Nov 02

Election Day in America

Culture, Media, Politics, Society No Comments »

I’m a political junkie. And a news junkie. And a court watcher. I’m the kind who wades happily through stacks of documents mining the little gems scattered in obscure places, looking for the untold story, looking closely at how language is used in politics and law and media to shape the culture. I look at number crunching and story spinning and gravitate to voices of reason, wherever they can be found. It all comes together with considerable drama on election day. And I love it…

We wait for and anticipate this with great eagerness. If your party or beliefs are in power, Hooray! You get to reaffirm them. If your principles and beliefs are suppressed and belittled, Hooray! You get to assert and affirm them. We are a representative republic, and today is our day to determine who represents us.

Voting is a moral act. Whenever they hold a ”Values Voters Summit” in Washington (or wherever) I always make the point that we’re all values voters. It just depends on whose values you accept as just and true and honorable and grounded in human dignity.

Campaigning for the mid-terms is now over, and we will have a new Congress and many new governors and many other new elected officials after the polls close and votes are counted. And at the end of the day, it was and remains all about ideas.

Power is shifting hands, and not just from one political party to the other. It’s going from elite powerbrokers to mainstream Americans once considered, dismissively, as the ‘Silent Majority.’

Voter discontent this year isn’t confined to the tea party. A new AP poll reports that 51% of Americans now think President Obama doesn’t deserve re-election.

But that campaign will begin tomorrow.

As for tonight, this will be quite a show as results come in across America, and I’m watching it all, and looking for the gems…

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Nov 01

Hyperbole and really bad reality

Culture, Law, Media, Politics, Society No Comments »

It has ratcheted up, the extreme language, the play on fears and/or biases, and the gloves off pugilism. Okay, stay on task. Know what you believe and take a reasoned stance for it. Put media reporting in proper perspective…

Where to begin? How about this CNN report, which acknolwedges the foregone conclusion that at least the House is about to change hands.

With an incoming freshman class of conservative and Tea Party Republicans skewing the GOP conference to the right, there will be little mood for compromise or bipartisan legislation on any major issues in the House, most observers say.

Hold on. Point to where and when in the past 20 months Congress has been in the “mood for compromise or bipartisan legislation”, on anything. That’s a serious and fair question or challenge. Because the press are swtiching the story line around fast right now, lining up the narrative ahead of the inevitable Democratic defeat.

Richard Grenell answers the question, on HuffPo, of all places.

United States Senator Barbara Boxer — she insists on being called by the full title — not only doesn’t work with Republicans in Washington, she doesn’t work very well with members of her own Democratic Party. Unlike our other U.S. Senator, Diane Feinstein, Boxer consistently advocates for radical views and fringe issues. Boxer is antagonistic towards California’s business community, votes exactly the way the unions instruct her, rarely meets with people and groups she disagrees with and is known for her grand ego and mean-spirited temper. Boxer has spent 28 years in Washington and is considered by many to be the consummate self-serving politician insulated from everyday people. If you think Washington, DC, is broken, Barbara Boxer’s radical tenure is one of the main reasons.

Takeabreath…..Whew.

Okay, continue…

Boxer has also not just been pro-choice but has worked to make abortions federally funded. Boxer has advocated the use of tax dollars to support women who want their abortions paid for by others. Boxer hasn’t just wanted health care reform to better serve those that get sick and can’t pay for health care, she has advocated and worked hard for a public option to replace our current system. Boxer has pushed for a federally run health care system similar to how the federal government runs the post office — federal control with local service centers. Boxer also continues to believe in an economic plan that is based around more federal spending and higher taxes to pay for the spending. Boxer is advocating for even more stimulus money than the $900 billion already spent by the Obama Administration.

This is a referendum on President Obama. He, himself, asserted that though he is not on the ballot, his agenda is.

Which is the point.

The time has come. Stay tuned…

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Oct 31

Anti-Dem or pro-GOP?

Culture, Media, Politics, Society 1 Comment »

It’s being referred to in terms of natural upheaval. Tuesday’s election is predicted to be a tidal wave or an earthquake. Indeed, this event was prompted by nature….human nature.

But though meterologists, geologists or political pollsters can predict what’s coming with some degree of accuracy, what it means on a deeper level in the longer term is an important piece of analysis.

This has been a fascinating four years. Yes, four. The race for the presidency and the general election of 2008 began the day after the mid-terms of 2006, probably the earliest ever. Barack Obama was already out of the blocks and on his way. This will happen again Wednesday, no doubt, as pundits are still trying to figure out what happened Tuesday…

Which gets back to the importance of why the GOP is poised to clean up in this mid-term election. Why is that? This WSJ analysis is as good as any, and here’s a key snip:

Remarkably, there have been plenty of warning signs over the past two years, but Democratic leaders ignored them. At least the captain of the Titanic tried to miss the iceberg. Congressional Democrats aimed right for it.

For the first time in many decades, the Democrats owned it all, both houses of Congress and the Executive, a very liberal, assertive and aggressive White House with fewer checks and balances than any in recent history. A filibuster-proof majority allowed them to ignore the Republicans and even the majority will of the people, especially with a complicit media. How in the world did they blow that?

Obamacare, in a word. That was an unstoppable, runaway freight train and the Dems helped it blow through the heartland.

From the moment in May 2009 when the Congressional Budget Office announced that the president’s plan would cost a trillion dollars, most voters opposed it. Today 53% want to repeal it. Opposition was always more intense than support, and opposition was especially high among senior citizens, who vote in high numbers in midterm elections.

Rather than acknowledging the public concern by passing a smaller and more popular plan, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and President Obama insisted on passing the proposed legislation by any means possible.

Popularity? They control things. What concern have they for popular opinion?  And the ‘ways and means’ they control make it possible to do anything at will. And have the audacity to blame the Republicans for ‘not having any ideas’, when Americans paying attention to everything except big media knew all along that the Democrat super-majority weren’t even acknowledging Republicans’ existence, other than to blame them.

So are the Republicans really the smart and good ones, with the best ideas for America? Have they won the sentiment of Americans, after all?

No to both, or at least it’s not that superficial.

Since we don’t have a parliamentary government and therefore don’t have the need for a coalition of consensus as they do in Britain, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Israel, and others…we’re stuck with the two-party system. And the Tea Party saved us from having that challenged or splintered by remaining a breakaway of the Republican Party.

The reality is that voters in 2010 are doing the same thing they did in 2006 and 2008: They are voting against the party in power.

This is the continuation of a trend that began nearly 20 years ago. In 1992, Bill Clinton was elected president and his party had control of Congress. Before he left office, his party lost control. Then, in 2000, George W. Bush came to power, and his party controlled Congress. But like Mr. Clinton before him, Mr. Bush saw his party lose control.

That’s never happened before in back-to-back administrations. The Obama administration appears poised to make it three in a row. This reflects a fundamental rejection of both political parties.

More precisely, it is a rejection of a bipartisan political elite that’s lost touch with the people they are supposed to serve.

Americans are rejecting the Democrat elite and establishment Republicans. They are flummoxed, to say the least.

Based on our polling, 51% now see Democrats as the party of big government and nearly as many see Republicans as the party of big business. That leaves no party left to represent the American people.

Voters today want hope and change every bit as much as in 2008. But most have come to recognize that if we have to rely on politicians for the change, there is no hope. At the same time, Americans instinctively understand that if we can unleash the collective wisdom and entrepreneurial spirit of the American people, there are no limits to what we can accomplish.

Yes, we can.

Furthermore…

In this environment, it would be wise for all Republicans to remember that their team didn’t win, the other team lost. Heading into 2012, voters will remain ready to vote against the party in power unless they are given a reason not to do so.

So there.

Elected politicians also should leave their ideological baggage behind because voters don’t want to be governed from the left, the right, or even the center. They want someone in Washington who understands that the American people want to govern themselves.

So let them. There’s a radical idea.

Finally, one of the prognosticators followed the fault line to its source. And issued a sound warning.

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Oct 27

It’s not working for the Dems

Abortion, Culture, Law, Media, Politics, Society No Comments »

In this final week before the mid-term elections, President Obama is both trying to help where he can, and staying out of sight where his campaigning would be a liability for the Democrats. As of mid-week, he’s off the trail, which says it all.

The winning strategy is reportedly ‘running away from Obama,’ which this AP article said more clearly before it was modified. But this is pretty clear:

Obama can “take his endorsement and really shove it,” declared Democrat Frank Caprio, battling Republican-turned-independent Lincoln Chafee in a Rhode Island gubernatorial race rated tight in the polls. Chafee endorsed Obama during the 2008 campaign for the White House.

As a payback, Obama is not endorsing the Democrat. Which suits Caprio just fine.

Such is the state of affairs in the runup to next week’s election.

Critical parts of the coalition that delivered President Obama to the White House in 2008 and gave Democrats control of Congress in 2006 are switching their allegiance to the Republicans in the final phase of the midterm Congressional elections, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

This is really remarkable.

Republicans have wiped out the advantage held by Democrats in recent election cycles among women, Roman Catholics, less affluent Americans and independents. All of those groups broke for Mr. Obama in 2008 and for Congressional Democrats when they grabbed both chambers from the Republicans four years ago, according to exit polls.

If women choose Republicans over Democrats in House races on Tuesday, it will be the first time they have done so since exit polls began tracking the breakdown in 1982.

The poll provides a pre-Election Day glimpse of a nation so politically disquieted and disappointed in its current trajectory that 57 percent of the registered voters surveyed said they were more willing to take a chance this year on a candidate with little previous political experience. More than a quarter of them said they were even willing to back a candidate who holds some views that “seem extreme.”

The approval rating for Congress came in lower than any time in the history of this poll. It’s bad news for the president and his party all-around.

In a follow-up interview, one poll respondent, Judy Berg, an independent from Morton Grove, Ill., said she voted for Mr. Obama in 2008 because she was “looking for a change,” adding, “the change that ensued was not the change I was looking for but something totally out of left field.”

This year, Ms. Berg, a registered nurse, expressed a preference for Republicans because “I’m pro-life and I’m also looking at the immigration issues and the tax issues.” She added, “I like the Republican agenda on these issues better than the Democratic agenda.”

That the Times would choose this example seems to me a sign that they either respect or fear the potent and growing sentiment of people who not only vote, but still pay any attention to publications losing the public trust at the same pace as establishment politicians.

How the times are changing.

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Oct 27

Still an ‘untold story’ of these elections?

Abortion, Bioethics, Church, Culture, Law, Media, Politics, Society No Comments »

Yes, say pro-life leaders in the U.S. The “A” word…the one other than ‘Amnesty’.

As recently as two weeks ago, social moral issues figured prominently in the elections. Then rather suddenly, most news reporting centered on the economy and jobs as the most important motivation for voters, and those stories relegated social moral issues to the distant reaches of concerns, if they were concerns at all. That was yet another attempt to form public opinion instead of reflect it.

Truth is, the candidates’ stance on the life issues matter very much.

The Susan B. Anthony List aims to play a role in dozens of races. SBA List president Marjorie Dannenfelser challenged the claim that economic issues are really the deciding factor in the election.

“The people that are saying that the loudest are pundits and folks inside the beltway and in the boardroom of major papers,” she commented…

“The truth is that economic issues are an overriding concern in every household in America, but it’s also true that people can think about more than one issue at a time, and so should leaders,” she told CNA. “This House of Representatives is likely to be among the most pro-life in history. That means it matters.”

She said the pro-life vote might be “decisive” in close races. This cuts across party lines to some degree, because some pro-life Democrats are trying to hold onto both their seats and their party affiliation in spite of the Democrat platform built on upholding abortion access. Trouble for them is….the healthcare legislation many of them voted for does provide funding for abortion in assorted ways.

Dannenfelser told CNA many of these candidates had initially agreed with the SBA List that adding pro-life restrictions to the bill was “the most important vote since Roe v. Wade.” They later changed their minds.

She claimed it was “politically impotent” to react to a vote for the health care bill by “politically rolling over and praying for breadcrumbs.”

“You don’t see unions behaving like that, you don’t see the NRA behaving like that. Any movement worth its salt doesn’t behave like that.”

Dannenfelser told CNA that Rep. Dan Lipinski, a pro-life Democrat from Illinois, should be the new standard-bearer for pro-lifers in his party. He resisted party leaders to vote against the health care legislation.

“He’s not someone who will cave at the last minute. We want to put wind behind his sails,” Dannenfelser said…

[Americans United for Life spokesman Matthew] Faraci commented. “I think you will find, after the mid-term elections, that life counts when it comes to elections.”

In advance of them, the bishops of Massachusetts are trying to make sure they do by publishing a joint guest column in the Boston Herald, saying

certain “moral and social issues are fundamentally important, since human rights are at stake and must be protected to help democracy to flourish in a way that benefits every citizen.”

“These include the defense of the sanctity of life, the family based on marriage between a man and a woman, religious freedom, and the well-being of the poor,” the prelates wrote…

“Particularly for us as Catholics,” they said, “voting is an exercise of reason inspired by faith. Our participation as citizens in the electoral process allows us to propose our vision for this country and about our future as a democracy.”

“Deciding which candidate in any particular race offers the best opportunity to take us in the right direction is not an easy task. Yet there is a measuring rod by which all electoral choices must be evaluated: Will my vote enhance human dignity?”

That bottom line won’t show up in most reporting. But it’s ultimately the strongest motivator in these elections, explicitly because it has been disregarded.

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Oct 26

How bad will it be for the majority party?

Culture, Law, Media, Politics, Society No Comments »

Consensus seems to be election day next week will bring fairly significant losses for the majority, which is the president’s party, both of which American’s are revolting against, according to prevailing wisdom.

There are many ways to forecast the elections. Here’s WaPo’s:

The question around Washington today is not whether Nov. 2 will be a difficult day for the Democrats who control Congress, but rather how bad it will be.

Increasingly, it looks like the answer depends on which chamber of Congress you’re following.

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report now estimates that more than 90 Democratic House seats are potentially in play; on the Republican side of the aisle, it estimates that only nine appear in jeopardy. As a result, most leading forecasters say it is more likely that Republicans will win the 39 House seats they need to take control.

On the Senate side, however, the battle has narrowed to a handful of true nail-biters in Nevada, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Colorado – all of which are likely to stay close to the end.

It would take a sweep of nearly all of them, improbable but not impossible, for the Republicans to pick up the 10 seats they need to gain control of the chamber. At this point, it’s possible that Democrats will end up losing only three or four seats, and they will count that as a good night.

If these trends hold – if the Republicans do gain the House without also taking control of the Senate – that would represent a historic anomaly: Not since the election of 1930 has the House changed hands without the Senate following suit.

Many Americans feel like they’ve been living through an historic anomaly for about two years now in the nation’s governance. It’s actually refreshing to hear the term ‘anomaly’ again since the pop culture tends to call things like that “the new normal.”

The point of the historic grassroots activism that sprang from resistance to new social and political realities is that America is being transformed radically away from its tradition and foundational values.

Tens of millions of ordinary people have been roused to fight for rights they assumed they had. From health-care mandates to rising federal debt to confiscatory taxes to suffocating speech codes, they have correctly concluded their liberty is under assault.

To be sure, dissenters do not have a monopoly on wisdom or common sense. A partisan label is never a guarantee of righteousness, as the reversal of political fortunes in two years demonstrates.
Rather, the American system, we learn again, is intolerant of only one thing: intolerance. Whether its hammer comes from left or right, it always wakes the spirit of revolution. Freedom of speech, to dissent, to oppose, to fight back, is not just the literal content of the First Amendment. It is the essence of who we are as a people.

Which is why the Democrats are headed for a bad day next week.

Is it dispirited liberals? Secret campaign spending from conservatives to “fool” voters? The unavoidable result of the Bush economy? A lack of “marketing” and “PR” from the White House about the legislative achievements of the past two years?

Those are all reasons being put forward by Democrats as to why the party is being tossed about on the electoral waves, but none really get to the heart of the problem.

At the center of it all is that the policies of the party since taking total control of Washington have angered independent voters while galvanizing conservative opposition.

What Democrats are doing now would be like a man who was about to get stung 100 times after whacking a hornets’ nest with a broom handle thinking of why it isn’t his fault. If his wife had bought the bug spray… If his son had cleaned the eaves while cleaning the gutters… Global warming has lengthened nest-building season… If only the hornets were really butterflies… and so on.

And so on…

The most conventional argument about what went wrong for Democrats is that Obama moved too far to the left in a country that is center-right. But this argument is not supported by a recent study by The Washington Post, Henry Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University.

The study found that Americans are philosophically conservative but operationally liberal. While they do express strong distrust of government in general, when asked about specific programs they usually voice their support. More Americans have more negative views of government than they did 10 years ago, yet most people still consider Social Security and Medicare to be “very important” and almost half support government regulation of health care.

…Obama has not performed very well as a party leader, even as he succeeded in obtaining a good deal of his presidential agenda from Congress. In this respect, there are some similarities between Obama and President Carter, who left his party in worse political shape in 1981 than when he found it.

Exactly. The similarities between Obama and Carter have hurt the party, but this isn’t just about the party. They have profoundly hurt the country and left it in worse shape, just two years in. Of all the things Americans still give thanks for, one is certainly mid-term elections.

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Oct 25

Don’t appreciate the president? It’s your fault.

Society No Comments »

Usually, politicians down in the polls and in voter sentiment find a way to adjust their positions and examine their performance and at least make the appearance of shifting toward the political center. Not Obama…

Always artful in creating new ways to spin his message, the campaigner-in-chief went from blaming Bush to blaming Republicans to spinning conspiracy theories about foreign interests funding the Chamber of Commerce….for his administratin’s failures. Now, he’s blaming the voters for a lapse in sane reasoning.

He’s now offering a scientific, indeed neurological, explanation for his current political troubles. The electorate apparently is deranged by its anxieties and fears to the point where it can’t think straight. Part of the reason “facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time,” he explained to a Massachusetts audience, “is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country is scared.”

Opening a whole new branch of cognitive science — liberal psychology — Obama has discovered a new principle: The fearful brain is hard-wired to act befuddled, i.e., vote Republican.

But of course. Here Obama has spent two years bestowing upon the peasantry the “New Foundation” of a more regulated, socially engineered and therefore more humane society, and they repay him with recalcitrance and outright opposition. Here he gave them ObamaCare, the stimulus, financial regulation and a shot at cap and trade — and the electorate remains not just unmoved but ungrateful.

Faced with this truly puzzling conundrum, Dr. Obama diagnoses a heretofore undiscovered psychological derangement: anxiety-induced Obama Underappreciation Syndrome, wherein an entire population is so addled by its economic anxieties as to be neurologically incapable of appreciating the “facts and science” undergirding ObamaCare and the other blessings their president has bestowed upon them from on high.

This is one of Charles Krauthammer’s best commentaries.

I have a better explanation. Better because it adheres to the ultimate scientific principle, Occam’s Razor, by which the preferred explanation for any phenomenon is the one with the most economy and simplicity. And there is nothing simpler than the Gallup findings on the ideological inclinations of the American people. Conservative: 42 percent. Moderate: 35 percent. Liberal: 20 percent. No fanciful new syndromes or other elaborate fictions are required to understand that if you try to impose a liberal agenda on such a demonstrably center-right country — a country that is 80 percent non-liberal — you get a massive backlash.

Moreover, apart from ideology is empirical reality. Even as we speak, the social democratic model Obama is openly and boldly trying to move America toward is unraveling in Europe. It’s not just the real prospect of financial collapse in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, with even the relatively more stable major countries in severe distress. It is the visible moral collapse of a system that, after two generations of increasing cradle-to-grave infantilization, turns millions of citizens into the streets of France in furious and often violent protest over what? Over raising the retirement age to 62 from 60!

Having seen this display of what can only be called decadence, Obama’s perfectly wired electorate says no, not us, not here. The peasants have seen the future — Greece and France — and concluded that it does not work. Hence their opposition to Obama’s proudly transformational New Foundation agenda. Their logic is impeccable: Only the most blinkered intellectual could be attempting to introduce social democracy to America precisely at a time when the world’s foremost exemplar of that model — Europe — is in chaotic meltdown.

Enough said. Especially with this punctuation:

The story of the last two years is as simple as it is dramatic. It is the epic story of an administration with a highly ideological agenda encountering a rising resistance from the American people over the major question in dispute: the size and reach and power of government and, even more fundamentally, the nature of the American social contract.

An adjudication of the question will be rendered Nov. 2. For the day, the American peasantry will be presiding.

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Oct 17

Do negative campaign ads work?

Culture, Politics, Society No Comments »

They work both ways. They incite repulsive backlash among a sector of the electorate sick and tired of politics as usual. And they fuel real fear and anger over government overreach and expansion into the furthest reaches of Americans’ lives. So who wins in these continuing on-air battles?

We’ll see in about two weeks. In the meantime……well, yes, this is a mean time. In race after race, it’s getting uglier in these final days.

Though the president at any given time is the de facto head of his party, some respect the office of the presidency as representing all the people of the United States more than others. So when the president goes on the stump to launch attacks against the other party…as opposed to campaigning for an idea or candidate…it polarizes a large swath of Americans. But president Obama is most comfortable campaigning, and so he has been in states with close races and especially ones in which the Democrats aren’t running away from him.

He was in Ohio over the weekend.

Barack Obama tried to recapture the spirit of his 2008 White House election today in a desperate effort to save Democrats facing a Republican avalanche in next month’s midterm elections.

Speaking at one of the biggest Democratic rallies since 2008, he reminded the crowd of 35,000 at Ohio State University of all the enthusiasm there had been then, the doors being knocked, the phone booths manned, election night itself and the inauguration concert, with Beyonce and Bono.

That was then. This is now. The message can’t be recycled.

He told them to rekindle that mood and campaign just as hard again now, adding that it was never just about getting him elected. “It was about building a movement for change that lasted for a long time. We will build a movement for change that will last 10 years from now and 20 years from now,” he said.

But, with election day just over a fortnight away, his appeal may be too late.

Actually, there’s considerable evidence that he has lost a lot of the appeal he had with some voters. So if the messenger is hollow, the message is all but evaporated. Campaign strategy reflects that reality.

The Democratic party campaign leader, bowing to political reality, are cancelling millions in advertising planned for Congressional candidates they no longer believe are capable of winning, and transferring the cash to shore up seats previously regarded as safe Democratic.

Like, Nevada. And California.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., was halting, confused and often nonresponsive in this week’s debate with Sharron Angle. “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid looked as if he could barely stay on a linear argument,” concluded Jon Ralston, dean of Nevada’s political analysts, “abruptly switching gears and failing to effectively parry or thrust.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is best described as imperiously incoherent, a verbal train wreck of cliches and grim smiles. Like her fellow San Francisco lefty Sen. Barbara Boxer, Pelosi avoids extended conversations with the press, refuses any meaningful debate about ideas, and manages to infuse almost every public appearance with contempt for everyone who does not agree with her very narrow world view.

Reid and Pelosi — or, truth be told, their staffs and handlers — are on every ballot this fall. Obamacare, the stimulus, the wild, out-of-control spending and the 9.6 percent unemployment are their handiwork.

So that means Democrats are caught….sorry….between ‘Barack and a hard place’ (overused, yes; apt, yes). It’s making for some interesting debates. Like Colorado’s.

Incumbent Sen. Michael Bennet, who replaced Ken Salazar last year, is in an uphill battle against Republican candidate and Tea Party favorite Ken Buck.

In a debate moderated by ABC News’ Jake Tapper and KMGH anchor Mike Landess, Bennet struggled to distance himself from the Obama administration, painting himself as a moderate as Buck accused him of running away from his record.

“I have been more likely to vote with the other party than any other member of the congressional delegation, whether they’re Democratic or whether they’re Republican,” said Bennet. “And on some critical issues for Colorado, I fought the administration.”

It’s a confusing election. Charges and counter-allegations mark nearly all the campaigns. That’s not unusual for elections. But a dance list is really needed in this one. Even….and especially….in Illinois.

In their most bitter face-to-face encounter yet, Gov. Quinn and GOP rival Bill Brady scrapped for 90 minutes Sunday with Quinn branding Brady a “walking conflict of interest” and Brady labeling Quinn a “worse governor” than Rod Blagojevich.

The name-calling dominated the third public debate between the major-party gubernatorial candidates, turning their exchange at Elmhurst College into a live replaying of their hostile attack ads that are blanketing the airwaves with 15 days left until Election Day.

That’s the reality. Minnesota is known as “The hockey state.” Illinois is now called…by no less than the Chicago Tribune…the ‘State of Corruption.”

Unlike in the earlier debates, Quinn — consistently trailing Brady in most polls — sharpened his attacks against the state senator from Bloomington, accusing him of voting three times as a lawmaker on issues of benefit to his Downstate real estate development company.

“We don’t need a walking conflict of interest as governor of Illinois,” Quinn said.

Brady denied “knowingly” casting votes that were in conflict with his business interests and accused Quinn of simply using that as a smoke screen to cover up his inability to improve the state’s economic malaise.

“Your personal attacks aren’t going to help the hard-working people in Illinois find a job,” Brady shot back.

And so it goes in ‘Election 2010.’ They don’t get it. But they will in about two weeks.

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Sep 06

The Fall

Media, Politics, Society No Comments »

Get ready. Congress comes back into session after Labor Day, and the Fall campaign for mid-term elections is about to get noisy.

But people are sharper this time around. Soft slogans that worked in ’08 have turned into blame in 2010, and blame doesn’t work as well as politicians think. Remember the promise of accountability?

The Barack Obama that most Hoosiers remember voting for can still be found on YouTube. He stands before a cheering Elkhart high school gymnasium in August 2008, tireless, aspirational, promising a new America of jobs and hope. “We can choose another future,” says the newcomer with the funny name. “So I ask you to join me.”

Today that view of Obama is harder to find in Indiana.

How times have changed.

In a recent television ad, an unflattering photo of Obama and Pelosi flashes while [Democratic Congressman Joe] Donnelly condemns “the Washington crowd.” This is basically a Democratic campaign slogan now: Don’t blame me for Obama and Pelosi. “I’m not one of them,” Donnelly told me when I caught up with him. “I’m one of us.”

This shift in perception — from Obama as political savior to Obama as creature of Washington — can be seen elsewhere. When Obama arrived in office in January ’09, his Gallup approval rating stood at 68%, a high for a newly elected leader not seen since John Kennedy in 1961. Today Obama’s job approval has been hovering in the mid-40s, which means that at least 1 in 4 Americans has changed his or her mind. The plunge has been particularly dramatic among independents, whites and those under age 30. With midterm elections just nine weeks off, instead of the generational transformation some Democrats predicted after 2008, the President’s party teeters on the brink of a broad setback in November, including the possible loss of both houses of Congress. By a 10-point margin, people say they will vote for Republicans over Democrats in Congress, the largest such gap ever recorded by Gallup.

This is more than the usual behavior of a disgruntled electorate. The precipitous fall from favor of a president elected on symbol over substance has even been acknowledged by the White House.

In more confiding moments, aides admit that the peak of Obama’s popularity may have been inflated, a fleeting result of elation at the prospect of change and national pride in electing the first African-American President. As one White House aide puts it, “It was sort of fake.”

Sort of? Small comfort there.

But while these explanations may be valid, they are also incomplete. A sense of disappointment, bordering on betrayal, has been growing across the country, especially in moderate states like Indiana, where people now openly say they didn’t quite understand the President they voted for in 2008. The fear most often expressed is that Obama is taking the country somewhere they don’t want to go. “We bought what he said. He offered a lot of hope,” says Fred Ferlic, an Obama voter and orthopedic surgeon in South Bend who has since soured on his choice. Ferlic talks about the messy compromises in health care reform, his sense of an inhospitable business climate and the growth of government spending under Obama. “He’s trying to Europeanize us, and the Europeans are going the other way,” continues Ferlic, a former Democratic campaign donor who plans to vote Republican this year. “The entire American spirit is being broken.”

Time for truth? Why wasn’t this magazine asking the hard questions in the presidential campaign that would have helped voters clarify what the candidates stood for and what qualified them for the most powerful job in the world? Where were the leaders, in media and government, before now? In fact, where’s the leadership now?

At an event the other day in Chicago, a man confided to me that he was a lifelong liberal Democrat, proudly and ecstatically caught up in the Grant Park frenzy when Obama delivered his victory speech in ’08, convinced that he would usher in a new era of utopia. And now, he said with great disappointment, some sadness and definite remorse, he knew it was all an illusion. “I would never vote for him now,” he admitted, and I knew this was difficult for the man to admit. “In fact, right now, I don’t care what party the candidates belong to, I’m just looking for good leaders.”

Amen, brother.

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Jul 28

Politics of blame

Politics, Society No Comments »

Everyone does it, no one benefits from it, and it particularly demeans the office of the presidency. But the president is resorting to it with greater frequency these days.

Just a sampling of headlines, and for each one there were plenty of others not captured here.

President Obama Blasts GOP During Speech.

Obama Accuses GOP of “Lack of Faith in the American People”.

Obama Criticizes Republicans on economy.

Obama Slams GOP for Opposing DISCLOSE Act.

Obama chides Republicans on campaign finance.

And that’s just a sampling. Why this sudden assault on Republicans?

Here’s my guess. Barack Obama was brought up in his early formative years in the Saul Alinsky school of community organizing, putting to great effect Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. One of those rules was to pick a target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it. Obama has used this strategy unlike any president of memory. He has ‘named the enemy’ throughout his presidency and attacked Republicans, Sarah Palin in particular (though why the president would take on a former small-town mayor and state governor who ran for vice-president, and lost, is both questionable and telling), Fox News, the Cambridge Mass. police force, the Supreme Court (in an unprecedented criticism of that body during a State of the Union address), Arizona lawmakers, and now the Republicans again.

The attack is timed to the November mid-term elections. If the other party can be diminished, maybe they can be defeated, or at least their victories can be minimized.

This is unpresidential. Sympathizers and staffers of George W. Bush asked him why he wouldn’t go before the public and the press to confront his attackers, and he contended it was beneath the office of the presidency. Period. No more would be said. Let history judge, for better or for worse.

The president is supposed to be the leader and the servant of all the people of the republic. This one is engaging in the partisan political sniping he promised to end when he ran for office, he is not attending to the will of the people, and his poll results show that.

For the Americans struggling with issues either being unaddressed or unresolved – or even threatened – by government, the promises of the 2008 elections have faded and become the brunt of jokes. They are looking for leaders who will inspire and elevate and ennoble, and be accountable for the results. And consequential election are under 100 days away.

Every election cycle, candidates promise to end ‘politics as usual’. All we’ve seen is a shifting definition of ‘usual.’ We want change alright. And hope is building as the election gets closer.

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