The most charitable way of explaining
the election results of 2012 is that Americans voted for the status quo – for
the incumbent President and for a divided Congress. They must enjoy
gridlock, partisanship, incompetence, economic stagnation and avoidance of
responsibility. And fewer people voted. As I write, with almost all the votes
counted, President Obama has won fewer votes than John McCain won in 2008,
and more than ten million off his own 2008 total.
But as we awake from the nightmare, it
is important to eschew the facile explanations for the Romney defeat that
will prevail among the chattering classes. Romney did not lose because of
the effects of Hurricane Sandy that devastated this area, nor did he lose
because he ran a poor campaign, nor did he lose because the
Republicans could have chosen better candidates, nor did he lose because
Obama benefited from a slight uptick in the economy due to the business
cycle.
Romney lost because he didn’t get
enough votes to win.
That might seem obvious, but not for
the obvious reasons. Romney lost because the
conservative virtues – the traditional American virtues – of liberty, hard
work, free enterprise, private initiative and aspirations to moral greatness
– no longer inspire or animate a majority of the electorate. The
notion of the “Reagan Democrat” is one cliché that should be permanently
retired.
Ronald Reagan himself could not win an
election in today’s America.
The simplest reason why Romney lost was because it is impossible to compete
against free stuff. Every businessman knows this; that is why the
“loss leader” or the giveaway is such a powerful marketing tool. Obama’s
America is one in which free stuff is given away: the adults among the 47,000,000
on food stamps clearly recognized for whom they should vote, and so they
did, by the tens of millions; those who – courtesy of Obama – receive two
full years of unemployment benefits (which, of course, both
disincentivizes looking for work and also motivates people to work off the
books while collecting their windfall) surely know for whom to vote; so too
those who anticipate “free” health care, who expect the government
to pay their mortgages, who look for the government to give them jobs.
The lure of free stuff is irresistible.
Imagine two restaurants side by side.
One sells its customers fine cuisine at a reasonable price, and the other
offers a free buffet, all-you-can-eat as long as supplies last. Few –
including me – could resist the attraction of the free food. Now imagine that
the second restaurant stays in business because the first restaurant is
forced to provide it with the food for the free buffet, and we have the
current economy, until, at least, the first restaurant decides to go out of
business. (Then, the government takes over the provision of free food to its
patrons.)
The defining moment of the whole
campaign was the revelation (by the amoral Obama team) of the secretly-recorded
video in which Romney acknowledged the difficulty of winning an election in
which “47% of the people” start off against him because they pay no taxes and
just receive money – “free stuff” – from the government. Almost half of the population has no skin in the game
– they don’t care about high taxes, promoting business, or creating jobs, nor
do they care that the money for their free stuff is being borrowed from their
children and from the Chinese. They just want the free stuff that
comes their way at someone else’s expense. In the end, that 47% leaves very
little margin for error for any Republican, and does not bode well for the
future.
It is impossible to imagine a
conservative candidate winning against such overwhelming odds. People do vote
their pocketbooks. In essence, the people vote for a Congress who will not
raise their taxes, and for a President who will give them free stuff, never
mind who has to pay for it.
That engenders the second reason why
Romney lost: the inescapable conclusion that the electorate is dumb –
ignorant, and uninformed. Indeed, it does not pay to be an informed
voter, because most other voters – the clear majority – are unintelligent and
easily swayed by emotion and raw populism. That is the indelicate way of
saying that too many people vote with their hearts and not their heads. That
is why Obama did not have to produce a second term agenda, or even defend his
first-term record. He needed only to portray Mitt Romney as a rapacious
capitalist who throws elderly women over a cliff, when he is not just
snatching away their cancer medication, while starving the poor and cutting
taxes for the rich. Obama could get away with saying that “Romney wants
the rich to play by a different set of rules” – without ever defining what
those different rules were; with saying that the “rich should pay their fair
share” – without ever defining what a “fair share” is; with saying that
Romney wants the poor, elderly and sick to “fend for themselves” – without
even acknowledging that all these government programs are going bankrupt, their
current insolvency only papered over by deficit spending. Obama could get
away with it because he knew he was talking to dunces waving signs and
squealing at any sight of him.
During his 1956 presidential campaign,
a woman called out to Adlai Stevenson: “Senator, you have the vote of every
thinking person!” Stevenson called back: “That’s not enough, madam, we need a
majority!” Truer words were never spoken.
Similarly, Obama (or his surrogates)
could hint to blacks that a Romney victory would lead them back into chains
and proclaim to women that their abortions and birth control would be taken
away. He could appeal to Hispanics that Romney would have them all arrested
and shipped to Mexico (even if they came from Cuba or Honduras), and
unabashedly state that he will not enforce the current immigration laws. He
could espouse the furtherance of the incestuous relationship between
governments and unions – in which politicians ply the unions with public
money, in exchange for which the unions provide the politicians with votes,
in exchange for which the politicians provide more money and the unions
provide more votes, etc., even though the money is gone. He could do and say
all these things because he knew his voters were dolts.
One might reasonably
object that not every Obama supporter could be unintelligent. But they must
then rationally explain how the Obama agenda can be paid for, aside from
racking up multi-trillion dollar deficits. “Taxing the rich” does not yield
even 10% of what is required – so what is the answer, i.e., an intelligent
answer?
Obama also knows that the
electorate has changed – that whites will soon be a minority in America
(they’re already a minority in California) and that the new immigrants to the
US are primarily from the Third World and do not share the traditional
American values that attracted immigrants in the 19th and 20th
centuries. It is a different world, and a different America. Obama is part of
that different America, knows it, and knows how to tap into it. That is why
he won.
Obama also proved again that negative
advertising works, invective sells, and harsh personal attacks succeed. That
Romney never engaged in such diatribes points to his essential goodness as a
person; his “negative ads” were simple facts, never personal abuse – facts
about high unemployment, lower take-home pay, a loss of American power and
prestige abroad, a lack of leadership, etc. As a politician, though, Romney
failed because he did not embrace the devil’s bargain of making unsustainable
promises, and by talking as the adult and not the adolescent. Obama has spent
the last six years campaigning; even his governance has been focused on
payoffs to his favored interest groups. The permanent campaign also won
again, to the detriment of American life.
It turned out that it was not possible
for Romney and Ryan – people of substance, depth and ideas – to compete with
the shallow populism and platitudes of their opponents. Obama mastered the politics of envy – of class warfare –
never reaching out to Americans as such but to individual groups, and
cobbling together a winning majority from these minority groups. Conservative
ideas failed to take root and states that seemed winnable, and amenable to
traditional American values, have simply disappeared from the map. If an
Obama could not be defeated – with his record and his vision of America, in
which free stuff seduces voters – it is hard to envision any change in the
future. The road to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to a European-socialist
economy – those very economies that are collapsing today in Europe – is
paved.
A second cliché that should be retired
is that America is a center-right country. It
clearly is not. It is a divided country with
peculiar voting patterns, and an appetite for free stuff. Studies will
invariably show that Republicans in Congress received more total votes than
Democrats in Congress, but that means little. The House of Representatives is
not truly representative of the country. That people would vote for a
Republican Congressmen or Senator and then Obama for President would tend to
reinforce point two above: the empty-headedness of the electorate.
Americans revile Congress but love their individual Congressmen. Go figure.
The mass media’s complicity in
Obama’s re-election cannot be denied. One example suffices. In 2004, CBS News
forged a letter in order to imply that President Bush did not fulfill his Air
National Guard service during the Vietnam War, all to impugn Bush and impair
his re-election prospects. In 2012, President Obama insisted – famously –
during the second debate that he had stated all along that the Arab attack on
the US Consulate in Benghazi was “terror” (a lie that Romney fumbled and
failed to exploit). Yet, CBS News sat on a tape of an interview with Obama in
which Obama specifically avoided and rejected the claim of terrorism – on the
day after the attack – clinging to the canard about the video. (This snippet of a “60 Minutes” interview was not revealed - until two
days ago!) In effect, CBS News fabricated
evidence in order to harm a Republican president, and suppressed evidence in
order to help a Democratic president. Simply
shameful, as was the media’s disregard of any scandal or story that could
have jeopardized the Obama re-election.
One of the more irritating aspects of
this campaign was its limited focus, odd in light of the billions of dollars
spent. Only a few states were contested, a strategy that Romney adopted, and
that clearly failed. The Democrat begins any race with a substantial
advantage. The liberal states – like the bankrupt California and Illinois –
and other states with large concentrations of minority voters as well as an
extensive welfare apparatus, like New York, New Jersey and others – give any
Democratic candidate an almost insurmountable edge in electoral votes. In
New Jersey, for example, it literally does not pay for a conservative to
vote. It is not worth the fuel expended driving to the polls. As some
economists have pointed generally, and it resonates here even more, the odds
are greater that a voter will be killed in a traffic accident on his way to
the polls than that his vote will make a difference in the election. It is an
irrational act. That most states are uncompetitive means that people are not
amenable to new ideas, or new thinking, or even having an open mind. If that
does not change, and it is hard to see how it can change, then the die is
cast. America is not what it was, and will never be again.
For Jews, mostly assimilated anyway
and staunch Democrats, the results demonstrate again that liberalism is their
Torah. Almost 70% voted for a president widely perceived by Israelis and
most committed Jews as hostile to Israel. They voted to secure Obama’s
future at America’s expense and at Israel’s expense – in effect, preferring
Obama to Netanyahu by a wide margin. A dangerous time is ahead. Under present
circumstances, it is inconceivable that the US will take any aggressive
action against Iran and will more likely thwart any Israeli initiative. That Obama’s top aide Valerie Jarrett (i.e., Iranian-born
Valerie Jarrett) spent last week in Teheran is not a good sign. The
US will preach the importance of negotiations up until the production of the
first Iranian nuclear weapon – and then state that the world must learn to
live with this new reality. As Obama has
committed himself to abolishing America’s nuclear arsenal, it is more likely
that that unfortunate circumstance will occur than that he will succeed in
obstructing Iran’s plans.
Obama’s victory could weaken
Netanyahu’s re-election prospects, because Israelis live with an unreasonable
– and somewhat pathetic – fear of American opinion and realize that Obama
despises Netanyahu. A Likud defeat – or a diminution of its margin of victory
– is more probable now than yesterday. That would not be the worst thing.
Netanyahu, in fact, has never distinguished himself by having a strong
political or moral backbone, and would be the first to cave to the American
pressure to surrender more territory to the enemy and acquiesce to a second
(or third, if you count Jordan) Palestinian state. A new US Secretary of
State named John Kerry, for example would not augur well. Netanyahu
remains the best of markedly poor alternatives. Thus, the likeliest
outcome of the upcoming Israeli elections is a center-left government that
will force itself to make more concessions and weaken Israel – an Oslo III.
. The most powerful
empires in history all crumbled – from the Greeks and the Romans to the
British and the Soviets. None of the collapses were easily foreseen, and yet
they were predictable in retrospect.
The American empire began to decline in
2007, and the deterioration has been exacerbated in the last five years. This
election only hastens that decline. Society is
permeated with sloth, greed, envy and materialistic excess. It has lost its
moorings and its moral foundations. The takers outnumber the givers,
and that will only increase in years to come. Across the world, America under
Bush was feared but not respected. Under Obama, America is neither feared
nor respected. Radical Islam has had a banner four years under Obama, and
its prospects for future growth look excellent. The “Occupy” riots across
this country in the last two years were mere dress rehearsals for what lies
ahead – years of unrest sparked by the increasing discontent of the
unsuccessful who want to seize the fruits and the bounty of the successful,
and do not appreciate the slow pace of redistribution.
If this election proves one thing, it
is that the Old America is gone. And, sad for the world, it is not coming
back.
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Comment from Erasmus of America. With the churches refusing
to teach now serious moral values to the American people and with the
Christians meekly surrendering America to the Antichrist elements without
serious opposition, this disaster above has just occurred to America because of
moral collapse in America caused by a Christianity that refuses to stand up for
Christ in America today. And with the churches so afraid to publicize stunning
Miracles of God letting "politically correct" be their religion
instead of Christ and Christianity, they have lost the basic foundation to
steer the direction of our national future by losing the youth of America to
paganism taught by our public school system of America. It is time to fight and
restore America from pagan and Antichrist America to Christian America once
more. As I don't see other strong Christian leaders standing up yet for victory
for Christianity in America, I must be the only strong Christian leader
standing for victory of Christianity in America today. Therefore, what
alternative do real Christians have than to back me now unless they just want
to surrender America to Satan and Antichrist leadership? I stand for both the
united interests of Catholic and Protestant Christianity so no reason for any
to be afraid to back me now due to partisan fears for their denomination. Yours
For God and Country, Erasmus of America (pen name. Read my 80 or so national
reports posted for around the last 7 months with Nesara News by posting Erasmus
of America in their search box at the top left side of their website. Send
emails to fastboomamericaneconomy@gmail.com
and say "Add To List" for national reports we will issue as we rally
Christianity to win America back to God! Look in Nesara News search box at Omni
Law which I wrote and will restore Christianity to the leadership of America
once more. And as always, financial support welcome for passage of the Omni Law.
Make out financial support to NIFI at NIFI, P.O. Box 1465, Seneca, SC 29679 and
you can write as memo "For Omni Law Drive." Remember as the New
Testament teaches, he that backs a servant or prophet of the Lord shares in the
reward of that servant or prophet with the Lord!)
4 comments:
Well all those status quo voters just got their foodstamps cut. I guess Obama had to pay for the phones he gave to them. Lol
ROMNEY LOST BECAUSE OF MASS VOTE FRAUD, PURE AND SIMPLE!!!
Catholicism and Biblical Protestantism cannot unite anymore today than 500 years ago. Only in apostasy and compromise of Divine, Biblical truth can such a thing appear to occur.
Real Christians understand that politics, of any kind, will not fix this world. Jesus said so. Jesus was urged, when here, to take up politics and political movements...and He point-blank refused. Politics does not fix the fallen human heart.
Jesus has already described to us, very clearly, how His conflict with Satan will come to its conclusion in this world. Real Christians need to go back to their Bibles and re-learn this, quickly. The time is at hand.
So Erasmus. You stated last week that you were going to get your money from the bad guys last Friday or Saturday. Haven't heard a word from you. What happened? Chicken out?
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