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.

Several more predictions for the Age of Obama, and then some

I'm sufficiently happy with my first fortune-cookie job in February of '09 to undertake a second, with predictions great and small, to wit:

1. The abolition of the light bulb will be repealed. It always was madness that the useless "Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007" included a provision outlawing the incandescent light bulb as of 2012. They're light bulbs: they're harmless, they cost a matter of pennies each, and they're so towering a monument to ingenuity and improvement that the image of the light bulb is the very symbol for genius inspiration. No American government can possibly be acting as intended by the Founders if it busies itself with the likes of abolishing the light bulb. But the House of Representatives now is to be re-taken by Republicans, and those Republicans will move to repeal the ban before the impossible enforcement of it commences, polls will show something over two-thirds support for repeal, and the ban will necessarily die, if not before Obama leaves office on January 20 of 2013 then very shortly thereafter.


2. This is probably so uncontroversial as to go without saying, but I thought it would only be appropriate to put on the record here that Republicans will hold the House of Representatives and gain the Senate in 2012. The Democrats were only saved in the Senate in 2010 by the fact that the third of the Senate that was up for re-election happened to be Republican seats or sufficiently Democratic seats to have survived a Republican year like 2004, when Republicans held the House, the Senate, and the presidency. The Democrats' margin was made in '06 and '08, which were high-water marks for them, and artificially high, at that, and those seats that took them from minority to majority will be up for grabs in '12 and '14. The next two years will be the last for Democratic control of the Senate for some time.

And the House Democrats affirmed their new status as minority not long after the midterms, in re-electing Nancy Pelosi to lead them, Pelosi being the most reviled figure in national politics and government and one of three authors of the greatest disquiet in American society in at least a generation. Something like re-nominating Carter against Reagan for '84. That lot won't be entrusted again with a House majority anytime soon.

3. Obama will be a one-term president, that much seems assured to me and has all along. His 2008 campaign was a fraud and he is singularly unsuited to the American presidency. The next president of the United States will be whomever is nominated for president by the Republican Party in 2012, but that question is an open one. Already there are maybe a dozen prospects, but I'm prepared now to venture out onto a limb and predict that the next Republican nominee for president and indeed the next president of the United States will be one Rick Perry of Texas.

Yes, my forecast two years ago was for Mark Sanford of South Carolina, but that ought not be held against me: Sanford might even have been the prohibitive favorite today if he hadn't got himself ruined by taking off for Argentina one fine day in 2009 to take up with an Argie gal he liked better than his wife back in SC, which Charles Krauthammer diagnosed as subconscious self-sabotage, in his capacity as a former psychiatrist.

So barring another unscheduled Argentine vacation, Rick Perry it is. Perry is now the longest-serving governor in the second-largest state in the Union. That he is a governor at all is a boon, but he is a particularly successful one. He has kept a balanced budget in a juggernaut state with no state income tax, and between August of '09 and August '10, "half of all the net new jobs created in the United States...were created in Texas," so says the National Review. Perry is solidly conservative and forcefully anti-Obama. He's sufficiently old without his seniority being anything approaching a liability, and he looks the part of president of the United States, for whatever that's worth, and it's not nothing. He's a Methodist, which I count among the "presidential denominations", though after Obama I suspect even a Mormon president would be a relief to the nation. And Rick Perry is a former airman, a Vietnam-era veteran of the United States Air Force. There's a presidential profile for 2012 if I've ever seen one.

Perry is not often counted among the prospective Republican candidates for president, but then John McCain was running third and fourth in the Republican primary polls in October of '07 when I reckoned him for the 2008 Republican nominee, and anyway at this point Perry is arguably better off in the shadows. The nation isn't ready for another presidential race just yet; no need of making everyone sick at the sight of you before it's even time for declarations of candidacy and fundraisers and debates and interviews.

4. The next Republican president, with his Republican Congress, will re-institute America's manned space program. Obama cancelled America's manned space program for the first time since there's been such a thing as manned space flight, not by presiding over the end of the 1970s-vintage shuttle program, which is in fact overdue for retirement and was scheduled to be retired, anyway, but by cancelling the replacement for the shuttle, which was called Constellation.

Constellation was inaugurated under the Bush Administration, and that may be the first clue as to why Obama ordered it cancelled. But the bigger reason seems plain enough to me, which is that Obama has an inveterate hostility to American greatness and to all those things that make for national greatness, including especially domination in rocketry which Obama and the Left like to fret will lead to a "weaponization of space", as if space isn't "weaponized" by military satellites and ballistic missiles already, and as if an American capitulation in space would make space any less "weaponized" by the Chinese and Russians.

Obama cancelled Constellation and with it America's manned space program for the same reason that Neil Armstrong came out of his seclusion along with two other Apollo commanders to oppose that cancellation, pleading that it would put America on "a long downhill slide to mediocrity." If you're the sort of person who takes it as read that America is the problem in the world, that it's a fundamentally wicked and stupid and greedy and abusive nation -- and Obama's personal history gives us every reason to believe that he is precisely that kind of person -- then "a long downhill slide to mediocrity" is the most politically-viable way of neutering and diminishing America, to where it is left to take orders from the more "enlightened" in the world, and no longer has it so good or has any capacity for venturing out into the world in the defense and promotion of its interests and values.

But Obama's red herring that America simply can no longer afford Constellation is an absurdity. At this point Constellation would be costing the United States something over $3 billion a year; Obama's worse-than-useless stimulus ended up at $862 billion, and with about 40 percent of that still unspent, Obama was calling for $266 billion more. Obama never came down against anything because it cost too much; he's against Constellation because he's against an American manned space program. For crying out loud, Obama put $2.5 billion over five years into NASA for the study of "global warming". Besides which, the American taxpayer has invested $9 billion in the program already, and the cancellation itself is supposed to cost $2.5 billion.

When the shuttle program expires and there is no Constellation program to replace it, America will have no heavy capacity for making it out of earth's atmosphere, and will be dependent on Russia for its space business, at $50 million per astronaut just to get to its International Space Station and back. There's $3 billion in the United States budget for a proper space program like America has had since there's been any such thing, and what America cannot afford is to cede space to the Chinese and Russians.

5. Obama-care will not stand. Michael Barone, who is as sober as he is encyclopedic, has called Obama-care the most unpopular major national legislation to be passed since the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and that led in part to the Civil War. It's a plain bad bill, for a start. Megan McArdle, who is an economist and by no means a Republican partisan, has concluded that Obama-care is "unstable, politically and practically." Quite. When over a hundred companies and institutions need exempting from a national law as just the first phases come into effect, then what you've got hold of is a bad law.

And Obama-care is the only social program ever to be enacted against the will of the people and with not a solitary vote from the minority opposition. Indeed, some 34 Democrats voted against the thing in the House. There was a consensus on Obama-care, both in the nation at large and in Congress, and it was that the bill ought not be passed. In the event, the final bill had to be passed by parliamentary manoeuver to circumvent the 60-percent threshold in the Senate.

The states are about to go into revolt against the mandates in Obama-care. In these midterm elections just past, Democrats were turned out of the state legislatures in what may be the largest-ever turnover at the state level since the founding of the Republic, with something like 680 seats switching from Democrat to Republican, and those Republican legislatures will become little battlefields in the war against Obama-care. And Obama-care may well be holed below the waterline by the Supreme Court if it strikes down as unconstitutional the "individual mandate" compelling the American people to buy health insurance -- and not some bare-bones health insurance, approximate to liability insurance for cars, but the comprehensive kind, as determined by the Health and Human Services Director and enforced by the IRS. Oh, yes: Obama-care will not stand.