There is some dispute over the origins but the sentiment is exactly right:
The danger to America is not Barack Obama, but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools, such as those who made him their president.
These are the sorts of things you have to believe to be considered by the left in the United States at the moment to be part of the far right:
. that governments should not spend more money than they receive
. deficits are a bad thing
. welfare should not be a way of life but should be a form of temporary assistance to those who are in need
. immigration should be regulated by the government which controls the flow of new migrants and ensures that they will be able to make a productive contribution to society
. free enterprise is the best way to manage an economy
I start with this, which is my frequently cited quote from Peggy Noonan from way back in 2011:
The other day a Republican political veteran forwarded me a hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. It read like politics as done by Martians. The ‘Analytics Department’ is looking for ‘predictive Modeling/Data Mining’ specialists to join the campaign’s ‘multi-disciplinary team of statisticians,’ which will use ‘predictive modeling’ to anticipate the behavior of the electorate. ‘We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions.’
There is no secret that the Democrats outhustled the Republicans on the technology of personal access. Here is an article that adds important detail. Picture just how pinpoint accurate the Obama campaign must have been to getting particular messages to particular people:
They created the most sophisticated email fundraising program ever. The digital team, under Rospars leadership, took their data-driven strategy to a new level. Any time you received an email from the Obama campaign, it had been tested on 18 smaller groups and the response rates had been gauged. The campaign thought all the letters had a good chance of succeeding, but the worst-performing letters did only 15 to 20 percent of what the best-performing emails could deliver. So, if a good performer could do $2.5 million, a poor performer might only net $500,000. The genius of the campaign was that it learned to stop sending poor performers.
Obama became the first presidential candidate to appear on Reddit, the massive popular social networking site. And yes, he really did type in his own answers with Goff at his side. One fascinating outcome of the AMA is that 30,000 Redditors registered to vote after President dropped in a link to the Obama voter registration page. Oh, and the campaign also officially has the most tweeted tweet and the most popular Facebook post. Not bad. I would also note that Laura Olin, a former strategist at Blue State Digital who moved to the Obama campaign, ran the best campaign Tumblr the world will probably ever see.
With Davidsen’s help, the Analytics team built a tool they called The Optimizer, which allowed the campaign to buy eyeballs on television more cheaply. They took set-top box (that is to say, your cable or satellite box or DVR) data from Davidsen’s old startup, Navik Networks, and correlated it with the campaign’s own data. This occurred through a third party called Epsilon: the campaign sent its voter file and the television provider sent their billing file and boom, a list came back of people who had done certain things like, for example, watched the first presidential debate. Having that data allowed the campaign to buy ads that they knew would get in front of the most of their people at the least cost. They didn’t have to buy the traditional stuff like the local news, either. Instead, they could run ads targeted to specific types of voters during reruns or off-peak hours.
This is the game as it is now played at the highest levels.
It’s hard to tell whether this opinion piece by Robert Shiller was put up by the Financial Review to remind us of just how stupid some people are or whether it is there because the editors think Shiller gets it exactly right. This is the bit they put on their editorial page:
During the US election campaign, opinion polls consistently showed the economy, especially unemployment, was voters’ No. 1 concern. The Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, sought to capitalise on the issue, asserting: ‘The President’s plans haven’t worked – he doesn’t have a plan to get the economy going.’
Nonetheless, Barack Obama was re-elected. The outcome may reflect the economy’s slight improvement at election time (as happened when Franklin Roosevelt defeated the Republican Alf Landon in 1936, despite the continuing Great Depression). But Obama’s victory might also be a testament to most US voters’ basic sense of economic reality.
I saw this at Andrew Bolt’s blog on election day and my reaction was, it just couldn’t be. Surely there was no one left with their vote not completely tethered at this final hour. Surely the election could not have turned on images of Obama at command central. But if it’s the real thing, if people really did change their vote because of how in command Obama was in the midst of the storm, you’d have to agree that it’s insane. But look at that image and now read this which is from a letter sent to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit:
In keeping with Professor Jacobson’s warning concerning the media’s ‘Operation Demoralize’ campaign, already in full swing, have you noticed how the role of ‘Superstorm Sandy’ in Obama’s win has now largely been buried by the mainstream media? Other than Chris Matthews’ now infamous praising of God for the political gift the storm provided to Obama, and some mention of the AP’s exit poll data showing 42% of those polled reported being positively influenced to vote for Obama based on his purported stellar handling of the emergency response to the storm, Superstorm Sandy has not found its way into many MSM election post mortems. The reason for that should be readily apparent. The mainstream media’s preferred narrative has predictably changed. Now, the Obama victory is being depicted as the result of America’s widespread disapproval and rejection of Republicans and their extremist, white-focused policies and ideology.
A week before the election, the in-the-tank-for-Obama MSM was deeply worried that Romney was going to beat their guy, so they played up Superstorm Sandy and the game-changing effect it was having on the election for all it was worth. Suddenly, Chris Christie was someone to be listened to, ad nauseum, rather than being dismissed as a partisan Republican attack dog. However, with Obama’s re-election now safely in the bag, the MSM would prefer that Americans forget that a freak storm probably averted an Obama loss. Obviously, such a loss would entirely preempt “Operation Demoralize,” and the only thing the MSM enjoys more than helping elect Democrats is predicting doom and despair for Republicans.
‘Operation Demoralize’ completely falls apart if one considers just how close the margin of victory was for Obama in the four swing states that decided the election, and how Superstorm Sandy almost certainly moved enough votes from Romney to Obama to provide the election of victory. In Florida, with nearly 8.3 million ballots cast, the margin of victory was a mere 52,000 votes. Because this U.S. presidential election was a two person race, a takeaway by one candidate from another represents a two vote swing. Accordingly, if somewhere in the order of 26,000 Floridians, out of 8.3 million, decided that they were changing their vote from Romney to Obama based on his supposed ‘heckuva job’ in relation to the storm response, those voters alone decided Florida’s 29 electoral votes. Given the AP exit poll and its 42% figure for those who claimed the storm influenced their decision to vote for Obama, it’s safe to say that Superstorm Sandy threw far more than 26,000 voters into Obama’s column and out of Romney’s.
The same argument can be made in Ohio. 5.3 million votes cast, margin of victory: 103,000. If the storm flipped about 52,000 votes or more from Romney to Obama, then no storm meant Ohio would have been a Romney win on election day.
In Virginia, 3.7 million votes cast, margin of victory: 107,000. If the storm influenced 54,000 voters or more to abandon Romney for Obama, the storm was decisive in converting a Romney win in Virginia to an Obama win.
In Colorado, nearly 2.4 million votes cast, margin of victory: 113,000. If 57,000 voters or more moved from the Romney camp to the Obama camp based on the storm, then Obama doesn’t win the state if the storm never happens.
A Romney win in these four states would have given him the election.
I want to emphasize that these are very small numbers of voters in relation to the overall number of votes cast in these states, and with such a high percentage of voters in the AP poll attributing their vote in large measure to Obama’s positive media coverage from the storm, I don’t think there’s much doubt that Obama loses the election, albeit narrowly, if Superstorm Sandy never happened. But for our illustrious media elites, the truth won’t do, not when such a grand opportunity for another anti-Republican hatchet job has presented itself…
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.
Barack Obama, although having the iciest and coldest of personalities, is noted for his likeability. He is a man of the far far left but is praised as a centralist. He is a divider but has risen to the presidency as someone who can bring the country together. He has had a succession of failed policies with not a success to be found yet people believe he has the answers to the country’s problems and this is so even though he did not propose a single initiative during the whole campaign. He defeated Mitt Romney by blaming George Bush for overseeing the briefest of recessions which ended in 2009. He has received astonishingly little blame for overseeing by far the worst recovery in post-War history which is not in spite of but because of the policies he pursued. He talks about the need to balance the budget while adding five trillion dollars of debt in four years with more to come.
So how did he do it? How did he win re-election. It is a conundrum being widely discussed because Mitt Romney did fairly represent the great traditions of the Republican Party. So far as policy is concerned, in most of the ways that count, there would not be a dime’s worth of difference between Romney and Ronald Reagan. And yet he lost and in the end it wasn’t close.
I have an article at Quadrant Online that tries to deal with this conundrum. This is how the article begins which summarises what comes after:
The confluence of the mendicants, the envious, the abortion lobby, what I will call the cohort of damaged women, and the social sciences know-nothings has proven a formidable combination. They are a new constituency amalgamation that will affect the politics of the United States for the foreseeable future.
And I will again mention the ability that the Obama team had in constructing tailor made policies just for you based on your demographic details. This is Peggy Noonan writing in 2011 in a passage I have quoted time and again because to my mind it explains better than anything else I have come across what happened:
The other day a Republican political veteran forwarded me a hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. It read like politics as done by Martians. The ‘Analytics Department’ is looking for ‘predictive Modeling/Data Mining’ specialists to join the campaign’s ‘multi-disciplinary team of statisticians,’ which will use ‘predictive modeling’ to anticipate the behavior of the electorate. ‘We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions.’
In my view, Gillard will try the same as Obama and quite possibly with the same success. We have already seen how potent labelling opponents as misogynists has been. More of the same to come from the Obama playbook which I discuss in this article at Quadrant Online.
I see the world in much the same way as Rush Limbaugh and have the same worries as he does. His post is titled, “In a Nation of Children, Santa Claus wins” which unfortunately gets to the heart of it. But it doesn’t get to the end of it.
There are larger things here at work. ‘Roughly half voters want the health care law as it is or expanded, and they are voting for Obama.’ Really? I haven’t seen a poll like that anywhere. Every poll — every poll! — I have seen on Obamacare features a majority and close to 60% who don’t like it, but this is an exit poll of people who voted.
‘People who say they are looking for a strong leader and someone who has more of a vision for the future support Romney. Romney even wins among voters voting for “a candidate who shares my values.” Voters believe the economy’s weak and Romney will be better able to manage the economy.’ Now, this is for people the exit pollers say, this is the reason if Romney wins. This is why. Well, obviously, those people were vastly outnumbered, which is where we are today.
We’re outnumbered.
That’s it. In a democracy numbers is all that counts and we are outnumbered.
A bit of an early post mortem on the American election but we have to start somewhere. Possibly the most crucial determinant of the result is that the American voting population is now inhabited in very large numbers by those who believe the world owes them a living and that someone else having more than they do is in itself a wrong that needs to be righted. There is, however, more to it than that.
The confluence of the mendicants, the envious, the abortion lobby, what I will call the cohort of damaged women, and the social sciences know-nothings has proven a formidable combination. They are a new constituency amalgamation that will affect the politics of the United States for the foreseeable future.
The Mendicants
So far as those who vote for a living are concerned one can understand why they are voting as they do. There are more of them than ever as their numbers have been propagated by leftist parties everywhere with the specific aim of building near-majority voting blocks. And this they have done. Whether it brings ruin to the country is merely a detail and as ruin is so slow, the present political class hopes to be gone and done before things really do fall about their heads. That was the view of the Roosevelt generation as it had been for those who took their lead from Lyndon Johnson. But now, with the $16 trillion debt and another trillion added each year, this may be the generation that finally does have to pay the price. Greece is more than a metaphor. It is an example of what really can happen when public spending moves beyond control. But in the meantime, there are large parts of the electorate voting for the services and goods that the government promises to distribute to them. Romney nearly having won after making it clear that he intended to withdraw the supposedly free healthcare was a sign of the residual good sense in much of the voting population but this 47% as he named them are a hard bunch to pry loose from their spoils. It may take an outcome no different from Greece, where the Government point blank can no longer afford to pay for its promises, that may well be the only way this will ever end.
The Resentful and the Envious
The resentful and the envious are the second cohort; they are the ones who had been instructed to vote for “revenge”. That Obama used precisely that word was seen as a blunder by those who had no idea just how potent the word was. This had been market tested and focused grouped to an extraordinary degree and was launched just when it was meant to have its greatest effect, just before the election itself. It is a word that makes little impact on people who are generally satisfied with their lives. The dangers in it went right past the Romney campaign team just as you might think. They even put the word revenge into their own ads and spread far and wide the very concept Obama was himself trying to promote.
It may strike the wrong tone for us, but for those who are worm eaten with envy, they understood the point very well indeed. They were there in their numbers with no greater aim in mind than to bring down those whom they resent and envy for their perceived success in life. For those who were never going to vote for Obama anyway, it was just one more reason amongst all of the others. For those towards whom the desire for vengeance was aimed, it found its mark and made them into broken glass Democrats. They were motivated to make sure Romney was never going to win if they had anything to do with it, and they did have something to do with it and Romney did indeed lose.
The Abortion Rights Lobby
An important component of this part of the Democrat program is the bringing into the fold what I describe as “damaged women”. This is a relatively new phenomenon in politics which has existed in various forms before now but has emerged only recently as a formidable force for right of centre parties to have to deal with. It is a product of the feminism of the 1960s which unmoored women from their traditional roles but had as its most significant element the “sexual revolution”, a change in social mores euphemistically known as “sexual liberation” but which is anything but. It has made the abortion rights issue possibly the greatest gift ever for the Democrats in the US.
And here is the thing. The likelihood that the Republicans would even attempt to do anything about “reproductive rights” cannot be seriously entertained. The ability to restrict a woman’s ability to secure an abortion, in New York or California let us say, would require a Republican to be elected with the expressed intent of limiting abortion, who would then make appointments to the Supreme Court dependent on this one feature in a judge’s CV. This judge would need to receive approval in the Senate and having done so would then need to form part of a majority decision to repeal Roe and Wade. Having repealed Roe and Wade there would then have to be legislation passed to make abortion illegal and we are talking about New York and California when such legislation would be unlikely to pass a single state house in the United States. Thus, the probability of any of this ever happening, whoever might become the president, is precisely zero. Abortion rights are as secure as, indeed more secure even than the right to bear arms. It might as well be in the Constitution given how literally impossible it would be to change the circumstances for abortion in any significant way, never mind the availability of contraception.
Damaged Women
And what’s more, everyone knows it. Anyone who votes based on some concern that the Republican party would be capable of making this change even if it wished to is living in a world of paranoia and might as well be worried about asking the government to protect them from men from Mars. The reality, however, is more closely represented by this video which is funny in a very unfunny way. Do not play this in an office environment and make sure you turn the volume down. I also give you a bad language alert. But the point is massive.
Miss 31 voted for Obama and is representative of the women who are in massive agreement with their cries of misogyny and the lack of respect for women. There is no point going too far into this, but the most influential social philosopher of the twentieth century was Hugh Hefner and his Playboy Philosophy. You would have to be at least as old as I am to recall what a shock it was to read Hefner’s “philosophy” in the pages of Playboy back when I was about 14 in the 1960s. Here’s the gist. All those uptight girls hanging onto their virginity ought to liberate themselves and get into the sexual scrum with the boys. In an era when a goodnight kiss was a big deal this was magic. And with the likes of Germaine Greer and her buddies saying the same just as the birth control pill was becoming readily available, a new world opened for which neither the young women of the time nor the young men were really prepared.
But who has come out of this genuinely hurt by the changed attitude to women. Both men and women are worse for it, but if you ask me, it is women who have been psychologically damaged far more than the men. And I suspect Miss 29 has not avoided the deep and fearsome pains of commitment-free sexual relations either.
These are the attitudes that Obama was tapping into. Watching the Middle East burn and the American economy trashed by debt and deficits are irrelevant to such women whose anger is beyond all understanding, particularly for men of my and Romney’s generation.
Social Sciences Know Nothings
And then, finally, there are the social sciences know nothings. It is a term I have put together for want of something better. They too love power but have no way to gain it other than through the words they use. These are the armchair Marxists and social revolutionaries of the couch. All talk and no action, but there is plenty of talk. They produce little and their value added is minimal in comparison with the serious producers of the world. They have read the literature of the left, they have thought their shallow thoughts, and they are irritated that the riches of the world have gone to people who never graduated from universities and who might be unable to string five sentences together in a single paragraph. These are your academics and media types who, in their own way, may be the most envious and resentful of the lot.
And it has been clear from the start that the media have understood exactly how bad Obama has been because they have known with precision exactly what parts of what Obama has done or said that have required their cover. Obama has had to lie over Benghazi and so they have covered for him to the maximum extent they can. Obama tells producers “you didn’t build that” and the media runs dead with the quote so that it never really becomes as significant as it ought to be. They know exactly how dreadful Obama has been, and cannot even manufacture a greater good that their lies and distortions have protected the community from having to do without should Obama lose this election in spite of everything they have done.
We are in dangerous times. Obama and Gillard are two of a kind. Empty of ability, proven failures at everything they have tried to achieve, but nevertheless able to command majorities in the legislative systems of our two nations. But the American election is the one that will matter most and whose outcome will resonate far into the future in ways that are incalculable. Re-electing Obama has endangered our way of life and may even make it unsustainable. Electing Mitt Romney would have given at least the possibility of putting us back on a more stable path. It is an option that has now been closed forever. It is the alternative future that because of the election will never be allowed to happen.
The voting has started for real. That Obama is the favourite and Mitt Romney remains an outside chance is a catastrophe for America whether Romney wins or not. The country’s voting population is now inhabited by those who believe the world owes them a living and that someone else having more than they do is in itself a wrong that needs to be righted.
The confluence of the medicants, the envious and the social sciences know-nothings has proven a formidable combination. So far as those who vote for a living are concerned one can understand why they are voting as they do. There are more than ever as their numbers have been propogated by leftist parties everywhere with the specific aim of building near-majority voting blocks. And this they have done. Whether it brings ruin to the country is merely a detail and as ruin is so slow, the present political class will be gone and done before things really do fall about their heads. That was the view of the Roosevelt generation as it had been for those who took their lead from Lyndon Johnson. But now, with the $16 trillion debt and another trillion added each year, this may be the generation that finally does have to pay the price. Greece is more than a metaphor. It is an example of what really can happen when public spending moves beyond control.
The resentful and the envious are the cohort who have been instructed to vote for revenge. This was a market tested word that makes little impact on people who are generally satisfied with their lives. But for those who are worm eaten with envy, they understand their instructions very well indeed. They will be there in their numbers with no greater aim in mind than to bring down to their level those whom they resent and envy for their success and joy of life.
And then, finally, the social sciences know nothings. It is a term I have put together for want of something better. They too love power but have no way to gain it other than through the words they use. They produce little and their value added is minimal in comparison with the serious producers of the world. They have read the literature of the left, they have thought their shallow thoughts, and they are irritated that the riches of the world have gone to people who never graduated from universities and who might be unable to string five sentences together in a single paragraph. These are your academics and media types who, in their own way, may be the most envious and resentful of the lot.
And it has been clear from the start that the media types have understood exactly how bad Obama has been because they have known with precision exactly what parts of what Obama has done or said that have required their cover. Obama has had to lie over Benghazi and so they have covered for him to the maximum extent they can. Obama tells producers “you didn’t build that” and the media runs dead with the quote so that it never really becomes as significant as it ought to be. They know exactly how dreadful Obama has been, and cannot even manufacture a greater good that their lies and distortions have protected the community from having to do without should Obama lose this election in spite of everything they have done.
We shall see how things go today. I of course hope Romney becomes president but the frightening part is just how flimsy any majority he creates really is. He is strangely the only person in the entire United States who I think could have run Obama such a close race. He is untouchable so far as his personal life is concerned. The politics of personal destruction, a specialty of the left, were utterly wasted on Romney. Not for failing to try, but there was nothing that really worked.
Beyond his personal virtues, Romney has exactly the expertise required to repair the American economy. What he learned at Bain was how to rescue enterprises which were on the point of failure. If ever the United States was in need of such a person to take control of its government, this is the time.
Romney moreover has a history of working with others to achieve common objectives. His term as governor of Massachusetts was exemplary. Obama is a divider and a hater. Romney is someone who can bring people together and has shown personal qualities of leadership in every part of past life.
But we are in dangerous times. Obama and Gillard are two of a kind. Empty of ability, proven failures at everything they have tried to achieve, but nevertheless able to command majorities in the legislative systems of our two nations. But the American election is the one that will matter most and whose outcome will resonate far into the future in ways that are incalculable. Re-electing Obama would endanger our way of life and may even make it unsustainable. Electing Mitt Romney gives us at least the possibility of putting us back on a more stable path. We shall soon enough know who is to be the president through until January 2017.
Law of Markets 