Scandals Built On Liberalism

By Joe Gruters

The three (and growing) major scandals rocking the Obama administration may well help Republicans in the 2014 mid-term elections and beyond. But they are more important than that.

The scandals give conservatives the opportunity to spell out a different vision for the country that extends far beyond political gain, and will allow Gov. Scott to more clearly separate his conservative vision for Florida from whoever his Democrat opponent will be.

All three scandals have in common that they rely on the depth and power of the federal government to make them so invasive. They are driven by the corruption of ideological federal bureaucrats and the Obama administration. But that corruption would not have such an impact without the overreaching, intrusive scale of the federal government.

The IRS scandal is one of the most frightening for the average American, because everyone (who works and pays taxes) has to deal with the IRS and has some justifiable degree of fear of the powerful government agency. It’s now obvious that the IRS was wielded as a weapon against political opponents of the president and we may have just uncovered the tip of the iceberg.

The Obama administration also used federal government wire-tapping powers to go after hundreds of reporters, supposedly in search of leakers. It’s not hard to harken back to the dark days of the Nixon administration, who also used powerful government agencies against political opponents. But the government is much larger and more powerful than it was under Richard Nixon, making the threat that much bigger.

In the newest potential scandal, it now looks like the EPA also was playing politics with fee waivers. Lawmakers are launching an investigation into charges that liberal groups in support of Democrats were given preferential treatment in obtaining government records and conservative groups were blocked from them.

Benghazi is the least obvious. But it involved the huge bureaucracy of the State Department and the probability that the U.S. government was running weapons from the Libyan rebels the administration armed to Syrian rebels it wanted to arm. Most importantly, it displayed a morally vacuous disposition within the administration when the right thing collided with gaining political advantage. The administration chose politics over the lives of Americans.

There are two levels every conservative needs to understand and articulate.

• First, the one consistent to all of these is the disturbing size and power of government over every American and its ability to insinuate itself into even the smallest aspects of our lives. Bureaucrats with agendas can make life miserable for individuals, companies, organizations. Everyone.

• Second, each of these scandals represents a place of corruption in the Obama administration. But taken altogether, they represent a breathtaking atmosphere of corruption throughout the administration.

The worst case scenario is now breaking: A frighteningly large and authoritative government with power over our lives and businesses combines with a corrupt presidential administration that is uses the massive power of the American government against the American people.

It has often been rightly said that a government big enough to give us everything we want can take everything we have. We are seeing that threat rise right now. It is for this very reason that conservatives believe in small government. Democrats represent ever bigger and more powerful government, a menacing prospect. We Republicans represent smaller government, one that cannot threaten its own people so readily.

This is not a solely federal issue.

Gov. Scott will be facing an opponent next year that is saddled with a Democrat Party that supports and fights to strengthen every one of these agencies against the average American. Those views infiltrate state-level thinking also. Scott represents the opposite. With ready help from Republicans in the Legislature, he has fought to shrink Florida’s government apparatus that intrudes on average Floridians, and shrink the footprint of taxes and regulations that weigh down companies’ abilities to grow, expand and hire.

The difference in worldviews are obvious and can be hammered home over and over, at the highest levels of political campaigns and over the fence with neighbors.

Thanks for being informed and engaged.

American Crossroads: “At Stake”

Our friends at American Crossroads at at it again with a new ad, this one featuring Clint Eastwood.

Sack It

American Crossroads is at it again. I love this ad. The message is strong, very strong, and it’s concise. But, what I love most is the incumbent President being ignored, speaking, with the volume on mute. It aptly conveys the fact that what Obama says does not matter, it’s just empty rhetoric.

GOP Fumbles Marketing Paul Ryan Opportunity to Hispanic Media

This column originally appeared at Texas GOP Vote:

By Artemio Muniz

Paul Ryan’s rise to the national mainstream has given the GOP a great chance to market its approach to the nation’s problems. Unfortunately in the last days, Republicans have dropped the ball when it comes to controlling the narrative put forward by Univision, the Spanish media giant. The current accusation by the Spanish media against Romney is that he has doubled down on his lack of concern for the Latino vote by choosing an extreme right winger like Paul Ryan. One consultant claims that Paul Ryan’s selection is a “hasta la vista, baby” to Hispanic voters. These accusations are defined as “Hispanic media attacks” by some conservative bloggers.

It’s not the “Hispanic media” stupid, it is conservatives not showing up to battle for the hearts and minds of viewers. It’s infuriating to watch golden opportunities like these slip by, where our lack of serious presence leads to having other forces define us. We should always be on offense, fighting for every single vote.

The truth is Paul Ryan is a problem solver, and his immigration solution would be more in line with our Texas solution on immigration from our Texas Republican platform. Paul Ryan supports a guest worker program. This is huge. Who shows more concern for Hispanics? Paul Ryan who supports keeping hard workers here with a temporary guest program or a two faced Obama who divides families and deports in record numbers?

The answer is easy to the Hispanic community. The fact that he promised immigration reform but deported in record numbers makes for a nuclear talking point that would crush or seriously hinder any get out the vote efforts of the Democrats. Throw in Fast and Furious and the deal is done. If Republicans at the national level could only modernize, or acquire the talent needed to express these talking points we would own the narrative in Spanish and all Hispanic media. In Houston, our Federation of Hispanic Republicans have been able to dismantle the Democrats on immigration in the media .

They no longer bring it up.

Peggy Noonan: Not-So-Smooth Operator

The one highlight is my own…

Obama increasingly comes across as devious and dishonest.
By Peggy Noonan in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Something’s happening to President Obama’s relationship with those who are inclined not to like his policies. They are now inclined not to like him. His supporters would say, “Nothing new there,” but actually I think there is. I’m referring to the broad, stable, nonradical, non-birther right. Among them the level of dislike for the president has ratcheted up sharply the past few months.

It’s not due to the election, and it’s not because the Republican candidates are so compelling and making such brilliant cases against him. That, actually, isn’t happening.

What is happening is that the president is coming across more and more as a trimmer, as an operator who’s not operating in good faith. This is hardening positions and leading to increased political bitterness. And it’s his fault, too. As an increase in polarization is a bad thing, it’s a big fault.

The shift started on Jan. 20, with the mandate that agencies of the Catholic Church would have to provide birth-control services the church finds morally repugnant. The public reaction? “You’re kidding me. That’s not just bad judgment and a lack of civic tact, it’s not even constitutional!” Faced with the blowback, the president offered a so-called accommodation that even its supporters recognized as devious. Not ill-advised, devious. Then his operatives flooded the airwaves with dishonest—not wrongheaded, dishonest—charges that those who defend the church’s religious liberties are trying to take away your contraceptives.

What a sour taste this all left. How shocking it was, including for those in the church who’d been in touch with the administration and were murmuring about having been misled.

Events of just the past 10 days have contributed to the shift. There was the open-mic conversation with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in which Mr. Obama pleaded for “space” and said he will have “more flexibility” in his negotiations once the election is over and those pesky voters have done their thing. On tape it looked so bush-league, so faux-sophisticated. When he knew he’d been caught, the president tried to laugh it off by comically covering a mic in a following meeting. It was all so . . . creepy.

Next, a boy of 17 is shot and killed under disputed and unclear circumstances. The whole issue is racially charged, emotions are high, and the only memorable words from the president’s response were, “If I had a son he’d look like Trayvon.” At first it seemed OK—not great, but all right—but as the story continued and suddenly there were death threats and tweeted addresses and congressmen in hoodies, it seemed insufficient to the moment. At the end of the day, the public reaction seemed to be: “Hey buddy, we don’t need you to personalize what is already too dramatic, it’s not about you.”

Now this week the Supreme Court arguments on ObamaCare, which have made that law look so hollow, so careless, that it amounts to a characterological indictment of the administration. The constitutional law professor from the University of Chicago didn’t notice the centerpiece of his agenda was not constitutional? How did that happen?

Maybe a stinging decision is coming, maybe not, but in a purely political sense this is how it looks: We were in crisis in 2009—we still are—and instead of doing something strong and pertinent about our economic woes, the president wasted history’s time. He wasted time that was precious—the debt clock is still ticking!—by following an imaginary bunny that disappeared down a rabbit hole.

The high court’s hearings gave off an overall air not of political misfeasance but malfeasance.

All these things have hardened lines of opposition, and left opponents with an aversion that will not go away.

I am not saying that the president has a terrible relationship with the American people. I’m only saying he’s made his relationship with those who oppose him worse.

In terms of the broad electorate, I’m not sure he really has a relationship. A president only gets a year or two to forge real bonds with the American people. In that time a crucial thing he must establish is that what is on his mind is what is on their mind. This is especially true during a crisis.

From the day Mr. Obama was sworn in, what was on the mind of the American people was financial calamity—unemployment, declining home values, foreclosures. These issues came within a context of some overarching questions: Can America survive its spending, its taxing, its regulating, is America over, can we turn it around?

That’s what the American people were thinking about.

But the new president wasn’t thinking about that. All the books written about the creation of economic policy within his administration make clear the president and his aides didn’t know it was so bad, didn’t understand the depth of the crisis, didn’t have a sense of how long it would last. They didn’t have their mind on what the American people had their mind on.

The president had his mind on health care. And, to be fair-minded, health care was part of the economic story. But only a part! And not the most urgent part. Not the most frightening, distressing, immediate part. Not the “Is America over?” part.

And so the relationship the president wanted never really knitted together. Health care was like the birth-control mandate: It came from his hermetically sealed inner circle, which operates with what seems an almost entirely abstract sense of America. They know Chicago, the machine, the ethnic realities. They know Democratic Party politics. They know the books they’ve read, largely written by people like them—bright, credentialed, intellectually cloistered. But there always seems a lack of lived experience among them, which is why they were so surprised by the town hall uprisings of August 2009 and the 2010 midterm elections.

If you jumped into a time machine to the day after the election, in November, 2012, and saw a headline saying “Obama Loses,” do you imagine that would be followed by widespread sadness, pain and a rending of garments? You do not. Even his own supporters will not be that sad. It’s hard to imagine people running around in 2014 saying, “If only Obama were president!” Including Mr. Obama, who is said by all who know him to be deeply competitive, but who doesn’t seem to like his job that much. As a former president he’d be quiet, detached, aloof. He’d make speeches and write a memoir laced with a certain high-toned bitterness. It was the Republicans’ fault. They didn’t want to work with him.

He will likely not see even then that an American president has to make the other side work with him. You think Tip O’Neill liked Ronald Reagan? You think he wanted to give him the gift of compromise? He was a mean, tough partisan who went to work every day to defeat Ronald Reagan. But forced by facts and numbers to deal, he dealt. So did Reagan.

An American president has to make cooperation happen.

But we’ve strayed from the point. Mr. Obama has a largely nonexistent relationship with many, and a worsening relationship with some.

Really, he cannot win the coming election. But the Republicans, still, can lose it. At this point in the column we usually sigh.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 31, 2012, on page A13 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Not-So-Smooth Operator.

A Trivial Question About Presidential Candidates

I was talking with a friend a few days ago about the upcoming 2012 Presidential election. As we talked about candidates, my friends list of potential candidates was interesting to me, and one thing stuck out to me: none of the names on the list were people currently serving in Washington DC. As I pointed that out to my friend, the response was, “Exactly”.

We discussed this for a while. It was pointed out to me that those in Washington just serve as members of the “peanut gallery”. I realized that Obama came from the Senate, and while he was able to criticize President Bush from his then (and current) role as national Commentator-In-Chief, he was never a leader before and that has hindered him from being effective as Marxist-In-Chief.

So, does it help someone like Newt Gingrich who served in Congress, then left Congress to run for President later? What about Herman Cain, a man who has actually run businesses, created jobs, achieved profits and balanced a real budget? What about Governors like Time Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie?

I’m interested in hearing what you think about this. Should our nominee be from outside of the Congress? What about names like Jim DeMint or Paul Ryan? I used the word “trivial” in the title of this post, I did that because I want a serious national discussion and dialogue about the real questions of our time. If the 2012 election turns into a non-sensical popularity contest, that gets us nowhere.

Education secretary urged his employees to attend Sharpton’s rally

Yet another reason that the Federal Department of Education needs to be eliminated and those powers returned back to the states. Like these people had nothing better to do with the innumerable problems with education in this country.

President Obama’s top education official urged government employees to attend a rally that the Rev. Al Sharpton organized to counter a larger conservative event on the Mall.

“ED staff are invited to join Secretary Arne Duncan, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and other leaders on Saturday, Aug. 28, for the ‘Reclaim the Dream’ rally and march,” began an internal e-mail sent to more than 4,000 employees of the Department of Education on Wednesday.

AP-GfK Poll: Most attuned voters tilt toward GOP

Huh, no surprise here.

Congressional races often turn on local concerns and the candidates’ character, factors that may yet sway many races this year. But many analysts think the public’s widely sour mood — just 35 percent in the AP-GfK poll said the country is headed in the right direction — means this year’s campaigns could be widely influenced by national issues, especially the economy.

“The economy is poor, we’re muddling through in Afghanistan, we’re not making much progress in the war on terror,” said Paul Goren, a University of Minnesota political scientist who studies voting behavior. “Every once in a while national issues can intrude. It looks like there’s a good chance this will be one of those elections.”

The vast majority of this poll is no surprise. Educated Republicans were not the ones looking for television cameras on election day in 2008 talking about Obama paying their mortgages, car payments and filling up their cars with gas.

Little-known fact: Obama’s failed stimulus program cost more than the Iraq war

I’m sure the Obama Regime wasn’t expecting this.

Expect to hear a lot about how much the Iraq war cost in the days ahead from Democrats worried about voter wrath against their unprecedented spending excesses.

The meme is simple: The economy is in a shambles because of Bush’s economic policies and his war in Iraq. As American Thinker’s Randall Hoven points out, that’s the message being peddled by lefties as diverse as former Clinton political strategist James Carville, economist Joseph Stiglitz, and The Nation’s Washington editor, Christopher Hayes.

Righting the Ship

Recent headlines like these, do not inspire me:

Obama backers show signs of disappointment

Obama Gets No Health Care Bounce

Democrats’ Long-Held Seats Face G.O.P. Threat

I myself file these headlines under the “I’ll believe it when I see it” banner. The main reason for this: Do we really trust the media to tell us the truth? Isn’t it possible the media is playing us, trying to trick us into believing our own desires?

Even if you want to buy into the headlines, this is no time to get over confident.

We can’t go into November with the mindset that “all signs point in our direction”. We must be different and we must be bold. We must campaign on our ideas and solutions. Just saying “vote for us, we’re not Obama”, does not build our movement in the long term. While we could squeak through an election cycle victorious, if we elect candidates to go and feed the perception of the “party of no”, we will still be on our heels headed into 2012.

A lot can happen between now and November. There are national holidays (Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day), Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, and a long summer when people will stop paying attention as they go on vacations. If Obama starts to show signs of recovery, let’s make sure we have a campaign plan that shows we have our own ideas for the direction of our country and that we have candidates willing and able to implement those ideas once elected.

Recently, I saw someone post these comments on Twitter, I was glad to see I am not alone. This person has a lot to say, obviously limited by Twitter’s 140 characters per post:

“Ask yourself this question: WHERE IN THE WORLD IS DAVID AXELROD AND WHY IS HE SO QUIET? He’s prepping for 2012, AWAY from social media #tcot”

“So get your bums off the chairs, sofas and Starbucks chairs, meet your neighbors, your colleagues and tell them the truth about today #tcot”

“FB, tweeting and blogging can only go this far .. while the Left is out there, canvassing OUR neighborhoods, we’re all… HERE… #tcot”

“So if on November 3, 2010 you ask yourselves “What happened?”, just look in the mirror and return to tweeting the same question! #tcot”

“So remember, you’re here or on FB or WordPress or blogger.. Organizing for America is on OUR streets .. WAKE THE HECK UP! #tcot”

I think there is some truth to what this person was saying. Before we start patting each other on the back for what should or could be a great 2010 election, there is work to do.

If we squeak by and win in 2010 on the “we’re not Obama” message, what have we really gained in the future? Think back to the great year of 1994. That year was sandwiched in between 1992 and 1996, years Clinton was elected and re-elected.

I agree with the Twitter poster, the Left is not sitting back waiting to take our best shot to see if they can survive. While they may not be confident going into November, they are still doing the work they need to do. They also had a much better head start in organizing on the heels of 2008 where they collected untold numbers of email addresses and cell numbers for texting. Even if the Left loses in 2010, they are building for 2012.

Let’s work so we don’t peak in April, when the election is in November.