As one who writes about everything political, one of the downsides of living in a state that is utterly unimportant from the Electoral College perspective is the fact that you’re insulated from much of the advertising campaigns that ravaged the battleground states. (From the perspective of a normal person however, that would likely be a blessing…)
2012 will not be a reprise of 2000. Although Barack Obama is building an army / phalanx of lawyers to try and redirect the election to the courts with the hope that the justices will lean against throwing out a sitting president, it won’t happen. 2000 only happened because the election was so close, with a mere half percent difference between the candidates. In 2012 that will not be a problem. Of course that was all about electoral votes, not popular, but the two usually go hand in hand. Michael Barone does a good job of looking at the electoral landscape. I’m looking at the popular vote.
The country is certainly a different place than it was when Andy Griffith was keeping the streets of Mayberry safe from pick pockets or settling disputes between feuding clans. It’s also a different place from the one Ronald Reagan inherited in 1981. While Americans may no longer be tethered to a telephone hanging on the wall or stuck getting their news or entertainment from a newspaper or television, those new freedoms and choices pale in comparison to the freedoms and choices lost in terms of their own economic opportunities.
Imagine what you could do with three quarters of a trillion dollars. You might buy a new house, maybe a new car and maybe even take a trip to Hawaii or Australia.
Seriously, what can $750 billion accomplish? Well, that all depends on who’s spending the money.
According to the Congressional Research Service the federal government spent $745 billion in 2011 on welfare payments.
I would suggest that if Mitt Romney avoids shooting himself in foot he will win this election, and will win by somewhere around 10 points. That’s good news. The bad news however is that he will likely have to win by double digits in order to survive the Obama campaign’s plan to employ a phalanx of lawyers to somehow wrest victory out of the jaws of defeat. Of course employing underhanded tactics are nothing new from this administration.
Liberals perceive tax cuts as giving something to the rich. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Tax cuts allow the rich and poor alike to keep more of the money they earned rather than give it to nameless, faceless and largely unaccountable bureaucrats to distribute.
Barring some unforeseen cataclysm, Mitt Romney will be the 45th president of the United States… and the vote will likely not even be close. His acceptance speech at the GOP convention last week did exactly what it had to do, it provided Americans who might have been sitting on the fence with the nudge they needed to climb down and pull the lever for him. If you had to distill his speech down to one line, it might have been “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. MY promise…is to help you and your family.”
We often learn from our mistakes. We often learn from our experiences in order to make adjustments or better decisions going forward. Unfortunately, although government is made up of humans, it does not share that same skillset.
That one speech gets to the core of the vision of America that voters are faced with in November. Barack Obama wants to take care of everyone, but he wants the government to do it with your money. Contrast that approach with Mitt Romney’s.
As I think about the election in November, I can’t help but think about Matt Ridley and his outstanding book “The Rational Optimist – How Prosperity Evolves”. In it he chronicles the evolution of human society and demonstrates a perfect understanding of why nations fail:
