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Blue Collar Dems, Others Abandon Obama

Yesterday's primary results in a handful of states including North Carolina, West Virginia, Indiana and Wisconsin spell more trouble for President Obama.
Let's talk about border states and Appalachia first.
What happened in West Virginia is indicative of something that's occurring in the south, border states and through the Appalachians up into Pennsylvania and Ohio. Blue collar Democrats are turning away from President Obama. To be sure, these have never been a big part of Obama's base (remember how Hillary Clinton trounced him among this group in '08) but now they are in full revolt against the President.
The situation is so bad that yesterday, in West Virginia a prison inmate managed to capture 40% of there vote against Obama in the Democrat primary. This inmate (Keith Judd) became Obama's most successful primary challenger this year.
Imagine the embarrassment the White House must (or should) feel.
When Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy scored 42% of the vote against President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary that was considered a stunning upset "victory" for McCarthy. It so humiliated President Johnson that by the end of the month Johnson dropped out of the presidential race altogether.
Yesterday, Keith Judd won 41% of the vote against a sitting president. Judd actually carried 10 counties.
And Judd didn't campaign and didn't have the small army of volunteers that McCarthy had. Indeed, Judd is still serving time at Beaumont Federal Correctional Institution in Texas.
People obviously weren't voting for Judd. They were voting against Obama.
Translation: West Virginians (who have elected a Democrat governor and two Democrat US Senators) are damned angry with Obama.
Now, let's look to North Carolina, a state that the Democrats are targeting with such fervor that they plan to hold their convention there this summer. In North Carolina, by a lopsided majority of 61% to 39%, moderate, blue-collar Democrats joined Republicans to reject gay marriage -- a proposal that has become a pillar of liberalism and a sort of litmus test for Democrat officeholders. In North Carolina we now know that at least 35% of the state's Democrat voters joined in voting for an amendment to the state's constitution which effectively bans gay marriage by defining marriage as the union of one man and  one woman.
This issue is tough for Obama and the president knows it. Though he nominally supported the federal Defense of Marriage Act and has said that marriage is between a man and a woman, he's also said that his position on gay marriage is "evolving" and he has allowed his Attorney General to actually back away from enforcing the Defense of Marriage Act.
Obama knows that gay marriage is unpopular in the African-American community and among blue-collar Democrats. But he needs to rouse his base and this issue is a rouser among rabid libs.
So, Obama allows Vive President Biden and other would-be surrogates to support gay marriage while he hides behind some sort of "evolutionary" position. He's playing politics, pure and simple. And, in so doing he's using the gay community -- manipulating them and teasing them on an issue that would appear to be critically important to them.
And yesterday made the whole thing even more uncomfortable -- and more awkward -- for Obama.
Now, on to the midwest. In Wisconsin, Republicans turned out in droves to support embattled Gov. Scott Walker in the state’s primary ahead of a June 5 recall election, while organized labor efforts failed to rouse Democrats. Walker got 97 percent of the vote in the Republican primary, and almost as many votes were cast for him than in the entire Democrat primary combined. Not band for a guy who's supposed to be "on the ropes."
And in Indiana moderate (and often left-leaning) GOP Senator Dick Lugar lost to his primary challenger State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, again by a roughly 60%/40% margin as the Tea Party came out in force. The message for Obama? The Tea Party is not only alive and well but it's on the march and stronger than ever. Tea Party intensity could create a repeat of the 2010 election results.
Bet on it: Mourdock will win in November and Romney will carry Indiana as well.
And Romney will carry West Virginia, too.
And North Carolina and Wisconsin are eminently winnable for the GOP.
And Pennsylvania and Ohio? Here we come . . . . .

The Brightest New Star Of The GOP?

Excerpts from a speech by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels delivered at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington DC, February 11, 2010:

We Hoosiers hold to some quaint notions. Some might say we “cling” to them, though not out of fear or ignorance. We believe in paying our bills. We have kept our state in the black throughout the recent unpleasantness, while cutting rather than raising taxes, by practicing an old tribal ritual – we spend less money than we take in.
We believe it wrong ever to take a dollar from a free citizen without a very necessary public purpose, because each such taking diminishes the freedom to spend that dollar as its owner would prefer. When we do find it necessary, we feel a profound duty to use that dollar as carefully and effectively as possible, else we should never have taken it at all.

When business leaders ask me what they can do for Indiana, I always reply: “Make money. Go make money. That’s the first act of 'corporate citizenship.'" If you do that, you’ll have to hire someone else, and you’ll have enough profit to help one of those non-profits we’re so proud of.”


We place our trust in average people. We are confident in their ability to decide wisely for themselves, on the important matters of their lives.

We believe in government that is limited but active. Within that narrow sphere of legitimate collective action, we choose to be the initiators of new ideas or, as we have labeled ourselves, the Party of Purpose. In President Reagan’s phrase, “We are the change.” On election nights, we remind each other that victory is not a vindication, it is an instruction, not an endorsement, but an assignment.


We face an enemy, lethal to liberty, and even more implacable than those America has defeated before. We cannot deter it; there is no countervailing danger we can pose. We cannot negotiate with it, any more than with an iceberg or a Great White.
I refer, of course, to the debts our nation has amassed for itself over decades of indulgence. It is the new Red Menace, this time consisting of ink.


If a foreign power advanced an army to the border of our land, everyone in this room would drop everything and look for a way to help. We would set aside all other agendas and disputes as secondary, and go to the ramparts until the threat was repelled. That is what those of us here, and every possible ally we can persuade to join us, are now called to do. It is our generational assignment. It is the mission of our era. Forgive the pun when I call it our “raison debt.”

The health care travesty now on the books will engulf private markets and produce a single-payer system or its equivalent, and it won’t take long to happen.


Our morbidly obese federal government needs not just behavior modification but bariatric surgery. The perverse presumption that places the burden of proof on the challenger of spending must be inverted, back to the rule that applies elsewhere in life: “Prove to me why we should.”

Within a few years, we will be spending more on interest payments than on national security. That is not, as our military friends say, a “robust strategy.”



We don’t have a prayer of defeating the Red Threat of our generation without a long boom of almost unprecedented duration. Every other goal, however worthy, must be tested against and often subordinated to actions that spur the faster expansion of the private sector on which all else depends.


Americans have seen these last two years what doesn’t work. The failure of national economic policy is costing us more than jobs; it has begun to weaken that uniquely American spirit of risk-taking, large ambition, and optimism about the future. We must rally them now to bold departures that rebuild our national morale as well as our material prosperity.


Drill, and frack, and lease, and license, unleash in every way the jobs potential in the enormous energy resources we have been denying ourselves. And help our fellow citizens to understand that a poorer country will not be a greener country, but its opposite. It is freedom and its fruits that enable the steady progress we have made in preserving and protecting God’s kingdom.


Americans, in a vast majority, are still a people born for self-governance. They are ready to summon the discipline to pay down our collective debts as they are now paying down their own; to put the future before the present, their children’s interest before their own.

It is up to us to show, specifically, the best way back to greatness, and to argue for it with all the passion of our patriotism. But, should the best way be blocked, while the enemy draws nearer, then someone will need to find the second best way. Or the third, because the nation’s survival requires it. Purity in martyrdom is for suicide bombers. King Pyrrhus is remembered, but his nation disappeared. Winston Churchill set aside his lifetime loathing of Communism in order to fight World War II. Challenged as a hypocrite, he said that when the safety of Britain was at stake, his “conscience became a good girl.” We are at such a moment. I for one have no interest in standing in the wreckage of our Republic saying “I told you so” or “You should’ve done it my way.”

It is up to us to show, specifically, the best way back to greatness, and to argue for it with all the passion of our patriotism. But, should the best way be blocked, while the enemy draws nearer, then someone will need to find the second best way. Or the third, because the nation’s survival requires it. Purity in martyrdom is for suicide bombers. King Pyrrhus is remembered, but his nation disappeared. Winston Churchill set aside his lifetime loathing of Communism in order to fight World War II. Challenged as a hypocrite, he said that when the safety of Britain was at stake, his “conscience became a good girl.” We are at such a moment. I for one have no interest in standing in the wreckage of our Republic saying “I told you so” or “You should’ve done it my way.”

We should address ourselves to young America at every opportunity. It is their futures that today’s policies endanger, and in their direct interest that we propose a new direction.
We should distinguish carefully skepticism about Big Government from contempt for all government. After all, it is a new government we hope to form, a government we will ask our fellow citizens to trust to make huge changes.

We are tasked to rebuild not just a damaged economy, and a debt-ridden balance sheet, but to do so by drawing forth the best that is in our fellow citizens. If we would summon the best from Americans, we must assume the best about them. If we don’t believe in Americans, who will?

 

 

Obama: heartland Disenchantment

From MSNBC:
While South Bend, Ind., was abuzz on Sunday over President Barack Obama's commencement address at Notre Dame University, many residents of nearby Elkhart said they are growing impatient as they wait for his grand economic visions to translate into something tangible.
Msnbc.com's Kari Huus interviewed a handful of Elkhart residents Sunday evening at Antonio's restaurant and detected no resentment that Obama didn't make his fourth visit to Elkhart while he was in the area.
In fact, Ryan Dobbs, a former RV worker who is now running a small construction team, said it's probably just as well that he didn't drop by. "
There were how many cops here for him?" he said. "I know the cities and the county are broke. Where is the money coming from to pay for these visits?" "
I'd rather he just talked about Elkhart in a speech at the White House," Dobbs said.
Dobbs, who watched snatches of Obama's Notre Dame address in newscasts that interrupted the basketball game on televisions above the bar, said he's never been a big Obama fan and likened the president to a smooth-talking car salesman. "He can come as many times as he wants. He talks change. Show me change."
"Sometimes it feels like he's still campaigning," said Bob Donegan, who owns and manages commercial and residential properties in Elkhart.
He said residents are still waiting for him to deliver on his promises — especially on the promise of jobs he made in his Feb. 9 visit, when he touted the massive federal stimulus package and insisted that the government must act "quickly and boldly.'
"When you tell people there are going to have jobs, they expect it right away," he said. "The first visit didn't really do anything for us. It didn't bring us any business."'
One customer at Antonio's, Joe Seher, said he had driven the 15 miles to South Bend to protest Obama's economic policies.
"The administration is focused on big companies — AIG, Chrysler," said Seher, who runs a manufacturing company. Meantime, he said, his suppliers are getting killed by the credit crunch. "I don't like Obama's programs, and I don't like him as a human being," he said.

Still Can't Close The Deal

Barack Obama was unable to close the deal again on Tuesday night.
Yes, he won North Carolina. But he simply won another southern state with a huge black vote in the Democrat primary (more than 30%). And he once again captured more than nine out of 10 of those black votes. But Obama lost Indiana to Clinton and Clinton won nearly 60% of late-deciding voters in Tuesday's primaries. It's significant that Obama couldn't win Indiana which borders his own state of Illinois.
So, let's review. Obama has lost New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts, Indiana, Florida and Texas. I add Florida because Obama never took his name off the ballot in Florida. These are big, significant states - key states in any general election.
And next week and the following week it's likely that Clinton will win West Virginia and Kentucky.
Still, Hillary faces an uphill climb.
Democrats will have a hard time denying Obama the nomination. The only question is will the prize be worth very much if and when Obama claims the prize? He can't win the big ones. He doesn't seem to be able to win over the groups that have turned against him. And, his inability to close the deal has led to a long, fractious race which has left both candidates bruised and battered.
And the doubts about Obama continue to grow - especially among the so-called "Reagan Democrats," older voters, regular church goers and independents. And these are people who actually vote.
If anything, the Clintons have been easy on Obama. That won't happen once the Republicans step to the plate.
Be sure of this: Nothing which Obama has faced thus far prepares him for the battle with the GOP that looms on the horizon.