The Opinionated Old Man

Monday, September 3, 2012

The Obama Conundrum

I’ll go out on a limb and predict that Obama will lose the general election by a landslide. Here’s why. The campaign has to take one of two positions on the economy: 1) The economy is better now than when he took office or 2) It is worse.

Arguing that the economy is better has two problems. Firstly, that argument is easily refuted. Taking that position calls into question the credibility of the proponent. The unemployment rate is higher and climbing, according to The Bureau of Labor Statistics.¹ Average national gasoline prices are $3.80 today, up from $1.80 on inauguration day.² Food prices are up 48% since February 2009.³ Perhaps the biggest drag on the economy is the housing crisis. Home foreclosure rates during the term have been sky high. And there is no end in sight - nearly 13 million home loans are underwater - meaning the loan balance is more than the house is worth, and are ticking time bombs.⁴ And the housing industry has widespread influence on other major parts of the economy.

But more important than the actual data is whether families think they are better off. In an August 22nd USA Today/Gallup poll, when asked “Are you and your family better off now than you were four year ago?”, 55% of the respondents said “No”, 42% said “Yes” and 3% didn’t know.⁵

Secondly, with such a dismal economy, Obama can’t run on his record. So the only thing left for the campaign to do is attack the Romney/Ryan ticket. And according to some, the attack approach is a losing proposition. On Friday two prominent Democratic strategists, Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen, in a Fox News interview, said that the negative tone of the Obama campaign is wearing thin on the public and on swing voters in particular. They are both seasoned Democratic strategists, and are not of the chew-the-opponents-legs-off-to-the-knees ilk but actually say sensible things. When asked what Obama has to do to win, they both agreed that Obama has to change the tone to a positive one. I agree - continuing to argue that the economy has improved and attacking Romney will guarantee Obama’s defeat.

So what if Obama sees the light and takes the second position – that the economy is worse than when he took office? I believe this could be a winning approach. Voters place a lot of respect in someone who can accept responsibility for his actions and propose a change of direction, a new plan. But will he do it? Misters Caddell and Schoen both agreed that in order to win, Obama has to be humble and acknowledge that not everything has been perfect, and admit his mistake in rejecting the Simpson-Bowles commission recommendations. Well I think Hell will freeze over before Obama admits a mistake or appears humble. His extreme narcissism will not allow him to do that. He just can't do it. And as for turning from negative campaigning, he is out of the Chicago political mold, and once a Chicago politician, always a Chicago politician. Both Pat and Doug said that they've seen no indication that Obama will pivot to the center and do what is necessary to get elected. And early coverage of the Democratic National Convention and recent stump speeches by Obama confirm that he is digging in on his position and upping the intensity of the Romney-would-destroy-the-country attack.

I used the word “landslide” in the opening sentence. Obama and Romney are neck-and-neck in the polls. So why do I think there’ll be a landslide for Romney? I’m basing that prediction on the current economy and its similarity to what happened in 1980. Carter was a first-term Democratic president, just like Obama. The economy was dismal, similar to now, but perhaps not even as bad. Two weeks before the election, a Gallup poll showed that Jimmy Carter was at 47% and Ronald Reagan 39%. Reagan won by a landslide, receiving the highest number of electoral votes ever won by a non-incumbent presidential candidate.⁶ It is a mathematical fact that because of their margin of error, in a tight race polls are very unreliable at predicting landslides.

References

1 United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment rate, 16 years and older, 2009 through August, 2012

http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet

2 Historical price charts for gasoline, Average Retail Price

http://gasbuddy.com/gb_retail_price_chart.aspx

3 Mundi Commodity Food Price Index, Feb 2009 – Jul 2012

http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=food-price-index&months=60

4 USA Today, “More homes faced foreclosure risk in June”

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/story/2012-07-12/US-foreclosure-rates/56162704/1

5 Fox News Insider, “Are You Better Off Now Than You Were 4 Years Ago?”

http://foxnewsinsider.com/2012/08/22/are-you-better-off-now-than-you-were-4-years-ago/

6 Wikipedia, United States presidential election, 1980

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1980

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Quotable quotes

In 1794, when Congress appropriated $15,000 to assist some French refugees, James Madison, the father of our Constitution, stood on the floor of the House to object, saying, "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."

James Madison

"No, my friend, the way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to. Let the national government be entrusted with the defence of the nation, and its foreign and federal relations; the State governments with the civil rights, laws, police, and administration of what concerns the State generally; the counties with the local concerns of the counties, and each ward direct the interests within itself. It is by dividing and subdividing these republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations, until it ends in the administration of every man's farm by himself; by placing under every one what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best. What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and power into one body..."

Thomas Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell, 2 Feb.

"God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it." -Daniel Webster

"1. It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

2. Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.

3. Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.

4. Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.

5. One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.

6. The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers.

7. The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

8. The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

9. What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long."

10. More than a century and a half of ignoring downturns in the economy never produced a depression as deep or as long as the 1930s depression, with its many federal interventions, first under Herbert Hoover and then under Franklin D. Roosevelt."

Thomas Sowell

"“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Mark Twain

"There is no constitutional authority for two-thirds to three-quarters of what Congress does." - Walter E. Williams, Constitutional Awakening, 3/24/2010

"The care, therefore, of every man's soul belongs unto himself, and is to be left unto himself. But what if he neglect the care of his soul? I answer: What if he neglect the care of his health or of his estate, which things are nearlier related to the government of the magistrate than the other? Will the magistrate provide by an express law that such a one shall not become poor or sick? Laws provide, as much as is possible, that the goods and health of subjects be not injured by the fraud and violence of others; they do not guard them from the negligence or ill-husbandry of the possessors themselves. No man can be forced to be rich or healthful whether he will or no." - John Locke, A Letter concerning Toleration, 1689

"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” - Winston Churchill

"To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality." From "General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, translated by John Beverly Robinson (London: Freedom Press, 1923), pp. 293-294." — Pierre Joseph Proudhon

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote"-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action." - George Washington

"Among the many infirmities of age is omniscience." - Thomas Sowell, Random Thoughts

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years." - Anonymous (although see: "The Truth About Tytler" )

"...if you STILL believe that our Constitution isn't under attack, well, then you've probably never read it." - Glenn Beck - 8/18/2009

"There exists a law, not written down anywhere, but inborn in our hearts; a law which comes to us not by training or custom or reading but by derivation and absorption and adoption from nature itself; a law which has come to us not from theory but from practice, not by instruction but by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays it down that, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right." - Cicero - approx. 2000 years ago

"The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left." - Ecc 10:2 , King Soloman, NIV

"The people who go around talking about their soft hearts - I admire them for their soft hearts, but unfortunately it very often extends to their heads as well." Milton Friedman, 1912 - 2006. For the full quote:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6813529239937418232&

"Friend, you cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. And what one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government can’t give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody. And when half of the people get the idea they don’t have to work because the other half’s going to take care of them, and when the other half get the idea it does no good to work because somebody’s going to get what I work for, that, dear friend, is about the end of any nation.” - Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931 - 2005

"As the expression goes, when a Republican becomes a Democrat, the average IQ increases on both sides of the aisle." -Ann Coulter, Guilty - Liberal "Victims" and their Assault on America, 2008

I enjoy the humor I find in daily life. Here's the latest example. Yesterday I replaced a burned-out belt on our vacuum cleaner. I found this on the belt wrapper: "IMPORTANT: Turn vacuum cleaner OFF before replacing belt." I'm so glad I read that, as it kept me from perhaps loosing fingers trying to put the belt on a rapidly-spining motor shaft and connecting the belt to a round beater bar wrapped with vicious brushes!

"The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little." - Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." - Mark Twain, a Biography

"Ought not then the right of each successive generation to be guaranteed against the dissipations and corruptions of those preceding, by a fundamental provision in our Constitution? And if that has not been made, does it exist the less, there being between generation and generation as between nation and nation no other law than that of nature? And is it the less dishonest to do what is wrong because not expressly prohibited by written law? Let us hope our moral principles are not yet in that stage of degeneracy, and that in instituting the system of finance to be hereafter pursued we shall adopt the only safe, the only lawful and honest one, of borrowing on such short terms of reimbursement of interest and principal as will fall within the accomplishment of our own lives." --Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, 1813. ME 13:357

Paraphrase: It is immoral to pass national debt on to our children's generation.

"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. -- I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer." — Benjamin Franklin - 1766

http://www.historycarper.com/resources/twobf3/price.htm

Monday, September 3, 2012

The Obama Conundrum

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