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Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard with a nice send off for Christopher Hitchens.
No secrets are being divulged when I report that Christopher Hitchens liked a drink every now and then. Preferably now. He wasn’t sloppy about it. In fact, he always seemed in perfect control. (I once saw him steer a beach bike through the streets of Key West without spilling his Scotch.) He just liked to keep the machine well-oiled so he could get on to more important things, like liberating oppressed peoples of the world, knocking out his 1,000 words a day, or starting fights with God, assuming there is one, which he didn’t. In some ways, his affection for drink brought us together, setting in motion my most vivid memories of him.
As the Iraq War kicked off in 2003, I was holed up in the Kuwait City Hilton—home to unembedded reporters looking to make their way in. While I’d only briefly met Hitchens once before, word had spread through mutual friends that my hotel room was the last cantina in town. Since the border being sealed meant the black market hooch supply had dried up, we smuggled our amber past customs officials in Listerine bottles. So when Hitchens showed up at my door early one morning kitted for battle with nothing more than his black leather jacket, blue jeans, and a half-smoked pack of Rothman’s (he refused to bring Kevlar, saying it made him feel “like a counterfeit”), I offered him a welcome-to-the-war shot of “Listerine,” just to be hospitable.
“I don’t usually start this early,” he said, his glass already gratefully extended, “but holding yourself to a drinking schedule is always the first sign of alcoholism.” …
We start an extended section on Obama’s re-elect chances with an article in the National Journal by Ron Brownstein. To be fair we start with a center left publication.
There’s an ominous trend for President Obama in the latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll: not only is his overall approval rating lagging, but he’s lost as much (or even more) ground among groups that favored him in 2008 as among those who resisted him last time.
The chart at left compares Obama’s vote among key groups in 2008, according to exit polls, and his job approval rating among them in the latest Heartland Monitor released Thursday morning. (The survey, conducted by FTI Strategic Communications, polled 1200 adults by landline telephone and cell phone from November 30 to December 4 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.)
Overall, Obama has slipped from 52.8 percent of the vote in 2008 to 44 percent approval in the new survey with 49 percent disapproving. As the chart shows, Obama has declined not only in the groups that were always dubious of him, but also with several that enthusiastically joined his winning 2008 majority.
In 2008, Obama assembled what I called a “coalition of the ascendant” – by which I meant he did best among groups that were themselves growing rapidly in society, particularly minorities, the vast Millennial Generation, and the growing ranks of college-educated whites, especially women. Several of those groups have noticeably cooled on him. Obama’s approval rating is now 12 percentage points lower than his 2008 share of the vote among young adults (aged 18-29); 11 points lower among African-Americans; and 10 points lower among college-educated white women. …
Chris Stirewalt of Fox News reports on polls that attend to states, not groups.
In the dozen swing states where voters will decide the 2012 presidential election, a new Gallup/USA Today poll shows President Obama losing to the current Republican frontrunners by significant margins.
Obama trailed Mitt Romney by 5 points, 43 percent to 48 percent and trailed Newt Gingrich by 3 points, 45 percent to 48 percent, in the survey of these 12 battleground states
It’s a pretty big deal.
While Obama continues to tie or lead national polls, his performance in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin matters more. And there, things are not so good for the incumbent.
Part of the gap with the national numbers can be explained by the fractious, boom-and-bust Republican nominating process. While the overwhelming number of Democrats in deep-blue states already know who their nominee will be next year, Republicans are still squabbling amongst themselves in bright-red states like Georgia and Texas. That will change after there is a nominee and the national number for the GOP standard bearer will even out.
But the biggest problem for Obama is that he is underperforming his national number by so much in the swing states. Compared to his national number, his score falls by 4 points against Gingrich and 5 points against Romney. While Obama believes he can drive down the support for whoever the Republican nominee may be, it seems unlikely that he can get his own numbers up very much. …
James Pethokoukis graphically illustrates Obama’s troubles.
And Reuters notes a Harvard poll showing re-elect problems.
… Harvard surveyed voters age 18 to 29, a group known as Millennials because many were born just before the turn of the millennium in 2000.
They supported Obama over a generic Republican candidate by 6 percentage points. His margin widened to about 11 percentage points if he faces Romney in a general election and to 16 percentage points if his opponent is Gingrich or Texas Governor Rick Perry, the survey said.
But 18 to 29-year-olds have become disillusioned with his job performance, the survey showed. Some 36 percent predict Obama will lose reelection, 30 percent said he will win and 32 percent are unsure.
Less than half of those polled approve of the job Obama is doing and their view of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress is slipping as well, according to the survey.
Only 12 percent of young Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction and less than one-third of those polled approve of the way Obama is managing the economy, results showed.
The web-based survey of 2,028 U.S. citizens age 18 to 29 was conducted between November 23 and December 3. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. …
Switching subjects, Pethokoukis quotes a FT article on problems in our economy.
1. From the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, 450,000-550,000 new businesses with at least one employee were created in the US each year. In 2009, the latest year for which records are available, there were just 400,000.
2. More recent numbers suggest that the climate has not improved: the number of incorporated self-employed people, a measure of the health of small businesses, was 5.06m in November, down from 5.37m in November 2009, official figures say.
3. As the rate of new company formation has been slowing, the number of jobs created by each start-up has been falling too – again a trend that began well before the start of the recession. The result is that the total number of jobs created by start-ups, which had been running at 3m-3.5m per year, dropped to just 2.3m in 2009.
4. For most of the 1990s, job creation ran at about 8 percent of employment, with job destruction a little lower at about 7.5 per cent, as the total number of people in work rose. Starting in about 2000, both job creation and destruction began to drift downwards, and carried on falling even as employment recovered after the 2000-01 recession. Job destruction has fallen and is now well below its rate in the 1990s, when the economy was much stronger. Job creation, however, also remains very weak, at only about 6.5 percent of employment. That statistic is the immediate cause of America’s persistently high unemployment.
Spengler catches Tom Friedman looking particularly stupid. We quote from this extensively since it hits the nail on the head when it comes to American universities.
That Thomas Friedman would spout stupidity and anti-Semitism surprises me no more than the appearance of a gumball after I put a quarter into the machine and turn the knob. But one line in the New York Times’ calumnist’s (sic) Dec. 13 tantrum against Israel was worth a double-take:
“I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby. The real test is what would happen if Bibi tried to speak at, let’s say, the University of Wisconsin. My guess is that many students would boycott him and many Jewish students would stay away, not because they are hostile but because they are confused.”
Why on earth is the “real test” at the University of Wisconsin? For liberals, the only people who count are the smart people, because it is an article of faith that social engineering can fix all the world’s problems, and a logical conclusion that only smart people qualify as social engineers. It doesn’t matter what the dumb people think. They are the ones who need to be socially engineered. To Friedman, it is irrelevant whether Americans at large support Israel by a 4:1 margin or better, and that support for Israel is growing steadily, as the Gallup Poll consistently shows:
That poll includes dumb people, so it doesn’t count. To Friedman, what matters is what university audiences might think. …
… The American university system exists for the most part to produce the social engineers who will fix all the world’s problems. During the 1960s, those of us who had the misfortune to attend the better colleges were taught that our mission was to make the world perfect, through the Great Society, arms control, internationalism, disarmament, and so forth. When the Vietnam War and the urban riots of the 1960s showed that the liberalism of our elders had not fixed the world’s problems, we abominated them, and pursued even more radical versions of social engineering. The radicalization of the universities produced a generation of clever people unsuited to productive activity in the real world but skilled at bloviating, and they became the tenured faculty of today. And their salaries, privileges, and perks continued to grow to the point that $50,000 in annual tuition barely covers them. Overall CPI is up 70% since 1990, but tuition and fees have risen by 300%. …
… Rather than produce smart people, the university system has dumbed America down. After two generations of academic wheel-spinning, the transformation of universities into Maoist re-education camps with beer kegs has ruined their practical value. The giant sucking sound you hear is the air going out of the higher education bubble. As the New York Times reported in a Nov. 23 feature, “One of the greatest changes is that a college degree is no longer the guarantor of a middle-class existence. Until the early 1970s, less than 11 percent of the adult population graduated from college, and most of them could get a decent job. Today nearly a third have college degrees, and a higher percentage of them graduated from non-elite schools. A bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability.”
Student loans, with a default rate of 8.8%, are the new subprime debt.
The only good news here is that liberal mainstream culture can’t afford to brainwash as many American kids as it used to. Prof. Harvey Mansfield of Harvard University likes to say that the big question in American politics is whether the red states can produce kids faster than professors from the blue states can corrupt them. …
… long before demographics catch up with liberal culture and extinguish it, like the post-Alexandrine Greeks or the 5th-century Romans, the economic destruction wrought by liberal education will have impoverished most of a generation of American young people.
Instapundit notes a change at the NY Times;
The New York Times Company today abruptly announced that its 61-year-old chief executive officer, Janet Robinson, will leave at the end of the year, with no permanent successor lined up.
An SEC filing says Ms. Robinson will get $4.5 million plus health insurance for a 12-month retirement and consulting agreement, including “two-year non-competition, non-solicitation and non-disparagement covenants, a three-year cooperation covenant and an indefinite confidentiality covenant.”
The Times itself reported that Ms. Robinson’s pay in 2009 was $4.9 million, so she’ll earn almost as much as a retired consultant as as a full-time CEO.
The handy investment calculator on the Times corporate Web site shows that $10,000 invested in NYT stock the day Ms. Robinson took over as CEO, on December 27, 2004, would be worth $1,855.14 today, a decline of 81.45%. The price of the stock went from $40.59 when she took over to $7.53 today, and though some dividends were paid out early in her tenure as CEO, the dividend has since been suspended.
Consequences for failure are for the little people.
Mad Magazine has a cover that catches the spirit of the Obama administration.