(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.
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.
