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Jennifer Rubin posts on Ann Romney’s speech.
She spoke with personal conviction, bringing the crowd to her feet with this personal endorsement of her husband:
… “I know this good and decent man for what he is — warm and loving and patient.
He has tried to live his life with a set of values centered on family, faith, and love of one’s fellow man. From the time we were first married, I’ve seen him spend countless hours helping others. I’ve seen him drop everything to help a friend in trouble, and been there when late-night calls of panic came from a member of our church whose child had been taken to the hospital.
You may not agree with Mitt’s positions on issues or his politics. Massachusetts is only 13% Republican, so it’s not like that’s a shock.
But let me say this to every American who is thinking about who should be our next President:
No one will work harder.
No one will care more.
No one will move heaven and earth like Mitt Romney to make this country a better place to live!” …
Rubin also admired Christie’s efforts.
No one in the GOP gives a speech like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Clapping his hands and punching the air he strode onto the stage at the RNC, and then he proceeded to wow the crowd. If Ann Romney was empathetic, he was tough. If she vouched for her husband, he vouched for Americans. They were the yin and yang of the first night of the convention.
Ironically for a convention with so many people chattering about “likability”, Christie declared, citing his mother, that it is “better to be respected than loved.” It was a powerful counterpoint to the hang-wringing and media fixation over likability.
Christie turned likability, or as he called it, popularity, into a liability. His was a tough message, repeatedly drawing contrasts with the Democrats. “Our ideas are right for America. Their ideas have failed.”
Citing his own improbable success in a deep blue state he made the case for truth telling. Republicans, he said, will tell the people we “have to fundamentally reduce the size of government.” In his view, President Obama is weak and timid. (“They believe the American people need to be coddled.”) Republicans, he urged, “believe in telling seniors the truth.” …
Kim Strassel thinks a second term for Obama would be more of the same. Thank goodness we will avoid it when President Narcisscist goes down in flames.
President Obama has a reputation for talking, but not necessarily for saying much. He has achieved new levels of vagueness this election season. Beyond repeating that he’s in favor of making the “rich” pay for more government “investment,” he hasn’t offered a single new idea for a second term. This is deliberate.
The core of the Obama strategy is to make Americans worry that whatever Mitt Romney does, it will be worse. That’s a harder case for Mr. Obama to make if he is himself proposing change. And so the Obama pitch is that this election is a choice between stability (giving Mr. Obama four more years to let his policies finally work) and upheaval (giving Mr. Romney four years to re-ruin the nation).
The pitch is profoundly dishonest. While the choice between four more years of Obama status quo and Mr. Romney is certainly vivid, it isn’t accurate. The real contrast is between Mr. Romney’s and Mr. Obama’s future plans. And while the president hasn’t revealed what those plans are, there is plenty of evidence for what a second term would look like.
Let’s dispense with the obvious: An Obama second term will be foremost about higher taxes and greater spending. The president has been clear about the former and will consider victory in November a mandate to raise taxes on higher-income Americans and small businesses—at the least. …
Mark Steyn says there is no war on women, but there is a war on children.
… As George Will pointed out this week, nanny-state solutions (such as Michelle Obama’s current campaign to get us all nibbling organic endives) don’t work: Overweight kids in schools with high-calorie junk food, 35.5 percent; overweight kids in schools that banned all the bad stuff, 34.8 percent. Indeed, the bloating of government, of entitlements, of debt, and the increase in obesity track each other pretty closely over the past four decades. If all those debt graphs showing how we’ve looted our future to bribe the present are too complicated for you, look out the window: We are our own walking (or waddling) metaphor for consumption unmoored from production. And, to the Chinese and many others around the world pondering whether America has the self-discipline to get its house in order, a trip to the mall provides its own answer.
So we can’t fight a war in Afghanistan, but we can fight a “war on women” that only exists in upscale liberal feminists’ heads. We can’t do anything about exploding rates of childhood obesity, diabetes and heart disease, but, if you define “health care” as forcing a Catholic institution to buy $8 contraception for the scions of wealth and privilege, we’re right on top of it. And above all, we’re doing it for the children, if by “doing it” you mean leaving them with a transgenerational bill unknown to human history – or engaging in what Boston University’s Larry Kotlikoff, speaking at the International Institute of Public Finance in Dresden last week, called “child fiscal abuse.”
If that sounds a trifle overheated, how about… hmm, “legitimate fiscal rape”? No? Then let’s call it a “war on children.” Unlike the “war on women,” it’s real.
John Fund profiles Artur Davis who will be making a major address at the GOP convention.
Only about 3 to 5 percent of voters are truly undecided between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. Focus groups run by Republicans have found that some of the most effective ads appealing to those voters feature Democrats and independents speaking candidly about how they voted for Obama in 2008 but are now disappointed.
That’s one of the reasons that Republicans have decided to showcase former Democratic congressman Artur Davis of Alabama as a “headline” speaker at their convention. Davis, a moderate black Democrat who voted against Obamacare in 2010 and was crushed later that year in a Democratic primary for governor, has since left the Democratic party and is backing Mitt Romney. He was an early Obama supporter — the first Democratic congressman outside Illinois to endorse the candidate in 2007. He seconded Obama’s nomination for president at the 2008 Denver convention.
“The Obama I endorsed was the constitutional-law professor who said he supported the rule of law,” Davis explained to me. “Instead, we got someone who always went to the left whenever he reached a fork in the road.” Now Davis spends a great deal of time describing his conversion to Republican audiences. Even Jamelle Bouie, a writer for the left-wing American Prospect who doesn’t find Davis’s conversion story all that compelling, acknowledges its power. “Davis, like Joe Lieberman before him (and Zell Miller before that), can tell a credible story of ideological alienation,” Bouie wrote in the Washington Post. “He thought the Democratic Party was a big tent, but now — under Barack Obama — it is a haven for intolerant leftism.” …
David Harsanyi with more on the election.
A little more than a year ago, speaking to CBS Sunday Morning, Barack Obama said, “I don’t think we’re in danger of another recession, but we are in danger of not having a recovery that’s fast enough to deal with what is a genuine unemployment crisis for a whole lot of folks out there, and that’s why we need to be doing more.”
“… I expect to be judged a year from now on whether or not things have continued to get better.”
They haven’t.
That’s why Obama and friends are singularly focused on critical issues like Mitt Romney’s tax returns and dog whistles. This month, consumer confidence fell to a nine-month low as Americans continued to be anxious about the economy and unemployment. The Conference Board confidence index fell to 60.6, the lowest level since November. That does not bode well for an unemployment rate that has been over 8 percent for 42 months.
Add to that the fear of rising gas prices — the average price of a gallon of gasoline spiked 23.5 cents last month — and the potential of European and/or Middle Eastern troubles to shake markets, and a lot of people may be feeling like a brittle economy is about to shatter.
But, hey, have you heard that Mitt Romney made a birther joke!? …
Charles Gasparino analyzes Buffett’s portfolio moves and spots a trend.
Is the sky really falling on state and local governments, as Warren Buffett’s recent bearish bet on municipal debt suggests?
Much of the media and even some sophisticated investors think so — even if Buffett’s bet against munis was only cryptically disclosed in a quarterly filing of his investment company Berkshire Hathaway (he has yet to make a public comment on it).
And even if, when you dig deeper, the move suggests Buffett wasn’t making a bet against all munis but only those that adopt some of the same policies he and President Obama are advocating on a national level. …
Powerline introduces the first cartoon today.
Michael Ramirez is in Tampa, attending the convention. He took time out to draw this cartoon, which contrasts Hurricane Isaac with the force that has really brought destruction to America: Barack Obama’s left-wing, crony-socialist policies.