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The NY Observer, the paper for the city’s carriage trade has endorsed Romney.
The crisis of leadership in American government is easily explained: thanks to a flawed presidential primary system that rewards strident rhetoric and hyper-partisanship, candidates tailor their messages to fringe elements in small, unrepresentative states. The result? A nasty, shallow and expensive process that rewards sound bites rather than solutions and gamesmanship instead of ideas. This year, however, we have witnessed a rare phenomenon in American politics. A candidate has emerged from the rough and tumble of the primaries with his dignity intact. The system has produced not a demagogue but a manager, a candidate whose experience is rooted in the pragmatism of the business world rather than the ideology of partisan politics.
That candidate is Mitt Romney.
Gov. Romney won the Republican Party’s nomination precisely because he is not an ideologue—and that is no small achievement. He persuaded enough Republican primary voters that the time has come to put aside dogma and inflexibility in favor of real-world solutions to the array of problems America faces at home and abroad.
Over the last few weeks, Mr. Romney has shown that he is a moderate to his core—he is a manager, and a listener, who believes he can restore the balance between the private and public sectors that has been a hallmark of the American economy.
The Observer endorses Mr. Romney’s candidacy and urges readers to support him. …
… Mr. Romney will not stand by idly while vicious anti-Semites in Egypt’s ruling Muslim Brotherhood threaten Israeli civilians. He will not bow to wishful thinking when terrorists hijack protest movements in the Arab world. And he will call out Israel’s critics in the West for their hypocrisy and utter disregard for the Jewish state’s security concerns.
The United States simply cannot afford another four years of weak leadership. The genius of American capitalism and the moral authority of American foreign policy must be restored.
Mitt Romney has a plan to do both. He has the credentials to restore the economy and to defend American values in a hostile world. He has the skills to help create jobs and a brighter future for our country.
This election is a true turning point for the next generation. Mitt Romney is the change the nation needs. And he is the change New York needs.
Toby Harnden has a good summary of President Romney’s second debate with his predecessor.
President Barack Obama needed a game-changing night here in Hampstead, New York and Mitt Romney made sure he didn’t get it. Over the 90 minutes, Obama might have edged it – just – but strategically he did little if anything to blunt Romney’s growing advantage.
Just as Al Gore over-compensated for his poor first debate in 2000, we saw a completely different Obama this time around. He had clearly had some intensive coaching from his debate prep team and was acting under orders to do change everything. Romney strategist Stuart Stevens quipped afterwards that he became ‘Joe Biden without the charm’.
The problem is that the difference was so stark it was jarring. And by throwing everything but the kitchen sink at Romney – we had tax rates, Bain, big bird and the 47 per cent – there was more than a whiff of desperation. While Obama flung mud, Romney was intent on dismantling Obama’s record in office.
Romney was awkward on Benghazi, challenging Obama on whether he had described the attack as an ‘act of terror’ without being completely sure of his ground. And Obama got in a good retort when Romney suggested the president’s pension contained foreign investments, shooting back: ‘I don’t ‘t look at my pension. It’s not as big as yours.’
These were small, tactical victories for Obama though. Although snap polls conducted by CNN gave Obama a win, the underlying numbers for him were bad - 58 to 40 per cent in Romney’s favour on the economy, 49 to 46 per cent on health care, 51 to 44 per cent on taxes, 59 to 36 per cent on the deficit.
What matters in a presidential debate is not who is declared the victor on the night but how the two performances change the landscape of the race.
If this had been the first debate then Obama would in all likelihood not be in the perilous danger he now faces of being a one-term president. But it wasn’t the first – it was effectively a do-over and one that will not erase the memory of a man in Denver who made no attempt to defend his record and was steamrollered by Romney. …
David Harsanyi says once again Obama’s record wins a debate for President Romney.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney couldn’t match his soaring first debate performance in a rematch with Barack Obama … but considering it was often a two-on-one, he didn’t do that poorly either.
And after taking a drubbing in the first presidential debate, a re-energized President Barack Obama vowed to bring passion to HofstraUniversity. He did. Feeling better in the more tranquil altitude of Long Island, the president deployed all his populist hits.
On style points it was close, but it’s unlikely anyone won by a wide enough margin to alter the fundamentals of the race. And as a CBS News snap poll found, 65 percent thought Romney would do a better job on the economy and only 34 percent believed Obama would – though the president scored a 37 to 30 overall win over Romney, with 33 percent believing it was a tie.
A big storyline for conservatives was moderator Candy Crowley, who injected herself into the mix to aid Obama. But a bigger story should be how she used a contrived Townhall setting to pick predominately slanted and loaded questions about the “evils” of guns, unfair pay practices and a mass imagined “outsourcing” of American jobs from our cast of allegedly undecided voters. Almost all questions played to Obama’s advantage, though few were especially relevant to this election. …
Megan McArdle says Obama is not running on anything but, “I’m not Romney.”
… This is really fairly remarkable. Lots of presidential candidates have run on a platform of Not The Incumbent, but Obama may be the first to define himself entirely as Not the Challenger. One of Romney’s pollsters suggested to USA Today that this has been a costly decision, as the Mitt Romney people are seeing in the debates doesn’t look much like the horrific, granny-killing, woman-hating GOP monster that Obama has been running against. Which may be why the gender gap, which has been giving Obama a big advantage, has started to close:
“In general, women tend to be later decision-makers than men and the Obama campaign has gone out of their way to run a negative campaign against Governor Romney among women,” Newhouse says. “The first debate had a significant impact on these voters as they watched it and Governor Romney appeared nothing like the candidate that was essentially a caricature in the advertising by the Obama campaign. It’s these voters who began to realize that the picture being painted of him was not reality.”
Of course, this is Romney’s campaign talking, so take that with a big grain of salt. However, I suspect that the core implication is correct: Obama is not going to make it across the finish line solely on the basis of who he isn’t. …
The Economist reviews a new book on the AustrianSchool of free-market economics.
HOW did a few Viennese economists persuade a grocer’s daughter, a former film star and Europe’s greatest chicken farmer to unravel 40 years of state expansion? How did a group of men dismissed as cranks and called neoliberals change world politics for good? Daniel Stedman Jones is the latest writer to tackle the issue. His response is finer than most.
Neoliberalism originated in Austria. As governments fattened in Britain and America in the 1940s, three men started a lonely battle against the new collective politics. Karl Popper, a philosopher and ex-communist, criticised thinkers from Plato to Marx who valued the collective over the individual. Ludwig von Mises, an economist and former left-winger, said no bureaucracy had the means to restrain itself. Friedrich Hayek said central planning was impossible, because no person, however clever, knew what people wanted.
Mr Stedman Jones teases out the professorial squabbles. Hayek and Mises wanted their message to be radical. Popper sought to woo as many as possible, even liberals and socialists. No hardliner, Popper later saw flaws in market ideology, comparing it to a religion. Hayek, ever the Utopian, pressed ahead. He started the Mont Pelerin Society to foster his ideas. Thus was neoliberalism founded. One hitch with writing about it is that the word is frequently misused today. Leftists use “neoliberal” to describe people whom they essentially do not like. Mr Stedman Jones seems to think the word should not be ditched; the original pugilists against state control happily went by that name.
Milton Friedman, a Chicago economist who headed the second wave of state-bashers, preferred the word “neoliberal” in a 1951 essay entitled, “Neoliberalism and Its Prospects”. …