Predictable History, Unpredictable Past

This Associated Press story suggests that the campaign is Too Close To Call

As the 2012 presidential campaign moves to a close, national polls say the race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is too close to call.

Romney's big lead over Obama from last summer is gone as the hard-fought battle has tightened over the past three months, following the pattern of presidential contests in years gone by.

As more and more Americans focus on the decision of which level ro pull tomorrow, the polls also say Obama's hopes may be damaged because many of those who support him may not vote.

The original watershed mark for the final round of polls was the nationally televised debate between Romney and Obama last month. But late-breaking developments regarding the Americans killed in Libya, or the Americans without power and heat due to Hurricane Sandy could make recent poll results quickly obsolete.
...
While the polls seem to have different results, in fact, the differences are all smaller than the error margins to which all polls are subject. This means that the polls cannot be said to put either man in the solid position as the frontrunner.

In addition, the close race spotlights the unique system of picking a president - the election is decided by who wins the most electoral votes, which are awarded sate-by-state. It is possible in a close race that a candidate could win the most populate votes nationwide and still lose the electoral vote to his or her opponent.

Of course, every election is decided by who actually goes to vote. But the polls this year demonstrate that the issue of turnout is ever more critical than ever. For example, among registered voters, the Pew Research poll put the race at Obama 49% and Romney 42%. But when the results were weighted to reflect possible turnout, their results were Romney 47% and Obama 50%.

Ok, that's not exactly what it said. To see exactly what it said, you need to replace 2012 with 1980, Obama with Carter, and Romney with Reagan. It wasn't published today - it was published on the day before the 1980 election. The day before Ronald Reagan won 50.7% of the vote vs. Jimmy Carter's 41% (John Anderson took 10%). The day before Reagan won 489 electoral votes.

Too close to call...

Big boots, little man

From the pen of the always brilliant Michael Ramirez comes an appropriate response to the Democrats attempt to 1) claim Ronald Reagan and 2) claim that Barack Obama is another Ronald Reagan.

(I'm not an editorial cartoonist, but it seems to me that there's also a Lloyd Bentsen/Dan Quayle joke somewhere in this situation, just waiting for someone to draw it...)

Well, yeah - what did you think it meant?

Ace notes Obama praising Reagan, and he's not buying it. As he shouldn't. Because, as he correctly observes,

...[P]raising the dead is pretty cheap theater, because the dead cannot run for election nor campaign for candidates nor write op-eds in response. (Reagan, were he alive, might have mentioned to Obama that it wasn't all about his messaging, but rather the substance of his policies, which generally worked and worked well.)

This is of a piece with liberals' dishonest comparison of all living, active politicians to the previous generation's dead or inactive ones -- and of course the current crop is always the worst ever. Praising the dead is simply a rhetorical gimmick to purchase some unearned credibility -- see, I can praise my opponents, so that means I'm objective and fair-minded and should be listened to in my other judgments.

And then finishes by asking "So is this 'civility' then? Dishonesty and hypocrisy and manipulation, and all of a cheap and shabby sort besides?" Which I answer in the post title. Or, as I put it last week, calls for civility are "not a general principle, but a political weapon that the left can use to cudgel the right." That's the sort of thing that happens when the nominal referees (the media) are actually playing for one of the teams...

"Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made..."

I just posted Ronald Reagan's first inaugural address, which came thirty years ago today. And it is a marvelous, moving, inspirational speech. At one point, told a story of one young American who had gone off to fight - and die - in the first World War, and he had trouble getting through it.

Martin Treptow ... left his job in a small town barber shop in 1917 to go to France with the famed Rainbow Division. There, on the western front, he was killed trying to carry a message between battalions under heavy artillery fire. We are told that on his body was found a diary. On the flyleaf under the heading, "My Pledge," he had written these words: "America must win this war. Therefore, I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone."

I had trouble getting through it too, in part because it recalls to me one of my favorite passages from one of my favorite books, and I'm reminded that C. S. Lewis also fought in the trenches during the first world war:

Did Maleldil want to lose worlds? What was the sense of so arranging things that anything really important should finally and absolutely depend on such a man of straw as himself? And at that moment, far away on Earth, as he now could not help remembering, men were at war, and white-faced subalterns and freckled corporals who had but lately begun to shave, stood in horrible gaps or crawled forward in deadly darkness, awaking, like him, to the preposterous truth that all really depended on their actions; and far away in time Horatius stood on the bridge, and Constantine settled in his mind whether he would or would not embrace the new religion, and Eve herself stood looking upon the forbidden fruit and the Heaven of Heavens waited for her decision. He writhed and ground his teeth, but could not help seeing. Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices. And if something, who could set bounds to it? A stone may determine the course of a river.

The first and third books of Lewis' space trilogy are wonderful, but Perelandra, the middle one, is the one that stands out for me.

30 years ago today

On January 21, 1981, the United States faced many of the same conditions, issues and problems that it faces today. But the man entering the White House was very different from the man who resides there today...



Ronald Reagan: First Inaugural Address

So, as we begin, let us take inventory. We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth. Our Government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.
It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people. All of us need to be reminded that the Federal Government did not create the States; the States created the Federal Government.
Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it is not my intention to do away with government. It is, rather, to make it work—work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.
...
It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government. It is time for us to realize that we are too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams. We are not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline. I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing. So, with all the creative energy at our command, let us begin an era of national renewal. Let us renew our determination, our courage, and our strength. And let us renew our faith and our hope.

Palin and the Left’s Status-Anxiety

Excellent Shannon Love piece on Palin and the Left’s Status-Anxiety.

That is why leftists see Palin as a genuine and significant threat of unusual magnitude. In the emotional thinking of leftists, she is a personal threat to everything each individual leftist has attained in life. They feel a sincere, visceral sense of danger about her because she attacks the very core of their egos. They feel the same hatred towards Palin that the European upper classes felt towards the upstart middle-class. They feel the same hatred that poor whites felt towards non-whites. They feel that way for the same reasons. If she succeeds, worse, if she is right, then they become nobodies.

As long as she is viewed as a significant political figure, the left’s obsession with Palin will never wane because it does not spring from rational roots. She threatens something too deep and too profound in a political subculture built around the belief that a small percentage of human beings have a vastly superior understanding of the world compared to all the rest.

Read the whole thing. It explains a lot.

And there were a lot of the same factors in play in the left's dislike for Ronald Reagan, too...

"Those Voices Don't Speak for the Rest of Us"

I miss the Gipper...

"We also dream..."

We were lucky to have him...

This is what a President should look like

Because, while there's never a bad time for Ronald Reagan, some times are better than others, here's his speech at the Brandenburg Gate.



The compare and contrast exercise with the current incumbent is stark and sobering...

Has a Democratic Speaker of the House ever been right? About anything?

Being a liberal politician means being wrong about everything, and receiving the loving praise of the mainstream press in return. Being a liberal politician means never having to say, "I'm sorry."

[Jim] Wright’s face hardened. Reagan’s declaration had destroyed any chance of the wall coming down, since Gorbachev could not appear to bow to him. Wright fumed, “It just makes me have utter contempt for Reagan. He spoiled the chance for a dramatic breakthrough in relations between our two countries It bespeaks his pettiness and self-centeredness. He just couldn’t bear Gorbachev doing it of his own volition.”

Those "thinkin' for themselves" journalists in the mainstream press...

I noted a new message in the liberal media the other day, equating Obama with Reagan. It showed up again today in that CNN piece I linked earlier.

Like Obama, polls showed that Reagan was more popular than his policies.

That's three different places now. I suspect that, if this doesn't come directly from the White House, then someone was making this point on the Journolist...

Early (pre-judicial) restraint from the CJ

I said that I'd have nothing more to say about Michael Jackson, and that's basically true. Let me just say, though, that this story does nothing but increase my affection for Chief Justice Roberts...

Mr. Jackson had visited the White House on May 16, 1984, and appeared with Mr. Reagan at an event on efforts against drunken driving...A correspondence aide at the White House, James K. Coyne, drafted a somewhat goofy letter that he proposed having Mr. Reagan sign....

Mr. Roberts expressed acid disapproval in a June 22, 1984, memorandum to Mr. Fielding:

I recognize that I am something of a vox clamans in terris in this area, but enough is enough. The Office of Presidential Correspondence is not yet an adjunct of Michael Jackson’s PR firm. “Billboard” can quite adequately cover the event by reproducing the award citation and/or reporting the President’s remarks. (As you know, there is very little to report about Mr. Jackson’s remarks.)

D-Day

65 years ago, the allied landing at the beaches of Normandy marked the beginning of the end of the Third Reich and the European front of World War II. Young men from Canada, England and the United States died by the thousands to liberate the captive nations of Europe. "They came not as conquerors but as liberators."

All those living in freedom today are doing so at the cost of their sacrifice.


Here, from 25 years ago today, is President Ronald Reagan, speaking in Normandy on the 40th anniversary.

The first speech was given at the Ranger Memorial at Pointe du Hoc.



And the second was given at Omaha Beach.

Reagan at the gate

21 years ago today, President Ronald Reagan spoke at the Brandenburg gate:

Are these the beginnings of profound changes in the Soviet state? Or are they token gestures, intended to raise false hopes in the West, or to strengthen the Soviet system without changing it? We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

Just over two years later, of course, the wall did come down...

Two interesting takes...

In an amusing take (think Diane Chambers picking based on cities with foreign-born orchestra conductors), Chris is looking at football picks with the Ronald Reagan and Ted Baxter methods.