8212; I said this all through the campaign.  They should have spent 30% of their budget on the internet.  They should have spent 30% of their total budget on Latinos, for a very simple reason.  If we don&#8217;t break through and we&#8217;re not competitive we&#8217;re not going to be a majority party again in your lifetime.</p>
<p>Now, if something is really obvious &#8212; it&#8217;s kind of like being on the side of the road with a flat tire.  If you&#8217;re not prepared to fix the tire, you could be at the side of the road for a long time.  And so you stand there and you say, &#8220;I wonder what the theoretical situation is that we&#8217;re in here?&#8221;  You have a flat tire, stupid.  &#8220;Yes, but what is the larger gestalt within which we are dealing with this?&#8221;  You&#8217;re tire&#8217;s flat.  &#8220;I understand, but that&#8217;s work.  And I dressed up this morning and fixing the tire I would get dirty.&#8221;</p>
<p>I mean, for example, to deal with Latinos you&#8217;d actually have to work with Latinos.  Have you looked at our consultants?  They don&#8217;t even want to work with people who are themselves.  (Laughter)  When we have a consultant class which is too arrogant to actually listen to anybody, why would you think they can understand people they&#8217;ve never met?</p>
<p>It is this fundamental a change that we are faced with if we are serious about taking back our country.</p>
<p>Yes, sir?</p>
<p>Unidentified Audience Member:  First, I&#8217;d like to thank you for your service to the country.  I would like to thank all the speakers here.  (Applause)  This is my first time at David&#8217;s conference and I&#8217;d like to thank David.  And I&#8217;ll be going to more conferences.  Anyways, my grandfather&#8217;s Spanish.  My mother&#8217;s from Argentina.  My dad&#8217;s American.  So what I get from this weekend is I have a good access to the Latin community.  And I was wondering if you could point me in the right direction, how &#8212; who to talk to, who to network with, where to put money to attract the Latin community back to the Republican Conservative party.  Thank you.</p>
<p>Newt Gingrich:  Well, this is just from my personal frame of reference.  There is somebody who a few of you know from California named Eric Beech, who is putting things together.  And my older daughter, Kathy Lubbers, who lives in Miami, who ran a project called The Americano for seven years, that was a conservative Latino website, is working with him to look at how &#8212; because we&#8217;re very close to Univision.</p>
<p>Go back and look at when Obama&#8217;s Univision advertising began.  Again, this is pretty basic stuff.  They were on for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks.  It started in May.  And this is the kind of stuff I want to, frankly, pull together so I can give you actual data and show you, whether it&#8217;s how to reach young people &#8212; I want to find out every show that Obama did that Romney didn&#8217;t do.</p>
<p>And you&#8217;ll be startled how many places &#8212; because in terms of people under 30, more people under 30 get news from <em>The Daily Show</em> and <em>Colbert</em> than get news from Fox.  Now, if you&#8217;re not in <em>The Daily Show</em> and <em>Colbert</em> you&#8217;re not even in their world.  And I think that&#8217;s the kind of stuff we just simply have to map reality, think it through and be prepared to compete anew.</p>
<p>Yes, sir?</p>
<p>Unidentified Audience Member:  Newt, what are the three effective arguments or explanations you can give to a liberal-minded friend or family member that you can use instead of having to choke them?  (Laughter)</p>
<p>Newt Gingrich:  Look, I think it&#8217;s pretty simple.  If you value fairness more than jobs, you&#8217;re going to have everybody equally unemployed.  Okay?  That&#8217;s the first big principle.  As Margaret Thatcher put it, &#8220;The problem with socialism is you run out of other people&#8217;s money to spend.&#8221;  So the first principle is simple.  Their model of society doesn&#8217;t work.  And if you&#8217;re happy that we have more people on food stamps than any time in American history, this is working.  Okay?</p>
<p>The second principle is equally simple.  Do you think you and your doctor should worry about your health?  Or do you think your doctor should be constrained by a bureaucrat you never met who has never been in your state, does not know what your disease is, but has a mathematical model which suggests that on average this will be fine, even though your doctor thinks it&#8217;s crazy.</p>
<p>Now, you decide.  You want Washington to run your &#8212; I tell people, the folks who are failing with Sandy in Long Island and Staten Island are the folks that they want to have run our health system.  So if you think they&#8217;re doing a great job in cleaning up New Jersey, you&#8217;re going to love it when they start controlling medicine.  Which is why &#8212; there is a reason conservatism will come back.  The only question is how stupid we are and how long it takes it.  It will come back.</p>
<p>The third is, do you think the primary danger in the world is that occasionally Americans make dumb movies and Danes make dumb cartoons?  Or is the primary danger in the world is that there is a faction that genuinely wants to kill us and that practices figuring out how to kill us on a regular basis and proves it?  And I think you begin to find these kind of fundamental divisions about reality.</p>
<p>Yes, way over here.</p>
<p>Unidentified Audience Member:  How to you defund when you&#8217;re governed by continuing resolutions?</p>
<p>Newt Gingrich:  The way you defund is it you don&#8217;t put it in the continuing resolution.  You just say, &#8220;Nothing in this resolution shall fund &#8216;X&#8217;,&#8221; whatever X is.  And then you get in a fight, then.  And then it&#8217;s going to get nasty and mean.  And then you&#8217;re going to have all the network television people saying, &#8220;The Republicans are being obstructionist because they ref- &#8221; You know.  It&#8217;s like Big Bird.  Big Bird gets $317,000 a year as an actor.  And Sesame Street makes $800 million a year, 94% of it from the private sector.  Now, you should be able to communicate, &#8220;I want Big Bird to live, but I want him to live in freedom.&#8221;  (Applause)</p>
<p>This lady right up here.    And then I want to come to Gay.</p>
<p>Unidentified Audience Member:  My question is regarding the length of the primaries.  Can you comment?  Because I felt it was so long and we started so late.</p>
<p>Newt Gingrich:  You see, I think, again, as a matter of fact, Hillary Clinton was still competing with Barack Obama on June 3<sup>rd</sup>.  So I don&#8217;t think &#8212; if the primaries were a problem for us it&#8217;s because we ended up nominating a candidate who was vivid in the primaries at saying things that made great commercials.  But I&#8217;m not sure you can say, &#8220;Gee, I don&#8217;t want to have our candidate be &#8212; say these things in the primaries because I&#8217;d like for him to say them in the general.&#8221;  So then I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s anything wrong with &#8212; the Democrat primaries were longer by two months.</p>
<p>But the other difference is, you go back to watch Obama in &#8217;08, he filled the summer.  He did not wait for the convention.  And, frankly, this idea that the convention was a problem is absurd.  We knew who the nominee was going to be, so he could behave as though he was in the general election from late May.</p>
<p>And then they say, &#8220;Well, they were out of money.&#8221;  He gave $42 million personally to win in 2008.  They could have somehow found the money if they were serious about winning.  This idea that they had to sit passively while Obama attacked them for three months is nonsense, I mean, just plain nonsense.  They had to model the campaign.  The model didn&#8217;t work.  We proved it on Tuesday a week ago.</p>
<p>And, again, I&#8217;m not blaming anybody else.  I thought we were going to win.  The model I had in my head was as wrong as the model the Romney team had in their head.</p>
<p>And, Gay, I think you have to be the last question.</p>
<p>Gay Gaines:  Monica mentioned this morning the education system has been taken over by the left.  And, Newt, we&#8217;ve had this conversation.  How on earth are the people of the United States going to vote Republican and believe in the Constitution if they&#8217;ve never studied, with three generations of historically illiterate students and the teachers themselves don&#8217;t know American history?</p>
<p>So I&#8217;m thrilled you&#8217;re coming to Mount Vernon.  We&#8217;re going to build a library at Mount Vernon for George Washington which opens next September.  And you have to come there and teach from the library, as all of you do.  Monica, I&#8217;m inviting you.  I&#8217;m inviting Laura Ingraham.  Because we can beam into the classrooms across America and start getting them to understand.  But what else can we do?  What else (inaudible &#8211; multiple speakers) &#8211;</p>
<p>Newt Gingrich:  But start &#8212; just stay with that for a minute, because I think it&#8217;s useful [to expand on] and a nice way for me to remind you that we do have a documentary film at 2:30 and that we have books that are American history.  We&#8217;re going to sign them there.</p>
<p>But here&#8217;s what I want all of you to think about.  There&#8217;s an institution called the Khan Academy, which you can see, by just putting in K-A-H-N Academy.  This is a guy who was an investment banker who began doing YouTube videos on math for his nephews who didn&#8217;t understand certain aspects of math.  And the videos began to go viral.  He now has 3,000 hours of free material, and really was the person who broke through in a huge way.</p>
<p>The Vice President for Development at Google decided he was going to teach a course at Stanford for 400 students in advanced design.  But he decided he would put it on the internet.  He announced casually at some speech in Palo Alto and within three days &#8212; this is a 400 student course &#8212; within three days they had thousands signed up.  They ultimately had 100,000 sign up.  They had 40,000 complete the class.</p>
<p>When they took the exam the top student at Stanford was number 42.  Forty-one other people who had taken the course by long distance outscored him in the final exam.  And it was a great recruiting device for Google because you now had thousands of people across the planet interacting that they could look at and say, &#8220;Oh, gee, we might want to hire you some day.&#8221;</p>
<p>Now, I&#8217;m giving you those examples because the reason we have an agreement now with Kaplan, and we&#8217;re trying to think through how to offer a series of courses and how to do it in a way that combines video, combines music, et cetera, so that you create compet &#8212; we&#8217;re never going to fix the public schools.  The unions are too entrenched.  They&#8217;re too left wing.  The length of time it would take us to fix them, that will be after the victory.</p>
<p>Between here and the victory what we can do is offer better products that are more exciting, and simply drain away the vitality and the energy.  And when you now have Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Virginia all offering their courses online for free, you&#8217;re really seeing the breakdown of the whole structure of the old order.  (Applause)  And I think we want to &#8211;</p>
<p>So Gingrich Productions actually wants to work with people like Robert Davi, both on his cinema side and his  music side, because it&#8217;s the composite of it all &#8212; it&#8217;s making it come alive in a way that people say, &#8220;I want that,&#8221; as opposed to, &#8220;You have to have it.&#8221;</p>
<p>And if we can do that well enough, I believe that the truth beats lies.  I think that history beats fantasies.  And I think that the world will, in fact, validate our philosophy and invalidate their philosophy.  And I think we have to be as courageous as George Washington and refuse to become defeated, refuse to become depressed, and commit ourselves to getting this country back on the right track.</p>
<p>Thank you all very much.  (Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Election Epiphany</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/election-epiphany/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=election-epiphany</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 08 Nov 2012 04:50:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Flynn]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The electorate has changed -- but where do we go from here? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/election-epiphany/romney_concession_rect-460x307/" rel="attachment wp-att-164476"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-164476" title="romney_concession_rect-460x307" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/romney_concession_rect-460x307-450x300.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="210" /></a>“Many times, I step out of my room, I go down to Polk Street, I feel like an immigrant who just arrived in a foreign country,” Eric Hoffer, a San Franciscan since the early 1940s, confessed to Eric Sevareid on CBS in the late 1960s. “And it’s a helluva job to immigrate at sixty-seven.” The longshoreman philosopher complained of the noise of his newcomer neighbors and his inability to determine the sex of passersby on the street. San Francisco, once a heavily Catholic blue-collar city, had morphed into a dropout destination for those who had left their morals at home.</p>
<p>Supporters of Mitt Romney feel a lot like Hoffer right now. Millions of voters who have resided in America their whole lives have immigrated without moving an inch. They don’t live in the country of their birth even if they’ve never travelled outside its borders. This is not your father’s America. It’s not even your older brother’s.</p>
<p>The electorate that voted Ronald Reagan into the presidency in 1980 was 88 percent white, ten percent black, and two percent Hispanic. The body politic that reelected Barack Obama in 2012 was 72 percent white, thirteen percent black, ten percent Hispanic, three percent Asian, and two percent “other.” If Mitt Romney had Ronald Reagan’s electorate, he wins in a landslide. If landslide winner Reagan had Romney’s, does he even win?</p>
<p>The changing complexion of America may be the most superficial of the major demographic shifts. Getting married and bringing children into the world are less popular now than at any point in U.S. history. In 1980, just 18 percent of births occurred to women not married to their child’s father. Now, that figure exceeds 40 percent. Without a daddy in their house, many single mothers look for a daddy in the White House.</p>
<p>In God Americans don’t trust—at least not as much as they once did. In 1980, fewer than ten percent of respondents cited “no religion” as their affiliation to the Pew Research Center. Today, that figure reaches twenty percent. Tuesday’s exit polls showed only a minority of voters attending religious services regularly. The exit polls clearly showed that the less one attended religious services the more one tended to vote for Obama.</p>
<p>So many Americans now depend on government for food, shelter, retirement, education, health care, and even jobs that the party of government almost guarantees itself a majority long before the campaign has started. Consider that in 1980 slightly more than twenty million Americans received food stamps. In 2012, the number approaches fifty million. From bailed-out Toledo autoworkers to the comfortably unemployed approaching 99 weeks of benefits in Detroit to Georgetown co-eds desiring free birth control, the Democrat constituency is the coalition of the bought. For Ronald Reagan government was the problem, not the solution. Tuesday’s electorate, even though a slight majority told exit pollsters that government does too much, voted for government as the solution rather than the problem.</p>
<p>The more likely a voter is to marry, visit a house of worship, or demonstrate economic self-sufficiency, the more likely that voter will cast a Republican ballot. Demographics, including Tuesday’s exit polls, show that the typical American voter resembles the typical Republican voter a lot less than thirty-two years ago.</p>
<p>Republicans Tuesday suddenly came to grips with the changes that have been slowly transforming the United States of America. The election acted as the epiphany. There has been a revolution within the form. The nation’s name remains the same. Its habits, and inhabitants, have changed beyond recognition.</p>
<p>“It makes me wonder who my fellow citizens are,” Bostonian Marianne Doherty poignantly told the <em>Washington Examiner</em>’s Byron York on election night. “I’ve got to be honest, I feel like I’ve lost touch with what the identity of America is right now. I really do.” This bewilderment, surely different from the intense alienation often experienced by partisans in the wake of election-night disappointment, ensnares many Americans. The electorate more so than the elected inflicts the sense of loss. There’s no time machine waiting to transport us back to 1980.</p>
<p>During a decade of dramatic change, Eric Hoffer, later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan, thought and wrote about how societies, like teenagers, endure rapid transformation as a traumatic experience. Hoffer wrote in 1967 that “it is becoming evident that, no matter how desirable, drastic change is the most difficult and dangerous experience mankind has undergone. We are discovering that broken habits can be more painful and crippling than broken bones.” Forty-five years later, the wisdom rings true for those dealing with a loss whose seeds were sown amid the changes that Hoffer fixated upon so many decades ago.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Charles Krauthammer: The Electorate vs. Obama&#8217;s Agenda &#8211; RealClearPolitics</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/charles-krauthammer-the-electorate-vs-obamas-agenda-realclearpolitics/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=charles-krauthammer-the-electorate-vs-obamas-agenda-realclearpolitics</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:16:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48985</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[WASHINGTON &#8212; &#8220;I am not an ideologue,&#8221; protested President Obama at a gathering with Republican House members last week. Perhaps, but he does have a tenacious commitment to a set of political convictions. Compare his 2010 State of the Union to his first address to Congress a year earlier. The consistency is remarkable. In 2009, [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>WASHINGTON &#8212; &#8220;I am not an ideologue,&#8221; protested President Obama at a gathering with Republican House members last week. Perhaps, but he does have a tenacious commitment to a set of political convictions.</p>
<p>Compare his 2010 State of the Union to his first address to Congress a year earlier. The consistency is remarkable. In 2009, after passing a $787 billion (now $862 billion) stimulus package, the largest spending bill in galactic history, he unveiled a manifesto for fundamentally restructuring the commanding heights of American society &#8212; health care, education and energy.</p>
<p>A year later, after stunning Democratic setbacks in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Obama gave a stay-the-course State of the Union address (a) pledging not to walk away from health care reform, (b) seeking to turn college education increasingly into a federal entitlement, and (c) asking again for cap-and-trade energy legislation. Plus, of course, another stimulus package, this time renamed a &#8220;jobs bill.&#8221;</p>
<p>This being a democracy, don&#8217;t the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don&#8217;t they understand Massachusetts?</p>
<p>Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.</p>
<p>Liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate have been, post-Massachusetts, remarkably unguarded. New York Times columnist Charles Blow chided Obama for not understanding the necessity of speaking &#8220;in the plain words of plain folks,&#8221; because the people are &#8220;suspicious of complexity.&#8221; Counseled Blow: &#8220;The next time he gives a speech, someone should tap him on the ankle and say, &#8216;Mr. President, we&#8217;re down here.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
<p>A Time magazine blogger was even more blunt about the ankle-dwelling mob, explaining that we are &#8220;a nation of dodos&#8221; that is &#8220;too dumb to thrive.&#8221;</p>
<p>Obama joined the parade in the State of the Union address when, with supercilious modesty, he chided himself &#8220;for not explaining it (health care) more clearly to the American people.&#8221; The subject, he noted, was &#8220;complex.&#8221; The subject, it might also be noted, was one to which the master of complexity had devoted 29 speeches. Perhaps he did not speak slowly enough.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/02/05/dont_they_understand_massachusetts.html">RealClearPolitics &#8211; The Electorate vs. Obama&#8217;s Agenda</a>.</p>
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		<title>Big government: Stop! &#8211; The Economist</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/big-government-stop-the-economist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=big-government-stop-the-economist</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/big-government-stop-the-economist/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 25 Jan 2010 19:22:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47593</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[IN THE aftermath of the Senate election in Massachusetts, the focus of attention is inevitably on what it means for Barack Obama. The impact on the Democratic president of the loss of the late Ted Kennedy’s seat to the Republicans will, no doubt, be significant (see article). Yet the result could be remembered as a [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15330481"><img src='http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/the-economist-logo.gif' alt='' /></a></p>
<p>IN THE aftermath of the Senate election in Massachusetts, the focus of attention is inevitably on what it means for Barack Obama. The impact on the Democratic president of the loss of the late Ted Kennedy’s seat to the Republicans will, no doubt, be significant (see article). Yet the result could be remembered as a message more profound than the disparate mutterings of a grumpy electorate that has lost faith in its leader—as a growl of hostility to the rising power of the state.</p>
<p>America’s most vibrant political force at the moment is the anti-tax tea-party movement. Even in leftish Massachusetts people are worried that Mr Obama’s spending splurge, notably his still-unpassed health-care bill, will send the deficit soaring. In Britain, where elections are usually spending competitions, the contest this year will be fought about where to cut. Even in regions as historically statist as Scandinavia and southern Europe debates are beginning to emerge about the size and effectiveness of government.</p>
<p>There are good reasons, as well as bad ones, why the state is growing; but the trend must be reversed. Doing so will prove exceedingly hard—not least because the bigger and more powerful the state gets, the more it tends to grow. But electorates, as in Massachusetts, eventually revolt; and such expressions of voters’ fury are likely to shape politics in the years to come.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15330481">Big government: Stop! | The Economist</a>.</p>
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		<title>Brown’s National Security Victory</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/brown%e2%80%99s-national-security-victory/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=brown%25e2%2580%2599s-national-security-victory</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/brown%e2%80%99s-national-security-victory/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 25 Jan 2010 05:27:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47472</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Massachusetts voters reject treating our terrorist enemies like common criminals. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47474" title="Democrats' Bad Week" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/brown1.jpg" alt="Democrats' Bad Week" width="450" height="323" /></p>
<p>Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a columnist for <em>National Review</em>. His book <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Willful-Blindness-Andrew-C-Mccarthy/dp/1594032653/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1262125302&amp;sr=8-4">Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad</a> </em>(Encounter Books, 2008), has just been released in paperback with a new preface. Check out <a href="http://www.encounterbooks.com/">a description</a> from Encounter Books.</p>
<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47525" title="andymccarthy" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/andymccarthy.jpg" alt="andymccarthy" width="320" height="240" /></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Andy McCarthy, welcome to Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p>I would like to talk to you today about Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts and how it was the issue of national-security that put Brown over Coakley.</p>
<p>Can you talk a bit about that? The people seemed to have cared about terrorism and the treatment of enemy combatants, yes?</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>McCarthy:</strong> Jamie, great to be here as always.  And you’re right.  The Brown campaign’s internal polling told them something very interesting.  While it’s true that healthcare is what nationalized the election and riveted everyone’s attention to it, it was the national security issues that put real distance between the two candidates in the mind of the electorate—in blue Massachusetts of all places.  Sen.-elect Brown was able to speak forcefully and convincingly on issues like treating our jihadist enemies as combatants rather than mere defendants, about killing terrorists and preventing terrorism rather than contenting ourselves with prosecutions after Americans have been killed, about tough interrogation when necessary to save innocent lives.  Martha Coakley, by contrast, had to try to defend the indefensible, which is Obama-style counterterrorism.  It evidently made a huge difference to voters.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What do you think of how Bush was treated on this whole issue?</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>McCarthy: </strong>As many of us predicted during the Bush years when the president was being hammered by the Left and the press, history is treating him much more kindly on the national security front.  His movement of the country to a war-footing rather than treating international terrorism as a criminal justice matter was common sense, but common sense cuts against the Washington grain so it took a strong president to do it.  Now, on issue after issue, he is being vindicated—he and Vice President Cheney, who has become the country’s leading voice on national security, after spending years being vilified.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What role did McCain play?</p>
<p><strong>McCarthy:</strong> Sen. McCain is, as ever, a mixed bag.  He’s recently been very good on the need to treat the enemy as an enemy, not as a defendant. So that was helpful to Brown. But it can’t be forgotten that McCain was the force behind the libel of Bush as a torture monger and the consequent ruination of our interrogation policy.  And it was the “McCain Amendment” that gave us, as a matter of law, the extension of Fifth Amendment rights to our enemies overseas, which has had awful ramifications even outside the issue of interrogation practices. McCain is responsible for a lot of the fodder that made Obama possible.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What lessons should Republicans take from Brown’s success?</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>McCarthy:</strong> These national security positions resonate with voters.  Healthcare, TARP, and the economic issues in general are very important, but they’re complex and make people’s eyes glaze over sometimes.  The national defense issues, besides being the most important ones confronted by a political community, are comparatively easy to wrap your brain around.  And strong, unapologetic national defense in a time of terrorist threat is appealing to voters.  So we should be arguing these issues forcefully, and not worry about the fact that the left-wing legacy media will say nasty things about us.  Their instinctive America-bashing is why they are speaking to—or, better, speaking <em>at</em>—a steadily decreasing audience.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> The Left pretends that its positions in how to confront terror (or not to) are somehow founded on the Constitution. What’s the mindset here?</p>
<p><strong>McCarthy:</strong> Yes, because they reject the foundational fact that the Constitution is a compact between the <em>American people</em> and the government they created.  They think every person on planet earth is an American waiting to happen, born with the full panoply of American constitutional rights that can be asserted against the American people.  And they think the courts, rather than being a peer branch of our government, stand over and above our government:  a forum where the rest of the world, including enemies of the United States, is invited to make its case against the United States.  That’s a warped understanding of the Constitution.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>What hope does Brown’s victory give? What do you think Obama, Holder and Napolitano are thinking – or not thinking?</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>McCarthy: </strong>Well, I think it’s Brown combined with what’s happened in New Jersey and Virginia, with Obama’s plunging numbers, the unpopularity of the Democrats’ healthcare, employment and national-security policies, and the disgusting wheeling-and-dealing the supposedly “transparent” Left is doing behind close doors (i.e., not on C-SPAN). All these things give hope that freedom is on the march, that people are broadly rejecting statism.  But I don’t think Obama is a normal politician and that his administration is a conventional “let’s modulate to remain viable” administration.</p>
<p>Enacting their agenda is more important to them than being reelected, and they are not to be underestimated.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Why do you think that when I see or think about Janet Napolitano I am engulfed with a profound sense of doom and despair?</p>
<p><strong>McCarthy:</strong> Well, if I have this right, she is an official who is in charge of securing the homeland but &#8212; after ballyhooed, years-long investigations, including by the 9/11 Commissions &#8212; she didn&#8217;t know how the 9/11 hijackers got here, thought they snuck in from Canada, and believes that what they did when they got here was a &#8220;man-caused disaster&#8221; that had nothing to do with jihadist ideology (indeed, she thinks that saying &#8220;jihadist&#8221; is problematic). She does see ideology as a problem, of course, but only if it is &#8230; <em>conservative</em> ideology.  That is, she thinks the <em>real </em>terror threat comes from people with radical ideas like limited government, the sanctity of life, and the Second Amendment &#8212; especially if they&#8217;re military vets who&#8217;ve served in George Bush&#8217;s wars of aggression. And she is in charge of enforcing the immigration laws but wasn&#8217;t aware that entering the country illegally is a criminal offense.</p>
<p>I can&#8217;t imagine why you&#8217;d have a problem with any of that, Jamie.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Who needs horror movies or a tragic film to make you cry when you have things like this to think about?</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p>Well, let’s move on:</p>
<p>What was this whole thing about Brown’s pick-up truck and Obama making fun of it? I thought Obama represented the common man?</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>McCarthy:</strong> This president has lived a very different kind of life from most Americans.  He lived his early, formative years in Indonesia, a majority-Muslim police state. After he returned to America at age ten or so, he dove into the fever-swamps of the Left and was steeped in the cynicism and nihilism of Saul Alinsky. For years, he&#8217;s surrounded himself with fawning sycophants who&#8217;ve told him he&#8217;s &#8220;The One.&#8221; And he&#8217;s extremely insulated from the real world of everyday Americans.  I don&#8217;t think the sudden burst of Obama-style populism is going to fly &#8212; and going after Brown&#8217;s pick-up is a good indication of why.  He thinks people who like their pick-up trucks are bitter-clingers.  Actually, they&#8217;re Americans.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Brown vs. Obama, 2012?</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>McCarthy: </strong>I don’t think we should get ahead of ourselves.  Brown’s an impressive, talented guy, but he’s also someone no one outside of Massachusetts had heard of until a few short weeks ago.  But this does underscore something I’ve been saying for a long time.  As late as 1991, few people really knew who Bill and Hillary Clinton were, and yet they’ve towered over our politics from 1992 forward.  The world changed on a dime on 9/11.</p>
<p>A year ago today, with Pres. Obama just inaugurated and with the Democrats having wide margins in Congress, the Republican party seemed dead and even conservative intellectuals were telling us we had to abandon Reagan conservatism—the conservatism that’s leading us out of the woods.  This is all a long-winded way of saying:  We may not yet know, even today, who the leaders will be when 2012 rolls around.  We’ve got a ton on our plate right now, and the unknown tomorrow.  You know the old saw, “You want to make God laugh—tell Him about your plans.”  Right now, I’m worried about today, and content to figure 2012 will take care of itself.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Well before we say goodbye for now, what is on your mind the most right now? What can you tell our readers that will give us all some hope that America, despite its current leadership, can prevail against the threats it faces?</p>
<p><strong>McCarthy: </strong>After slumbering for too long, the public &#8212; the great swath of Americans that is basically conservative, patriotic, and thinks the country is the best the world has ever known, not in dire need of transformative &#8220;change&#8221; &#8212; has asserted itself.  But even if he&#8217;s held to one term, Obama will leave us in a deep hole.  The reckless borrowing and spending would take decades to dig out of even if we stopped it tomorrow. There is a lot of mischief a sprawling executive bureaucracy can do in four years, and Obama is likely to stock the federal courts with very left-wing judges who will try to impose transnational progressivism by fiat if the Republicans don&#8217;t have the gumption to stop the president from appointing them.  And that last point is what I think about most.</p>
<p>The challenge for Republicans is not to win the next elections.  The smart Democrats have already factored elections in.  Obama Leftists are not conventional politicians. They are true-believers. Of course they hope their friends at ACORN and similar outfits will soften the blow come November.  But if not, they are willing to endure electoral losses for what they see as the greater good of using this one-time opportunity they have to transform this country radically.</p>
<p>Republicans don&#8217;t so much need a plan to win elections &#8212; the Democrats&#8217; statist policies and their irresponsible positions on national security will take care of that.  Stopping bad government is not enough. Republicans need a plan, after they win elections, to roll back what the Left has done and is doing.  That will require courage and skill.  I hope we have it, but I confess to worrying about whether we do.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Andy McCarthy, thank you, and a pleasure and honor as always to speak with you.</p>
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		<title>Today, Brown is Golden</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/michael-reagan/today-brown-is-golden/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=today-brown-is-golden</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/michael-reagan/today-brown-is-golden/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 25 Jan 2010 05:08:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michael Reagan]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47511</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A stern rebuke of the Democrats’ national agenda.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47514" title="brown" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/brown.jpg" alt="brown" width="450" height="321" /></p>
<p><span><span>Last Tuesday, the voters of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts sent an incredibly powerful message to the Democrats in Washington that their out-of-control spending and efforts to rush through healthcare legislation will not be tolerated by the electorate. In a stunning upset, Republican Scott Brown defeated his Democratic opponent in the bluest of blue states to capture the United States Senate position left vacant by the passing of the late Ted Kennedy.</span></span></p>
<p>Only a year ago pundits across the nation were proclaiming the Republican Party dead in the water &#8212; causing many Democrats to feel they had free rein. However, things are about to change in a different direction than anticipated by the president just one year ago.</p>
<p>There’s just no way to oversell this victory. Massachusetts hasn’t fielded a Republican Senator for 31 years. Senator-elect Brown will be the only Republican in the entire state delegation to Congress. Less than a year and a half ago, Barack Obama took Massachusetts by 26 points, which makes Scott Brown’s triumph a 31-point reversal.</p>
<p>Today, many Democrats are rushing in to do damage control &#8212; claiming that this was a case of a bad candidate in a challenging local environment, as was also claimed after Republican victories in Virginia and New Jersey earlier this year. However, coming into this race, Martha Coakley was not an unknown commodity who was quickly cast on the most public of stages. Rather, she came into this general election only after having earned her party’s nomination due, in part, to her position as a popular statewide figure who had previously received over 78 percent of the statewide vote earning her the commonwealth’s attorney general position. And she also had one of the strongest political machines in the country at her disposal. No, this was not a case of a bad candidate struggling in a tough local environment. (How anyone could call Massachusetts a tough local environment for a Democrat while maintaining a straight face is beyond me.) This was clearly a rebuke of the Democrats’ national agenda.</p>
<p>And not only did Scott Brown win a political race &#8212; he may have helped delay or defeat one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation to sniff passage in decades. And for Democrats who may hold on to the hope that the Massachusetts results were not about the Democrats’ national agenda &#8212; they only need to be reminded the Republican candidate Brown was victorious in Ted Kennedy’s own precinct.</p>
<p>I don’t often give advice to my friends across the proverbial political aisle, but I feel compelled to do so today. Democrats need to step back and realize that a wave of populism is taking hold in this country, uniting Democrats, Republicans and Independents alike.</p>
<p>If the fact that over 20 percent of registered Democrats in Massachusetts gravitated to the Republican candidate does not help my Democratic friends come to this realization, nothing will. Just 11 percent of voters in Massachusetts are Republicans. Republicans did not carry this victory. The people of Massachusetts did, people of every political stripe.</p>
<p>Democrats need to immediately suspend debate and votes on healthcare legislation until Scott Brown is seated &#8212; as was articulately stated by Democratic Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia. They also need to realize that when polling shows that a mere 38 percent of Americans support that legislation, it is time to make significant changes to their agenda.</p>
<p>It should not be lost on them that the 38 percent number equals former President George W. Bush’s approval at the end of this presidency &#8212; a number that Democrats once pointed to as proof that Americans clearly rebuked the policies of his administration past his final day in office.</p>
<p>Three consecutive times now &#8212; in the races for Governor in New Jersey and Virginia, and now in Massachusetts &#8212; independents have surged against the president and brought the Republican candidate to victory. Now that’s a rebuke!</p>
<p>The results in Massachusetts demonstrate that a tide of real change is finally taking hold in this country &#8212; rejecting excessive spending whether it is promoted by Republicans or Democrats. Republicans would be wise to take advantage of this sweeping movement by returning to their party&#8217;s roots of promoting a smaller, smarter and more efficient government &#8212; a government that is not in the business of running our nation’s healthcare programs.  Working together, holding to Americans&#8217; core principles, and speaking for the people, the Republicans can carry this momentum westward to electoral victory, even in the most blue of states and districts.</p>
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		<title>How the Democrats Lost Massachusetts</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/how-the-democrats-lost-massachusetts/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-the-democrats-lost-massachusetts</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/how-the-democrats-lost-massachusetts/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Jan 2010 07:01:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=46981</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Political excess and an unpopular agenda paved the way for Scott’s Brown’s improbable Senate victory. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-46982" title="539w" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/539w.jpg" alt="539w" width="539" height="338" /></p>
<p>On the one-year anniversary of his presidency, Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress have received a stinging verdict on their collaborative reign. By <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31674.html">electing</a> Republican Scott Brown over Democratic state Attorney General Martha Coakley to succeed in the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, the voters of a state that Obama carried by 26 points in 2008 have sent a clear message that the legislative excesses of the majority party are too much for even the residents of the reliably liberal Bay State to bear.</p>
<p>Brown’s <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31674.html">stunning five-point upset victory</a> has already inspired its share of intraparty recrimination, much of it justified. It seems clear, for instance, that Coakley ran an inept and ultimately uninspired campaign, one that <a href="http://news.bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/view/20100120dems_slam_martha_coakleys_political_malpractice/">took victory for granted</a> <a href="http://news.bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/view/20100120dems_slam_martha_coakleys_political_malpractice/"></a>and paid the price for its complacency. One could also argue, as some Democratic insiders have, that the party’s campaign committee failed to foresee the dangers of Brown’s insurgent populist candidacy, intervening to save Coakley’s faltering campaign <a href="http://news.bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/view/20100120dems_slam_martha_coakleys_political_malpractice/">only after it was too late</a>. Whatever the merit of these post-mortems, they also miss the broader lessons of Brown’s seismic triumph.</p>
<p><em>Domestic criminal trials for terrorists are a losing issue for Democrats. </em>Brown scored some of his greatest successes when he assailed Coakley for her stand on national security. Some of Coakley’s wounds were self-inflicted, as when she insisted, against all evidence to the contrary, that there were no terrorists active in Afghanistan. But Brown was also able to tap into the mainstream view, which runs counter to the Obama administration’s policy, that terrorist detainees should not be entitled to criminal protections. In the aftermath of the Christmas terror plot, when aspiring underwear bomber <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2010/01/11/why-the-rich-muslim-boy-became-a-terrorist-by-jamie-glazov/">Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab</a> kept mum after being granted an attorney, there is little public appetite for terrorists with possible knowledge of new plots to be afforded the right to remain silent. Extending these civil liberties to terrorists is not only a national security threat. Brown’s victory suggests that it also a political danger to Democrats.  </p>
<p><em>Even Democratic-leaning states oppose the Democrats’ health care overhaul. </em>In its final poll before the election, the well-regarded Democratic polling firm Public Policy Polling <a href="http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_MA_117468963846.pdf">found</a> that the Massachusetts’ electorate was deeply skeptical of the Democrats’ health care plan, with 48 percent of voters opposing the plan. Considering that the state’s 2006 health care law was seen as an early model for the national reform, Brown’s win is the latest indictment of the Democrats’ vision of an expanded government role in health care. Because Coakley was a supporter of health care reform, Brown was able to capitalize on popular skepticism by running as the self-styled “<a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2010/01/19/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry6116071.shtml">41<sup>st</sup> vote</a>” who could stop the health care bill. He will now have the chance to make good on that promise.</p>
<p><em>Independents are disenchanted with the Democratic leadership. </em>While Massachusetts is often seen as a liberal bastion, more than half the electorate is made up of independents. Their support proved critical to Brown’s victory. Even as liberal Boston voted the party line, independent voters from the state’s suburbs <a href="http://news.bostonherald.com/news/politics/view/20100120state_independents_lead_scott_browns_charge/">turned the tide in Brown’s favor</a>. That follows a pattern in other battleground states, including Virginia and New Jersey, where an independent-led insurgency helped down Democratic incumbents. Against this backlash from independents, President Obama’s influence was ineffectual. Despite a last-minute stumping effort on Coakley’s behalf, Obama did little to help her cause. With his approval rating slipping <a href="http://www.pollster.com/blogs/winston_drop_in_polls_threaten.php">below 50 percent</a>, yesterday’s redeemer of Democratic Party fortunes has become today’s bystander in defeat.</p>
<p><em>The anti-Democratic revolt has crossed party lines.</em> Although Democratic spinmeisters and partisans worked overtime to cast Brown as the tool of hateful right-wing interests and tea-party reactionaries – MSNBC loudmouth Keith Olbermann <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31648.html">scraped bottom</a> with an unhinged and invective-laden rant assailing Brown as an “irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude-model, tea-bagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees” – the discomfiting truth for the party is that Brown’s appeal blurred party lines. Some polls had Brown drawing support from <a href="http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_MA_117468963846.pdf">nearly 20 percent</a> of registered Democrats. That Democrats can no longer count on the loyalties of party faithful even in staunchly “blue” states is a poignant commentary on both the failures of Congressional Democratic leadership and a reflection of the growing populist backlash against Democrats’ misrule.</p>
<p>If Brown’s victory represents a severe judgment on the failings of the Democrats’ leadership, it’s not clear that they have gotten the message. One might think that Democrats would be chastened by the Massachusetts results. But the only lesson that Democrats seem to have learned from the race is that they need to be even more arrogant in pursuing an unpopular legislative agenda. When, in the final days of the race, it looked like Brown could indeed win, Democrats floated the idea of ramming the health bill through backchannels – whether by bypassing the Senate altogether and sending the House-approved version straight to President Obama or else by resorting to the “nuclear” option that would allow them to pass the bill with a 51-vote majority. Both options are widely considered political suicide, but such is the Democrats’ commitment to the legislation that even the prospect of certain defeat may be a weak deterrent.</p>
<p>Democrats’ missteps are of course only part of the story of the Massachusetts race. The other is Scott Brown. Savvy, charismatic and clued into voters’ concerns, Brown’s campaign was everything that Coakley’s was not. Both the Coakley campaign and President Obama poked fun at Brown’s regular-guy image – particularly the well-worn GMC truck with which he traversed the state. But it’s Brown who will have the last laugh. In one of his final campaign stops, Brown promised to pack up his “truck and drive it straight to Washington.” Thanks to the Democrats’ blunders and to his political skills, he’s on his way.</p>
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		<title>Janet Daley: There&#8217;ll be nowhere to run from the new world government &#8211; Telegraph</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/jlaksin/janet-daley-therell-be-nowhere-to-run-from-the-new-world-government-telegraph/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=janet-daley-therell-be-nowhere-to-run-from-the-new-world-government-telegraph</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 21 Dec 2009 18:29:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=42716</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[There is scope for debate – and innumerable newspaper quizzes – about who was the most influential public figure of the year, or which the most significant event. But there can be little doubt which word won the prize for most important adjective. 2009 was the year in which &#8220;global&#8221; swept the rest of the [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>There is scope for debate – and innumerable newspaper quizzes – about who was the most influential public figure of the year, or which the most significant event. But there can be little doubt which word won the prize for most important adjective. 2009 was the year in which &#8220;global&#8221; swept the rest of the political lexicon into obscurity. There were &#8220;global crises&#8221; and &#8220;global challenges&#8221;, the only possible resolution to which lay in &#8220;global solutions&#8221; necessitating &#8220;global agreements&#8221;. Gordon Brown actually suggested something called a &#8220;global alliance&#8221; in response to climate change. (Would this be an alliance against the Axis of Extra-Terrestrials?)</p>
<p>Some of this was sheer hokum: when uttered by Gordon Brown, the word &#8220;global&#8221;, as in &#8220;global economic crisis&#8221;, meant: &#8220;It&#8217;s not my fault&#8221;. To the extent that the word had intelligible meaning, it also had political ramifications that were scarcely examined by those who bandied it about with such ponderous self-importance. The mere utterance of it was assumed to sweep away any consideration of what was once assumed to be the most basic principle of modern democracy: that elected national governments are responsible to their own people – that the right to govern derives from the consent of the electorate.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/janetdaley/6845967/Therell-be-nowhere-to-run-from-the-new-world-government.html">There&#8217;ll be nowhere to run from the new world government &#8211; Telegraph</a>.</p>
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		<title>Swiss Minarets and European Islam &#8211; by Daniel Pipes</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/daniel-pipes/swiss-minarets-and-european-islam-by-daniel-pipes/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=swiss-minarets-and-european-islam-by-daniel-pipes</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/daniel-pipes/swiss-minarets-and-european-islam-by-daniel-pipes/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Dec 2009 05:10:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Pipes]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=40979</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Switzerland revolts against symbols of advancing totalitarianism.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-40982" title="1027-switzerland-minarets" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/1027-switzerland-minarets.jpg" alt="1027-switzerland-minarets" width="465" height="602" /></p>
<p>What importance has the recent Swiss referendum to ban the building of minarets (spires next to mosques from which the call to prayer is issued)?</p>
<p>Some may see the 57.5 to 42.5 percent decision endorsing a constitutional amendment as nearly meaningless. The political establishment being overwhelmingly opposed to the amendment, the ban will probably never go into effect. Only 53.4 percent of the electorate voted, so a mere 31 percent of the whole population endorses the ban. The ban does not address Islamist aspirations, much less Muslim terrorism. It has no impact on the practice of Islam. It prevents neither the building of new mosques nor requires that Switzerland&#8217;s four existing minarets be demolished.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s also possible to dismiss the vote as the quirky result of Switzerland&#8217;s unique <a href="http://direct-democracy.geschichte-schweiz.ch/">direct democracy</a>, a tradition that goes back to 1291 and exists nowhere else in Europe. <a href="http://www.zeit.de/2009/50/Zeitgeist-50?page=all&amp;print=true">Josef Joffe</a>, the distinguished German analyst, sees the vote as a populist backlash against the series of humiliations the Swiss have endured in recent years culminating in the seizure of <a href="http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8351246.stm?ad=1">two businessmen in Libya</a> and the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/6073643/Swiss-governments-apology-over-Hannibal-Gaddafis-arrest-sparks-angry-backlash.html">Swiss president&#8217;s mortifying apology</a> to win their release.</p>
<p>However, I see the referendum as consequential, and well so beyond Swiss borders.</p>
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<p style="font-size:smaller;margin:4px;">&#8220;Our Lady of the Rosary,&#8221; Qatar&#8217;s first Christian church, lacks cross, bell, dome, steeple, and signage.</p>
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<p>First, it raises delicate issues of reciprocity in Muslim-Christian relations. A few examples: When Our Lady of the Rosary, <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,338014,00.html">Qatar</a>&#8216;s first-ever church opened in 2008, it did so minus cross, bell, dome, steeple, or signboard. Rosary&#8217;s priest, Father Tom Veneracion, explained their absence: &#8220;The idea is to be discreet because we don&#8217;t want to inflame any sensitivities.&#8221; And when the Christians of a town in Upper <a href="http://www.copts.com/english/?p=3643">Egypt</a>, Nazlet al-Badraman, finally after four years of &#8220;laborious negotiation, pleading, and grappling with the authorities,&#8221; won permission in October to restore a tottering tower at the Mar-Girgis Church, a <a href="http://www.freecopts.net/arabic/2009-06-28-16-57-25/42-rokstories/1395-2009-10-30-22-27-16">mob of about 200 Muslims</a> attacked them, throwing stones and shouting Islamic and sectarian slogans. The situation for Copts is so bad, they have reverted to building <a href="http://www.ebnmaryam.com/vb/showthread.php?p=52207">secret churches</a>.</p>
<p>Why, the <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/3729/the-vatican-confronts-islam">Catholic Church</a> and others are asking, should Christian suffer such indignities while Muslims enjoy full rights in historically Christian countries? The Swiss vote fits into this new spirit. Islamists, of course, reject this premise of equality; Iranian foreign minister <a href="http://www.irna.ir/En/View/FullStory/?NewsId=826171&amp;IdLanguage=3">Manouchehr Mottaki</a> warned his Swiss counterpart of unspecified &#8220;consequences&#8221; of what he called anti-Islamic acts, implicitly threatening to make the minaret ban an international issue comparable to the <a href="http://www.meforum.org/1437/after-the-danish-cartoon-controversy">Danish cartoon</a> fracas of 2006.</p>
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<p style="font-size:smaller;margin:4px;">Iran&#8217;s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki warns of &#8220;consequences&#8221; for anti-Islamic acts.</p>
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<p>Second, Europe stands at a crossroads with respect to its Muslim population. Of the <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/4323/europes-stark-options">three main future prospects</a> – everyone getting along, Muslims dominating, or Muslims rejected – the first is highly improbable but the second and third seem equally possible. In this context, the Swiss vote represents a potentially important legitimation of anti-Islamic views. The vote inspired support across Europe, as signaled by online polling sponsored by the mainstream media and by statements from leading figures. Here follows a small sampling:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>France</strong>: 49,000 readers at <a href="http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2009/11/30/01016-20091130QCMWWW00619-faut-il-interdire-la-construction-de-nouveaux-minarets-en-france-.php"><em>Le Figaro</em></a>, by a 73-27 percent margin, would vote to ban new minarets in their country. 24,000 readers at <a href="http://www.lexpress.fr/opinions/sondages/?idSondage=831955"><em>L&#8217;Express</em></a> agreed by an 86-12 percent margin, with 2 percent undecided. A leading columnist, <a href="http://blog.lefigaro.fr/rioufol/">Ivan Rioufol</a> of <em>Le Figaro</em>, wrote an article titled &#8220;Homage to the Resistance of the Swiss People.&#8221; President <a href="http://www.france24.com/fr/20091202-sarkozy-interdiction-minarets-reaction-crainte-populations-pays-denature-identite-islam?autoplay=">Nicolas Sarkozy</a> was quoted as saying that &#8220;the people, in Switzerland as in France, don&#8217;t want their country to change, that it be denatured. They want to keep their identity.&#8221;</li>
<li><strong>Germany</strong>: 29.000 readers at <a href="http://www1.spiegel.de/active/vote/fcgi/vote.fcgi?voteid=6471&amp;choice=1&amp;aktion=setcookie"><em>Der Spiegel</em></a> voted 76-21 percent, with 2 percent undecided, to ban minarets in Germany. 17,000 readers of <a href="http://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article5382070/Sind-wir-eigentlich-auch-Schweizer.html"><em>Die Welt</em></a> voted 82-16 in favor of &#8220;Yes, I feel cramped by minarets&#8221; over &#8220;No, freedom of religion is constrained.&#8221;</li>
<li><strong>Spain</strong>: 14,000 readers of <a href="http://www.20minutos.es/encuesta/3991/0/0/"><em>20 Minutos</em></a> voted 93-6 percent in favor of the statement &#8220;Good, we must curb Islamization&#8217;s growing presence&#8221; and against &#8220;Bad, it is an obstacle to the integration of immigrants.&#8221; 35,000 readers of <a href="http://www.elmundo.es/debate/2009/11/2519/prevotaciones2519.html"><em>El Mondo</em></a> replied 80-20 percent that they support a Swiss-like banning of minarets.</li>
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<p>Although not scientific, the lop-sidedness of these (and <a href="http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2009/12/around-the-world-.html">other</a>) polls, ranging from 73 to 93 percent majorities endorsing the Swiss referendum, signal that Swiss voters represent growing anti-Islamic sentiments throughout Europe. The new amendment also validates and potentially encourages resistance to Islamization throughout the continent.</p>
<p>For these reasons, the Swiss vote represents a possible turning point for European Islam.</p>
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