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You want the truth about what the election is about? Krauthammer has answers.
… First, like all U.S. elections, it’s about the economy. The effect of the weakest recovery in two generations is reflected in President Obama’s 13-point underwater ratings for his handling of the economy.
Moreover, here is a president who proclaims the reduction of inequality to be the great cause of his administration. Yet it has radically worsened in his six years. The 1 percent are doing splendidly in the Fed-fueled stock market, even as median income has fallen.
Second is the question of competence. The list of disasters is long, highlighted by the Obamacare rollout, the Veterans Affairs scandal and the pratfalls of the once-lionized Secret Service. Beyond mere incompetence is government intrusiveness and corruption, as in the overreach of national security surveillance and IRS targeting of politically disfavored advocacy groups.
Ebola has crystallized the collapse of trust in state authorities. The overstated assurances, the ever-changing protocols, the startling contradictions — the Army quarantines soldiers returning from West Africa while the White House denounces governors who did precisely the same with returning health-care workers — have undermined government in general, this government in particular.
Obama’s clumsy attempt to restore confidence by appointing an Ebola czar has turned farcical. …
John Fund writes on the voting of non-citizens.
Could non-citizen voting be a problem in next week’s elections, and perhaps even swing some very close elections?
A new study by two OldDominionUniversity professors, based on survey data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, indicated that 6.4 percent of all non-citizens voted illegally in the 2008 presidential election, and 2.2 percent in the 2010 midterms. Given that 80 percent of non-citizens lean Democratic, they cite Al Franken ’s 312-vote win in the 2008 Minnesota U.S. Senate race as one likely tipped by non-citizen voting. As a senator, Franken cast the 60th vote needed to make Obamacare law.
North Carolina features one of the closest Senate races in the country this year, between Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan and Republican Thom Tillis. So what guerrilla filmmaker James O’Keefe, the man who has uncovered voter irregularities in states ranging from Colorado to New Hampshire, has learned in North Carolina is disturbing. This month, North Carolina officials found at least 145 illegal aliens, still in the country thanks to the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, registered to vote. Hundreds of other non-citizens may be on the rolls.
A voter-registration card is routinely issued without any identification check, and undocumented workers can use it for many purposes, including obtaining a driver’s license and qualifying for a job. And if a non-citizen has a voter-registration card, there are plenty of campaign operatives who will encourage him or her to vote illegally. …
According to John Fund, the campaign manager caught in the James O’Keefe NC sting has resigned.
Guerrilla filmmaker James O’Keefe has prompted investigations into political operatives he caught on camera advising non-citizens they could vote. The North Carolina Board of Elections is looking into whether they broke state law.
Meanwhile, Greg Amick, the campaign manager for the Democratic candidate for sheriff in Charlotte, N.C., has left his position. Amick told an O’Keefe investigator that her non-citizen status was no problem: “As long as you’re registered to vote, you’ll be fine.” …
Stephen Hayes says this election is about everything.
… Not only is this election not about nothing, it is being fought over exactly the kinds of things that ought to determine our elections.
It’s about the size and scope of government. It’s about the rule of law. It’s about the security of the citizenry. It’s about competence. It’s about integrity. It’s about honor.
It’s about a government that makes promises to those who have defended the country and then fails those veterans, again and again and again. It’s about a president who offers soothing reassurances on his sweeping health care reforms and shrugs his shoulders when consumers learn those assurances were fraudulent. It’s about government websites that cost billions but don’t function and about “smart power” that isn’t very smart. It’s about an administration that cares more about ending wars than winning them, and that claims to have decimated an enemy one day only to find that that enemy is still prosecuting its war against us the next. It’s about shifting red lines and failed resets. It’s about a president who ignores restrictions on his power when they don’t suit him and who unilaterally rewrites laws that inconvenience him. It’s about a powerful federal agency that targets citizens because of their political beliefs and a White House that claims ignorance of what its agents are up to because government is too “vast.” In sum, this is an election about a president who promised to restore faith in government and by every measure has done the opposite. …
Kevin Williamson gives a hearty goodbye to Wendy Davis and her Texas fail.
Acknowledging the admittedly remote risk that I am giving a hostage to fate by writing these words, I note that the implosion of Wendy Davis’s ugly and vacuous gubernatorial campaign in Texas has been a satisfying spectacle. On Tuesday, it is all but inevitable that Greg Abbot’s campaign and Texas voters are going to beat Wendy Davis like a circus monkey, and it will be her second significant defeat in the campaign: She ran triumphantly unopposed in the New York Times primary, with Robert Draper all but kissing the hem of her garment, but she took a beating in the Rio Grande primary, with her penniless nobody opponent outperforming her in critical border counties that had gone heavily for Barack Obama in the presidential elections.
Bipartisan lesson: If you are going to run a horsepucky media creation as a single-issue candidate, pick a single issue that doesn’t stack voters up against you four to one.
Wendy Davis is a fanatic as Winston Churchill defined the word: “One who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” Her candidacy was the product of abortion fanaticism and almost nothing else. …
… Strangely enough, marijuana reform is a notable locus of fanaticism. You’d think that of all the single-issue enthusiasms across these fruited plains, the marijuana-legalization crusade would be one of the more laid-back. It isn’t. If you think that the gay-marriage obsessives or the Chicken Littles of climate change are fanatics and bores, spend a few hours with the potheads. Marijuana — or cannabis, or hemp, or whatever particular nomenclature the individual factionalist with whom you are speaking insists upon — will, if the ganja gang is to be believed, cure cancer, replace fossil fuels, prevent global warming, transform the economy, balance the budget, lower taxes, win the war on terror (“Duuude, I could go for some falafel . . . ”), lower health-care costs, eliminate kitchen drudgery, turn a sandwich into a banquet, and find that slipper that’s been at large under the chaise lounge for several weeks. I agree with the potheads on the basic policy, but even so, it is all but impossible to have a conversation with them about the subject, especially one that considers the possible downsides associated with having a legal free market in marijuana, such as an increased difficulty in getting correct change at 7-Eleven, longer lines at Taco Bell, increased incidence of Phish concerts, etc. …
George Will writes on some of the little noticed items on Tuesday.
… Because Senate control is at issue, insufficient attention has been paid to 2014’s most important election, which is in the worst-governed state. Illinois incumbent governor is Pat Quinn, a compliant time-server who floated up from lieutenant governor when Rod Blagojevich became the fourth of the previous nine governors to be imprisoned. The state has high unemployment, low growth and more than $100 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. If voters ratify the state’s trajectory by reelecting Quinn, he will accelerate the downward spiral by continuing policies that have produced it, beginning by making “temporary” tax increases permanent. Republicans will win if their candidate, businessowner Bruce Rauner, wins and delivers, among other things, a campaign to term-limit the state legislators who, collaborating with government employee unions, buy job permanence using money looted from taxpayers.
Republicans also will win if Quinn wins, thereby making Illinois a scary example to the nation of the terrible toll taken by the “blue model” of governance. Although U.S. law allows a one-party city like Detroit to go bankrupt, there is no provision for state bankruptcies. Hence a Quinn victory would provide, perhaps within his next term, hair-raising excitement for the states’ masochistic electorate as lenders recoil from America’s Argentina. …
… We govern through parties, and this autumn President Obama’s has repudiated him. Tuesday will supply evidence of not only how little pulse Obama’s presidency still has but also how much damage he has done to his party. Before he led it to its 2010 debacle, it controlled 62 state legislative chambers to the Republicans’ 36. Entering Tuesday, Republicans led Democrats, 59 to 39. (Subtract two chambers because Nebraska’s legislature is unicameral and nonpartisan.) Can Democrats stop the hemorrhaging? …
Peter Wehner posts on the damage done to the Dems.
How much damage is Barack Obama doing to the Democratic Party? According to the respected political analyst Stuart Rothenberg, the answer is quite a lot. According to Rothenberg, “President Barack Obama is about to do what no president has done in the past 50 years: Have two horrible, terrible, awful midterm elections in a row.”
Mr. Rothenberg compares Obama to the worst midterm numbers of two-term presidents going back to Harry Truman. He concludes that it’s likely that over the course of two midterm elections, Democrats will lose somewhere in the range of 68-75 House seats range and 11-15 Senate seats. …
Jennifer Rubin spots some sore losers.
If you have been watching or reading the caterwauling in the mainstream media about the midterms, you will have discovered it goes something like this: There is no GOP wave. Well, there is a GOP wave, but Republicans are not running on anything. Well, the Republicans ARE running on something, but they will kill each other. Maybe they won’t kill each other, but the majority will be so big that it will fall apart. Even if it does not fall apart, the Democrats will get the Senate back in 2016.
It is more than sore loser-itis in anticipation of a loss they fear will be impossible to spin. It is evidence of a party and a liberal movement out of gas, barren of ideas and desperate to scare its own base with race-baiting and gender victimization. Even the New York Times sounded shocked: “The images and words they are using are striking for how overtly they play on fears of intimidation and repression.” Welcome to what is left of “hope and change.”
It seems fitting that embattled Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) finishes the race accusing her fellow citizens of racism. (“I’ll be very, very honest with you. The South has not always been the friendliest place for African Americans. It’s been a difficult time for the president to present himself in a very positive light as a leader.”) Who wouldn’t want to vote for a pol who thinks them so despicable, huh? …
Michael Goodwin notices the president and his staff always blame someone else.
In the New York Times the other day, anonymous aides to President Obama trashed Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. Kerry was mocked mercilessly, with officials joking “that he is like the astronaut played by Sandra Bullock in the movie ‘Gravity,’ somersaulting through space, untethered to the White House.”
A week before that, The Times reported that, despite Obama’s public efforts to calm fears over Ebola, he was privately seething at health aides’ bungling. In a bid to separate him from the incompetence of his administration, the leakers claimed Obama was “visibly angry” and “demanded a more hands-on approach” from his team.
Then there was the story about Pentagon boss Hagel firing off a memo to national security chief Susan Rice that faulted America’s Syrian policy. Then there was a story about — oh, never mind, you get the picture.
The extraordinary pile-up of crises has turned the usual White House blame game into something more lethal: a shootout in a lifeboat. The presidency is sinking, but we are expected to believe that only the president is blameless. …
Power Line tells us one of Louisiana’s most famous crooks, Edwin Edwards, is running for office again.
I think it is Glenn Reynolds who may have first come up with the slogan that the Democratic Party is nowadays a criminal conspiracy masquerading as a political party, which is fitting for their candidate for Louisiana’s 6th House district: Edwin Edwards!
He’s only a convicted felon, and after serving nine years in federal prison he’s back in he game, a spry age 87 adorned by his 35-year-old (third) wife, whom he met while in prison when she became his pen pal. …