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Jennifer Rubin liked Romney’s speech Friday in Wisconsin.
If Mitt Romney wins Wisconsin, it may be because of the speech. If he loses the election it might be argued it was because he didn’t give that speech at the convention. But whatever the outcome, the speech Romney gave in Wisconsin today was the best written and best delivered of his campaign, probably of his political life.
There were some lovely, memorable flourishes: “The door to a brighter future is there, open, waiting for us. I need your vote, I need your help. Walk with me, walk together. Let us start anew.” “Walk with me” was the grace note, a welcome variation from exhortations to follow politicians. And there was some effective parallel structure (maybe the most compelling rhetorical form when done well):
“You know that if the President is re-elected, he will still be unable to work with the people in Congress. He has ignored them, attacked them, blamed them. The debt ceiling will come up again, and shutdown and default will be threatened, chilling the economy. The President was right when he said he can’t change Washington from the inside. In this case, you can take him at his word.
When I am elected, I will work with Republicans and Democrats in Congress. I will meet regularly with their leaders. I will endeavor to find those good men and women on both sides of the aisle who care more about the country than about the politics. Together, we will put the nation on track to a balanced budget, to reform our tax code, and to finally reaffirm our commitment to financial responsibility.
You know that if the President is re-elected, he will continue his war on coal and oil and natural gas. He will send billions more dollars to his favorite solar and wind companies. And all of this will guarantee higher energy prices at the pump and fewer jobs. Today, gas costs twice what it did when President Obama was elected.” …
Charles Krauthammer explalins Tuesday’s choice.
… An Obama second term means that the movement toward European-style social democracy continues, in part by legislation, in part by executive decree. The American experiment — the more individualistic, energetic, innovative, risk-taking model of democratic governance — continues to recede, yielding to the supervised life of the entitlement state.
If Obama loses, however, his presidency becomes a historical parenthesis, a passing interlude of overreaching hyper-liberalism, rejected by a center-right country that is 80 percent nonliberal.
Should they summon the skill and dexterity, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan could guide the country to the restoration of a more austere and modest government with more restrained entitlements and a more equitable and efficient tax code. Those achievements alone would mark a new trajectory — a return to what Reagan started three decades ago.
Every four years we are told that the coming election is the most important of one’s life. This time it might actually be true. At stake is the relation between citizen and state, the very nature of the American social contract.
John Fund wrote the book on voter fraud.
Patrick Moran claims he was just joking about encouraging voter fraud. But he nonetheless resigned last week as field director for the campaign of his father, Virginia Congressman Jim Moran.
Guerrilla videographer James O’Keefe caught Patrick Moran on tape offering advice on how to commit in-person voter fraud. The scheme involved forging utility bills that would satisfy Virginia’s non-photo ID law, and then casting ballots in the name of others — relying on the help of Democratic lawyers stationed at the polls if there were any problems. Some joke.
Last April, a 22-year-old O’Keefe associate showed how easy it is to vote in someone else’s name if no ID is required by being offered the ballot of Attorney General Eric Holder simply by mentioning his name to a Washington, D.C. poll worker. Now O’Keefe has shown just how easy it is to commit in-person voter fraud in states that have loose non-photo ID laws
But opponents of voter ID dismiss worries about our voting system’s vulnerability. The liberal Advancement Project claims “you’re more likely to get hit by lightning than find a case of prosecutorial voter fraud.” I guess the Advancement Project missed these recent lightning strikes: …
According to the Examiner, Doug Wilder is having Obama doubts.
Former Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder, America’s first elected black governor, has his own reservations about America’s first black president, Barack Obama.
Wilder, an emphatic Obama supporter in 2008, said his fellow Democrat should have focused more on creating jobs during his first term and faulted the president for failing to keep his campaign promise to bridge the partisan gap in Washington.
“I think he’s governed left of center and didn’t focus on jobs and economic recovery,” Wilder told The Washington Examiner.
But will Wilder still vote for Obama on Tuesday in a battleground state Obama is desperate to win again?
“I have not said anything differently,” Wilder said with a chuckle.
In 2008, Wilder helped Obama become the only Democratic presidential candidate to win Virginia in half a century.
But Wilder said the presidential race in the state remains a tossup this late into the election cycle because many independents feel disappointment in the man they helped put in power four years ago. That has opened the door for Romney to make his case and it has been a compelling one so far, Wilder said. …
Mark Tapscott has the Lee Iacocca story.
… “But the reason we’re supporting Mitt Romney for president is because our entire country faces a critical turning point. The truth of the matter is we can’t afford four more years like the last four years.
“Mitt Romney is the leader with the plan and the experience to lead our nation and restore her strength, which also just happens to be the best thing we could do for America’s automotive industry and the people whose lives depend on this critical industry.”
Go here for the full text.
Whoever wins next Tuesday, Iacocca is likely to give the same advice to them as he did to Chrysler and General Motors in 2009 in an AP dispatch:
“They’re on you day and night. Their oversight is just too extreme. That’s why our 10-year loan, we paid it back in three years. We couldn’t stand the government. The bureaucracy kills you.”
WSJ reviews a book on Thomas Jefferson in his role as slave owner. The Dems might want to re-think their claim of Jefferson as the founder of the beginnings of the Democrat party. Then again, they might be comfortable with the hypocrisy.
… Whatever moral ambivalence he may have felt toward the institution of slavery he overcame when he sat down and did the numbers for Monticello. In 1792, he calculated precisely what his slaves were worth. Mr. Wiencek writes: “What Jefferson set out clearly for the first time was that he was making a 4 percent profit every year on the birth of black children. The enslaved children were yielding him a bonanza, a perpetual human dividend at compound interest.” To intimates, Jefferson described slavery matter-of-factly as a good investment strategy, advising one friend that if his family had cash to spare, “every farthing of it [should be] laid out in land and negroes.”
When it comes to Jefferson the slave owner, Mr. Wiencek’s judgment is unsparing. “His assets reliably compounding, his philosophy rendering him deaf to the appeals of humanity, he plowed through any contradiction,” he writes. “He wielded a species of power that made its own reality.” Mr. Wiencek notes that Jefferson deliberately presented visitors with an idyllic but artificial picture of slave life at his estate. He would point to a few exceptionally industrious slaves who in fact, Mr. Wiencek says, “were desperate to remain in the master’s favor, to stay on the mountaintop”—that is, the part of the estate closest to the house—”and not be sent [to the plantations] below, where the overseers were in charge.” …