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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Midterm</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>Rick Perry: Restore the 10th Amendment, Restore Freedom</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/rick-perry-restore-the-10th-amendment-restore-freedom/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rick-perry-restore-the-10th-amendment-restore-freedom</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Dec 2014 05:54:47 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[Former governor of the Lone Star State sheds light on the path to liberty at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to Gov. Rick Perry’s keynote speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event took place Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/114532350" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>David, as we gather here for this 20th anniversary celebration of the Freedom Center, it was similar circumstances that this country found itself in when you had the first Restoration weekend in 1994. Two decades ago Republicans had swept into power in both of the Houses, a revolution that changed the balance of power for the first time, Cleta, in 40 years. Twenty years later, Republicans again have won historic victories in the midterm elections and once again we are controlling both houses of Congress. In addition to picking up eight seats in the U.S. Senate, we picked up at least a dozen House seats, three governorships, several state legislative chambers. Today, Republicans control 68 of the 98 partisan state legislative chambers. That is the most in the history of our party. And we stunned the pollsters. It was a beautiful thing. We stunned the pollsters even more than we stunned President Barack Obama, who apparently doesn&#8217;t realize that November 4 even happened. He&#8217;s too busy representing those who didn&#8217;t vote to listen to those who did vote. But even if he didn&#8217;t hear the message, the American people delivered one. They said enough of the slow growth tax policies, enough of the smothering debt, they said enough to this colossal bureaucracy that we&#8217;ve seen, and these agencies of government that all too often are unaccountable to the people. They rebelled against government-run healthcare schemes, against a President who refuses to secure the border, and against bureaucracies that are broken, arrogant and abusive of power. That&#8217;s what the American people said Tuesday. The American people made it clear. They want a clean break from the economic policies that have slowed our recovery at home, and the foreign policies that Jim did an incredible job of laying out that have weakened our standing abroad.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m here to say that a congressional majority is a terrible thing to waste. The power that has been newly granted by the people must be used wisely to serve the people, that it&#8217;s not good enough to state what we are against. We must articulate what we are for. The election results leave us with a truly once in a generation opportunity to usher in an era of renewal and reform. You are here tonight through your commitment to the Freedom Center, and you&#8217;re going to be on the front lines of this battle. One of the ideas that has returned to the fore of the conversation, to the forefront of people&#8217;s minds, if you will, is the proper place of states within our constitutional system. Indeed, we have spent the last six years challenging edicts out of Washington that amount to federal control of our classrooms, our healthcare, and our environment and our economy. Washington&#8217;s assault on state sovereignty and individual freedom is a well-documented assault on the Constitution and, in particular, the Tenth Amendment. Some have ridiculed the binding power of the Tenth Amendment, but, of course, Jay, without that amendment, the Bill of Rights would have been incomplete, and the Constitution would never have been ratified. The question is whether Republicans in Washington, now in control, will pursue Washington-centric solutions to the problems that plague us, or will they look to and empower the states.</p>
<p>It was the liberal Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who called the states laboratories of democracy which &#8220;tried novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.&#8221; Yet Brandeis&#8217;s political descendants have forgotten that lesson. In fact, they flipped it around trying these grand experiments in federal power, ostensibly for the common good. I like that Tocqueville observed that in the American system the actions of the federal government would be rare, but the reality is the federal government is involved in all kinds of things the Constitution doesn&#8217;t empower it to do, while ignoring basic responsibilities like securing our border. And it&#8217;s the states that are pushing back against federal overreach and the courts are starting to take notice.</p>
<p>In the infamous Obamacare case of 2012, Chief Justice Roberts upheld the law, but the Supreme Court also struck down the mandatory Medicaid expansion as a violation of the Tenth Amendment. Now a new Obamacare case is about to be heard. It uses the letter of the law to challenge the federal government&#8217;s use of subsidies on many of these healthcare insurance exchanges. Now we know that the federal government overstepped its powers. We know that, partly because we know there is now a new smoking gun: One Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of Obamacare. In less than a week&#8217;s period of time the Washington sin of prevarication has come to be known as &#8220;Gruber-ing.&#8221; He said repeatedly, I think, what is there now, six videos that we have, that the federal government had to lie to the voters because we are too stupid to know what&#8217;s good for us. That shows exactly why the states are so important to defending individual freedom; because the states have stood up to the abuses of federal power in Obamacare. The law, as a matter of fact, it may collapse upon its own weight.</p>
<p>So if the states are these laboratories of democracy, I would suggest to you that Texas has found the formula for success. You know, it&#8217;s interesting, some people call it the Texas miracle, and I tell them, I said it&#8217;s not a miracle. I can&#8217;t explain a miracle. This I can explain. This is really pretty simple. This is not rocket science. You don&#8217;t spend all the money. Keep the taxes low, a regulatory climate that is fair and predictable, a legal system that doesn&#8217;t allow for over-suing, and accountable public schools so you&#8217;ve got a skilled workforce. This will work. It&#8217;ll work anywhere. Jay, it&#8217;ll even work in California, I swear to God, I&#8217;m telling you it will. And the results have been rather stunning. When you look at job creation, one-third, one-third of all the jobs created in the United States in the last 13 plus years have been in the Lone Star State. Over the last ten years, we have created four times more jobs than the state of New York, we have created nine times more jobs than the state of California. And some would say well it&#8217;s because you have all of that energy, and I will suggest to you we are glad we have that energy. America is glad we have that energy. But it&#8217;s not singularly the energy boom, that&#8217;s only part of the reason for our success. We&#8217;ve added jobs across the spectrum – 228,000 workers in education and healthcare, 156,000 in professional services, 162,000 in hospitality services, 130,000 in trade and transportation, according to the Texas Public Policy Foundation. I am particularly proud of the fact that as of January of this year, Texas became the number one high-tech exporting state in the nation, passing up California and the famed Silicon Valley. And we&#8217;ve been continuing to reach out to give California companies the opportunity to relocate to the great state of Texas, companies like Toyota, who moved their North American headquarters to Plano this last year, companies like Space-X, and we&#8217;re going to keep doing it.</p>
<p>And my point is, I want the Golden State to succeed. We need California to be a powerful, successful country. That was a Freudian slip. We would really like to bring them into the United States and be a part of this country. You know, for ten consecutive years now, Chief Executive Officer magazine has chosen Texas as the number one state to do business, and, thanks to the governor of this state, Rick Scott, they are doing a good job to push us. Rick Scott is an extraordinary governor, and Floridians were really wise to put this man back into office again because he really understands what the future of our nation, the future of this state is all about, and the focus on creating that environment, where the citizens of this state will be free.</p>
<p>Freedom is what this is all about. It is in the pursuit of freedom, and, on average, there is a thousand people every day moving to the state of Texas because they are in pursuit of freedom. Freedom from over-taxation, freedom from over-litigation, freedom from over-regulation. That is what needs to be the powerful Republican message as we go forward inside the boundaries of this country. And here are some of the results of those policies. Our crime rate is now the lowest that it&#8217;s been since 1968. We&#8217;re shutting prisons down in the state of Texas, not building them.</p>
<p>What&#8217;s the result of good, thoughtful public policy? There are those that would stand up and say you cannot have a growing economy and take care of your environment. That is an absolute false lie. Nitrogen oxide levels are down 63 percent in the state of Texas in the last decade, ozone levels are down by 23 percent during that same period of time, our carbon footprint which, by the way, is not a pollutant, but is down by 11 percent during that period of time because we understand that, even if it is, we want to make sure that we&#8217;re doing everything that we can to make that environment as pleasing as it can be for the future generations, and that&#8217;s what we&#8217;ve done in the state of Texas. Part of that&#8217;s been because of policies that we&#8217;ve put into place to move old polluting types of engines, diesel engines, out of the fleets. Part of it&#8217;s been moving to that natural gas. That&#8217;s what can happen all across this country. This isn&#8217;t a miracle. It&#8217;s a model and it&#8217;s a model that will work anywhere. We are an increasingly diverse state. We got a little of something for everybody. We have Austin, Texas. As I told you, we are a diverse state. I refer to it as the blueberry in the tomato soup. And, David, I encourage you to visit from time to time. You can talk philosophy and tenure to the professors at the University of Texas. They would love to have you.</p>
<p>But, in all seriousness, can we do more? Yes. Should we try to do more? Absolutely. But what Texas shows is that with a rapidly growing economy all else becomes possible. Clearly Texas is a model that works, but we&#8217;re not alone. America has just experienced a great test of governing principles. In the days leading up to the 2014 mid-term elections, we were told that Republican governors were in trouble. You read it everywhere. You saw it on multiple outlets. Scott Walker&#8217;s public union reforms in Wisconsin, Sam Brownback&#8217;s tax-cutting in Kansas, Rick Scott&#8217;s pro-growth policies in Florida, all were going to be punished by the voters. For example, the campaign for America&#8217;s future said that seven Republican governors were now &#8220;being judged harshly by voters now that their right-wing policies had failed to deliver.&#8221; It went on to say that these states were laboratories for the kind of small government trickle-down economics that Senate candidates hoped to bring to Washington, impose on the nation, and there is a real danger that the failed experiments in these seven states will be brought to Washington by a Senate Republican majority. But the experiment wasn&#8217;t quite over, and the voters decided in a very powerful conclusion on November 4. Not only did six of those seven governors win re-election, but Republicans picked up governorships in solid states for Democrats like Massachusetts, Illinois, and even Maryland. And there were a lot of people, a lot of people that were responsible for those Republican victories including a number of you, if not all of you, in this audience tonight. Yet in the end it was the people who decided. They told fellow Americans that the experiment and conservative governance is a resounding success and they want more of it.</p>
<p>There were a few places that bucked the trend though. Jay, your California being one of them. See, I tell people, I say California, for example, is as liberal as Texas is conservative. But that is not an argument against federalism. In fact, California is an example of how the state&#8217;s Tenth Amendment powers work for liberals too. You think about this. California has some policies that no other state in the union have tried, and in most other states, don&#8217;t want to try. Take cap and trade, for instance. I mean, not even Barack Obama, in those heady early days of his first administration, could pass cap and trade, but California has it. And it&#8217;s making new companies like Tesla a lot of money, even as it is at the same time forcing a lot of companies out of that state.</p>
<p>Nearly 20 years ago, California also became the first state in the nation to legalize medical marijuana. In 2012, Washington and Colorado legalized marijuana entirely. This year Alaska, Oregon, and the District of Columbia followed suit. The governor of Colorado said that he regrets it. Most conservatives oppose it. The federal government&#8217;s still fighting it, and the United Nations said this week that legalizing marijuana violates international law. But that is the beauty of the Tenth Amendment. I&#8217;m telling you, that is the beauty of federalism. If states can make their own decisions on matters of general policy, then we can have the kind of political diversity among the states that gives meaning to the pursuit of happiness. People can vote with their feet, they can vote with their pocketbooks, they can invest their dollars where they want, and that gives states an incentive to attract them, and to innovate. The reason welfare reform became so popular nationwide was because it succeeded in Wisconsin. The reason state provided healthcare is unpopular nationwide is they proved that it was costly in Massachusetts.</p>
<p>Some states want to cling to policies for various reasons. California is addicted to spending. Therefore, it&#8217;s addicted to debt and taxes. So, there&#8217;s a result. It&#8217;s losing people, and entrepreneurs, and homeowners, and that is another benefit of federalism. You can do what you want in your state. But you are forced at some point to pay the costs.</p>
<p>So, how do we ensure that the states protect and, I might say, regain their Tenth Amendment rights? One way is by continuing to fight the encroachments of the federal government. Whether bad laws like Obamacare, bad spending like the stimulus of 2009, or bad faith in immigration policy, but beyond that we can take political action. We can show the American people concrete results, how states work better, how states compete against each other, and, I might add, better than the federal government could do. And that&#8217;s exactly how Governor-elect Larry Hogan over in Maryland, that was the point that he made. He laid out the data. He showed people in that state how many people had left the state, how many billions of dollars it was costing the state because of the bad policies. If we show people the difference between conservative policies and liberal policies, I happen to think they&#8217;re going to demand conservative policies almost every time just as they did last Tuesday. And when people understand, when people understand that they have the power to choose these policies, they&#8217;ll resist. They&#8217;ll resist any attempt by the federal government to take that power away. There is a reason that people and states are included together in that Tenth Amendment. Individual liberty has shone brightest when it&#8217;s been protected from big government. Only successful states are strong enough to protect our freedom from those in Washington who think they know better. States are the essence of our national motto e pluribus unum, from many one. That is the common creed of the David Horowitz Freedom Center that defends it every day. They defend it now and I will suggest to you they will defend it 20 years from now. And that is what each of us must fight for every day.</p>
<p>God bless you, and thank you all for coming and being a part of this.</p>
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		<title>Kimberley Strassel on the GOP Game Plan Going into 2016</title>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Dec 2014 05:51:44 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[Wall Street Journal editor lays out the political battle ahead in Washington at Restoration Weekend.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to Kimberley Strassel&#8217;s speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event took place Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/113680186" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>A little bit more on me and my background.  I do sit on the editorial board of the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>.  We have a motto. We&#8217;ve had the motto, the same motto for decades, &#8220;Free Markets, Free People.&#8221;  It used to actually be &#8220;Free Markets, Free Men,&#8221; but then folks like me worked there, and we had to switch it up a little.  I&#8217;m the only member of the board who sits down in Washington and, from there, I write quite a few of the unsigned editorials that are the opinion of the editorial page.  Most of those focus on laying out our views on policy.  I separately also, under my own name once a week write a Potomac Watch column, and the idea of that is not to talk about policy but to try to explain politics which is, of course, infinitely harder, although infinitely more amusing.  It always reminds me of that famous Will Rogers line, &#8220;I don&#8217;t make jokes, I just watch the government and report the facts.&#8221;</p>
<p>So, we just had an election.  We are still waiting for a few last final results, Louisiana Senate race, some House seats, but the headline news is in and, of course, it is that the Republicans won and they won big.  This marks the first time in four years that one party has owned both houses of Congress, and the first time in the Obama presidency that he has faced a united Republican front.  In other words, after years of watching Harry Reid turn the Senate into an earthbound equivalent of the black hole, we are about to experience in Washington something very, very new, and I thought what I would do is just spend a few minutes talking about what I think we might expect.  What can we expect from President Obama in terms of his interaction with Republicans?  What can we expect from the GOP in terms of what they&#8217;re going to try to accomplish with domestic legislation and foreign policy and oversight?</p>
<p>Let me start with the President because I think that one&#8217;s pretty easy.  There are some, we can call them the world&#8217;s bipartisan optimists, who think that perhaps President Obama has been chastened by this loss.  They believe that he is like most Presidents, that he&#8217;ll be worried about his legacy, he hasn&#8217;t passed anything of consequence since 2010.  He&#8217;ll want to move up those approval ratings.  He&#8217;ll extend a hand to Republicans.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m a Conservative, and so I&#8217;m a born optimist, but I also try not to confuse optimism with insanity.  I think if we&#8217;ve learned anything about this presidency it&#8217;s that this President is fairly self-satisfied.  What you hear coming out of the White House is that he already believes he has written himself into the history books.  He did Obamacare.  He will take credit for restoring the economy.  He won the Nobel Peace Prize.  There is a view in the White House that what will in fact determine President Obama&#8217;s legacy is his party&#8217;s ability to keep the White House in 2016 and therefore protect programs like Obamacare.  And if that&#8217;s your guiding principle, then your impulse is going to be to spend the next two years trying to lay traps and create scenarios designed to make Republicans look bad, to make them look obstructionist and hostile to progress and therefore laying the groundwork for another Democratic President.  And I point out that he&#8217;s likely to get a lot of support for that strategy from Congress.  They are not chastened either.</p>
<p>One aspect of this recent midterm that has not been adequately noted is that most of the Democrats who lost their seats were the ones who at least claimed to represent the more moderate wing of the Democratic Party.  So the Democrats who were going to be returning to Washington in January are not only going to be greatly reduced in numbers, they&#8217;re going to be a far more liberal caucus than that party has probably seen in decades.</p>
<p>And we&#8217;re already seeing the President&#8217;s approach.  I&#8217;d like to point out to you for any of you who didn&#8217;t watch it or didn&#8217;t note this, the most telling line in the President&#8217;s press conference after his midterm thumping, &#8220;To all the Americans who voted, I hear you.  To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you too.&#8221;  This is a story Democrats are already telling themselves.  They didn&#8217;t lose this because it was a referendum on Obama.  They didn&#8217;t lose it because people disapprove of their policies or their candidates or want to change.  Oh, no.  They lost because not enough people voted.  In particular, not enough people on their side.  And so the approach going forward is to double down, to reenergize the liberal base with more aggressive policies.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s been the definition of Obama&#8217;s past week.  In the ten short days since this midterm, the President&#8217;s announced he&#8217;s going to unveil a series of unlawful immigration orders to get the Hispanic vote back onside.  He&#8217;s unilaterally cemented a new climate deal with China to get the Tom Steyers and the environmental base back onside.  He&#8217;s pressuring the Federal Communications Commissions on net neutrality to get all those Silicon Valley donors onboard.  And this in my view will be the definition of Obama&#8217;s behavior in his last two years in office.  This is going to be a White House that continues to break in every form and fashion and to new levels of the boundaries of Presidential power.  And the reason I think this is guaranteed is because I believe there is really only one lesson this President has learned in the last six years and that lesson is this.  He has discovered, to his delight, that when he does this stuff, there really isn&#8217;t anything anyone can do to stop him.</p>
<p>So, what about Republicans.  Republicans.  It is sometimes easy to look at the Republicans over the past few years and not be filled with huge amounts of rousing confidence that they&#8217;re going to successfully navigate the next couple of years.  But I think the glass-half-full side of all of this is that, in fact, the GOP has learned some very bruising lessons over the last couple of years, and they&#8217;ve learned them the hard way.  And so they come into this majority with those mistakes under their belt a little bit savvier perhaps than in recent years.  And their greatest insight, in my mind, and the one that their ability to remember I think is going to define their success, is that they can&#8217;t govern from Congress.  You can&#8217;t govern from Congress.  You can&#8217;t.  You can push, you can demand, you can block, you can exert influence.  They&#8217;re going to have a bigger megaphone than they did because they&#8217;ll now have both chambers.  But it&#8217;s the other guy who has the veto pen, and they know that this President is going to use that pen to draw lines around certain of his priorities and to protect them at all cost.  And so the trickiest thing the GOP is going to have to handle over the next two years is expectations management.  They cannot afford to go out and promise to repeal Obamacare because they can&#8217;t.  And they can&#8217;t reform Medicare.  And they can&#8217;t abolish the EPA.  That&#8217;s just not going to happen.</p>
<p>What they can do, and what they must do, is instead lay out on the national stage an optimistic, creative, pro-growth, problem-solving agenda by moving a steady stream of targeted, sometimes smaller legislation, to the President&#8217;s desk and daring him to say no to that.  Set peace battles in which the GOP highlights very specific positive changes and then forces congressional Democrats and President Obama to make choices.  And note this President has never had to do that before.  For six years he&#8217;s been protected by the Democratic Senate which spent its first two years only sending him his priorities, and the last four years shutting down the entire chamber to shield him from any controversial bills.  And by the way, most of the Senate has never had to take a difficult vote.  Do not underestimate the power of simply forcing the left to have to vote on some issues.</p>
<p>Look at Keystone.  I think this is a fabulous example.  It has been delayed for six years.  The House has passed legislation authorizing it nine times, and Harry Reid acted like the subject never existed, never had binding vote on it.  But now, Democrats came back and they realized that this was going to be one of the first things that Republicans took up when they took over the Senate.  They realized that 70 percent of Americans support the idea of the Keystone Pipeline.  They know that many of their members are going to get shellacked if they actually do vote no.  So rather than wait for Republicans to take credit for that, they&#8217;re moving it up, and they&#8217;re likely to have a vote on Tuesday.  And I will wager that there will be a number, a significant number, of Democrats who vote for this only because they are finally being made to.  So that&#8217;s an idea of the dynamic and how it changes.</p>
<p>Republicans are going to have a lot of avenues by which to make President Obama and Democrats have to make those choices.  In particular, because they have vowed to, and this is important not just for the country, I think, but for their success in Washington, they vowed to go back to regular order.  Something Washington has been missing a while.  We may finally have, for instance, an honest to goodness appropriations process.  Imagine that.  And that means the full use of the power of the purse which is the power that&#8217;s been largely obliterated by these many years of continuing resolutions and omnibus bills.  Those CRs have meant that if Republicans ever wanted to force a policy change via the federal purse, they had to hold the whole government hostage.  That&#8217;s what happened last fall with Obamacare and the government shut down, and it isn&#8217;t always good politics.</p>
<p>If you go back to the regular process, however, as both John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have promised to do, and it&#8217;s important that they be held to that, that&#8217;s a whole new ballgame.  You can put policy into individual funding bills.  You can pressure Democrats to join it.  You can send it to the President and then he has a choice.  He can agree to your policy, or he can be responsible for shutting down one piece of his own government.</p>
<p>Think about how much fun this could be with, say, an energy appropriations bill.  You put all this policy in there that the President and Democrats have for years, claims that they&#8217;re in favor of, more liquid natural gas terminals, offshore drilling, and you force them to vote on it, and you send it to the President and if he vetoes it, darn, he shut down his energy department, which would just be awful, right?  I mean he wouldn&#8217;t be able to send anymore subsidies to Solyndras.</p>
<p>If Republicans are going to lay out an agenda, that appropriations process is also going to be vital for another reason.  It&#8217;s going to be the main way to finally and again have a national debate on spending and priorities in government.  This is a debate the President has also been largely able to deep-six over the last few years because of the continuing resolution culture.  &#8220;Government Just Gets Funded,&#8221; it&#8217;s a little note on Page 36 of the newspapers.  Nobody talks about what was in it.  Republicans can once again talk about the sequester.  They can tie this into the foreign policy debate that we&#8217;re now having, the cuts President Obama has made to the military and what&#8217;s that meant for our national security, and even if they don&#8217;t send all their ideas to the President, they can tee-up via these process, budget process, their visions of healthcare reform and entitlement reform and give the country an idea of what would happen if there were a Republican President.</p>
<p>Some of these little set piece battles aside, there&#8217;s probably a few bigger and bolder things, if Republicans are very smart about it.  There is a push right now coming from the White House to work with Republicans on corporate tax reform.  Paul Ryan is taking over Ways and Means.  He&#8217;s very serious on this subject.  And the question is going to be whether Obama can be a trusted partner in a tax venture.  He never has been before.  We&#8217;ll see if he&#8217;s changed.</p>
<p>Immigration.  There is only one reason in my cynical little mind that the President is now threatening these immediate actions on immigration executive orders.  It isn&#8217;t to help the Hispanic community.  It isn&#8217;t to clarify the law.  It probably isn&#8217;t even likely because he believes that it&#8217;s great politics for him.  It is for one reason only. It is to goad Republicans into acting like lunatics.  And I know there is a very controversial question out there still, immigration, among the conservative ranks, but in my view Republicans would be very wise to act in a responsible way on some form of legislation and just clear this from their decks.</p>
<p>A little takeaway from the midterm that I didn&#8217;t think got a lot of attention, but it&#8217;s hugely relevant.  One of the reasons Republicans did better among Hispanics this midterm, and they did – a lot of senators, a lot of governors, a lot of house members.  Their numbers were higher with Hispanic voters.  I think it&#8217;s because immigration wasn&#8217;t really a topic.  The President didn&#8217;t want to talk about it because of what had gone on down at the border.  Republicans didn&#8217;t want to talk about it because it&#8217;s an uncomfortable subject.  And it just didn&#8217;t come up in a lot of races.  And as a result, the GOP had an opportunity to talk to Hispanic voters about other issues that matter deeply to the country, the economy, jobs, healthcare.  This ought to be the situation that Republicans are striving for.  Being able to talk to Hispanic voters about other issues that matter to them, and you can&#8217;t do that until immigration as a policy topic is neutralized.</p>
<p>So that&#8217;s legislative.  Beyond that, the next most important thing the GOP is going to have to do is tackle nominations.  It&#8217;s huge.  As many of you know, Mr. Reid at the end of last year blew up the Senate filibuster for Presidential nominations.  The consequences of that have been profound.  For years now Federal Appeals Courts have favored Conservative justices because of the legacies of Reagan and both Bushes.  Now for the first time in more than a decade, and a lot of people don&#8217;t know this, for the first time in more than a decade judges appointed by Democratic Presidents significantly outnumber judges appointed by Republicans.  Democratic appointees now hold the majority of seats of 9 of 13 appellate court circuits.  When Obama took office that number was one.</p>
<p>The most consequential of these as you may know is the DC Circuit which hears almost every important case out of Washington and now has seven Liberals and five Conservatives on it.  Four of those seven were picked by Obama, and most of them ran through just in this past year since the filibuster was blown up.  Obama has now not only appointed far more judges than President Bush had by this time in his tenure, those justices, because there has been no filibuster to provide a check on what kind of judges they are, they are far more Liberal than most justices that have been put on the court in decades.  And they&#8217;re going to serve lifelong terms.</p>
<p>Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has said he&#8217;s going to return the Senate to regular order and also restore the filibuster to 60 votes to confirm nominees.  I know there&#8217;s a big debate out there among Republicans on whether or not this is a good idea.  I think it is.  I know a lot of people think that Republicans should give Democrats a taste of their own medicine, but if you don&#8217;t go back up to 60 votes, here&#8217;s one of the problems.  There are a lot of Republican Senators right now in the Senate who are of the mind frame that you need to show deference to Presidential appointments and nominations.  And there are plenty more Republicans who are up for election in 2016 in very tough states, and they are not always going to be reliable when it comes to the nominations questions.  And I think it&#8217;s going to be very, very hard.  I don&#8217;t think, I&#8217;m sorry, I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s going to be very, very hard for Democrats to get 51 votes on most of these nominations, so if you don&#8217;t put it back up to 60, it becomes much harder to block things.  And I want everyone to think about that too in the context if there is a potential Supreme Court opening.</p>
<p>Finally, the other major priority for Republicans has to be oversight.  This is a Presidency that is a mountain of scandals: Fast and furious, Benghazi, the IRS, the Veterans Administration, the Pebble Mine veto.  And the only thing that all of these cases all have in common is that we don&#8217;t have answers to any of them.  We have very valiant people trying to get those answers.  I saw that Cleta Mitchell got your Annie Taylor award last night.  By the way, Cleta Mitchell took me to the bar last night, and if I don&#8217;t make it all the way through this speech, it&#8217;s her fault.</p>
<p>The individual agencies that are the subject of these probes backed up by the Justice Department and aided by Democrats in Congress have spent the past three years engaging in a fulltime outright effort to stonewall every one of these probes.  Will a Republican Senate get us all the answers?  No.  But what this does do &#8212; and Cleta actually wrote an amazing piece in the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> this last week which everyone should pay attention to because it&#8217;s correct &#8212; this ought to be a moment for the Republicans to finally get more serious about oversight, to be far more aggressive to get the right people at the committees who are actually going to go to the wall to get some of the answers.  And that&#8217;s a big moment for Republicans too, because unravelling some of these scandals, I think, it&#8217;s going to be important for laying the groundwork for 2016 for them.</p>
<p>And they&#8217;ve got to do all this because it plays back to the opening point.  The GOP&#8217;s challenge in a nutshell is this.  They were voted in because people in this country desperately want change, but it&#8217;s also the case that they can&#8217;t run all of Washington just from Congress.  There are limits on what they can do, so they&#8217;ve got get through what smaller things they can while every day showing what things could be like, how things could be different.  And every day master the impulse to react to Obama, because his only goal is going to be to paint them as obstructionists who can&#8217;t govern, who are driven by internal fights, and they&#8217;ve got to prove that that isn&#8217;t true.</p>
<p>And they have to too because this next Presidential race is going to be very tough and nobody should think otherwise.  The Republicans on the upside have a very neat, new, young generationally different crew of potential nominees coming up, and that&#8217;s very good for the party.  But it&#8217;s also going to mean potentially a very long and ugly nomination fight.  And the Democrats aren&#8217;t going to have that problem because they&#8217;re going to have Hillary.  I mean everyone keeps asking is Hillary going to run?  Hillary is running.  She&#8217;s running right now.  She&#8217;s running, running, running.  You don&#8217;t go out and write a book and campaign for everyone across the country unless you&#8217;re saying I&#8217;m running.  Now she could change her mind in the next few months, but right now we are going to have some Republican versus Hillary Clinton.  And not only does some Republican have to get through a potentially ugly primary, but that some Republican then has to run in a general election in which increasingly the demographics of this country do favor a Democratic party.</p>
<p>And it isn&#8217;t just the Presidency on the line.  I&#8217;ve talked to some Democrats in the last few weeks since this election.  They&#8217;re not really overly fussed that they just lost the Senate.  Why?  Because they&#8217;re convinced this is going to be the shortest term loss ever.  The last three election cycles have all favored Republicans in the Senate.  Far more Democrats up for reelection than Republicans.  In 2016, that situation is totally reversed.  There will be 24 Republicans up for reelection.  Many in states that are absolutely brutal for Republicans to hold.  Places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin.  By comparison there will be ten Democrats up for reelection in 2016.</p>
<p>So, again, the ability for Republicans to prove that they can do something and to lay out, to lay out very clear, modest proposals, act on them, and then provide a vision could well shape the politics of this country for the next decade.  The policies the President&#8217;s passed, whether they&#8217;re allowed to stand, the shape of the courts, the final truth about these scandals, the biggest questions and whether they can ultimately be changed &#8212; entitlements, the tax code, tort reform, campaign finance, speech laws &#8211; this next two years are very important.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m just going to finish by telling you what I&#8217;m actually most excited about, and that&#8217;s actually the things I don&#8217;t yet know are going to come.  A major shift has actually been happening in Congress, one that tends to not get a lot of attention.  The media tends to be so obsessed with the split in the Republican Party, the Tea Party versus establishment and Libertarians versus Hawks.  The biggest change I&#8217;ve actually seen in Washington and particularly in the Senate in the decade I&#8217;ve been covering is in fact a generational one.  When I first started writing about the Senate, the average age of a Senator was about 180 years old.  And the real story of recent elections is how many of these older, distinguished politicians have retired or died in office and been replaced by a lot younger people with new ideas.  And that&#8217;s happened on both sides of the aisle, by the way.  It&#8217;s not just a Republican phenomena.  But given Harry Reid&#8217;s lockdown, hardly any of these guys have ever had a chance to make a mark.</p>
<p>And some of them are really impressive thinkers and policymakers.  I know you&#8217;ve heard from Ron Johnson last night.  Yeah.  Marco Rubio, Pat Toomey, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and they&#8217;re about to be joined by what I would term the best crop as a whole of Republican Senatorial candidates in goodness knows how long.  Tom Cotton in Arkansas, Ben Sasse in Nebraska, Dan Sullivan in Alaska &#8212; woo hoo, just got Alaska! &#8212; Joanie Ernst in Iowa, Steve Daines in Montana.  This is a really impressive crew, all of whom have real expertise in the areas that are actually going to matter profoundly in the debates in the next two years, things like energy, things like foreign policy.  And you&#8217;re going to see them join the many reformers you&#8217;ve also seen in the House.  And you can have real opportunity, I think, for some ideas and innovation of the kind that the Conservative moment has been lacking for some time and I think that&#8217;s going to be a really fun thing to watch.</p>
<p>So, on that more optimistic note, I&#8217;m going to let you all get back to your lunch.  Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to me, and if there are any questions I&#8217;m happy to take them.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>The Democrats have really poisoned the well.  Everybody who is an uninformed voter knows full well that every Conservative, every Republican is mean, selfish, dishonest, homophobic, bigoted, racist and any other bad thing you can think of.  So the question is, if people are really convinced of this, we have to change that impression first.  How the heck do we do it?</p>
<p><strong>Kimberley Strassel: </strong>Well, we have to show it, you know, and actually I think there were some remarkable examples of how people did that in this last election.  I think it&#8217;s why the Republicans won is because they did.  You know, the war on women thing, okay.  I mean, that has crushed Republicans the last few years.  It hit a wall this year and in part it was because of guys like Cory Gardner out in Colorado, who when they started running ads against him saying he was anti-women and, and would stop everything, he said, actually you know what, I&#8217;m in favor of over-the-counter contraception which actually would make it much easier for all of you women out there.  And by talking about policies that would actually help women in particular and by not being afraid to, he didn&#8217;t just say no, I&#8217;m not.  He actually gave examples of what it was that made him, his policies and his ideas work for women and, you know, I can&#8217;t remember what the final vote was but he kept the gap with Mark Udall very small in the women&#8217;s vote.  When Ken Buck ran in 2010 he lost women by 17 points.  And they did the same playbook on him in Colorado and I think Cory Gardner lost women by 3 or 4 in the end or something like that.  Tom Cotton won women by 10 points in part by talking about issues that mattered to women that went beyond uteruses.  You know, he talked about foreign policy.  You know, remember, there&#8217;s a lot of women out there that are national security moms.  They care about things like this.  So I think you have to address these head on.  You know, Ed Gillespie in Virginia, so close, but he spent most of his time, a lot of time on the campaign trail and I advised everyone to go look in Ed Gillespie&#8217;s campaign, he had all of his policies laid out.  He was a very informed candidate who went on an agenda and he spent a lot of time on the campaign trail talking about ways in which Republican policies will help the working poor.  You know, you have to address these things if you&#8217;re not going to be tarred as anti-women, anti-poor and everything else.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Yeah, just so the Republicans don&#8217;t overreact and go ballistic and actually damage themselves, what is your recommendation for a strategy after Obama commits his lawless act next week?</p>
<p><strong>Kimberley Strassel:</strong> Well, look, I think the first thing Republicans have to do is actually just point out, A) how unlawful this is, okay, and that&#8217;s a theme that&#8217;s really grown out there among people and the public and I think it resonates.  I think they also have to point out that this was done for cynical reasons.  The President is not helping Hispanic voters.  What he will put out will not be durable, it does not address a lot of the problems the Hispanic community cares about.  There are all kinds of problems with doing this by executive order because you shouldn&#8217;t do it that way.  So they should point out that there are major problems and that he didn&#8217;t do this to actually help and it&#8217;s not good policy, and then I think they should put forward a series of bills that address different issues, starting with the border security bill, but going through some of the things.  And, you know, I think that Republicans have the ability, when I think of immigration, I know that this is very controversial but immigration can also be seen as a big jobs bill.  I mean, there&#8217;s a lot to this about high tech visas, guest worker programs, things like that, and I think it&#8217;s got to be a framing issue as well as anything.  But they do I think have to respond in some way.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>John Boehner has already rolled over on immigration and is going to give us amnesty and it makes those of us who worked hard to get Republicans elected wonder what the effort was about and why the Republicans in the House can&#8217;t seem to get a Republican as a leader.  Would you like to comment on that?</p>
<p><strong>Kimberley Strassel: </strong>Well, they just had elections.  Anyone could have challenged him and nobody did.  So I think one problem that has happened, and I would wager if you talked to members of Congress they would agree with this too, is that probably one of the failings of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell over the last few years is they haven&#8217;t actually talked to each other, and they haven&#8217;t necessarily talked to their conferences as much as they should and told them what they&#8217;re going to do and make an effort to get them onboard with it.  And you know when you&#8217;re not sending a message about what your plan is and working hard internally to get your guys onboard, you create a vacuum which allows everyone to kind of do whatever they want.  And, you know, I think that was some of the craziness you saw over the shutdown last year, it wasn&#8217;t the shutdown itself but the fact that the party didn&#8217;t seem to know where it was going, it was running in 15 different directions all at the same time.  So this isn&#8217;t directly addressing your question but I do think one of the things that I&#8217;m hearing from people is that there&#8217;s been a big push on Boehner and McConnell to be a lot more responsive to their caucuses, be a lot more informative about what they&#8217;re doing and to work with each other and have a unified strategy and we&#8217;ll see if that doesn&#8217;t help.  Thank you.</p>
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		<title>Andrew Klavan: How the Media See the Midterms</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/andrew-klavan-how-the-media-see-the-midterms/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=andrew-klavan-how-the-media-see-the-midterms</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Nov 2014 05:57:05 +0000</pubDate>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246144</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><span style="color: #000000;">In this special episode, our</span><span style="color: #000000;"> yes-he&#8217;s-happily-married-ladies host examines how the wise sages of main stream media covered, or didn&#8217;t cover, the recent mid-term elections. See the video and transcript below. </span></strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/FKLy-IcdH7c" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">I’m Andrew Klavan and this is the Revolting Truth.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The political landscape has changed and now that some time has passed, let’s try to get at the deeper meaning of the midterm elections.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">In the final results, Republicans won eleventy hundred Senate seats out of a possible thirty-three, and approximately a gazillion governorships including four in the seven states that only exist in Barack Obama’s imagination.  I know many of you untrained amateur political hobbyists out there may feel this means that voters have repudiated the Obama presidency&#8230;  and then thrown it to the ground and stomped on it&#8230;  then set it on fire&#8230;  and then mocked its dying agonies&#8230;  while feeding the flames with crumpled Hope posters&#8230;  that once seemed to promise so very, very much and now are only ashes.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">And yet President Obama himself says he still believes he has the love of a grateful nation. The nation is Iran but Iranians are people too, some of them.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">To separate the facts from the things the president says, let’s turn to the sharp-eyed, clear-eyed, blue-eyed, google-eyed experts who populate the mainstream media.  Only their incisive analysis can help us reach the revolting truth.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">For instance, the mainstream Washington Post determined that this was a so-called Seinfeld election that was about nothing, whereas the mainstream Daily Beast allowed it was more of a Seinfeld election that was actually about nothing.  Mainstream New York magazine said this was really a Seinfeld election about nothing but mainstream columnists at CNN, Huffington Post and USA Today said this looked to them like a Seinfeld election and was about nothing.  This, of course, is as opposed to being, say, a screw-off-leftist-jackass election that was about telling leftist jackasses to screw off.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The mainstream New York Times, a former newspaper, ran an op-ed saying there shouldn’t be any mid-term elections, while mainstream ABC, CBS and NBC simply pretended there weren’t any.  According to our friends at the Media Research Center, mainstream ABC World News Tonight went seven weeks in September and October without running a single story about the midterms, while mainstream NBC and CBS ran only a tiny percentage of the number of stories they ran before the Democrat midterm victory in 2006.  Network news executives were asked why they barely covered the upcoming Republican tsunami but they couldn’t hear the question because they had their fingers in their ears and were singing lalala very loudly.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But in the wake of the crushing, excoriating, devastating, humiliating, crushing and humiliating and devastating and humiliating rejection of Obama and the Democrat agenda, mainstream news commentators were quick to explain how Republicans winning elections meant Republicans were losing elections.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Matthew Dowd from the mainstream ABC News network said the Republican election triumph left the Republican brand “still very damaged,” whereas Jim Vanderhei of the mainstream website Politico said the GOP victory will put the party in “a hell of a jam” and Mika Brzezinski at the extremely mainstream MSNBC said the Republican wave will hurt Republicans because it will “embolden their self-destructive ways.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">And while Republicans did crush the Democrats&#8230; and did see them driven before them while hearing the lamentations of their women, Ben Smith of the mainstream website Buzzfeed said the elections meant surprisingly little, while Chris Cillizza at the still mainstream Washington Post called the elections “boring, vapid and inconsequential.”  Chris Matthews made the following face.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">So there you have it:  according to the mainstream media, the midterms were elections about nothing that shouldn’t have been allowed and didn’t really happen but if they did they didn’t matter and Republicans lost them even if they won.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Now some of you may say this sort of election analysis only proves that so-called mainstream journalists are really just a bunch of ideologically corrupt leftist shills seeking to twist the facts to advance an extremist agenda that’s completely out of keeping with the founding principles of the United States.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">I’m Andrew Klavan with the Revolting Truth.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Pat Caddell: Midterm Elections a Repudiation of Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/pat-caddell-midterm-elections-a-repudiation-of-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=pat-caddell-midterm-elections-a-repudiation-of-obama</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2014 05:52:22 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[One of America's foremost election experts analyzes the GOP's victory at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to Pat Caddell&#8217;s speech 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/112328603" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Yes, I’m basically happy.  The person I’m really happy about is that Harry Reid is no longer Majority Leader.  I say that certainly not because I’m a Republican.  I say that because I’m an American and, as I had said on television, he was the greatest danger to democracy, I said this election, that we&#8217;ve ever seen, and his damage to the institution of the Senate where no one was allowed to vote, where there were no amendments, where there were no bills considered unless he wanted to, where he killed all discussion and basically all effective work in the world’s most deliberative body, supposedly.  And what he did with the nuclear option overnight to roll back 250 years of protecting the minority, which now the Democrats are going to find out how much they like that, but all of that and I think for the sake of the democracy, his demise is the biggest and greatest news.  The fact that he stays on only shows you how my party cannot get beyond—he and Nancy Pelosi&#8211;the Democrats cannot get beyond their own myopia and thinking as they have a truly disastrous election.</p>
<p>An election, I want to point out that was not only &#8212; but has many interesting kernels to it.  And I want to say, first of all, and it has many instructions for the future and then it was also about not a lot, not a lot.  The one thing is that, first of all, yes, the Republicans won a big victory and, once again, left amazing possibilities on the table because their consultant, lobbying, whoever controls this Republican Party has the imagination of a French General staff in World War I.  They poured hundreds of millions of dollars into about a dozen states, and they did not put anything into what I thought was a pretty simple election.  First, the Republicans decided they didn’t have anything they were going to offer.  No economic plan, no message, nothing like what happened in &#8217;94 with which was the Contract for America.  Which no one knew what was in the Contract for America, but it set an image for the Republicans that year with Gingrich and the victory that year, which was that at least the Republicans had a plan, had an idea.  We’re most of all united.  Let me just say something about those kinds of things, misreading elections.  Newt Gingrich then misread that election that the country had voted for revolution.  The country had voted to stop Bill Clinton.  There is somewhat of a vast difference there.</p>
<p>This election, let me just say, the success.  I want to talk first about what was left there and then the success.  The strangest thing about the election, for those of you who don’t know, I’m on a program at 7:30 eastern time on Sunday nights live with Doug Schoen and John LeBoutillier called <i>Political Insiders</i> in which we basically try to tell the truth, and we’ve been fortunate enough to have quite a response, and sometimes I get a little carried away.  I called the President last week a raging narcissist, which is true.  The whole problem with this guy is not that he’s a radical Pres &#8212; he’s a raging narcissist, and he’s going to prove it in the next couple of weeks.  But the election hung for a long time.  Those close Senate races hung to the end.  You could not look at the national situation &#8212; the direction of America where it was more than two to one or going in the wrong direction, the President’s job rating poorly, all of his policies under attack and very negatively received, an economy that people believed was not helping them, and all of that &#8212; and you look at the historical record in the six years and you say, “My God, that’s got to be a Republican landslide.”  And then you look down at the individual race and you said, “My God, they’re all close.”  And I kept saying this tension could not hold.  And I thought, as I had said the Sunday before election, there was a good 30 percent chance or more that it would just blow open; that eventually the undecides would move in the direction they should and essentially that’s what happened.</p>
<p>But when I look at the election and say what was possible, and I don’t mean to be a sour note on what makes everyone happy, but it’s important to understand what it may tell you.  In the states that did not have big battleground Senate races, where none of the several billion dollars or $4 billion, whatever was spent, the Republicans put no effort whatsoever.  I had argued, as I had done in &#8217;12, and argued since, hey, this is a pretty simple election.  This is a referendum election.  And why the Republicans refused to take some of that money that they were wasting by piling even more.  For those of you who know economics, know the marginal gain, marginal differentials.  But when you keep pouring money into races where people are saturated beyond belief with television and where you’re watching 50 spots at one time and the whole thing, because of local buy, and the expense the stations are gouging, the people buying the media and whatever, why did the Republican National Committee, which does have the ability to do this, where the Senate can eat it up by national advertising amazes me, why didn’t they put air cover over the race?  Why didn’t they?  Very simple, first of all, remember we’ve had all of these crises.  Starting, you go to the VA, Benghazi, or anything you want to take, White House Secret Service, Bergdahl, on and on and on, a disaster after disaster this year.  And, voters, like all of us, there was one coming every week and then Ebola and ISIS and then you go, my God I forgot about the VA.  Well, in advertising there is a reason they keep reminding you.  So, what I’m wondering is why wasn’t there some kind of effort to put out a message that said to remind.  First of all, all it did was remind people.  Remember this, remember this, and ask a simple question.  Because we knew what the results were.  They were more than two to one people opposed his policies.  Once Obama handed the Republicans and shafted his party with the message that my policies are on the ballad, why didn’t they just quote that.  Put that up and say, “If you disagree with those policies and here’s an example, send him a message.  Vote Republican.”  If you weren’t going to say anything positive, that certainly was a major message.  And guess what, it would’ve been seen by everybody and cheaper and better placement, everywhere across the country.</p>
<p>And you know what would’ve happened?  Let me tell you what happens.  There were 15 House races that were undecided election night.  Most of them line outside of all of these states where the money was spent.  As of to date, nine of those 15 have ended up being won by Democrats because there was no national message.  If you look at Illinois, where the Republican Senate gubernatorial candidate won a surprising victory over one of the most corrupt&#8211;I mean really, I’m broke.  I mean what a disastrous place Illinois is&#8211;after Obama had campaigned for Pat Quinn, the incumbent.  Won by five, six points.  That’s even counting Chicago several times.  But Dick Durbin, the major force in Democrats in the Senate, Democrat Whitt got 53 percent of the vote.  Al Franken got 53 percent of the vote.  You go through some of these races and you think, my God.  Always when we have landslides, we have these surprise upsets.  Like Virginia almost was.  But we have them.  Now Gillespie had no more.  He couldn’t buy media pretty much the last month.  No one was supporting him.  Can you imagine what a little bit more push and a national message would have done or might have opened up in a couple of these Senate races?</p>
<p>Look, the Republicans have their best House position since 1946.  But if you’re going to win an election, take everything off the table you can is my theory.  But, unfortunately, the strategy I described does not enrich the political consultant, lobbyist class in the Republican party, which makes a lot more money by having only state races and does not require them to have any imagination other than storming across no man’s land in the same way they do.</p>
<p>Let me say this.  You look at the exit polls and there are some problems.  When everyone tells you how all the vote came out, let me tell you a dirty little secret for which I will probably be shot for having announced.  At the end of the process, after the votes come in, the people who run the exit poll reweight all of their actual results from the 20,000 people they interview and weight it to the results.  That’s like if you hired me to poll and I said to you, just wait election night I guarantee you I will give you the winner and the right result.  Well, they’ve got some bias problems in there.  So, take some of these divisions skeptically.  So, I went back.  I polled the numbers for the 97 percent before we had the magic of this.  And here’s part of the story of the election.  One, it is that the voters were not rewarding.  And this is important about misreading elections as I pointed out in &#8217;94.</p>
<p>This was a repudiation of the President and his policies and his party.  But it was not an endorsement of the Republican Party by any means.  This was voting for the lesser of which evil that was in front of you and the evil in front of you was the one that was in the White House and in power.  Now, that doesn’t mean the opportunities don’t exist for what you do, but to think that this was an endorsement, because mainly remember I don’t know if you can define.  I don’t know what the campaign was about other than beating Obama.  And in individual races, it worked.  But listen to this, and this goes to a message I’ll talk about at the end in a few minutes about 2016 and what’s coming and a project I’ve been working on.  But I want to tell you this.  What you had was both parties had high negative ratings.  The public was dissatisfied, to say the least, with Obama.  When asked angry or dissatisfied, it was around 60 percent.  The Republican leadership in Congress got the same number, 60 some percent, just to show you, and this is of Republicans.  I mean this is a Republican wave election.  Right?  Republicans are still getting even worse ratings relatively, if you think about how people are voting, than did the Democrats.  All of that pointed to me to the fact that one should be careful; that basically, this was a very dissatisfied election.</p>
<p>Remember, we had a drop off.  This is the lowest midterm election since 1942.  Now, in 1942 there was a reason a lot of people didn’t get to the ballot.  For those of you who are too young to know, there was a thing called World War II going on.  But the results are only slightly better than they were in the 1942 turnout because so many dissatisfied voters where both parties stayed home.  And they depended on area.  Someone has done this.  It’s quite an interesting analysis.  In the third most rural and, therefore, most Republican areas of the country, the turnout was down about 34 percent.  In the exurbs and the suburbs, it was 38 percent decline, and in the urban areas, the urban centers, it was 47 percent.  Now that does not mean that the black vote, for instance, necessarily, and this is where only when we get a genius like Mike Barone you get in the precinct and actual numbers analysis is what we know.  But we have a situation where the exit polls tell us that the black turnout, the African American turnout, was only a point less than it was in 2012.  The Hispanics really stayed home.  But as Tavis Smiley, I agree with Tavis Smiley, if you’re black or Hispanic or of any color, what the hell was your reason to turn out and vote Democratic.  What had you been given, an economy where your income had gone down, where your families are not benefited and where the very wealthy were.  Remember, this is a Fed, appointed by Barrack Obama, propping up the very richest people with this wonderful bond buying plan they had, which has stoked the stock market, but done nothing for ordinary Americans.  And the President can’t understand and the economists say, “Oh my gosh, look how good the economy’s doing.”  Well, the American people have a different perception whether they are Democrats, Republicans or Conservatives.  If they know that they are not doing as well, they know that the jobs being created, thanks in part to Obamacare, more than half of them and a vast majority of them now, are part-time.  People are not working.  They live on the edge and they are still very nervous even though things are getting better.  And that partly is reflected you could see in the exit polls.  Seventy-eight percent of the people thought that they were extremely or very worried about the economy in the next year or so, which is totally different than what we’re being told is the case.</p>
<p>And then finally, one of the points in the exit poll that was interesting was that 3/4th of the American people believe that we were going to have another terrorist attack.  That it was highly likely or more that we would have a terrorist attack.  Those numbers are actually higher than they were after 2001.  And I wonder why?  Well, because if you look to the feckless leadership of this White House.  I mean the only way I can even describe it in foreign policy is feckless.  Whether it is in Iran.  In search of a deal, you have to be panic.  Barrack Obama’s proven one thing.  In search of a deal, he will do anything.  And that’s what’s been happening with Iran.  They’re allowing Iran supposedly to stop their nuclear weapons plan to continue to enrich uranium.  Hardly a prescription.  And if they don’t get an agreement by the 24th, the Iranians have used this time and given up nothing that they said they would.  And we have the person, so you can feel certain at night and not worry, the very woman who crafted the wonderful plan with the North Koreans during the Clinton administration to keep them from having nucs and expanding is the one working with the Iranians that John Kerry has brought in to handle that.</p>
<p>And then we have the Ukraine.  Putin sees the President at this meeting in Asia for two days and immediately starts reinvading Ukraine because he was so amazed with the President’s toughness.</p>
<p>And then finally we do it in a climate deal with Chinese, which is wonderful.  They buy 20/30 somewhere in the future.  They will cut back their CO2 use, but with no plan.  And meanwhile, we’re supposed to cut even more in between.  Once again, the search free deal at all costs.  And it should frighten anybody that for two years this will happen and you have to look to the Republican Congress.</p>
<p>But the President’s lack of behavior during this ISIS, which most Americans support.  Fifty-eight, thirty-seven support.  And yet on the ISIS thing, you have a lot of the people who opposed it, Democrats and Republicans agreed equally in their support, but people who oppose this, Democrat and Republican, who oppose what’s going on with ISIS, voted Republican.  Why?  Because I suspect they think this is not working.  That this is another sham being presented.  And any plan that has five shorties a day for air cover with no one on the ground.  And now our new, in the spirit of Arvin, we are sending in deals to that crack Iraqi Army to take on ISIS, and with what will be, we promise, great results.  That whole unraveling, all of that has made the American people very, very nervous.  And yet the President seems to have learned nothing from the election.</p>
<p>And I want to talk about a couple of issues for now they are very important coming up, and they also relate to the election and what we also know.  And also the question of how the Republicans will behave because I think they’ve behaved badly on many of these issues, and I have said this before at this forum.</p>
<p>Let’s take Obamacare.  What I call the night it was passed, a crime against democracy.  To jam through something without any support, unlike Social Security or Medicare where we had massive support from both parties, jam through with lies.  And, by the way, when we really found out the lies, it was amazing but by, and basically on the basis of bribery.  And all those people this time who voted for it, except for Jeanne Sheehan, were defeated and Franken and Durbin.  But the point is is that the American people have never accepted Obamacare.  We are kept told how great it is.  And then we have this gift of Mr. Gruber.  I just can’t get over him.  All I can think is Goober peas.  Gruber, he’s out there with all his comments.  And the White House denies he had anything to do.  We were paying him $400,000.00 apparently not to do anything except write the plan.  He is a Romney hangover from Romneycare.  Which is one of the reasons I am so unenthusiastic about your last nominee, who should have won the election and lost the election that should never have been lost.  Again, and the same people who came up short in delivering what could have been this year and are running around crowing are the same people who delivered that mistake.</p>
<p>And the Supreme Court ruled Obamacare was legal.  But when John Roberts had that visitation that he wouldn’t be invited to Washington dinner parties anymore after <i>The Washington Post</i> warned him desperately.  Things in Washington, there are certain priorities in life, going to dinner parties.  Apparently, John Roberts is more important than the law.  So he changed his opinion, embarrassingly so, and then decided to call the mandated attacks.  And, as I said at the time, my God, in this terrible disaster, he’s handed one club to the Republicans that they must use, which is that they lied that it was a tax.  Right?  Now, you would have thought the Republican party would have taken that in the Senate and the election and pounded that, and they didn’t and they wouldn’t.  And, to this day, I don’t know.  I can speculate why, but they did not.  That message for the American people, because it was very simple for the Democratic opponents in some of these Senate races that year, which is were you lying.  Were you part of the lie or, if you didn’t know, will you vow to vote to repeal the mandate now that you were lied to too.  It’s only one of two choices.  Either you were fooled or you were part of the fooling of us.</p>
<p>But that kind of thinking doesn’t seem to make it into politics anymore, which I think would’ve been helpful.  I think all along the Republican establishment has been lukewarm about Obamacare.  They have gone through the motions, sometimes these useless repeals.  Why we had useless repeals after 27 of them or whatever after the Supreme Court decision, not move to specifically just repeal the mandate, which would’ve killed healthcare, I do not know.  We’re going to have more opportunities.  But the notion of let’s repeal it all or whatever the strategies are, Obamacare has been proven to be the big lie of American politics.  And the President and now Mr. Gruber has pulled the bandage off so we can all see what was the truth, and we’re hopeful that that will change.</p>
<p>The other issue is immigration.  I listen to the people saying how great things would be.  We’d all be holding hands and jumping up and down because Obama would now embrace the compromise.  So, I’m sitting with Neil Cavuto election night on his show on Fox Business about 10:00, and I’m getting this and someone’s arguing on a panel.  I’m going, wait a minute, didn’t we do this two years ago.  I sat right here while all you people were saying Obama now would have a legacy.  He’s got a second term.  He’ll now work with people.  And didn’t I tell you he just tore the country apart to win and that he hates his other opposition and he’s so arrogant.  I told you there would be no peace.  And now you people think he’s going to do anything.  He’s going to blow the country up.  And all of this we’re going to work together and whatever?  This is a President who has decided that with this immigration move, and here is a very important point if you take nothing back.  And I am going to stress it Sunday because it’s really important. I watched the Sunday shows last week and all of the commentators in the Beltway, all of the wonderful media, and I want to talk about them for one second in a minute.  But all of them talked about this in one sentence.  Well, the Republicans are going to be angry.  It’s going to be a firestorm among the Republicans.  No, the firestorm will be with the American people.</p>
<p>The attitudes on immigration have had a sea change in three months.  In September, Rasmussen had numbers that showed vast majorities of Americans both oppose the President granting amnesty, believe that he did not have the power to do so, and also believed that if they did, the Republicans should take him to court, which people had ridiculed before, and including a large majority of moderates, the most critical group in the election who were normally democratic.  They do not vote like liberals, but they generally follow that and they deserted on immigration.</p>
<p>Everything points to we had a referendum in Oregon election night.  Now, you wouldn’t know this because, even if you go to CNN or whatever, the only thing that you will find that was on the ballot in Oregon was the legalization of marijuana, which CNN and the people in the news organization mainly think that’s probably one of the more important issues.  But they didn’t cover, and they don’t even report to this day on their web site, is there was a ballot measure by the same people, liberal Oregon, which had just voted for marijuana, to allow illegal aliens to have driver’s license.  Almost 70 percent of the vote was no.  Okay?  You want to talk about canaries in the mine.  Actually, the Democrats will have to worry because they blow up the Democratic party with this.  But you know what happened in the election, and I said this weeks before.  I was talking about the sea change on immigration.  The fact that it went to the idea of the President was King, not President, and that even large numbers of Democrats were opposed, and what I didn’t understand is why wasn’t the Republican party making that a direct issue against Democratic candidates.  How are you voting on immigration?  The President’s going to sign this amnesty.  Will you reject the President or not?  Actually, make it explicit particularly in those places where you don’t have a chance.  But they didn’t and I’ll tell you why.</p>
<p>Because the unholy alliance.  And some of you won’t like this, but it’s the truth.  The unholy alliance on immigration is an alliance between unions and the left because they want more cheap votes and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, particularly, and a lot of major Republican donors who want a lot of cheap workers.  And, therefore, and that is best illustrated by <i>The Wall Street Journal</i>, which takes all leave of its senses because of their support for total, open borders, along with <i>The New York Times</i>.  That’s when they stroll through the lilies together, skipping through and singing.  This is the problem.  The country doesn’t want this.  The country’s attitudes are changing.  And certainly, by the way, generically, and I love the way the institutions organize and put together the stuff on polling because they try to give a question that will give them some answer.  So, once it was clear that attitudes on immigration change, all of the major mainstream media polling outfits stopped polling on immigration.  As I pointed out, they didn’t even mention it in their election results.</p>
<p>And it goes to the other question.  The President’s right to constitutional power; that he is King.  But I have no confidence when Lindsey Graham, who got, by the way, 54 percent in South Carolina and a black man got 62 percent, tells you what might have been in South Carolina.  Some people, as opponents, are better to be lucky than to be good.  But Lindsey Graham and John McCain, who led the surrender on the appointments when the President was appointing these people on the Labor Practices Commission, laid down on that, which the court ruled unanimously was illegal.  And the Republicans were halfhearted.  It’s like the response when Harry Reid did the nuclear option.  Mitch McConnell and the Republicans could have stopped everything in the Senate.  Everything in the Senate requires unanimous consent, including the prayer in the morning.  Do you know what happens if Mitch McConnell had gotten up and said there will be no more business in this Senate until this is revoked.  You are not going to overnight have a coup de tat against the Constitution of the United States.  A stand for principle for once, the people would’ve supported.  Instead, they just said, “Oh my God, wait until we get to have it.”  It’s just those kinds of things that disillusion Americans.</p>
<p>Finally, the last point I want to really talk about other than the media.  And let me tell you something, whatever goes forward, the true enemy, and I’ve said this for years, is the media.  And it is not because of the truth they tell or the lies they tell, it is what they do not tell.  It is their decision not to report things.  For instance, the Gruber incident as of last night until yesterday morning, once, had been mentioned, only once, on any of the major networks, NBC, ABC, CBS.  Now, of course, CBS news is run by the man whose brother, Ben Rhodes, is the one who manufactured the talking points at Tom Donlan’s direction from Benghazi, and who makes sure to protect Obama.  But, they report nothing.  In the election, its stunning.  Numbers were in 2006, huge percentages.  I think it was like 150 some mentions on the evening news about President Bush being in trouble.  On the three networks this time, it was like 15 or 16.  And on ABC, it was zero.  ABC wasn’t even…and you wonder why interest was lower?  Because a lot of it wasn’t being reported.  And this has got to be taken on at a different level.  Too many Republicans in Washington and the establishment want to have nice relations with the press.  They want to be mentioned in the press.  They want to go along.  There needs to be a war on the press because it goes to the culture and it goes to whether or not we have a Constitution.</p>
<p>I was on the board at West Point.  I watched young men and women who were willing to stand on the ramparts and pledge with their very lives to protect our freedom, who thought it was an honor.  The press, which their ramparts, is a special deal on the First Amendment is that they would protect the American people from power from the Government.  And they have deserted those ramparts.  And in deserting those ramparts, they have endangered the freedom of every American, Democrat, Republican, Liberal or Conservative.  And there has to be a real war here.  And there is not.</p>
<p>You people, it’s like Bill Maher on television.  I mean HBO.  Bill Maher is not practicing free speech.  He’s practicing paid speech.  He gets paid by HBO.  He gets paid by you subscribers.  How many of you people in here subscribe to HBO?  Look.  Come on, let’s all be honest, I mean.  Yeah.  You know what you’re doing, you’re subsidizing all of that because Conservatives don’t know how to fight.  They don’t know how to take on HBO and say, hey, we’re not asking you take Bill Maher off.  How about put someone else on.  I have a friend in mind I would like to mention, but I won’t.  But, put someone on that balances that out or we will all cancel.  Do you know how fast Time-Warner would do if a million people in this country said they would cancel if they did not put a balance on HBO?  But you don’t fight.  You just give in.  It’s like the war on the culture.  This is a time to actually make definitions of these things.  The influence of the culture in Hollywood, as my friend Michael Barnes here says, every day on YouTube and everything else, they get up and then the score is at the end of the day is 845 to nothing.  Imagine if you cut that to two to one in the culture in terms of messaging and real things.</p>
<p>Finally, on 2016.  Nothing can be read from 2014.  The things I talk about is what I have discussed in my Smith Project.  The American people are united about one thing.  They hate the political class in Washington.  They hate the Democrats and Republicans, alike, with that.  They believe they are being screwed by both.  And I would like to remind the Speaker, again last night, Elizabeth Warren’s position about how the banks operate and about how they are getting off.  You know who agrees with that?  About 85 percent of the Republicans and Conservatives.  The entire country understands being screwed by crony capitalism which operates with the Chamber of Commerce and in Washington and the Democrats with all of their energy and all of their building bureaucracies for political machinery.  And they know they’re not being benefited and there is a common sense center that is gigantic, and it is coming.  It didn’t come in this election because we were squeezed between who would be in control of the Senate.</p>
<p>But I will tell you one last thing from the exit polls that has not been discussed.  There was a special sub sample of them, in which they asked people about several candidates would they be a good president.  Hillary Clinton was 42 yes, 53 no.  Then they asked about four Republicans, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Rand Paul and Rick Perrin.  On the average, 26 percent said that each of them would make a good president.  On average, 60 to 63 percent said no, they wouldn’t.  And this is in a Republican sweep going on.  And when they asked to how the people would vote in an election, 39 to 40 percent said they would vote Republican.  Thirty-four percent for Hillary.  This is not good news for Hillary at all.  And the balance said that it all depended.  They weren’t sure.  They weren’t particularly happy.  Understand we’re going to have insurgencies in 2016.  The Republican party and for the first time in your lifetime, my lifetime, or anyone’s lifetime.  Well, I guess some people were born in 1940 when you had Wendell Willkie seize the Republican party.  It was an insurgency.  You could have one this year.</p>
<p>And let me give you one last example why.  I’ll give you an issue.  One of the things the American people most are upset about when you ask them about it.  I’ve done it, Heather Higgins has done it, on polling about the exemption for Congress and the Congressional staff in the healthcare bill that the President came down and negotiated with Harry Reid and with John Boehner.  And Boehner was then saying, oh, he was against this exemption except that Harry Reid got ticked off and leaked all the emails where they agreed, they came together, so that they protect the Congress from what the American people were doing.  When you ask that of American people, 2/3rds of Republicans believe that’s the reason to turn every single person in Washington out of office.  You have 15, 18, whatever number of candidates running for President or thinking about running or having dreams and visions of White House and oval offices.  Not a single one of them will raise this issue.  This issue, the agreement between the two parties was that it was not to be discussed in the election, and it wasn’t.  Did you know that?  They had an actual agreement they would not raise this issue.  Do you know what could’ve happened to some of the incumbents, Democrats particularly, who were vulnerable if that had been raised.  And it wasn’t.  And the reason is and that’s what I mean, there is an insurgency.</p>
<p>I will know the Republican party has life when there’s a Republican running for President willing to attack the establishment of his own party the way that Jimmy Carter and others did in the Democratic party that I was involved in in the 70s.  Then you may get somebody who represents the American people.  As long as this is controlled by the people, as I said to you for two years, in Washington whose only real ambition is to hold on to the power they have and the money they make, your prospects in 2016 are dim.</p>
<p>Anyway, thank you very much.</p>
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		<title>Midterm Election: What Just Happened?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/midterm-election-what-just-happened/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=midterm-election-what-just-happened</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2014 05:53:03 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[An all-star panel discusses what to expect in 2016 and beyond at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to the panel discussion &#8220;Midterm Election: What Just Happened?&#8221; 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/112390545" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Richard Baehr:</strong> Let me start in response a little bit to what Ben said last night where he broke down the urgent versus the necessary. Obviously, election matter because the last six years I think have done real damage, and we lost very badly in 2006, both the House and the Senate. 2008 it got even worse. Also lost the presidency and terribly wide margins for the Democrats in both the House and the Senate. Made a comeback in 2010, moved back 2012, made some progress again this year, and now we have control of the Congress, but in the two years we have left with Obama in the White House, in a sense we have a blocking action. We&#8217;ll have some discussion later about what we can achieve positively and how clever we can be, but losing elections really does matter and yes, changing the culture matters too, and that&#8217;s a longer-term proposition, but we really can&#8217;t afford to lose the next presidential election and then have essentially the judiciary locked up for the next 25, 30 years under the control of the Democrats as well as the political election cycle.</p>
<p>Start with the big issue of whether the Republicans, based on what happened this year, can win a presidential election, and this comes down to what I call the demographic argument, and I want to throw out a comparison of two presidential elections, 1988 and 2012. 1988 was the last presidential election a Republican won when most of the media and the Democrats thought the Republicans had a lock on the Electoral College. George Herbert Walker Bush beat Michael Dukakis 40 states to 10, 426 electoral votes to 112, won by 8 percent in the popular vote, 54 to 46, but the interesting thing is, if you look at the breakdown between the votes of white voters and nonwhite voters in that election, Bush won by 20 percent among white voters and lost by 66 percent among non-white voters. In 2012 you have exactly, exactly the same breakdown in terms of white voters and non-white voters. Romney won by 20 percent among white voters and lost by 66 percent among non-white voters. The difference is in 1988 whites were 86 percent of those who voted in the presidential election and in 2012 they were 72 percent. When you change 14 percent and you take away a 20 percent margin among those 14 percent, a positive margin for your side, and replace it with a 66 percent margin for the other side, those 14 percent produced a 12 percent shift in margin. Instead of an 8 percent victory for Bush over Dukakis, Obama beat Romney by 4 percent. All right? Every 1, 2 percent shift has that impact at this point, assuming the numbers stay the same.</p>
<p>Now, the good news is the Republicans are improving their performance slightly among white voters. They won by 22 percent in 2014, and they did substantially better among minority voters. Instead of losing by 45 percent among Hispanics, they lost by roughly 26, 27 percent. They almost broke even among Asian voters after losing that group by 45 percent in 2012. The exit polls showed they won among Native Americans. That doesn&#8217;t make a whole lot of sense to me, but I think that may be some of the massaging that Pat Caddell talked about. The African Americans who voted 96 to 3 in 2008 for Obama and 93 to 6 in 2012 this time in the congressional elections was 89 to 10. It may not seem like a big deal, but it is a big deal. When George Bush was elected in 2004, the black vote was 88 to 11. That&#8217;s a huge difference from 96 to 3 or 93 to 6. All right? In fact, in 2004 to 2008 Bush won by 3 million votes, Obama won in 2008 by 9½ million votes. That&#8217;s a 12½ million shift in margin. Half of it, half of it was in increased turnout, substantially increased turnout among African Americans and the huge victory margin they gave of 93 percent margin as opposed to 77. Okay?</p>
<p>The Obama team knew what they were doing. They knew who would vote for them, and they got them registered, and they brought them to the polls. That&#8217;s a good thing they did for their candidate. All right? They knew who their voters were, and they got them to register, and they got them to vote, and they had the mechanics to monitor who was voting on election day and who hadn&#8217;t, and getting to the votes with early voting and so on. Okay? Republicans did better in the ground game this time, but still probably not up to where we need to be to win a presidential election.</p>
<p>So what were the demographics? I mean, if you think about it for a second, last year in the United States, actually for the last two years, 50 percent of the live births went to whites, 50 percent to non-whites. Let&#8217;s assume you look 30, 40 years out and you assume we have a country where the white vote goes for 22 percent. Remember, these are all citizens; they&#8217;re all born here. 22 percent for the Republican and the non-white vote, which is 50 percent, goes by 50, 55 percent to the Democrats. You balance those out, you average them out, what do you have? California. The nation has become California in terms of its electoral mix. What if you get the 2014 numbers, which are better. Republicans did better among whites. They won by 22 percent. They lose among minorities by say 45 to 50 percent. Then you get Oregon. Or maybe Minnesota. Okay? You got a shot in a good year, but doesn&#8217;t look very good.</p>
<p>The good news is the shift in the birth rate is not reflected in the shift in the mix of those who are voting to the same extent. Hispanics were 8 percent in 2006, they were 8 percent in 2010, they were 8 percent of the vote in 2014. Given that they are by far the fastest-growing group in America, that suggests that even with the Hispanic vote being obviously a pro-Democratic vote, if that vote grows much more slowly than is anticipated and grows to 10 percent, 12 percent, 13, and Republicans can keep their losses to 20 percent, you do not have the demographic nightmare which was forecast for the Republican Party in a book in 2002 by John Judis and Reed Teixeira, who called it the emerging demographic majority for the Democrats because of A) growing minority vote and B) growing percentage of white voters who are college educated who are more open and receptive to Democrats than non-college-educated white voters are who are the Republicans&#8217; strongest base.</p>
<p>Turns out that white college-educated voters move from election to election and can get disgusted if they think their taxes are going up and their services are going down or if they see things that they&#8217;re unhappy about, so it&#8217;s not a lost cause, but it would be silly not to recognize some of the trends that are underway in American society. This country is changing faster demographically than any country in Europe, and we&#8217;ve had books by Mark Steyn and others talking about how Europe is gone and it&#8217;s going to be 50 percent Muslim and those countries are going to disappear. The United States&#8217; demographics is changing much faster than any of those countries, and that&#8217;s with a replacement birthrate here at almost 2.1. We&#8217;re just a little bit below that. In Europe they&#8217;re much below that. They&#8217;re bringing in people. Their actual native population is declining.</p>
<p>So this is a shift and it&#8217;d be silly &#8212; Republicans have to do better with all groups. That&#8217;s the message I&#8217;d have, and do better with all groups means less pandering and more having a national American message, which is exactly I think what Pat Caddell was talking about today. I could not agree with him more. If the Republican Party simply is part of the governing majority and it&#8217;s a little bit less liberal than the other party, you sort of have the political parties in Great Britain. They are all locked in, essentially, to the same situation.</p>
<p>Now, let me talk again: Some good news this year in the elections. Republicans, the charge was, well, it&#8217;s a favorable nap in the Senate. You had all these Senate seats in red states that Romney had won big. There were 36 governors&#8217; races, and 22 of them were in states that Obama had carried. Republicans did not win red state governorships. They won in Maryland, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Maine. I have a summer home in Maine. One of the biggest wins of the night for me, because there&#8217;s probably no more detested character on the left than the governor of Maine, who is an abused child, one of 18 children. You talk about a rags to riches story. Look up Paul LePage on Wikipedia and read his life story, and it will match what you heard before in the previous talks about someone making something of their life and dealing with a tough situation and overcoming it. Maine Public Radio had a suicide watch out for all of their listeners on election night. They called for grief counselors, but unfortunately the grief counselors were all their listeners. They had to bring them in from Northern New Hampshire. There were seven Republican grief counselors in Northern New Hampshire.</p>
<p>Anyway, in the House of Representatives, I disagree a little bit with Pat, but for the most part he&#8217;s correct. Republicans probably left six, seven, eight seats on the table this year, but their maximum, given essentially the current mix of the populations and how people vote, is probably not a lot higher than 260, and they will probably get to 248, 249, 250 after those last few recounts are done in Arizona and New York, California, and you have the two runoffs in Louisiana. By the way, Louisiana Senate, first poll on the runoff, Cassidy is 16 points ahead of Mary Landrieu, so say goodbye to Mary.</p>
<p>There is something to having a national message, if you&#8217;re a national political party, and the Republicans again, why I say there&#8217;s sort of a limit, 260, 265, you&#8217;re not going to do much better. The Republicans did a great job redistricting, which is why winning the governorships in 2018, winning state legislative seats in 2020 is so crucial to maintaining that for the next ten years. I mean, in Ohio, Republicans have 12 of the 16 House seats. They have 13 of the 18 House seats in Pennsylvania, 9 or 14 in Michigan, 9 of 13 in North Carolina. Those are not deep red states. I mean, essentially what&#8217;s happened is the Democrats want their minority voters concentrated, and the Republicans cooperate, so they give them seats where Democrats had enormous numbers of wasted votes. They win by 80 to 20 in their seats. Republicans win a lot of other seats by 55/45, 60/40. All right?</p>
<p>So, and I want to say this very clearly. For the purposes of what you&#8217;re going to hear over the next few days, I&#8217;m not saying the Republicans are the good guys, but they&#8217;re our side at this point, and it&#8217;s our side versus the other side, and I would prefer our side wins. Okay? And getting the right people on our side obviously matters, and getting better candidates for our side matters, but we did well this year as a party and conservatives are in better shape for the Republicans having won control of both Houses than if they had remained in a minority on the other side.</p>
<p>One last thing. You hear a lot of talk about this blue wall. Republicans can&#8217;t win the White House. They can&#8217;t win the White House because the Democrats have won enough states in the last six presidential elections to get 242 electoral votes. All right? So Republicans gotta win pretty much every toss-up to be able to get elected President. Well, Republicans were 206 this time. Add Florida, Virginia, and Ohio you get to 266. Those are three states Republicans have to win to win the presidency. If they can&#8217;t win those three states they&#8217;re not going to win the presidency. All right? But then you have a bunch of other states. There are seven or eight states from Iowa, Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, which was only a 5 percent state, New Hampshire, Colorado. Republicans can put together a win nationally at the White House and for once they&#8217;ll be running against a candidate who may be older than the Republican, and the Republicans may not be nominating someone who ran before and lost, which has been six of their last seven nominees. All right? That seems to be how you get nominated for Republican. Run once and lose. So put together a younger candidate, someone with a fresh face, someone with ideas and I don&#8217;t think 2016 is a dead issue. Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Ron Radosh: </strong>This election, the midterm election, was not a vote for conservatism or the Republican Party. It was a vote against President Barack Obama, that the whole populace and the America people were really fed up with, and look at the minuses that Obama had: the handling of the Ebola crisis, the handling of Obamacare, the lies about Obamacare, his entire foreign policy collapse where his whole approach to the Middle East has gone up in flames. Everyone can see that Obama, in virtually domestic and foreign policy, I would say he&#8217;s actually the worst president that we&#8217;ve had certainly in the 20th century on. I think history will show, if the liberals on the left stop writing history and get some conservatives in there, at least, that Obama will be in the middle or on the bottom and nowhere near the top, as the greatest president, as a good president. He&#8217;s not in the ranks of an FDR or a Lincoln or a Reagan. He will be at the bottom.</p>
<p>So this midterm election really should come as no surprise. The presidency is something very, very different, and here&#8217;s what I think the problem is. The Republicans have to have a few different things if they are going to win. First, they have to understand that they must get votes from and appeal to the white working class, young people, Hispanics, African Americans. They have to broaden their approach and realize that they have to make inroads in groups that traditionally have not voted Republican in a long, long time. They can make these inroads, but to do that the Republicans have to have the message that they are a Big 10 party. They are not going to impose an ideological uniformity where if you don&#8217;t have either the most conservative position or if you disagree on tactics with some conservatives, that you are therefore not a conservative and not a Republican. They have to realize that everyone is not going to agree on every issue within the Republican Party, and the party has to begin trying to change its message to appeal to some of the groups whose votes they need.</p>
<p>Now, here is where Rand Paul sees part of the picture. Now I&#8217;m an opponent of Rand Paul. I think he would be a disaster. I think he&#8217;s trying to hide it by calling himself a realist, but he has an isolationist or a non-interventionist position very close to that of his father. That would be a disaster for America as well as the Republican Party. But the one thing Rand Paul has understood has to be done is a broad outreach to African Americans showing that the Republican Party has something to offer the African American community. In fact, has a great deal more to offer them than the Democratic Party, whose Great Society programs have collapsed and have proved to be an utter failure. So Rand Paul understands that. Secondly, Rand Paul has been making a great outreach to young people, and young people are attracted to a lot of his libertarian message. I don&#8217;t agree, again, with all of the libertarian message or proposals of the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, but Paul is reaching them and getting the big turnouts on campus because he understands the need for a new kind of message and reconsideration of old views.</p>
<p>Now, let me raise as an example here, the attitude towards gay marriage. Social conservatives have, for reasons that I respect, drawn a strong case against gay marriage as being good for society. My friend Robbie George, the Princeton professor of politics and perhaps the nation&#8217;s leading social conservative, has made a compelling case against gay marriage. But as I said to them, the tipping point is over. It&#8217;s a done deal. None of your arguments, as good as you and people who agree with you make them out to be, it&#8217;s over. The fight has been lost. You can&#8217;t change the fights that have been lost. There have been polls taken of young Republicans. I think a poll I read said that about 80 percent of young Republicans who consider themselves conservatives support gay marriage. The tide has changed. If the Republican Party can&#8217;t come out for gay marriage because they have to hold the party together, at least they can unite and work in areas in which both factions of the party agree to end discrimination against gay people. That has to be an opening in that position and a shift, or the Republican Party is going to lose young Republicans and young conservatives as well. I think that&#8217;s a hard truth, and it has to be accepted.</p>
<p>Secondly, let me give you another example, and here I&#8217;m going to quote from Michael Gerson&#8217;s recent column in the Washington Post about John Kasich. Now John Kasich has done tremendous things. Here&#8217;s what Gerson writes, and I&#8217;ll ready the quote. Kasich, he writes, deserves the award for the best performance in a battleground state. Yet Kasich won a majority of union voters, three-fifths of female voters, a majority of voters under the age of 30, two-thirds of Independents, and one quarter of African American voters. That is an incredible statistic for a real conservative. Now let&#8217;s say hypothetically John Kasich or someone who has his kind of positions got to be the Republican nominee. Are conservatives going to stand against such a person merely because he moved in one direction other Republican conservative governors did not move? That is, accepting the expansion of Medicaid and accepting the government funds to do that while other conservatives who were governors voted against it and stood firm against that? Kasich believes, right or wrong, that a program exists to help the poor who deserve help for health insurance, that that was a necessary step. In other words, he dissented from traditional conservative positions on one issue. To a lot of conservatives, that makes Kasich beyond the pale. I think you can&#8217;t do that. For a party that wants to broaden its appeal, it has to agree that not everyone is going to agree with what most people think are conservative principles. On one or another specific issue a conservative can feel a different approach has to be taken, even if it goes against the sentiment or the viewpoint of other conservatives. We have to accept that kind of diversity and try to understand why someone like a John Kasich, who is a conservative, disagrees and does something else in his own state. So there&#8217;s that to consider.</p>
<p>Secondly, let me finish with this thought. I think that one also has to stop demanding all or nothing. I think some of the arguments coming from the Ted Cruz faction or from Cruz himself of the Republican Party, and you heard Ted here last year. He&#8217;s a very intelligent man, brilliant intelligence. Both Robbie George and Alan Dershowitz said he was the best student they ever had, but I think Ted Cruz is wrong in a lot of his tactics, making extreme tactics the equivalent or the mark for being a conservative. Cruz has been making some noise recently about maybe we should close down the government again and not accept certain things that Republican leadership seems to be accepting. I think that&#8217;s wrong and dangerous.</p>
<p>Now, let me quote one conservative who said this. If you read Commentary Magazine you saw it in the cover story by Peter Wehner, and I forget who coauthored it. I think it might be Yuval Levin. But they have this quote from a conservative leader, who said, &#8220;True believers on the Republican right prefer to go off the cliff with flags flying rather than take half a loaf and later come back for more.&#8221; Now you know who said that? Anybody? Yes, it was Ronald Reagan, and Reagan understood that one has to make compromises. For example, in 1964 Reagan campaigned very strongly against Medicare. In 1980 he said we have to accept the fact Medicaid is popular. It passed with votes from both Republicans and Democrats. We can&#8217;t undo Medicare or spend any time attacking it. It&#8217;s here to stay. Reagan adopted to reality. There are some things we can&#8217;t change. We have to pick our fights closely, fight where we can win, and fight not only getting conservatives to vote for us, but getting centrist and disaffected Democrats. We have to create, as Reagan managed to do, a new generation of Reagan Democrats. They&#8217;re there waiting to be taken back into the fold. The midterm elections showed that. We have to remember that as we go forward to 2016. Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Matt Kibbe: </strong>Saving Pat Roberts, $12 million. Rescuing Mitch McConnell in very Republican Kentucky, $50 million. The look on Harry Reid&#8217;s face sitting next to Barack Obama two days later, priceless. If you haven&#8217;t seen that picture, please print it and frame it and put it over your desk. You know, I think Pat Caddell and Richard delivered some of the buzzkill facts about what happened in the last election, but I think we should do a victory lap first, and we all know about the Senate. In some ways I think that was the least important victory, and let me just point out a couple things that happened. We&#8217;ve talked about new Republican governors. There were at least 350 new Republican seats picked up in state legislatures. Tim Scott, one of my favorite senators, is the first black American to win in the south since Reconstruction. Some of you will remember that Tim Scott was in fact the Tea Party candidate in a very crowded House Republican primary who ran on issues, who ran on something called the Contract from America against Strom Thurmond&#8217;s grandson. Someone should tell Mother Jones the story about how it is that the Tea Party is expanding what it is the Republican Party looks like in 2014, which brings up, of course, Mia Love.</p>
<p>The story in the House, I think, is more compelling. Let&#8217;s give a shout out to Mia Love. I first met Mia Love when she was still a mayor in the State of Utah, and if you&#8217;re talking about expanding the demographics of the GOP, consider this. Black, woman, conservative, Tea Partier, Mormon. That&#8217;s pretty cool, huh? Someone send a memo to Mother Jones on that one too. But you know the House got more conservative. It got more liberty minded, and yes, the House majority grew but we also picked up seats like Mia Love&#8217;s which is a Democratic pickup. Bruce Poliquin in Maine, who is another liberty-minded fiscal conservative, and also Rod Blum in Iowa. This is a seat that Republicans should not have picked up. These are candidates that ran on something other than &#8220;I&#8217;m not Barack Obama.&#8221; There may be a lesson in there.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s at least touch on the down side here. The turnout in 2014 compared to 2010 was down 8 million voters. Now imagine what we might have done with a couple million votes at the margin in some of these battleground states. In 2010 we had much higher turnout among self-identified Independents, self-identified Tea Partiers, and self-identified conservatives. All of those voters showed up less in 2014 than they did in 2010. Interestingly, registered Republicans, or at least self-identified Republicans, went up a little bit, 1 percent according to a Wall Street Journal poll. I think that sort of punches a hole in this mythology that somehow Tea Partiers and conservatives are the Republican base. I think it&#8217;s better described that there are people that vote based on issues, not party affiliation. Someone should send that memo to Reince Priebus. You&#8217;re allowed to clap. It&#8217;s cool. So that&#8217;s the good news.</p>
<p>That was good stuff, and we need to be careful about the lessons for 2016 because I think, if you go to Nebraska, one of my favorite senators that will be coming in 2015, of course, is Ben Sasse in Nebraska. Now, if you compare Ben&#8217;s performance in Nebraska to what happened in Kansas, these states are fairly comparable in terms of size, in terms of massive Republican advantage. Pat Roberts struggled until the last minute to win in a state that we shouldn&#8217;t have spent a dime in. Ben Sasse spent far less money, and he won by 34 points. Now how did that happen? Anyone who was paying attention to this race should remember that Ben Sasse not only ran against Obamacare, he actually put together a very specific plan on what he would do to dismantle and replace Obamacare with a patient-driven system. You didn&#8217;t see that much amongst Republican candidates. Ed Gillespie actually did something similar at the last minute in Virginia, and you might argue that that was where he got his last-minute surge. I don&#8217;t have data to prove that point, and I won&#8217;t necessarily be able to defend it, but it&#8217;s something to check out, but Ben Sasse comes to the U.S. Senate as a one-man think tank that actually has ideas that were proven on the campaign trail on how we are going to manage Obamacare now that it is law, now that it has destroyed the individual market, now that it has radically expanded Medicaid rolls. We need more than &#8220;I&#8217;m not Barack Obama&#8221; to solve this problem, and this goes back to the 2010 analogy.</p>
<p>In 2010 there was a crowd-source document some of you will remember. It was called the Contract from America, and it was modeled after Newt Gingrich&#8217;s 1994 contract with one important difference. It wasn&#8217;t designed in Washington, D.C. It was crowd-sourced from millions of Americans who were asked, and Freedom Works was intimately part of this process. We actually had the audacity to ask Americans what they thought Washington should do, and so you came up with a ten-policy plank platform that not only Tim Scott ran on in South Carolina, but a vast majority of the Republicans that won in 2010 on a positive, specific, bold agenda. That&#8217;s where that came from.</p>
<p>Maybe that&#8217;s a lesson for 2016. The good news, and we&#8217;ve heard all the bad news, and I agree with all of the analysis on demographics and how an off-year election is fundamentally different than a presidential election. The good news is that we can actually fix this if we look at where the ideas are coming from in the House and the Senate Republican caucuses. It&#8217;s not coming from the top. It&#8217;s not coming from leadership. It&#8217;s coming from the bottom up, and perhaps that&#8217;s appropriate given who we are and what we believe. We think the genius of America comes from our communities, not from Washington, D.C., not from the top down. We are not Democratic apparatchiks that wait for someone to tell us what to do, right? This is why herding individualists is a lot like herding cats. But in the age of the Internet there&#8217;s a lot more of us than there are of them. If you go to the very long tail of the Internet where the decentralization of information – do you guys remember when Walter Cronkite used to tell you &#8220;that&#8217;s the way it is&#8221;? You couldn&#8217;t go on Google and fact check him, could you? You couldn&#8217;t set up an RSS feed and get multiple sources of information that told you that what the three networks were spoon feeding you was just not true. That doesn&#8217;t exist anymore, and even the New York Times is scrambling for eyeballs online in a very decentralized world where good information gets to people at lower marginal costs all the time. This is the new normal. This is the opportunity for Republicans that have enough faith in their ideas that they&#8217;re actually going to talk about big bold ideas going into 2016.</p>
<p>When Pat Robertson was in trouble in Kansas, did he call John McCain to come rescue him? Who did he call? Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. Where are the ideas coming from in the Republican Party? Mike Lee just became the chairman of the Senate Steering Committee, which Jim DeMint turned into the Republican Senate Think Tank a few years earlier. Mike Lee is another one-man think tank. He&#8217;s the guy that&#8217;s actually not only sober in his analysis but bold in his willingness to put good ideas on the table. We should learn a thing or two from Mike, and by the way, the GOP establishment is preparing to primary him in Utah in 2016. We should not let that happen.</p>
<p>I think Republicans mostly succeeded in 2014 by not being Barack Obama. This is not a very good long-term strategy, but if we would embrace the idea that good ideas can actually engage people that are interested in ideas, not party affiliation, and connect with Independents, connect with young people who are more liberty minded, there&#8217;s nothing but potential here, but the GOP needs to get comfortable with the fact that they&#8217;re not in charge anymore. You think about the vaunted Obama Get Out the Vote machine, for all of its decentralization it was fundamentally dependent on a cult of personality from someone at the very top of the pyramid dictating this is what we&#8217;re going to do, people waiting for their marching orders. You cannot do that with Republicans, and if you try they will take your head off. You can&#8217;t do that with libertarians. You can&#8217;t do that with Tea Partiers. They rightly believe that they&#8217;re in charge, and the moms that have Facebook pages all over American, Tea Party moms that are bigger than county GOPs, they&#8217;re in charge now.</p>
<p>So the question is what is the party going to do to tap into this massive decentralized network of people that should be constituents of Republican candidates? Don&#8217;t take them for granted. Don&#8217;t tell them what to do. Engage them on a set of values and ideas that are compelling. Now this is not necessarily completely like what you would argue Ted Cruz is doing. I think there are a lot of big bold ideas, positive ideas, Reaganesque ideas that cut across party lines. One is yes, we do need to repeal Obamacare, but we need to replace it with something, right? And if Republicans were good they would put that on the president&#8217;s desk. If they can&#8217;t do that, they should repeal the individual mandate. It is completely unjust. It is completely screwing our young people, and it has bipartisan support. There was a House vote where 30 Democrats crossed across the aisle. Another interesting subject is criminal justice reform, including asset seizure, sentencing reform. These are things that Rand Paul has worked on that again creates bipartisan majorities. They would put the president in quite a bind if he chose to veto things like that, and most importantly, embrace the chaos of a beautiful decentralized community that will show up if you stand for something and will stay home if you don&#8217;t. Thank you very much.</p>
<p><strong>Richard Baehr: </strong>I just want to make one quick note. To follow up with what Matt said. At this point in time, the Republican Party, which is of course the old people&#8217;s white people&#8217;s party, there are more statewide elected officials which means senators or governors, minorities in the Republican Party than there are in the Democratic Party. There are five versus four. The Republicans will put up a candidate and it doesn&#8217;t matter whether they&#8217;re Hispanic or Black to run statewide or Asian, and they&#8217;ll win if the voters, and particularly in those states where a lot of Republican voters like their ideas. Tim Scott proves that. Democrats will only put up their candidates, minority candidates, in safe minority districts. They will not risk essentially what&#8217;s going on statewide, and that&#8217;s why they have so few. If they are the overwhelming choice, they should be putting up more state nominees and they don&#8217;t.</p>
<p><strong>Matt Kibbe: </strong>Just one more comment on what Rand Paul is doing. I was on a panel recently with Richard Viguerie and he described libertarians as the fourth leg of what has now become a Republican table. Not, no longer the traditional stool where you had social conservatives, defense conservatives and fiscal conservatives. I do think that&#8217;s true particularly with young people, and we should be careful not to disenfranchise all of these crazy liberty kids that can be unruly. They can be loud. Remind me a lot of exactly what I was like when I was their age. This is an opportunity, and I think that the party made a huge mistake at the convention in 2012 by disenfranchising Ron Paul delegations. It wasn&#8217;t like Ron Paul was going to win the nomination. They would have been smarter to embrace a very broad community that includes the liberty agenda as part of that.</p>
<p><strong>Tom Lifson: </strong>I&#8217;ll use the moderator&#8217;s prerogative to agree with Matt. I live in Berkeley, California believe or not, and when Rand Paul came to campus it was electric. Nobody has been screwed worse by Obama than the young demographic. Nobody has been screwed worse by the education establishment than the young demographic, who are graduating college with debt that can&#8217;t be discharged in bankruptcy. So there is an opportunity there for the Republicans, if we&#8217;re willing to take it. Okay. Throwing it open to questions. Over there.</p>
<p>Next Speaker</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> I&#8217;d like to challenge some of the things that I heard from Ron Radosh, I&#8217;ve heard these from others as well, that the Republican Party somehow has to become more like the Democrat Party. We have to be for amnesty. We have to be for gay marriage. We have to be for all of this left-wing social agenda and it&#8217;s because of these palecon social conservatives that we are losing elections. I can say as a Republican candidate in a blue state, Maryland, first for Congress I was the Republican nominee in 2012 against Chris Van Hollen and again this year as a lieutenant governor candidate in a primary in Maryland where we ultimately won the governor&#8217;s race in a blue state, nobody saw that coming, that social conservative issues are big winners. And we have to be true to our social roots and our conservative roots. I campaigned an awful lot in Hispanic churches. I can tell you this is a demographic we are told by the political consultants that is not supposed to vote Republican. They were overwhelming going to vote Republican, and why were they going to vote Republican? Because we were against gay marriage, we affirm that marriage was between one man and one woman, and that is the way it always has been. That is a natural fact. You cannot legislate marriage and destroy biology. It does not happen.</p>
<p>Young people understand. And even in the Hispanic community they understood the argument which I put forward boldly and frankly and openly looking people in their eyes that we exist in a nation of laws. And the reason that many Hispanics came to this country was to escape countries where there was not a rule of law, and do you want to go back to dictatorship, which is what you fled from &#8212; or do you want to live here in a country with rule of law?</p>
<p>So I think, I would challenge you that we should not be abandoning our social agenda. We can perhaps express it differently. I&#8217;ll give you that. Yes, we could express it differently. We can put a more positive spin on it, not a restricted spin on it. But a lot of social conservatives stayed home. Many of them in minority communities, and these are votes that could be big winners for us, if we stay true to our values. Thanks.</p>
<p><strong>Ron Radosh: </strong>I&#8217;m not saying you and other social conservatives should not stay true to their values. I did not say the Republican Party should endorse gay marriage. I don&#8217;t think it should. I think it should allow in its ranks those who believe that gay marriage is right, and those who believe it is wrong. To take a position on this kind of issue is going to lose a lot of young people. And they are overwhelmingly in favor of gay marriage. Now you can try and educate them for your point of view, argue with them, present solid arguments as to why marriage should just be between a man and woman. That&#8217;s fine. But for the party to come out on one or another side of this would be disastrous. It&#8217;s going to put into oblivion. I think there are common issues. One other comment I wanted to make that I forgot to say, about ideas. And I agree with a lot of what Matt said. There is that group what they call the Young, the YG project, Young Guards?</p>
<p><strong>Matt Kibbe: </strong>Young Guns.</p>
<p><strong>Ron Radosh: </strong>Young Guns.</p>
<p><strong>Matt Kibbe: </strong>Yeah.</p>
<p><strong>Ron Radosh: </strong>And they put out a book filled with ideas. There are great theorists. Like my two favorite ones are conservative intellectuals Yuval Levin and James Capretta. You&#8217;ve seen Capretta a lot on Fox News. They have drawn up serious arguments for how to not just say replace, get rid of Obamacare, but how to replace it with a solid program that gives real healthcare on market-based principals. They have thought about this. I think all political leaders have to look at the various arguments in their book, that is free online, and take these, a lot of their ideas into consideration, and if you&#8217;re in office as Republican in the state or national level, see if you can work with some of these people to fashion legislation to present based on some of the concrete ideas they lay out. I think that&#8217;s extremely important.</p>
<p><strong>Matt Kibbe: </strong>A quick comment on the question from a libertarian perspective, I can speak to my community which is very libertarian, but also significantly socially conservative, and I don&#8217;t think that you had to abandon your personal values and the things that you learn in church on Sunday or the definition of marriage in order to understand that outsourcing really important social institutions to 535 men and women that can&#8217;t balance a budget is a really bad idea. And I think we learn that during, you can clap. That&#8217;s cool. During the Bush administration, I think there was a lesson learned when we got involved in things like face-based initiatives that really outsourced really precious community actions, voluntary community-based activities to Washington, DC, and they started fighting over who got the most earmarks. I think that&#8217;s a huge mistake. I think that social institutions that hold this country together are way too important to let Washington, DC get its hand on them.</p>
<p><strong>Tom Lifson: </strong>Thank you. One more question. The gentleman on the aisle, yes?</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>What you guys think about first a new radical right that gets in the media&#8217;s face and pushes the agenda to them instead of accepting the agenda that they get shut out of day after day, and secondly, creating a real marketing machine for the things that we hold most dear and pushing it out to the American people who will follow the first shiny object that comes in front of them?</p>
<p><strong>Richard Baehr: </strong>I&#8217;m going to take a quick response and really take a different attack which is I think Republicans win when they have better candidates, and the machinery makes the big difference and the spending does, but we had better candidates this year. Wendy Davis was a terrible candidate. She was their Todd Akin. Bruce Braley was a terrible candidate in Iowa state. Democratic never should have lost. We came up in the process this year, produced much better, more effective, positive messengers for our side. It wasn&#8217;t just all a negative anti-Obama message on the state level in these individual races. The people we put up were better candidates. They were more &#8212; there&#8217;s no way a Republican should ever win an open seat race in Iowa by 9 percent, and that had a lot to do, not with the amount of spending, each side had it, not with the particular messaging that the parties put in behind it, but the fact that one candidate communicated better and connected with the voters better than the other side did.</p>
<p><strong>Matt Kibbe: </strong>You know I think politics is a little bit like entrepreneurship because sometimes the customer is always right and sometimes you go to market with something they didn&#8217;t know they wanted. Say an iPhone, something like that. And all of sudden everybody decides that that&#8217;s what they want. So it is good candidates. But I think the machinery matters as well, and you guys are in the right place if you want to understand a little bit about how Democratic apparatchiks function because I assume you&#8217;ve all been assigned your readings from Saul Alinsky, and we need to understand that. Pat Caddell mentioned something that can&#8217;t be overstated. The consultant industrial complex is so fixated on paid media because that&#8217;s where they can make their margins. You can&#8217;t make a lot of money going door to door, engaging grassroots communities. This is why the left beats on us the ground. I&#8217;ll go back to something I mentioned earlier: embrace decentralization, social media. Instead of running thousand point TV buys, why don&#8217;t you target young people on Facebook? We&#8217;ve tested this. It works.</p>
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		<title>What Happened?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/what-happened/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-happened</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/what-happened/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Nov 2014 05:01:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Democrat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Looking at the years ahead after the midterm elections. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Midterm-Elections-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245228" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Midterm-Elections-1-444x350.jpg" alt="Midterm Elections-1" width="312" height="246" /></a>Just what happened last week on election day? And what is going to happen in the years ahead?</p>
<p>The most important thing that happened last week was that the country dodged a bullet. Had the Democrats retained control of the Senate, President Obama could have spent his last two years in office loading the federal judiciary with judges who share his contempt for the Constitution of the United States.</p>
<p>Such judges — perhaps including Supreme Court justices — would have been confirmed by Senate Democrats, and could spend the rest of their lifetime appointments ruling in favor of expansions of federal government power that would make the freedom of &#8220;we the people&#8221; only a distant memory and a painful mockery.</p>
<p>We dodged that bullet. But what about the rest of Barack Obama&#8217;s term?</p>
<p>Pundits who depict Obama as a weak, lame duck president may be greatly misjudging him, as they have so often in the past. Despite the Republican sweep of elections across the country last week, President Obama has issued an ultimatum to Congress, to either pass the kind of immigration law he wants before the end of this year or he will issue Executive Orders changing the country&#8217;s immigration laws unilaterally.</p>
<p>Does that sound like a lame duck president?</p>
<p>On the contrary, it sounds more like some banana republic&#8217;s dictator. Nor is Obama making an idle bluff. He has already changed other laws unilaterally, including the work requirement in welfare reform laws passed during the Clinton administration.</p>
<p>The very idea of Congress rushing a bill into law in less than two months, on a subject as complex, and with such irreversible long-run consequences as immigration, is staggering. But there is already a precedent for such hasty action, without Congressional hearings to bring out facts or air different views. That is how ObamaCare was passed. And we see how that has turned out.</p>
<p>People who are increasingly questioning Barack Obama&#8217;s competence are continuing to ignore the alternative possibility that his fundamental values and imperatives are different from theirs.</p>
<p>You cannot tell whether someone is failing or succeeding without knowing what they are trying to do.</p>
<p>When Obama made a brief public statement about Americans being beheaded by terrorists, and then went on out to play golf, that was seen as a sign of political ineptness, rather than a stark revelation of what kind of man he is, underneath the smooth image and lofty rhetoric.</p>
<p>The president&#8217;s refusal to protect the American people by quarantining people coming from Ebola-infected areas — as was done by Britain and a number of African nations — is by no means a sign of incompetence. It is a sacrifice of Americans&#8217; interests for the sake of other people&#8217;s interests, as is an assisted invasion of illegal immigrants across our southern borders.</p>
<p>Such actions are perfectly consistent with Obama&#8217;s citizen of the world vision that has led to such statements of his in 2008: &#8220;We can&#8217;t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times &#8230; and then just expect that every other country&#8217;s going to say okay.&#8221;</p>
<p>In a similar vein, Obama said, &#8220;we consume more than 20 percent of the world&#8217;s oil but have less than 2 percent of the world&#8217;s oil reserves.&#8221; In short, Americans are undeservedly prosperous and selfishly consuming a disproportionate share of &#8220;the world&#8217;s output&#8221; — at least in the vision of Barack Obama.</p>
<p>That Americans are producing a disproportionate share of what is called &#8220;the world&#8217;s output&#8221; and consuming what we produce — while paying for our imports — is not allowed to disturb Obama&#8217;s vision.</p>
<p>Resentment of the prosperous — whether at home or on the world stage — runs through virtually everything Barack Obama has said and done throughout his life. You don&#8217;t need to be Sherlock Holmes to find the clues. You have to shut your eyes tightly to keep from seeing them everywhere, in every period of his life.</p>
<p>The big question is whether the other branches of government — Congress and the Supreme Court — can stop him from doing irreparable damage to America in his last two years. Seeing Obama as an incompetent and weak, lame duck president only makes that task harder.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Bill Whittle: Give Back the Senate</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-give-back-the-senate/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bill-whittle-give-back-the-senate</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Nov 2014 05:54:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244889</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><strong>Well, the Republicans have retaken the Senate from the Democrats, and now that they have, it&#8217;s time to give it back to its rightful owners&#8230;</strong></p>
<p style="color: #000000;"><strong>Join Bill Whittle in his latest Firewall, where he shows how destructive the Progressive Amendments have been &#8212; especially the Seventeenth Amendment. Find out why it matters! See the video and transcript below. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/DUOGdBgeB14" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Hi everybody, I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Well, the Republicans have retaken the Senate from the Democrats. And now that they have, it’s time to give it back. Not to the Democrats. And not even to we, the people. No, now that Republicans have the Senate, it would be nice if actual conservatives lead the fight to return the Senate to its rightful owners.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">See these ancient old prudes? These are Progressives. Yes, they were ancient old prudes even back in the Progressive era, around the turn of the last century. Now modern Progressives are a little better exfoliated and botoxed, of course, but they have in common with these proto-Progressives that same fiery look in the eye — which is that genetic defect of getting all excited about telling other people what to do — for their own good, naturally.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">((WINK))</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Progressive Era gave us the Progressive Amendments to the Constitution — which, looked at individually, show just how envious Progressives are, how prudish they are, and how tyrannical they are.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The 16th Amendment gave us the income tax, which, when you think about it, doesn’t even penalize the rich — which was, of course their goal then as it is today. No, taking income penalizes hard work, and the harder you work, the more you get penalized. So next time you get your paycheck, take a look at the raw amount before withholdings. Thank the Progressives for what you don’t take home.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Eighteenth Amendment — Prohibition — was the first time the Constitution was changed to actually take away a freedom: the freedom to get lit so that you didn’t have to listen to these Progressive harpies whine and complain day and night. But this freedom — the God-given freedom to have beer at the end of a hard day — was a little too precious, a little too near-and-dear to give up, so the eighteenth amendment was repealed by the twenty first Amendment. And don’t forget that: freedom can come back sometimes — if you miss it enough.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But the real damage was done by the Seventeenth Amendment, changing Article one, section three of the Constitution, which stated that U.S. Senators were to be elected by the legislatures of each state. The Seventeenth Amendment changed that to make US Senators electable by the people of the state.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Democracy! Now the people have a voice in Washington, not just the rich fat cats in the state legislatures! Hooray for democracy! And that is how Progressives steal freedom: they do it in the name of democracy. They’re very good at it now: they ought to be — they’ve had a lot of practice.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Well, first, those fat cats in the legislatures were in fact elected by the people of their state, so there’s some democracy for you right there.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But the main problem is, the people already had a voice in Washington: it’s called the House of Representatives. They’re elected directly by the people, every two years, and the more people a state has, the more representatives that state has in the House.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Senate was never intended to represent the people. The senate was supposed to represent the states: that’s why Wyoming, with roughly five hundred thousand people, has two senators, and California, with roughly seventy-six times as many people — also has two senators.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Seventeenth Amendment made the Senate utterly redundant. Now it’s kind of a retirement home for lifers; the House of Lords with six year terms that get further and further away from the people that elected them and who sit in a sort of royal court being serenaded by special interest groups in DC steakhouses.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Senate was designed to protect the power of the states because the more power the states have, the less power the Federal government has — and vice versa. But progressives can’t leave people alone, you see? They have to take their income, and tell them whether they can drink or not, or what kind of health insurance they have to buy, or how big a soda they can have, and what kind of car to drive and all the rest. And in order to do that, they need the coercive power of central authority — which meant destruction of the power of the states. After all, you can’t force people not to gamble, drink, or whore around if they can just move to Nevada!</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">To paraphrase H.L Menken, that’s the Progressive nightmare: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may escape being told what to do.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Our founders weren’t the idiots we have in Washington today. They knew what kind of people go into politics — control-freak weenies, that’s what kind — and they set up legal and structural barriers to put limits on just how much power jug-eared narcissists, sleazy used-car salesmen and dimwitted botoxed harpies can actually accumulate. We need to get that power back to the states, so that if you don’t like the way they roll in Tulsa you can move to San Francisco and visa versa.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">We repealed the Eighteenth Amendment — we can repeal the Seventeenth as well, because only the states are powerful enough to stop this Federal government from enforcing that Progressive utopia: a country where anything that is not forbidden is mandatory.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">So kick back, relax, have a drink and think it over.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>White House Plots 2012 Campaign &#8211; Politico</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-swindle/white-house-plots-2012-campaign-politico/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=white-house-plots-2012-campaign-politico</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:27:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Swindle]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=51954</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[President Barack Obama’s top advisers are quietly laying the groundwork for the 2012 reelection campaign, which is likely to be run out of Chicago and managed by White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, according to Democrats familiar with the discussions. For now, the planning consists entirely of private conversations, with Obama aides at [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>President Barack Obama’s top advisers are quietly laying the groundwork for the <a href="http://topics.politico.com/index.cfm/topic/2012" target="_blank">2012 reelection campaign</a>, which is likely to be run out of Chicago and managed by White House <a href="http://topics.politico.com/index.cfm/topic/jimmessina" target="_blank">deputy chief of staff Jim Messina</a>, according to Democrats familiar with the discussions.</p>
<p>For now, the planning consists entirely of private conversations, with Obama aides at all levels indulging occasionally in closed-door 2012 discussions while focusing ferociously on the <a href="http://www.politico.com/2010/" target="_blank">midterm elections</a> and <a href="http://topics.politico.com/index.cfm/topic/healthcarereform" target="_blank">health care reform</a>, the Democratic sources said. “The gathering storm is the 2010 elections,” one top official said.</p>
<p>But the sources said Obama has given every sign of planning to run again and wants the next campaign to resemble the <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15301.html" target="_blank">highly successful 2008 effort</a>.</p>
<p>David Axelrod, White House senior adviser, may leave the West Wing to rejoin his family in Chicago and reprise his role as <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/32837.html" target="_blank">Obama’s</a> muse, overseeing the campaign’s tone, themes, messages and advertising, the sources said.</p>
<p>David Plouffe, the Obama for America campaign manager, described by one friend as &#8220;the father of all this,&#8221; will be a <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31900.html" target="_blank">central player in the reelect</a>, perhaps as an outside adviser.</p>
<p>&#8220;The conversations are beginning, but decisions haven&#8217;t been made,&#8221; a top official said. &#8220;If you look at David Plouffe&#8217;s stepped-up level of activity with the political organization [as an outside adviser on the 2010 races], that is obviously the beginning of the process.&#8221;</p>
<p><a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/33411.html" target="_blank">Read more at Politico</a></p>
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		<title>Ramesh Ponnuru: Why the GOP Shouldn&#8217;t Get Too Confident &#8211; Time.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/ramesh-ponnuru-why-the-gop-shouldnt-get-too-confident-time-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ramesh-ponnuru-why-the-gop-shouldnt-get-too-confident-time-com</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 14 Jan 2010 18:11:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=46127</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Republicans can hardly believe their good fortune. First, Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota announced that he would not run for re-election, giving Republicans a good shot at taking his seat. Then the Democratic governor of Colorado, Bill Ritter, said he was bowing out. Ditto the Democrats&#8217; top candidate for governor in Michigan. And [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Republicans can hardly believe their good fortune. First, Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota announced that he would not run for re-election, giving Republicans a good shot at taking his seat. Then the Democratic governor of Colorado, Bill Ritter, said he was bowing out. Ditto the Democrats&#8217; top candidate for governor in Michigan. And all of it happened on the same day.The Democratic politicians&#8217; decisions to step back both reflect and contribute to the party&#8217;s grim prospects this November. The weak economy and public anxiety about President Obama&#8217;s agenda are making Democrats think twice about running. But when they don&#8217;t run, they make the party&#8217;s predicament worse. The exception is when Democratic officeholders are in such bad shape that their retirement actually helps the party come up with a stronger candidate. It was good news for Democrats when Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd called it a career on the same day that his fellow Dems bowed out.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1952807,00.html">Midterm Elections: Five Roadblocks to the GOP&#8217;s &#8211; Flash Player Installation</a>.</p>
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