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Mark Steyn writes about President Future.

One of the reasons why Barack Obama is regarded as the greatest orator of our age is that he’s always banging on about some other age yet to come — e.g., the Future! A future of whose contours he is remarkably certain and boundlessly confident: The future will belong to nations that invest in education because the children are our future, but the future will not belong to nations that do not invest in green-energy projects because solar-powered prompters are our future, and most of all the future will belong to people who look back at the Obama era and marvel that there was a courageous far-sighted man willing to take on the tough task of slowing the rise of the oceans because the future will belong to people on viable land masses. This futuristic shtick is a cheap’n’cheesy rhetorical device (I speak as the author of a book called “After America,” whose title is less futuristic than you might think) but it seems to play well with the impressionable Obammysoxers of the press corps.

And so it was with President Obama’s usual visionary, inspiring, historic, etc., address to the U.N. General Assembly the other day: “The future must not belong to those who bully women,” he told the world, in a reference either to Egyptian clitoridectomists or the Republican party, according to taste. “The future must not belong to those who target Coptic Christians,” he added. You mean those Muslim guys? Whoa, don’t jump to conclusions. “The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam,” he declared, introducing to U.S. jurisprudence the novel concept of being able to slander a bloke who’s been dead for getting on a millennium and a half now. If I understand correctly the cumulative vision of the speech, the future will belong to gay feminist ecumenical Muslims. You can take that to the bank. But make no mistake, as he would say, and in fact did: “We face a choice between the promise of the future or the prisons of the past, and we cannot afford to get it wrong.” Because if we do, we could spend our future living in the prisons of the past, which we forgot to demolish in the present for breach of wheelchair-accessibility codes.

And the crowd went wild! Well, okay, they didn’t. They’re transnational bureaucrats on expense accounts, so they clapped politely, and then nipped out for a bathroom break before the president of Serbia. But, if I’d been one of the globetrotting bigwigs fortunate enough to get an invite — the prime minister of Azerbaijan, say, or the deputy tourism minister of Equatorial Guinea — I would have responded: Well, maybe the future will belong to those who empower women and don’t diss Mohammed. But maybe it’ll belong to albino midgets who wear pink thongs. Who knows? Que sera sera, whatever will be will be, the future’s not ours to see. But one thing we can say for certain is that the future will not belong to broke losers. You’re the brokest guy in the room, you’re the president of Brokistan. You’ve got to pay back $16 trillion just to get back to having nothing, nada, zip. Who the hell are you to tell us who the future’s going to belong to?

The excitable lads around the globe torching American embassies with impunity seem to have figured this out, even if the striped-pants crowd at TurtleBay are too polite to mention it.  Obama is not the president of the Future. He is president right now, and one occasionally wishes the great visionary would take his eye off the far-distant horizon where educated women and fire-breathing imams frolic and gambol side by side around their Chevy Volts, to focus on the humdrum present where the rest of us have the misfortune to live. …

Yesterday Charles Krauthammer wanted Mitt to go large. Now Josh Kraushaar suggests it is time for Romney to think outside the box.

Rereading Walter Isaacson’s biography of the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, it’s hard not be struck by one passage illustrating the late Apple CEO’s philosophy about focus groups and survey data: He ignored it. In his mind, he had a vision for what the iPhone should look like, and it was his job to convince consumers that they absolutely needed a touch-screen phone that could play music and surf the Internet, even though few people were clamoring for it.

Mitt Romney’s struggling campaign could use a little of the Jobs business plan — coming up with a grand vision for the future and making a case for it throughout the country. Instead, the candidate with the mind of a consultant has become obsessed with persuading the micro-demographic groups who remain undecided. So there’s an ad about coal in Ohio and Virginia, a “Dear Daughter” ad transparently trying to win over women, and even a Republican National Committee ad featuring a female Hispanic voter “breaking up” with a cardboard cutout of President Obama.  

Micro-targeting has worked like a charm for Obama’s campaign, which has avoided talking about the president’s record in favor of mobilizing a base of young voters, minorities, and abortion rights-supporting women to carve out a bare majority. But it’s a questionable strategy for his Republican challenger, who badly needs an overarching vision that appeals to Americans dissatisfied with Obama’s performance in office and struggling in a stagnant economy.

If Bill Clinton served as Team Obama’s masterful defense lawyer at the Democratic National Convention, there’s been little attempt since by the Romney campaign to rebut the argument that Obama’s doing the best he can under the troubling circumstances he inherited. There’s little attempt at making the connection between the president’s unpopular first-term policies — the health care law, the stimulus bill, cap-and-trade energy regulations — and the sorry state of the U.S. economy. …

Human Events on the people leaving California.

… Business owners talk not just about the costs, but about harassment by myriad government tax and regulatory agencies that often treat them like criminals. Freedom is on the decline as government gains more authority to micromanage virtually everything. Just check out the kind of bills the governor is now signing into law. (I love Steve Breen’s cartoon, which says, “If you’re a Californian and want to start a small business, there are a number of different routes you could take.” It then shows the various Interstate highways that lead to other states.)

Yet Brown insists that California is still “the land of dreams.” And some academics say the talk about a California exodus to other states is not true. In May, University of Southern California Professor Dowell Myers argued that we shouldn’t believe “the tales of gloom. Californians aren’t fleeing.” The main problem, he wrote, is Californians don’t spend enough public money on schools.

This is where I want to bang my head against the wall. There have been some reductions in per-pupil public-school spending from 2008, given California’s budget problems.

But these reductions come after massive spending increases in previous years and Prop. 98 mandates 40 percent of the general fund goes to K-14 education. Schooling is so important, yet California’s leaders have been resistant to imposing the real reforms that will improve schools through competition and teacher testing — ideas that run afoul of the powerful California Teachers Association.

Despite these delusions, productive people are leaving and they will do so more rapidly if this “just tax and spend more” advice is followed.

A new study from the Manhattan Institute called “The Great California Exodus: A Closer Look” offers a reality check. Yes, Californians are fleeing mostly for pro-growth states with a better tax and regulatory climate. California used to be a destination state, but has outsourced 3.4 million residents in the past 22 years. …

Late Night from Andrew Malcolm.

Fallon: Stevie Wonder will do a fundraiser for President Obama this month. And then Stevie will return to his other gig — as an NFL replacement ref.

Conan: Patriots Coach Bill Belichick got so mad about a call by a replacement referee he grabbed his arm. Fortunately Belichick was stopped by the ref’s seeing-eye dog.

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Telegraph Blogs, UK with the top ten moments in US debates.

1. The first televised presidential debate was a turning point in the tight battle between John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 – but not because of what either candidate said. Kennedy oozed charm and confidence. Nixon, who was just out of hospital, applied chemist store make-up to his five o-clock shadow, looked pale and shifty and perspired heavily. Presidential candidates opted not to appear in televised debates for the next 16 years.

2. In 1976, President Gerald Ford bewilderingly insisted: “”There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.” He lost shortly afterwards to Jimmy Carter.

3. Ronald Reagan, the former Hollywood star, was not surprisingly a natural in front of the cameras. In 1980, he fatally wounded Carter with his delivery of the simplest question to viewers. “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The Romney ticket is asking the same question this year.

4. In 1984, Democrats tried to make Reagan’s age an election issue – at 73, he was America’s oldest president and had performed shakily in his first debate with Walter Mondale. But when asked about his age in the final debate, he replied: “I want you to know also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Even his rival laughed and shortly afterwards Reagan swept the country. …

Newt Gingrich has much on past debates and some advice.

… Newt’s advice: Relax and be prepared

I tell the stories to make the point that too much debate preparation is cognitive, fact-filled, rational and focused on verbal game playing.

The most important aspect of a debate is how you feel.

Mike Deaver, the great media adviser to President Reagan, used to assert that television is 85 percent visual, 10 percent how you sound and 5 percent what you say.

In every Presidential debate I participated in I always remembered Deaver’s rule.

More important than what Romney knows is how he feels.

Is he confident?

Is he relaxed?

Is he in command of himself?

Can he stand up to both the media and the president?

These body language issues are far more important than the specific things he says.

Be assertive and be on offense against both Obama and his media

You can be on offense without being offensive.

The strongest reactions I got to my debates came from people who were desperate for someone to stand up to the media and redefine the questions and reframe the assumptions.

Americans are sick and tired of the unending liberalism and suffocating groupthink of the elite media.

If you look at my strongest applause lines virtually every one was taking on the media. …

Interesting post from Pajamas Media on 10 things to expect from the first debate.

The very poor, a battle of government-run healthcare, “economic patriotism,” and much more!

With Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) portraying Mitt Romney and Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) acting as President Obama, the 2012 presidential hopefuls are crunching in their last days of prep before facing off for the first of three nationally televised debates Wednesday.

The University of Denver event, beginning at 9 p.m. Eastern time, is a domestic-policy gauntlet moderated by Jim Lehrer. Subject to “possible changes because of news developments,” Lehrer picked the topics: three parts on the economy, and other 15-minute segments on health care, the role of government, and governing.

We’ve seen and heard much from Romney and Obama on the campaign trail, but what might we hear in their first debate?

Cayman Islands
Don’t expect Obama to go Full Harry Reid and accuse Romney of not paying taxes. Obama has learned by this point that it’s Reid’s job to say crazy stuff, and it’s his job to either nod politely, nod enthusiastically, or pretend like he didn’t hear it. The Obama camp is more than happy, though, to go after tax shelters as a double-edged weapon: use it as proof to convince Congress that the rich are dodging taxes and therefore Bush-era tax cuts shouldn’t be extended for upper-income brackets, and use it on the campaign trail to try to convince the electorate that Romney is out-of-touch wildly wealthy. An unwise rebuttal would be the Ann Romney route of telling a reporter that they don’t even know what’s in their blind trust. A wise rebuttal would steer the conversation to the small-business owners who fall in those upper-income brackets and may have to cut jobs if their taxes went up.

47 percent
Obama just might as well prop up an old-school projector and loop Mother Jones’ undercover fundraiser video, because he wants to have those dim tabletop candles and Romney words branded in voters’ minds from now until Nov. 6. “As I travel around the state, I don’t see a lot of victims. I see a lot of hardworking Nevadans,” he cooed to his Las Vegas audience last night. The big question here is if Romney will be able to go on the offensive against Obama on this issue of government dependency. The Romney camp wishes the tape would disappear, but there are three debates to get through questions about the 47 percent (yep, I wouldn’t put a dropping of that digit past Obama in the foreign policy debate), and where the GOP hopeful does not want to be is on the defensive. …

David Harsanyi says Romney must make Obama own the economy. 

It’s simple. During the upcoming debates, no matter what question is thrown at him, Mitt Romney has to dump the economy onto the lap of its rightful owner. The president, Romney might suggest, shouldn’t be judged on the economy he campaigned so hard to inherit, but the recovery he has botched. As it stands, Obama is the owner of the most pathetic economic revival in American history. A recovery so weak, it’s difficult to believe that voters even think of it as one.

So, when the president starts unfurling his economic vision of growth through wind-powered fairness factories, Romney has to bring it back to reality. Mr. President, you passed $831 billion special interest “stimulus” plan that you promised the American people would spark growth, yet it has had a negligible impact on economic growth.

It was your administration that claimed growth would climb to 4 percent during your first term if we passed the stimulus. This year, growth is under 2 percent. And it was your economic forecasters who told us that the stimulus would help avert an unemployment disaster. But the unemployment numbers we’re now facing are actually worse than the ones your administration predicted we would have had without the “stimulus.”

Nowadays, the president and his advocates are compelled to cobble together ludicrous claims of success. “In the last 29 months,” Obama will say, “our economy has produced about 4.5 million private-sector jobs.” Or, under the Obama administration “we’ve created more private sector jobs than George Bush’s entire term.”

Romney can’t get bogged down deconstructing these ridiculous cherry-picked assertions. Mr. President, he has to explain, if labor force stood where it was when the Bush administration handed it to you, rather than being depleted by millions of Americans who have given up hope of finding a job, the unemployment rate would be somewhere around 11 percent. That’s what you own.

More than that, the economy has only seen a net gain of around 300,000 jobs over the course of your entire administration. If you’re telling the American people that it takes trillions in extra government spending to create those 300,000 jobs, I say your philosophy is an abject failure. Considering those numbers, it is, in fact, more likely that your policies have hampered the private sector economic growth then helped it. …

Since the government will not stop making laws, perhaps our salvation will come from wise juries. A counter culture blog named Alchemy of the Modern Renaissance has the story of a dairy farmer harassed by ag bureaucrats and saved by jury nullification.

Last week a Minnesota man charged with violating the state’s restrictions on raw milk sales was acquitted in what he and his supporters called a victory for consumer freedom.  Alvin Schlangen is a peaceful farmer who connects people with the food sources that meet their high standards for health by providing private access under lawful ownership of farm animals.  the member owners pay the Amish farm family for labor to milk the leased 100% grass-fed cows, manage the pasture, store the feed, etc. This co op is a sustainable farming effort where the value of food supports the cost incurred, without government subsidies or harm to the environment. The balance of food options are purchased by the club, for the members. The group has multiple farm sources providing real food to member families- very efficiently, with lots of volunteer effort.

Over the past two years, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture has illegally raided Alvin’s van, warehouse, and farm resulting in the multiple charges that were decided upon in court last week.  Technically, Alvin was guilty of breaking the laws in question, even though the laws are totally ridiculous and unjust.  Luckily this jury was informed about the process of jury nullification, and their legal right to rule in favor of the accused for breaking unjust laws. …

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Charles Krauthammer wants Romney to go large.

.. Even his counterpunching has gone miniature. Obama has successfully painted Romney as an out-of-touch, unfeeling plutocrat whose only interest is to cut taxes for the rich. Romney has complained in interviews that it’s not true. He has proposed cutting tax rates, while pledging that the share of the tax burden paid by the rich remains unchanged (by “broadening the base” as in the wildly successful, revenue-neutral Reagan-O’Neill tax reform of 1986).

But how many people know this? Where is the speech that hammers home precisely that point, advocates a reformed tax code that accelerates growth without letting the rich off the hook, and gives lie to the Obama demagoguery about dismantling the social safety net in order to enrich the rich?

Romney has accumulated tons of cash for 30-second ads. But unless they’re placed on the scaffolding of serious speeches making the larger argument, they will be treated as nothing more than tit for tat.

Make the case. Go large. About a foreign policy in ruins. About an archaic, 20th-century welfare state model that guarantees 21st-century insolvency. And about an alternate vision of an unapologetically assertive America abroad unafraid of fundamental structural change at home.

It might just work. And it’s not too late.

Jennifer Rubin posts on the dissembling about Benghazi coming from the administration.

Late Friday afternoon the spokesman for Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James R. Clapper Jr. released a statement in which the intelligence head tried to fall on the administration’s sword on the Libyan-consulate debacle. But the problem was that Clapper’s statement did not absolve the administration of repeatedly making false statements after intelligence agencies knew this was a planned al-Qaeda terrorist attack.

The Post’s Glenn Kessler got things started with a devastating timeline of the Libya events. Then Fox News’s Bret Baier put together an extremely useful video account of the sequence of events.

And the New York Times followed suit:

“The Obama administration’s shifting accounts of the fatal attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, have left President Obama suddenly exposed on national security and foreign policy, a field where he had enjoyed a seemingly unassailable advantage over Mitt Romney in the presidential race.” … 

David Ignatius, one of WaPo’s liberals is unhappy with Obama’s abdication during the campaign.

It’s embarrassing when President Obama’s risk-averse refusal to engage on foreign policy issues becomes so obvious that it’s a laugh line for the president of Iran.

“I do believe that some conversations and key issues must be talked about again once we come out of the other end of the political election atmosphere in the United States,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said cheekily in an interview last Sunday. I hate to say it, but on this matter the often-annoying Iranian leader is right.

Less than six weeks before the election, the Obama campaign’s theme song might as well be the old country-music favorite “Make the World Go Away.” This may be smart politics, but it’s not good governing: The way this campaign is going, the president will have a foreign affairs mandate for . . . nothing. …

… To be blunt: The administration has a lot invested in the public impression that al-Qaeda was vanquished when Osama bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011. Obama would lose some of that luster if the public examined whether al-Qaeda is adopting a new, Zawahiri-led strategy of interweaving its operations with the unrest sweeping the Arab world. But this discussion is needed, and a responsible president should lead it, even during a presidential campaign.

Perhaps the most disheartening example of a topic that has been deep-sixed during campaign season is the war in Afghanistan. This month marked the end of the surge that President Obama ordered in December 2009, and troops are back to the pre-surge level of about 68,000. How fast will that number decline over the next year? Here again, we probably won’t know until after Election Day. Gen. John Allen, the commander of U.S. forces in Kabul, is preparing his recommendations, but officials say that this process of review will take . . . well, at least six weeks.

The president hasn’t really made any bones about his wait-till-later approach. He put it frankly to Dmitry Medvedev, then president of Russia, back in March when he thought the microphone was off: “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”

This strategy of avoiding major foreign policy risks or decisions may help get Obama reelected. But he is robbing the country of a debate it needs to have — and denying himself the public understanding and support he will need to be an effective foreign policy president in a second term, if the “rope-a-dope” campaign should prove successful.

The principled left is after Obama for the drone wars and other things. The Democracy in America Blog of the Economist posts on the latest salvo.

CONOR FRIEDERSDORF’S post yesterday at the Atlantic on “Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama” is a huge internet hit. As I write, it has been tweeted 2,000 times, and has been liked by more than 90,000 on Facebook. He has struck a nerve. Mr Friedersdorf’s bill of indictment is damning, and hard to dispute:

“1. Obama terrorizes innocent Pakistanis on an almost daily basis. The drone war he is waging in North Waziristan isn’t “precise” or “surgical” as he would have Americans believe. It kills hundreds of innocents, including children. And for thousands of more innocents who live in the targeted communities, the drone war makes their lives into a nightmare worthy of dystopian novels. People are always afraid. Women cower in their homes. Children are kept out of school. The stress they endure gives them psychiatric disorders. Men are driven crazy by an inability to sleep as drones buzz overhead 24 hours a day, a deadly strike possible at any moment. At worst, this policy creates more terrorists than it kills; at best, America is ruining the lives of thousands of innocent people and killing hundreds of innocents for a small increase in safety from terrorists. It is a cowardly, immoral, and illegal policy, deliberately cloaked in opportunistic secrecy. And Democrats who believe that it is the most moral of all responsible policy alternatives are as misinformed and blinded by partisanship as any conservative ideologue.

2. Obama established one of the most reckless precedents imaginable: that any president can secretly order and oversee the extrajudicial killing of American citizens. Obama’s kill list transgresses against the Constitution as egregiously as anything George W. Bush ever did. It is as radical an invocation of executive power as anything Dick Cheney championed. The fact that the Democrats rebelled against those men before enthusiastically supporting Obama is hackery every bit as blatant and shameful as anything any talk radio host has done.

3. Contrary to his own previously stated understanding of what the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution demand, President Obama committed U.S. forces to war in Libya without Congressional approval, despite the lack of anything like an imminent threat to national security.” …

 

More from Clive Crook in the Atlantic Blogs.

… I can’t get to Friedersdorf’s level of certainty that the policy is evil, but he’s pulled me in his direction.

How to think this through? If drone attacks are counterproductive from a security point of view — because they kill the wrong people and stir up hostility to the United States — then we needn’t spend much time asking whether they’re legal or moral. If they don’t work, no dilemma arises. But do they? I don’t know and the truth is, neither does Friedersdorf. At best, he says, the increase in safety is small. That might be true but how are we supposed to know? The dangers of blowback are clear, but with little or no public information about the targets, outsiders can’t judge whether the campaign is making Americans safer.

The question of legality is complicated because there are so many variables: context (is this an “armed conflict” in the legal sense?); the decision-making process (how were the targets chosen?); necessity (were there alternatives?); proportionality; and so on. Legality matters but it shouldn’t be the main concern. Lawyers can’t tell us what’s just or right. If I thought the drone war was immoral and legal, I’d say let’s not do it. If I thought it was moral and illegal, I’d say let’s change the law.

In principle (I don’t know if Friedersdorf would agree) the drone attacks could be moral, but the net security gains have to be very impressive. If the targeting is as poor as Friedersdorf thinks and the execution as imprecise, then it’s hard to see how the policy could be justified. If “signature targeting” as described in the Stanford/NYU report is really going on — that is, not attacking known terrorists but striking on the basis of “behavior patterns” observed from high altitude — I’d need a lot of persuading that this wasn’t recklessness to an immoral degree (as well as being most likely illegal, by the way). …

More on polls. This time from one of our long time favorites, Michael Barone. 

As a recovering pollster (I worked for Democratic pollster Peter Hart from 1974 to 1981), let me weigh in on the controversy over whether the polls are accurate. Many conservatives are claiming that multiple polls have overly Democratic samples, and some charge that media pollsters are trying to discourage Republican voters.

First, some points about the limits of polls. Random-sample polling is an imprecise instrument. There’s an error margin of 3 or 4 percent and polling theory tells us that one out of 20 polls is wrong, with results outside the margin of error. Sometimes it’s easy to spot such an outlier; sometimes not.

In addition, it’s getting much harder for pollsters to get people to respond to interviews. The Pew Research Center reports that it’s getting only 9 percent of the people it contacts to respond to its questions. That’s compared with 36 percent in 1997.

Interestingly, response rates are much higher in new democracies. Americans, particularly in target states, may be getting poll fatigue. When a phone rings in New Hampshire, it might well be a pollster calling.

Are those 9 percent representative of the larger population? As that percentage declines, it seems increasingly possible that the sample is unrepresentative of the much larger voting public. One thing a poll can’t tell us is the opinion of people who refuse to be polled.

Then there is the problem of cellphone-only households. In the 1930s and 1940s, pollsters conducted interviews in person, because half of households had no phone or (your grandparents can explain this) a party-line phone. …

William Jacobson says one of Warren’s defenders is throwing in the towel.

Soon after my original post, Elizabeth Warren’s law license problem, Mark Thompson at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen wrote a post taking an opposite view, No, Elizabeth Warren Did Not Engage in the Unauthorized Practice of Law.That post by Thompson was cited far and wide, including at Memeorandum as well as at friendly conservative blogs which wanted to present the case for Warren to provide balance.

In light of my post this morning that Warren represented a Massachusetts client in Massachusetts on an issue related to Massachusetts law, Thompson has concluded in a new post today:

“Professor Jacobson has uncovered this morning a case in which Elizabeth Warren entered an appearance in a federal appellate court as a representative of a Massachusetts client in a case that appears to have clearly implicated Massachusetts law.  Although this is still a federal appellate court, because we’re dealing with a Massachusetts client and issues of Massachusetts law, this looks really, really bad for Professor Warren.  With this bombshell, I would no longer view the case against her as weak.” …