Thoughts on Election Day

The New Neo Posted on by

I just voted.

My polling place was not too crowded. I couldn’t tell a thing from the crowd; their faces were pleasant and inscrutable. Mostly women at this time of day, many with little children.

I find Election Day to be very solemn. Standing in that booth feels portentous, although this time my one little vote seemed so tiny. I waited in the booth—for what, I don’t really know—for quite a few moments before I could tear myself away. Maybe because leaving the polling place means being one step closer to the moment of truth tonight, the time when we’ll know if America has become something quite different (and more leftist, and more the pawns of an MSM that has abdicated its profoundly important duty) than what it used to be.

I’ve described this as a watershed election, and I mean it. The choice is stark and clear, or at least it should be. But since the the polls are so close, my stomach is in an uproar, and I think that feeling will increase come this evening. If I get good news, it will subside. If I don’t…

When I was younger, I cared about the results of presidential elections, but not too deeply. I wanted my guy to win, but if the opponent was the victor instead I thought it would still be okay. The country might go in the wrong direction for a while, but things could easily be righted next time. I was sad when my candidate lost, but the feeling was something akin to when the Red Sox lost the World Series—depressing for a day or two, but then its importance began to fade.

I was a Democrat back then, of course. I never demonized Republicans, though; I knew that Republicans would keep us safe to the best of their ability. Each party had about an equal propensity to make war, and each one was anti-Soviet. The main difference between the parties seemed to involve how much to expand the welfare state, and in those days that prospect didn’t appear to jeopardize our entire economy (maybe that was a misperception, but that’s the way it seemed).

And then came my political change—which also involved paying a lot more attention to politics, and a concomitant deeper emotional investment in them. During the election of 2004, I got really, really nervous. although I ended up relieved when that election ended up going my way by what seemed like a hair.

The same anxiety beset me for a while in 2008. But after the debates that year, I pretty much knew that Obama was almost certain to win. So by the time Election Day 2008 rolled around at least I wasn’t stretched on the rack of hope vs. despair, as I had been in 2004. I had already “accepted” the outcome, although I was very down about it.

But ever since the first debate of 2012, that hope/despair torque has been sharper for me than it was in 2004. Back then my worry was mostly about Iraq and the War on Terror; I didn’t want it to all have been for naught (a secondary concern was to avoid having to watch John Kerry’s insufferable pompousness for four years). Those things seemed bad enough, but the prospect we face in this election is worse, much worse. It’s about our economic recovery and our economic future. It’s about our national and international security. It’s about a Chavez-like threat to the long-held traditions of our republic, the last best hope of mankind.

I’m not making either any sanguine or any morose predictions for tonight’s election results. I simply haven’t a clue what will happen. I don’t even have a hunch. I change my opinion from minute to minute.

In this I think I’m being more honest than most pundits, who also haven’t a clue but whose livelihood depends on pretending they do. Some of them will be proven to have been correct and some wrong. That’s usually the case when there’s a large number of disparate predictions. But which prognostications will turn out to have been right and which in error is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

Remember that Howard Dean was once the Chair of the DNC

The New Neo Posted on by

And that the current Chair is Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Two sleazy party hacks. If you don’t believe me, take a look at this abominable video of Dean from today:

So despite the polls that find a race that’s too close to call, Dean stirs up the masses (and I have little doubt that “masses” is the way he thinks of the Democratic rank and file) by setting up the charge of fraud in advance as the only way Romney could win in Ohio.

It is no surprise, however, that the Democrats continue to choose leaders of this caliber. This is what the Democratic Party has become.

Election 2012: tonight we finally open the box…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and find out whether Schré¶dinger’s cat is alive or dead.

I know, I know; it’s not really a great analogy. Nor do I actually understand the physics. So, chalk it up to poetic license.

But right now the cat is both dead and alive, and late tonight (unless we have some sort of repeat of Florida 2000) we will know which of the two it is:

Why has Obama been so negative throughout his 2012 campaign?

The New Neo Posted on by

Why, Republicans made him do it, don’t you see, by lying about him.

But all that nastiness wasn’t really comfortable for Obama, don’t you see, and so his heart wasn’t in it:

The key to understanding the Obama enigma of 2012, according to more than a dozen Obama associates interviewed by POLITICO during the campaign, is that the president enthusiastically approved the message of relentless attacks against Mitt Romney. But until the last week of the campaign ”” when optimism made a major comeback ”” Obama executed it mirthlessly and mechanically, at times reinforcing the “meh” vibe of his supportive but uninspired base.

Obama’s pollster, Joel Benenson, told him early on that hope and change couldn’t be recycled in a country enduring three years of grim recovery, and the campaign’s highly effective June and July anti-Romney blitz in battlegrounds was brutally effective. But the attack-first, hope-second strategy never quite suited Obama personally ”” in fact, it seemed to directly contradict his transformational, upbeat brand…

Obama officials say their boss had no choice but to run the campaign he did, given Romney’s fact-challenged attacks on Obama’s record.

Unfortunately this divisive nastiness that was forced on Obama will make it harder for him, if he wins (perish the thought), to be the reach-across-the-aisle transformational healer he would so like to be, if those Republicans hadn’t forced him into the opposite:

“I get why he had to do what he did. It was smart politically. But he’s become the embodiment of the partisanship he once decried,” said The New York Times’s David Brooks…

It’s so sad, isn’t it? Poor guy. Reminds me of how the Republicans forced Obama to go back on his public campaign financing pledge in 2008.

CBS could have proved that Obama refused to call Benghazi “terrorism”

The New Neo Posted on by

But instead it released a truncated version of an interview edited to make it seem that the opposite was true.

Completely and utterly in the tank, as Brett Baier points out. But what else is new?

Understand that this interview is just hours after he gets out of the Rose Garden.

How after this exchange and the CIA explanation of what was being put up the chain in the intel channels does the Ambassador to the United Nations go on the Sunday shows and say what she says about a spontaneous demonstration sparked by that anti-Islam video? And how does the president deliver a speech to the United Nations 13 days later where he references that anti-Islam video six times when referring to the attack in Benghazi?

There are many questions, and here are a few more.

Why did CBS release a clip that appeared to back up Obama’s claim in the second debate on Oct. 19, a few days before the foreign policy debate, and not release the rest of that interview at the beginning?

Why on the Sunday before the election, almost six weeks after the attack, at 6 p.m. does an obscure online timeline posted on CBS.com contain the additional “60 Minutes” interview material from Sept. 12?

Why wasn’t it news after the president said what he said in the second debate, knowing what they had in that “60 Minutes” tape — why didn’t they use it then? And why is it taking Fox News to spur other media organizations to take the Benghazi story seriously?

Whatever your politics, there are a lot of loose ends here, a lot of unanswered questions and a lot of strange political maneuvers that don’t add up.

That’s what reporters should live for, but this time they’re not. We will.

No wonder Obama (and liberals) consider Fox the enemy. The colossal nerve of them, pursuing this story! And no wonder the liberal masses are told that Fox is a bunch of lying liars. That way there’s no need to ever pay a particle of attention to it.

If Obama wins tomorrow (perish the thought), I hope Fox pursues and pursues and pursues this until the entire country has to pay attention. Of course, it may be too little too late. That’s what Obama and the rest of the MSM are counting on.

[Hat tip: DrewM at Ace’s.]

The Cloward-Pivens of the right

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Susanamantha” quotes a libertarian friend of hers who refuses to vote for Romney this year and will be voting for Gary Johnson:

Not a single Republican IN MY LIFETIME has reduced the national debt; in fact, excepting Ford, they have all significantly increased it. There have been NO attempts to curb the growth of medicare/medicaid, or defense, for that matter; three things cannot keep growing disproportionately to GDP. If we’re going to crash and burn, I’d rather it be now, than in 30 years when my kids or grandkids have to deal with a much worse burden.

I hope Romney wins, I really do; but he is not the best candidate for the job, in my opinion. I’m not wasting my vote for Gary Johnson, I’m voting for who I think best reflects my values, and how I think government should be run (and he as demonstrably proven that he can do that in NM).

Democrats are getting more big government, not smaller, so it’s not like it will be any less high stakes next time around, and voting for a Republican who is slightly less big government is no longer an option, in my opinion.

The fact that his vote might end up causing Romney to lose and Obama to win is irrelevant to this man. He and others of his ilk, who might be addressed by Bill Whittle’s video but who close themselves to its message and who look instead to the imminent arrival of an economic apocalypse, have more in common with the far left than they think they do. They are the Cloward-Pivenistas of the right. They believe that, if things get bad enough, the system will break down and enough people will see the light and then the true conservative dawn will break.

Cloward and Piven thought the breakdown would lead people towards the leftist light. People like Susanamantha’s friend think it will be the light on the right. But the idea is similar: endure (or even cause) pain now for future gain.

Of course, it all depends on being able to count on future events and people’s reactions. But that’s a messy, risky, and downright dangerous business.

Both sides are idealists, Don Quixotes if you will (although perhaps that’s being unfair to the Don) against the rest of us plodding Sancho Panzas. It’s an old story, isn’t it? A perfectionistic idealism is where the Don Quixotes on the right meet those on the left, in a dangerous no man’s land. The ones on the right could well end up encouraging the triumph of what they most hate.

[ADDENDUM: Randy Barnett has something to say to his fellow libertarians.]

California and its electoral votes

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day I came across some statistics that reminded me that electoral-vote-heavy California, one of the most reliably Democrat states these days in presidential elections, didn’t used to swing that way.

The change came rather recently. Take a look: from 1972 to 1988, solid Republican. From 1992 on, solid Democrat.

It matters a lot. California now has 55 electoral votes, the equivalent of the sum total of the states of Montana, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alaska combined. And California’s electoral votes are now a given for Democrats.

Other electorally hefty states such as New York (29) and Texas (38) sort of cancel each other out, and biggish Florida (29) is a toss-up. But California the jumungous stands alone, and is responsible for the fact that a Republican candidate often has an arduous uphill battle to offset it.

I wonder whether, as California goes down the tubes, enough of its residents will wise up (or leave the state and reduce its electoral share) to make a difference. And I wonder how long that might take to happen, and what the state of this country will be by then.

Crowd size: does it matter?

The New Neo Posted on by

You’ve probably noticed lots of photos of the huge crowds Romney has been drawing lately.

And perhaps you’ve read some of the articles I’ve read, pro and con on the subject of whether crowd size at rallies matters. They tend to point out that a lot of losing candidates (for example, John Kerry) have drawn huge crowds, especially towards the final days of their campaigns.

Of course, Kerry almost won, so I guess you’d expect him to have attracted large crowds. It’s not as though 2004 was a blowout election.

This article points out that in 1972 and 1988—elections in which the losers lost big—McGovern and Dukakis drew large and enthusiastic crowds.

But what I’m trying to find out—and what so far has been hard to discover—is where these huge crowds were showing up. For example, in that article I just linked to, the Humphrey and Dukakis rallies mentioned took place in New York City. Also mentioned are large rallies for Dukakis in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia.

These are liberal Democratic strongholds, and I believe that was true back then as well. So large crowds there for liberal Democratic nominees would hardly be surprising, even if the candidate went on to lose big-time, like McGovern and Dukakis (McGovern carried only the state of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, but if memory serves me I recall that he also won New York City).

My sense of it is that in general crowd size can indicate enthusiasm, but it really doesn’t tell you much about who will win, especially in a close race. But this time around both candidates are spending nearly all their time during these waning weeks of the campaign in battleground states. One would expect a big Romney crowd in Utah or Kansas, or a big Obama crowd in Madison or Berkeley, but what’s going on in possible swing states Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Ohio and Colorado? Seems to me that Romney is drawing the bigger crowds there, but that might be because more people feel they know Obama and are curious about Romney.

Whatever the reason, I’ll take it. Large crowds can’t be a bad sign. But I don’t put a whole lot of stock in it.

I don’t put a whole lot of stock in anything this election year. It’s been clear for quite some time that most Democrats will vote for Obama, most Republicans for Romney, and Independents will go somewhat for Romney. But no one knows how many of each group will come out to vote, and that’s what the results will depend on.

My liberal friends and acquaintances and relatives are an admittedly tiny sample, even though most of my friends/acquaintances/relatives are liberal. I have not spoken to all of them about this election, but I can tell you about the ones I have talked to. Although they are not quite as starry-eyed about Obama as they were in 2008, their enthusiasm and determination to vote for him remain undiminished. In fact, my impression is that their drive to do so may even be greater than before, because I sense a protective and defensive quality in them now, a perception that Obama has been under siege and is vulnerable.

They have also most definitely bought into every talking point the Obama campaign has given out about Romney, and they demonize him. One or two even cited Romney’s Mormonism against him, although they themselves are not religious and Obama’s affiliation with Reverend Wright has never been a problem for them.

So if these people are any indication, there is still enthusiasm for Obama—if not for Obama as Lightbringer, then for Obama as good guy liberal vs. evil Republican capitalist woman-hater. That’s the power of propaganda, folks.

As I said, it’s a small sample. Perhaps it means nothing. But it perturbs me. I hate to be such a worrywart, but that’s what I’ve been observing lately, and it’s one of the reasons I’ll be shaking come Tuesday night.

A video to send to conversatives and libertarians who might be contemplating voting third-party or not at all

The New Neo Posted on by

They’re not as numerous or vocal as during the Republican primaries, but there are still quite a few conservatives or libertarians or somewhat-conservatives who, although they’re not keen on Obama, are reluctant to vote for Romney. Their reasons can range from thinking he’s not conservative enough to vague unease about his stiffness or some other gut feeling that gives them pause.

Bill Whittle has something important to say to them, and he says it in one fairly compact and easily-watched video. Send a link to any of your friends and/or relatives who might fall into one of the above categories:

Just copy and paste this link: http://youtu.be/wPjBXufufUU

You can also send a link to this post of mine to any and all of your friends and relatives who might have other friends and relatives who fall into the “conservative-but-not-voting-for-Romney” category. This needs to blanket the country prior to Tuesday.

Remember, it’s all about turnout now. Romney has done his best. Now you do yours.

[ADDENDUM: And that can include volunteering at your local Romney office, or online at mittromney.com.]

Looking backward at the Obama campaign: August 22, 2012

The New Neo Posted on by

This is absolutely fascinating (hat tip: Steven Hayward at Powerline). The date of the article is August 22, 2012, and we get a glimpse into the mastermind of the Obama campaign, David Axelrod [emphasis mine]:

“The summer is when candidates and races get defined. That’s why we made a strategic decision that it was better to muscle up in the summer…

Many in Obama’s inner circle also believe that Obama is the more likable, Reagan-like figure who can remake his party and the nation’s policies. They see Romney as far more like Carter, who never wore well with his party, was prone to awkwardness, and won the nomination by default. They also doubt any comparison to the economic doldrums of then and now and any possibility of a late-breaking shift of Democratic and undecided voters to Romney (as happened with Reagan).

“They have this fantasy that the debates will come and the dam will break like it did in 1980,” Axelrod said. “I think they are delusional.”

There’s no question that such a shift occurred. The only question is whether it will have been enough to elect Romney, or whether Obama will hold on. But the “delusional” one appears to have been Axelrod, when he discounted even the possibility of such a change in voter attitude.

There’s much, much more. For example:

“It’s like that line from that Richard Pryor movie,” Axelrod says. “ ”˜Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes? People trust their lying eyes. They’re not going to believe the [Romney] ads. They know who [Obama] is. You try to runs ads suggesting that he’s corrupt; they know he’s not corrupt. You try to run ads saying he doesn’t care about the state of the economy; it didn’t move anything. You can’t tell people what they’re not willing to believe and expect it to work. You’re not going to tell them what their lying eyes tell them.”

Projection, anyone?

Well worth reading the whole thing.

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m not counting any chickens in this election. My stomach has been mildly queasy for days, and I will be shaking with nerves on election night, so nervous I might have trouble turning on my TV. I say that not to emphasize my own cowardice, but to underline how incredibly important I feel this election is, and how close it seems to be.

Obama’s self-evaluation

The New Neo Posted on by

In light of Benghazi, let’s take a trip back in time—here’s candidate Barack Obama, in April of 2008, describing the challenges ahead:

Nobody is entirely prepared for being Commander-in-Chief. The question is when the 3 AM phone call comes do you have somebody who has the judgment, the temperament to ask the right questions, to weigh the costs and benefits of military action, who insists on good intelligence, who is not going to be swayed by the short-term politics. By most criteria, I’ve passed those tests…

Ironic, isn’t it?