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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Voters</title>
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		<title>Downing Street Gruber</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ann-coulter/downing-street-gruber/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=downing-street-gruber</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ann-coulter/downing-street-gruber/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Nov 2014 05:20:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Downing Street memo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gruber]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why the ObamaCare architect's statements are worse than the Downing Street memo.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/jonathan-gruber-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-245647" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/jonathan-gruber-1.jpg" alt="jonathan-gruber-1" width="240" height="240" /></a>Isn&#8217;t Jonathan Gruber worse than the Downing Street memo?</p>
<p>Gruber, who was paid half a million dollars to design Obamacare, is on tape bragging about how the Democrats relied on &#8220;the stupidity of the American voter&#8221; to pass that law. Which, ironically, was sort of a stupid thing to say on camera.</p>
<p>By now there are so many tapes of Gruber explaining how Obamacare fooled stupid Americans that they&#8217;re being released as a boxed set in time for Christmas.</p>
<p>Gruber, who will hereafter be known as &#8220;the architect of Obamacare,&#8221; said:</p>
<p>&#8220;If you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in &#8212; if you made it explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed. &#8230; Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Downing Street memo consisted of minutes from a July 2002 meeting of British labor, defense and intelligence officials during the run-up to the Iraq War, in which the MI6 head, Richard Dearlove, reportedly said that &#8220;Bush wanted to remove Saddam Hussein, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.&#8221;</p>
<p>These notes from a British cabinet meeting were called the smoking gun of Bush&#8217;s lying his way into war.</p>
<p>The Downing Street memo was written about in dozens of New York Times articles &#8212; including six hysterical Frank Rich op-eds. It has been mentioned more than a hundred times in The Washington Post. It was covered on ABC&#8217;s &#8220;Nightline,&#8221; by George Stephanopoulos on ABC&#8217;s &#8220;This Week,&#8221; on NBC&#8217;s &#8220;Meet the Press&#8221; &#8212; even on the &#8220;Today&#8221; show. It was discussed nightly on MSNBC, where Keith Olbermann covered it like it was Kim Kardashian and he was the E! Network.</p>
<p>By contrast, this week, NBC&#8217;s Chuck Todd dismissed the Gruber tapes as &#8220;a political story&#8221; and The New York Times said of Gruber: &#8220;In truth, his role was limited.&#8221; (NYT, March 28, 2012: &#8220;Mr. Gruber helped the administration put together the basic principles of the proposal, (then) the White House lent him to Capitol Hill to help congressional staff members draft the specifics of the legislation.&#8221;)</p>
<p>But when the Downing Street memo came out, conservatives weren&#8217;t allowed to say, Yeah, well, the British memo writer didn&#8217;t have anything to do with the president&#8217;s decision to go to war &#8212; even though that guy really didn&#8217;t have anything to do with it.</p>
<p>Those weren&#8217;t Tony Blair&#8217;s notes. They were a secretary&#8217;s interpretation of the MI6 chief&#8217;s interpretation of the Bush administration&#8217;s argument to the United Nations. It&#8217;s like a movie review, written by someone who knew someone who had seen the movie.</p>
<p>The memo writer also wasn&#8217;t being paid $400,000 by the Bush administration to make Iraq War policy. Jonathan Gruber was paid that much &#8212; plus another several million from the states &#8212; to design Obamacare.</p>
<p>You don&#8217;t pay a half-million dollars to someone who is only peripherally involved in making policy. (Unless we&#8217;re talking about Obama himself.)</p>
<p>There was no tape of Bush and Blair running around saying: Trust this guy &#8212; the memo writer is our guide! But that&#8217;s what Obama, Nancy Pelosi, then-Sen. John Kerry and other Democrats said about Gruber.</p>
<p>&#8211; Kerry on Oct. 1, 2009: &#8220;(Gruber) has been our guide on a lot of this &#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8211; Pelosi on Nov. 5, 2009: &#8220;Our bill brings down rates &#8212; I don&#8217;t know if you have seen Jonathan Gruber&#8217;s MIT analysis &#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8211; Obama&#8217;s Organizing for Action website, until the tapes surfaced: &#8220;Jon Gruber, who helped write Obamacare &#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>Gruber had more than a dozen meetings at the White House during the drafting of Obamacare. The Downing Street memo writer had no meetings at the Bush White House. Even the guy he was quoting had only one.</p>
<p>The outrage over the Downing Street memo concerned the claim &#8212; in the memo writer&#8217;s words &#8212; that the intelligence was being &#8220;fixed&#8221; around a policy. Although a number of commentators claimed that the British meaning of &#8220;fixed&#8221; is more like &#8220;arranged,&#8221; let&#8217;s assume &#8220;fixed&#8221; implies trickery.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s still one word! Gruber has given six different speeches rambling at length about how Obamacare was intended to deceive &#8220;stupid&#8221; voters.</p>
<p>You can&#8217;t say the Downing Street memo was a totally legitimate news story, but that the Gruber tapes are meaningless.</p>
<p>Ninety-nine percent of Americans were utterly unaffected by the invasion of Iraq &#8212; other than to be made safer, until Obama threw our victory away. Every American is affected by Obamacare.</p>
<p>The bald-faced lies told to pass Obamacare expose not only that law, but all Democratic economic claims. When Obama boasts that it will be a huge boon to the economy to give amnesty to millions of low-wage workers, who won&#8217;t pay income taxes but will need a lot of government services, remember: Obamacare was supposed to save money, too.</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>Obamacare Architect Exposes Progressive Totalitarianism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/obamacare-architect-exposes-progressive-totalitarianism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamacare-architect-exposes-progressive-totalitarianism</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Nov 2014 05:55:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Architect]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jonathan Gruber]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressive]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[stupidity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[totalitarianism]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245191</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A glimpse into the true heart of the Left.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Jonathan-Gruber-MSNBC-interview.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245193" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Jonathan-Gruber-MSNBC-interview.jpg" alt="Jonathan-Gruber-MSNBC-interview" width="329" height="269" /></a>Professor Jonathan Gruber of MIT, who designed the Affordable Care Act, used to be the symbol of the Democrats’ technocratic bona fides, and an example of how big government with its “scientific” experts can solve social and economic problems from health care to a warming planet. Yet a recently publicized video of remarks he made at a panel in 2013, along with 2 other videos in the same vein, has now made him the poster child of the elitist progressives’ contempt for the American people, and their sacrifice of prudence and reason to raw political power.</p>
<p>In the video Gruber explains the spin and lies the Dems used to give cover to their Congressmen so they could vote for Obamacare. Especially important was avoiding the “t-word.” So, Gruber crows on the video, “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.” He also explained how the bills’ writers covered up the obvious redistributionist core of the legislation, which to work has to take money from the healthy young to pay for health care for the sick and old. “If you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in — you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed.”</p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><span style="color: #000000;">Then this handsomely paid consultant to the “most transparent administration in history” revealed the foundational contempt progressives have for the “people” whose champions they claim to be: </span>“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.” As David Horowitz tweeted, “<span style="color: #202327;">Progressive totalitarianism: We know what&#8217;s good for you and will lie, cheat and then compel you to agree with us.”</span></p>
<p style="color: #202327;">This modern version of the Platonic “guardians,” who possess superior knowledge but who must camouflage their tyrannical rule with lies, is now over 100 years old, and has become deeply embedded in our politics. It was the fundamental assumption of American Progressivism, which argued that modern technology and social change had rendered the old constitutional order a dangerous relic. The native common sense and wisdom of ordinary people to know their own interests and pursue them primarily at the local and state levels were now replaced by the allegedly scientific knowledge of “experts,” who alone could solve the problems created by the modern world. As Progressive Theodore Roosevelt said in 1901, the “very serious social problems” confronting the nation could no longer be solved by “the old laws, and the old customs,” especially the power given to state governments and laws, which “are no longer sufficient.” Woodrow Wilson agreed, complaining in 1913 that “the laws of this country have not kept up with the change” of economic and political circumstances. To achieve “social justice” and eliminate income inequality, the “laws,” particularly the Constitution, had to change.</p>
<p style="color: #202327;">But to effect such change, the old order of conflicting and balancing “passions and interests,” as James Madison described the political order, had to be transformed in order to create a more collectivist people united in their “collective purpose” to achieve a “vigorous social program,” particularly the redistribution of property. As Progressive Frank Johnson Goodnow wrote ominously in 1916, “Changed conditions . . . must bring in their train different conceptions of private rights if society is to be advantageously carried on.” Individual rights, especially property rights, “may become a menace when social rather than individual efficiency is the necessary prerequisite of progress. For social efficiency probably owes more to the common realization of social duties than to the general insistence on privileges based on individual private rights.”</p>
<p>In practical terms, these goals of “social efficiency” and “social duties” required more power centralized in the federal government and executive at the expense of the states and the people. The most important Progressive theorist, Herbert Croly, wrote in 1909, “Under existing conditions and simply as a matter of expediency, the national advance of the American democracy does demand an increasing amount of centralized action and responsibility.” Woodrow Wilson agreed, and envisioned a cadre of elites to address the national “cares and responsibilities which will require not a little wisdom, knowledge, and experience,” as he wrote in his 1887 essay “The Study of Administration.” As such, administrative power lies beyond politics, and should be insulated from the machinery of participatory government. And much like today’s progressives, Wilson’s ideas were based on contempt for the people who lack this specialized knowledge and so cannot be trusted with the power to run their own lives. Thus Wilson envisioned federal administrative bureaucracies “of skilled, economical administration” comprising the “hundred who are wise” empowered to guide the thousands who are “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.”</p>
<p style="color: #202327;">Sound familiar? From these early Progressive theorists to MIT Professor Gruber and the Democrats the line is direct, based on the same flawed and illiberal assumptions. The masses cannot be allowed, as envisioned by the Constitution, the autonomy to pursue their interests through local and state governments closest to them, their conflicts regulated by the balance of power, mixed government, and federalism, which prevent any one faction from amassing enough power to tyrannize the rest. Rather, administrative elites must be empowered to override those many interests in order to “solve problems” and achieve “social justice.” This in turn means growing the size and scope of the federal government into the bloated Leviathan it is today.</p>
<p style="color: #202327;">But as Wilson complained, <span style="color: #272727;">“The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes.”</span>  Since the citizens still have the vote and can exercise it every 2 years, they must be tricked into doing the “right thing,” as defined by the technocratic elite. One of the most chilling statements by an American president was made by Woodrow Wilson in his essay on administration: “Whoever would effect a change in modern constitutional government must first educate his fellow-citizens to <i>want</i> some change. That done, he must persuade them to want the particular change he wants. He must first make public opinion willing to listen and then see to it that it listen to the right things. He must stir it up to search for an opinion, and then manage to put the right opinion in its way.” What else has “income inequality,” “war on women,” “you didn’t build that,” and all the other slogans of this administration been other than the attempt to get the voters to “listen to the right things” and form a “right opinion”? Listen again to Wilson, from his essay “Leaders of Men”: “<span style="color: #040404;">Only a very gross substance of concrete conception can make any impression on the minds of the masses; they must get their ideas very absolutely put, and are much readier to receive a half-truth which they can promptly understand than a whole truth which has too many sides to be seen all at once.” Is this not the spirit of Professor Gruber’s remarks </span><span style="color: #000000;">on his “very clever basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter” in designing the Obamacare legislation?</span></p>
<p style="color: #202327;">The politics of today’s progressives all have their roots in the old Progressive assumptions––that enlightened elites know better than the people what is good for them, and that the people, being such unenlightened clods, need to be manipulated and lied to for their own good. Most important, the freedom and autonomy of the people must be limited by intrusive federal agencies and regulations in order for these utopian goals to be achieved.</p>
<p style="color: #202327;">Or to put it in other terms, this set of progressive beliefs––which we have seen acted on for the last six years by the president and practically every government agency––is totalitarian at its core. Not the brutal despotism of Italian fascism or Soviet communism or German Nazism, but Tocqueville’s “soft despotism,” the kinder, gentler Leviathan which undermines self-reliance and self-government by taking responsibility for the people’s comfort and happiness, and financing its largess by the redistribution of property. But no matter how comfortable in the short-term, such a condition is nothing other than servitude. And as Tocqueville warns, “No one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people.”</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>Why Republicans Don&#8217;t Get It</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/why-republicans-dont-get-it/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-republicans-dont-get-it</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 22 Oct 2014 04:47:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The folly of sidelining the conservative base. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/aaavote-here.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243546" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/aaavote-here-450x337.jpg" alt="Americans Go To The Polls To Elect The Next U.S. President" width="331" height="248" /></a>A new poll this week shows 2012 presidential nominee and 2008 primary candidate Mitt Romney leading the field of potential 2016 Republican candidates. According to ABC News/Washington Post, 21 percent of Republican voters would vote for Romney in the primaries; Jeb Bush and Mike Huckabee tie at 10 percent, followed by Rand Paul, Chris Christie and Paul Ryan. Altogether, some 44 percent of Republican primary voters want an &#8220;establishment&#8221; candidate — by which we mean a candidate for whom social issues are secondary, immigration reform is primary and economics dominates.</p>
<p>The establishment donors on the coasts see this poll and believe that a consolidated funding effort mobilized behind the Chosen One (Romney, Bush, Christie or Ryan) could avoid a messy primary and keep the powder dry for a 2016 showdown with Hillary.</p>
<p>The conservative base knows this, and they groan.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s because the conservative base understands that what motivates them is not the marginal tax rate — nobody in the country knows, offhand, his or her effective tax rate — but values. And none of the top priorities for Republican donors match the fire-in-the-belly issues that motivate the folks who knock on doors, phone bank and provide the under-$50 donations that could power a Republican to victory.</p>
<p>The divide between the establishment and the base represents a divide between the wallet and the working man, the penthouse and the pews, the Ivy Leagues and the homeschools. Which is why Republican leadership quietly assures its top donors that should Republicans win the Senate, their first legislative push will encompass corporate tax reform and immigration reform.</p>
<p>They will not push primarily for border security, or for protection of religious freedom, or for repeal of Common Core. They will not use their opportunity to govern as an opportunity to draw contrast between conservatism and leftism. Instead, they will seek &#8220;common ground&#8221; in a vain attempt to show the American people that efficiency deserves re-election.</p>
<p>And the American people will go to sleep, conservatives will vomit in their mouths, and leftists will demonize Republicans all the same.</p>
<p>Conservatives understand that politics simply reflect underlying values. That&#8217;s why they are passionate. They don&#8217;t vote their pocketbooks. They vote their guts, and their guts tell them that leftism is immoral on the most basic level.</p>
<p>Republicans, on the other hand, believe that politics are just business by other means. That means that Republicans think Americans, left and right, share the same underlying values. That&#8217;s a lie, and it&#8217;s a self-defeating lie at that.</p>
<p>Until Republicans begin to appreciate the moral conflict between right and left, they will dishearten the right and provide easy targets for the left. The nominee won&#8217;t matter; elections won&#8217;t matter. And the alienation of the American conservative will deepen and broaden, until, one day, it bursts forth with a renewed fire that consumes the Republican Party whole.</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>Choosing American Workers over Amnesty</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/choosing-american-workers-over-amnesty/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=choosing-american-workers-over-amnesty</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Mar 2014 04:44:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221138</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Senator Sessions issues a call to action.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/worker-construction-grinder-machiine.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-221139 alignleft" alt="worker-construction-grinder-machiine" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/worker-construction-grinder-machiine.jpg" width="324" height="258" /></a>JFK won Macomb County, Michigan in 1960 by 75 percent. In 1980, Reagan won it by 66 percent. This heart of ‘Reagan Democrat’ country was closely split by Gore and Bush and Bush and Kerry… until Obama won it 53 to 45 in 2008 and by 51 to 47 in 2012.  </span></p>
<p>The Republican Party doesn’t need to worry about the Latino vote nearly as much as it should be worrying about its inability to connect with white working class Americans. The pro-amnesty GOP establishment’s electoral vision of a party of corporations and minority voters already exists.</p>
<p>It’s called the Democratic Party.</p>
<p>The Republican Party’s fate in 2016 will be decided in places like Macomb County. It will be decided by white men and women earning $20,000 to $50,000 a year. It will be decided by working families struggling to get by and searching for answers from a government that keeps betraying them.</p>
<p>That is the point that Senator Jeff Sessions, the Republican senator who has stood tallest against amnesty, makes in his National Review article “<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/373230/becoming-party-work-senator-jeff-sessions">Becoming the Party of Work</a>.”</p>
<p>Sessions argues that slowing down immigration in a time of tremendous economic turmoil would actually be the populist thing to do. Three to one of those earning under $30,000 want to see reductions in immigration. Instead the Republican Party is alienating them further by championing illegal aliens.</p>
<p>&#8220;To open the ears of disaffected voters, the GOP must break publicly from the elite immigration consensus of Wall Street and Davos,&#8221; Sessions warns.</p>
<p>Too many Senate Republicans act like members of a globalist party who legislate while detached from the concerns of ordinary working Americans. McCain, the GOP candidate in 2008, and the most aggressive GOP proponent for amnesty in the Senate, whose daughter has made a career of “outreach” to her own class of hip young wealthy people, represents the opposite of what the GOP should be doing.</p>
<p>McCain’s infamous claim, “There are jobs Americans won’t do” was seen as embodying the detachment of the pro-amnesty elite from working Americans struggling to get by.</p>
<p>“Mitt Romney,” Sessions points out, “lost lower- and middle-income voters by an astonishing margin. Among voters earning $30,000 to $50,000, he trailed by 15 points, and among voters earning under $30,000 he trailed by 28 points.”</p>
<p>In 2008, McCain won only 25 percent of voters whose incomes fell below $15,000, 37 percent of voters whose incomes were between $15,000 and $30,000 and 43 percent of voters in the $30,000 to $50,000 range. That is not what a party that aspires to represent the silent majority of Americans looks like.</p>
<p>Inflation has changed income and demographics have changed as well, but still the only income group that Reagan lost in 1984 were in the under $12,500 range and even then it was close. Even in 1980, Reagan did not lose any income group by more than 10 percent.</p>
<p>George W. Bush was able to win back some Reagan Democrats, but the party never again equaled Reagan’s performance.</p>
<p>Senator Sessions however has some proposals for changing that from merging 80 means-tested poverty-assistance and welfare programs into one to be administered by a welfare office that doubles as a job training program to cracking down on corporate outsourcing and repealing ObamaCare.</p>
<p>The Republican Party has been able to put forward a credible pro-business agenda, but it needs a credible pro-worker agenda without assuming that talking about Staples is the same thing as connecting with Staples employees. If it fails to do that, it will be hammered by minimum wage and overtime measures until its voting base is limited to a shrinking upper middle class.</p>
<p>“Wherever the policies of the Left have been faithfully implemented, as in Detroit, human tragedy has followed. The future offered by the Left — a shrinking work force struggling to fund a growing welfare state — is not only unsustainable but uncompassionate. Compassion demands that we spare no effort in helping millions now jobless to realize the dream of financial independence. This is the urgent economic task of the 21st century,” Sessions writes.</p>
<p>The Republican Party has to stop merely running against welfare and start running on opportunity. The left’s response to the GOP’s anti-welfare rhetoric has been to swell the welfare rolls making more and more Americans complicit in the welfare state.</p>
<p>Instead of turning to 47% rhetoric, the critique of a political movement that has given up, it has to reclaim welfare voters and transform them into working voters.</p>
<p>Session’s agenda challenges the GOP to stop trying to plug a work culture hole with immigrants. Instead he urges the Republican Party to “help the millions struggling here today — immigrant and native-born alike — transition from dependency to self-sufficiency.”</p>
<p>Reagan understood that welfare was morally crippling. In his 1985 State of the Union address, he said, “Let us resolve that we will stop spreading dependency and start spreading opportunity; that we will stop spreading bondage and start spreading freedom.”</p>
<p>In a ringing critique of the welfare state, he stated that, “Policies that increase dependency, break up families, and destroy self-respect are not progressive; they’re reactionary. Despite our strides in civil rights, blacks, Hispanics, and all minorities will not have full and equal power until they have full economic power.”</p>
<p>This is the critique that Sessions and David Horowitz return to.</p>
<p>Last year, <a href="http://www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org/david_horowitz_fight_fire_with_fire">David Horowitz said that</a> the “historic assault on Detroit’s African American population was absent from all the speeches and all the political ads of all the actors supporting free market solutions in the 2012 elections. The word &#8216;Detroit&#8217; wasn’t mentioned.”</p>
<p>Amnesty for illegal aliens may be an even bigger assault on both lower income whites and blacks than anything before. Instead of countering it, too many Republicans are providing cover for it. Instead of offering American solutions to American problems, they take refuge in abstract free market ideology.</p>
<p>Sessions confronts the intersection between immigration and unemployment, between the welfare state and the open border and urges the Republican Party to stand up for American workers.</p>
<p>Amnesty is an assault on the economic freedom and opportunity of the voters that the Republican Party needs to win in 2016. The Republican Party has critiqued the Democratic Party’s debt slavery, borrowing trillions to be repaid in the future, but with amnesty the GOP is selling off its base of today in the hopes of buying a new demographic of voters from a new nation.</p>
<p>The United States cannot survive as a welfare nation, but the Republican Party cannot win it back until it relearns how to speak to the national interest instead of the global interest, to the American worker and the American businessman.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Daniel Greenfield </strong>on <strong>The</strong> <strong>Glazov Gang</strong>. He discusses <em>Why Lois Lerner Pleaded the Fifth</em>, <em>Obama&#8217;s Belief that Abbas is a Peace Angel</em>, <em>Obama&#8217;s Helplessness Over the Ukraine</em>, and much, much more:</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/6Se7vaS-INo" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></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>
<p><b>Make sure to </b><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>Switzerland Draws a Line on Immigration</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/switzerland-draws-a-line-on-immigration/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=switzerland-draws-a-line-on-immigration</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Feb 2014 05:42:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218965</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[And the EU goes on the warpath.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/switz.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219028" alt="-" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/switz-450x253.jpg" width="270" height="152" /></a>Switzerland is a small, prosperous country which during World War II managed not to become part of the Nazi empire and during the postwar era has succeeded in staying out of the EU. Nonetheless, like other European countries whose citizens have voted to stay out of the EU, Switzerland – in exchange for participation in free trade with EU members – has signed treaties that subject its citizens to EU regulations. Among those treaties is a seven-year-old agreement that grants most EU citizens the right to live and work in Switzerland.</p>
<p>In a referendum on February 14, however, the Swiss electorate voted by a slim majority for a proposal by the Swiss People&#8217;s Party (SVP) that will invalidate that treaty. The <i>Washington Post</i>&#8216;s Anthony Faiola, in his report on the vote, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/swiss-vote-to-limit-foreign-workers-captures-growing-european-fears-about-immigration/2014/02/10/e0dfd354-9254-11e3-b3f7-f5107432ca45_story.html%20">provided</a> a fine example of the way in which the left-wing media routinely reduce real-life concerns to obnoxious caricatures, all the while acting as if the people they&#8217;re condescendingly mocking are the ones purveying the caricatures: the Swiss vote, he wrote, was the result of the mischievous efforts of “right-wing populists” who worry that their “idyllic Swiss lifestyle” is “being trampled by hordes of foreign newcomers.” Faiola went on to compare Swiss voters to “the paramilitaries of the Golden Dawn” in Greece and the “anti-immigrant, anti-Roma and anti-Semitic” members of the radical-right Jobbik Party in Hungary. The <i>New York Times </i>took a similar <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/11/world/europe/swiss-immigration-vote-raises-alarm-across-europe.html?_r=0%20%20%20">approach</a>: “Far-right parties with anti-immigrant platforms in France, the Netherlands and Norway have gained strength in recent years,” wrote Melissa Eddy and Stephen Castle (the Norway reference obviously being to the center-right Progress Party, which is closer to the American political center than any other party in Norway).</p>
<p>Never mind the reality: Switzerland – where about a quarter of the legal residents were born abroad and 37 percent of residents are foreign-born or have two foreign-born parents – is one of the two countries in the world with the highest percentage of immigrants. (The other is Austria.) The SVP – the same party that sponsored the 2009 law banning minarets – said during the run-up to the plebiscite that the 80,000 EU citizens who are now moving to Switzerland every year (a number equal to 1% of the country&#8217;s population) amounts to approximately “ten times the initial predictions back in 2007,” <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/switzerland/10627452/Switzerland-votes-to-re-introduce-curbs-on-immigration.html">reported</a> the <i>Telegraph</i>.</p>
<p>It doesn&#8217;t take much imagination to recognize what a massive burden this flood of immigrants represents – and what a social and culural transformation it entails. As the <i>Telegraph </i>itself seems to acknowledge, the schools, hospitals, public-transport system, and housing market in Switzerland have been “struggling to cope” with the influx. This sort of rapid, dramatic metamorphosis is enough to pose a risk to any country&#8217;s social, cultural, and economic stability. Add to this the fact that citizens of Romania and Bulgaria (including innumerable gypsies who, frankly, aren&#8217;t looking for honest work but for pockets to pick, houses to plunder, and public property to trash) are now free to settle anywhere they want in the EU – or in countries, like Switzerland and Norway, which have open-border arrangements with the EU. Under such circumstances, the action by Swiss voters isn&#8217;t just eminently understandable; it is, quite simply, the responsible thing to do.</p>
<p>Yet such facts on the ground, however compelling, matter little in Brussels. What matters there is the open-borders ideology – and the consolidation and expansion of EU power. The Swiss vote, warned the <i>Telegraph, </i>was “likely to cause anger” among Eurocrats. Faiola noted<i> </i>that the vote had “brought threats of retaliation Monday from leaders across the continent.” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier sniffed that “Switzerland must realise that cherry picking with the EU is not a long-term strategy.” Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn vowed that the Swiss would face “consequences”: “You can&#8217;t have privileged access to the European internal market and on the other hand, dilute free circulation.” You would&#8217;ve thought that EU-Swiss relations have benefited only the Swiss all these years – that they&#8217;re the ungrateful beneficiaries of EU largesse. On the contrary, Switzerland contributes some $600 million a year to the EU budget and dutifully subjects itself to countless EU controls and directives, even though its voters long ago told the EU to take a hike.</p>
<p>But that&#8217;s not enough for the EU masters. They can&#8217;t stand that a rich country like Switzerland (Norway, too) isn&#8217;t fully within its grasp. And for Bern to withdraw itself from the EU&#8217;s clutches in the matter of immigration is more than the power-hungry men and women in Brussels can stand. “The message is clear today: free movement of people is a sacred right for the EU,” <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304104504579374541319660538?mg=reno64-wsj&amp;url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304104504579374541319660538.html%20">said</a> European Commission spokeswoman Pia Ahrenkilde-Hansen.</p>
<p>Yes, “sacred.” How interesting to learn that <i>this, </i>of all things, is what&#8217;s “a sacred right for the EU.” We know, after all, that freedom of expression doesn&#8217;t make the cut: in 2006, the European Commissioner for External Relations and European Neighborhood Policy (i.e. Flunky in Charge of EU-Arab Relations) told journalists that self-censorship for the sake of “mutual respect and understanding” between cultures was “a vital part of the fight against racism and xenophobia” and that freedom of expression doesn&#8217;t mean “the freedom to insult or offend”; in 2007, the EU made “incitement of racism, xenophobia, or hatred against a racial, ethnic, or religious group” punishable by up to three years behind bars; the EU&#8217;s 2007 Lisbon Treaty provides for automatic arrest and extradition of persons accused of racism and xenophobia.”</p>
<p>So, no, freedom of speech isn&#8217;t “sacred” in the EU. What&#8217;s “sacred” is the right of busloads of gypsies to cross into Switzerland and start gathering up goodies. What person in his right mind wants to belong to a congregation for which <i>this</i> is what&#8217;s holy? Good for Switzerland&#8217;s voters. More power to them.</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>Dumb Politicians Won&#8217;t Get Elected</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/dumb-politicians-wont-get-elected/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dumb-politicians-wont-get-elected</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 24 Dec 2013 05:03:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213779</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When trashing the Constitution is the politically smart thing to do. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/VoteHereSignBethelFellowshipSTP640.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213800" alt="VoteHereSignBethelFellowshipSTP640" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/VoteHereSignBethelFellowshipSTP640-432x350.png" width="302" height="245" /></a>Politicians can be progressives, liberals, conservatives, Democrats or Republicans, and right-wingers. They just can&#8217;t be dumb. The American people will never elect them to office. Let&#8217;s look at it.</p>
<p>For years, I used to blame politicians for our economic and social mess. That changed during the 1980s as a result of several lunches with Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., which produced an epiphany of sorts.</p>
<p>At the time, I had written several columns highly critical of farm subsidies and handouts. Helms agreed, saying something should be done. Then he asked me whether I could tell him how he could vote against them and remain a senator from North Carolina. He said that if he voted against them, North Carolinians would vote him out of office and replace him with somebody probably worse. My epiphany came when I asked myself whether it was reasonable to expect a politician to commit what he considered to be political suicide — in a word, be dumb.</p>
<p>The Office of Management and Budget calculates that more than 40 percent of federal spending is for entitlements for the elderly in the forms of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, housing and other assistance programs. Total entitlement spending comes to about 62 percent of federal spending. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that entitlement spending will consume all federal tax revenue by 2048.</p>
<p>Only a dumb politician would argue that something must be done immediately about the main components of entitlement spending: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Senior citizens indignantly would tell him that what they&#8217;re receiving are not entitlements. It&#8217;s their money that Congress put aside for them. They would attack any politician who told them that the only way they get Social Security and Medicare money is through taxes levied on current workers. The smart politician would go along with these people&#8217;s vision that Social Security and Medicare are their money that the government was holding for them. The dumb politician, who is truthful about Social Security and Medicare and their devastating impact on our nation&#8217;s future, would be run out of office.</p>
<p>Social Security and Medicare are by no means the only sources of unsustainable congressional spending.</p>
<p>There are billions upon billions in handouts going to farmers, corporations, poor people and thousands of federal programs that have no constitutional basis whatsoever. But a smart politician reasons that if Congress enables one group of Americans to live at the expense of another American, then in fairness, what possible argument can be made for not giving that same right to other groups of Americans? Making a constitutional and moral argument against the growth of handouts would qualify as dumb.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s examine some statements of past Americans whom we&#8217;ve mistakenly called great but would be deemed both heartless and dumb if they were around today. In 1794, James Madison, the father of our Constitution, irate over a $15,000 congressional appropriation to assist some French refugees, said, &#8220;I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.&#8221; He added, &#8220;Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.&#8221;</p>
<p>In 1854, President Franklin Pierce vetoed a bill intended to help the mentally ill, saying, &#8220;I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity&#8221; &#8230; and to approve such spending &#8220;would be contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded.&#8221;</p>
<p>Grover Cleveland vetoed hundreds of congressional spending bills during his two terms as president in the late 1800s. His often stated veto message was, &#8220;I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution.&#8221;</p>
<p>If these men were around today, making similar statements, Americans would hold them in contempt and disqualify them from office. That&#8217;s a sad commentary on how we&#8217;ve trashed our Constitution.</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>2014: And the Future of the Republican Party</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/2014-and-the-future-of-the-republican-party/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=2014-and-the-future-of-the-republican-party</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Nov 2013 04:50:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=211304</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An expert panel assesses the odds for next year's election at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Editor’s note: Below is the video and transcript of the panel discussion &#8220;2014: And the Future of the Republican Party,&#8221; which took place at the Freedom Center’s 2013 Restoration Weekend. The event was held November 14th-17th at The Breakers resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/79954731" height="281" width="500" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/79954731">2014: And the Future of the Republican Party</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user15333690">DHFC</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> Thanks so much.</p>
<p>When I was elected state party chairman in Georgia in 2002, we had not elected a Republican governor in my state in 134 years.  And in fact, if you go back to the time since the first Europeans landed on the North American continent 400 years earlier, we had actually never elected a Republican governor since we became a colony, without the benefit of the occupation of federal troops.  Which worked for awhile, but then they left.  So it&#8217;s not really a good long-term strategy.</p>
<p>And what I&#8217;m going to talk about a little bit today &#8212; first of all, I want to talk about 2014.  But second of all, I want to talk about some lessons that I learned not only in that experience but in the nine presidential campaigns that I&#8217;ve been privileged to work on, about how, just for example, in my state we went from having neither chamber of the legislature &#8212; also we had not held since Reconstruction &#8212; neither chamber had ever been held, hadn&#8217;t have a governor, had neither US senator; and the Democrats controlled both US Senate seats from my state, and they had a majority of the Congressional delegation.</p>
<p>And when the dust settled after two cycles, we had every statewide constitutional officer, we had both US Senators, both the State House and the State Senate; and we had a majority of the Congressional delegation.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Now, the question is &#8212; how does that happen?  And I&#8217;ll talk about those broader themes in a minute.  But first, I want to focus on 2014.</p>
<p>2014 is a huge opportunity for the Republican Party, for two reasons &#8212; number one, because we&#8217;re entering what political scientists refer to as the six-year-itch election.  It&#8217;s the second midterm of a two-term presidency.  And historically, whether you&#8217;re LBJ in &#8217;66 or Eisenhower in &#8217;58, or Gerald Ford in &#8217;74, that Nixon-Ford post-Watergate, six-year=itch election &#8212; doesn&#8217;t matter when it is &#8212; historically, it&#8217;s devastating.  There&#8217;ve been 17 midterm elections held since World War II.  In nine of those instances, there&#8217;s been a Democrat President.  It&#8217;s been nine midterm elections since World War II with a Democrat incumbent President &#8212; the average number of seats lost in those nine midterms is 33 seats.</p>
<p>Now, that&#8217;s unlikely to happen this time, for the same reason why &#8217;98 didn&#8217;t turn out to be Bill Clinton&#8217;s six-year-itch election.  And why was that?  It&#8217;d already happened.</p>
<p>In Clinton&#8217;s case, the six-year itch was a two-year itch, right?  That was the 53 House seats, eight Senate seats.  Then we had two switchers in Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado and Richard Shelby of Alabama, giving us a total net gain of 10 in the Senate and 53 in the House.  The net gain in the last midterm, in Obama&#8217;s first midterm in 2010, was 63 House seats, which is the highest recorded since World War II, and it&#8217;s the highest recorded by either party since 1922.  And so therefore, I don&#8217;t think we should look for a wave election in the House.</p>
<p>To give you another data point, to look at how narrow the band is &#8212; if you look at the 234 seats currently held by Republicans, only nine of those seats were carried by Barack Obama.  So because of redistricting, it&#8217;s going to be very difficult for Obama and the Democrats to go in and beat a bunch of Republicans.  Because he only carried nine of their seats.</p>
<p>On the other side, there are &#8212; I&#8217;m sorry, there are 201 seats held by Democrats; nine were carried by Romney.  I apologize.  So Romney carried nine seats held by Democrats.  That doesn&#8217;t give you a lot of room to knock off Democrats.  Of the 234 Republicans, there are 17 seats that were held by Democrats.  And of course, they&#8217;d have to carry every single one of those and then some to get the House back.</p>
<p>The place where you&#8217;re more likely to see big change is in the US Senate.  There are 33 seats up, 21 held by Democrats, 14 held by Republicans.  And in seven of those 21 seats held by Democrats, the Republicans over-performed from Romney&#8217;s national average.  And those seven seats are in Alaska, Arkansas, South Dakota, Montana, Louisiana, North Carolina and West Virginia.</p>
<p>Most people believe &#8212; and again, it&#8217;s hard to predict this far out &#8212; but if the election were held today, the consensus is that Arkansas, the Pryor seat, where he&#8217;s running against Tom Cotton; South Dakota, the Johnson seat; Montana, the open Baucus seat; and West Virginia, the open Rockefeller seat; would all go Republican.</p>
<p>So I tend to think the floor for the Republicans in 2014 is four.  And I tend to think the ceiling is seven.  And as you know, they need to get to seven to really be sure that they&#8217;re where they want to be.  It&#8217;s possible.</p>
<p>The question is &#8212; how do you get there?  Number one, you run against Obamacare.  The election needs to be a referendum on the failure of Obamacare.  The President&#8217;s job approval is plummeting.  Today, in the Real Clear Politics average, Obama&#8217;s job approval is 40, his disapproval is 53.  That&#8217;s minus 13.  The most important variable in the midterm, other than the economy, the unemployment rate and per-capita income after inflation and taxes, is his job approval.</p>
<p>If a President has a job approval of 60 or above in a midterm, he usually loses only a handful of seats.  That was the case with Clinton in 1998, for example.  If the President&#8217;s job approval is at 50 or below, historically, that incumbent loses 12 percent of his caucus.  That would translate into a 24-seat loss in the House.  And if a President&#8217;s job approval is below 40, he loses 18 percent of his caucus, which would be a 36-seat loss.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>So, the first rule is, when your opponent is in the process of committing suicide, get out of the way.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s what&#8217;s happening right now.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>The second thing &#8212; and this is critical &#8212; it isn&#8217;t enough to just watch him crater and watch him implode, and to watch Democrats run from this President, as Haley Barbour used to say, like scalded dogs.  That&#8217;s not enough.  The other thing that the Republicans have got to do is they have got to put forward an alternative, proactive, positive, conservative reform agenda for where they want to take the country.  It isn&#8217;t enough to just say what you&#8217;re against; you have to say what you&#8217;re for.</p>
<p>And I was fortunate to be involved in developing the Contract with America.  A lot of people said that we were crazy.  You know, everybody was mad at Clinton over Hillary Care and the crime bill, and the tax increase and everything else.  They just said stand back, and just let them fall.</p>
<p>We knew that to get the House and the Senate, and deserve the House and the Senate, we had to tell the country what we would do if we got it.  And that&#8217;s what the Republicans have to do.  They haven&#8217;t done it yet.  That&#8217;s a critical next step.</p>
<p>Thank you very much.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> Thank you, Ralph.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m going to invite up Richard Grenell to come speak to you next.  He served eight years as an appointee in the Bush Administration.  And one of his tasks in that role was to advise Ambassador John Bolton.  Also now, he is a Fox News contributor, so you&#8217;ll be seeing more of him.</p>
<p>So let me invite Richard up here.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> Thank you very much.</p>
<p>First thing I want to do is take a picture.  Because I&#8217;m a big tweeter.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So I want everyone to smile.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>All right, great.  That&#8217;s going to go up on Twitter.</p>
<p>If you&#8217;re not on Twitter, let me just say you&#8217;ve got to get on Twitter.  It is changing the way we look at the media.  The media hate it, reporters hate it.  Because suddenly, they get feedback.  And they can talk and criticize all day and give it to thousands of people.  And one person criticizes them, and they freak out.  It is the best thing in the world to watch these reporters completely implode.</p>
<p>I was involved in a Twitter fight this morning.  I don&#8217;t know if anybody saw it.  But I was going crazy.  Because as you know, the New York Times this morning compares Obamacare to Bush&#8217;s Katrina.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>To which I said &#8212; oh, that was so great when all those Democrats came out and warned us that a hurricane was coming and the levies were going to break, and nobody was going to be able to move.  I mean, come on.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>This is a natural disaster, versus one that was completely manmade, thought-about and supported by one party.  So anyway, that&#8217;s just free.  That&#8217;s not part of my standup today.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>You get that for free.</p>
<p>First of all, I want to say, Ralph, thank you very much.  Everything that you said I agreed with.  There&#8217;s not one thing I disagreed with.  And talk about a big tent &#8212; this morning, we&#8217;re representing a big tent here, when we can come together and agree exactly on the strategy forward.</p>
<p>One question, though, I do have for you is Michigan &#8212; where do you have that?</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> It&#8217;s coming into play.</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> You have it as one of the seven?</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> It&#8217;s not one of the seven, but it&#8217;s coming into play.</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> I think you can go up to eight, then.  Because I really think Michigan is an absolute plus for the Republicans.  Terri Land is fantastic.  She&#8217;s demonstrated she knows how to win statewide.  And they have a terrible candidate on the other side.  So I think &#8212; watch Michigan.  And if you have any money to give, come out and give in Michigan.</p>
<p>A couple of things that I&#8217;ll say about going forward in 2014, from my perspective &#8212; I think we have to have a governor as a nominee &#8212; I mean, in 2016, sorry.  We have to have a governor as our nominee.  We have to have someone, I think &#8212; as Ralph says, a reform agenda &#8212; I say someone who has demonstrated fundamental change in their state.  I want a record.  I want someone to say this is what was going on in the state, and this is how I changed it.</p>
<p>I think that someone has to demonstrate that they have been through the media scrutiny &#8212; that, like it or not, the national media are going to come up with false narratives.  They&#8217;re going to come after you with everything they have.  And you have to be able to demonstrate you have an answer, you have a good answer, and you know how to push back.</p>
<p>And lastly, I think for me, we have to have a nominee in 2016 that knows how to communicate with young people.  The world is changing, they don&#8217;t read the newspapers like they used to.  They&#8217;re getting their information from alternative sources.  They&#8217;re getting a lot of information from programs like &#8220;Oprah&#8221; and &#8220;Entertainment Tonight,&#8221; like it or not.  And we have to be able to compete on that level.  We have to be able to talk to them and organize that way.</p>
<p>But I don&#8217;t think that all is lost.  I don&#8217;t buy this argument that young people are turned off from a pro-liberty argument.  I think, if anything, that they have demonstrated over the last year that they don&#8217;t want government involved in their lives.  They don&#8217;t want someone spying on them.  They don&#8217;t want the scrutiny that comes from a program like Obamacare into their lives.</p>
<p>We have to be able to package those pro-liberty, anti-government, strong-America messages and put it in front of the young people.  They will respond.  They have grown up not trusting a lot of people.  And we have to play into the fact that government is one of the institutions that they should mistrust, and that if we package it as a pro-liberty, make your decisions, don&#8217;t let other people tell you what to do; that&#8217;s where we win.</p>
<p>I see it every single day on Twitter.  I see it every single day on social media.  Young people are frustrated with having things taken away from them.  And they&#8217;re having a sense that they&#8217;re losing it.</p>
<p>So in 2014, what I would say is that it&#8217;s not rocket science.  All politics is local.  We have to take our local candidates, and we have to make sure that they&#8217;re appealing to young people, and that they&#8217;re giving a very pro-liberty message.</p>
<p>Also, I&#8217;m big on fighting back against the media.  They are the biggest &#8211;</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>They&#8217;re the biggest babies with the thinnest skin.  And when you push back, and you challenge their narrative, they don&#8217;t know what to do.  They are not accustomed to being challenged.  All of these reporters, especially in Washington &#8212; they like to file their story and go home.</p>
<p>And so for me, challenging the media right up front to say &#8212; that is not true, you&#8217;ve got that fact wrong, why are you using an anonymous source &#8212; and going right to them, and challenging them, it makes a difference for the next story.  So we have to have candidates that do it, I think, in a nice way, but in a very challenging way.</p>
<p>We don&#8217;t want to go and attack them personally.  You want to attack their story and their facts and the way that they come to a story, and the way they view it.  And I think that&#8217;s a winning strategy for candidates that push back.  Because there&#8217;s only one entity that&#8217;s lower in approval ratings than Congress, and that&#8217;s the media.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> Yeah.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> Can I comment on that?  Can I just &#8212; if I could just put an exclamation point on that last point, about the media?  First of all, their trust factor is at an all-time low.  Second of all, the disaggregation of the media universe, through the rise of the Internet, cable television, talk radio; allows us to communicate far more effectively what the actual facts are.  And Exhibit A, by the way, is Obamacare.  A lot of these facts have not gotten out through the traditional media.</p>
<p>And thirdly, look what happened in that second debate &#8212; I believe it was the second debate, on foreign policy &#8212; when Candy Crowley &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> Yeah.</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> &#8212; who was supposed to be the moderator, stepped in there and went to bat for Obama, and said &#8212; in fact, sir, he did say it was a terrorist attack.</p>
<p>Now, you know and I know that Obama never said it was a terrorist attack in that Rose Garden ceremony after the Benghazi attack.  And Romney, to his eternal shame, did not call her on it.  He should have, in a very nice way, in a very polite but firm way &#8212; he should&#8217;ve stepped forward and said &#8212; excuse me, I&#8217;ve read the transcript.  I saw what he said.  He never called it a terrorist attack.  And he hasn&#8217;t to this day.  That&#8217;s what he should&#8217;ve done.  And instead, he just &#8212; oh, he didn&#8217;t?  He didn&#8217;t do that?  And that was a critical moment in the campaign.</p>
<p>By the way, the advisors on the campaign on the foreign policy side had prepared him, and he was ready for that.  And &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> We can&#8217;t hear.</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> Sorry.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> Speak closer to it.  Got to speak directly into it.</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> The advisors on the campaign, the foreign policy advisors, had prepared the governor for that question and for that line of attack.  So he should&#8217;ve been able to immediately turn that around.  And the advisors were left to say &#8212; what&#8217;s going on?  This is implosion before our eyes.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>I&#8217;d just like to say there are some good members of the media out there.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So let&#8217;s get specific a little bit, because I like to do that with all my writers at The Register and elsewhere.  You both mentioned the message being very important for Republicans.  And Richard, I think you said specifically a pro-liberty message.  What does that look like?  On what issues should Republicans be focusing, and on what issues should Republicans not be focusing?</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> Well, I think that a winning strategy right now is talking about the economy and jobs.  We can&#8217;t just be out there saying cut taxes.  I&#8217;m all for balancing the budget.  I&#8217;m all for cutting the taxes when we get everything paid for.  But right now, when you say &#8212; I just want to cut taxes, it&#8217;s an immediate message to the other side that you&#8217;re mean-spirited and that you&#8217;re not thinking about the programs.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s a way to talk about these issues.  I think you have to talk about balancing the budget.  You have to talk about the fact that we have a $17 trillion national debt, and that spending keeps going.  But I think that the better argument is to talk about prioritizing spending, making sure that we&#8217;re spending it in the right way, not overspending.  There&#8217;s a way to say all of this without just saying &#8212; I want to come in and cut your taxes.</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> Yeah.  And I think there are also ways to talk about tax reduction and fiscal responsibility and spending restraint in a way that sounds populist and pro-middle class, as opposed to you&#8217;re only defending the wealthy.</p>
<p>Let me just give you a couple of examples.  And I agree we&#8217;ve got to focus on jobs and the economy.  As important as Obamacare is, and it&#8217;s terribly important to turning out vote &#8212; remember, independents have turned on this guy.  The only people left are the partisan Democrats.  Everybody else has jumped out of the flaming Buick before it goes off the cliff.</p>
<p>People don&#8217;t want to have any association with this program whatsoever.  So we don&#8217;t neglect that.  But his job approval on healthcare, interestingly enough, is 37 percent.  His job approval on the economy is 32 percent.  People are still hurting out there.  People still can&#8217;t find jobs.  The people who can&#8217;t find jobs &#8212; if they can find anything, it&#8217;s a part-time job.</p>
<p>So one way to talk about this issue is to talk about exempting from taxation up to 20 percent of the net of a small business, a family-owned business, so that money can be plowed back into the business and create jobs.  This is a pro-jobs provision, it&#8217;s a tax credit.  But it&#8217;s targeted in a way that helps create jobs and helps drive small business, which creates 80 percent of jobs.</p>
<p>Another that a lot of Republicans are starting to talk about &#8212; I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s really ready for legislation yet, I don&#8217;t think that cake is quite yet baked &#8212; is to increase the child tax credit.  This would be a pro-middle class way to say that two-parent families that are raising children, that are the most successful Department of Health Education and Welfare ever conceived, do a far better job of educating, nurturing and training their children than the federal government will.</p>
<p>We created the child tax credit during the contract with America; Bush doubled it.  It hasn&#8217;t kept pace with inflation.  These are some of the things that Republicans can run on and be for.  I would say that the details of this agenda are less important than that you&#8217;re for something.</p>
<p>You know, you look at some of the things that Pat had up that are so popular, like reining in the out-of-control special interests and the lobbyists and the revolving door.  That&#8217;s the equivalent of the Perot movement, where we ran on the Contract with America on every law applying to members of Congress.  You know, you saw that blow up on Obamacare, where the law didn&#8217;t apply to them; and also term limits for committee chairmen, and having a vote on term limits for members of Congress &#8212; that you can take some of that populist reform agenda, leaven it in with tax cuts, fiscal restraint and other things, and you&#8217;ve got a very compelling agenda.</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> One thing that I just want to add is that, you know, Republicans are terrible, we are terrible, at recognizing that we have to win first before we get to put our ideas forward.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Too many times, we have candidates that are putting those ideas forward in such detail that they&#8217;re alienating everyone before they even get to the polls.  And one thing that we can steal from the Obama campaign is that everything they did was just a generic message &#8212; Republicans hate women.  Gee, it&#8217;s a war on women.  Everything was a war on women.  And all you eventually heard down the way &#8212; if you&#8217;re not paying attention to the news, and you&#8217;re not coming to conferences like this, all you hear is, oh, Republicans hate women.  I&#8217;m not going to vote for the ones who hate women.  It was that simple.</p>
<p>And so I think that when we&#8217;re not in power, we have the benefit of being the ones who just get to be against all those big, bad programs.  And we&#8217;re the ones who, I think, can have generic solutions.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> But let me challenge you on that real quickly.  Because as Margaret Thatcher once said, you know, you have the win the idea first; then you win the vote.  So if that&#8217;s true, how does that jibe with what you&#8217;re saying?</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> I think that&#8217;s a very good question.  And I&#8217;m not suggesting that we not stand for something.  We have to stand for a positive message.  All I&#8217;m saying is let&#8217;s not get too weighed down into the details that we&#8217;re convincing people who may have an agenda or an interest in the status quo, suddenly get nervous by our big change message.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> Got you.  Because the Obama Administration &#8212; big narratives, war on women, wealthy Republicans, all that kind of stuff, are easy, simple ideas to digest.  If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> Okay.  So let&#8217;s talk a little bit about the election.  Do either of you have any favorites in 2014 in terms of Senate candidates that you think have great potential in winning the race and bringing in new leadership into the Republican Caucus in the US Senate?</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> Well, I&#8217;m a huge fan of Tom Cotton in Arkansas.  I think he&#8217;s going to win that election.  I think he&#8217;s going to be a star.  And he&#8217;s going to be an impact player the minute he gets to the US Senate.  If there&#8217;s somebody out there that you&#8217;re thinking &#8212; you know, you&#8217;re debating &#8212; I know many of us get solicited by all these candidates.  I don&#8217;t know about you, but I seem to be on every direct-mail list.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>This guy is a keeper.  He&#8217;s the real deal, and he will join Cruz and Paul and Rubio and others in being a real change agent.</p>
<p>Another one that I&#8217;m excited about &#8212; not as much of a household name, probably very few people in this room have heard of him yet &#8212; but I think he&#8217;s going to beat Mark Begich in Alaska.  And that&#8217;s Mead Treadwell, who&#8217;s the incumbent lieutenant governor of Alaska.  That&#8217;s going to be a big, big race.  And I don&#8217;t see how the Republicans can gain control of the Senate without winning that Alaska seat.</p>
<p>I mean, I know Joe Miller&#8217;s running again.  He&#8217;s the one who lost the seat six years ago.  I think very unfairly, by the way; he was subjected to very vicious media attacks.  But the fact is, I think it&#8217;d be better off if we had a new and different face in that race.  And I think Mead will be a reformer, a conservative, and unapologetically so.  Good candidate.</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> I&#8217;ve mentioned one already &#8212; Michigan, Terri Land.  I think she&#8217;s going to do it.  She knows how to win, and she&#8217;s already demonstrated statewide that she can win in Michigan.  Plus we&#8217;ve got that great governor there that I think is going to really pull Terri through in Michigan.  So I&#8217;m excited about Michigan.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m also really excited &#8212; and this may be controversial &#8212; I&#8217;m a big Liz Cheney fan.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And I want to see Liz in the Senate, and I&#8217;ll tell you why.  We have very few &#8212; I can think of maybe one &#8212; very good senator on foreign policy issues on our side.  I&#8217;m disappointed with several of the senators, the Republican senators, that have taken up the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  Once again, we have a committee that is just willing to back down from what the Democrats want.</p>
<p>I want a Senate Foreign Relations Committee that holds up people like Wendy Sherman.  Why is Wendy Sherman allowed to be putting forward her ideas on Iran when she just failed miserably on North Korea?  She even convinced Hillary Clinton, who &#8212; Hillary Clinton then said &#8212; no, Wendy, I don&#8217;t like your way, so I have to pull you back from this food aid idea in North Korea.  But yet, Wendy Sherman is allowed to sail through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee because our senators won&#8217;t stand up to her.</p>
<p>Liz Cheney will.  Liz Cheney will be there.  She is articulate on these issues.  And she&#8217;s willing with a smile to stand up and say &#8212; no, Wendy, you&#8217;re not going to get confirmed.  And that&#8217;s what I want.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> There&#8217;s a microphone here at the center of the room.  So if anyone has questions, you might consider lining up now.  I&#8217;m going to ask one more question, and then open it up to everyone else.</p>
<p>Another big question is 2016.  Every speech I give, every conference like this I go to, several conversations about who the GOP nominee should be in 2016 &#8212; any thoughts on that, gentlemen?</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> I think it&#8217;s way too early.  And I&#8217;m not going to do this today, but within our ranks at Faith and Freedom Coalition, the organization that I head, we have sort of told people they&#8217;re not allowed to talk about 2016 until after 2014.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>We&#8217;re focused on the US Senate and the House and these governors, and that&#8217;s the most important thing.</p>
<p>I will say this, though &#8212; I think it&#8217;s an embarrassment of riches.  I think this is the strongest field, potentially &#8212; depending upon who goes &#8212; that the Republican Party has had since 1980, when you had Phil Crane, you had Reagan, Bush, Dole, Baker, Connelly.  I mean, whatever you thought of where they stood on the issues, that was a strong field of candidates.  And if all the people who are being talked about [as going go] &#8212; which would be Christie, Jeb Bush, Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Scott Walker &#8212; I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;m leaving out a few others &#8212; Rick Perry&#8217;s almost certain to go, Rick Santorum is running now, in case you hadn&#8217;t noticed.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>You know, this is going to be a very strong field.</p>
<p>And here&#8217;s the other thing that&#8217;s interesting.  At least right now, there is no true classic frontrunner, in the sense of a Reagan &#8217;80 or a Bush &#8217;88 or a Bush 2000.  Or really, even a McCain 2008.  If you look at the polling, if they all go, I think Christie, Cruz and Bush are all within two points of each other.  And nobody gets over 20 percent.</p>
<p>So I think that I agree with the fact that it ought to be somebody who has demonstrated that they can lead a conservative reform agenda.  And I think we ought to measure these candidates to some extent by what they do and how much they fight for these Senate candidates in 2014.  If they went into these battleground states and helped these candidates who need their help, then I think that ought to count for something.</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> I would be for an amendment to the Constitution saying no senator should ever be able to be President.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>They&#8217;re terrible.  They show up to vote, and they think that&#8217;s it.  They don&#8217;t know how to build coalitions.  So I&#8217;m only for governors.  I&#8217;m going to give you four governors &#8212; two of which I think are running, two I wish were running.  And I think these four have demonstrated that they know how to win, and they know how to change.  Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Rick Snyder in Michigan, Brian Sandoval in Nevada, and John Kasich in Ohio.  Those are the four that I&#8217;m watching.</p>
<p><strong>Group:</strong> Boo.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> Who do you wish was running?  Was that who you wish was running?</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> I&#8217;m a big Scott Walker fan right now.  Yeah.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>I know you all booed the last one, but I&#8217;ve got a governor you&#8217;ll boo even more.  Five minutes before I walked in, I walked right past Charlie Crist.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> Can I just ask a question?  Interesting show of hands &#8212; how many people here would be excited about Chris Christie if he were the nominee?</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> Boo.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> Boo.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> Yeah.  That&#8217;s kind of the sense I&#8217;m getting.</p>
<p>Okay, let&#8217;s go to our questions.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> I have several.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> One per person.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> Your feelings on Matt Bevin, your feelings on the Constitutional amendment that Rand Paul made &#8212; and should that be part of a campaign either in &#8217;14 or &#8217;16?  And are past statistics available in terms of charts to use?</p>
<p>(Multiple speakers)</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> The answer on the statistics is &#8212; not yet.  No.  They&#8217;re still off the record.  They are being (inaudible).  When we announce it publicly, we get the control of our &#8212; it&#8217;s a much more complicated thing.  Then they&#8217;ll be (multiple speakers).  Huh?</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> Get a little bit closer.</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> Oh, I&#8217;m sorry.  I said no, they&#8217;re not available yet.  They will be when we announce them publicly.  Right now, they&#8217;re off the record.  [You all had] a chance to share, I&#8217;ll be glad to talk &#8212; there&#8217;s a lot more.  When we roll it out, Smith out, all of this data, then it&#8217;ll be up.  And this meeting will actually go up too, at that point in my talk.  So it will be eventual.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> [Just] &#8212; your other question on the Constitutional amendment?</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> The Constitutional amendment that I believe Rand Paul proposed, that no law should not apply to the federal government, basically (multiple speakers) &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> That any law that is passed by Congress should also apply to Congress, correct?  Great, okay.  That&#8217;s the question, is &#8212; what are your thoughts on Rand Paul&#8217;s idea that no law passed by Congress should not apply to Congress?</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> Yeah.  I mean, I&#8217;m for it.  And as I said, we had that in the Contract with America in &#8217;94, it was very popular.  And &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> Well then, what happened to it, then?</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> &#8212; it will be very popular again as a result of this Obamacare failure.</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> What you did in &#8217;94 &#8212; was it a rule?  Was it taken out?  What happened?  Because obviously isn&#8217;t in effect; hasn&#8217;t been in effect.</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> Think it was a message, one of the messages.</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> It was a message you gave.  You see, it wasn&#8217;t something we delivered.</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> I wouldn&#8217;t support a Constitutional amendment to say that, but I think that that&#8217;s the straight base test.  I think you run against that idea.  And for me, that&#8217;s something that is an absolute &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> It should be in Smith&#8217;s platform, I&#8217;ll tell you that.  Smith &#8212; we should&#8217;ve had it in our platform.  But I didn&#8217;t want to load the platform up.  Because, my God, what if we put, as I said, hanging people, and that&#8217;s close to it?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But this is the difference in the politics, which is it&#8217;s a good message.  You see, as opposed to &#8212; this is a conviction.  And that&#8217;s the difference in our politics of what can be and what&#8217;s going on now.</p>
<p>(Multiple speakers)</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> Well, I think, Pat, it was passed.  And I think when Obamacare was passed, the legislation said it was supposed to apply &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> Well, that&#8217;s the exemption.</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> &#8212; to members and staff.  And then Obama illegally granted an exemption.  That&#8217;s what happened.</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> But for a long time in his &#8212; and with John Boehner&#8217;s connivance and the connivance of the Republican leadership.</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> Sure.</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> Let&#8217;s get all this on the table.</p>
<p>And the other thing is &#8212; but for a long time, since 1994, that has not been applied in laws passed.</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> Yeah, I wouldn&#8217;t disagree with that.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> Let me go &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> Comment on that &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> Let me go to the next question.  If we have time, we&#8217;ll go to that.  Thanks.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> &#8212; comment on that, [though].</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> Hi, good morning.</p>
<p>Speaking of Chris Christie, I was wondering if you could address his recent comments.  And to paraphrase &#8212; if Republicans want to get votes from Hispanics and African Americans, that we need to be in their communities 24/7 and not just two weeks before the election.</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> Yeah.  Yeah.  I mean, my attitude is if you have a very pro-liberty argument and message, that absolutely that appeals to African Americans and Hispanics.  I also think school choice is one of these issues that we haven&#8217;t done a very good job articulating.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Because I can tell you in California, overwhelmingly, Hispanics support school choice.  Why haven&#8217;t we (multiple speakers) &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> &#8212; African Americans, in large, large numbers.</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> Yeah.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> Yeah.</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> And that&#8217;s a straight base argument, too.  That&#8217;s a &#8212; do you want to be able to choose the school that your kids go to, and choose the better one?  Or do you want to go to the lousy one down the street?  I mean, that&#8217;s just a simple message.  And then we push the Democrats into defending the union school system.</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> Can I just comment for a second on that?  There is &#8212; I totally agree with what both of you all said.  But here&#8217;s the thing &#8212; you know, if you look at the August study, the four groups &#8212; and to go to Ralph&#8217;s point about why the economy is a major issue &#8212; the four groups that have lost the most median income in this country since Barack Obama&#8217;s been President are blacks, Hispanics, women and young people.  But the Republican Party, your candidates &#8212; I don&#8217;t even hear a message about economic growth or whatever.  But more importantly, it is the empathy.</p>
<p>The same thing with these [questions] &#8212; you have to be outraged on behalf of people who are being used.  They are being used just like the Republican establishment uses the base of the Republican Party.  That&#8217;s what Obama and the Democrats do.  People that get up and say &#8212; see those people?  They&#8217;re evil.  We&#8217;re for you.  And they&#8217;re not.  But somebody&#8217;s got to speak for them.</p>
<p>You saw in the Smith data just how many blacks, women &#8212; the Obama base was willing to defect.  But you have to make it empathetic and real link to them.  It can&#8217;t be &#8212; you should be for what we are, because we&#8217;re conservatives.  It&#8217;s got to have something that says &#8212; we&#8217;re on your side.</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> Well, and two things.  Number one, let me start with the Hispanics.  I think it is a tragedy that the Republican Party has gotten to where it is today positioned vis-à-vis Hispanic voters.  As recently as 2004, the nominee of this party carried 44 percent of the Hispanic vote.  And, by the way, carried 56 percent of the Hispanic vote in the all-important state of Florida, which, along with Ohio, really decided the election.</p>
<p>And when you take that and look what happened in 2012, which was just a slaughter, with the nominee winning 26 percent of the Hispanic vote &#8212; leaving aside for a minute whether it would&#8217;ve changed the outcome of the election &#8212; given the fact that Hispanics are as highly entrepreneurial as they are, when millions of Hispanics own small businesses; given the fact that 42 percent of Hispanics self-identify as conservatives &#8212; that 22 percent of them are evangelicals, another 15 percent are faithful, frequently mass-attending pro-life, pro-marriage Catholics &#8212; how do you lose this vote like this?</p>
<p>It gets back to what Pat was talking about.  Candidates matter.  Messengers matter.  The ability to express the idea that your vision for the future of this country includes them is critical.</p>
<p>And when you have candidates like Jeb Bush, who have won upwards of 60 percent of the Hispanic vote, who has a wife who is a Mexican, who speaks Spanish at home, who&#8217;s fluent in Spanish &#8212; I&#8217;m not saying you have to be that kind of candidate.  Christie won 50 percent of the Hispanic vote and doesn&#8217;t speak fluent Spanish.  But he did go into those neighborhoods.</p>
<p>Now, with regard to the African-American community, it&#8217;s candidly tougher.  And it&#8217;s tougher because Barack Obama&#8217;s still in the White House.  I think we&#8217;re going to have to get past the Obama era.  But I think it&#8217;s entirely possible for Republicans to win up to a quarter of that vote.  And if they win a quarter of that vote, the Democratic coalition really implodes.  They can&#8217;t win a national election without winning high 80s, low 90s of that vote.</p>
<p>And I&#8217;ll tell you counterintuitively &#8212; and this isn&#8217;t popular among the Republican establishment, but it&#8217;s an empirical fact &#8212; the way you win those African-American votes is through the churches, and it&#8217;s usually on social and cultural issues.  It&#8217;s school choice, it&#8217;s marriage.  Remember, Barack Obama got 945,000 fewer African-American votes in 2012 than he got in 2008.  And you can be darn sure that his position in support of same-sex marriage was one of the big reasons why.</p>
<p>I had major African-American pastors who told me personally, not for publication &#8212; I can&#8217;t publicly criticize him, I can&#8217;t publicly urge a vote for Romney; but I can tell you this &#8212; I&#8217;m not voting for him, and I&#8217;m not going to ask my people to vote for him.  And there is an opportunity for Republican candidates as a result of that radical agenda that Obama is now pushing.</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> Now, that&#8217;s where I have to disagree with Ralph, just because I feel like we as a party have to be able to have people understand that pro-liberty messages &#8212; what works in California or Florida may not work in another community.  And so, having the ability to separate church and state, I think, is really important.</p>
<p>And I think the social agenda cuts against us too much.  And I know we disagree on that, but I feel like it cuts against our party too much.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> It did not cut against us in minority communities.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> But maybe &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> I can tell you that right now.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> &#8212; and youth (multiple speakers) &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> &#8212; among young people.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> &#8212; but maybe not in minority communities.</p>
<p>I&#8217;d also add that &#8212; I&#8217;m going to go straight to your question afterwards &#8212; that we&#8217;re also overlooking &#8212; which is consistent in all of these panels that I moderate or speak at &#8212; is Asian-American voters.  Asian-Americans are a growing bloc, and President Obama won those, too.  So we need to continue our effort &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> This is your California message.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> This is definitely my California message.</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> We&#8217;re learning this lesson in California very fast.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> Well, and if you look at it, it&#8217;s interesting.  Because in California, the Democratic Party is having a struggle internally.  They have all the power in California, as you all know.  But they&#8217;re having a struggle internally over issues like education.  And if you look at their last convention, they would not let the mayor of Sacramento, an African-American Democrat, have a booth at their convention.  Because his wife, an Asian-American education reformer, Michelle Rhee, supports school choice.  And Gloria Romero, who&#8217;s a Democrat former state senator and state assemblywoman, is pro-school choice; a Latina.</p>
<p>And so there&#8217;s an internal struggle with minority sectors in the Democratic Party in California.</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> It&#8217;s a winning issue.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> It&#8217;s a big issue for us.</p>
<p>Okay, your question?</p>
<p><strong>Sarah Stern:</strong> Okay.  My name is Sarah Stern.  I&#8217;m from the Endowment for Middle East Truth, or EMET.  And you did a great, great job.  But I&#8217;m very curious as to why you didn&#8217;t say a word about the President&#8217;s horrible handling of foreign policy.  According to a Real Clear Politics average of recent polls that I just read on my iPhone, the President only has a 37 percent approval rating of foreign policy.  It&#8217;s almost Machiavellian.  He is keeping our friends, especially Israel, at a great distance; and our enemies close.  And he&#8217;s not succeeding in either; even the Saudis hate us right now.</p>
<p>So I think there is plenty of room to use that issue.  He&#8217;s throwing Israel under the bus.  He&#8217;s forgotten about the clear commitment to Czechoslovakia and Poland in terms of missile defense.  I mean, the list goes on and on and on.</p>
<p>And I think it&#8217;s really important &#8212; there are people out there that would like America to be respected again, to be a force of strength and not just appeasement, and not for us to go on an apology tour.  So I&#8217;d like you to &#8211;</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> Sure.  Yeah, I mean, I totally agree.  I would say you should follow me on Twitter.  Because that&#8217;s really my meme on Twitter &#8212; constantly going after the President on his foreign policy.  I think when you look at the red line in Syria, you look at how he&#8217;s handled Egypt, you look at Turkey &#8212; a once-ally that we can&#8217;t even talk to anymore and we can&#8217;t convince to do anything &#8212; and their disastrous messaging on the flotilla, and yet they didn&#8217;t get any pushback from the State Department.  And now we&#8217;ve got John Kerry as the Secretary of State, who &#8212; if you look at who he&#8217;s bringing in to advise him, it&#8217;s getting worse.</p>
<p>I think there&#8217;s no question that even reporters are beginning to see that this guy in the White House is just not interested in foreign policy.</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> And neither is the Republican Party.  Let&#8217;s deal with the real fact here.  The two props under the Reagan coalition that held up the tent &#8212; one of them was less government spending.  George Bush took care of that, and then took care of the other one, which is strong national defense but nonintervention.</p>
<p>I know Republicans [themselves] have told their members foreign policy&#8217;s not a big issue.  It happens to matter a great deal.  I just finished a poll with John McLaughlin for Secure America Now; we&#8217;ve appeared here before.  Let me tell you something.  On Iran, the threat to Iran &#8212; this ain&#8217;t Syria &#8212; 91 percent of people believe that if they get a nuclear weapon, the entire world will be [de-stable].  Huge majority believe they&#8217;ll use it against Israel.  A majority of American women are willing to go to war &#8212; to attack &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> But the &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> My point is &#8212; let me &#8212; my point is, they don&#8217;t press this.  Because what you have is you have the caucus led by McCain and Lindsay Graham, what I call the Muslim Brotherhood caucus, which is for everything.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>You have a Republican Party that does not make foreign policy a basis in the security of the United States a major platform.  Because they see people don&#8217;t care about it.</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> Well, I agree that the Republicans are doing a lousy job on that.</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> But they do it on purpose.</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> And the Foreign Relations Committee is atrocious.</p>
<p>However, on Iran, it&#8217;s very different.  Because I think &#8212; you know, you said 91 percent of the people say that it&#8217;s wrong for Iran to get a nuclear weapon.  So &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> No (multiple speakers) destabilize the world.</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> Right, there&#8217;s no question.  No one disagrees with that.  The problem is that the President keeps saying he doesn&#8217;t want Iran &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> And the American people &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> &#8212; to get &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> &#8212; don&#8217;t believe them.</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> Right.</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> Look at (multiple speakers) poll.  They don&#8217;t believe it.</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> So that&#8217;s my point.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> I&#8217;m going to &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> It&#8217;s more unbelievable issue, because the President keeps saying he doesn&#8217;t want Iran to get a nuclear weapon, but he&#8217;s going around the six UN resolutions that were passed, telling Iran to stop enriching all uranium.  And yet, they&#8217;re trying to do a new thing in Geneva.  So &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> Well, it&#8217;s awfully hard to make the French look like they&#8217;re tougher than you are.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But this guy has pulled it off.</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> Yeah, thank God.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> We’re actually going to have a whole conversation on this, the panel tomorrow morning, on Obama&#8217;s foreign policy disaster.  So I&#8217;m sure that&#8217;ll be touched upon more.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> Richard Grenell, I read something, that you have 15,000 Twitter followers.  That&#8217;s pretty impressive.  I was wondering, because you were involved with Mitt Romney&#8217;s campaign for awhile &#8212; he looked like a dinosaur when he just wasn&#8217;t up to date with social media.  And I&#8217;m wondering &#8212; what advice would you have for the next election?  And where is there &#8212; do you see, or do you know that they&#8217;re actually doing something?  Do they recognize that there was an issue?</p>
<p><strong>Richard Grenell:</strong> Yeah, I think they do now, they recognize.  I mean, I think Ralph can attest to the fact that there were a lot of people pushing at the Romney Campaign to get tougher on their messaging, to take on the reporters.  They didn&#8217;t have a spokesperson that really was willing to battle on a daily basis with the media.  And yet, the Obama team had like three.</p>
<p>And so, it was a frustrating thing for me to not have a campaign that was wanting to fight.  I think they felt like they had messages that were going to sink in because the economy was so bad.  But the day-to-day fighting, for whatever reason, they just really didn&#8217;t want to do.</p>
<p>I think now on social media, Stuart Stevens and others are recognizing that they&#8217;ve got to fight on social media and that they are starting to.  So hopefully, the next nominee has that in place before the learn the hard lesson.</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> Well, and I would add this &#8212; social media is not an elixir.  It can&#8217;t be a surrogate for the candidate.  The reason why Obama took off online is because he was taking off offline.  And the online energy was just a reflection of the energy that was already out there.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ll just give you one data point.  When Scott Brown was running for the US Senate in 2010 in Massachusetts &#8212; I&#8217;m trying to remember her name.  Was it Moakley?  The Attorney General?</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> Martha Coakley.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> Martha Coakley.</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> He had 10 times as many Facebook fans as she did.  That wasn&#8217;t because he had a more muscular online strategy; that was because people were excited about Scott Brown.</p>
<p>So yes, you need to &#8212; if you look at what happened in Virginia in 2013, just, I mean, a few weeks ago, McAuliffe spent 18 percent of his media budget online.  Cuccinelli spent two.  The reason why we&#8217;re not yielding a return on investment, in terms of social media and online marketing, is because we&#8217;re not investing in it.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> No.</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> You can&#8217;t get an ROI if you&#8217;re not spending it.</p>
<p>And then finally, candidates matter.  You know, Bill Rusher once said that Ronald Reagan believed everything that Barry Goldwater believed.  But Reagan said it with a smile, and Barry said it with a frown.  And it made all the difference.</p>
<p>And you know, there&#8217;s that great line that Jonah Goldberg has &#8212; I have to give him credit for this &#8212; that Romney looked like the picture that came that with the frame.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I mean, there&#8217;s a &#8212; you know &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; I had a governor &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> It&#8217;s so true.</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> I had a governor &#8212; I met with a governor &#8212; I won&#8217;t name who it is, because this was offered in confidence.  But this was a month after the 2012 election.  And this governor, who probably everybody in this room knows and you&#8217;re big fans of, said &#8212; I met with him 12 times.  On two of those occasions, those meetings lasted over an hour.  He said &#8212; Ralph, I never connected with him.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> Wow.</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> I never felt a connection.  If you ever met Reagan, or if you were ever in a click line with Bush 43, you know what I&#8217;m talking about.  There was a connection.  Good candidates know how to connect with voters.  And there&#8217;s no substitute for that.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> All right.  Let&#8217;s go to our next question.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> Great, thank you.</p>
<p>Yes, I agree &#8212; we must not nominate another stiff for President.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>To give you my observations &#8212; I&#8217;m going to give some observations on what I heard today &#8212; (inaudible) on Pat, and Pat and Ralph both know me.</p>
<p>Pat, I think that your survey results largely could be boiled down into a different paradigm.  One is, it&#8217;s the economy, stupid.  And the second thing is that the populace has become much more narcissistic and much less altruistic.  You look at it within those two models, I think that explains almost all of your results there.</p>
<p>The Mr. Smith that you created &#8212; first of all, I think it was brilliant work you did &#8212; this Mr. Smith you created is basically change that we can believe in.  That&#8217;s what the message &#8212; you look at that, that was Obama.  It&#8217;s change that we can believe in.  David Horowitz has this little pamphlet called &#8220;Go for the Heart.&#8221;  And that is basically what Mr. Smith is &#8212; someone who cares about others, as opposed to being hard issue-driven.</p>
<p>Just a few more observations, then I&#8217;ll let you tear what I&#8217;m saying apart.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> Do you have a question you want to ask?</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> I&#8217;m going to get to it.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> Okay.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> The Achilles &#8212; there&#8217;s four people behind me.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> I know, I got about four minutes.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> (Multiple speakers) do this quickly, though?  The Achilles Heel in democracy is that demagogues can win.  And that&#8217;s what we&#8217;ve seen.  I think there&#8217;s two classes in America &#8212; there&#8217;s the political class, and then there&#8217;s the majority.  The people here &#8212; I love you all; you were all part of the political class &#8212; the majority &#8212; and as you people were saying, they get their opinions from Oprah and from entertainment.  And I don&#8217;t know that an issue-oriented candidate is going to win &#8212; past Mr. Smith, which is like Obama&#8217;s, will win.</p>
<p>My question is &#8212; sorry.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Hopefully, my insights are a little value &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> You know, we can pull up a chair up here.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> Okay.  Pat, when you showed Mr. Smith doing well in the black community against Hillary, maybe you&#8217;re implying that Hillary &#8212; like, you know, Bill was the first black President, and Hillary&#8217;s another black President.  But if you would&#8217;ve put a black candidate against Mr. Smith, I&#8217;m not sure that Mr. Smith would&#8217;ve done as well as your &#8212; nearly as well as your numbers showed.</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> Look.  You know, you can say what you want.  I&#8217;ve been doing this for some years of my life.  I&#8217;ve never seen something as a projected statement get that kind of results, take away from real people real votes they had before.  And I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s because one was white or black.  The fact that so many Democrats, so many women would defect, so many people (inaudible) &#8212; but I disagree with your &#8212; I mean, no.  Mr. Smith or Ms. Smith is about some &#8212; candidate Smith is about something else.</p>
<p>Candidate Smith is not just about &#8212; the economy, stupid.  I mean, it is a part of the economic frustration.  It is also about I&#8217;m losing my country, my children are losing their country, and these politicians don&#8217;t care a whit about me, the country or what happens.  And the fact is that what that is is an attack on the political class and a cry to restore the sovereignty of the American people.</p>
<p>Those numbers are not a bunch of narcissists.  Those numbers are people saying they have taken our country from us.  And the parties, Democrats and Republicans, have failed alike.  And I’m sorry, I just disagree.  I mean, I do think part of it&#8217;s the economy.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>But it is a bigger message.  And here is the question &#8212; can you evolve politics to an idea?  In 1776, initially, until Thomas Payne wrote &#8220;Common Sense,&#8221; no American, including George Washington, publicly talked about independence.  He was still toasting the King.  Then it became apparent that the common people had responded.  And that whole thing &#8212; by July, you had a Declaration of Independence.  It is &#8212; understand how these movements happen.</p>
<p>The country has moved.  They&#8217;ve had it with all of what they&#8217;ve had.  And remember, I did this before we&#8217;ve had the last two months.  Just wait till what the numbers are coming.</p>
<p>The question is &#8212; you&#8217;re right about demagogues &#8212; (multiple speakers) whether someone good will come, or someone bad.  Question is how many Smiths.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> Okay, let&#8217;s go to the next question.</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> Next question.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> No &#8212; I&#8217;m sorry &#8212; you didn&#8217;t understand what I said.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> Let&#8217;s go to the next question.  (Multiple speakers) you can talk to him afterwards.  Let&#8217;s talk to him afterwards.  Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> Quick question, I know we&#8217;re running late &#8212; Pat, great job on the research.  Kudos to the Hanleys for having financed that.  And I&#8217;m just wondering &#8212; I know it&#8217;s embargoed &#8212; but what can we in this room do?  What are you asking us to do?  What&#8217;s next?</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> Well, those of you who are interested &#8212; look, I&#8217;ve never been in politics for the interest of simply amusing myself.  My purpose in politics is to make change and make things happen.  And it&#8217;s a good question.</p>
<p>What we&#8217;re planning is &#8212; what we think is, look, there are some very concrete things that could be done.  We&#8217;ve been working, the people &#8212; Bob Perkins, [Hinder Smith], and Scott Miller and I &#8212; the people worked on this project with Lee &#8212; we have worked, figuring out &#8212; what would you do next?  How do you roll &#8212; how do you get people to stand up?  How do you start making Smith stand for something?  I don&#8217;t care &#8212; there are many candidates.</p>
<p>One of the things about candidate recruitment &#8212; I am &#8212; you know, y&#8217;all can all have all have the people, just more political-class people going up the ladder as candidates.  Or in some of these states where no one wants to run, why can&#8217;t you recruit people who run?  We need a platform.  We’re talking about what is the outlines of a platform, to Richie&#8217;s point.  It&#8217;s not enough to simply [say] you&#8217;re unhappy.  There are some pieces there, but there are more in the common sense.</p>
<p>So we have got a plan.  And I&#8217;m telling you that the game here is to change the dialogue.  And, you know, it&#8217;s the old tree falling in the forest.  But we have some things &#8212; and anyone who&#8217;s interested &#8212; many of you are not going to be; that&#8217;s fine.  You want to be conventional.  But people who see a moment to make history and be the architects of that history, to help make history come, will have a chance to sit down, talk to Lee Hanley and I, and Steve &#8212; or some others &#8212; were talking about how to do this, how to effectively make [go] that opening into something that can propel a movement, and take the high ground.  You take the high ground, and what&#8217;s been going on in America now was over.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> Got about two minutes left.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> Hi.  I&#8217;m a member of a Republican women&#8217;s committee club in Northern Virginia.  And you talked about Cuccinelli.  And you said Cuccinelli only spent so much.  The Republican National Committee gave a pittance to Cuccinelli compared to McDonnell in the last governor&#8217;s campaign.  I&#8217;m not a Gloria Steinem.  But the women voted big time for the governor in Virginia.</p>
<p>Another thing &#8212; I guess my big question here, though, is &#8212; when is the Republican committee, the Republicans &#8212; when are all the Republicans going to get over this fear of the Tea Party?  It seemed to me &#8211;</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>&#8211; that because the Tea Party supported Cuccinelli, the Republicans didn&#8217;t want to support Cuccinelli.</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> Yeah, I mean &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> So if you don&#8217;t support the Tea Party, I think the Republicans do not have a future.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> Yeah, the short answer is never.  The Republican establishment is not going to welcome the Tea Party with open arms.  If the Tea Party wants to move the party in a different direction, they&#8217;re going to have to do exactly what the Goldwater and Reagan conservatives did in the &#8217;60s and &#8217;70s.  They&#8217;re going to have to do exactly what the social conservatives did in the &#8217;80s and &#8217;90s.  They&#8217;re going to have to move into this party at the precinct level, and they&#8217;re going to have to take it over and grab the helm, and redirect it.</p>
<p>Nobody who has the power is going to give it to you.  You&#8217;re going to have to take it away from them.  And the way you take it away from them is by overwhelming them at the grass roots.</p>
<p>And I speak as somebody who came up with both of those predecessors.  I was both a Reagan conservative and then, when I was privileged to head the Christian Coalition, I helped facilitate the influx of the social conservatives into the party.</p>
<p>Do you think we were welcomed with open arms?  Do you think when we went out and won primaries that hedge fund guys in New York just did the bum&#8217;s rush to write us a max check?  No.  They couldn&#8217;t stand us.  They saw us the same way they see the Tea Party.  They see it as a liability, when it is an asset.  They see it as a drag on the party, when it is jet fuel.</p>
<p>And so what you have to do is you have to go in there, and you have to &#8211;</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>&#8211; you have to dominate at the grass roots.</p>
<p>Now, I&#8217;ll say something else.  And I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;m &#8212; I think I&#8217;m preaching to the choir here on this, but it&#8217;s an important point.  If you are a conservative Tea Party candidate, you have to demonstrate the capacity, either through conventional means or online, that you can raise the money to run a competitive campaign.</p>
<p>And let me tell you something &#8212; I laid across the barbed wire for Ken Cuccinelli.  My organization spent over a quarter of a million dollars in voter mail, in phone calls, in door-knocking.  We had regional offices in Richmond, in Northern Virginia, in Hampton Roads and in the Shenandoah Valley.  And we never pulled back.  Even when he was down by 15 in some polls.</p>
<p>But I will tell you, he got outspent by Terry McAuliffe by $15 million.  Terry raised $35 million; he raised $20 million.  In 2009, Bob McDonnell raised $25 million to Creigh Deeds&#8217;s $16 million.  Bob McDonnell held most of the same positions that Ken Cuccinelli did.  But he raised more money than his opponent.</p>
<p>And if you&#8217;re going to win this nomination &#8212; I don&#8217;t care if you&#8217;re Rubio, Paul, Ted Cruz; or you&#8217;re Sharon Engle or you&#8217;re Ken Cuccinelli &#8212; if you&#8217;re going to be the general election nominee &#8212; and I&#8217;m speaking among family here &#8212; you can&#8217;t go rattling a tin cup at 310 First Street.  You can&#8217;t go to the RNC and ask them to bail you out, when you&#8217;re being outspent by $15 million.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m not defending what the RNC did.  Of course they should&#8217;ve put in more money.  But they put in three times more money for Cuccinelli than the DNC did for Terry.  You know why?  Because Terry McAuliffe wasn&#8217;t waiting for the cavalry.  Terry McAuliffe said &#8212; I&#8217;m going to raise the money, I&#8217;m going to beat this guy like a drum.  And we need candidates with that eye of the tiger.  Not somebody who&#8217;s going to the national party and saying &#8212; I&#8217;m being outspent; please bail me out.</p>
<p>I hope I&#8217;m not offending anybody.  I&#8217;m just &#8212; that&#8217;s how you have to win.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> [And it's a rally there.]</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> I just want to add to Ralph&#8217;s point one thing, which is &#8212; do you think the establishment &#8212; neither establish &#8212; the political class in Washington &#8212; whether it&#8217;s the Tea Party, any other kind of movement, is an enemy threatening their power and privilege.  They will fight to the death.  They don&#8217;t really care if the country goes down, as long as they hold on.  So don&#8217;t understand &#8212; they&#8217;re never going to come around &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Ralph Reed:</strong> Right.</p>
<p><strong>Pat Caddell:</strong> &#8212; to all of this stuff, and to what I was talking about this morning.  They are the people that have to go.  They have to go.  Because basically, they&#8217;re never going to accept things.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> Let&#8217;s get a round of applause for our panel.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
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		<title>Don’t Write Off the White Vote</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/dont-write-off-the-white-vote/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dont-write-off-the-white-vote</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/dont-write-off-the-white-vote/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 29 May 2013 04:18:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Diversity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rand Paul]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Voters]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[White]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=190426</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why trading the white vote for amnesty is a bad idea.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/young-voters-poll-0614-art.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-190464" alt="young-voters-poll-0614-art" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/young-voters-poll-0614-art.jpg" width="256" height="182" /></a>Getting an early start on primary season, Rand Paul stopped by New Hampshire and, <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/newswidget/rand-paul-diversity-IRS/2013/05/21/id/505631?promo_code=F470-1&amp;utm_source=Fox_Politics&amp;utm_medium=nmwidget&amp;utm_campaign=widgetphase2">according to an article</a>, &#8220;urged New Hampshire Republicans to become more diversified.&#8221;</p>
<p>New Hampshire is 94.6% white, 2.9% Latino and 1.3% Black. I don&#8217;t know the exact diversity statistics for New Hampshire Republicans, but if they get a half-black and half-Latino guy in a wheelchair to run for something, they will have covered all the statistical bases.</p>
<p>&#8220;We need to grow bigger,&#8221; Rand Paul said. &#8220;If you want to be the party of white people, we&#8217;re winning all the white votes. We&#8217;re a diverse nation. We&#8217;re going to win when we look like America.&#8221;</p>
<p>Looking like America is common advice these days. What does America look like? For now it still looks more like New Hampshire than like California. And despite that, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2012/11/09/new-hampshires-democratic-wave-explained/">Democrats scored some big wins in New Hampshire</a> in the last election.</p>
<p>Obama won New Hampshire 52 to 46 and it probably wasn&#8217;t the black vote that put him over the top. He picked up over 100,000 votes in Hillsborough County, which is 90 percent white. Clearly Republicans aren&#8217;t winning all the white votes in New Hampshire. Or in Kentucky.</p>
<p>Rand Paul&#8217;s Kentucky looks a lot like New Hampshire. It&#8217;s 88.9% white. In his 2010 Senate election, Paul won 59% of the white vote and <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/election2010/exit.shtml?state=KY&amp;jurisdiction=0&amp;race=S">his opponent won 86%</a> of the black vote. Two years later, <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/elections/2012-exit-poll/US/President">Romney won 59% of the white vote</a> and his opponent won 93% of the black vote. Both men scored the exact same percentage of the white vote.</p>
<p>Some might try to find a silver lining in that Rand Paul won 13 percent of the black vote, but he wasn&#8217;t running against a black candidate. In 2004, <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/5297164/">Bush won 12 percent</a> of the Kentucky black vote. Nearly the same amount as Rand Paul. More importantly, he won 64 percent of the white vote and 58 percent of the female vote to Rand Paul&#8217;s 51 percent. The female vote is far more important than picking up minority votes in New Hampshire or Kentucky.</p>
<p>Romney did not lose because he lost the Latino vote. That&#8217;s a myth which has been discredited, but is still being used to push for an illegal alien amnesty. Instead of trying to be diverse for the sake of diversity, the GOP might try doing what the other side did, increasing the turnout for its base by actually appealing to them.</p>
<p>The Republican National Convention in 2012 was a study in diversity. It was possibly even more diverse than the Democratic National Convention. It also didn&#8217;t work.</p>
<p>Diversity is familiar enough to be met with casual contempt. Every company trots out stock photos overflowing with stock minorities so that they can look like America or some part of America. It impresses absolutely no one. &#8220;Looking like America&#8221; is slang for racial tokenism which is both patronizing and insulting.</p>
<p>Common skin color alone does not win elections. If it did, the Republican Party could just push out countless white Democrats in precarious districts by running black candidates against them. The idea that skin color alone is representation is still the law and its emotional resonance is sometimes undeniable, but emotional identification is also based on more than just race. And representation cannot be reduced to racial diversity as a winning strategy.</p>
<p>The Republican Party has two Latino senators and one Black senator. That tops the Democratic Party in the &#8220;Looking like California&#8221; metrics but doesn&#8217;t move the political numbers forward.</p>
<p>“We need to have black people, brown people, white people, we need to have people with tattoos, without tattoos, with long hair, with short hair, with beards, without beards,” Rand Paul  said. “We need to look more like America. We need to appeal to the working class; we need to appeal to all segments of the country.”</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s assume that the Republican Party gets people with hair of all sizes, what then? Talking about appealing to the working class is nice, but Rand Paul lost the under $30,000 vote. He tied for the $30,000 to $49,000 vote. He<a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/election2010/exit.shtml?state=KY&amp;jurisdiction=0&amp;race=S"> only broke out with</a> the above $50,000 voters. That was the same thing that happened to Romney. And unlike Romney, race couldn&#8217;t be blamed for those results. Not when <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/5297164/">Bush decisively won those same voters</a> in Kentucky in 2004.</p>
<p>In 2004, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html">Bush tied Kerry</a> among the $30,000 to $49,000 voters. In 2012, Romney lost them by 8 percent. <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/elections/2008-exit-poll">McCain had lost them</a> by 7 percent in 2008. Grafton County, the site of Obama&#8217;s biggest margin of victory in New Hampshire, is 95% white and its median household income is $41,962. That&#8217;s well below the median household income in the country, but that only hovers a little above $50,000.</p>
<p>In 2000, Bush nearly tied Kerry in Grafton County. In 2008, Obama won it by 63 percent. Instead of looking to see why Republicans can&#8217;t win the Latino vote, it might be a good idea to see why Republicans have begun losing Grafton County; which looks a whole lot like America.</p>
<p>Amnesty for illegal aliens will hit low-income voters hardest. It will punish the very voters that Republicans need in order to win and build up demographics of voters who are not going to vote Republican anyway.</p>
<p>Republicans would be foolish to give up on minority voters, but even more foolish to give up on low-income white voters. <a href="http://www.people-press.org/2011/07/22/gop-makes-big-gains-among-white-voters/">In 2011, Republicans</a> had pulled ahead among $30,000 voters, going from 37 to 47 percent since the 2008 election. The real question worth asking about the 2012 election is what happened to those numbers?</p>
<p>The Republican Party does not need to &#8220;look like America.&#8221; It needs to actually look at America. And if it can do that, if it can find common ground with low-income voters, then it will find that it has increased its share among minority voters as well. It worked for Reagan. It might just work in 2016.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Where’s the Outrage Over Obama&#8217;s Lies?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/wheres-the-outrage-over-obamas-lies/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=wheres-the-outrage-over-obamas-lies</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/wheres-the-outrage-over-obamas-lies/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Mar 2013 04:44:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benghazi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Media]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[oil production]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Voters]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=181386</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Something is missing when the media and voters shrug away a president's deception -- what is it?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/wheres-the-outrage-over-obamas-lies/2013-02-19t230140z_1_cbre91i1ryz00_rtroptp_2_industry-us-usa-obama-media/" rel="attachment wp-att-181447"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-181447" title="2013-02-19T230140Z_1_CBRE91I1RYZ00_RTROPTP_2_INDUSTRY-US-USA-OBAMA-MEDIA" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/2013-02-19T230140Z_1_CBRE91I1RYZ00_RTROPTP_2_INDUSTRY-US-USA-OBAMA-MEDIA.jpg" alt="" width="261" height="214" /></a>Last month President Obama said in a speech, “I’m proud of the fact that under my administration oil production is higher than it has been in a decade or more.” Last year in the second presidential debate, Obama made the same claim, and when Mitt Romney pointed out the facts that debunked it, Obama sniffed, “What you&#8217;re saying is just not true. It&#8217;s not true.” As the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323826704578354683011933850.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop">reports</a>, the Congressional Research Service now confirms that Obama cleverly lied both times. But the real question is, do any of those Obama voters care? And if not, why not?</p>
<p>They can’t say Obama didn’t lie. The facts on oil production show that Obama shamelessly tried to take credit for the 1.1 million barrels per day increase since 2007 that happened in spite of, not because of, his policies. According to the CRS, “All of the increased [oil] production from 2007 to 2012 took place on non-federal lands.” On federal land, production fell more than 23% between 2010 and 2012. The federal share of oil production fell from 31% in fiscal 2008 to 26% in fiscal 2012. Similarly, the feds’ share of natural gas production went from 27.8% in 2007 to 15.5% today. Nor is it any mystery why federal oil production has fallen. Obama’s drilling moratorium after the BP Deepwater Horizon spill, and his snail’s-pace process for awarding permits on federal land––process time increased 41% from 2006 to 2011––has held back oil production to gratify the sensibilities of deep-pocketed environmental romantics like the Sierra Club.</p>
<p>As Bob Dole wondered during the 1996 presidential race, “Where’s the outrage?” Where are all those fearless investigative reporters, the self-styled watchdogs of the public weal, who claim to hold politicians accountable when they lie and mislead on the scale this president has? But taking credit for increased oil production is small beer compared to the still festering scandal surrounding the administration’s response to the murder of 4 Americans, including an ambassador, in Benghazi last summer. The legacy media have shown little interest in ferreting out why the President, his ambassador to the U.N., his Secretary of State, and various flunkeys and flacks made multiple public claims that the murders resulted from a spontaneous demonstration sparked by an obscure Internet video.</p>
<p>Indeed, this patent attempt to spin bad news should have been chum to those reporters constantly circling politicians and sniffing out scandal. Nor did you need Sherlock Holmes to figure out the motive. Obama has staked his foreign policy bona fides on the claim that “al Qaeda’s on its heels” and  “al Qaeda is on the run,” that the death of Bin Laden and continuing droning of al Qaeda operatives had contained that terrorist threat, and that the foreign policy of “leading from behind” in Libya and promoting Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt would serve America’s interests and security without the interventionist excesses of the Bush administration and its wrong-headed wars. Confronting the truth about Benghazi would have exposed Obama’s foreign policy blunders and the truth he wanted to hide: al Qaeda is active and growing, and overthrowing Gaddafi released tons of advanced weapons into the hands of terrorists while leaving behind a failed state.</p>
<p>The same media that turned a shabby campaign scandal like Watergate, a type of hardball politics unexceptional in American history, into an existential threat to our freedom and democracy, has been AWOL on Benghazi. Where’s Bob Woodward now? He’s too busy recycling anonymous gossip and squabbling with White House factotums who find his tone objectionable. Meanwhile the death of our ambassador, the dangerous failures of the president’s foreign policy, and the patent lies told to cover-up these failures are all ignored.</p>
<p>So much for the media, whose partisanship is so persistent and obvious that it has become a dog-bites-man story. So we know why they are ignoring the scandals and lies and other sins of the Obama administration that, under a Republican, they would have burned through the whole Brazilian rainforest to report. As Jennifer Rubin <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2013/01/01/the-senates-benghazi-report/">wrote</a> in January, “The media, in failing to doggedly seek answers, share in this shameful episode and have contributed to the complete absence of transparency and accountability. Nothing but blatant bias can explain that.” But where is the outrage of the American voter? Why didn’t some of the 5 million voters who put Obama over the top last November feel outraged enough by the Benghazi debacle and cover-up to question their support?</p>
<p>This is the key question for those plotting a Republican comeback. Are there too many “uninformed voters” who are ignorant of the facts damning the Obama administration? Then how do we inform them? Given how easily information is available to those who want it in an age of 24/7 cable news and the Internet, it’s hard to imagine what new messaging technique or device will get people to pay attention who clearly don’t want to. Scarier still is the prospect that people know and don’t care. They see the administration peddle half-truths and lies to cover-up a deadly attack on our fellow citizens caused by the president’s incompetence, and simply don’t care. The death of Christopher Stevens to them is not an affront on the dignity and honor of the United States, one to be punished. It is just another statistic, like a highway death, one of those sad things that are the cost of doing business. Poking around in the cause of it is unseemly, as Hillary Clinton said when she yelled at the Senate hearing, “Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?”</p>
<p>That last question, by the way, itself should have generated a firestorm of outrage and demands for her resignation. Whether the Secretary of State doesn’t indeed know “what difference” it makes, or does know and was trying to evade inconvenient truths by resorting to sentimental bluster, she should have been fired. On the contrary, the lapdog press lauded her “fiery moment,” as ABC put it, and her <a href="http://www.quinnipiac.edu/institutes-centers/polling-institute/national/release-detail/?ReleaseID=1849">approval numbers</a> reached 61% <em>after</em> her outburst before the Senate, making her the most popular politician in the country.</p>
<p>Clearly, something is missing in a critical mass of American voters when assaults on our interests and security abroad arouse no righteous anger either at the perpetrators or the politicians who caused the attacks and then tried to misdirect the citizens about the real causes for partisan electoral advantage. Something is missing when voters shrug away patent lies about oil production, and ignore policies that are hampering an industry that can create jobs and radically change our foreign policy calculus by liberating our energy needs from thug regimes who use our dollars to attack our interests. So what’s missing?</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Messengers, Messages, and Voters, Part 2</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/messengers-messages-and-voters-part-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=messengers-messages-and-voters-part-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Jan 2013 04:18:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[message]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[messengers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Voters]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=175096</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Sadly, voters will learn their lesson only after being hit hard by the folly of progressive policies. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/messengers-messages-and-voters-part-2/vt-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-175218"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-175218" title="vt" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/vt1.jpg" alt="" width="276" height="183" /></a>At their retreat in Williamsburg a few weeks ago House Republicans continued the post-mortem of November’s debacle. A big topic was how to better market the Republican brand. A Domino’s Pizza executive gave “a well-received talk about selling a damaged brand to a modern audience,” as <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/338042/ten-takeaways-gop-retreat-robert-costa?pg=1">NRO</a> reported. But professional marketers start by understanding their target audience. Music companies don’t spend a lot of money trying to sell rap music to senior citizens, and denture cream manufacturers pretty much ignore the 18-35 demographic. When it comes to politics, we forget this critical dimension of marketing. We just assume that a critical mass of voters, including the millions who voted for the other guy, want to buy our product.</p>
<p>Party activists and operatives, of course, publicly can’t address this issue. As Romney’s leaked “47%” comment shows, it doesn’t do to insult the people you want to buy your goods. But that pragmatic consideration doesn’t change the reality that the interests of voters that frequently determine how they vote will not necessarily be trumped by more effectively or skillfully presenting facts and principles.</p>
<p>Nor is it exceptional to observe that citizens vote their interests. Starting with the earliest critics of democracy, the tendency of voters to put their private interests over the long-term well being of the state was a consistent criticism. Around 425 B.C., the “Old Oligarch” made this fact the basis of his attack on Athenian democracy: “It is my opinion that the people at Athens know which citizens are good and which bad, but that in spite of this knowledge they cultivate those who are complaisant and useful to themselves, even if bad; and they tend to hate the good. For they do not think that the good are naturally virtuous for the people’s benefit, but for their hurt.” In other words, it wasn’t a question of just not knowing who was good or bad, ignorance to be corrected through more knowledge. The point was that self-interest was more important than sorting out the noble and base.</p>
<p>Likewise Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War shows us the Athenian Assembly making decisions based on their own interests no matter how obvious the long-term damage to Athens. The famous recreation of the debate over invading Sicily––one of the worst military disasters in history––shows the Athenians enthusiastically voting for the expedition even after Nicias documents precisely the dangers that doomed it. Facts weren’t as important as the benefits various citizens thought they would acquire from the war. For other critics of Athens, state pay for public service and attending festivals was the best evidence that the people saw the state as a source of personal gain and advancement. Such indulgence of self-interest at the expense of the state, Socrates claimed, made the people “idle and cowardly, and encouraged them in the love of talk and money.” The citizen became, Aristophanes sneered, “as mercenary as the stonemason.”</p>
<p>We may dismiss such criticism as the complaints of disgruntled elitists, but the American Founders in the main agreed. They shared the ancient view of human nature as motivated by passion and self-interest, and similarly feared democracy as the form of government that gave the widest scope to those passions and interests. Thus the Founders crafted a mixed government in which democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy––the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Presidency––created, along with the judiciary, a balance of powers that would limit the pursuit of self-interest on the part of citizens by balancing “faction” (our “special interests”) against faction, so that no one group could dominate the government and weaken political liberty.</p>
<p>In Federalist No. 10, James Madison wrote that this “factious spirit” is the consequence of the human propensity to form “factions”–– “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, <em>who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.</em>” Moreover, Madison points out, faction is an inevitable expression of human nature and political freedom itself, and so cannot be eliminated without “destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence,” a cure “worse than the disease.” The other cure would be to give all citizens “the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.” But this is impossible given human nature, for “As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. <em>As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves</em>.”</p>
<p>Madison concludes, “The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man . . . A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, <em>and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good</em>.” The solution of the Founders is the balance of power defining our government: “The balance of a well-ordered government,” John Adams wrote, “will alone be able to prevent that emulation [rivalry for power] from degenerating into dangerous ambition, irregular rivalries, destructive factions, wasting seditions, and bloody civil war.”</p>
<p>Our problem today is that our government has evolved to something closer to ancient Athenian democracy than the Founders ever imagined. Universal suffrage and the popular election of Senators have subjected politicians more directly to the will and aims of the people. The expansion of the federal government’s power and reach through entitlements bestowed on citizens has given them a powerful self-interest that frequently determines their votes (see Nicholas Eberstadt’s <em>Wall Street Journal</em> <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323539804578259940213918254.html?KEYWORDS=nicholas+eberstadt">column</a> for a succinct description of just how extensive––and expensive–– entitlements have become). And modern communication technologies, particularly the internet and 24/7 cable news and commentary, the endless political campaign, and multiple daily polls have intensified the direct impact voters and “factions” can have on their representatives to make sure their interests are served. All these developments have made cogent the criticisms of Athenian democracy that so influenced the Founders of our political order.</p>
<p>So unless one believes that human nature has evolved beyond passion and self-interest so that today a critical mass of voters will consider principle and the good of the whole even at the cost of their own interests, we still face the same problem that troubled earlier critics of democracy. Of course, this doesn’t mean that conservatives should adopt the fatalistic attitude that there’s nothing to be done. By all means, identify talented leaders, and think about more effective ways to communicate. But let’s not pretend that it won’t take the folly of progressive policies hitting hard people’s material interests and political freedom––which will happen, without question, under Obama and the Democrats–– to make voters receptive to those messengers and messages.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>It&#8217;s the Message and Yes the Messengers &#8212; NOT the Voters</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/its-the-message-and-yes-the-messengers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=its-the-message-and-yes-the-messengers</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/its-the-message-and-yes-the-messengers/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 21 Jan 2013 20:02:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=174325</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Anyone remember a Republican attack ad from the 2012 campaign? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/its-the-message-and-yes-the-messengers/mitt_romney_/" rel="attachment wp-att-174327"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-174327" title="mitt_romney_" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/mitt_romney_-450x243.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="170" /></a>Bruce Thornton, a highly intelligent and eloquent writer is one hundred percent wrong <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/its-not-the-message-its-not-the-messenger-its-the-voter/">in attributing </a>the Republican election loss to the alleged fact that 47% of the country are now “takers” from government. If Thornton is right, how is it that Republicans were the minority party in 1960 and 1964, before Medicare and all the entitlements that followed the Great Society programs were in place? I say that 47% takers is an “alleged fact” because millions of veterans receive benefits that they made sacrifices for, and millions of older people receive medicare and social security assistance that they also paid for. Moreover, millions of Republican voters are among these so-called takers, and millions more have children who took government loans to get through college.</p>
<p>Asian Americans voted 70% for Obama. Because they are takers? These are entrepreneurial, traditional value, family oriented Americans. They have Republican values. They are welfare averse. Yet they voted for Obama because he persuaded them that he cared about minorities, and Republicans didn’t. That is they didn&#8217;t communicate to America&#8217;s minority populations that they cared for them. It&#8217;s always so easy to blame others for your own screw ups.</p>
<p>The 2012 campaign was all about message. Romney and the Republicans were tarred and feathered for imaginary crimes – wars against women (no free contraceptives), minorities and the middle class. The Democrats&#8217; message machine blistered their opponents day in day out. Anyone remember a Republican attack ad? Republicans didn’t lay a finger on Obama and the Democrats for <em>their</em> wars against women, minorities and the middle class. They hardly mentioned the suffering of these groups under Obama’s policies. They didn’t dare raise the issue of his betrayal of all our soldiers who gave their lives in Iraq to keep it from falling into the hands of Iran. They were silent over his criminal betrayal of our embassy in Benghazi, and the fact that he has aided and abetted the Muslim Brotherhood in its conquest of the Middle East. That he is supplying weapons to Al-Qaeda.</p>
<p>There is a famous poem by Bertolt Brecht called The Solution about the revolts against the Soviet occupation of East Germany. It’s a sad day when Frontpage and a gifted writer like Bruce Thornton embrace this solution:</p>
<p><a title="Die Lösung" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_L%C3%B6sung" target="_blank">The Solution</a></p>
<p>After the uprising of the 17th of June<br />
The Secretary of the Writers Union<br />
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee<br />
Stating that the people<br />
Had forfeited the confidence of the government<br />
And could win it back only<br />
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier<br />
In that case for the government<br />
To dissolve the people<br />
And elect another?</p>
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		<title>It’s Not the Message, It’s Not the Messenger, It’s the Voter</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/its-not-the-message-its-not-the-messenger-its-the-voter/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=its-not-the-message-its-not-the-messenger-its-the-voter</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 21 Jan 2013 04:53:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=174113</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The nightmares we face won't be addressed until a critical mass of citizens feels the pain. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/its-not-the-message-its-not-the-messenger-its-the-voter/vt/" rel="attachment wp-att-174117"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-174117" title="vt" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/vt-450x299.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="209" /></a>Nearly 3 months after the presidential election the Republicans are still trying to fix what they think went wrong. A popular culprit is the Republicans’ alleged failure to communicate forcefully or persuasively a message that would move voters presumably receptive to conservative policies and principles. Just in the last week <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/337755/myth-impure-gop-jonah-goldberg">Jonah Goldberg</a>, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323468604578245770087839486.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop">Daniel Henninger</a>, <a href="http://www.hughhewitt.com/transcripts.aspx?id=e6440b8d-089c-4435-a962-2462e256c42f">Ari Fleischer</a>, <a href="http://www.hughhewitt.com/transcripts.aspx?id=8be0a2d9-c65d-4be9-8801-51dbe79a49de">Ross Douthat</a>, and <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323468604578245450307332268.html?mod=opinion_newsreel">Karl Rove</a> have worked variations on this theme. Yet we should remember that any act of communication comprises not just a sender and a message, but also a receiver. We need to focus on the nature of America’s political “receivers,” the 65 million who voted for Obama in the November election, and the 93 million registered voters who didn’t vote.  If those voters are not receptive to the Republican message, it doesn’t matter much how brilliant the messenger or the packaging of the message.</p>
<p>And that “message” has been out there for years now and constantly repeated. Only the stupid or willfully inattentive haven’t heard that we face a financial abyss waiting at the end of our entitlement road, that entitlements need to be reformed, that we have an exploding debt and deficit crisis, that a “tax the rich” policy only produces chump-change for solving that problem, that Obama’s economic policies have bloated the federal government at the expense of jobs and growth, and that Obama himself is the most left-wing, duplicitous, partisan, and incompetent president in modern history. And conservatives have identified repeatedly the bad ideology and flawed assumptions that have generated the policies that created those problems. The fact is, many voters know full well this dismal catalogue of failure, and they either don’t care, or they believe the fatuous rationalizations, lies, excuses, and economic magical thinking offered by the Democrats. How else explain Obama’s 55% approval rating in the latest Time/CNN poll? Either way, repeating once again the facts demonstrating that failure and the flawed ideology that has created it, or more effectively repackaging the facts and arguments and having it delivered by an oratorical genius, is not going to cut much ice.</p>
<p>If you disagree, remember what happened to Paul Ryan last year. He identified the problem of entitlement-driven deficits and crafted a response that made a modest start at reform. But after several months of demonization by the Democrats that included an ad with a Ryan look-alike pushing an old lady in a wheelchair over a cliff, the only narrative with traction by election day was the lie that Republicans “want to end Medicare as we know it” and “shred the safety net” and keep the “rich” from “paying their fair share.” You could have resurrected Ronald Reagan and had him deliver the counter-message and the outcome would’ve been the same.</p>
<p>Or maybe you’re cheered by those exit polls that reported majorities of Americans “want government to do less,” and so voters are ready to support entitlement reform. But be more specific about <em>which</em> entitlements should be reduced and see what response you get. Someone on Medicare who will get $3 for every $1 put into the program––thus receiving taxpayer money––may be in favor of cutting back on food stamps or extended unemployment benefits, but don’t even think about reducing <em>his</em> subsidy. Remember those AARP ads with the snarling oldsters warning, “Keep your hands off my Medicare” because they “earned” those benefits? So too with the home mortgage deduction, or agriculture subsidies, or any number of mechanisms for transferring public money to citizens and businesses. The fact is, the entitlement mentality has insidiously spread even among people who think that the “government does too much.” As David Brooks summed up recently, “Many voters have decided they like spending a lot on themselves and pushing costs onto their children and grandchildren. They have decided they like borrowing up to $1 trillion a year for tax credits, disability payments, defense contracts and the rest. They have found that the original Keynesian rationale for these deficits provides a perfect cover for permanent deficit-living. They have made it clear that they will destroy any politician who tries to stop them from cost-shifting in this way.”</p>
<p>Dig deeper into the ideas behind the policies and you’ll find out why the Democrats’ narrative is so much more appealing to such voters than is that of the Republicans. The conservative message is predicated on beliefs about ordered liberty, self-reliance, equality of opportunity, individualism, limited government, entrepreneurship, and all those other virtues and principles that indeed have made the United States the wealthiest, freest, most open great power in all of history. But those virtues necessarily entail a tragic view of human life. Individual freedom requires as well personal responsibility and accountability for bad choices. Equality of opportunity is no guarantee of success. Talent, character, initiative, brains, and luck are not evenly distributed among people. Limiting government means individuals, families, churches, and communities must see to their own needs and wants and find some way to pay for them. Many businesses are going to fail, but that is part of capitalism’s “creative destruction” that has made free-market economies so successful. We can’t have every good we want without paying a price or making a trade-off or accepting some level of risk. The good of driving cars, for example, costs us about 35,000 fatalities a year in road accidents. In short, a flawed human nature, the law of unforeseen consequences, and the limits of human knowledge all mean that we have to accept an imperfect world in which life isn’t fair: there are no winners without losers, there’s no free lunch, and we can’t eat our cake and have it.</p>
<p>The progressive Democrats, in contrast to the timeless wisdom even an illiterate peasant once understood, endorse a therapeutic view of human life. People aren’t responsible for their choices, for an unjust political and economic environment conditions those choices. Success doesn’t result from individual hard work and brains as well as luck, but solely from the accidents of birth or access to social advantages unjustly denied to others. Equality means not equality of opportunity, but equality of result, the primary goal being the reduction of esteem-wounding income differences through the redistribution of wealth by government. Free citizens are not responsible for solving problems or managing their lives, but rather techno-elites possessing superior knowledge must be given the state’s coercive power to reshape and control social and economic institutions in order to reduce the destructive consequences of failures of character or of unjust social, political, and economic institutions. Risk and trade-offs are not a permanent cost of human aspirations and actions, but can be removed from human life. The result will be a much better world in which failure is rare, all goods can be had simultaneously at minimal costs, income equality is achieved, risk is eliminated, and everybody gets to be a winner. Contrary to those cranky “mean” conservatives, there <em>is</em> such a thing as a free lunch, and we <em>can</em> eat our cake and still have it.</p>
<p>Given that humans, as Alexander Hamilton said, “are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious,” we shouldn’t be surprised that the progressive promise to indulge the self-interests and selfish appetites of the citizenry is more attractive than conservative sermons about self-control and self-sacrifice. So what if history shows that every attempt to create the progressive utopia has ended in disaster and failure, so what if the math says the entitlement state ends in bankruptcy, so what if our national character is being insidiously corrupted by getting something we haven’t earned but think is a human right, so what if, as Tocqueville warned 170 years ago, empowering the state to achieve these utopian boons comes at the cost of our freedom and autonomy. We want our free stuff now, and somebody else can pay the cost, whether the “rich” or our grandchildren.</p>
<p>The great 19<sup>th</sup> century French economist Frédéric Bastiat once wrote:</p>
<blockquote><p>“When misguided public opinion honors what is despicable and despises what is honorable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is useful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns its back on progress and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Better messages and better messengers are not going to overcome human nature. The melancholy truth is that our debt, deficit, and entitlement problems will not be seriously addressed until a critical mass of citizens feels the pain of these self-interested, shortsighted, catastrophic policies.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>A Conservative Sellout Is Not the Solution</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/a-conservative-sellout-is-not-the-solution/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-conservative-sellout-is-not-the-solution</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 13 Nov 2012 04:50:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=164965</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The rush to centrism is a rush to political suicide for the Right. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/a-conservative-sellout-is-not-the-solution/1106-early-voting-obama-lead_full_600/" rel="attachment wp-att-164969"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-164969" title="1106-Early-Voting-obama-lead_full_600" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/1106-Early-Voting-obama-lead_full_600-450x329.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="230" /></a>Many of you reading this probably felt a kick in the gut when the election results came in. Filled with optimism by Republican pollsters predicting a landslide victory, the outcome came as an even bigger shock.</p>
<p>Losing is never fun or easy and can lead to a temporary state of shell shock in which bad decisions get made. Some in the Republican establishment are now operating in that state of shock and proposing to dismantle every conservative position in the hopes of appearing more moderate in the next election. That is a futile and destructive course of action.</p>
<p>The Republican Party ran two moderates, whose liberal credentials were acknowledged by the media, and lost two presidential elections. Neither Senator McCain nor Governor Romney would have been described as extreme until they ran for president. The same fate will meet any Republican candidate, no matter how moderate or centrist.</p>
<p>Running a candidate who signs off on tax hikes, amnesty for illegal aliens, gay marriage and abortion will not win an election against a Democrat who already stands for all those things. Abandoning fiscal and social conservatism will leave the Republican Party with nothing to offer to the public except its moderate willingness to abandon its principles for other principles that poll better.</p>
<p>To understand why a sellout is not the solution, all we have to do is compare how the Democrats and the Republicans approached the 2012 elections.</p>
<p>The Democrats turned to their base, offering special favors to narrow constituencies, from a unilateral DREAM Act to gay marriage to mandatory abortion coverage. These positions were all extreme and some of them were unpopular, but they brought out the affected groups in large numbers.</p>
<p>The Republican Party neglected its base and rushed to the center in pursuit of the voters that it didn’t have. Romney made an effective case for being the one to fix the economy, but only in generalities, while Obama successfully made the case to groups within his base that he was going to take care of their special interests. While Romney won the macro argument, Obama took the micro and in a low turnout election used it to win.</p>
<p>In response, the Republican establishment seeks to run even further to the center, even though it’s a center defined wholly by the ascendancy of the left, which pulls the center to the left every time it asserts new extremist positions. The only outcome of this strategy is to give the left more uncontested victories while encouraging voters who might have come out for the Republican Party to stay home once again.</p>
<p>The Republican Party has two choices. It can chase after the center, with amnesty and tax cuts in hand, or it can move to the right in order to redefine where the center is. The second way is the path that Reagan and Gingrich took. The first way is what cost Republicans a second election against Obama.</p>
<p>Let’s strip away ideology for a moment and ask the simple question that every voter going to the polls asked. That question was not, as the pollsters put it, “Who do I trust more on the economy?” or “Who showed more leadership based on last night’s debate?” but “Who is going to look out for my economic interests?”</p>
<p>Minority voters voted with their food stamps and race cards. They voted for affirmative action and government jobs. These were votes based on economic interest. Considering the catastrophic toll of the Obama years on the African-American income, it was a shortsighted vote, but Madoff’s clients also thought that they were acting in their own economic interest. And something for nothing looks even more tempting in a bad economy.</p>
<p>But they weren’t the only ones voting with their wallets. The Julia vote came out for free birth control. The gay vote was there for partner benefits. And there were plenty of non-minorities also looking to protect their government benefits, their union jobs and the other touchstones of their economic life. They came out for Obama, not because they had any remaining enthusiasm for him, but because his extremist campaign had given him credibility as a man who would defend his base. A man who would stand up for them.</p>
<p>The Romney campaign was unable to bring out as large a base that was as deeply committed to its own besieged economic interests. Small business owners flocked to Romney and his rallies revealed a depth of passion for free enterprise, but there just weren’t enough people who felt the same way. There weren’t enough workers who felt that Romney would bring back manufacturing, not enough small business owners who really believed that the end of the red tape parade had come and not enough of the unemployed who thought that it was in their economic best interest to vote for Romney. There just weren’t enough voters with that same sense of personal investment in Romney’s agenda that there were in Obama’s agenda.</p>
<p>It’s easy to dismiss them as fools, but that cathartic reaction does not accomplish anything. As any good businessman knows, to rack up sales, you need more than just a good product, you also need good marketing. Cursing the customer because the sales aren’t there accomplishes nothing and is defeatist. The only way to move a product is to convince customers that they need this product and that they can’t live without it.</p>
<p>This is where conservatives are now. We have a great product and lousy marketing. And we have three choices.</p>
<p>We can make our product more like the one sold by our competitors in the hopes of winning over their customers, even though it makes our product indistinguishable from theirs.</p>
<p>We can increase our customer loyalty program and our sales to the people who already buy our product.</p>
<p>Or we can try to move into territories that don’t buy what either side is selling because they don’t see how it serves their economic interests.</p>
<p>Those last two options are not mutually exclusive. However pursuing the first option cuts us off from the second option and makes the third option trickier because moderation is not a selling point to people who already believe that both parties are the same bunch of crooks with no principles. All it does is confirm their thesis.</p>
<p>A political party has to stand for something besides winning elections. There has to be a reason for people to come out and support it and being non-threatening and unprincipled is not a reason; it is an election strategy thought up by consultants who understand chess better than they understand people.</p>
<p>In a tough economic climate, victories go to the candidate that can make a compelling case for the economic interests of the individual, rather than the national economic interest. That is a hard fact of human nature, which is survival oriented, and in this election Democrats understood it and Republicans did not.</p>
<p>The Republican Party does not have an image problem; it has a constituency problem. The GOP can either find a constituency and stand by it, or it can cheat on its constituency at every turn by running for the center. The Democrats won by standing by their constituency. Maybe it’s time that the Republican Party considered following their example.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>What Do Young People Believe?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/howard-hyde/what-do-young-people-believe/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-do-young-people-believe</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 13 Nov 2012 04:04:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Hyde]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=164929</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Is there hope for the next generation? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/howard-hyde/what-do-young-people-believe/soboroff9e-1-web/" rel="attachment wp-att-164930"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-164930" title="soboroff9e-1-web" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/soboroff9e-1-web-450x350.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="245" /></a>One of the most remarkable impressions  of election night was seeing, in places like Times Square and the Obama campaign stadium in Chicago, crowds of young people, cheering, laughing, dancing, crying with joy over the result. Since these are the people who will have to live with the consequences of this election the longest, it is worth asking: what is it exactly that they are cheering? What do they believe?</p>
<p>They must believe that their future is bright, that it has been saved from the ravages of the evil, uncaring, racist and homophobic Republicans with that rich, white vulture of the weird cult at the top of the ticket.  Their free education, free student &#8220;loans,&#8221; and free health care including contraception and abortion services are now secure. The fact that so many college graduates can&#8217;t find work today is George Bush&#8217;s fault, and that circumstance will soon be resolved by the wise policies of the revitalized Obama administration.</p>
<p>What do they believe about Republicans? They must believe that the 48% of Americans &#8212; half the country &#8212; hate women, gays and minorities, would force all women to have invasive ultrasounds, gays to be burned next to witches, and blacks sent to the back of the bus if not back to the cotton fields as chattel slaves. They must believe that Paul Ryan wishes to commit a Texas (or is it Wisconsin?) chainsaw massacre upon the entitlement programs that they are counting on and that those programs will now be solvent with no sacrifice required on their part.</p>
<p>What do they believe about America&#8217;s role in the world? They must believe that a foreign policy of apologizing for American Imperialism, bowing to Saudi kings, supplicating for a &#8220;reset&#8221; of relations with Russia, leading in reverse gear in Benghazi and throwing Israel under the bus, is completely adequate to the challenges of Iran&#8217;s nuclear ambitions, China&#8217;s expanding Pacific navy, the global Jihad network and the rest of geopolitics for the next four if not forty years, as long as we don&#8217;t have a warmongering president with an itchy trigger finger looking for another Iraq to invade unnecessarily. They must believe that it is a good thing for Obama to have greater &#8220;flexibility&#8221; with Russia, Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood in his second term. And they have to believe that the United Nations is a greater force for good in the world than America, and that America&#8217;s exceptionalism should be subordinated to the international &#8220;community.&#8221;</p>
<p>What do they believe about the economic issues? What little economics they have been spoon-fed in our schools and universities must be of the pseudo-Keynesian variety, whereby all good things come from the government and nothing good comes from greedy capitalist one-percenters. The fact that the federal government consumes a higher percentage of GDP today than at any time since World War II is not seen as a problem, because government tax revenue and spending is what brings about prosperity. They must believe that it was the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that bankrupted the nation; that fat-cat pure-capitalist bankers caused the financial crisis by redlining minority communities; that increased social spending such as on Obamacare has a positive multiplier effect on the economy. They must believe that entitlements and unfunded defined-benefit pension liabilities for unionized government employees are sacrosanct contracts that must be honored above any rights accorded to private-sector taxpayers yet to be born; that the federal budget deficit and the national debt are abstractions, old tin cans that may be kicked down the dirt road. They have to believe that there are fifty million people in America without access to health care who will now get it free of charge with no impact on the already-insured, on unemployment, on public finances or any other sector of the economy; that high-earning individuals and successful small businesses pay little or no taxes; that businessmen get fat in their sleep. They must believe that corporations are chauvanistic to the point of utter stupidity, preferring to hire and pay men 30% more for the same work that women willing to work for 30% less are perfectly capable in every way of doing, in spite of being driven by greed and greed alone. Any budget shortfalls can always be made up by raising taxes just one more time on the rich; after all, the 1 percent of income earners that now pays 40 percent of the taxes can always afford to pay a little more, with no harm to economic growth or unemployment.</p>
<p>It is difficult to tell what they believe about socialism, communism and capitalism, because it is doubtful they have any real understanding of the significance of those words, what are the histories of the nations that have attempted to implement them, and of the peoples who have lived under them. If they possess any understanding at all of what socialism is, they will deny that they are socialists while agreeing with at least 90% of the principles that animate European political parties that have no qualms about using the word in their names; and they will zealously strive to implement the same policies here under the labels of Hope, Change, Fairness, Justice and Forward.</p>
<p>Or perhaps they are not terribly concerned with any of these things, because espousing a purely self-interested point of view they have the expectation of being on the inside, of having government careers and/or belonging to unions whose power will insulate them from any crises; that their salaries, job security and pensions will be protected from any general economic conditions as long as they can hold off attacks by barbarians like Scott Walker and Chris Christie. They do not blame the United Auto Workers for the economic devastation of Detroit and the industrial Midwest, but celebrate its clout in the auto bailout. They do not blame collective bargaining on the part of employees whose salaries are paid by taxpayers for the bankruptcy of Michigan, New Jersey, California and cities across the fruited plain. Or they don&#8217;t care, because the point is not do what&#8217;s right but to get what one can, to work the system for one&#8217;s own and one&#8217;s (preferably protected) group&#8217;s benefit.</p>
<p>These cheering, sunny-faced young people will be left to deal with the real-world consequences of these beliefs and policies on their own for thirty years after this author and his cohort are gone.  May God help them.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Democrats Furious with Cuban-American Voters</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/humberto-fontova/democrats-furious-with-cuban-american-voters/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=democrats-furious-with-cuban-american-voters</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 05 Nov 2012 04:31:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Hispanics who don't fit the anti-American agenda. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/humberto-fontova/democrats-furious-with-cuban-american-voters/orlandovotersignpalmtree-e1348172451506/" rel="attachment wp-att-163924"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-163924" title="orlandovotersignpalmtree-e1348172451506" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/orlandovotersignpalmtree-e1348172451506.gif" alt="" width="315" height="226" /></a>As we go to press, polls are showing America’s largest swing state in a dead head between Romney and Obama. Florida has 29 electoral votes and the third largest “Hispanic” population in America. Normally this means a cakewalk for any Democrat.</p>
<p>But whoops! Turns out that about a third of these Florida Hispanics (Cuban-Americans) are <em>actually</em> Hispanic—as in Americans whose ancestors hail almost exclusively from Europe’s Iberian Peninsula known as &#8220;Hispania&#8221; by the Romans. So, as a broken clock is right twice a day, the term “Hispanic” as used by the mainstream media, can actually be correct about 1/1000 of the time (i.e. when it refers to Cuban-Americans).</p>
<p>A poll last week of voters in Florida’s Miami-Dade county by the <em>Miami Herald</em> found the following breakdown:</p>
<p>Obama     Romney    Undecided</p>
<p>White:       64%             30%             6%</p>
<p>Black:        95%               2%              3%</p>
<p>Hispanic: 33%            62%              5%</p>
<p>&#8220;Hey, wait a minute!&#8221; liberals wail. “But every poll on the planet shows Obama with at least 70% of the U.S. Hispanic vote. So what’s going on here?”</p>
<p>Americans of Cuban heritage as usual, that’s what’s going on. The <em>Miami Herald</em> poll broke it down further, noting that Cuban-Americans support Obama 19%, Romney 76% and 5% are undecided.</p>
<p>In brief: no ethnic group in the U.S. comes even close to matching Cuban-Americans in their level of disdain for President Barack Obama in particular and the Democratic Party in general.</p>
<p>Their nonconformity is such that these insufferable Cuban-Americans drove an exasperated pollster to stop polling in areas they are known to infest, including in south Florida. “Eduardo Gamarra, a registered Democrat of Bolivian descent,” reports the <em>Miami Herald</em> about a pollster from Florida International University last week, “actually had to scale back the number of Cuban-American respondents in the poll, a process known as &#8216;weighting,&#8217;….Gamarra stopped polling in South Florida all together when he concluded the three-day survey last week in order to reach other Hispanics.”</p>
<p>“The difference [with polling] in Florida,” reads the <em>Miami Herald</em> story, “are Cuban voters. Without them, the FIU poll shows, Obama would handily win likely Florida Hispanic voters 65-32 percent. Not only are Cubans reliable Republican voters — they’re about 70 percent of Miami-Dade’s registered Republicans.”</p>
<p>“You keep hearing about a liberalization of the vote with younger, second-generation Cubans,” wailed Democratic pollster Gamarra. “But the polls are not showing it. Young Cubans are starting to look more Republican than their parents.”</p>
<p>Which is saying a lot.</p>
<p>These insufferable political mavericks have often goaded the Democratic/media axis into enraged sputterings against them. “Truly disgusting,” was how Bryant Gumbel characterized the Cuban-Americans demonstrating against shanghaiing Elian Gonzalez back to Castro. Five years ago Georgetown professor Norman Birnbaum, an advisor to three Democratic presidential candidates and today a columnist for The Daily Beast, labeled &#8220;Miami-Cubans” a “truly reprehensible” group. In 2008, one of America&#8217;s most influential newspapers, the <em>Washington Post</em>, ran a cartoon celebrating Cuban-Americans’ <a href="http://babalublog.com/2012/09/latinos-want-bias-probe-of-media-says-a-washington-examiner-headline/oliphant-on-cuba/">expulsion from the U.S. en masse.</a></p>
<p>Study the cartoon and imagine the fire (literal, perhaps) if instead of fedoras (which are rarely worn by Cuban-Americans) the group depicted in the cartoon had worn kuffiyehs, burkhas and chadors. What if the boat&#8217;s passengers had been labeled &#8220;nappy-headed&#8221; and were headed for Africa? Imagine the rallies in Los Angeles, Phoenix and Chicago if they&#8217;d worn sombreros.</p>
<p>Such cartoons are indeed imaginable with other ethnic groups &#8212; but only with Uncle Sam cast as the villain, wearing a white hood, a swastika, or an Ann Coulter mask. In dispatching Cuban-American Republicans, Uncle Sam smiles benevolently while handing the boat&#8217;s ethnic occupants off to a Stalinist gulag. “Ha-ha!”</p>
<p>The head explodes imagining the mainstream media reaction against such depictions against any other ethnic group.</p>
<p>&#8220;Cuba Policy isn&#8217;t made in Washington,&#8221; once griped Bill Press in a CNN column. &#8220;It&#8217;s made in Miami by former Batista supporters who think they can reverse history.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Bush&#8217;s defense of the [Cuban] embargo serves a family voting bloc and little else,&#8221; griped Kathleen Parker in a column years ago.</p>
<p>&#8220;A small number of powerful exiles in South Florida cow our politicians into keeping the crazy Cuban policy,&#8221; once griped media baron Al Neuharth in <em>USA Today</em>.</p>
<p>All this takes talent, amigos. Around our domino tables we snicker derisively at those bumbling Trilateralists. Between sips of our <em>mojitos</em> we guffaw and slap our thighs at the incompetence of the Bilderbergers and Rothschilds. We Cuban-Americans are the Illuminati to beat all Illuminati, the slickest of the slick. We watch &#8220;Godfather II&#8221; and snort scornfully. That was a chump operation Mikey Corleone pulled on Nevada Senator Geary with that dead prostitute. We would have had him in our pocket for half the trouble.</p>
<p>We watch &#8220;Mr. Smith Goes to Washington&#8221; and direct our boos and hisses at Jimmy Stewart. What a fuddy-duddy.</p>
<p>Cuban-Americans have managed to get Bill Buckley and Gore Vidal, Chris Dodd and Larry Craig, The Brookings Institution and the Cato Institute, the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> and <em>The Nation</em>, The U.S. Communist Party and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce &#8212; all on the same side of an issue. All of the above have come out publicly against the <a href="http://townhall.com/columnists/HumbertoFontova/2010/08/04/castro_prepares_for_a_us_bail-out">so-called</a> Cuban embargo. All blame it on the &#8220;politically powerful&#8221; and &#8220;well-heeled&#8221; Cuban-American lobby.</p>
<p>Thank you kindly.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Kingmakers and Heartbreakers: Ohio&#8217;s Crucial Independent Voters</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/matt-hurley/kingmakers-and-heartbreakers-ohios-crucial-independent-voters/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=kingmakers-and-heartbreakers-ohios-crucial-independent-voters</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Oct 2012 04:45:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matt Hurley]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Which way will they turn the presidential election? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/matt-hurley/kingmakers-and-heartbreakers-ohios-crucial-independent-voters/voters-poll-stationjpg-46198c90e8f8f0e3/" rel="attachment wp-att-163047"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-163047" title="voters-poll-stationjpg-46198c90e8f8f0e3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/voters-poll-stationjpg-46198c90e8f8f0e3.gif" alt="" width="315" height="224" /></a>Do not trust anyone who claims to know what is going to happen in Ohio on Election Day.  The sheer number of variables in play here are plenty, and even the most experienced political observers are having difficulty decoding the Buckeye State.</p>
<p>Polling the electorate in Ohio is tough, and many public polls over-sample Democrats enough to skew results beyond their stated margin of error percentages.  This is nothing new for Ohio, though, as typical polling of just about any race in Ohio will show whether the election is an issue race or an election of officials.</p>
<p>At the time of this writing, the RealClearPolitics average has Obama up by just over 2 points but that includes a number of polls that are Democrat-heavy.  Regardless, the RCP number is probably a good measure of where the race actually is in this state.</p>
<p>There are two polls that seem to have figured out how to get realistic numbers in Ohio.  Rasmussen Reports&#8217; most recent poll shows the race tied and has been within the margin of error for months.  The Ohio Poll by the University of Cincinnati is the other but they have not released a poll on this race since late August when they declared the race a toss-up.</p>
<p>There is, however, one piece of good news for the Romney campaign that seems to have been overlooked by most commentators covering the race in Ohio.  In all 19 of the public polls released since the first debate, Mitt Romney has gained and held the lead among Ohio’s independents.  Ohio’s independent voters have determined the winner in at least five recent major elections in the Buckeye State and are considered to be kingmakers or heartbreakers in any election here.</p>
<p>Polling only tells part of the story.  Republicans in Ohio tell of great strides being made on the ground and momentum appears to have shifted in their direction.  A recently released memo from the Romney campaign on the state of the race in Ohio highlighted a few items that illustrate that shift.</p>
<p>Ohio Republicans are outperforming their share of voter registration in absentee requests and early voting by over 8.5 points thus far.  They also claim to have closed the gap in early voting and absentee voting in the last two weeks as well by outperforming in Ohio’s largest counties.  This demonstrates that Republicans are impacting the momentum of the voting as Election Day approaches.</p>
<p>3.7 million voter contacts have been made by Republican volunteers on the phone and 1.8 million door knocks on the ground signify a vast improvement over 2008 totals.  Consider that Ohio’s Republicans have knocked on 21 times as many doors and made three times as many phone calls in Ohio compared to 2008.  They are expecting to knock on the two millionth door and make their sixth millionth voter contact since May.</p>
<p>One other factor that may have a significant impact this cycle is a holdover from the previous election.  Ohio’s labor unions came out in force against the Republicans&#8217; attempt to reform public sector pensions and flaunted their power in a crushing defeat of Issue 2, a statewide referendum on Senate Bill 5.  It appears, however, that the Obama campaign failed to encourage continuing that momentum, as the unions have largely been silent this time, perhaps in part because of the administrations ongoing War on Coal, which has heavily impacted the southeastern part of Ohio.</p>
<p>Romney’s debate performance and Obama’s mishandling of the Benghazi terrorist assassination of our ambassador are two things driving momentum in Ohio.  In a purely unscientific survey of Ohio voters on Facebook, jobs and the economy still rank as top issues of concern, but a few sleeper issues have emerged as well.</p>
<p>Few people would suspect that national security and foreign affairs weigh on Ohio voters, but it is real, and if the sentiment expressed in these discussions are widespread across Ohio, Obama’s performance as Commander-in-Chief has been a dismal disappointment and potentially fatal for his re-election hopes in Ohio.</p>
<p>Tea Party concerns were also well represented in my survey.  The unrestrained growth of government and government spending were common themes, as were concerns about the national debt and the diminishing value of the dollar.  There is a wide mistrust of government in general and of this administration in particular that is motivating Tea Party activists in Ohio to work hard to defeat President Obama at the polls.</p>
<p>The sleeper issue that might have the most impact, however, is energy.  Whether it is the price of gasoline or the Environmental Protection Agency meddling in coal and oil policy, a significant number of Ohio voters will be affected by this election; the aftermath of which will likely determine whether thousands of energy sector jobs materialize in Ohio or not.</p>
<p>Ohio voters are well aware of the consequences of their vote.  Historically, no Republican has ever captured the White House without winning Ohio and this is another election season where Ohioans will likely decide the race.  The winner of Ohio’s 18 electoral votes will be whichever side maximizes turnout on Election Day.  Republican counties to watch are Butler, Hamilton, and Warren, all in the southwestern part of the state.  Democratic counties to watch are Cuyahoga, Franklin, and Montgomery.  If turnout is higher than 2008 in the red counties and we see an increase in Republican turnout in the blue counties, then it will be a good night for Mitt Romney.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Post-Debate Media Cheerleading Won&#8217;t Fool Voters</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/ann-coulter/post-debate-media-cheerleading-wont-fool-voters/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=post-debate-media-cheerleading-wont-fool-voters</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Oct 2012 04:20:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[Michael Jones]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Romney]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Voters]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=148829</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A mildly alert Barack Obama impresses his fans, but not struggling Americans. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/ann-coulter/post-debate-media-cheerleading-wont-fool-voters/ap_obama_kb_121016_wg-620x348/" rel="attachment wp-att-148834"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-148834" title="ap_obama_kb_121016_wg-620x348" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/ap_obama_kb_121016_wg-620x348.gif" alt="" width="315" height="243" /></a>The best question at the second presidential debate came from Michael Jones, an African-American who said: &#8220;Mr. President, I voted for you in 2008. What have you done or accomplished to earn my vote in 2012? I&#8217;m not that optimistic, as I was in 2008. Most things I need for everyday living are very expensive.&#8221;</p>
<p>To which Obama said: &#8220;Are you my half-brother?&#8221;</p>
<p>Actually, all Obama could say was that he had ended the war in Iraq (while pointlessly escalating the war in Afghanistan) and that Osama bin Laden is dead (and so is our ambassador). Both of which must be a great comfort to Mr. Jones as he tries to pay his bills every month.</p>
<p>Jones was right: Since Obama has been president, everything you own &#8212; your home, pension, savings accounts, weekly paychecks &#8212; are all worth less.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, everything you need &#8212; gas, food, and anything else that requires fuel to be transported to you &#8212; costs more.</p>
<p>Obama can&#8217;t talk his way out of his record. As Romney said in response to the president&#8217;s allegation that he is gung-ho about drilling for oil to lower fuel prices: &#8220;But that&#8217;s not what you&#8217;ve done in the last four years. That&#8217;s the problem.&#8221;</p>
<p>Obama also suddenly announced: &#8220;I&#8217;m all for pipelines. I&#8217;m all for oil production.&#8221; But he vetoed the Keystone pipeline.</p>
<p>He explained that the price of gasoline was $1.80 when he took office because the economy was in the toilet. Apparently, prices have spiked to more than $4 a gallon because all Americans are back at work now and making big bucks!</p>
<p>Obama said the &#8220;most important thing we can do is to make sure that we are creating jobs in this country.&#8221;</p>
<p>So <em>now</em> he&#8217;s going to create jobs? Because, nearly four years into his presidency, 23 million Americans are out of work and more than half of recent college graduates can&#8217;t find a job.</p>
<p>He claimed to believe that we should reward &#8220;self-reliance,&#8221; &#8220;individual initiative&#8221; and &#8220;risk-takers.&#8221; And yet, a few months ago, he ridiculed these self-reliant risk-takers for thinking they were &#8220;just so smart,&#8221; sneering &#8220;if you&#8217;ve got a business, you didn&#8217;t build that. Somebody else made that happen.&#8221;</p>
<p>Obama said we have to be &#8220;serious about reducing the deficit,&#8221; calling it &#8220;a moral obligation to the next generation.&#8221; But he&#8217;s increased the deficit by $5 trillion &#8212; more in four years than President Bush did in eight.</p>
<p>He also said he supported cutting corporate taxes. But only in odd-numbered years that don&#8217;t start with &#8220;2.&#8221;</p>
<p>The media will lie and say Obama won the debate &#8212; he has stopped the bleeding, he&#8217;s drawing huge crowds, the momentum is back! But as Romney said in response to many of Obama&#8217;s promises Tuesday night, &#8220;I don&#8217;t think the American people believe that.&#8221;</p>
<p>The trend is set and Obama&#8217;s voters are moving away from him in droves. People can see that Obama has to go to college campuses, the David Letterman show and &#8220;The Daily Show&#8221; to get a friendly audience these days. Even Lindsay Lohan is for Romney.</p>
<p>The media&#8217;s campaigning for Obama isn&#8217;t fooling Americans; it&#8217;s just making Obama&#8217;s obtuseness worse. If you&#8217;re behind at halftime, you don&#8217;t go to the cheerleading squad to ask what you&#8217;re doing wrong.</p>
<p><em>Absolutely nothing! You&#8217;re perfect! Don&#8217;t change anything!</em></p>
<p>But we&#8217;re behind by 7 points &#8230;</p>
<p><em>You&#8217;re great! You&#8217;re the best team ever!</em></p>
<p>With Obama unable to compete in a fair fight, debate moderator Candy Crowley had to become Obama&#8217;s wingman, injecting herself into the debate by declaring Obama the winner on the question of whether he had called the Benghazi attack an act of terror the day after the attack. Only after the debate, when everyone had gone home, did Crowley admit that Romney was right on Libya.</p>
<p>(If Obama called the Benghazi attack an &#8220;act of terror&#8221; in his Rose Garden speech, then he also said the victims of that attack were buried in the &#8220;hallowed grounds of Arlington Cemetery&#8221; and that he had visited them at Walter Reed &#8212; other comments in that speech not specifically referring to the Benghazi attack.)</p>
<p>Crowley stopped Romney from talking about Fast and Furious on the grounds that it had <em>nothing</em> to do with guns. She didn&#8217;t take a single question on Obamacare &#8212; the universally loathed monstrosity that fueled the 2010 Republican landslide and continues to be a thorn in America&#8217;s side.</p>
<p>In the media room, journalists cheered Obama&#8217;s cheap shot about Romney being rich, according to The Washington Times. Say, who did the Democrats run for president right before Obama? That would be the richest man in the U.S. Senate, John Kerry. But liberals believe Kerry acquired his fortune more honestly than by building businesses and creating jobs. He married a rich woman.</p>
<p>For all the media cheerleading, millions of Americans still know they&#8217;re out of work. They know, as Michael Jones noted, that everything is more expensive, including even-handed moderators.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Hugo Chavez: ‘I Am Not a Socialist!’</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/david-paulin/hugo-chavez-%e2%80%98i-am-not-a-socialist%e2%80%99/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hugo-chavez-%25e2%2580%2598i-am-not-a-socialist%25e2%2580%2599</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Oct 2012 04:12:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Paulin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[venezuala]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Voters]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=146899</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Deceit and bullying on a political campaign.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/hugo.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-146997" title="hugo" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/hugo.jpg" alt="" width="374" height="290" /></a></p>
<p>Yes, Hugo Chavez really said it: “I am not a socialist!” Not recently, to be sure, but 14 years ago when Chavez – as a cashiered Army paratrooper who&#8217;d led a failed military coup in February 1992 &#8212; was making a run for Venezuela’s presidency.</p>
<p>“I am not a socialist!” he said during a television interview, wearing a suite and speaking in reasonable tones. This was when he was trying hard to convince voters – especially middle-class and well-off Venezuelans who were leery of him &#8212; that he&#8217;d definitely cast aside the bullet for the ballot. Chavez, at the time, claimed he was an idealistic moderate who would pursue a “Third Way” between capitalism and socialism. He pledged to reverse wide-spread poverty, clean up endemic corruption, and restore the oil-rich but impoverished South American nation’s national pride – a nation that, during the era of high oil prices, was a beacon of democracy in the region and, many Venezuelans believed, was poised to attain first-world status. Back then, the country was dubbed “Saudi Venezuela.”</p>
<p>“I am not a socialist!” Chavez&#8217;s words now figure prominently into a powerful YouTube video – &#8220;Yo no soy socialista&#8221; – that juxtaposes Chavez’s original campaign pledges against his leftist rhetoric that started soon after he took office in 1999. The video comes as Chavez, 58, is in a close election race against 40-year-old state governor Henrique Capriles.</p>
<p>You don&#8217;t need to understand Spanish to understand the video in which El Presidente &#8212; who now speaks of creating a paradise of “21st Century Socialism” &#8212; extols the virtues of “fatherland, socialism, or death” (“patria, socialismo o muerte&#8221;) to an audience. At another point, he declares: “I am a true revolutionary!”</p>
<p><iframe width="610" height="343" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/yVvwWH3GlOY?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p>In the mainstream media’s Venezuela coverage, an important piece of context is often omitted regarding Chavez’s rise to power – it&#8217;s erroneously suggested that only Venezuela’s poor voted for Chavez, who won the second-largest<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_presidential_election,_1998"> popular vote </a>ever, 58.4%, in 1998. In fact, many middle-class and well-off Venezuelans voted for Chavez. They didn’t see him as a messiah as did Venezuela’s poor, to be sure. But they did regard him as a sincere reformer &#8212; a political outsider not associated with Venezuela’s traditional parties, a man who would be an antidote for Venezuela’s decline.</p>
<p>But as the YouTube video dramatically shows, Chavez carried out a monstrous bait-and-switch after becoming president. Declaring himself a revolutionary socialist and adopting an anti-American foreign policy, despite Venezuela’s historically close ties with the U.S., Chavez consolidated his power by rewriting the constitution and packing the Supreme Court and other institutions with his supporters. He demonized anybody who disagreed with him. It happened because of Venezuela’s weak checks and balances and the popular wave of support on which Chavez was riding.</p>
<p>As a Caracas-based journalist at the time, I was impressed at the way some prescient Venezuelans, a minority to be sure, avoided group think. They saw Chavez as a wolf-in-sheep’s clothing from the start. Even before Chavez’s landslide election victory, for instance, many upper-level executives in state oil company PDVSA were resigning &#8212; making plans for early retirement aboard, with Miami being a popular spot to whether out the storm. Many were among Venezuela’s best and brightest. They had wanted to be part of the solution to Venezuela’s problems. But Chavez, a class warrior instead of a uniter, saw them as part of Venezuela’s problems.</p>
<p>Ultimately, Chavez took three bad ideas from Venezuela’s past – statism, authoritarianism, and bread-and-circuses populism – and took them to new heights. He stoked anti-Americanism like never before, traveling frequently aboard as he made alliances with Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Middle Eastern strongmen. He even praised Venezuelan-born terrorist Carlos the Jackal as a &#8220;worthy heir of the greatest [leftist] struggles.&#8221;</p>
<p>As for PDVSA, it used to be one of the world’s most respected state oil companies, a vital source of income. Under Chavez, it has become rife with political cronyism. Oil production has declined significantly, according to many observers. It’s thought the Chavez administration’s mismanagement was responsible for a huge refinery explosion last month – whose flames, as shown in the “I-am-not-a-socialist” video, look like scenes from hell. It’s an apt metaphor for what “21st Century socialism” has brought to Venezuela.</p>
<p>In his reelection campaign, Chavez has had a clear advantage. He controls the levers of power and has no qualms about using state resources to aid his campaign, as was underscored on Tuesday with<a href="http://globovision.com/articulo/el-dato-vehiculos-de-pdvsa-hacen-campana-en-favor-del-candidato-de-gobierno"> a report </a>from television news channel Globovision: It showed PDVSA vehicles driving around with Chavez campaign stickers.</p>
<p>Capriles is good looking compared to the puffy-faced Chavez who claims to be in remission from cancer; and in Venezuela &#8212; home to many beauty queens &#8212; looks matter. Capriles has connected with audiences by hammering away at Venezuela’s epic levels of corruption, mismanagement, and Chavez’s willingness to use Venezuela’s oil to support leftist political goals abroad &#8212; all while Venezuela has suffered regular <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/venezuela/110615/venezuela-power-outages">electricity outages</a>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/21/world/americas/venezuela-faces-shortages-in-grocery-staples.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0">food shortages</a>, and one of the world’s highest <a href="http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/120915/venezuela-has-the-fourth-highest-homicide-rate-worldwide">murder rates</a>.</p>
<p>What will happen when Venezuelans go to the polls this Sunday? It may be ugly. Chavez, after all, sees himself as being on a divine mission, a veritable reincarnation of Venezuelan independence hero Simon Bolivar, his idol. He believes the ends justify the means. Most ominously, Chavez and his senior advisers <a href="http://www.cfr.org/venezuela/political-unrest-venezuela/p28936">have asserted </a>that Venezuela will suffer violence and political instability if he’s not reelected. All of which raises fears that the country is poised for a social explosion, with Chavez’s most fanatical supporters and government forces taking to the streets. This would be in response to a Capriles victory – or perhaps in response to a Chavez victory that&#8217;s regarded by enraged Capriles’ supporters as being rigged.</p>
<p>“A number of multinational companies with operations in Venezuela (including oil companies) are updating contingency plans to pull their expatriate staff out of the country quickly if there’s a sudden eruption of social and political conflict,”<a href="http://caracasgringo.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/contingency-plans/"> writes</a> blogger Caracas Gringo, a prescient American expat who writes anonymously from Venezuela.</p>
<p>Whoever wins, Venezuela’s sad decline will not be reversed anytime soon.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The New York Times and New Black Panthers Protect Election Lawbreakers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/j-christian-adams/the-new-york-times-and-new-black-panthers-protect-election-lawbreakers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-new-york-times-and-new-black-panthers-protect-election-lawbreakers</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/j-christian-adams/the-new-york-times-and-new-black-panthers-protect-election-lawbreakers/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Sep 2012 04:50:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[J. Christian Adams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dead]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fraud]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York Times]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[registration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tea Party]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[True the Vote]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Voters]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=145726</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Decent Americans seeking to improve the election process are smeared and slandered by the paper's lies. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/new-york-times-building.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-145742" title="new-york-times-building" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/new-york-times-building.gif" alt="" width="375" height="258" /></a>Once upon a time in America, if a group of citizen volunteers set out to help election officials detect problems with the voter rolls, they would have been praised.  If a group of citizen volunteers had detected scores of dead people on the voter rolls they would have received broad accolades from all corners of America.</p>
<p>Once upon a time in America, we esteemed law abiding citizens who helped law enforcement detect law breakers – especially when it comes to the sanctity of elections.</p>
<p>But this isn’t the America we used to know.  Instead, when election integrity groups like Houston-based <a href="http://www.truethevote.org/">True the Vote</a> help detect countless problems with American elections – including people who illegally voted twice in the 2008 Presidential election from different states – they are slandered and attacked by the <em>New York Times</em>, academia and formerly relevant civil rights organizations.</p>
<p>When the Pew Charitable Trust <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/other-races/210327-pew-study-2-million-dead-americans-on-active-voter-rolls">reports</a> that there are 2,000,000 ineligible voters on the rolls, nothing happens.  But when volunteers seek to find and remove them, they <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/the-long-and-disreputable-history-of-repressing-the-black-vote/262744/">are attacked</a> as racists.</p>
<p>Something has indeed changed.</p>
<p>The 2012 election will have something never before seen in American elections – ordinary citizens in every corner of the country analyzing the voter rolls to see if dead and ineligible voters remain registered.  On election day, volunteers will fan out across thousands of American polling places armed with pen and paper and record what happened.</p>
<p>For exercising this noble civic undertaking, the headlines of the <em>New York Times </em><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/opinion/voter-harassment-circa-2012.html?_r=0">scream</a> “Voter Harassment Circa 2012.” The <em>Times</em> tells us “a Tea Party group, True the Vote, descends on a largely minority precinct and combs the registration records . . . nonexistent [voter fraud] is used as an excuse to reduce the political rights of minorities, the poor, students, older Americans and other groups that tend to vote Democratic.”</p>
<p>This is an outright lie.  And it might be shocking if it weren’t published on the pages of a newspaper with a long history of publishing lies, such as those fed through the pen of <em>Times </em>reporter and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Apologist-Walter-Duranty-Timess/dp/0195057007">Stalin stooge Walter Duranty</a>.  The <em>Times </em>has no data that cleaning up the voter rolls affects “minorities” and “the poor,” but emotional dog whistles work better than reason or facts.</p>
<p>Then the <em>Times </em>lies about the election day poll observation activities of citizen volunteers: “In 2009 and 2010, for example, the group focused on the Houston Congressional district represented by Sheila Jackson Lee, a black Democrat. . . . That didn’t stop the group from sending dozens of white “poll watchers” to precincts in the district during the 2010 elections, deliberately creating friction with black voters.”</p>
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		<title>Time for An Intervention</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/peggy-noonan/time-for-an-intervention/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=time-for-an-intervention</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/peggy-noonan/time-for-an-intervention/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Sep 2012 04:25:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Peggy Noonan]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[47%]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservatism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fundraiser]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mitt romney]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Video]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Voters]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=144938</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Mitt Romney's "47 percent" remark is not how big leaders talk. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/romney-campaigns-iowa-4x3-thumb-400xauto-28047.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-144966" title="romney-campaigns-iowa-4x3-thumb-400xauto-28047" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/romney-campaigns-iowa-4x3-thumb-400xauto-28047.gif" alt="" width="375" height="256" /></a>Visit <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/">Peggy Noonan&#8217;s Blog.</a></strong></p>
<p>What should Mitt Romney do now? He should peer deep into the abyss. He should look straight into the heart of darkness where lies a Republican defeat in a year the Republican presidential candidate almost couldn’t lose. He should imagine what it will mean for the country, for a great political philosophy, conservatism, for his party and, last, for himself. He must look down unblinkingly.</p>
<p>And then he needs to snap out of it, and <em>move.</em></p>
<p>He has got seven weeks. He’s just had two big flubs. On the Mideast he seemed like a political opportunist, not big and wise but small and tinny. It mattered because the crisis was one of those moments when people look at you and imagine you as president.</p>
<p>Then his comments released last night and made months ago at the private fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla. Mr. Romney has relearned what four years ago Sen. Barack Obama learned: There’s no such thing as private when you’re a candidate with a mic. There’s someone who doesn’t like you in that audience. There’s someone with a cellphone. Mr. Obama’s clinger comments became famous in 2008 because when people heard what he’d said, they thought, “That’s the real him, that’s him when he’s talking to his friends.”</p>
<div align="center">* * *</div>
<p>And so a quick denunciation of what Mr. Romney said, followed by some ideas.</p>
<p>The central problem revealed by the tape is Romney’s theory of the 2012 election. It is that a high percentage of the electorate receives government checks and therefore won’t vote for him, another high percentage is supplying the tax revenues and will vote for him, and almost half the people don’t pay taxes and presumably won’t vote for him.</p>
<p>My goodness, that’s a lot of people who won’t vote for you. You wonder how he gets up in the morning.</p>
<p>This is not how big leaders talk, it’s how shallow campaign operatives talk: They slice and dice the electorate like that, they see everything as determined by this interest or that. They’re usually young enough and dumb enough that nobody holds it against them, but they don’t know anything. They don’t know much about America.</p>
<p>We are a big, complicated nation. And we are human beings. We are people. We have souls. We are complex. We are not data points. Many things go into our decisions and our political affiliations.</p>
<p>You have to be sophisticated to know that. And if you’re operating at the top of national politics, you’re supposed to be sophisticated.</p>
<p><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444375104577593580486242106.html">I wrote recently</a> of an imagined rural Ohio woman sitting on her porch, watching the campaign go by. She’s 60, she identifies as conservative, she likes guns, she thinks the culture has gone crazy. She doesn’t like Obama. Romney looks OK. She’s worried about the national debt and what it will mean to her children. But she’s having a hard time, things are tight for her right now, she’s on partial disability, and her husband is a vet and he gets help, and her mother receives Social Security.</p>
<p>She’s worked hard and paid into the system for years. Her husband fought for his country.</p>
<p>And she’s watching this whole election and <em>thinking.</em>You can win her vote if you give her faith in your fairness and wisdom. But not if you label her and dismiss her.</p>
<p>As for those workers who don’t pay any income taxes, they pay payroll taxes—Social Security and Medicare. They want to rise in the world and make more money. They’d like to file a 1040 because that will mean they got a raise or a better job.</p>
<p>They too are potential Romney voters, because they’re suffering under the no-growth economy.</p>
<p>So: Romney’s theory of the case is all wrong. His understanding of the political topography is wrong.</p>
<p>And his tone is fatalistic. <em>I can’t win these guys who will only vote their economic interests, but I can win these guys who will vote their economic interests, plus some guys in the middle, whoever they are.</em></p>
<p>That’s too small and pinched and narrow. That’s not how Republicans emerge victorious—”I can’t win these guys.” You have to have more respect than that, and more affection, you don’t write anyone off, you invite everyone in. Reagan in 1984 used to put out his hand: “Come too, come walk with me.” Come join, come help, whatever is happening in your life.</p>
<p>You know what Romney sounded like? Like a kid new to politics who thinks he got the inside lowdown on how it works from some operative. But those old operatives, they never know how it works. They knew how it worked for one cycle back in the day.</p>
<p>They’re jockeys who rode Seabiscuit and thought they won a race.</p>
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<p>The big issue—how we view government, what we want from it, what we need, what it rightly asks of us, what it wrongly demands of us—is a good…</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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