Surrender: Why does anyone ever vote for the Republican Party... at least one run by Boehner & McConnell?

Do you ever wonder sometimes why Americans vote? How many times have you heard people say “I don’t vote because my vote doesn’t really matter, those politicians are going to do what they want regardless of how I vote.” In some cases that’s true. Obamacare was a perfect example. In January 2010 Scott Brown won his campaign for the Senate in deep blue Massachusetts by promising to be the 41st vote against Obamacare. The Democrats didn’t care, and despite the fact that 60% of the American people were opposed to Obamacare, they sidestepped Brown and used “reconciliation” to shove the law down the throats of the American people. As a result, that November the GOP retook the House in a landslide election, but by that point the damage had ever been done. If there was ever an example of politicians doing exactly what they wanted in the face of constituent opposition, Obamacare was it.

So why did citizens reward Democrats in 2012 and send Barack Obama back to work? Because presidential elections are personality driven contests (as opposed to issue driven contests) far more than are midterms, with the presidential candidates generating an unparalleled level of attention. Voters in midterm elections are generally more engaged and more aware of the issues than many who vote in presidential elections. Not sure? How many videos did you see in 2008 where voters could barely name the vice presidential candidates, nevermind the issues or candidates lower down the ticket. That reality repeated itself in 2012 with the cult of Barack Obama. Add to that the fact that Mittens Romney ran a campaign so uninspiring that millions of conservatives didn’t even bother to show up and it’s easy to understand how the country got another 4 years of The One.

Just two years later however, 2014 proved to be 2010 on steroids as the GOP picked up 9 seats in the Senate. Why? Not only had Obamacare proven to be exactly the disaster Republicans had predicted, but more timely was the fact that Barack Obama was basically promising amnesty to 4 million illegal immigrants. For the GOP, the numbers were clear: fully 70% of GOP voters were against Obama’s amnesty and at the end of the day those voters delivered a victory.

But alas, that doesn’t seem to matter. Like the Democrats in 2010 voting for something 60% of the Americans didn’t want, in 2014 the Republican leadership plans to ignore the wishes of 70% of their constituents by surrendering on immigration.

Surrender? That is essentially what the leadership has done as it promises there will be no government shutdown. The purse strings are one of the few checks the legislative branch has on the executive. As such, the primary way Congress can impact what the administration does is by deciding what to fund and what not to fund. In this context, a shutdown would occur when Congress passes a bill to fund the entire government except for those DHS functions involved in the president’s amnesty and then the president vetoes it. No dice say Boehner and McConnell. They are scared that the GOP would be blamed for any shutdown and get hammered in 2016. That’s an illusion, as most of the government would still function, and, frankly, most Americans wouldn’t even notice a shutdown were it not for the bleating of the administration’s media minions. In last year’s shutdown, once it was over a full 78% of Americans reported that they weren’t inconvenienced by the shutdown at all and another 11% felt only minor inconveniences. And a year later the GOP went on to flatten the Democrats in the midterms!

So the question is, why would anyone bother to vote for the GOP in the first place? What’s the point? If they are going to rail against the president acting unconstitutionally but take the single most powerful weapon for stopping him off the table, what’s the difference between the parties besides rhetoric? The truth is, now that they are firmly back in power, Boehner and McConnell feel like they have no obligation to respect their voter’s wishes. Apparently the desire of the Chamber of Commerce’s members for cheap labor trumps Republican voter’s opposition to amnesty.

Such has become life in America in the 21st Century. Half of the voters don’t bother to vote because they feel like their votes don’t count and the other half go to the polls to prove them right. Barack Obama has demonstrated that government can basically do what it wants, regardless of what the law says. The GOP has ostensibly stood against that principal as it claimed to be a bulwark built on the voices of the people. But in reality it is anything but. If the GOP is unwilling to go to the mattresses for amnesty, one of the most visceral issues of the day, what are they willing to do for more pedestrian things like reining in the bureaucracy or the welfare state?

If Boehner, McConnell and the GOP establishment continue to act as paper tigers in the fight against government overreach because they fear a 2016 backlash, they should be prepared to for that backlash to become a self fulfilling prophecy as conservatives abandon them in droves. Some will go Libertarian, some will stay home and some will simply jump ship to the Democrats. At the end of the day at least with Democrats voters understand that the law is no roadblock to getting what you want. Why bother voting for the Republican illusion of restraint when they can simply throw their weight behind Democrats and at least sit at the table when the spoils are dispensed?

Is an election a gift for a job well done or a choice about the country's future?

Throughout any given day I normally catch bits and pieces of three or four different talk radio shows during the day. From Rush to Boortz to Hannity to Michael Medved and an occasional Mark Levin peppered in. All are brilliant with their own styles, but sometimes they overlap. At some point last week most of them invited listeners to call in and explain why they support Barack Obama. Invariably the callers sounded like buffoons, and it had nothing to do with anything the host said. In fact, heard Neal Boortz give a number of callers a full uninterrupted 60 seconds to explain their position. It didn’t help.

Now, there are lots of reasons someone might not sound good on the radio. Sometimes callers get nervous knowing that millions of people are listening to them. Other times they miscalculate how long they have and stumble to get through their points. And the truth is, not everyone has the gift of gab and often simply don’t express themselves well. Despite those caveats, the reality is that most callers who say they support Barack Obama have a very difficult time explaining why. He killed Osama Bin Laden, he saved the auto industry, Obamacare will guarantee healthcare for everyone and he ended the war in Iraq are usually the four main points.

Interestingly, regardless of their veracity, all of those reasons are backward looking. They’re looking to reward the President for things already done. Rarely do you hear Obama supporters say things like “He’s going revive the economy” or “He’s going to jumpstart the American jobs engine” or even “He’s going to lower gas prices or taxes”. And you never ever hear them talk about their candidate reducing government regulations.

Romney supporters on the other hand, can be equally disingenuous: “He’s not Obama.” The difference is, however, typically those supporting Romney are not doing so to punish Obama – although there are certainly those – but rather because they see what Obama and the Democrats have wrought on the country and they want a change of direction.

And that is the key. An election is not about thanking someone for a job well done… or even the Alice in Wonderland perception of a job well done… but rather a Presidential election is about doing what’s best for the country over the next four years. If hiring a President was a reward for a service rendered, John McCain would be president. He served in the Senate for decades, he authored one of the most important (not to be confused with good…) pieces of legislation in decades and he proved his valor and mettle during five years in a North Vietnamese prison. No, Americans elected Barack Obama because he told a story that inspired millions of followers and supporters. If nothing else, Barack Obama was a brilliant campaigner, albeit with a great deal of support from the media.

But there’s a difference between inspiring a political movement and actually doing a good job of governing. On that score, Barack Obama has been a complete and utter disaster. On virtually every facet of the job, he has failed, and done so miserably… with the exception of not screwing up the plan to find and kill Bin Laden. From the millions of lost jobs to an economy that’s stuck in park to billions lost in his green job boondoggles to $5 trillion in new debt, the Obama administration has been an abject failure. And that doesn’t begin to address the tyranny of the growth of government regulation he has fostered.

That discontinuity between candidate and executive is at the heart of the decision Americans are being asked to make in November: Barack Obama is a brilliant candidate, but a disastrous executive while Mitt Romney is barely adequate as a candidate but has a proven record of success as an executive. Do voters want someone who talks a good game but actually manages it poorly or would they rather have a guy who mumbles his words but actually manages the game very well?

The key to the White House comes down to this: Are those voters who were willing to overlook the holes in Barack Obama’s resume in 2008 in order to make a leap of faith in an historic election going to overlook the fact that those very holes are today filled in with failing marks? There’s an old saying “Trick me once shame on you… trick me twice shame on me.” Let’s hope they’ve learned Barack Obama’s tricks over the last four years…

Obama shreds the Constitution... again

Last week President Obama was overheard telling a room full of Democrats that during the most recent budget negotiations the GOP had sought to defund some of his priorities. He checked them into the boards with “Do you think we’re stupid”?

While the GOP members certainly don’t think the President is stupid, he definitely thinks the voters are. (Perhaps with good reason… If you haven’t seen the video “How Obama Got Elected” now as we roll towards 2012 it might be a good time to watch it. If you have, now is a good time to revisit it. The level of ignorance of some of people who exercise their right to vote is nothing short of extraordinary. Rather than giving out voter cards at the DMV like lollypops at a pediatrician’s office we might want to require prospective voters to pass the same citizenship test wannabe citizens must pass…)

Not that it should be a surprise to anyone that the President thinks Americans are stupid. It’s one thing to hoodwink people during the campaign as everyone expects politicians to stretch the bounds of credulity. This was perfectly demonstrated when candidate Obama suggested that he sat in Jeremiah Wright’s church for 20 years yet somehow never heard a single one of his racist anti-American diatribes. It’s another thing all together to expect citizens to believe their President is openly seeking to mislead them. Such was the case early on in the Obama presidency and that arrogance was never as clear when the administration introduced what is possibly the most absurd policy gauge ever uttered by any politician, the infamous: “Jobs created or saved.” How is it even remotely possible that the president thought that anyone with a functioning brain would consider “Jobs created or saved” as a legitimate measure for any policy anywhere? No idea, but they did… and did so with a straight face.

Now we jump ahead two years and we finding the President once again demonstrating low opinion he has of average American’s intelligence. Not only does he think that Americans will somehow forget his plethora of flip-flops, (which Victor Davis Hanson lays out brilliantly here) what’s worse, he thinks that no one else in the country is bright enough to understand the Constitution.

One example - In December, despite a federal court ruling that the FCC lacked authority to regulate Internet service providers, Chairman Julius Genachowski and two fellow Democrats on the five-member decided to do just that and rammed through Net Neutrality regulations – which limit how ISPs can use and charge for their networks. Earlier this year the House passed a bill explicitly stripping the Commission of that power and the Senate is likely to kill it. This usurpation of power by Obama portends very bad things… If the default now becomes that the Executive branch gets to decide what it can and can’t regulate, with explicit exclusionary language from Congress being the only yoke on its power, the nation cannot survive as rapacious nanny state government bureaucrats seeking to feed their insatiable appetite for power will always be able to act more swiftly than a legislature of 535 representatives with tens of thousands of different priorities.

In another example, just last week, in signing the budget compromise, President Obama added a signing statement which essentially says he's going to ignore part of the legislation. The bill included Section 2262, which essentially defunds the President’s czars overseeing the auto industry, health care, climate change and urban affairs. Strangely, rather than simply abiding by the legislation’s covenants, which actually applied to positions that were already vacant, the President felt the need to explicitly say that Congress did not have the constitutional authority to limit his spending. Back in 2008, then candidate Obama said that unlike George Bush, he “would not use signing statements as a way to do an end run around Congress.” Essentially what the President is doing is practicing a line item veto; something I and many others support, but thanks to Rudy Giuliani, the Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional. Barack Obama doesn’t care about that and thinks American voters are too stupid to notice. As if to prove the point, now he’s not even using a proxy like the FCC to shred the Constitution, he’s going out of his way to do it himself.

These are but two examples where President Obama, the self described Constitutional expert “I taught the Constitution for 10 years” is demonstrating his disdain for said Constitution. At the same time however the issues are relatively esoteric. It is up to the Tea Parties and the GOP (if the leadership can remember that the word leadership actually suggests leading) to clearly articulate to American voters that while Barack Obama may be a Constitutional scholar, he does not feel the document applies to him or his administration. If they can do so in a coherent and compelling way, even the voters in John Ziegler’s video might be bright enough to vote against another four years of “Change we can believe in”.

Obama's failure will make black voters relevant again

Barack Obama is doing something that no politician has done in 50 years. He is making black voters politically relevant again. Blacks have been largely
irrelevant to the political discussion for much of the last 50 years. Not that they haven't been important on Election Day. On the contrary, the black vote has been very important on Election Day for decades. It's the black voters who have been invisible.

The black vote has been relevant to the success of Democrats for years - without the black vote Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all would have lost, not to mention countless down ticket Democrats. Black voters... not so much. Why? Because they are taken for granted. Across the country, across economic lines, in almost any election, blacks vote for Democrats 85% of the time… or more! Black voters (as in the people themselves) are of little importance to Democrats because they understand that regardless of the policies the party puts forth, 85% of black votes will come down in the Democrat column.

For years Democrats simply had to ensure blacks voted, they didn’t actually have to compete for their votes. Democrats knew that if they just got out the black vote, it was theirs. The beauty of this for Democrats is that they didn’t have to worry about discussing policies that might actually help black voters, might improve their lives, might address issues important to them. No, all they had to do was paint their GOP opponents as racists who would somehow repeal various Civil Rights Acts and then the black vote would be delivered. Sound familiar?

And it’s easy to see why blacks have been so loyal to the Democrats over the last five decades. The education gap has disappeared. Black unemployment is equal to the general population. Crime is no longer a concern in Democrat strongholds like Detroit, Gary, and Baltimore. The poverty rate and out of wedlock rate for blacks are the lowest in a generation… Oh, wait, none of those things are true.

The $64,000 question is, what have black voters gotten in exchange for their loyalty to the Democrats. I’d argue, not much.

That is where Barack Obama comes in. By demonstrating with unparalleled clarity the absolute inability of the Democrat / progressive / liberal agenda to make the lives of citizens better, and indeed its penchant for making them worse, I believe he has finally done what the GOP could not: Break the Democrat’s monopoly on black voters.

This might sound oxymoronic, but I believe that Barack Obama may be the Moses who (accidentally) leads black voters to the Promised Land. In this case the Promised Land is not beyond some body of water, but rather it is the garden of success that can be built in their own communities.

And how is he doing that? By focusing the country’s attention on the feckless and, frankly, the pernicious nature of the liberal agenda he will have loosened the grip Democrats have on black voters. They, like so many others in the country will be asking themselves, is there something else, is there an alternative to these failed policies. Not that I imagine black voters will be jumping to the GOP in droves starting tomorrow. No, it will take time, but thanks to Barack Obama, conversations will begin.

The beauty of this is that unlike the Democrats, the GOP doesn’t need to pander to black voters with a platform built on racial grievances and a race based agenda. No, the GOP can focus on blacks as Americans as opposed to the the Democrat policy of focusing on blacks as blacks.

How can the GOP take advantage of the opportunity that Barack Obama has placed at their feet? By reaching out to black voters in places where they have rarely done so. They should buy advertising and pursue interviews on urban radio stations. They should advertise in magazines and various other media that target a black demographic. They should seek to bring their message to groups like the NAACP and the National Bar Association. Importantly, what I didn’t say was that they should change their message.

With the rise of the Tea Party influence, the GOP may finally be able to make inroads with black voters. Conservatives understand that government is the problem and not the solution to problems in America in general and in the black community (to the degree that such a thing exists) in particular.

By focusing on the notion of free market solutions to American problems, the GOP can make itself a viable alternative for black voters. School choice, vouchers and
other kinds of education reform have the potential to help black families far more than virtually anything else in the country. Low taxes and reduced regulation are fundamental elements to inducing entrepreneurs and investors to take risks by starting new companies or by expanding existing ones, both of which entail the creation of jobs. With black unemployment 60% higher than the national average, such investments and jobs are particularly important to black voters.

This November, if history is any gauge, 85% of black votes will go to Democrats. Nonetheless, the GOP should not look at that as a lost constituency, but rather as an opportunity that represents 12% of the American population. Black Americans are more American than they are black – a black teenager in St. Louis or LA has much more in common with a white kid from Chicago or Seattle than he does with someone growing up in Liberia or South Africa. As such, the GOP should proactively reach out and make the argument that small government, low taxes and private enterprise are the foundation of success in America for everyone, including blacks stuck in the fog of Democrat / progressive failure. Straightforward discourse on policies that offer everyone the opportunity to succeed in the pursuit of the American dream. Now that's real relevance.