The most charitable way of explaining the election results of 2012 w/comment

I generally agree with the author ---but the decline of the U.S. empire did not begin in 2007----it began in the 1960's and 70's when we decided to prolong our "Moment in the Sun" fron 1945 to 1970 when we literally owned the production capacity of the world in our hands. We decided to prolong our honeymoon by borrowing from our future and Social Security trust fund. We raised a bunch of Dr. Spock pampered kids who knew nothing but good times---except for the new immigrants who discovered Uncle Sam's largesse trade for votes.

Fast forward to 2007 and we suddenly discoverd the "emperor has no clothes" and the piper had to be paid. Now we discover we are held hostage by a majority of people who indeed will not work or would rather get "free stuff" for not working.

One other thing that may not be correct. Romney's 47% statement includes all of us on Social Security and medicare. Many of us are retired conservatives and Republicans so the 47% becomes much less in numbers but much more important in actual numbers and the effect on the voting system.

We now are a mulit racist society. The blacks and hispanics are now aligned so tightly with the Dems they can not be pryed away. If you accept this then whites have no option but to vote their own interests and become racist as the blacks now define us. Then we will have not two parties but at least three, and maybe an Asian party. Congress will become multifactional and all hell will break loose in terms of coming to grips with the problems of the country until 2014.

Other that...all is not lost ... 2014 will show Conservatives controlling both houses & prosperity returning to US...SM1.


Posted on November 7, 2012


The most charitable way of explaining the election results of 2012 is
that Americans voted for the status quo – for the incumbent President,
and for a divided Congress. They must enjoy gridlock, partisanship,
incompetence, economic stagnation and avoidance of responsibility.
And, fewer people voted. As I write, with almost all the votes
counted, President Obama has won fewer votes than John McCain won in
2008, and more than ten million less than his own 2008 total.

But as we awake from this nightmare, it’s important to eschew the
facile explanations for the Romney defeat that will prevail among the
chattering classes. Romney did not lose because of the effects of
Hurricane Sandy that devastated this area, nor did he lose because he
ran a poor campaign, nor did he lose because the Republicans could
have chosen better candidates, nor did he lose because Obama benefited
from a slight uptick in the economy due to the business cycle.

Romney lost because he didn't get enough votes to win.

That might seem obvious, but not for the obvious reasons. Romney lost
because the conservative virtues – the traditional American virtues –
of liberty, hard work, free enterprise, private initiative and
aspirations to moral greatness – no longer inspire or animate a
majority of the electorate. The notion of the “Reagan Democrat” is one
cliché that should be permanently retired.

Ronald Reagan himself could not win an election in today’s America.

The simplest reason why Romney lost was because it is impossible to
compete against free stuff. Every businessman knows this; that is why
the “loss leader” or the giveaway is such a powerful marketing tool.
Obama’s America is one in which free stuff is given away wholesale:
the adults among the 47,000,000 on food stamps clearly recognized for
whom they should vote, and so they did, by the tens of millions; those
who – courtesy of Obama – receive two full years of unemployment
benefits (which, of course, both disincentives looking for work and
also motivates people to work off the books while collecting their
windfall) surely know for whom to vote; so too do those who anticipate
“free” health care, who expect the government to pay their mortgages,
and who look for the government to give them jobs. The lure of free
stuff is irresistible. In other words, Romney ran against Santa Claus;
and Santa won by a landslide.

Imagine two restaurants side by side. One sells its customers fine
cuisine at a reasonable price, and the other offers a free buffet,
all-you-can-eat as long as supplies last. Few – including me – could
resist the attraction of the free food. Now imagine that the second
restaurant stays in business because the first restaurant is forced to
provide it with the food for the free buffet, and we have the current
economy, until, at least, the first restaurant decides to go out of
business. (Then, the government takes over the provision of free food
to its patrons.)

The defining moment of the whole campaign was the revelation (by the
amoral Obama team) of the secretly-recorded video in which Romney
acknowledged the difficulty of winning an election in which “47% of
the people” start off against him because they pay no taxes and just
receive money – “free stuff” – from the government. Almost half of the
population has no skin in the game – they don’t care about high taxes,
promoting business, or creating jobs, nor do they care that the money
for their free stuff is being borrowed from their children and from
the Chinese. They just want the free stuff that comes their way at
someone else’s expense. In the end, that 47% leaves very little margin
for error for any Republican, and does not bode well for the future.

It is impossible to imagine a conservative candidate winning against
such overwhelming odds. People do vote their pocketbooks. In essence,
the people vote for a Congress who will not raise their taxes, and for
a President who will give them free stuff, never mind who has to pay
for it.

That suggests the second reason why Romney lost: the inescapable
conclusion that, as Winston Churchill stated so tartly, “the best
argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the
average voter.” Voters – a clear majority – are easily swayed by
emotion and raw populism. Said another way, too many people vote with
their hearts and not their heads. That is why Obama did not have to
produce a second term agenda, or even defend his first-term record. He
needed only to portray Mitt Romney as a rapacious capitalist who
throws elderly women over a cliff, when he is not just snatching away
their cancer medication, while starving the poor and cutting taxes for
the rich. Obama could get away with saying that “Romney wants the rich
to play by a different set of rules” – without ever defining what
those different rules were; with saying that the “rich should pay
their fair share” – without ever defining what a “fair share” is; with
saying that Romney wants the poor, elderly and sick to “fend for
themselves” – without even acknowledging that all these government
programs are going bankrupt, their current insolvency only papered
over by deficit spending. How could Obama get away with such rants to
squealing sign-wavers? See Churchill, above.

During his 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out to Adlai
Stevenson: “Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!”
Stevenson called back: “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!”
Truer words were never spoken.

Similarly, Obama (or his surrogates) could hint to blacks that a
Romney victory would lead them back into chains and proclaim to women
that their abortions and birth control would be taken away. He could
appeal to Hispanics that Romney would have them all arrested and
shipped to Mexico (even if they came from Cuba or Honduras), and
unabashedly state that he will not enforce the current immigration
laws. He could espouse the furtherance of the incestuous relationship
between governments and unions – in which politicians ply the unions
with public money, in exchange for which the unions provide the
politicians with votes, in exchange for which the politicians provide
more money and the unions provide more votes, etc., even though the
money is gone. How could he do and say all these things ? See
Churchill, above.

One might reasonably object that not every Obama supporter could be
unintelligent. But they must then rationally explain how the Obama
agenda can be paid for, aside from racking up multi-trillion dollar
deficits. “Taxing the rich” does not yield even 10% of what is
required and does not solve any discernible problem – so what is the
answer, i.e., an intelligent answer?

Obama also knows that the electorate has changed – that whites will
soon be a minority in America (they're already a minority in
California) and that the new immigrants to the US are primarily from
the Third World and do not share the traditional American values that
attracted immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a different
world, and a different America. Obama is part of that different
America, knows it, and knows how to tap into it. That is why he won.

Obama also proved again that negative advertising works, invective
sells, and harsh personal attacks succeed. That Romney never engaged
in such diatribes points to his essential goodness as a person; his
“negative ads” were simple facts, never personal abuse – facts about
high unemployment, lower take-home pay, a loss of American power and
prestige abroad, a lack of leadership, etc. As a politician, though,
Romney failed because he did not embrace the devil’s bargain of making
unsustainable promises, and by talking as the adult and not the
adolescent. Obama has spent the last six years campaigning; even his
governance has been focused on payoffs to his favored interest groups.
The permanent campaign also won again, to the detriment of American
life.

It turned out that it was not possible for Romney and Ryan – people of
substance, depth and ideas – to compete with the shallow populism and
platitudes of their opponents. Obama mastered the politics of envy –
of class warfare – never reaching out to Americans as such but to
individual groups, and cobbling together a winning majority from these
minority groups. Conservative ideas failed to take root and states
that seemed winnable, and amenable to traditional American values,
have simply disappeared from the map. If an Obama could not be
defeated – with his record and his vision of America, in which free
stuff seduces voters – it is hard to envision any change in the
future. The road to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to a
European-socialist economy – those very economies that are collapsing
today in Europe – was paved in this election.

A second cliché that should be retired is that America is a
center-right country. It clearly is not. It is a divided country with
peculiar voting patterns, and an appetite for free stuff. Studies will
invariably show that Republicans in Congress received more total votes
than Democrats in Congress, but that means little. The House of
Representatives is not truly representative of the country. That
people would vote for a Republican Congressmen or Senator and then
Obama for President would tend to reinforce point two above: the
empty-headedness of the electorate. Americans revile Congress but love
their individual Congressmen. Go figure.

The mass media’s complicity in Obama’s re-election cannot be denied.
One example suffices. In 2004, CBS News forged a letter in order to
imply that President Bush did not fulfill his Air National Guard
service during the Vietnam War, all to impugn Bush and impair his
re-election prospects. In 2012, President Obama insisted – famously –
during the second debate that he had stated all along that the Arab
attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi was “terror” (a lie that Romney
fumbled and failed to exploit). Yet, CBS News sat on a tape of an
interview with Obama in which Obama specifically avoided and rejected
the claim of terrorism – on the day after the attack – clinging to the
canard about the video. (This snippet of a “60 Minutes” interview was
not revealed - until two days ago!) In effect, CBS News fabricated
evidence in order to harm a Republican president, and suppressed
evidence in order to help a Democratic president. Simply shameful, as
was the media’s disregard of any scandal or story that could have
jeopardized the Obama re-election.

One of the more irritating aspects of this campaign was its limited
focus, odd in light of the billions of dollars spent. Only a few
states were contested, a strategy that Romney adopted, and that
clearly failed. The Democrat begins any race with a substantial
advantage. The liberal states – like the bankrupt California and
Illinois – and other states with large concentrations of minority
voters as well as an extensive welfare apparatus, like New York, New
Jersey and others – give any Democratic candidate an almost
insurmountable edge in electoral votes. In New Jersey, for example, it
literally does not pay for a conservative to vote. It is not worth the
fuel expended driving to the polls. As some economists have pointed
generally, and it resonates here even more, the odds are greater that
a voter will be killed in a traffic accident on his way to the polls
than that his vote will make a difference in the election. It is an
irrational act. That most states are uncompetitive means that people
are not amenable to new ideas, or new thinking, or even having an open
mind. If that does not change, and it is hard to see how it can
change, then the die is cast. America is not what it was, and will
never be again.

For Jews, mostly assimilated anyway and staunch Democrats, the results
demonstrate again that liberalism is their Torah. Almost 70% voted for
a president widely perceived by Israelis and most committed Jews as
hostile to Israel. They voted to secure Obama’s future at America’s
expense and at Israel’s expense – in effect, preferring Obama to
Netanyahu by a wide margin. A dangerous time is ahead. Under present
circumstances, it is inconceivable that the US will take any
aggressive action against Iran and will more likely thwart any Israeli
initiative. That Obama’s top aide Valerie Jarrett (i.e., Iranian-born
Valerie Jarrett) spent last week in Teheran is not a good sign. The US
will preach the importance of negotiations up until the production of
the first Iranian nuclear weapon – and then state that the world must
learn to live with this new reality. As Obama has committed himself to
abolishing America’s nuclear arsenal, it is more likely that that
unfortunate circumstance will occur than that he will succeed in
obstructing Iran’s plans.

Obama’s victory could weaken Netanyahu’s re-election prospects,
because Israelis live with an unreasonable – and somewhat pathetic –
fear of American opinion and realize that Obama despises Netanyahu. A
Likud defeat – or a diminution of its margin of victory – is more
probable now than yesterday. That would not be the worst thing.
Netanyahu, in fact, has never distinguished himself by having a strong
political or moral backbone, and would be the first to cave to the
American pressure to surrender more territory to the enemy and
acquiesce to a second (or third, if you count Jordan) Palestinian
state. A new US Secretary of State named John Kerry, for example (he
of the Jewish father) would not augur well. Netanyahu remains the best
of markedly poor alternatives. Thus, the likeliest outcome of the
upcoming Israeli elections is a center-left government that will force
itself to make more concessions and weaken Israel – an Oslo III.

But this election should be a wake-up call to Jews. There is no
permanent homeland, nor is there is an enduring haven for Jews
anywhere in the exile. The most powerful empires in history all
crumbled – from the Greeks and the Romans to the British and the
Soviets. None of the collapses were easily foreseen, and yet they were
predictable in retrospect.

The American dream began to decline in 2007, and the deterioration has
been exacerbated in the last five years. This election only hastens
that decline. Society is permeated with sloth, greed, envy and
materialistic excess. It has lost its moorings and its moral
foundations. The takers outnumber the givers, and that will only
increase in years to come. Across the world, America under Bush was
feared but not respected. Under Obama, America is neither feared nor
respected. Radical Islam has had a banner four years under Obama, and
its prospects for future growth look excellent. The “Occupy” riots
across this country in the last two years were mere dress rehearsals
for what lies ahead – years of unrest sparked by the increasing
discontent of the unsuccessful who want to seize the fruits and the
bounty of the successful, and do not appreciate the slow pace of
redistribution.

Two bright sides: Notwithstanding the election results, I arose this
morning, went to shul, davened and learned Torah afterwards. That is
our reality, and that trumps all other events. Our relationship with
God matters more than our relationship with any politician, Republican
or Democrat. And, notwithstanding the problems in Israel, it is time
for Jews to go home, to Israel. We have about a decade, perhaps 15
years, to leave with dignity and without stress. Thinking that it will
always be, because it always was, has been a repetitive and deadly
mistake. America was always the land from which “positive” aliya came
– Jews leaving on their own, and not fleeing a dire situation. But
that can also change. The increase daliya in the last few years is
partly attributable to young people fleeing the high cost of Jewish
living in America. Those costs will only increase in the coming years.
We should therefore draw the appropriate conclusions.

If this election proves one thing, it is that the Old America, as we
knew it, is gone. And, sad for the world, it is not coming back.