Republican Extremists

[philunderwood]

Here Come the Extremists!

By Mona Charen

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

It isn't quite panic yet, but the sounds emanating from Obamaland are certainly nervous. If you are David Axelrod, chief strategist for President Obama's re-election campaign, you are well aware of your idol's fall and doubtless less than thrilled to get this question from CNN's Candy Crowley:

"Something that the president said this week struck me ... he said it's not as cool to be an Obama supporter as it was in 2008... I think he's right. I think it's not as cool to be an Obama supporter now. How do you get cool back into this?"

Gee, how do you compare a campaign that was based entirely on vapid promises and vaporous sentiment with a referendum on actual job performance? Axelrod denied (unconvincingly) that the 2008 campaign had been a "cult of personality" and assured Crowley that once the campaign gets "fully engaged and the choices become clear, you are going to see a great deal of activity out there on his behalf." In a signal of just how feeble the case for Obama's re-election is, Axelrod fell back on the bogeyman:

"I think one of the things that's going to inform that campaign is whether that Republican candidate is going to yield to some of the forces within his own party or her own party that is driving their — their party further to the right."

For the record, there has never been a time in the past 50 years that the Democrats have not claimed to detect a frightening rightward tilt in the GOP — even as the party has nominated such wild-eyed radicals as George H.W. Bush, John McCain and George W. ("compassionate conservative") Bush.

Crowley pointed out that support for the president among independents has declined from 52 percent in the 2008 election to 42 percent today, and that even among staunch liberals, 89 percent of whom voted for Obama in 2008, support has dipped to 64 percent. How does the Obama team re-create a victory in light of these numbers?

She might have added so much more to that question. She might have asked how an incumbent requests re-election when the unemployment is at 9.1 percent. Even more worrisome, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fully half of the jobless are now long-term unemployed, meaning they have been without jobs for 27 weeks or longer. That is the highest percentage of long-term unemployed since the Labor Department starting keeping such records in 1948.

She might have asked how an incumbent achieves a vote of confidence when commodity prices on food and fuel are rising and, relatedly, the value of the dollar is plunging; when the housing market has yet to recover from the crash despite (or, more likely, because of) the president's Home Affordable Modification Program, which has prevented markets from clearing; when a record one in seven Americans now receives Food Stamps; when one out of six Americans is on Medicaid; and when a whopping 62.5 percent of respondents say the nation is on the wrong track.

When the economy is strong, elections can turn on a variety of issues. But when the economy is poor, elections are seldom about anything else. The 1980 race was illustrative.

Though the Carter/Reagan race is remembered now as a landslide for Ronald Reagan, the contours of the victory were not apparent during the campaign. As late as October 29, Gallup had the race as a dead heat, with Reagan at 44 percent and President Carter at 43 (it was a three-man race). Other polling showed larger margins for Reagan but nothing like the 10-point margin of victory he achieved. At the time, the contest was perceived as close.

It was after the first and only debate, a week before Election Day, that voters definitively moved into Reagan's column. At the time, inflation was running at 13.5 percent, unemployment was 7 percent and interest rates were 21 percent. American hostages remained in Tehran. Carter's approval ratings hovered in the 30s during the final year of his tenure.

Why wasn't Carter perceived as hopelessly weak? Perhaps because as bad as things were, voters needed to be confident about the challenger's fitness. Carter had succeeded to some degree in frightening voters about Reagan's (you guessed it) right-wing extremism. Reagan's reassuring debate performance allayed those fears. And Reagan's summation drilled to the heart of voters' concerns. Ask yourself, Reagan advised, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"

The economy today is in some respects worse than it was in 1980. Barring a catastrophe, little else will matter in 2012. Any credible Republican can defeat Obama — which is why Axelrod is already smearing as "extremist" a person whose name he does not know.

[philunderwood]

Three-Out-of-Four Americans Are Radicals

By Arnold Ahlert

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

There are a lot of absurdities surrounding the debt ceiling talks. But two of the biggest have to be the idea that Republicans are the "radicals" in this particular dance and, unbelievably as it may seem, all of our current fiscal problems are George W. Bush's fault — therefore we must maintain our spending binge with no end in sight, other than some opaque promise to address the issue somewhere down the road.

First, the radicalism. What does such radicalism consist of? Something in writing, aka the Cut Cap and Balance Act. Now one can debate the pros and cons of such a bill. Or they might have, if Harry Reid and his fellow Senate Democrats hadn't voted to table it before such a debate could take place. How could Harry and Company get away with that? Easy. Just call the bill "perhaps some of the worst legislation in the history of this country" as Mr. Reid did, and trust that the communications arm of the Democrat party, more familiarly known as the mainstream media, will faithfully regurgitate that assessment without the slightest examination of the facts.

How radical is CC&B? So radical it would have cut spending for 2012 by all of $111 billion. That's so radical it amounts to less than 7 percent of next year's projected deficit. Not the budget. Just the deficit part of it. the Other radical part? A ten year glide path, reducing government spending from its current 22.5 percent of GDP, down to 19.9 percent in 2021. How radical is that? For the last sixty years, government spending has averaged 18 percent of GDP. Thus, this radical plan still allows the government to continue spending more than it ever has, on average.

There is a truly radical component in this plan, however. At least radical by Washington D.C. standards. These "nutters" actually proposed a Balanced Budget Amendment which would limit spending to a fixed percentage of GDP, unless a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress allowed the ruling class to return to their drunken sailor spending habits.

How whacky is that? According to a CNN poll, "only" 74 percent of Americans think a Balanced Budget Amendment is a good idea. That means only 26 percent would be, as our reliable media refers to them, the only "adults in the room." Of course no one's supposed to notice that the leaders of the Adult Faction, aka Congressional Democrats and president Obama, have yet to put a single proposal of their own in writing, nor has the Democratically-controlled Senate produced a budget in more than two years. Only radicals take responsibility for their actions.

The second component of our adult conversation? Blaming George W. Bush for everything that's gone wrong in the last two-and-a-half years. What is the essence of that blame? Bush — and a Democratically-controlled Congress (the part we're supposed to ignore) — ran the nation's debt up to unprecedented heights. That is, they were unprecedented until Mr. O tripled down on them in a Keynesian economic frenzy to "stimulate" the economy. Thus, the "adults in the room" have come up with one of the more familiar rationalizations of all time to continue spending like there's no tomorrow:

George did it, so why can't we do it too?

Now if that sounds somewhat adolescent to you, it's because you're obviously a radical. Just like three-out-of-four of your fellow American radicals. And if you point out that Mr. Bush did indeed break the bank, but that two wrongs don't make a right, you're some fringe-dwelling moralist in a country where morals went out of fashion along time ago.

So did spending restraints, all of which must be offset by taxes. On the rich. Keep your eye on that word "rich," and trust me when I tell you that it's probably the most fluid word in the English language at the moment. In fact, if there's anything moving in a downward direction at this particular time, it would be the number that defines rich. We started at billionaires, worked our way through millionaires, three-quarter-millionaires, and half-millionaires. The adults in the room are currently dithering between quarter-millionaires and one-fifth-millionaires as to where the draw the line between "rich" and the rest of us.

It's not hard to imagine a time in the not-too-distant future where more than half of America will be ungrateful bastards who don't give a damn about the poor. The road to Social Justice can't be paved strictly with good intentions. Somebody's got to pull the proverbial wagon when more and more people hop on for the ride.

That's what "fairness" is all about — even if the country goes down the tubes in pursuit of it.