Monthly Archives: January 2012

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Why Mitt Romney lost to Newt Gingrich in South Carolina

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A couple of days ago, Mitt Romney was leading by 14 points in South Carolina – and he lost it by 12 points. What happened?

First, here’s a snippet from Gingrich’s victory speech:

“One of the key issues and I’m prepared to take this straight at the president and frankly straight at the elite media. One of the key issues is the growing anti-religious bigotry of our elites, and if you go to newt.org, my campaign site there’s a 54-page paper there on the balance of power, putting the judiciary back in its proper role in eliminating dictatorial bigots such as justice Berry in San Antonio who issued a ruling not only could the students not pray at their graduation, if they used the word “benediction” the word “invocation,” the word “God,” asked the audience to stand or a moment of silence he would put the superintendent in jail. Now we don’t have speech dictatorship in America by anti-religious bigots, period.

The second big theme, frankly, is one that every South Carolinian understands. It’s jobs, economic growth, balancing the budget, having stable money, and let’s be very clear, and again this makes some of the elite media nervous. President Obama has been historically the most effective food stamp president in American history. I worked with ronald reagan to create jobs and 16 million jobs were created by the American people in the 1980s. i worked with Bill Clinton, a democrat to create jobs and 11 million jobs were created by the American people during the four years that I was speaker.

I would like to be the best paycheck president in American history and I want to go into every neighborhood of every ethnic background in every part of the country and say to people very simply, if you want your children to have a life of dependency and food stamps, you have a candidate as Barack Obama. If you want your children to have a life of independency and paychecks, you have a candidate that’s Newt Gingrich, and I’ll bet you we have votes everywhere.”

That’s red meat for conservatives. We like policy papers and statistics. We like substance and bold contrasts.

Byron York explains how Newt won in the Washington Examiner. (H/T Smitty @ The Other McCain)

Excerpt:

Romney stages perfect events.  For example, on the eve of the primary, Romney’s rally in North Charleston was perfect from a production point of view: stage just right, big flags, big Romney signs, smooth introductions from South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, all topped off by a showy entrance by Romney, who arrived in his big campaign bus that drove right into the room.

It was perfect in every sense but engaging with the voters.  Romney’s stump speech was a clipped — some would say dumbed down — list of generalities, concluding with this: “I love this land, I love its Constitution, I revere its founders, I will restore those principles, I will get America back to work, and I’ll make sure that we remain the shining city on the hill.”  Romney offered his supporters very little to chew on.  In this primary race, voters are hungry for substance, and Romney didn’t give them much.

Gingrich’s last event before the voting, a couple of hours later, was a rally on the hangar deck of the USS Yorktown, a World War II aircraft carrier that is now a floating museum across the bay from Charleston.  It was a most un-perfect affair.  To begin with, it just so happened that dozens of Cub Scouts were having an overnight on the Yorktown at the same time as Gingrich and the press showed up for the rally.  Their presence contributed to an air of happy chaos on board, and Gingrich was delighted to invite a few scouts on stage with him at the beginning of his speech.  When Gingrich got to the substance of his remarks, he was wandering, expansive, and detailed, where Romney had been brief and canned.  But Gingrich kept the crowd with him the whole way, and in the end had engaged his audience more than Romney could have hoped for.  Gingrich respected them enough to discuss issues with them seriously.

[…]Gingrich’s success here in South Carolina shows more than just a skepticism toward establishment Republicanism.  It also shows a hunger for real substance in the campaign, for a candidate who will talk to voters and give them more than phrases like “I believe in America.”  Mitt Romney’s team of seasoned campaign professionals may not think Newt Gingrich has any business playing a deciding role in the race.  But they better believe it, and they better take seriously what the Gingrich challenge represents — before it’s too late.

If you listen to Romney closely in debates, he never speaks like Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum. With those two, you get specifics. Rick Santorum talks about his efforts to push for balanced budgets or his bill to ban partial birth abortions.  Newt Gingrich talks about the millions of jobs created when he was Speaker of the House and his 98.5% pro-life voting record.

What does Mitt Romney talk about? He never talks about his record – because it’s liberal. He passed socialized medicine with taxpayer subsidies for abortions. He raised taxes by $740 million dollars. He handed out licenses for gay marriages. When he speaks, he talks about how much he loves the United States, and how he would like to achieve results – results he never achieved when he was governor of Massachusetts. Mitt Romney has a Democrat record.

Note: Gingrich was losing to Romney 43-18 in Florida according to the January 17th CNN poll, but the latest ARG poll has Gingrich up 34.4 to 25.6, and the latest Rasmussen Reports poll has it at 41-32 for Newt. That’s how quickly things change because of a couple of good debates, with some real substance.

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Did Obama really create jobs with his green energy and stimulus programs?

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From Hans Bader writing for the DC Examiner.

Excerpt: (links removed)

There are only 140,000 jobs in the whole renewable-energy sector, but in a new ad, Obama is taking credit for a “clean energy industry” that has “2.7 million jobs.”  Obama inflated the number of “clean-energy” jobs by adding people who have nothing to do with clean-energy, like “trash collectors” and bureaucrats.  By inflating the total, Obama was able to paper over his complete failure to live up to his utterly unrealisticcampaign promise “to create 5 million new green jobs.” Most of America’s existing green jobs predate the Obama Administration, which did not create them: “from 2003-2010, the rate of growth for clean jobs was 3.4 percent.”

Indeed, the Obama Administration used federal green-jobs money to outsource American jobs to countries like China: “Despite all the talk of green jobs, the overwhelming majority of stimulus money spent on wind power has gone to foreign companies, according to a new report by the Investigative Reporting Workshop” at American University.   “79 percent” of all green-jobs funding “went to companies based overseas,” with the largest payment going to a bankrupt Australian company.  “Most of the jobs are going overseas,” said Russ Choma at the Investigative Reporting Workshop.

Meanwhile, America actually lost jobs in wind-manufacturing: “Even with the infusion of so much stimulus money, a recent report by American Wind Energy Association showed a drop in U.S. wind manufacturing jobs last year.”  (CBS News recently reported that there are 11 more companies, in addition to Solyndra, that are embroiled in financial trouble after receiving billions of dollars in taxpayer money; five have already filed for bankruptcy).

Obama’s mythical green-jobs are like other imaginary jobs he claimed to have created with the $800 billion stimulus package.  The Obama Administration took credit for jobs created in 440 non-existent Congressional districts, such as Arizona’s 15th and 86th districts (Arizona only had 8 Congressional districts, as ABC News noted with amusement).  The Washington Examiner noted that at least “75,000 jobs” Obama has claimed credit for are “clearly imaginary” or “highly doubtful.” Readers can view its interactive map of “Inflated Jobs by State.”

He’s going to have trouble defending this in a debate, as long as we pick someone who will go after him.

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Hypocrisy on the left: do the actions of liberals match their words?

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Funny video from American Power Blog.

That’s one case, but are leftists always hypocrites?

Do As I Say Not As I Do

I had a long drive on the way to my parents’ house for Christmas and I decided to listen to the audio book version of Peter Schweizer’s 2004 book “Do As I Say Not As I Do“. In that book, he profiles a number of leftist public figures, and he discovers that leftists don’t practice what they preach, because even they know that leftist ideas don’t actually work. I really recommend the book, so let’s take a closer look at it and you’ll see why you should read it, too.

Here’s a 32 minute 2011 lecture about the book:

And here’s an interview with the author from FrontPage magazine.

Excerpt:

FrontPage: Give us some of the best examples of the gulf between some liberals’ social criticisms and the ingredients of their private lives. Give us some insights, for instance, into the likes of Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Cornel West, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy and Barbra Streisand.

Schweizer: Looking for liberal hypocrisy is, as they say in the military, a target-rich environment. Noam Chomsky, for example, has attacked wealthy Americans who set up trusts to avoid paying inheritance taxes. But this self-professed “radical socialist” has a tax attorney and did the very same thing. (When I asked him about this hypocrisy he said it was okay because he and has family have been working on behalf of suffering people all these years.)

Michael Moore’s hypocrisy is pathological. He has said numerous times that he doesn’t own a single share of stock and that capitalism is not acceptable “on any level.” And yet, I found that, according to tax returns filed with the IRS, he has owned shares in Halliburton, numerous oil companies, defense contractors and other multinationals through a tax shelter. When it comes he race he’s also wildly hypocritical. He says that Americans who happen to live in largely white neighbhorhoods do so because they are “racists.” But he lives in Central Lake, Michigan, which according to the U.S. Census has more than 2,500 residents and not a single black person in the entire town.

Cornel West has numerous times condemned middle class blacks that abandon the “chocolate cities” for the “vanilla suburbs” but guess what, his flavour of choice is vanilla, too.

Ted Kennedy likes to pose as the Robin Hood of the Senate, forcing wealthy Americans to pay their taxes to help the poor. But I discovered that Kennedys record of actually paying taxes is horrible. Tax the inheritance tax. He says that Americans should pay 49% to the IRS when they die in the name of “social justice.” But according to public records, the Kennedys have almost completely avoided contributing to “social justice” by placing their assets in trusts that are located overseas. The Kennedys, over the past thirty years, have paid less than 1% in inheritance taxes on more than $300 million. Ted Kennedy, like Hillary Clinton and George Soros, loves higher taxes. On other people.

And:

FrontPage: Why do you think people are drawn to leftist ideals and what kind of people are they? Self-contempt appears to be a common ingredient, no?

Schweizer: Yes, self-contempt is a big part of it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German pastor who stood up to Hitler, wrote a book about “cheap grace.” Liberals are guilty of cheap grace in the political sense. They feel guilty and their form of penance is embracing the destructive ideas of the progressive faith. But it’s cheap grace because as I show it the book, they don’t actually change the way they live. I think that the religious comparison makes sense because in many respects the modern day left represents a religious movement. They are motivated by a sense of sin, guilt, and the need for salvation and absolution in the political sense. Socialism offers salvation to them. Of course, they don’t actually plan to live like socialists.

I would really recommend taking a look at this book. It’s similar to Paul Johnson’s “Intellectuals” if you’ve ever read that, but it’s better.