A COMPLETE POST-MORTEM OP-ED SERIES ON THE ELECTION

[Dennis Olson]

I've been reading a bunch of op-ed pieces this morning, and have decided to pull them all together into a single thread. I'm doing this because they are all individual writers' thoughts on what happened on Tuesday. I'm going to post them immediately following this post, so give me a few minutes to get them included.

Thanks.

 

[Dennis Olson]

Seven things that mattered in the 2012 election

By Rod D. Martin

Published November 09, 2012

| FoxNews.com

I have not called this op-ed “What the Election Meant.” That might be a bit grandiose for the day after. But Nov. 6, 2012 definitely taught us some things we must not ignore.

First and possibly foremost, stuff happens. In this case it was a hurricane. Sandy kept Mitt Romney off TV for five crucial days, days which, without Sandy, would almost certainly have seen Romney’s lead solidify and grow.

Instead, Barack Obama had a rare (and rarely taken) chance to look truly presidential, for the entire last week of the campaign, with zero competition. He did take it, aided indelibly by visuals of a certain portly Republican firebrand governor fawning all over his presidential greatness.

Which is the second half of this lesson: Sandy may have put Obama over the top. It may also have relegated Chris Christie to the list of also-rans.

Second, this election was not some massive failure by Mitt Romney. It’s always easy to dump on the loser, but the truth is, Romney ran a solid campaign – despite all the Monday morning quarterbacking you are now hearing – and got beaten.

Should he have avoided dumb mistakes like the 47% rant? Sure, just as Obama should have avoided telling people to vote out of “revenge.”

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Should he have driven harder at Obama in the third debate? Maybe in hindsight, but it was a reasonably smart strategy at the time.

Welcome to the NFL.

Third, let’s just say it: Obama knocked it out of the park. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, to a lesser degree Michigan and Minnesota should have been in play.

They weren’t.

North Carolina and Florida certainly should not have been in play: they certainly were.

This is a testament to an amazing organizational effort which, unlike anything remotely similar on our side (hint: there wasn’t anything remotely similar on our side), started sometime in 2007 and never shut down.

MoveOn and Organizing for America (OFA), not to mention ACORN (or whatever it calls itself now) and a host of other groups just never went home: they dug in to win, maintaining field offices and staff without a break. And we didn’t. We never do and never have. But it’s a new world, and the old rules don’t work anymore.

Which brings us to:

Fourth, the Democrats continue to dominate in technology.

If Republican leaders think of technology at all, they think top-down (lists) and broadcasting (alternate media). They aren’t wrong to think of these things: they’re just leaving oh so much on the table: it’s kind of like using your iPad as a hammer, or perhaps only using it to play Pong.

The Internet is about mass communities, networking, conversation, organizing. But these things threaten the Republican establishment’s pecking order and income stream. It is a massive case of “not invented here.”

The Internet is also about Big Data, and therefore microtargeting. But the GOP is largely lacking this political atomic bomb because they continue to ignore Silicon Valley or anyone else outside the Beltway consultancy class.

By contrast, a Facebook co-founder was drafted to run Obama’s Internet campaign in 2007; and in 2012, media reports indicate that 34 Facebook executives and staff took leadership roles on the campaign.

If there’s a well-recognized “enthusiasm gap,” and you need that few extra points at the margin, an extremely organized well-oiled machine of millions of passionate volunteers, expertly-trained in what to do, equipped with the very most advanced tools, and intrinsically prone to creativity and initiative might just be your margin of victory. And moreover, at some point, if you keep ignoring a development of such magnitude while the other side keeps using it against you, your outdated tactics start making you look like the Polish Cavalry being mowed down by German tanks.

We have reached that point.

It will get worse.

Fifth, the now near-total bias of the media represents something like a trillion-dollar in-kind contribution to the left.

Could Sandy have possibly helped Obama if it had been covered like Katrina? If billionaires like Donald Trump really want to change things, they should send less money to the Kochs and Crossroads (not that Trump patronizes either) and takeover CBS or NBC instead.

Creating more balance in the media – not through some bogus “Fairness Doctrine” censorship scheme but through private establishment of diverse media – would utterly remake America.

Sixth, minorities were 26% of the vote, but are 51% of live births. Republicans do not have to abandon their principles, but they absolutely must mend fences with Hispanics and Latinos in particular. This will require creativity. But time is running out; indeed, it may have run out this year. Which is also…

Seventh, a case for the church and social conservatives. Take for instance, oh, Hispanics (!), many of whom find libertarian and Randian appeals to be heartless and foul – even (ironically) as so many of them are capitalists in every possible sense – but who respond extremely well to engagement on social issues; and indeed, 85% of Hispanic and Latino Americans who convert to Evangelical, Reformed or Pentecostal Christianity also start voting Republican.

But if there’s a case to be made for the church, there’s also a twofold lesson for it.

Lesson one: Half of Evangelicals still aren’t voting, and that’s the direct responsibility of cowardly clergy, who value their tax status and their cushy jobs above applying God’s truth to the life-and-death issues before us, not least in this election being Obama’s assault on religious liberties.

And lesson two? The inescapable conclusion of that statistic a couple paragraphs back about Hispanic voting: Pastors, your stagnant church attendance and faithlessness in taking the Gospel to your city, state and country is a self-executing curse. When you stubbornly disobey Christ’s Great Commission, Christ increasingly swallows you up in a nation of unbelievers who revile you and everything you believe in.

Oh wait, that was “What the Election Meant” after all. This election meant that we aren’t doing our jobs. It meant that from the Beltway to the Baptist church to each of our boardrooms and break rooms, the free ride is over. We can still win America. We can still maintain what the Founding Fathers bequeathed us. But not by waiting for someone else to do it, not by slopping through with half-measures and not by “throw money at it” schemes.

We have to decide to bring our A Game. And then we – all of us, each and every one – have to live up to our responsibilities as Americans and get to work.
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[Dennis Olson]

WWRD: What would Reagan do after Obama's victory?

By Martin Sieff

Published November 08, 2012

| FoxNews.com

The Republican Party and the conservative movement in America have been brought to their current appalling state because they are full of people who endlessly praise Ronald Reagan while doing the opposite of what he taught and practiced. In fact, Reagan’s brilliant example and crystal spirit can light up the road ahead – if conservatives will open their closed minds and shriveled spirits to him.

First of all, Ronald Reagan was a lifelong optimist and an example of remarkable resilience especially in bad times. After Barry Goldwater went down to the greatest presidential defeat in American history to that point in 1964, Reagan, whose nationally televised speech was the one shining success in that campaign, was neither shaken no disheartened. Within two years he had won the governorship of California – and the rest is history.

Reagan therefore would not have lost heart and despaired of conservative and patriotic principles, nor of America. He would have taken a good night’s sleep and got up in the morning eager to find new directions and new opportunities for the way ahead.

Second, the conservative movement that Ronald Reagan created was generous and inclusive. Reagan welcomed brilliant African-American and Jewish intellectuals alike on to his team.

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President George W. Bush understood this generous, inclusive essential component of conservatism. I have been critical of Bush for many important things -- unnecessary wars, out of control spending, playing ultimately catastrophic games with keeping interest rates artificially low. But Bush 43, among other things, was highly successful in reaching out to Hispanic Americans. He knew and thought better of grassroots conservatives than assuming that they would never accept Hispanic, black or Jewish Americans in major positions.

Mitt Romney lost a major opportunity when he refused to seriously consider Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico or Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida as his vice presidential running mate. Martinez in particular gave a superb speech at the Republican National Convention in Tampa and could have helped Romney enormously with women and Hispanics – two huge constituencies that he effectively chose to write off. George W. Bush did not make that mistake. Neither did Ronald Reagan.

The Republican Party spent at least $1 billion on the 2012 presidential campaign and it still lost by a clear two percentage points in the national popular vote. There was no serious effort to reach out to women or Hispanics, nor to young Americans – a constituency who responded tremendously to Ronald Reagan back in 1980.

Ronald Reagan have never have blamed these groups for not voting Republican. He would certainly never have written off 47 percent of Americans as a waste of time. He would never have dreamed of even thinking such a thought. Ronald Reagan loved and respected ordinary working Americans and they knew it. He always recognized clearly that arrogant, self-appointed elitists were political poison to the conservative movement and the GOP.

Reagan’s two administrations were exceptional from the start in ringing new and brilliant talents and ideas to Washington. Often these ideas and their champions clashed with each other. The fresh blood Reagan brought to the moribund Beltway culture was often remarkably young in years. Sometimes in age it was remarkably old, as in the case of Director of Central Intelligence William Casey. Reagan never cared. He never ruled talent out however old or young it was according to conventional wisdom.

The conservative moment has lost that open-mindedness and flexibility. The same columnists, the same pundits, serve up the same ideas in lockstep with each other time and again. When new ideas and new challenges emerge across America, they are shoehorned into the old rhetoric by the same arrogant, repetitive tired old faces. New minds and new blood are needed.

Ronald Reagan was a social conservative and one of the greatest spokesmen for genuine moral values in the history of American politics. But he was never a bigot or a fool. He never outraged women or any other group by expressing ridiculous, offensive, or plain absurd sentiments. An ill-judged tolerance for such buffoons has just cost the Republican Party and the conservative movement two Senate seats they were otherwise almost certain to win.

Ronald Reagan did not mindlessly worship youth or embody it. His mind and spirit were always young – always optimistic, intellectually curious and ready to challenge old orthodoxies from economics to national security. But he was almost 70 years old when he took the oath of office for the first time, the oldest American ever to do so.

Neither was Reagan afraid to change and adapt his policies to changing times. The Ronald Reagan who ended one of the most dangerous periods of the Cold War by launching a new era of détente with Mikhail Gorbachev was not a different Reagan from the Reagan who had had fearlessly stood up to previous Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yury Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. It was the same Reagan. But when the Soviet leadership changed, he recognized when he needed to change his policies – never his principles – too.

Ronald Reagan was no war-lover, armchair warrior or quick on the trigger hothead. He defused immensely serious crises with the Soviet Union and Iran on many occasions. But he also avoided getting the United States bogged down in any blooded and extended war, unlike others we could mention. Like Dwight David Eisenhower, for a full eight years he brilliantly preserved peace through strength and wisdom when it seemed almost impossible to do.

Reagan had nerves of steel and genuinely trusted the workings of the free market. He let interest rates soar to break the back of inflation in 1981-82 even though for more than a year it looked as if he would suffer sweeping defeat in any re-election bid for doing so.

George W. Bush never shared that courage and optimistic faith and kept interest rates bottled up for almost his entire two terms. The result was the housing bubble burst and disastrous Wall Street meltdown of 2008.

The Republican Party and the conservative movement need to recover that steely courage in applying necessary economic policies rather than pandering to either public opinion or ignorant pundits.

Reagan would not have despaired -- or even been disheartened -- by the national election results on Tuesday night. He would have been energized by them to seek out new opportunities. He would have sought to learn the right lessons and apply them. And he would not have let the architects of such a sweeping and comprehensive defeat get the chance to bang their heads against the same old brick walls and ever bury the conservative movement again.

Finally, Ronald Reagan would never have tried to turn the clock back to some mythical golden age before the New Deal, or before Teddy Roosevelt’s Square Deal or, for that matter, before the Bill of Rights. For him the true golden age was always ahead, and it was a privilege for him and the American people to strive to achieve it.
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[Dennis Olson]

The real reasons for Republicans’ lack of success in 2012

By Frank Donatelli

Published November 08, 2012

| FoxNews.com

The 2012 election can only be seen as a bitter disappointment for conservatives and the Republican Party. An incumbent well to the left of center with limited job approval ran for reelection burdened by high unemployment and huge budget deficits – and won.

In these situations, the losing candidate always comes in for their share of the blame, and Governor Mitt Romney certainly wasn’t a perfect candidate, nor was his campaign error-free. But the reasons for Republicans’ lack of success this year go far deeper than our candidate’s personal appeal.

First, the Obama campaign did a first rate job of targeting and turning out their voters in battleground states. Their ground game was as good as advertised. Through a judicious use of state-of-the-art social media systems and technology, Obama won virtually every important state by razor thin margins. The campaign ignored red states and focused its energy and resources to leverage a very narrow popular vote majority into a convincing victory in the Electoral College. Republicans are getting better but need to work harder to match Democrats’ modern online voter ID tools and expertise.

Second, Republicans were unable to convince voters that they had a clear set of alternative policies that would produce significantly better economic results for the country than Obama’s record, which featured little economic growth or job creation and huge budget deficits. This was thought to be the GOP’s strongest argument, but it didn’t move the electorate nearly enough for Romney to win.

The task was complicated by the willingness of many voters to blame former President George W. Bush rather than the man in charge for the past four years for our poor economic circumstances. Also, the (very) slowly improving economic numbers convinced a plurality of voters that the economy was actually getting better rather than worse.

Obama argued that he was doing the best anyone could under the circumstances. Much of the mainstream media bought his argument completely. When Romney announced his 12 million job creation goal, very achievable by historic standards, most in the media scoffed and immediately pronounced it unattainable.

We are learning to settle for less because government continues to perform so poorly. Thus did the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression become the Gold Standard for presidential leadership and economic policymaking.

We need to redouble our efforts to explain in the clearest possible terms why limited government, including proper tax and regulatory policies, leads to prosperity while big government does just the opposite.

Third, it is undeniable that the GOP has serious institutional weaknesses that must be addressed and soon. Young voters last supported the Republican nominee in 1988 – a quarter century ago. They supported the Obama administration again this year despite the huge deficits they will ultimately pay for and a lack of real economic opportunity the past four years.

Mitt Romney actually did worse than John McCain among Hispanics, the fastest growing ethnic group in the country. Romney can be faulted here for moving sharply in a nativist direction in the primaries and then spurning the chance to work with Senator Marco Rubio to produce a GOP version of the “Dream Act.”

The result was that Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado were won by Obama for the second consecutive election. Unless Republicans come to grips with the immigration issue, more states will become unwinnable, including Arizona and even Texas. There is no more urgent priority for Republicans than to aggressively compete for Hispanic support.

Finally, the gender gap remains as big as ever. Republicans continue to have problems with moderate suburban moms and single women – even though many of these voters agree with their economic message.

It is a dubious strategy for any candidate to speak so insensitively and cavalierly about why women who are victims of violent assault cannot be trusted to make their own health and medical decisions.

Republicans need a new agenda to focus attention on strengthening the multiple roles women uniquely fulfill in our society – as wife, as mother and caregiver, and as breadwinner, sometimes the only breadwinner for her family and children. Our goal should be to identify with the overlapping challenges many women face and to develop policies to make it easier for modern women to achieve these multiple economic and social objectives.

It is said that we learn far more in defeat than victory. That’s why these next few months will be crucial as Republicans consider the future of their party.
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[Dennis Olson]

A former congressional insider offers the good and bad of the next four years

By Sue Kelly

Published November 08, 2012

| FoxNews.com

What can we expect from Congress in the next four years? Now that the election is over, will Congress learn to get along?

The election having shown the general public to be nearly evenly divided, what are the possibilities Congress will stop rampant partisanship long enough to address the serious problems facing this nation?

If twelve years served in the US House of Representatives taught me anything, it was how very difficult it is to move entrenched attitudes there.

Tuesday night’s results left us in exactly the same position we’ve been in for the past four years. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is still presiding over a dysfunctional Senate. Speaker John Boehner is still presiding over a fractious House and President Obama is still presiding over a badly divided country.

It will be even more difficult for Congress to work successfully over the coming years because the Democrats increased their hold on the Senate and the Republicans their hold on the House. That alone ensures partisan voting on basic policy issues. It also will ensure large, complicated bills with partisan lines giving many special features to people the leadership has bargained with in order to secure a promised vote. Remember Senator Landrieu’s “Louisiana purchase” deal with Harry Reid?

Even with the popular vote of 50% to 48%, expect neither side to give way. Remember Nancy Pelosi’s answer when asked why there was little bi-partisan work being done on the health care bill, “we won.”

It was clear from President Obama’s speech Tuesday night; there will be little change in his attitude. Each side in our national politics has a sense of having been wronged and of their policy aims being morally superior. That isn’t going to change any time soon. The one thing that has changed is that it will be useless for the president to continue to blame Republicans for his inept handling of the county. There is no longer any point.

Oh, there will be much hot air expended on both sides, but moving the nation forward on serious issues like solving the problem of the “fiscal cliff” of tax increases and defense reductions, restructuring laws so small businesses can thrive and create jobs, and recharging the economic stability of the nation so our credit rating becomes attractive for more investment will be slow in coming.

Anyone hoping for a change in the tone and rhetoric of the last four years should turn off all electronics, phones and stop reading the newspapers. Try living off the grid.

I believe what we can expect for this new chapter of Congress will be angry, hard rhetoric from increased partisanship and continued tinkering about the edges of major bills, with little of major consequence addressing our problems.

Expect increased taxes, increased Agency controlled regulations, increased health care costs and a lack of a Federal budget to help hold down spending and reduce the debt. There seems little chance of détente on any of these issues.

The only glimmer of hope we citizens have would be changes in leadership in both the House and the Senate. Removing Harry Reid from leadership, with his limited vision and hard- core partisan style of ruling the Senate would be a welcome indicator that the Senators will once again work together to get things done. Perhaps, without Senator Reid as leader, the Senate will pass a budget.

Removing from the House leadership some of the strongly right-wing leaders currently there, will allow the passage of bills to solve our real and serious problems. Unfortunately we, the public, have no voice in who becomes leadership on either house. Only the Senators and Congressmen control that vote.

Since voters get the government they vote for, apparently this must be what they want – another four years of partisan bickering while the country’s problems stagnate. Would that it could have been otherwise.
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[Dennis Olson]

Latinos Make American History, GOP Pays the Bill

By Juan Williams

Published November 07, 2012

| Fox News Latino

After Tuesday’s presidential election, Latinos now enjoy a new status as power players in U.S. politics.

President Obama defeated Mitt Romney in large measure because he won 71 percent of the Latino vote, in a year when Latinos made American history by reaching a landmark 10 percent of the nation’s voters.

According to exit polls, Mitt Romney lost their vote to Obama by 44 points, 71 percent to 27 percent. This is an unprecedented margin of defeat for Republicans among the fastest growing segment of American voters, Latinos. It is a scream for hard-line conservatives to reconsider their stand on immigration reform and Arizona’s new law giving police the right to ask anyone for their immigration papers.

One Republican who understood this early on was the man Mitt Romney almost picked as his vice presidential running mate, Florida Senator Marco Rubio.

If I had to pick one quote that perfectly captures why the Republicans lost the Latino vote in Tuesday’s election so decisively, I would pick something Senator Rubio told to me in an exclusive interview for Fox News Latino this past April.

When I asked Rubio why the GOP’s economic message didn’t seem to be resonating with Latinos who faced disproportionately high levels of unemployment, poverty and foreclosure during the Obama presidency, the Freshman Tea Party Senator told me candidly “It’s very hard to make the economic argument to people who think you want to deport their grandmother.”

It is far from clear that having Rubio as the vice presidential nominee would have stopped Romney from losing the Latino vote. But if Rubio’s advice been heeded and had Republicans been more quick to embrace his alternative DREAM Act proposal, they would not have had such a decisive loss could have been averted.

President Obama delivered a similar message when he told the Des Moines Register just before the election: “A big reason I will win a second term is because the Republican nominee and Republican Party have so alienated the fastest-growing demographic group in the country, the Latino community.”

“For the first time in U.S. history, the Latino vote can plausibly claim to be nationally decisive,” Stanford University professor Gary Segura said on Election Night.

Professor Segura calculates the Latino vote provided Obama with 5.4 percent of his margin over Romney essentially delivering a victory in the popular vote for him. Segura also calculates that if Romney had garnered just 35 percent of the Latino vote, he could have won the election.

In Florida, Virginia, Colorado and Nevada there is no question, based on exit poll surveys, that Latinos made the difference for the President.

Latinos increased their percentage of the electorate from 9 percent in 2008 to 10 percent in this race. In Florida, for example, the number of Hispanics in the state grew by nearly 200,000 in the last four years. Nationwide, four million more registered Latino voters have been added to the polls in the last four years.

In 2008 Latino voters nationwide gave Obama 67 percent of their vote and they upped that in this election to 71 percent.

The first step for the GOP is to avoid falling into the trap of thinking of the Latino vote as monolithic. According to the 2010 census, the U.S. Hispanic population is comprised of 63 percent Mexicans, 9.2 Puerto Ricans, 3.5 Cubans like Rubio and 3.3 Salvadorans.

Aside from Rubio, the only prominent national Republican Latino figures are Governors Susana Martinez of New Mexico and Brian Sandoval of Nevada – both of whom delivered powerful speeches at the GOP convention in Tampa. Senator-elect Ted Cruz of Texas is another strong candidate to lead GOP outreach to Hispanics.

The Democrats also have a deep bench of charismatic Latino officials. They include the 2012 DNC keynote speaker, San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaragosia, Illinois Congressman Luis Gutierrez and California Congressman and Democratic Conference Vice Chairman Xavier Becerra.

And the Democrats are glad to point out that the far right of the GOP has not been welcoming to Hispanics. During the GOP primaries, for example, Romney pushed to impress conservatives by calling for “self-deportation” of illegal immigrants. He seemed to be harsh with the immigrant community to prove his conservative credentials to the conservative base of the party.

Romney even pledged to veto the DREAM Act which provided citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants who enroll in college or enlist in the military. He called the Arizona “papers please” anti-illegal immigration law, SB 1070, a “model for the nation.”

Romney made a conscious decision to align himself with the nation’s most vocal exponents of tough immigration policies. Having Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, former California Gov. Pete Wilson and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach squarely in his corner was enough to keep many Latinos away.

Latinos got tremendous attention this election cycle because their numbers had simply grown too large to ignore. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the U.S. Hispanic Population is now over 50 million strong.

If the GOP continues down this path, it will cease to be an electorally viable political party. They need to start listening to Sen. Rubio.
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[Dennis Olson]

There was no 'tipping point' in the 2012 election

By Douglas E. Schoen

Published November 07, 2012

| FoxNews.com

There was no tipping point in this election. Former Gov. Mitt Romney simply made a number of strategic errors that cost him and the Republican Party the presidency, and any hope that they had of winning control of the U.S. senate.

Indeed, the Republican Party brand faces real problems and challenges going forward, in the systemic and endemic problems the Romney campaign failed to confront.

First, and most importantly, the Romney campaign lacked a rationale or a message for why people should turn away from an unpopular incumbent.

At a time of economic distress, Republicans needed to have -- and the electorate required -- an alternate vision of America, one that spoke of growth and opportunity, one that recognized the economic challenges that people were facing and offered an alternative narrative to the classed-based approach that the Obama campaign took.

Other than the poorly fleshed out 5-point plan that the Romney campaign hastily added to their convention speech, there never was a moment when the Romney campaign offered a clear, convincing alternative to the failed policies of President Obama.

Just as importantly, the Romney campaign failed to define their man over the summer, allowing President Obama's campaign to define the governor before he was able to define himself. To be sure, the Republican nominee depended on Super PACS to carry his campaign message on TV during the summer, but the bulk of that advertising was negative, and very little of it sought to articulate a reasoned rationale or logic for electing Governor Romney.

There was also the failure of Governor Romney to offer -- other than in 90 minutes during the first debate -- a centrist alternative to the approach President Obama took in the reelection campaign, which emphasized redistribution of wealth and class based politics.

The Romney of the primaries, who spoke to how "severely conservative" he was, morphed into a more bipartisan Romney who was prepared to embrace Bowles-Simpson principles in the first debate, and who had a more inclusive vision of the presidency than he had previously articulated.

That Romney was present for only 90 minutes, and the failure to coherently and consistently outline a vision for the party cost the Republicans dearly.

Moreover, and more fundamentally, the Republican brand is in trouble. One of the points that was never understood by the Republican Party during the election was how poorly their brand fares with the broader electorate.

Poll after poll that I did showed the Republican brand ten points weaker than the Democratic brand, and there was no systemic effort by the Republican Party to try to offer, on an institutional basis, an argument on their own behalf. While it seems logical that the Republican party would recognize the challenges they face, the hundreds of millions of dollars in Super PAC and institutional party money that was raised was used almost exclusively for attack ads that fell short, rather than for message-based ads that sought to advance the interest of the Republican Party.

What, then, does the party need to do for the future?

First and foremost, it needs an approach that emphasizes economic growth and job creation, that recognizes that we need inclusive policies that appreciate that we are one nation, and that minorities, both Blacks and Hispanics, play a critical role.

Exit polls on Election Night showed that fiscally conservative free market policies along with a social safety net that protects the less fortunate of us is an approach that garners majority support.

The problem is that the Republicans have yet to flesh out a clear approach and a clear vision, and unless and until they do they will not fully realize their vision of becoming a majority party in the United States, much less win the presidency of the United States.
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[Dennis Olson]

What Obama's victory means for your health care -- a doctor's take

By Dr. Marc Siegel

Published November 07, 2012

| FoxNews.com

Tuesday night's win in the presidential contest for President Obama was a win for ObamaCare, the president's signature legislation from his first term. ObamaCare will now continue to be implemented.

This future means that we will continue to be faced with rising insurance premiums, as our current insurance expands to cover all patients regardless of pre-existing condition, age, or how many times they've already used the policy.

Insurance will continue to follow a one-size-fits all model, where it is easy to overuse but may not cover our latest expensive technology which offer more personalized solutions.

Federal regulations in the form of Medicare's Independent Payment Advisory Board as well as ObamaCare's many other committees will restrict my choices for my patients. I will have more patients with more red tape and less time to spend with them.

Since ObamaCare does not effectively address the doctor shortage, you will see more nurse practitioners and physicians assistants, who are quite competent, but have different training than I have treating patients.

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Medical care will be shifted more and more to the hospital and medical center, which are more equipped to preserve their bottom line profits despite increasing federal regulations.

Accountable Care Organizations under the Affordable Care Act will focus more on quality of care as opposed to fee for service, which large groups and medical centers are more equipped to implement.

Doctors will cherry-pick their patients, staying away from those who are too sick to allow them to apply for financial incentives.

ObamaCare can only afford to extend health insurance entitlements to more people through increased taxes or penalties (payroll tax for Medicare, individual and business mandates, tax on medical devices, etc.).

If the current economic climate continues, small businesses will be reluctant to add more employees and large businesses will prefer to pay the ObamaCare penalty than pay the increasing premiums.

More and more people will get their health insurances at the state exchanges, where taxes pay for federal stipends in states which have created their own exchanges.

There will be a disparity of services provided depending on your state. Medicaid expansion offered to 16 million more people will also vary depending on whether your state can afford to implement it or not. Medicaid lacks sufficient providers or networks to provide care, and the expansion makes this problem far worse.

President Obama's victory on election night is not a victory for health care, though it may be a narrow one for health insurance companies who gain more customers.

Prices will continue to rise and access to actual care will decline in an already overcrowded system.

Biotech companies and drug companies may feel that the climate is no longer ripe for innovation.

Hospitals and other health care providers will continue to struggle amid shrinking reimbursements.

Bottom line: my patients who gain a new insurance card may find that it doesn't buy them the care they were expecting.
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[Dennis Olson]

Four more years--what is going on here?

By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano

Published November 08, 2012

| FoxNews.com

Only in America can a president who inherits a deep recession and whose policies have actually made the effects of that recession worse get re-elected. Only in America can a president who wants the bureaucrats who can’t run the Post Office to micromanage the administration of every American’s health care get re-elected. Only in America can a president who kills Americans overseas who have never been charged or convicted of a crime get re-elected. And only in America can a president who borrowed and spent more than $5 trillion in fewer than four years, plans to repay none of it and promises to borrow another $5 trillion in his second term get re-elected.

What’s going on here?

What is going on is the present-day proof of the truism observed by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, who rarely agreed on anything in public: When the voters recognize that the public treasury has become a public trough, they will send to Washington not persons who will promote self-reliance and foster an atmosphere of prosperity, but rather those who will give away the most cash and thereby create dependency. This is an attitude that, though present in some localities in the colonial era, was created at the federal level by Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, magnified by FDR, enhanced by LBJ, and eventually joined in by all modern-day Democrats and most contemporary Republicans.

Mitt Romney is one of those Republicans. He is no opponent of federal entitlements, and he basically promised to keep them where they are. Where they are is a cost to taxpayers of about $1.7 trillion a year. Under President Obama, however, the costs have actually increased, and so have the numbers of those who now receive them. Half of the country knows this, and so it has gleefully sent Obama back to office so he can send them more federal cash taken from the other half.

It is fair to say that Obama is the least skilled and least effective American president since Jimmy Carter, but he is far more menacing. His every instinct is toward the central planning of the economy and the federal regulation of private behavior. He has no interest in protecting American government employees in harm’s way in Libya, and he never admits he has been wrong about anything. Though he took an oath to uphold the Constitution, he treats it as a mere guideline, whose grand principles intended to guarantee personal liberty and a diffusion of power can be twisted and compromised to suit his purposes. He rejects the most fundamental of American values -- that our rights come from our Creator, and not from the government. His rejection of that leads him to an expansive view of the federal government, which permits it, and thus him, to right any wrong, to regulate any behavior and to tax any event, whether authorized by the Constitution or not, and to subordinate the individual to the state at every turn.

As a practical matter, we are in for very difficult times during Obama’s second term. ObamaCare is now here to stay; so, no matter who you are or how you pay your medical bills, federal bureaucrats will direct your physicians in their treatment of you, and they will see your medical records. As well, Obama is committed to raising the debt of the federal government to $20 trillion. So, if the Republican-controlled House of Representatives goes along with this, as it did during Obama’s first term, the cost will be close to $1 trillion in interest payments every year. As well, everyone’s taxes will go up on. New Year’s Day, as the Bush-era tax cuts will expire then. The progressive vision of a populace dependent on a central government and a European-style welfare state is now at hand.

Though I argued during the campaign that this election was a Hobson’s choice between big government and bigger government, and that regrettably it addressed how much private wealth the feds should seize and redistribute and how much private behavior they should regulate, rather than whether the Constitution permits them to do so, and though I have argued that we have really one political party whose two branches mirror each other’s wishes for war and power, it is unsettling to find Obama back in the White House for another four years. That sinking feeling comes from the knowledge that he is free from the need to keep an eye on the electorate, and from the terrible thought that he may be the authoritarian we have all known and feared would visit us one day and crush our personal freedoms.
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http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/11/08/four-more-years-what-is-going-on-here/

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[Dennis Olson]

That's all for now. Read 'em and weep....

 

[Flippper]

This author says the post mortem on America via the Nov. 2012 mock election strongly indicates death via fraud and collusion.

 

[TerryK]

Thanks Dennis for some good food for thought as we go through a kind of retreat in our minds to re-examine some basic premises.

 

[Troke]

Good work DO.

 

[Dennis Olson]

Bump for the night shift.

 

[Housecarl]

Thanks Dennis.

 

[Echo 5]

A question for Nate Silver: so how were you able to predict turnout greater than 100% in dozens of jurisdictions? What, no answer? Yeah, thought so.

 

[blueridge]

The real reason the Reps lost is that they put up a Rep. candidate...of sorts...

If they had put up a REAL Democrat, it might have CONFUSED the electorate sufficiently to have given them a decent chance.

Perhaps that's what they'll put up in 2016? I.e. someone that can't POSSIBLY be distinguished from their Democrat rival???

 

[Mudkip]

Perhaps that's what they'll put up in 2016? I.e. someone that can't POSSIBLY be distinguished from their Democrat rival???

That appears to be the plan. Of course, that would preclude that there will be elections.