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Kyle Smith in the NY Post says Obama has “mud on his hands.”
Watch the campaign news segment with the sound turned down. You can see what’s happening in their faces: Mitt Romney is earnest, optimistic and forward-looking. Barack Obama is sour with sarcasm, peevish, defensive and even downright angry. …
… When the history of Campaign 2012 is written, let it not be forgotten that Barack Obama has spent more money on character assassination than anyone at any time in the entire history of humanity. The man who once predicted that Republicans would say about him, “He’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?” has run a campaign based on exactly that level of substance. The shrinks call this “projection.”
For the most part, Obama hasn’t even tried to campaign on his actual accomplishments, because voters made it clear they didn’t think much of them at the time and haven’t changed their minds. He doesn’t mention the $800 billion of wasted stimulus, barely talks about ObamaCare and omits mention of how he ignored the recommendations of his own blue-ribbon debt-reduction commission.
He even cut the “al Qaeda on the run” line from his standard speech, because in fact al Qaeda is on the prowl and Obama would rather voters not be thinking about how terrorists on Sept. 11 attacked the US consulate all night long in Benghazi while he did nothing.
Nor, for the most part, has Obama run on Romney’s actual record, because he’d rather not encourage the fact-check mafia to mention that during the Romney governorship, the Massachusetts unemployment rate went from 5.6% to 4.7% while the budget was balanced.
Instead, Obama, whose campaign strategists have been up front about their strategy from Day One (Politico, after talking to the president’s minions, headlined its Aug. 9, 2011 story, “Obama Plan: Destroy Romney”) has deployed hundreds of millions of dollars primarily to create a fictitious Romney, a heartless jobicidal monster who hides his money in shadowy offshore accounts and is, as the infamous ad put it, “Not one of us.” A Romney ad that said the same about Obama would, of course, be racist.
Ads from the super PAC run by Obama’s former campaign secretary shamelessly and falsely blamed Romney for the death by cancer of a Kansas City woman whose husband had earlier starred in an official Obama campaign ad. Obama ads have described Romney as the “outsourcer in chief,” as though Romney were responsible for the basic economic principle that causes jobs to go to those willing to do them for the lowest wages.
Another official Obama ad asked, …
Jennifer Rubin posts on 10 surprises from the election this year.
In some respects the 2012 presidential campaign has played out in predictable fashion. The focus has been on the economy. President Obama has tried to make Mitt Romney unacceptable. A ton of money was spent. In a polarized country the race is close. But much about the 2012 elections has surprised voters and pundits alike. Here are only 10:
1. The meltdown of GOP Senate candidates: Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock, Connie Mack IV, Tommy Thompson and George Allen have showed, one GOP insider wisecracked to me, “It must be really hard to run a competent campaign.” Some of these candidates might win, but most won’t. Republicans as a result are unlikely to take back the Senate, something that seemed very possible only a few months ago.
2. The debates were the surprise: For weeks liberals denied it, but in fact the debates (all four) fundamentally changed the trajectory of the race and the perception of Mitt Romney. Democrats didn’t expect that Romney to show up, but, candidly, Republicans were just as surprised. …
This election will tell us if our country is going to continue as a beacon to the world. Since we will soon learn if our country is actually an exceptional place, it seems a good time to pass along Norman Podhoretz’s piece for The Imprimis of Hillsdale College that is titled; “Is America Exceptional?”
ONCE UPON A TIME, hardly anyone dissented from the idea that, for better or worse, the United States of America was different from all other nations. This is not surprising, since the attributes that made it different were vividly evident from the day of its birth. Let me say a few words about three of them in particular.
First of all, unlike all other nations past or present, this one accepted as a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. What this meant was that its Founders aimed to create a society in which, for the first time in the history of the world, the individual’s fate would be determined not by who his father was, but by his own freely chosen pursuit of his own ambitions. In other words, America was to be something new under the sun: a society in which hereditary status and class distinctions would be erased, leaving individuals free to act and to be judged on their merits alone. There remained, of course, the two atavistic contradictions of slavery and the position of women; but so intolerable did these contradictions ultimately prove that they had to be resolved—even if, as in the case of the former, it took the bloodiest war the nation has ever fought.
Secondly, in all other countries membership or citizenship was a matter of birth, of blood, of lineage, of rootedness in the soil. Thus, foreigners who were admitted for one reason or another could never become full-fledged members of the society. But America was the incarnation of an idea, and therefore no such factors came into play. To become a full-fledged American, it was only necessary to pledge allegiance to the new Republic and to the principles for which it stood.
Thirdly, in all other nations, the rights, if any, enjoyed by their citizens were conferred by human agencies: kings and princes and occasionally parliaments. As such, these rights amounted to privileges that could be revoked at will by the same human agencies. In America, by contrast, the citizen’s rights were declared from the beginning to have come from God and to be “inalienable”—that is, immune to legitimate revocation.
As time went on, other characteristics that were unique to America gradually manifested themselves. For instance, in the 20th century, social scientists began speculating as to why America was the only country in the developed world where socialism had failed to take root. As it happens, I myself first came upon the term “American exceptionalism” not in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, where it has mistakenly been thought to have originated, but in a book by the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, who used it in connection with the absence in America of a strong socialist party. More recently I have discovered that the term may actually have originated with Joseph Stalin, of all people, who coined the term in the same connection but only in order to dismiss it. Thus, when an American Communist leader informed him that American workers had no intention of playing the role Marx had assigned to the worldwide proletariat as the vanguard of the coming socialist revolution, Stalin reputedly shouted something like, “Away with this heresy of American exceptionalism!” And yet Stalin and his followers were themselves exceptional in denying that America was exceptional in the plainly observable ways I have mentioned. If, however, almost everyone agreed that America was different, there was a great deal of disagreement over whether its exceptionalism made it into a force for good or a force for evil. This too went back to the beginning, when the denigrators outnumbered the enthusiasts.
At first, anti-American passions were understandably fuelled by the dangerous political challenge posed to the monarchies of Europe by the republican ideas of the American Revolution. But the political side of anti-Americanism was soon joined to a cultural indictment that proved to have more staying power. Here is how the brilliant but volatile historian Henry Adams—the descendent of two American presidents—described the cultural indictment as it was framed in the earliest days of the Republic:
“In the foreigner’s range of observation, love of money was the most conspicuous and most common trait of the American character . . . . No foreigner of that day—neither poet, painter, or philosopher—could detect in American life anything higher than vulgarity . . . . Englishmen especially indulged in unbounded invective against the sordid character of American society . . . . Contemporary critics could see neither generosity, economy, honor, nor ideas of any kind in the American breast.”
In his younger days, Adams defended America against these foreign critics; but in later life, snobbishly recoiling from the changes wrought by rapid industrialization following the Civil War, he would hurl the same charge at the America of the so-called Gilded Age.
We see a similar conflict in Tocqueville. Democracy in America was mainly a defense of the country’s political system and many of its egalitarian habits and mores. But where its cultural and spiritual life was concerned, Tocqueville expressed much the same contempt as the critics cited by Henry Adams. The Americans, he wrote, with “their exclusively commercial habits,” were so fixated “upon purely practical objects” that they neglected “the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts,” and it was only their proximity to Europe that allowed them “to neglect these pursuits without lapsing into barbarism.” Many years later, another Frenchman, Georges Clemenceau, went Tocqueville one better: “America,” he quipped, “is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone from barbarism to decadence without the usual interval of civilization.” …
… With all exceptions duly noted, I think it is fair to say that what liberals mainly see when they look at America today is injustice and oppression crying out for redress. By sharp contrast, conservatives see a complex of traditions and institutions built upon the principles that animated the American Revolution and that have made it possible—to say yet again what cannot be said too often—for more freedom and more prosperity to be enjoyed by more of its citizens than in any other society in human history. It follows that what liberals—who concentrate their attention on the relatively little that is wrong with America instead of the enormous good embodied within it—seek to change or discard is precisely what conservatives are dedicated to preserving, reinvigorating, and defending. …