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Krauthammer on the debate.

… By the end of the debate, Obama looked small, uncertain. It was Romney who had the presidential look.

Reelection campaigns after a failed presidential term — so failed that Obama barely even bothers to make the case, preferring to blame everything on his predecessor — hinge almost entirely on whether the challenger can meet the threshold of acceptability. Romney crossed the threshold Wednesday night.

Reagan won his election (Carter was actually ahead at the time) when he defused his caricature as some wild, extreme, warmongering cowboy. In his debate with Carter, he was affable, avuncular and reasonable. That’s why with a single aw-shucks line, “There you go again,” the election was over.

Romney had to show something a little different: That he is not the clumsy, out-of-touch plutocrat that the paid Obama ads and the unpaid media have portrayed him to be. He did, decisively.

That’s why MSNBC is on suicide watch. Why the polls show that, by a margin of at least 2 to 1, voters overwhelmingly gave the debate to Romney.

And he won big in an unusual way. This could be the only presidential debate ever won so definitively in the absence of some obvious and ruinous gaffe, like Gerald Ford’s “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.”

Romney by two touchdowns.

Daniel Henninger.

… Barack Obama, perhaps the most self-confident person to occupy that office in our lifetime, was always skating along the edge of a cliff of self-destructive arrogance. No other president would have thought to berate the members of the Supreme Court as they sat in front of him during his State of the Union speech. The famous GeorgeWashingtonUniversity speech in which he ridiculed his Republican partners in the deficit-negotiation talks, who had come to the speech expecting to hear a policy response, was another sign of potential danger.

And finally there was the report a few weeks ago that Mr. Obama did not respect Gov. Romney and did not consider him competent to be president.

This is a president, dismissive and condescending to any opposition, who went into that debate in Denver and essentially got his head handed to him by a better-prepared opponent.

What was especially damaging to Mr. Obama is that when it became clear early in the initial discussion of tax policy that Mitt Romney was going to take his argument to a deeper level, the president’s response was essentially to start cutting and pasting stock lines from speeches he’s been giving for years. After awhile, he looked like a guy who was rummaging through a drawer for old audio cassettes. “The oil industry gets $4 billion a year in corporate welfare.” He even rolled out the corporate jets.

The president sounded like someone who had simply run out of ideas. His challenger was elaborating detail on his policies, and the president was the candidate living in the past. His references to what he would do with a second term were minimal. Instead, he had to spend most of the 90 minutes trying to defend his policies from Mr. Romney’s critique.

This was most notable on the biggest issue of all— the future of ObamaCare. Mr. Obama’s defense of the 15-member review board came down to citing some process reforms at the Cleveland Clinic. Gov. Romney immediately turned that around as an example of a private institution experimenting its way toward new ideas—a difference of policy and philosophy. …

Jonah Goldberg.

… For a guy who supposedly gives wonderful speeches, he rarely persuades the un-persuaded or inspires those he didn’t already have at “hello.” That’s partly the fault of his speechwriters, who always did him the disservice of producing the kind of pedantic and clichéd boilerplate that Obama mistook for soaring oratory. He thought he smashed through the Democratic primaries like a battering ram through concrete when he mostly pushed on open doors.

As president, he’s convinced himself that he is a policy wonk with a deeper understanding of the machinery of government and the mysteries of the economy than even his advisors. And yet he had to learn on the job that “shovel-ready jobs” were magic beans sold to him by party hacks hungry for pork. He bought a stimulus that only stimulated political cronies. In the debate, he touted windmills and solar power as the energy sources of the future as if he still honestly believes that.

The media’s infatuation with Obama and/or their contempt for his critics only served to reinforce his delusions. When the press laughs at all of your jokes and takes your glib excuses as profound insights, the inevitable result is a kind of flabby narcissism. Kings can be forgiven for thinking they are the greatest poets when the court weeps at their clunky limericks.

The Obama who delivered a shockingly lackluster convention speech last month is the same man who walked into that Denver stadium in 2008 to rapturous approval. The man who lost the debate Wednesday night is the same man who never managed to make Obamacare popular after more than 50 speeches and pronouncements on it in his first year.

The key difference now is that the hunger for Obama has been replaced with the indigestion that follows after four unimpressive years in office. In sales, they say you sell the sizzle, not the steak. In 2008, the man was all sizzle, and the ravenous throng was sold. Now he must sell the steak itself, and it’s full of gristle, fat and bone. He may yet still close the deal, but only if people fall for his Puss in Boots eyes.

Keith Koffler at White House Dossier blog has more on the president that didn’t show up.

… Obama, who was barely present onstage last night, was the same president who has been failing to show up for years.

He’s the man who can’t be bothered to tackle entitlement reform, to keep his promises on immigration, to negotiate a Middle East peace deal, to remind Americans that we are at war, to meet regularly with members of Congress, to meet with any world leaders at the UN last week, and to put away his golf clubs.

Last night, he couldn’t be bothered to debate. And today, the Obama campaign is feeling very bothered indeed.

In light of the Obama debate failure, Fred Barnes has a, now ironic, piece on the bias in the media. Maybe they will be too embarrassed now to continue.

The Time cover story last week was headlined “The Mormon Identity.” The cover, featuring Mitt Romney in a stained-glass window, said in smaller type, “What Mitt Romney’s faith tells us about his vision and values.” Newsweek had President Obama on the cover, identifying him as “The Democrats’ Reagan” and heralding the story inside as “What Obama Will Achieve in His Second Term.”

Neither of the stories, to put it mildly, was helpful to Romney’s presidential campaign. The piece in Time was fair, but the timing, long after Mormonism had faded as a factor in the election, was suspect. In Newsweek, Obama was lionized, while Romney and Republicans were treated like hyperpartisan right-wingers.

My point in citing the newsmagazines is not that they’re colluding to reelect Obama. They don’t have to. It comes quite naturally to these pillars of the mainstream media to elevate issues with a pro-Obama tilt. And they’re not even the biggest contributors to the liberal bias that has dominated media coverage of the presidential race.

The bias has been so massive, palpable, and unprecedented that the scales have begun to fall from the eyes of a few stalwarts of the media establishment. Obama, Mark Halperin of Time noted last week, “has been covered as a candidate, rather than as an incumbent whose record needs to be scrutinized.” As you might suspect, this coincides neatly with the president’s reelection strategy.

The Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman has suggested the media have all but given the president a free ride. …

A perfect illustration of the rush to make amends is the New Yorker cover due out today. Toby Harnden of the London Daily Mail notes the significance of the cover showing Romney debating an empty chair.

… For the liberal ‘New Yorker’ to carry such a cover is all the more remarkable because David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, is an admirer of Obama who wrote a positive and well-received book on the President entitled ‘The Bridge’.

The cover – and Obama’s debate performance – could be seen as a degree of vindication for the Romney advisers who gave Eastwood a prime-time slot on the final night of the Republican convention in Tampa and allowed him to ad-lib his speech.

At the time, senior Republicans were livid with some calling for top Romney aides to be fired. But although Eastwood’s improv show was panned by the media, he appears to have created an enduring motif representing Obama – and one that has now been embraced to a large extent by the liberal establishment.

Senator Blutarsky blogs on what we might see in the next debates.

It seems fair to say that most of us on the right were pleasantly surprised by the result of the first Presidential debate, Wednesday evening, if nothing like so shocked as the mainstream media or the Obama fluffers at MSNBC.

In 2008, Obama got to debate John McCain. The acclaim for his campaign has always struck me as over the top in light of that fact. And on Wednesday night we saw what Obama looks like in a debate where the dessicated and ineffectual old man in the room in not his opponent but merely the moderator.

From where I’m sitting, the best thing about the outcome of the first debate is how it sets Mitt Romney up for the second debate. Like a power pitcher behind in the count, Obama is under pressure to bring the heat, but he’s got to be exceedingly careful about how he does it. 

Obama’s most fervent partisans want to see him become much more aggressive in attacking Romney, and after seeing the reviews of his performance in the first debate, Obama is probably happy to oblige. And therein lay the danger.

The upside, from Obama’s perspective, of his performance on Wednesday night, was that it kept his natural churlishness in check. He smirked, and offered other tells, but mostly you had to be looking for them in order to notice. In going after Mitt Romney aggressively, Obama risks showing Americans a side of his personality that he’d be better off hiding.

Simply put, Barack Obama is a smug prick. He is not used to being challenged, and is prone to react badly when it happens. The more effectively he conceals this, the better off he’ll be, but he is now under pressure to adopt a debate posture that risks highlighting it.

In this way, the town hall format of the second debate may work to his disadvantage. …

There are, of course, many other things happening in the country. We apologize for the singular focus on the campaign, but there is little more important than sending the fool packing. A good illustration of that, is the dire straights of black men in the country. If Obama had turned out to the president we all hoped for, he might have turned his attention to this problem. Bloomberg/Business Week calls it to our attention.

The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any wealthy nation, with about 2.3 million people behind bars at any given moment. (That’s 730 out of 100,000, vs. just 154 for England and Wales.) There are more people in U.S. prisons than are in the country’s active-duty military. That much is well known. What’s less known is that people who are incarcerated are excluded from most surveys by U.S. statistical agencies. Since young, black men are disproportionately likely to be in jail or prison, the exclusion of penal institutions from the statistics makes the jobs situation of young, black men look better than it really is.

That’s the point of a new book, Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress, by Becky Pettit, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington. Pettit spoke on Thursday in a telephone press conference.

On the day Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009, Pettit said, “there was hope that perhaps the U.S. was becoming a post-racial society.” But it wasn’t true then, and it’s not true now. The gap between blacks and whites remains wide in employment, income, wealth, and health. And as Bloomberg’s David J. Lynch reported earlier this month: “The nation’s first African-American president hasn’t done much for African-Americans.”

The unemployment rate and the employment-to-population ratio reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics are based on a survey of households—people “who are not inmates of institutions (for example, penal and mental facilities and homes for the aged) and who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces.” …

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Neal Boortz has some advice.

It’s been a full day since the debate, and I have just one piece of advice for those of you who love freedom: Don’t get cocky.

Spengler on the character test in this election.

The Romney the world saw at last night’s debate — confident, enthusiastic about his ideas, hopeful and articulate — is no stranger to those fortunate enough to have heard him speak in person during the past year. I reported in this space on a primary campaign breakfast in November 2011 where Romney won me over. What changed last night emphatically was not Mitt Romney. What changed is that we finally got to see the real Mitt Romney. The Republican candidate, that is, defined himself against Barack Obama, rather than allowing an overwhelmingly hostile media to define him. And Barack Obama, alone on the stage with his opponent, stripped of teleprompter and fawning media, revealed himself to be a fearful, petulant, petty man. Not only did Romney win; Obama lost.

There has never been a presidential candidates’ debate on national television where the instant polls declared such a lopsided victory (3 to 1 in Romney’s favor according to CNN) — not Kennedy-Nixon, nor Reagan-Carter. Response to televised debates in the past split neatly down partisan lines, so much so that conventional wisdom states that presidential debates simply weren’t a factor in the election. The voters watched the debate and assigned a better performance to the candidate they liked beforehand. Al Gore’s sighs or Richard Nixon’s sweats influenced the electoral outcome in legend more than in fact.

Just because debates weren’t decisive in the past doesn’t mean that this one won’t be decisive now. The most lopsided factor in this election is the character of the candidates. What we saw last night is a unique and unprecedented event in American political history. We have never had a president like Barack Obama, and the American public got its first peek at the man behind the curtain.

Barack Obama is a narcissist and a sociopath, with the skills of persuasion that children abandoned by their parents learn as a survival mechanism. In the adoring light of the liberal media, Obama reflected power and self-confidence — so long as he was in control, and stood in front of the teleprompter. The real Barack Obama is the one who cowered in the Oval Office protected by his Praetorian guard, who declined to hold cabinet meetings or meet with Republican leaders: McBama surrounded by the weird sisters, Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice and Michelle. Obama’s greatest strength always has been his greatest weakness, potentially a catastrophic one: he manipulates so effectively because he has a compulsion to be in control. When he knows that he is not in control, Obama is paralyzed. Absent last night were the easy rhetorical flourishes and rock star pose of 2008.

Andrew Malcolm posts on the debate.

… Even though it was night-time in Denver, Gov. Romney handed the ex-state senator his lunch — and it wasn’t one of Michelle’s nutritious school meals either. (Scroll down here for the full debate video. The full transcript is here.)

The president was disappointing. Maybe Obama needs to fire his debate-prep partner, John Kerry, who was such a good debater in 2004 that he blew his own bid for the White House. Obama was awful. He looked and sounded unprepared, listless, in deep water way over his head. What was he doing at that Vegas resort since Sunday, besides visiting the Hoover Dam?

Without a teleprompter feeding him lines, Obama lacked specifics, dissembled, at one point pleading with a deferential moderator Jim Lehrer to change the topic, as if Obama owned the debate. The president, who got four more minutes of speaking time from Lehrer than did Romney, spent much of the debate looking down at the podium, not addressing his challenger.

Devout Democrat James Carville observed, “The president didn’t bring his A-game.” A-game? He didn’t bring his M-game. It wasn’t quite an empty chair, but….

When Obama, who doesn’t bother with many full Cabinet meetings, began touting generalized training for jobs of the future, it was Romney the well-briefed, no-nonsense, rational business executive who pointed out:

“But our training programs right now, we got 47 of them housed in the federal government, reporting to eight different agencies. Overhead is overwhelming.”

At the start Obama looked shocked that Romney spoke to him so directly. Commentator David Gergen, who’s worked in White Houses under both parties, noted that first-term staffs are packed with sycophants. He speculated that no one inside the presidential bubble has talked to Obama that way in years. …

Roger Simon was watching too.

It was a bad twentieth wedding anniversary night for Barack and Michelle Obama. Twenty-five should be better. No irritating debates to deal with. It won’t even be an election year. Maybe they can celebrate with a Mai Tai or two in their new beachfront home on Oahu.

All the networks agreed last night, even the court eunuchs on MSNBC, as did the polls and the focus groups, that Romney won the debate. Obama looked like a warmed-over version of Richard Nixon, shifty and evasive in his answers. But Nixon was always infinitely more prepared than our current president and considerably more informed.

The fuddy-duddy liberal choir of the mainstream media looked shell-shocked. But secretly some of them may actually be relieved. Anyone with an IQ in triple digits knows that Romney would be a better president than Obama with the country and the world in the situation they are. And that probably includes Obama himself, considering the level at which he debated.

If Romney is elected, dad would be back and they (the media) would get to be kids again, living la vida loca while protesting until blue in their collective faces everything Romney does in the coming years. They get to be “against the man” once more. They don’t have to defend the man, such as he is.

A few of these media folks may even subtly throw Obama under the bus – a just deserts since he has done that favor to so many others. We’ll have to see. It did seem to me while watching the debate that even moderator Jim Lehrer, try as he might to help the president, was starting to realize Romney was the better man. Even Ed Schultz and Bill Maher apparently tweeted that Romney had won …

Robert Costa gives us a peek at Romney’s debate prep.

The elements of Mitt Romney’s RockyMountain rout were hatched weeks ago in Vermont’s Green Mountains. In early September, Romney slowed down his campaign schedule and retreated with a small group of advisers to the home of Kerry Healey, his former lieutenant governor. Ohio senator Rob Portman, a trusted ally, joined Stuart Stevens, Eric Fehrnstrom, Bob White, and a handful of other Romney confidants. They spent days holding mock debates, and nights reviewing President Obama’s stylistic tics. When they needed a break, they roamed around Healey’s secluded estate, which is 100 miles south of Burlington, Vt. But mostly they talked, over hot chocolate and coffee, about how best to communicate Romney’s message.

Portman says Romney’s willingness to fully commit to the prep was striking. Day after day, he’d get up early, exercise, and then join the team for hours of work. Advisers certainly played a role, but according to Portman, it was the candidate who drove his advisers. Even when he had a busy week of campaigning, Romney would always find time to study or hold a brief mock debate. “It was all him,” Portman tells me. “Honestly, I’ve spent a lot of time with Mitt Romney for the past month or so, and what I saw on stage is who he is. He’s smart, he’s articulate, and he’s got a big heart.”

During the opening prep sessions, the group quickly came to a consensus: At the podium, Romney would be forceful, nearly as assertive as he was in Healey’s living room. His advisers have always admired Romney’s ability to peel apart arguments in private, and they encouraged him to do the same at the debate, with a little polish. The goal was to overwhelm the president with liveliness and information, to force him to confront the messy details of his economic and fiscal record. The strategy, sources say, clicked with Romney for two reasons: He did not want to spend hours tinkering with his mannerisms, and he wanted to focus on internalizing data. He’d take advice on his voice, his posture, and the rest, but he wanted his prep time to be a policy workshop.

“This whole thing about ‘zingers,’ I never even heard that word discussed in debate prep,” Stevens says. “If you go back to the history and look at Governor Romney’s 20 debates, he likes policy, he likes substance, and he likes strong arguments that are based on merits and on differences. He’s never been one for debate tricks and sleight of hand.” …

Jonathan Tobin wonders if the Dems are going to draw the wrong conclusions from their debate debacle.

… Democrats know that personal attacks on Romney have taken a huge toll on the Republican in recent months. They have had some success depicting him as a heartless plutocrat who cares nothing about ordinary people and who stashes money abroad while not paying taxes at home. Romney’s “47 percent” gaffe hurt him in large measure because it fit right into the portrait Democrats have been painting of him. But the assumption that the president would have done better had he echoed these nasty and quite personal barbs is faulty. Presidents are supposed to be presidential while leaving the business of carving up their opponents to lesser beings like vice presidents. If Obama’s cheering section in the media thinks getting down into the gutter on stage during a presidential debate is what Obama needs to do, they may soon be proved wrong.

The problem with the president last night wasn’t that he wasn’t nasty enough but the arrogance with which he seemed to regard the proceedings. His body language and long-winded lectures betrayed not just a man who didn’t adequately prepare for the format, but also a man who has no respect for his opponent or the ideas he put forward.

Yet the ultimate problem for the president is not so much what he did or didn’t say; it’s that he gave us a glimpse of the man that Republicans have always claimed him to be: the arrogant liberal poseur who looks down his nose at the rest of us. More than all the videos in which Obama uses racial incitement or talks down individual initiative, the real danger is that on the big stage of the first debate, he came across as less likeable. The stuffy, long-winded bore we saw in Denver is not the historic figure that inspired millions with his messianic promises of hope and change. …

John Hinderaker posts on the debate in Power Line.

… The Daily Mail headlines: “The new Jimmy Carter? Obama slammed by media as even his own supporters trash debate performance after Romney’s crushing win.” Per Drudge, Michael Moore comments, “This is what happens when u pick John Kerry as your debate coach.” Dennis Miller: “Obama better hope a kicked a** is covered under Obamacare.”

So where do we go from here? My guess is that we will see a slight uptick in the polls for Romney, but don’t expect anything dramatic. It takes time and reinforcement for people’s perceptions to change. Last night was the beginning of a process, not the end.

The remaining debates will be important; more important, I think, than if the first one had not been such a blowout. The pressure will be on Obama to do better next time, and liberal moderators will do all they can to help him. (One reason last night’s debate was so one-sided was that, with the exception of one or two rather feeble efforts to lend Obama a hand, Jim Lehrer stayed out of the way.) …

VodkaPundit liked one of the pictures of the debate aftermath.

Any further comment would just be rubbing salt in the wound — so let’s do that.

We’ve discussed before one of the most difficult things about unseating an incumbent president: He just looks so darned presidential. He has Air Force One, he has a custom Cadillac limo, he even has a marching band at his disposal. This johnny-come-lately trying to unseat him has none of that.

But look at that photo again. Does that man look presidential to you? Does he look like the most powerful man in the world? He’s not even the most powerful man on that little stage, even though the johnny-come-lately came without the jumbo jet or the phalanx of Marines.

But Mitt Romney did show up ready to be President. Obama showed up with — as — the Empty Chair. He stared at his feet. He grimaced. Occasionally a smile would flash on his face, with all the spontaneity of Bush 41′s “Message: I Care.” He was whiny, he was defensive. Worst of all? Empty Chair’s body language didn’t just show contempt for Romney. He displayed contempt for the setting, for the requirement that he be there, and I think it even showed contempt for the office he (still) holds.

Barack Obama is tired of being President. I’m not sure he ever enjoyed it. That is what he brought to the debate last night, and that is why he lost.

Bill Kristol finds a good quote from Jimmy Carter, another debate loser.

A friend notes Jimmy Carter’s diary entry from the day after the 1980 Reagan debate—the last time a Democratic president lost a debate to a Republican challenger:

“He apparently made a better impression on the TV audience than I did, but I made all our points to the constituency groups—which we believe will become preeminent in the public’s mind as they approach the point a week from now of actually going to the polls,” writes Carter.

Leaving aside Carter’s wishful thinking, it’s striking how explicitly Carter confirms Jay Cost’s thesis that the modern Democratic party is a collection of “constituency groups” to be appealed to, and that the leaders of that party think of their job as appealing to those groups rather than speaking to and on behalf of the nation. The experience of Reagan and Romney both suggest that a forceful appeal to the common good can trump constituency group politics.

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Sunday morning we’ll spend more time on the debate, but a little bit now will be fun. Last night we got to see what happens to lazy presidents. Barry outsourced his job while prancing around the country and the world. Now he can’t come up with a logical defense of the actions of his administration. Here’s John Hinderaker from Power Line;

I’ve been watching presidential debates for quite a few years, but I have never seen one like this. It wasn’t a TKO, it was a knockout. Mitt Romney was in control from the beginning. He was the alpha male, while Barack Obama was weak, hesitant, stuttering, often apologetic. The visuals were great for Romney and awful for Obama. Obama looked small, tired, defeated after four years of failure, out of ammo. One small point among many: Obama doesn’t even know how to stand at a podium, as he continually lifted up one leg. He would be below average as a high school debater. …

And here’s my favorite tweet. This is from Bob Owens.

Some people eat when they get depressed. I hope Michelle put Bo outside for the night.

Craig Pirrong posts on the debacle in Libya.

It’s hard to know what is more appalling: the administration’s handling of Benghazi before the assault on the consulate and the killing of Ambassador Stevens and 3 other Americans, or its handling of the aftermath.

The ranking doesn’t matter really, because both are off the charts bad.

It is now abundantly clear that the security situation in Benghazi was atrocious before September 11, and that there were myriad warnings that Al Qaeda was active in the city.  The Brits withdrew their personnel from the city in July. American State Department personnel asked for more security-and were turned down.

It is now acknowledged that the judgment of the intelligence community within 24 hours of the attack was that it was a planned terrorist attack by Al Qaeda.

Well, duh.

Even a cursory review of what happened made the administration’s “spontaneous flash mob in response to a movie nobody saw” narrative obvious bullshit.

But in some respects the planned vs. unplanned debate is a red herring.  Would it actually be better for the administration and the State Department if the consulate and the ambassador were so vulnerable to an extemporaneous, unplanned attack that such an assault could overwhelm security in minutes and kill 4 Americans?  It’s a defense that American security was so bad that an ad hoc attack could kill the ambassador?

The only thing that really matters is that there were armed, hostile elements in the vicinity and that American security was completely insufficient to handle it. …

Andrew Malcolm says America’s savings rate has soared, suggesting how they might vote.

… “People have lost their appetite for risk,” the Brookings Institution’s Karen Dynan told the Washington Post the other day.

Think about that. It’s true. Just about everybody knows somebody who’s lost a job, a home, a marriage in recent times. Or all three.

That kind of pervasive uncertainty, even fear, is confining, feeds caution and creates a high hurdle for any incumbent to overcome. A challenger need only present himself as a conceivably presidential alternative.

That’s Romney’s challenge — and opportunity — tomorrow evening before a nationwide audience on the same stage with the Big Guy. To look like the former governor could become a president. He’ll have three chances to create a collective impression of that this month.

Polls show the race strangely close now. Which reminds us of that contentious statewide recall vote in Wisconsin back in early June, the most recent broad political measure we have. Unions and Democrats had successfully petitioned to force a vote on recalling Republican Gov. Scott Walker over his fiscal restraints and budget cuts. 

Remember how slow broadcasters were to call the race that evening? Know why?

Results from waves of exit polls throughout the day told them it was going to be a real squeaker either way. So, they were very careful with their words until the trend could not be ignored.

In the end, of course, it wasn’t close at all. Walker kept his job by a larger margin than he’d won with just 24 months previously against the same opponent. So, how to explain the skewed survey?

Concerned about how they’d be perceived voting against a Democrat and the unions in favor of a Republican, many voters lied to pollsters.

Imagine that.

Michael Barone says Obama has declared war on the young who elected him.

… Government has grown bigger. But big business doesn’t generate jobs; most are created by small businesses and startups. Unions have shrunk, and most union members are public employees.

Meanwhile, public policies have remained in place. Every year, government transfers increasing amounts from working-age taxpayers to the elderly through Social Security and Medicare. Obamacare amplifies this by requiring young workers to buy expensive insurance far beyond their needs.

In the meantime, the collective impact of Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and the fiscal cliff we are headed toward — all Obama policies — has cut job growth below the rate of population increase. Why?

“If you are a small business,” Dallas Fed head Richard Fisher says, “… you are stymied by not knowing what your tax rate will be in future years, or how you should cost out the social overhead of your employees, or how you should budget from the proliferation of regulations flowing from Washington.”

At the same time, Obama vows to resist any changes in Medicare, which is on a trajectory to welsh on its obligations well before the first Millennial turns 65.

For the young, Obama promises to expand college loans. But just as housing policies created a housing bubble, college loan policies have created a higher education bubble. The flood of money has been captured by colleges and universities through above-inflation tuition increases and administrative bloat.

But the Obama administration does not crack down on them, but on graduates or dropouts with thousands in college loan debt, which they can’t escape through bankruptcy. …

Whoever is elected, Bill Gross says he will have to deal with our $16 trillion debt, and the country’s $60 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Bill Wilson of NetRight Daily has the story.

Woe unto the next president, whoever he may be.

Managing director and co-founder of the world’s largest bond trader Pimco, Bill Gross, has released a shocking warning to the U.S. that promised entitlements to citizens may not be worth the paper they’re printed on.

He called the U.S. “an addict whose habit extends beyond weed or cocaine and who frequently pleasures itself with budgetary crystal meth.”

Gross counts some $60 trillion of unfunded liabilities that will ultimately be added to the now $16 trillion national debt to pay for future benefits.

“It just so happens that the $60 trillion comes not in the form of promises to pay bonds or bills at maturity, but the present value of future Social Security benefits, Medicaid expenses and expected costs for Medicare,” Gross wrote in his “Investment Outlook” newsletter.

Gross warned that unless we begin to address our fiscal crisis, disaster will eventually follow. “If we continue to close our eyes to existing 8 percent of [Gross Domestic Product] GDP deficits, which when including Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare liabilities compose an average estimated 11 percent annual ‘fiscal gap,’ then we will begin to resemble Greece before the turn of the next decade.”

Gross is correct. This is a ticking time bomb. In the past fiscal year alone, the national debt has grown by more than $1.2 trillion and under current projections will grow by about $1 trillion every year for the next decade.

The $16 trillion total liability is already larger than the entire economy. By 2022, it is expected by the Office of Management and Budget to swell to $26 trillion. Nobody except for the insane asylum on Capitol Hill expects economic growth will be able to keep pace with that level of debt accumulation. …

Great background piece in the Weekly Standard about the race in MA.

… “I don’t kid myself. I know it’s going to be a fight,” Warren says. Her voice is flat, her rhythm slow and deliberate. “I know it’s going to be tough. I know they’re going to throw everything they possibly can at me. I know this. I know this. But here’s what I want to tell you. I am not afraid.” Warren’s voice gets louder. “I am not afraid.” And more piercing. “I am not afraid!”

And why should she be? Warren is running for senator as a liberal Democrat in Massachusetts, in a year when the liberal Democratic president is up for reelection, and in a state where he’s never been more popular. Her opponent is the 53-year-old incumbent, Scott Brown, the only Republican in the state’s congressional delegation, and the only Republican statewide elected official. Brown won a low-turnout special election in 2010 by driving around the state in his pickup truck, wearing a brown Carhartt jacket. His image as a moderate Republican with blue-collar roots appealed to Democratic-leaning middle-class independents. In Massachusetts, though, Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than three to one. Warren ought to be running away with this race.

But Warren’s not running away with this race. The Real Clear Politics poll average shows Warren fewer than 2 points ahead of Brown, and a Rasmussen poll released last week shows the candidates tied. Most observers consider the race a toss-up. At the candidates’ first debate on September 20, a whole cadre of national reporters traveled to Boston to watch. It turns out the year’s most interesting Senate race isn’t in a swing state like Virginia or Ohio but in deep-blue Massachusetts.

The fact is, Scott Brown is one of the most gifted natural politicians in the country, and Elizabeth Warren simply isn’t. 

Warren’s campaign has had its fair share of stumbles. When the media first began asking questions about her claim of Cherokee heritage, especially whether she had used that claim to advance her career, Warren was unclear and contradictory in her answers. Her television advertisements, most of which feature a serious Warren speaking directly to the camera, have fallen flat. Her best ad is a testimonial from a well-known boxing trainer, Art Ramalho of Lowell, who praises the Harvard lawyer from Oklahoma in his thick New England accent. Warren herself doesn’t appear in the ad until halfway through. 

But it’s on the trail that Warren really looks out of her league. …

According to Our Amazing Planet, Nadine is becoming one of the hero hurricanes.

Nadine was born, declared to be over, came back from the dead and just keeps sticking around.

And now, the cyclone’s longevity will earn it a spot in the record books: By tonight, it will become the Atlantic Ocean’s 10th longest-lasting tropical cyclone, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC). A tropical cyclone is an organized storm with winds greater than 32 mph (52 kph), and includes tropical depressions, tropical storms and hurricanes.

Nadine is expected to retain tropical cyclone strength for another three to four days, in which case it could become one of the top five longest-lasting cyclones, said Dennis Feltgen, an NHC spokesman.

The longest-lasting Atlantic cyclone ever was the San Ciriaco Hurricane of 1899, which hung on for 28 days. Nadine, which has been a cyclone for 19 days, is not expected to challenge that record, Feltgen told OurAmazingPlanet. [50 Amazing Hurricane Facts]

Nadine has had an interesting life.

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Mark Steyn writes about President Future.

One of the reasons why Barack Obama is regarded as the greatest orator of our age is that he’s always banging on about some other age yet to come — e.g., the Future! A future of whose contours he is remarkably certain and boundlessly confident: The future will belong to nations that invest in education because the children are our future, but the future will not belong to nations that do not invest in green-energy projects because solar-powered prompters are our future, and most of all the future will belong to people who look back at the Obama era and marvel that there was a courageous far-sighted man willing to take on the tough task of slowing the rise of the oceans because the future will belong to people on viable land masses. This futuristic shtick is a cheap’n’cheesy rhetorical device (I speak as the author of a book called “After America,” whose title is less futuristic than you might think) but it seems to play well with the impressionable Obammysoxers of the press corps.

And so it was with President Obama’s usual visionary, inspiring, historic, etc., address to the U.N. General Assembly the other day: “The future must not belong to those who bully women,” he told the world, in a reference either to Egyptian clitoridectomists or the Republican party, according to taste. “The future must not belong to those who target Coptic Christians,” he added. You mean those Muslim guys? Whoa, don’t jump to conclusions. “The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam,” he declared, introducing to U.S. jurisprudence the novel concept of being able to slander a bloke who’s been dead for getting on a millennium and a half now. If I understand correctly the cumulative vision of the speech, the future will belong to gay feminist ecumenical Muslims. You can take that to the bank. But make no mistake, as he would say, and in fact did: “We face a choice between the promise of the future or the prisons of the past, and we cannot afford to get it wrong.” Because if we do, we could spend our future living in the prisons of the past, which we forgot to demolish in the present for breach of wheelchair-accessibility codes.

And the crowd went wild! Well, okay, they didn’t. They’re transnational bureaucrats on expense accounts, so they clapped politely, and then nipped out for a bathroom break before the president of Serbia. But, if I’d been one of the globetrotting bigwigs fortunate enough to get an invite — the prime minister of Azerbaijan, say, or the deputy tourism minister of Equatorial Guinea — I would have responded: Well, maybe the future will belong to those who empower women and don’t diss Mohammed. But maybe it’ll belong to albino midgets who wear pink thongs. Who knows? Que sera sera, whatever will be will be, the future’s not ours to see. But one thing we can say for certain is that the future will not belong to broke losers. You’re the brokest guy in the room, you’re the president of Brokistan. You’ve got to pay back $16 trillion just to get back to having nothing, nada, zip. Who the hell are you to tell us who the future’s going to belong to?

The excitable lads around the globe torching American embassies with impunity seem to have figured this out, even if the striped-pants crowd at TurtleBay are too polite to mention it.  Obama is not the president of the Future. He is president right now, and one occasionally wishes the great visionary would take his eye off the far-distant horizon where educated women and fire-breathing imams frolic and gambol side by side around their Chevy Volts, to focus on the humdrum present where the rest of us have the misfortune to live. …

Yesterday Charles Krauthammer wanted Mitt to go large. Now Josh Kraushaar suggests it is time for Romney to think outside the box.

Rereading Walter Isaacson’s biography of the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, it’s hard not be struck by one passage illustrating the late Apple CEO’s philosophy about focus groups and survey data: He ignored it. In his mind, he had a vision for what the iPhone should look like, and it was his job to convince consumers that they absolutely needed a touch-screen phone that could play music and surf the Internet, even though few people were clamoring for it.

Mitt Romney’s struggling campaign could use a little of the Jobs business plan — coming up with a grand vision for the future and making a case for it throughout the country. Instead, the candidate with the mind of a consultant has become obsessed with persuading the micro-demographic groups who remain undecided. So there’s an ad about coal in Ohio and Virginia, a “Dear Daughter” ad transparently trying to win over women, and even a Republican National Committee ad featuring a female Hispanic voter “breaking up” with a cardboard cutout of President Obama.  

Micro-targeting has worked like a charm for Obama’s campaign, which has avoided talking about the president’s record in favor of mobilizing a base of young voters, minorities, and abortion rights-supporting women to carve out a bare majority. But it’s a questionable strategy for his Republican challenger, who badly needs an overarching vision that appeals to Americans dissatisfied with Obama’s performance in office and struggling in a stagnant economy.

If Bill Clinton served as Team Obama’s masterful defense lawyer at the Democratic National Convention, there’s been little attempt since by the Romney campaign to rebut the argument that Obama’s doing the best he can under the troubling circumstances he inherited. There’s little attempt at making the connection between the president’s unpopular first-term policies — the health care law, the stimulus bill, cap-and-trade energy regulations — and the sorry state of the U.S. economy. …

Human Events on the people leaving California.

… Business owners talk not just about the costs, but about harassment by myriad government tax and regulatory agencies that often treat them like criminals. Freedom is on the decline as government gains more authority to micromanage virtually everything. Just check out the kind of bills the governor is now signing into law. (I love Steve Breen’s cartoon, which says, “If you’re a Californian and want to start a small business, there are a number of different routes you could take.” It then shows the various Interstate highways that lead to other states.)

Yet Brown insists that California is still “the land of dreams.” And some academics say the talk about a California exodus to other states is not true. In May, University of Southern California Professor Dowell Myers argued that we shouldn’t believe “the tales of gloom. Californians aren’t fleeing.” The main problem, he wrote, is Californians don’t spend enough public money on schools.

This is where I want to bang my head against the wall. There have been some reductions in per-pupil public-school spending from 2008, given California’s budget problems.

But these reductions come after massive spending increases in previous years and Prop. 98 mandates 40 percent of the general fund goes to K-14 education. Schooling is so important, yet California’s leaders have been resistant to imposing the real reforms that will improve schools through competition and teacher testing — ideas that run afoul of the powerful California Teachers Association.

Despite these delusions, productive people are leaving and they will do so more rapidly if this “just tax and spend more” advice is followed.

A new study from the Manhattan Institute called “The Great California Exodus: A Closer Look” offers a reality check. Yes, Californians are fleeing mostly for pro-growth states with a better tax and regulatory climate. California used to be a destination state, but has outsourced 3.4 million residents in the past 22 years. …

Late Night from Andrew Malcolm.

Fallon: Stevie Wonder will do a fundraiser for President Obama this month. And then Stevie will return to his other gig — as an NFL replacement ref.

Conan: Patriots Coach Bill Belichick got so mad about a call by a replacement referee he grabbed his arm. Fortunately Belichick was stopped by the ref’s seeing-eye dog.

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Telegraph Blogs, UK with the top ten moments in US debates.

1. The first televised presidential debate was a turning point in the tight battle between John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 – but not because of what either candidate said. Kennedy oozed charm and confidence. Nixon, who was just out of hospital, applied chemist store make-up to his five o-clock shadow, looked pale and shifty and perspired heavily. Presidential candidates opted not to appear in televised debates for the next 16 years.

2. In 1976, President Gerald Ford bewilderingly insisted: “”There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.” He lost shortly afterwards to Jimmy Carter.

3. Ronald Reagan, the former Hollywood star, was not surprisingly a natural in front of the cameras. In 1980, he fatally wounded Carter with his delivery of the simplest question to viewers. “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The Romney ticket is asking the same question this year.

4. In 1984, Democrats tried to make Reagan’s age an election issue – at 73, he was America’s oldest president and had performed shakily in his first debate with Walter Mondale. But when asked about his age in the final debate, he replied: “I want you to know also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Even his rival laughed and shortly afterwards Reagan swept the country. …

Newt Gingrich has much on past debates and some advice.

… Newt’s advice: Relax and be prepared

I tell the stories to make the point that too much debate preparation is cognitive, fact-filled, rational and focused on verbal game playing.

The most important aspect of a debate is how you feel.

Mike Deaver, the great media adviser to President Reagan, used to assert that television is 85 percent visual, 10 percent how you sound and 5 percent what you say.

In every Presidential debate I participated in I always remembered Deaver’s rule.

More important than what Romney knows is how he feels.

Is he confident?

Is he relaxed?

Is he in command of himself?

Can he stand up to both the media and the president?

These body language issues are far more important than the specific things he says.

Be assertive and be on offense against both Obama and his media

You can be on offense without being offensive.

The strongest reactions I got to my debates came from people who were desperate for someone to stand up to the media and redefine the questions and reframe the assumptions.

Americans are sick and tired of the unending liberalism and suffocating groupthink of the elite media.

If you look at my strongest applause lines virtually every one was taking on the media. …

Interesting post from Pajamas Media on 10 things to expect from the first debate.

The very poor, a battle of government-run healthcare, “economic patriotism,” and much more!

With Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) portraying Mitt Romney and Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) acting as President Obama, the 2012 presidential hopefuls are crunching in their last days of prep before facing off for the first of three nationally televised debates Wednesday.

The University of Denver event, beginning at 9 p.m. Eastern time, is a domestic-policy gauntlet moderated by Jim Lehrer. Subject to “possible changes because of news developments,” Lehrer picked the topics: three parts on the economy, and other 15-minute segments on health care, the role of government, and governing.

We’ve seen and heard much from Romney and Obama on the campaign trail, but what might we hear in their first debate?

Cayman Islands
Don’t expect Obama to go Full Harry Reid and accuse Romney of not paying taxes. Obama has learned by this point that it’s Reid’s job to say crazy stuff, and it’s his job to either nod politely, nod enthusiastically, or pretend like he didn’t hear it. The Obama camp is more than happy, though, to go after tax shelters as a double-edged weapon: use it as proof to convince Congress that the rich are dodging taxes and therefore Bush-era tax cuts shouldn’t be extended for upper-income brackets, and use it on the campaign trail to try to convince the electorate that Romney is out-of-touch wildly wealthy. An unwise rebuttal would be the Ann Romney route of telling a reporter that they don’t even know what’s in their blind trust. A wise rebuttal would steer the conversation to the small-business owners who fall in those upper-income brackets and may have to cut jobs if their taxes went up.

47 percent
Obama just might as well prop up an old-school projector and loop Mother Jones’ undercover fundraiser video, because he wants to have those dim tabletop candles and Romney words branded in voters’ minds from now until Nov. 6. “As I travel around the state, I don’t see a lot of victims. I see a lot of hardworking Nevadans,” he cooed to his Las Vegas audience last night. The big question here is if Romney will be able to go on the offensive against Obama on this issue of government dependency. The Romney camp wishes the tape would disappear, but there are three debates to get through questions about the 47 percent (yep, I wouldn’t put a dropping of that digit past Obama in the foreign policy debate), and where the GOP hopeful does not want to be is on the defensive. …

David Harsanyi says Romney must make Obama own the economy. 

It’s simple. During the upcoming debates, no matter what question is thrown at him, Mitt Romney has to dump the economy onto the lap of its rightful owner. The president, Romney might suggest, shouldn’t be judged on the economy he campaigned so hard to inherit, but the recovery he has botched. As it stands, Obama is the owner of the most pathetic economic revival in American history. A recovery so weak, it’s difficult to believe that voters even think of it as one.

So, when the president starts unfurling his economic vision of growth through wind-powered fairness factories, Romney has to bring it back to reality. Mr. President, you passed $831 billion special interest “stimulus” plan that you promised the American people would spark growth, yet it has had a negligible impact on economic growth.

It was your administration that claimed growth would climb to 4 percent during your first term if we passed the stimulus. This year, growth is under 2 percent. And it was your economic forecasters who told us that the stimulus would help avert an unemployment disaster. But the unemployment numbers we’re now facing are actually worse than the ones your administration predicted we would have had without the “stimulus.”

Nowadays, the president and his advocates are compelled to cobble together ludicrous claims of success. “In the last 29 months,” Obama will say, “our economy has produced about 4.5 million private-sector jobs.” Or, under the Obama administration “we’ve created more private sector jobs than George Bush’s entire term.”

Romney can’t get bogged down deconstructing these ridiculous cherry-picked assertions. Mr. President, he has to explain, if labor force stood where it was when the Bush administration handed it to you, rather than being depleted by millions of Americans who have given up hope of finding a job, the unemployment rate would be somewhere around 11 percent. That’s what you own.

More than that, the economy has only seen a net gain of around 300,000 jobs over the course of your entire administration. If you’re telling the American people that it takes trillions in extra government spending to create those 300,000 jobs, I say your philosophy is an abject failure. Considering those numbers, it is, in fact, more likely that your policies have hampered the private sector economic growth then helped it. …

Since the government will not stop making laws, perhaps our salvation will come from wise juries. A counter culture blog named Alchemy of the Modern Renaissance has the story of a dairy farmer harassed by ag bureaucrats and saved by jury nullification.

Last week a Minnesota man charged with violating the state’s restrictions on raw milk sales was acquitted in what he and his supporters called a victory for consumer freedom.  Alvin Schlangen is a peaceful farmer who connects people with the food sources that meet their high standards for health by providing private access under lawful ownership of farm animals.  the member owners pay the Amish farm family for labor to milk the leased 100% grass-fed cows, manage the pasture, store the feed, etc. This co op is a sustainable farming effort where the value of food supports the cost incurred, without government subsidies or harm to the environment. The balance of food options are purchased by the club, for the members. The group has multiple farm sources providing real food to member families- very efficiently, with lots of volunteer effort.

Over the past two years, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture has illegally raided Alvin’s van, warehouse, and farm resulting in the multiple charges that were decided upon in court last week.  Technically, Alvin was guilty of breaking the laws in question, even though the laws are totally ridiculous and unjust.  Luckily this jury was informed about the process of jury nullification, and their legal right to rule in favor of the accused for breaking unjust laws. …

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Charles Krauthammer wants Romney to go large.

.. Even his counterpunching has gone miniature. Obama has successfully painted Romney as an out-of-touch, unfeeling plutocrat whose only interest is to cut taxes for the rich. Romney has complained in interviews that it’s not true. He has proposed cutting tax rates, while pledging that the share of the tax burden paid by the rich remains unchanged (by “broadening the base” as in the wildly successful, revenue-neutral Reagan-O’Neill tax reform of 1986).

But how many people know this? Where is the speech that hammers home precisely that point, advocates a reformed tax code that accelerates growth without letting the rich off the hook, and gives lie to the Obama demagoguery about dismantling the social safety net in order to enrich the rich?

Romney has accumulated tons of cash for 30-second ads. But unless they’re placed on the scaffolding of serious speeches making the larger argument, they will be treated as nothing more than tit for tat.

Make the case. Go large. About a foreign policy in ruins. About an archaic, 20th-century welfare state model that guarantees 21st-century insolvency. And about an alternate vision of an unapologetically assertive America abroad unafraid of fundamental structural change at home.

It might just work. And it’s not too late.

Jennifer Rubin posts on the dissembling about Benghazi coming from the administration.

Late Friday afternoon the spokesman for Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James R. Clapper Jr. released a statement in which the intelligence head tried to fall on the administration’s sword on the Libyan-consulate debacle. But the problem was that Clapper’s statement did not absolve the administration of repeatedly making false statements after intelligence agencies knew this was a planned al-Qaeda terrorist attack.

The Post’s Glenn Kessler got things started with a devastating timeline of the Libya events. Then Fox News’s Bret Baier put together an extremely useful video account of the sequence of events.

And the New York Times followed suit:

“The Obama administration’s shifting accounts of the fatal attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, have left President Obama suddenly exposed on national security and foreign policy, a field where he had enjoyed a seemingly unassailable advantage over Mitt Romney in the presidential race.” … 

David Ignatius, one of WaPo’s liberals is unhappy with Obama’s abdication during the campaign.

It’s embarrassing when President Obama’s risk-averse refusal to engage on foreign policy issues becomes so obvious that it’s a laugh line for the president of Iran.

“I do believe that some conversations and key issues must be talked about again once we come out of the other end of the political election atmosphere in the United States,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said cheekily in an interview last Sunday. I hate to say it, but on this matter the often-annoying Iranian leader is right.

Less than six weeks before the election, the Obama campaign’s theme song might as well be the old country-music favorite “Make the World Go Away.” This may be smart politics, but it’s not good governing: The way this campaign is going, the president will have a foreign affairs mandate for . . . nothing. …

… To be blunt: The administration has a lot invested in the public impression that al-Qaeda was vanquished when Osama bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011. Obama would lose some of that luster if the public examined whether al-Qaeda is adopting a new, Zawahiri-led strategy of interweaving its operations with the unrest sweeping the Arab world. But this discussion is needed, and a responsible president should lead it, even during a presidential campaign.

Perhaps the most disheartening example of a topic that has been deep-sixed during campaign season is the war in Afghanistan. This month marked the end of the surge that President Obama ordered in December 2009, and troops are back to the pre-surge level of about 68,000. How fast will that number decline over the next year? Here again, we probably won’t know until after Election Day. Gen. John Allen, the commander of U.S. forces in Kabul, is preparing his recommendations, but officials say that this process of review will take . . . well, at least six weeks.

The president hasn’t really made any bones about his wait-till-later approach. He put it frankly to Dmitry Medvedev, then president of Russia, back in March when he thought the microphone was off: “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”

This strategy of avoiding major foreign policy risks or decisions may help get Obama reelected. But he is robbing the country of a debate it needs to have — and denying himself the public understanding and support he will need to be an effective foreign policy president in a second term, if the “rope-a-dope” campaign should prove successful.

The principled left is after Obama for the drone wars and other things. The Democracy in America Blog of the Economist posts on the latest salvo.

CONOR FRIEDERSDORF’S post yesterday at the Atlantic on “Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama” is a huge internet hit. As I write, it has been tweeted 2,000 times, and has been liked by more than 90,000 on Facebook. He has struck a nerve. Mr Friedersdorf’s bill of indictment is damning, and hard to dispute:

“1. Obama terrorizes innocent Pakistanis on an almost daily basis. The drone war he is waging in North Waziristan isn’t “precise” or “surgical” as he would have Americans believe. It kills hundreds of innocents, including children. And for thousands of more innocents who live in the targeted communities, the drone war makes their lives into a nightmare worthy of dystopian novels. People are always afraid. Women cower in their homes. Children are kept out of school. The stress they endure gives them psychiatric disorders. Men are driven crazy by an inability to sleep as drones buzz overhead 24 hours a day, a deadly strike possible at any moment. At worst, this policy creates more terrorists than it kills; at best, America is ruining the lives of thousands of innocent people and killing hundreds of innocents for a small increase in safety from terrorists. It is a cowardly, immoral, and illegal policy, deliberately cloaked in opportunistic secrecy. And Democrats who believe that it is the most moral of all responsible policy alternatives are as misinformed and blinded by partisanship as any conservative ideologue.

2. Obama established one of the most reckless precedents imaginable: that any president can secretly order and oversee the extrajudicial killing of American citizens. Obama’s kill list transgresses against the Constitution as egregiously as anything George W. Bush ever did. It is as radical an invocation of executive power as anything Dick Cheney championed. The fact that the Democrats rebelled against those men before enthusiastically supporting Obama is hackery every bit as blatant and shameful as anything any talk radio host has done.

3. Contrary to his own previously stated understanding of what the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution demand, President Obama committed U.S. forces to war in Libya without Congressional approval, despite the lack of anything like an imminent threat to national security.” …

 

More from Clive Crook in the Atlantic Blogs.

… I can’t get to Friedersdorf’s level of certainty that the policy is evil, but he’s pulled me in his direction.

How to think this through? If drone attacks are counterproductive from a security point of view — because they kill the wrong people and stir up hostility to the United States — then we needn’t spend much time asking whether they’re legal or moral. If they don’t work, no dilemma arises. But do they? I don’t know and the truth is, neither does Friedersdorf. At best, he says, the increase in safety is small. That might be true but how are we supposed to know? The dangers of blowback are clear, but with little or no public information about the targets, outsiders can’t judge whether the campaign is making Americans safer.

The question of legality is complicated because there are so many variables: context (is this an “armed conflict” in the legal sense?); the decision-making process (how were the targets chosen?); necessity (were there alternatives?); proportionality; and so on. Legality matters but it shouldn’t be the main concern. Lawyers can’t tell us what’s just or right. If I thought the drone war was immoral and legal, I’d say let’s not do it. If I thought it was moral and illegal, I’d say let’s change the law.

In principle (I don’t know if Friedersdorf would agree) the drone attacks could be moral, but the net security gains have to be very impressive. If the targeting is as poor as Friedersdorf thinks and the execution as imprecise, then it’s hard to see how the policy could be justified. If “signature targeting” as described in the Stanford/NYU report is really going on — that is, not attacking known terrorists but striking on the basis of “behavior patterns” observed from high altitude — I’d need a lot of persuading that this wasn’t recklessness to an immoral degree (as well as being most likely illegal, by the way). …

More on polls. This time from one of our long time favorites, Michael Barone. 

As a recovering pollster (I worked for Democratic pollster Peter Hart from 1974 to 1981), let me weigh in on the controversy over whether the polls are accurate. Many conservatives are claiming that multiple polls have overly Democratic samples, and some charge that media pollsters are trying to discourage Republican voters.

First, some points about the limits of polls. Random-sample polling is an imprecise instrument. There’s an error margin of 3 or 4 percent and polling theory tells us that one out of 20 polls is wrong, with results outside the margin of error. Sometimes it’s easy to spot such an outlier; sometimes not.

In addition, it’s getting much harder for pollsters to get people to respond to interviews. The Pew Research Center reports that it’s getting only 9 percent of the people it contacts to respond to its questions. That’s compared with 36 percent in 1997.

Interestingly, response rates are much higher in new democracies. Americans, particularly in target states, may be getting poll fatigue. When a phone rings in New Hampshire, it might well be a pollster calling.

Are those 9 percent representative of the larger population? As that percentage declines, it seems increasingly possible that the sample is unrepresentative of the much larger voting public. One thing a poll can’t tell us is the opinion of people who refuse to be polled.

Then there is the problem of cellphone-only households. In the 1930s and 1940s, pollsters conducted interviews in person, because half of households had no phone or (your grandparents can explain this) a party-line phone. …

William Jacobson says one of Warren’s defenders is throwing in the towel.

Soon after my original post, Elizabeth Warren’s law license problem, Mark Thompson at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen wrote a post taking an opposite view, No, Elizabeth Warren Did Not Engage in the Unauthorized Practice of Law.That post by Thompson was cited far and wide, including at Memeorandum as well as at friendly conservative blogs which wanted to present the case for Warren to provide balance.

In light of my post this morning that Warren represented a Massachusetts client in Massachusetts on an issue related to Massachusetts law, Thompson has concluded in a new post today:

“Professor Jacobson has uncovered this morning a case in which Elizabeth Warren entered an appearance in a federal appellate court as a representative of a Massachusetts client in a case that appears to have clearly implicated Massachusetts law.  Although this is still a federal appellate court, because we’re dealing with a Massachusetts client and issues of Massachusetts law, this looks really, really bad for Professor Warren.  With this bombshell, I would no longer view the case against her as weak.” …

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John Hinderaker at Power Line has some good advice for Romney partisans; keep calm and carry on.

As Paul noted last night, the Gallup Poll currently has Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney by six points, 50-44. Paul expressed skepticism about that finding, with which I agree. Why would Obama be enjoying a spike in support over the last week? Are voters happy to see an American ambassador murdered and the Middle East in flames, while our economy continues to stagnate? I don’t think so.

Certainly the Rasmussen survey, which tracks likely voters, hasn’t seen any similar bump for Obama. As of today, Rasmussen’s three-day rolling numbers have the race tied 46-46. It couldn’t be closer: with “leaners” included, Rasmussen has it 48-48, and in the swing states it’s 46-46.

Obama’s resurgence in the Gallup Poll looks suspiciously like the one that Gallup gave Jimmy Carter in 1980. As we noted a couple of weeks ago, Gallup tried to convince its readers in October 1980 that Carter had surged to an eight-point lead over Ronald Reagan:

 

So, were voters suddenly happy about American hostages being held in Iran for a year, or about high unemployment and skyrocketing prices? Of course not. The Carter bounce was entirely fictional, caused either by lousy polling technique or an effort by Democrats at Gallup to drum up support for their candidate. I suspect that this year’s Obama bounce is cut from the same cloth.

Still, there is no denying that Republicans are nervous. This election shouldn’t be close, given Obama’s record, yet it looks as though it will be. So everyone has advice for the Romney campaign. …

WSJ Editors listened to the Obama excuses and responded.

… “When I came into office, I inherited the biggest deficit in our history.1 And over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90% of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren’t paid for,2 as a consequence of tax cuts that weren’t paid for,3 a prescription drug plan that was not paid for,4 and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.5

“Now we took some emergency actions, but that accounts for about 10% of this increase in the deficit,6 and we have actually seen the federal government grow at a slower pace than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower, in fact, substantially lower than the federal government grew under either Ronald Reagan or George Bush.7″

Footnote No. 1: Either Mr. Obama inherited the largest deficit in American history or he won the 1944 election, but both can’t be true. The biggest annual deficit the modern government has ever run was in 1943, equal to 30.3% of the economy, to mobilize for World War II. The next biggest years were the following two, at 22.7% and 21.5%, to win it.

The deficit in fiscal 2008 was a mere 3.2% of GDP. The deficit in fiscal 2009, which began on October 1, 2008 and ran through September 2009, soared to 10.1%, the highest since 1945.

Mr. Obama wants to blame all of that on his predecessor, and no doubt the recession that began in December 2007 reduced revenues and increased automatic spending “stabilizers” like jobless insurance. But Mr. Obama conveniently forgets a little event in February 2009 known as the “stimulus” that increased spending by a mere $830 billion above the normal baseline.

The recession ended in June 2009, but spending has still kept rising. The President has presided over four years in a row of deficits in excess of $1 trillion, and the spending baseline going forward into his second term is nearly $1.1 trillion more than in fiscal 2007.

Federal spending as a share of GDP will average 24.1% over his first term including 2013. Even if you throw out fiscal 2009 and blame that entirely on Mr. Bush, the Obama spending average will be 23.8% of GDP. That compares to a post-WWII average of a little under 20%. Spending under Mr. Bush averaged 20.1% including 2009, and 19.6% if that year is left out. …

… Footnote No. 5: Mr. Obama keeps dining out on the excuse of the recession, but that ended halfway through his first year. The main deficit problems since 2009 are a permanently higher spending base (see Footnote No. 1) and the slowest economic recovery in modern history. Revenues have remained below 16% of the economy, compared to 18% to 19% in a normal expansion.

The 2008 crisis is long over. The crisis now is Mr. Obama’s non-recovery.

Footnote No. 6: Even at face value, Mr. Obama’s suggestion that he is “only” responsible for 10% of what the government does is ludicrous. Note that in addition to his stimulus, what he calls “emergency actions” include his new health-care entitlement that will cost taxpayers $200 billion per year when fully implemented and grow annually at 8%, even using low-ball assumptions.

But the larger point concerns executive leadership. Every President “inherits” a government that was built over generations, which he chooses to change, or not to change, to suit his priorities. Mr. Obama chose to see the government he inherited and grow it faster than any President since LBJ. …

 

More on this from Veronique de Rugy at The Corner.

Who remembers President Obama’s first budget? I do. It was called “A New Era of Responsibility.” Back then, the president promised that he would cut the deficit to $912 billion in 2011 and to $581 billion by 2012. But that’s another of the president’s promises that never come to pass. As Fiscal Year 2012 nears to an end, the data shows that the deficit for 2012 will surpass a trillion dollars for the fourth straight year in a row.

But according to the president, he has almost no responsibility in this sad state of affairs. In fact, he claims that “90 percent” of the deficit is due to President Bush’s policy:

Over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90 percent of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren’t paid for, as a consequence of tax cuts that weren’t paid for, a prescription drug plan that was not paid for, and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

That’s a remarkably bold statement considering that President Obama has been in office for four years, and that he has engaged in seriously expansive policies of his own. I am always happy to remind conservatives about the incredible fiscal irresponsibility that reigned during the Bush years, but for Obama to claim that he shares almost no responsibility (10 percent, to be precise) in this fourth trillion-dollar deficit is ridiculous.

In fact, Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler looked at the claim this morning and concludes that the president deserves four Pinocchios for it. …

September 24th Pickings had poll analysis from Charlie Martin at Pajamas Media. Martin added more which we have today.

It isn’t unusual for the state of the polls to be a big issue this close to an election, but this week has been different from any previous campaign I remember — it’s not who’s ahead in the polls, it’s the polls themselves that are the big topic of discussion. My article “Skewed and Unskewed Polls” got picked up by both Drudge Report and Rush Limbaugh’s Stack O’ Stuff and — along with plenty of other contributions — made the topic of how polls are being performed into a national one.

The problem is that the discussion (as happens only too often) is now being led by people who don’t understand the whole topic very well. So let’s just talk about this a bit. I promise to almost completely eliminate the math; believe it or not, people can learn to reason about statistics without learning the central limit theorem.

Imagine a future day when, through technology and psychic powers, we can at any moment take an instant poll, checking what people mean in their heart of hearts to do when they vote in November. (And let’s not think what else could be done with that technology — this is a thought experiment.)

Secretary Dumbledore, Minister of Polling, goes into the office and pushes the appropriate button, and the poll is taken, click. It’s 51,267,303 for Romney and 49,109,941 for Obama, with 2,007,007 undecided. Does this tell us how the election is going to really come out? No, because it’s still 40 days (and nights) into the future. People may change their minds. Some people will die unexpectedly. And those two million-odd undecideds will have to either decide how to vote or decide not to vote at all.

And that’s the way it would work if we had this Perfect Magical Polling Wizardry. That would be a perfect poll.

Of course, we don’t. So this is what real polling companies do: …

Joel Gehrke in Beltway Confidential reports 55 percent of small businesses would not be started under this regulatory regime.

Fifty-five percent of small business owners and manufacturers would not have started their businesses in today’s economy, according to a new poll that also reports 69 percent say President Obama’s regulatory policies have hurt their businesses.

“There is far too much uncertainty, too many burdensome regulations and too few policymakers willing to put aside their egos and fulfill their responsibilities to the American people,” said Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, which commissioned the poll along with the National Federation of Independent Businesses. “To fix this problem, we need immediate action on pro-growth tax and regulatory policies that put manufacturers in the United States in a position to compete and succeed in an ever-more competitive global economy.”

The poll reports another ominous statistic for job creation: “67 percent say there is too much uncertainty in the market today to expand, grow or hire new workers.” Why? Because “President Obama’s Executive Branch and regulatory policies have hurt American small businesses and manufacturers,” according to 69 percent of the business owners surveyed. …

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More on polls. This time from John Nolte at Breitbart.

If you’re going to believe the polls released from CBS/New York Times this morning — you know, the polls the media’s currently using to beat Romney senseless and to depress Republican enthusiasm, you have to believe that the turnout advantage for Democrats over Republicans will blow away every previous record and common sense. 

It’s that simple. Because these polls are not only telling us that Romney is losing OH, PA, and FL by insurmountable margins; these polls are also telling us that Democrat turnout is projected to blow away every modern record.   

But these media polls don’t headline what they’re seeing as far as the Democrat turnout advantage because no one would believe it. In fact, no one believes Obama will match the D+7 nationwide advantage he enjoyed in 2008. And no one certainly believes he will surpass it.  

Oh, except this non-stop litany of media polls being wielded like weapons by the corrupt media.  

Here are the CBS/New York Times internals.  And here’s the con the CBS/NYTs is attempting to pull: …

Jennifer Rubin examines the president’s UN speech.

President Obama is so soaked in the State Department/Western European/ leftist intellectual goo of moral relativism and disdain for core American values that I doubt he understood how offensive were his remarks at the United Nations today.

After fessing up that our embassy people were killed by terrorists (he doesn’t say what kind, however) and reciting that violence is never justified he then once again denounced the anti-Islam video. And he delivers this:

“The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. But to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see in the images of Jesus Christ that are desecrated or churches that are destroyed, or the Holocaust that is denied.

Let us condemn incitement against Sufi Muslims and Shia pilgrims. It’s time to heed the words of Gandhi, “Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit.”

Together, we must work towards a work where we are strengthened by our differences, and not defined by them. That is what America embodies. That’s the vision we will support.”

Where to begin?

Let’s start with the simple observation that he is the president and not the minister of religion. It is not necessary for him to select out one or another references to the Divine. (No “God of Moses”?). It sounds like blatant pandering and it is.

The fact that he embodies the U.N. mantra on defamation of religion (“slander”) is even more regrettable. This is, as informed watchers of the U.N. know, an invidious movement to control and suppress speech, to prevent criticism of Islamic extremists and to use the West’s legal system against itself.

Moreover, Obama is heading down a path to nowhere in which every statement of intolerance theoretically must be individually condemned by our government. But he doesn’t mean it. The hypocrisy is evident. He doesn’t and will never do this when Evangelical Christians are vilified, when art displays portray Jesus in offensive ways or when Broadway musicals jab at Mormons. …

Jonah Goldberg asks what Obama has learned.

The Oval Office isn’t the place to learn on the job. That was the line from both Hillary Clinton and John McCain in 2008. In fairness, that’s always the argument the more experienced candidate uses against the less experienced candidate (just ask Mitt Romney).

But Barack Obama seemed a special case, easily among the least experienced major-party nominees in U.S. history. A Pew poll in August 2008, found that the biggest concern voters had with Obama fell under the category of “personal abilities and experience.” In a “change” year, Americans swallowed those concerns and voted for the change candidate.

Four years later, it’s worth asking, “What has Obama learned?”

Several journalists have asked that exact question. And Obama’s answers raise another question: Can Obama learn?

In July, CBS News’s Charlie Rose asked Obama what the biggest mistake of his first term was. Obama replied it “was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right.”

Getting the policy right is important, Obama continued, “but the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.” …

… His claim that he was too busy “getting the policy right” to tell the people a story is doubly creepy in its lack of self-awareness. All the reporting about Obama’s first term suggests that he outsourced the heavy lifting on the stimulus, “Obamacare,” and Wall Street reform to the Democratic leadership while he indulged his logorrheic platitudinousness. According to Bob Woodward’s new book, even Nancy Pelosi hit mute on the speakerphone (which she’s denied) during one of Obama’s perorations, and she and Harry Reid went on with their meeting.

In his first year, Obama barely stopped talking to the American people, who unfortunately didn’t always have a mute button handy. According to CBS’s Mark Knoller, Obama gave 411 speeches or statements (52 addresses solely on health-care reform), 42 news conferences, 158 interviews, 23 town-hall meetings, and 28 fundraisers.

And what did Obama learn from all of this? Nothing, nothing at all.

Andrew Malcolm cuts to the chase.

It’s probably safe to surmise that if, as he did, Barack Obama bothered to set up a formal teleprompter in the manure-sprinkled dirt of a rodeo arena for remarks to a captive crowd back in 2008, he doesn’t care much what people think. 

To be sure, he and his sleeveless wife have followed that pattern consistently during their 1,344 days of White House residency with her mother. He launched a war against Libya without congressional approval, while he took his extended family around South America. Nine days later he consented to explain his military actions.

Obama took two months to talk to the country about its worst environmental disaster, the Gulf oil spill. 

The Obamas entertained Hollywood celebrities at lavish White House parties while millions of Americans lost jobs, homes and hope during recovery-less Recovery Summers. While her husband urged Americans to vacation on the recovering GulfCoast, Michelle Obama flew off to a luxury resort in Spain with numerous friends. 

Like many in the 1%, Obama plays golf, 104 presidential rounds to be exact. But only Obama was Commander-in-Chief, presiding at one point over the conduct of three wars — and the awful sacrifices by others involved in armed conflicts, while Obama lined up challenging putts.

But with a national election just six weeks from today, a voter verdict he so clearly is desperate to win, this guy has carried an oblivious insouciance to unparalleled heights — or depths. 

Several weeks ago as a few dozen Virginians began to collapse in the afternoon heat during an unusually long Obama lecture, the president noted paramedics were on the way. But instead of wrapping up, he offered the audience advice on how to stand while he finished.

An American ambassador is killed on duty in Libya on 9/11, the first in three decades, along with three countrymen. Obama reads a tribute to their sacrifice and heads to Vegas for fundraising. …

London’s Telegraph sends a reporter to a town in Ohio to find voters who like Obama. Slim pickings.

There is a narrative in Washington that goes like this: swing voters basically like Barack Obama. They like his level temperament and they like his modern charm. They like pictures of him and his young family and their rambunctious dog, Bo. They like that he can sing, that he can shoot a three-pointer on the basketball court and can deliver a joke on late night.

The narrative is so strong that even Mitt Romney appears to buy into it. During his covertly-filmed remarks to donors at a Florida fundraiser, he warned that all-out assaults on the President’s character could backfire and that voters don’t want to be told Obama is a failure. “They like him,” the Republican conceded.

But as Dunkirk’s residents gathered for a communal meal of chicken noodles and mashed potato on Tuesday night there was little evidence of the latent affection that Washington has diagnosed.

In some cases the hostility took a predictable form. Ray Petty, a kind-hearted handyman with an eager smile, said he had always voted Democrat and was a big fan of both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. But he lit up with delight as he explained that Obama was a Muslim born outside the United States. “We’ve got to watch out for the Islamic birthrate,” he says, still smiling.

Another man quietly noted that Obama had won Ohio in 2008 even though “I’ve never met anyone who voted for him”. He trails off, leaving the conservative spectre of voter fraud hanging over the meal.

But even away from those whose dislike for Obama is anchored in conspiracy and ignorance, it is still hard difficult to find anyone with kind words to say about the President. …

John Hinderaker at Power Line follows up on Elizabeth Warren’s missing law license.

Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaign is, I think, going rapidly down the drain. On top of her affirmative action fiasco comes another scandal: it appears that she has been practicing law in Massachusetts without a license for some years.

Credit William Jacobson, who, like Warren, is a law professor, for the discovery. Jacobson has been one of the most effective members of the blogosphere over the last couple of years, and this story is a tribute to his dogged investigation. His initial post is here. Jacobson establishes that Warren is not licensed in Massachusetts, and never has been; that she is not currently licensed to practice law anywhere; that Warren repeatedly listed her Cambridge, Massachusetts office as her law office in court filings; and that Warren in fact practiced law out of her Cambridge office. If all of that is true, as seems incontestable, Warren has a lot of explaining to do.

It is important to note that Warren has done a considerable amount of legal work in recent years, and has been well paid for it. She was paid a fee by Travelers Insurance Company, to cite just one example, that was in the low six figures. So we are not talking about a casual, borderline situation. Warren indisputably is practicing law, and by her own repeated assertion, she is doing so in Massachusetts.

The Massachusetts Rules of Professional Responsibility treat this subject as the rules do in most states. Rule 5.5 addresses the unauthorized practice of law. Rule 5.5 (b) sets out the basic prohibition on practicing law in Massachusetts without a Massachusetts license:

(b) A lawyer who is not admitted to practice in this jurisdiction shall not:

(1) except as authorized by these Rules or other law, establish an office or other systematic and continuous presence in this jurisdiction for the practice of law; or

(2) hold out to the public or otherwise represent that the lawyer is admitted to practice law in this jurisdiction.

Emphasis added. On the undisputed facts, it appears that Warren has violated this prohibition. She admittedly is not licensed in Massachusetts, and yet she has established a law office in Massachusetts–one which she has referenced on any number of appellate briefs, and in which she has earned a large amount of money. Absent an exception, she is guilty as charged. …

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Jeff Jacoby tells the story of how Jimmy Carter IV, grandson of the president, located the famous Romney 47% tape. The grandson said his actions were in part payback for the way the GOP treats the hapless former president.

… You can’t fault the guy for wanting to defend his grandfather’s reputation, but Jimmy Carter’s reputation as a foreign-policy schlemiel can hardly be blamed on the Romney campaign. Americans came to that conclusion more than 30 years ago, having watched the world grow more dangerous — and America’s enemies more brazen — during Carter’s feckless years as steward of US national security.

“There was strong evidence that voters … wanted a tougher American foreign policy,” reported The New York Times on November 5, 1980, the morning after Ronald Reagan crushed Carter’s reelection bid in a 44-state landslide. By a nearly 2-to-1 ratio, voters surveyed in exit polls “said they wanted this country to be more forceful in dealing with the Soviet Union, ‘even if it increased the risk of war.’”

In fact, Reagan’s muscular, unapologetic approach to international relations — “peace through strength” — didn’t increase the risk of war with the Soviets. It reduced it. Within a decade of his election, the Soviet empire — as Reagan foretold — would be relegated to the ash-heap of history. …

… Is it fair to compare Obama’s foreign policy to Carter’s? The similarities were especially vivid after the murder of four US diplomats at the American consulate in Benghazi. Even more so when the administration insisted that the outbreak of anti-American violence by rampaging Islamists in nearly 30 countries was due solely to a YouTube video mocking Islam — a video the White House bent over backward to condemn.

But Obama-Carter likenesses were being remarked on long before this latest evidence of what the appearance of US weakness leads to. Obama was still a presidential hopeful when liberal historian Sean Wilentz observed in 2008 that he “resembles Jimmy Carter more than he does any other Democratic president in living memory.” Within weeks of Obama’s inauguration, troubling parallels could already be detected. In January 2010, Foreign Policy magazine’s cover story, “The Carter Syndrome,” wondered whether the 44th president’s foreign policy was beginning to collapse “into the incoherence and reversals” that had characterized No. 39′s.

The Carter years are a warning of what can happen when the “Leader of the Free World” won’t lead. It may irk his grandson to hear it, but Jimmy Carter’s legacy is still too timely to ignore.

Jeffrey Lord in the American Spectator takes off from the Dick Morris column in September 24th Pickings and shows how the New York Times and Washington Post have tried to help liberal Dems with polls.

Dick Morris is right.

Here’s his column on “Why the Polls Understate the Romney Vote.”

Here’s something Dick Morris doesn’t mention. And he’s charitable.

Remember when Jimmy Carter beat Ronald Reagan in 1980?

That’s right. Jimmy Carter beat Ronald Reagan in 1980.

In a series of nine stories in 1980 on “Crucial States” — battleground states as they are known today — the New York Times repeatedly told readers then-President Carter was in a close and decidedly winnable race with the former California governor. And used polling data from the New York Times/CBS polls to back up its stories.

Four years later, it was the Washington Post that played the polling game — and when called out by Reagan campaign manager Ed Rollins a famous Post executive called his paper’s polling an “in-kind contribution to the Mondale campaign.” Mondale, of course, being then-President Reagan’s 1984 opponent and Carter’s vice president.

All of which will doubtless serve as a reminder of just how blatantly polling data is manipulated by liberal media — used essentially as a political weapon to support the liberal of the moment, whether Jimmy Carter in 1980, Walter Mondale in 1984 — or Barack Obama in 2012. 

First the Times in 1980 and how it played the polling game.

The states involved, and the datelines for the stories: …

… Here is how the Times played the game with the seven of the nine states in question.

• Texas: In a story datelined October 8 from Houston, the Times headlined:

Texas Looming as a Close Battle Between President and Reagan

The Reagan-Carter race in Texas, the paper claimed, had “suddenly tightened and now shapes up as a close, bruising battle to the finish.” The paper said “a New York Times/CBS News Poll, the second of seven in crucial big states, showing the Reagan-Carter race now a virtual dead heat despite a string of earlier polls on both sides that had shown the state leaning toward Mr. Reagan.”

The narrative? It was like the famous scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy and her friends stare in astonishment as dog Toto pulls back the curtain in the wizard’s lair to reveal merely a man bellowing through a microphone. Causing the startled “wizard” caught in the act to frantically start yelling, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” In the case of the Times in its look at Texas in October of 1980 the paper dismissed “a string of earlier polls on both sides” that repeatedly showed Texas going for Reagan. Instead, the Times presented this data:

A survey of 1,050 registered voters, weighted to form a probable electorate, gave Mr. Carter 40 percent support, Mr. Reagan 39 percent, John. B. Anderson, the independent candidate, 3 percent, and 18 percent were undecided. The survey, conducted by telephone from Oct. 1 to Oct. 6, has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

In other words, the race in Texas is close, assures the Times, with Carter actually in the lead.

What happened? Reagan beat Carter by over 13 points. It wasn’t even close to close. …

… So the questions for 2012.

How corrupt are all these polls showing Obama leading or in a “close race”?

Are they to Obama what that California poll of the Washington Post was for Walter Mondale — an “in-kind contribution”?

Is that in fact what was going on with the New York Times in 1980? An “in-kind contribution” to the Carter campaign from the Times?

What can explain all these polls today — like the ones discussed here at NBC where the Obama media cheerleaders make their TV home? Polls that the Obama media groupies insist show Obama 1 point up in Florida or 4 points in North Carolina or 5 points in Pennsylvania. And so on and so on.

How does one explain a president who, like Jimmy Carter in 1980, is increasingly seen as a disaster in both economic and foreign policy? How does a President Obama, with a Gallup job approval rating currently at 49% — down a full 20% from 2009 — mysteriously win the day in all these polls?

How does this happen?

Can you say “in-kind contribution”?

Time has decided to hit Obama upside the head.

On Monday, President Barack Obama made his fourth pilgrimage to New York City for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. He arrived in Manhattan on a glorious autumn afternoon and rushed to his first – and only – public event of the day: a taping of ABC’s The View with his wife, Michelle. …

… Of course, meeting with world leaders when you don’t know if you’ll still have your job in the next few weeks, can be potentially awkward. It can lead to unfortunate hot-mic gaffes, of which Obama has not been immune (for example,  in Seoul earlier this year he asked Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to be flexible on missile defense until after the election, when Obama would have more space to maneuver–too much diplomatic candor for the sensitive electoral season). Still, ignoring the opportunity to meet one-on-one with world leaders underlined where Obama’s attention is fixed: the campaign. And it was the election that dominated the taping of The View. That, and the inside skinny of the Obama family’s schedule. …

Power Line reminds us what a liar Bill Clinton is.

Nearly twelve years after the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency it has become easy to forget this central fact about the former president: he is a pathological liar. For better or for worse, Clinton’s active participation in this year’s presidential campaign reminds us of this sad reality.

Take, for example, this exchange between Clinton and Fareed Zakaria:

ZAKARIA: Is Mitt Romney right that the only thing you can do with the Israeli-Palestinian issue is kick the can down the road?

CLINTON: No, it is accurate that the United States cannot make peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. They have to do that. What we need to do is maximize the attractiveness of doing it and minimize the risks of doing it. We can do that.

And if you look at it, President Bush, when he took office, the second President Bush, I’ll never forget he said, “You know the names of every street in the old city and look what it got you. I’m not going to fool with this now.”

And immediately the death rate went up among Israelis and Palestinians because there was nothing going on.

However, as Seth Mandel explains, something was going on when Bush took office — the Second Intifada, which began under President Bill Clinton. The “death rate” went up because the Palestinians launched a terror war against Israeli civilians following the abject failure of Clinton’s Camp David peace talks. For this reason, Clinton’s attempt to blame the increased death rate of Bush’s inactivity is extremely deceptive.

It’s also fundamentally dishonest. The import of Clinton’s comment to Zakaria is that Bush rejected Clinton’s preferred course when he declined to engage in (or “fool with,” to use the perfect turn of phrase Clinton attributes to “W”) the “peace process.”

But, as Mandel shows, Clinton was dead set against trying to jump start peace talks following the failure of Camp David. Indeed, according to Martin Indyk, United States ambassador to Israel and Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs during the Clinton Administration, Clinton told Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell and anyone else he could get an audience with that the new administration should not deal with Arafat, whom he called a liar who had destroyed the chance for peace. As Indyk put it in his memoir of the Clinton administration’s Middle East policy, in Clinton’s “final hours as president. . .there was one piece of unfinished business he was determined to take care of: it was payback time for Yasser Arafat.” For once, Clinton had it right on a major foreign policy issue.

It should be possible for Clinton to serve Team Obama in this election — and thus to improve the likelhood of his return to the White House in 2017 — without telling lies that place blame on George W. Bush (a non-participant in the election) for the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians during the Intifada. But Clinton can’t resist the temptation to engage in this slander — a hallmark of the pathological liar

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Mark Steyn on the film and all.

… after a week and a half of peddling an utterly false narrative of what happened in Libya, the United States government is apparently beginning to discern that there are limits to what even Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice can say with a straight face. The official line – that the slaughter of American officials was some sort of improvised movie review that got a little out of hand – is now in the process of modification to something bearing a less patently absurd relationship to what actually happened. That should not make any more forgivable the grotesque damage that the administration has done to the bedrock principle of civilized society: freedom of speech

The more that U.S. government officials talk about the so-called film “Innocence Of Muslims” (which is actually merely a YouTube trailer) the more they confirm the mob’s belief that works of “art” are the proper responsibility of government. Obama and Clinton are currently starring as the Siskel & Ebert of Pakistani TV, giving two thumbs-down to “Innocence Of Muslims” in hopes that it will dissuade local movie-goers from giving two heads-off to consular officials. “The United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video,” says Hillary Clinton. “We absolutely reject its content, and message.” “We reject the efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others,” adds Barack Obama. There follows the official State Department seal of the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.

Fellow government-funded film critics call “Innocence Of Muslims” “hateful and offensive” (Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations) and “reprehensible and disgusting” (Jay Carney, White House press secretary). Gen. Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Senior Pentagon Advisor to Variety, has taken to telephoning personally those few movie fans who claim to enjoy the film. He called up Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who apparently thinks “Innocence Of Muslims” is the perfect date movie, to tell him the official position of the United States military is they’d be grateful if he could ease up on the five-star reviews. …

… What other entertainments have senior U.S. officials reviewed lately? Last year Hillary Clinton went to see the Broadway musical “Book of Mormon.” “We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others”? The Book of Mormon’s big showstopper is “Hasa Diga Eebowai,” which apparently translates as “F*** You, God.” The U.S. Secretary of State stood and cheered.

Why does Secretary Clinton regard “F*** You, God” as a fun toe-tapper for all the family but “F***, You Allah” as “disgusting and reprehensible”? The obvious answer is that, if you sing the latter, you’ll find a far more motivated crowd waiting for you at the stage door. So the “Leader of the Free World” and “the most powerful man in the world” (to revive two cobwebbed phrases nobody seems to apply anymore to the president of the United States) is telling the planet that the way to ensure your beliefs command his “respect” is to be willing to burn and bomb and kill. You Mormons need to get with the program. …

He’s fit for campaigning, but not for governing says Michael Barone.

“[T]he most important lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t change Washington from the inside,” Barack Obama said in an interview Thursday on the Spanish-language Univision network. “You can only change it from the outside.”

A better way to put it is that Barack Obama has proved he can’t change Washington from the inside.

One case in point is the comprehensive immigration legislation Obama promised to steer to passage in his first term. The Univision interviewers, who asked tougher questions than the president has been getting from David Letterman or various rappers, zeroed in on this issue.

With a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate and a solid Democratic majority in the House in 2009 and 2010, Obama could have pushed for an immigration bill.

Instead, he acquiesced in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision not to bring such a measure to the floor. It would require some of her members to cast tough votes.

But, with Obama’s encouragement, she did bring to the floor and pushed through a cap-and-trade bill that also required some of her members to cast tough and, in some cases, career-ending votes.

Cap and trade was a favorite of gentry liberals, the kind of people Obama regularly has seen at his 200-plus fundraising events. As for the Hispanics who want immigration legislation, he’s now promising that he’ll push it in his second term. Wait in line.

George W. Bush managed to get congressional votes on comprehensive immigration bills. Obama didn’t bother.

Obama’s inability to change Washington from the inside is also on display in Bob Woodward’s latest best-seller, “The Price of Politics.”

He tells how in a meeting of congressional leaders, Pelosi muted a speakerphone as Obama droned on lecturing members on the national interest, so the legislators could get some work done. …

Jonah Goldberg show how silly the media’s treatment of the GOP has become.

… When MSNBC got an advance copy of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s convention speech, the network landed another scoop. “For four years,” McConnell planned to say, “Barack Obama has been running from the nation’s problems. He hasn’t been working to earn reelection. He has been working to earn a spot on the PGA Tour.” A fool might think this a not-exactly-veiled reference to the fact that Barack Obama plays a lot of golf, more than 100 rounds since he was elected. But MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell is no fool.

Asked what he made of the line, O’Donnell confidently replied, “Well, we know exactly what he’s trying to do there. He’s trying to align . . . the lifestyle of Tiger Woods with Barack Obama.”

Martin Bashir asked O’Donnell whether he really believed that. Couldn’t McConnell just mean what he said?

O’Donnell went into full eye-roll mode. “Martin, there are many, many, many rhetorical choices you can make at any point in any speech to make whatever point you want to make.” According to O’Donnell, McConnell’s speechwriters chose the golf reference because “these people reach for every single possible racial double entendre they can find in every one of these speeches.”

Bashir, who for a moment gave the impression of neural activity, was convinced. “Wow,” he exclaimed. “Things are getting lower and lower by the day.”

When Robert Welch of the John Birch Society insisted that Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist, Russell Kirk famously retorted, “He’s not a Communist, he’s a golfer.” Thank goodness no one knew back then that Kirk was calling Ike a sexually promiscuous half-black man. …

The latest episode in the “Perils of Lizzie” surfaced yesterday when the news broke Warren has practiced law in Massachusetts without a license. Those laws are for little people and do not apply to card carrying liberals. Daily Caller has the story.

Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren may have practiced law in Massachusetts for years without a license to do so, according to a newly surfaced report.

Republican Sen. Scott Brown — whom Warren is challenging — reminded viewers that Warren helped represent The Travelers Insurance Company on an asbestos case which reached the Supreme Court in 2009.

In May, the Boston Globe reported that Warren argued that case before the Supreme Court. “Six months after Elizabeth Warren arrived in Washington to work as an adviser to Congress, she experienced another career milestone in the nation’s capital, a seat at the US Supreme Court’s mahogany counsel table,” the Globe wrote. “The 2009 appearance was the only time Warren helped represent a party before the nation’s highest court. And it provides a rare window into a less-heralded aspect of the Harvard Law professor’s career, her time as a working attorney in the courts.”

According to the Legal Insurrection blog, this was hardly the only case Warren was involved in. “Warren represented not just Travelers, but numerous other companies starting in the late 1990s working out of and using her Harvard Law School office in Cambridge, which she listed as her office of record on briefs filed with various courts,” Legal Insurrection’s William A. Jacobson reported on Monday morning.

There’s just one caveat: “Warren, however, never has been licensed to practice law in Massachusetts.” …