The Complete Guide to the 2012 Presidential Election, According to Me

(Updated, Dec 5)

I'm afraid I'm unrepentant in my prophesies that Barack Obama was to be a one-term president: I'm not sure that was so very far off considering that the Gallup and Rasmussen polls both had Obama at 48 percent on election eve, with Romney favored albeit by just a point, considering that the difference in the four deciding swing states came to not much more than 400,000 votes combined, considering that Obama shed something like four million votes off his '08 numbers, considering that Obama's margin in the popular vote was hacked from over 7 percent in '08 to something over 3 percent in '12, considering that whites who are after all the great majority voted against Obama by all of 20 points, 59-39 percent, and considering that independents came down against Obama by five points. But Democrats outnumbered Republicans by six points, and that decided it.

Romney's surplus independents might well have lifted him over that Democrat advantage except that they were shorn away in the last days of the campaign by Obama's Superstorm Sandy photo-op, that storm becoming a humanitarian and economic crisis only after Obama had taken his victory lap and jetted off again to his campaign rallies, with such statesmanlike displays as urging his followers to vote for "revenge". Had he belonged to the unapproved party, Sandy would've been treated by the press and popular culture as Obama's Katrina, but because he's a Democrat, a leftist, and an Obama, he showed up for the first inning of a nine-inning ballgame and was acclaimed World Series champion, just in time for the vote.

Obama has become one of two presidents in all American history to win a second term with a narrowed margin in the popular vote and a shrunken share of the electoral vote. The other one to do it also was a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, who won a second term in 1916 on keeping America out of the war, then proceeded promptly to take America all the way into it, conscription and Sedition Act and all. (In case you're curious, things went badly for Wilson's Democrat Party after 1916: they were reduced in the 1918 midterms from 53 seats to 47 in the Senate, and from 214 to 192 in the House, and they were shut out of the presidency 'til 1932.)

Barack Obama won his re-election with very many fewer votes than four years prior and very much shrunken margins, flopping over the finish line about 400,000 votes ahead of Romney in the four kingmaker states put together, with independents affirmatively voting to terminate his presidency, and on the strength of an "anti" campaign, "killing Romney" as per the explicit Obama strategy from the start, as opposed to presenting a program for the next four years. But now the course for those next four years is set, to wit:

Foreign affairs and war.

Afghanistan is a lost war and Obama has lost it, after throwing three times more dead American bodies at it in four years than Bush did in seven. The trouble with Obama's surge was that it wasn't a surge; it was something closer to the pre-surge policy in Iraq. And now Obama will withdraw from Afghanistan in what he prefers to conceive of as "ending the war", only, there is no such neutral alternative in war. Wars are won or lost, and very occasionally stalemated, but to withdraw from the field without achieving your object, and abandon it to the enemy, is what is called "losing a war". And Obama will be the president who lost the Afghan War; indeed, he's that already, but now that fact will be made plain.

Al Qaeda is running amok across the greater Middle East including especially Libya, and when Obama thumps his chest about "decimating" al Qaeda, I believe he is deluding himself or lying, because as commander-in-chief he has to see the reports of al Qaeda ascendancy, including in precincts that were until lately free of Islamist militancy. Al Qaeda affiliates have now killed an American ambassador and three other Americans, and sacked an American consulate, in what is arguably al Qaeda's greatest coup against the United States since the 9/11 attacks of '01. Obama failed utterly to act before that attack to defend against it, despite that the consulate in question had been attacked twice in the months before and that every man and his dog on the ground were pleading for security. Come to that, a good part of what little security they did have was withdrawn not long before the final assault. Obama then failed also to intervene in the seven-hour assault with the ready forces he had at his command. And finally Obama tried to make out that this al Qaeda-affiliated terror attack was some sort of movie review that got carried away, to borrow from Mark Steyn. There is real trouble, and real incapacity on the part of Obama to attend to it or even to recognize it.

Iran is four years closer to going nuclear than when Obama ascended the presidency. A nuclear Iran would be the Armageddon nightmare that's had people awake nights since the advent of the bomb in 1945, and Obama is very much more against action to forestall Iran's going nuclear than he is against an Iranian bomb.

Economics and finances.

The markets are in freefall as I write this. The Dow Jones gave up 313 points or 2.4 percent in the wake of the vote, for its worst crash of the year. And that's the second-worst selloff yet registered on the Dow following a presidential election, second only to the bloodbath of 486 points and over 5 percent, on the day after Obama's first election in '08. So there's progress.

The national debt under Obama's own optimistic FY2013 budget proposal would go past $20 trillion in four scant years, i.e. 2016, as Obama retires from the presidency, meaning that Obama would have doubled the debt single-handed, adding as much debt in one presidency as was added in the other 43 combined.

And about how much longer before America runs up against the credit wall? There's not capital enough in the world to finance this kind of debt, and the Federal Reserve on Obama's watch is presently into its third round of quantitative easing, i.e., printing American dollars to soak up some part of this uncoverable debt, which has the effect of debasing the dollar and making everything that much more expensive. Obama's Plans A, B, and C for resolving the debt crisis are to raise taxes on the rich, despite that the revenue from his proposed tax hikes would come to a drop in the bucket, and the top 10 percent of federal income tax filers have been carrying 71 percent of the federal income tax burden for some time already, at the Bush rates.

When the economists and business analysts have observed in this Age of Obama that "capital is sitting on the sidelines", what they've been getting at is that real-economy investment has been waiting and watching for a change in direction. The election has determined there'll be no such change in direction for four years more, and so that capital can only be expected to stay put or to flee for jurisdictions where the leadership doesn't treat businessmen as sort-of enemies of the state. There is no good reason to imagine that the economy in the next four years will be appreciably different from the last four years. Come to that, full implementation of Obama's greatest onslaughts against business, Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, the financial regulatory leviathan, was deferred 'til after the election, as if to prove beyond all doubt that they'd be economically crushing and politically toxic, so there's good cause to suspect the Obama economy has not found its bottom even yet.

Recessional remarks.

Dick Morris had by my lights the best line of the campaign. (Yes, I know Morris has come out of this badly inasmuch as he was projecting a world-beating Romney landslide, though to be fair he was going on historic averages of turnout among blacks, Hispanics, and young people, which was not an indefensible presupposition. In any event, Morris had a good line.) He said, Obama likes to tell about all the troubles he inherited as president; just imagine how he'll complain if he wins a second term and inherits this mess. 

I talked a long while a couple months ago with an old Marine, who said something I mostly set aside 'til election night, namely that if Obama were to be re-elected, the patience of the people would run out. And along those lines, Bill O'Reilly is no hack like me, and unlike me he never passes up an opportunity to extend Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt, so when he comes down against Obama with great force of conviction, I take notice, and I was frankly shocked to hear O'Reilly's pronouncement on Obama and his Democrat Party on the night after the vote. He said, if Obama hasn't got the economy rolling again in two years, it's the end for the Democrats, not for two years but for good. Even I wouldn't be quite so categorical as that -- I'd prefer "for a generation" -- but I thought on it, and O'Reilly is hitting on something there. This unending sort-of depression that we've got mucked down in has carried on for about half a decade now; Obama was elected to fix it, and instead he turned a recession into the next thing to a depression. If the desolate moonscape of this economy does not bloom with new growth, if our lives are kept on hold for not half a decade but nearly a decade as in the Great Depression, then the people and history will never forgive Obama.

Now to the usual refrain that this is "the demise of the Republican Party!" which we get every year the Democrats can claim a victory, from the press about as much as from Democrats: if ever there was a case to be made for that proposition it was in '08, when the Rs lost the presidency by half a dozen points and were reduced from minorities to smaller minorities in both houses of Congress, but a year later they were winning again even in statewide races in New Jersey and Massachusetts, and a year after that they had won arguably the greatest turnover in the century and a half of the Grand Old Party, taking into account the red wave in the statehouses and governorships. There really is no reason in 2012 to see some smouldering hole where the Republican Party used to be: Republicans held their big majority in the House, filled out their governorships to a nice round 30 of 50, and came within 400,000 votes in the four deciding swing states to knocking off an incumbent president.

And another thing. Since I was a boy, I've seen three two-term presidents, and I've observed in these presidential second terms a couple common traits: nothing much gets done, with the prospect for accomplishment declining as the term progresses; scandals, sometimes from the first term, fester and pop; and that second term flies by. In a year and a half, we'll be into the midterms campaign, and it won't be long after the vote in November 2014 that things will turn inexorably to the presidential primaries, on both sides, with the president becoming in his final year a kind of afterthought, pushed aside first by the primaries and then by the general election. By maybe the spring of 2015, candidacies will be declared and so on, and the sitting, lame-duck president will begin to fade from our thinking. A second-term president gets closer to three years than four, effectively, and indeed sometimes he doesn't get even that much. It'll go faster than you know.

Betting on form for November 6

Never mind the polls and unemployment rates and even Harold Macmillan's "events, dear boy, events". If Barack Obama were to win re-election come November 6, he'd be only the second Democrat president to be elected to more terms than one since Franklin Roosevelt, back when Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters were tearing up the Billboard charts with "Is You Is or Is You Ain't (Ma' Baby)".

Bill Clinton was of course elected to two terms, though it has to be said that he was the beneficiary in his first election especially of an unusually strong third-party candidacy in Ross Perot. Perot split the anti-Clinton vote in 1992 and '96 such that Clinton could pass through to the White House with 43 percent and 49 percent of the popular vote. Obama has no third-party spoiler on Perot's order of magnitude to save him, and in any event Barack Obama is no Bill Clinton, having no truck with Clinton's Third Way, more pro-business, incremental leftism which as an ideology has turned out to be nothing much more than a curiosity of the 1990s.

Jimmy Carter's offer for re-election in 1980 went sufficiently badly that he had conceded to Ronald Reagan before the polling stations on the West Coast were closed.

Lyndon Johnson served out the last year of John Kennedy's term and proceeded handily to win a term of his own in '64, but he was eligible per the 22nd Amendment for re-election and was the presumptive Democratic nominee until Eugene McCarthy finished seven points behind the sitting president in the New Hampshire primary of March 1968. By the end of the month, Johnson had uttered maybe his most famous remark, that "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president." The Democratic National Convention that summer was a madhouse, the party was radicalized, and Democrats were banished from the presidency for seven of the next ten elections.

John Kennedy was of course assassinated about three years into his only term, so his case can only be left out of consideration here. Unfair though that may be, it just can't be said with certainty that he'd have won re-election, and neither that he'd have lost, so Kennedy is counted out for these purposes.

Which leaves the case of Harry Truman. Truman filled out all but a few months of Franklin Roosevelt's last term and won a term of his own in 1948, but he'd been exempted from the 22nd Amendment and was thus eligible for another kick at the can in '52. He wrote that he'd no intention of offering for re-election, but his name was on the ballot in the New Hampshire primary that March when Estes Kefauver won 55 percent to Truman's 44, and it was only after the Kefauver upset that Truman announced he'd be standing down. The Democrats chose Adlai Stevenson later that year and again four years after that, as their nominee to lose to Dwight Eisenhower.

On the Republican side over this same period were George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, and Dwight Eisenhower. Four of those six were elected to two terms, though Nixon didn't finish his second. Ford assumed the presidency to fill out that second Nixon term and a couple years later gave way to the Carter interregnum, but Ford doesn't exactly fit in this scheme on account of he wasn't elected in the first place. And so one is left with Bush the Elder as the only Republican president since Herbert Hoover in 1932 to be elected and not re-elected, and obviously he wasn't helped by the same 19-percent Perot phenomenon that smoothed the way for Clinton.

And the period from Hoover back to the advent of the Republican Party in the middle-19th Century is bleaker still for Democrats: James Buchanan, Grover Cleveland, and Woodrow Wilson constitute the totality of elected Democrat presidents in the three-quarters of a century spanning 1856 and 1932. There's a reason they call Republicans the Grand Old Party.

Come to that, the grand total of Democrat presidents to be elected to more terms than one, in the century and a half since the founding of the Republican Party, is four. And that counts Cleveland whose two terms were non-consecutive. Republicans have re-elected presidents as many times in just the last sixty years.

It may justly be said that none of this history and statistics is dispositive, but there is such a thing as betting on form.

The mystical awfulness of Troll 2

The story goes wrong very early on, when it’s explained that the Waits family is moving from the suburbs to the country community of Nilbog for a month as part of some rural-urban exchange program. Now, anyone who’s tried his hand at fiction will surely forgive a little shoehorning. Certain things must happen to advance the plot, certain characters must be in certain places at certain times and so on, and a little coincidence or implausibility is eminently forgivable when it’s in aid of a plot point. The trouble with this rural-urban exchange explanation is that it’s so needlessly implausible. We all know there is no such thing in America as a rural-urban exchange program, in which whole families uproot and displace themselves and switch homes with some other family for the sake, presumably, of mixing the rural and urban populations, like something out of the imagination of some mad mid-20th Century Communist central planner.

What’s worse is that there’s a compelling explanation for the move to the country that’s screaming itself hoarse and which could have tied up two other dangling ends at the same time. Apart from this business of the move, we are left with the still bigger questions of why does the ghost of Grandpa visit the boy to warn him about this place called Nilbog and the goblins there, and why do these goblins consume humans? Could the goblins not eat animals like the rest of us, or that is to say, could they not convert animals to the vegetarian goop that they consume as they do with humans? It’s explained at the outset that goblins “need no reason” for what they do, that they eat people out of sheerest evil, but that’s not terribly interesting. Come to that, why are the goblins so hell-bent on eating the Waitses and what odds does it make to them which humans they eat?

So why, oh, why did it not occur to the filmmakers that they had three elements which made no sense at all, but which could be explained in one swoop, all of them together, and in a way that would make the story very much more compelling? The family goes to the country because their recently-deceased patriarch owned property there; the ghost of Grandpa visits the boy from beyond the grave because he has unfinished business with the goblins of his old Nilbog homestead; and the goblins don’t eat people for its own sake but to vanquish their mortal enemies. Maybe the goblins had been driven out of Nilbog long ago but regrouped and reclaimed the place after a long struggle, and maybe the Grandpa character was the last of the goblin-fighters and finally had to abandon the property at Nilbog to save himself, and now the Nilboggian goblins want revenge against their old nemesis, in consuming his surviving family. There, in one motion, the story would have made sense of the senseless and given some purpose to the thing to boot. Not to say it wouldn’t be fairly silly still, but it would at least not be both silly and nonsensical.

To the extent Troll 2 crosses from horror into something resembling science fiction, Jules Verne it ain’t. In order that these vegetarian goblins can at the same time be cannibals, they must first feed the people they mean to eat some elixir which converts them into a vegetarian green goop. Now I know they’re doing great things these days in trying to make soybeans taste like hamburgers, but that’s the point: because soybeans are vegetables, anything that is made from them is necessarily vegetable; if a story is asking us to suspend our disbelief far enough to accept that humans can be converted to vegetable matter, it’ll have to give us some compelling explanation -- science or sorcery, but something big and something particular -- or else the whole business will come off as a joke. And it does. And to this day the Italian fellow who directed Troll 2 is painfully plain that it was not for laughs, and indeed he’s affronted that folks are laughing where he didn’t intend for them to.

The special effects are dreadful, but that’s not necessarily a strike against Troll 2, or anyway it’s not so much a strike against it in this 21st Century. A lot of us are sick to death by now of CGI and have a newfound appreciation for “real” faking. CGI FX are too often too perfect and too canned and too busy to move a lot of us viewing public, and so a puppet arm rigged with fake goblin blood getting the chop with an actual axe is really rather quaint and honest to us today. There’s a lot to be said for cheap and cheerful.

The dialogue comes off by times like it was translated from the German, and that’s not far off: the screenwriter is in fact Italian and not the most expert at the American vernacular.

The acting is said to be bad, but I’m not so sure there was anything in the way of acting in Troll 2 that couldn’t have been salvaged by the right material and direction and editing. Hold a shot for too long and even Remains of the Day could be made to look unnatural and silly. And I defy any great actor to pull off lines and directions like were in that script. Let’s see Anthony Hopkins try and pull off the father role in the most representative scene: Father dumps boy onto bed and bellows, “You can’t pi** on hospitality! I won’t allow it!” whereupon the father goes for his belt and the frightened boy asks what he means to do, with the answer being, “Tighten my belt by one loop so I don’t feel hunger pangs!” The only way to come at material like that and make it work is to play it as a gag, but the director wouldn't hear of it.

I may be prejudiced on this point on account of I incline to what may be called the Roberto Rossellini school, that most anyone can act for the movies if they’re cast in the right parts and if the director handles them and their footage in the right way. They got the chap who plays the proprietor of the general store out of a mental institution, and he did a fine job, despite or maybe because of his being off his nut during shooting. Connie McFarland’s performance as the daughter is held out for special scorn, but I don’t see how her acting was anything worse than what qualified for Saved by the Bell at about that same time -- and Saved by the Bell is an American institution. Robert Ormsby as Grandpa was perfectly competent and absolutely grandfatherly. And I certainly don’t see why the father himself, good old George Hardy, shouldn’t get work as an actor today, provided of course that the roles call for a Southern accent.

Which brings us to the near-mystical question of what it is about this ridiculous Troll 2 that is so fascinating to so many. EPIX, the poor man’s HBO, has run Troll 2 along with its companion documentary Best Worst Movie by Michael Stephenson, who played the boy in the film. As this documentary goes on it becomes plain, slowly but surely and without ever spelling it out, how it was that Troll 2 turned out as it did.

At one point a Troll 2 appreciator in line outside one of the theatrical showings offers that Troll 2 is a movie that aliens might make if they'd been receiving our TV signals and tried to ape what they had seen, without properly understanding any of it. Well, that fellow may have been righter than he knew for: the director is a strange man and an Italian, who only just gets by in English, and the screenwriter happened to be his wife, also Italian and not the most proficient in English. This was an all-American horror picture circa 1990 through the funhouse mirrors of strange Italian filmmakers. That explains it, really, and once you've worked that out then the fascination falls away a bit. Troll 2 is an American movie, and American popular culture for a couple decades up to 1990, as perceived by outsiders who don't have a very firm grasp on anything American.

Which wouldn’t be the first time Italian filmmakers aped an American film genre. I refer of course to the Spaghetti Westerns, which also turned out a bit off and not in a bad way.

Before Alberta puts its tarsands oil on a slow boat to China

Any Canadian wondering how it is that President Obama's job approval average for his third year rated second-from-bottom in the Gallup archives among presidential junior years, need wonder no longer. If a president of the United States cannot bring himself simply to permit a pipeline carrying cheaper, steadier fuel from a friendly neighbour, at no cost to the taxpayer and generating a modest boom to boot in economic activity and jobs, then all that's left is to hang on in there 'til he can be put out of our misery sometime around January 20th of 2013.
　
The average American pulled at random from a Tulsa, Oklahoma Walmart and made president-for-a-day not only would have approved the Keystone XL pipeline project, he'd have wondered why there was any question about it at all. The Keystone XL line is what is called a no-brainer, a win-win, as uncomplicated a proposition as any president can expect to have dumped on his desk. The reader will pardon me if these points have been rehearsed overmuch already, but they bear repeating:

The pipeline would have shifted some part of America's oil importation from the sort of characters who threaten to shut the Strait of Hormuz and precipitate a global energy crisis, half-way around the world, to a sort-of cousin-nation directly over the border. It would have taken the thumb that much off the windpipe, to invoke the old Suez formulation, and given America that much more insurance against a crisis. Besides which, this cousin-nation in question happens to carry on a deal of trade with the United States, so that not all of the exported dollars for that imported oil would have been lost to the American economy. 　

The pipeline would have helped depress the price of oil in America by the increase in supply and availability, and by cutting the transportation overhead. It's Obama policies like declining the pipeline or banning new offshore oil production for seven years -- announced once the November '10 elections were safely past, undoing an opening of the offshore to exploration announced eight months before the vote -- that have helped push the price of a gallon of gas to slightly more than double what Obama "inherited," to borrow his preferred usage. 　

The pipeline would have cost not a thin dime to the taxpayer, being one of those private enterprises which Obama daily damns and menaces and punishes. One almost wonders if that counts as a strike against it to Obama's way of thinking: two years ago Obama put up $2 billion that America didn't have for offshore drilling -- in Brazil -- so demonstrably he's got it in him to support big oil projects, at least where government money is involved and American oil is not.

And then there are the jobs involved in building a pipeline so ambitious as to amount to a transcontinental highway of sorts. In the mind of Barack Obama, unemployment insurance is where the jobs are; not in any great private project to connect Alberta and Texas with the fuel to move and do things. Obama made the point explicit in December: "However many jobs might be generated by a Keystone pipeline, they're going to be a lot fewer than the jobs that are created by extending the payroll tax cut and extending unemployment insurance." There's the Age of Obama in a sentence, if ever I saw it. They ought to make a campaign slogan of it. "Obama - He's for the dole."

The story is of course that Obama's concern was for "health and safety," and something called "the Ogallala aquifer" in Nebraska, and that the three years of State Department study on the project were inadequate, and indeed that the Keystone pipeline now in operation wasn't proof enough of the "healthiness and safety" of the thing. There may even be people in the world who truly believe that was the reasoning. Some of the less credulous types have it that Obama's prohibitionism was a sop to the hard-Left environmentalist interest groups, which is fine as far as it goes, only it lets on that Obama is something apart from the hard-Left himself, when I think the inquiring mind will find that the larger part of Obama's deleterious policymaking is down to his own unworkable, alien, doctrinaire leftism.

At the risk of presuming to offer unsolicited advice to the prime minister and government of Canada, I'd say don't sign any papers on that east-west pipeline to serve China just yet. It happens that there's an election in America in a matter of months, and it happens also that the other side in this election are the sort who could conceivably approve the Keystone XL among their early orders of business.

I decline to say that America makes mistakes, but it does occasionally have accidents, and it had one of those one day in November of 2008. Now, it could conceivably be that America will vote for four more years of this, or anyway that the vote could be split by a serious third-party challenge allowing Obama to slip through to a second term with a plurality, but that very expression, "four more years of this," and the way it sounds to American ears, inclines against it. So before you put your tarsands oil on a slow boat to China, maybe see how that election turns out.