Posted on 11/09/2012 2:54:05 AM PST by SoFloFreeper
President Obama won one of the narrower re-elections in modern times Tuesday, eking out a second term with a fraction of his 7.3% margin of 2008, in a polarized country with the opposition GOP retaining and still dominating the House. Given that second Presidential terms are rarely better than the first, this is best described as the voters doubling down on hope over experience.
*** Mr. Obama's campaign stitched together a shrunken but still decisive version of his 2008 coalition—single women, the young and culturally liberal, government and other unions workers, and especially minority voters.
He said little during the campaign about his first term and even less about his plans for a second. Instead his strategy was to portray Mitt Romney as a plutocrat and intolerant threat to each of those voting blocs. No contraception for women. No green cards for immigrants. A return to Jim Crow via voter ID laws. No Pell grants for college.
This was all a caricature even by the standards of modern politics. But it worked with brutal efficiency—the definition of winning ugly. Mr. Obama was able to patch together just enough of these voting groups to prevail even as he lost independents and won only 40% of the overall white vote, according to the exit polls. His campaign's turnout machine was as effective as advertised in getting Democratic partisans to the polls.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Some of our conservative friends will argue that Mr. Obama's victory thus represents a decline in national virtue and a tipping point in favor of the "takers" over the makers. They will say the middle class chose Mr. Obama's government blandishments over Mr. Romney's opportunity society. We don't think such a narrow victory of an incumbent President who continues to be personally admired justifies such a conclusion.
Perhaps this fear will be realized over time, but such a fate continues to be in our hands. There are few permanent victories or defeats in American politics, and Tuesday wasn't one of them. The battle for liberty begins anew this morning.
I agree but good luck selling optimism on this site. I say we look to change some seats in the senate in two years and move on.
Some observations:
1. Fewer people voted in 2012 than 2008. Fewer people voted for President Obama.
2. The county by county map....shows mostly red in the nation. So the red voting districts did the only thing they could....they sent Republican Representatives back to the House. That was just as big a mandate as the win for the President.
3. There is no difference between the number of last week and this week over the trend that most people see the nation moving...that we are moving in a negative direction.
4. Finally, if you did ask most folks simple questions on economics...you’d find that half of the American public has no clear understanding of simple economics. They’d readily go and borrow lots of money, get themselves deep into debt....with nothing to show for it. That kind of says something about our nation.
Wow! Great article but I take exception to one line...
“The GOP needs to leave its anti-immigration absolutists behind.”
If an article that is fair sees us this way, we have a problem. I didn’t think we were anti-immigration, only that we wanted the laws enforced.Immigrate legally and don’t come expecting to be on the dole. Self supporting by their own contributions.
This is something we must address, because there are people standing in line, following the spaghetti-bowl rules and getting kicked in the teeth for following the rules.
We must define what it is we want or accept on immigration, if not they will define us and alienate us.
Truly secure our borders is a first for me.
Mark Levin had someone on his show yesterday who argued that immigration policy isn’t costing Republicans Latino votes. They as a demographic like big government free stuff.
“If an article that is fair sees us this way, we have a problem”
But that was always the position of the WSJ. They are very conservative but when it comes to illegals, they want to remove all obstacles.
This article needs a “wool-over-eyes” alert. No mandate? The guy is a two-term president. If he chooses to lead, he creates his own mandate.
We don’t need to remove all obstacles. We need to define ourselves, organize around a list of what we can accept and stick to it. We need to stop being defined by *them*. We have a plan, here it is...
Your #4 is important. Neither Romney nor McCain made any effort to explain the causes of the recession and its relation to big government programs, including those of G. W. Bush. Reagan would have given the public an economics lesson, but Romney did not.
I think we need to do to Obamugabe exactly what Pelosi and the Dems did to Dubya after the 2004 election. Think about it—Obama won by a similar popular vote margin...and his “magic”, even with the victory, is GONE.
SAME thing happened to Bush...in fact, I think Bush’s poll numbers were higher than BO’s are now. Yet the Demon Rats were able to shut down his plan to give young people a CHOICE in their retirement.
So let’s keep up the resistance, as Muse would say.
obama did nnot win shit. America lost. I don’t know how at this point in time[I suspect early voting] the Democrats managed to steal the election.But it is what it is. The [I will never call the bastards that voted for obama Americans] majority of those who voted got what and who they wanted. Let them enjoy him.
Sequestering and Fiscal Cliff. He needs to own it.
Neither one of them could do that because that would force them to acknowledge that it would be necessary to cut those "big government programs." Romney and McCain are big supporters of those programs, just as Bush was.
The last two months of this campaign were completely bizarre. We had Romney and Ryan running around (say that three times fast!) campaigning against the massive Medicare cuts in Obamacare, and Obama running around campaigning for a huge cut in U.S. corporate tax rates. On some of these issues, the political landscape has been turned completely on its head.
he didnt win,,he owned the voting machines and evangelicals that are liberal..
I watched Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary `2016’ last night with the wife—yes, an actual documentary, not a Michael Moore agitprop piece. She was a lib as a girl, is actually non-political but as a retired academic considers herself “progressive” like so many duped by The One.
And she was shocked by `2016’. All I could say was, “This is what I’ve been trying to tell you and others for the last four years.” But like so many, she didn’t vote. Too little, too late.
Winning fewer votes the second time hasn’t happened to a US president since FDR. There’s certainly no mandate after this close shave for the WH resident. He got his 47% of the “disadvantaged/welfare drones/gimme kultur” and the remainder in the usual suspects walking our universities, as planned by his cynical political calculus (”They Live!”) and won with those in the lefty coasts, blue states around the great lakes and odd purple states.
Also odd isn’t it—all the noise the black ministers were making about homosexuality and Obama in the last few months, while about all I saw last Tuesday in the MSM videos were black voters in lines, apparently anxious to vote for their black christ.
The most Reverends Jackson, Sharp and Wright—and the bible-beating black preachers across America—revealed themselves and their congregations last Tuesday for what they really are: race-baiting political organs of the Democratic party.
So now the illegals are emboldened (”Gueros, gimme!”); the left is angry because half the country wanted their Baal gone; the Dow is plummeting and employers are laying off workers—and Obama’s slash-and-burn “Destroy the colonial powers!” well, the beat goes on.
“In matters of taste, swim with the current. In matters of principle, stand like a rock.” T. Jefferson
Boehner and others in the GOP-e appear resigned to swimming with the current in the days ahead.
Rant over, time to clean house!
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