HALF-FULL REPORT 07/13/12

It’s Friday the 13^th, a date that fills many with dread. There’s a cool word for our fear of it – friggatriskaidekaphobia.  Friday the 13^th has been considered a bad luck day for thousands of years, because it combines two ancient superstitions:

*13 is an unlucky number.  In numerology, 12 is the number of completeness.  13 transgresses it.  The Code of Hammurabi (1700 BC) skips the number 13, presumably because of its unluckiness. 

In Norse mythology, 12 gods were having a dinner party in Valhalla when an univited 13^th – the god Loki – crashed the party.  Once there, Loki caused the death of Balder the Beautiful, the god of joy and gladness.

There were 13 Apostles with Matthias replacing Judas who caused Jesus’ Crucifixion, which, you’ll recall, took place on a Friday…

*which is named after a Norse goddess (Frigg or Freya), who early Christians associated with witchcraft.  It is allegedly she who set the size of a witches’ coven at 13.  Friday was execution day in ancient Rome.

Friday the 13^th sure was unlucky for the Knights Templar.  It was on that date in 1307 that King Philip IV of France ordered their arrest. (He owed them a lot of money – what better way to cancel the huge debt than to declare them heretics?  He did the same to the Jews, expelling them from France in 1306.)

The friggatriskaidekaphobists among you may regard it as an ill omen that I’m filling in for Jack Wheeler on the HFR this week, while he skulks around the Iranian border in  Nagorno-Karabagh.  For Zero and the Obamunists, every day this week was Friday the 13^th.

************

You’d think the wheels were falling off our trolley, not theirs, if you listened to the strident criticism of the Romney campaign by prominent conservatives.

His "insular staff and strategy" are "slowly squandering an historic opportunity," said the Wall Street Journal in a savage editorial.  Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol wants Romney "to get off autopilot and actually think about the race he’s running." 

"The morning after the 2012 election (Team Romney) may well find themselves linked forever to the famously hapless 1948 campaign of Tom Dewey," wrote former Reagan political aide Jeff Lord.

Their angst was generated by the news media’s distortion of what Romney aide Eric Fehrnstrom said during an interview on MSNBC, which I discussed in Charlie Brown Conservatives, and by the Supreme Court’s Obamacare decision, which was a buzzkill for many. The angst is unwarranted.

"Give the media enough time, and they will spin straw into gold – for Democrats, naturally," says my favorite psephologist, Jay Cost.

"And so it has been over the last two weeks since the Obamacare ruling was handed down. We have seen media pundits debate whether the ruling hurts Mitt Romney. We have seen them criticize Team Romney for not being johnny-on-the-spot with a reaction to a ruling that virtually nobody expected.

"We have seen them speculate that Team Obama’s Bain attacks are working, despite a dearth of hard evidence and no serious indication from the Romney campaign that they are worth responding to. And on and on it goes."

Last week in the RealClear Politics average of polls, 46.6 per cent approved of the job President Obama is doing; 48.9 percent disapproved.  The key fact liberal journalists try to hide, Jay said, is that no president with a job approval rating below 50 percent has ever been re-elected.

Zero is in worse shape than this indicates, because many polls over-sample Democrats.  But even in the slanted polls, the truth is there if you know what to look for:

*In a Washington Post poll released Tuesday, only 24 percent of respondents were Republicans.  But even in that poll, 54 percent disapproved of the job Obama is doing
on the economy.  In the presidential race, Romney and Zero were tied at 47 percent.  Among independents, Zero trailed Romney by 14 percentage points.

*A Zogby poll for the Washington Times released Monday had Romney leading, 43-42.  A small plurality said they agreed with the Supreme Court’s Obamacare ruling, but the poll found 45 percent of self-identified independents said they are less likely to support the president now after the ruling.  Just 20 percent said the ruling made them more likely to back him.

*A poll by Pulse Opinion Research for The Hill newspaper  released Monday found that 56 percent of respondents think Obama has transformed the country – for the worse.

*Zero is sinking to historic lows among blue collar men, said Ron Brownstein of the National Journal.

*The Dems are bleeding voters in the swing states, according to a Bloomberg News analysis.

*According to Gallup’s tracking poll, only 51 percent of Americans aged 18-29 approve of the job Obama is doing, down from 70 percent in the first week of July, 2009.
 
Elections are about numbers, and right now the president’s are bad, Karl Rove wrote Thursday.  Only 37 percent of white voters approve of the job Zero is doing, Jay Cost found.  That’s much less than what Michael Dukakis and John Kerry got in their losing races.  And, compared to them, Zero isn’t doing so hot among minorities, either.

If the economy improves, so may Obama’s job approval.  But it looks as if it’s headed further south – maybe down Tierra del Fuego way.

Small business confidence fell in June to the lowest level in eight months.  The "perfect storm" of economic calamities that portend a depression  is happening now, says economist Nouriel Roubini. A deteriorating economy means a comfortable Romney win, says the bank BBVA Compass.

Even the polls which oversample Democrats show the race as a dead heat, which, in the second week in July, is a remarkably strong position for a challenger. There’s always a stature gap between the challenger and the incumbent – who is, after all, the president – which usually doesn’t close until after the out party’s nominating convention.  At this point in 1980, Jimmy Carter had a comfortable lead over Ronald Reagan.

A tie now is even worse for Zero than it appears at first glance, because Team Obama and allied SuperPacs have spent $91 million in eight swing states attacking Romney as a rich, out of touch outsourcer of jobs – and barely moved the needle.

The Bain Capital attacks haven’t worked, Ed Morrissey said, because: "even the WaPo/ABC poll shows that half of voters don’t care, and only 24% in a sample with 33% being Democrats think it constitutes a reason to vote against Romney."

************

"There are two things that are important in politics," said Mark Hanna, who is credited with running the first modern presidential campaign (for William McKinley in 1896). "The first is money, and I can’t remember the second." 

Zero agrees.  Romney outraised him substantially in June, and he’s freaking out. "I will be the first president in modern history to be outspent in his re-election campaign," he said in a fund-raising appeal.

He’s lying (so what else is new?).  Team Obama, the DNC and allied SuperPacs have so far raised about $125 million more than has Team Romney, the RNC, and allied SuperPacs.

But it’s possible Romney will have more to spend in October, because Zero is as profligate with his campaign funds as he is with the taxpayers’ money. In May, Team Obama spent $15 million more than it raised.

"The Obama campaign’s high burn rate doesn’t come from large television buys, phone banks or mail programs that could be immediately stopped," Karl Rove wrote in March.  "It appears to result instead from huge fixed costs for a big staff and higher-than-expected fund-raising outlays."

Mitt Romney, good businessman that he is, is husbanding his resources for when it counts most.

************

Democrats usually have a huge advantage over Republicans, because of all the spending by organized labor.  But their advantage will be much smaller this year. 

This is mostly because Zero has browned off so many of his 2008 supporters in the business community –some who raised big bucks for him then are raising big bucks for Romney now – and because of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.  It’s also because:

*Several unions borrowed a lot to spend on Democrats in 2008, and can’t afford to do as much this year.

*Unions spent a ton of money fighting reforms in Wisconsin (unsuccessfully) and Ohio (successfully) and in various broke municipalities (mostly unsuccessfully).  They plan to spend a lot on a ballot initiative in Michigan this year.

*Where reforms have been implemented, they’ve put a crimp in union resources.  So has this Supreme Court decision.

*Labor bosses, like just about everyone else in America, are disappointed by Obama.

It’s nice to have more money than your opponent, but it isn’t essential.  What is essential is to have enough early enough to get your message out.  If you do, (and Romney does) then how you craft your message and whether it resonates is more important than how much you spend advertising it. 

Which is another reason why Zero’s money advantage doesn’t mean so much.  If the dogs won’t eat the dog food, it matters little how much is spent to advertise it.

************

Zero’s troubles don’t make Romney a good candidate, his conservative critics grouse. Mitt needs to hammer Obama on the cost of Obamacare, say the editors of the Wall Street Journal.  He can’t just talk in generalities about how bad the economy is, says Bill Kristol, he has to tell voters what he plans to do to fix it.  And he needs to talk about other issues.

I agree.  But I bet Romney has planned all along to do (just about) all his conservative critics want him to do, closer to the election, when voters pay more attention.  If the Nervous Nellies paid less heed to news media distortions, more to what Team Romney actually is saying and doing, they’d sleep better.

*You think Romney needs to get tough with Zero personally?  OK, watch this ad, which is running now in Ohio and other swing states.

*Romney spoke to the NAACP convention in Houston Wednesday. Unlike several recent GOP candidates, he didn’t pander at all.  Romney got booed when he criticized Obamacare, which the news media emphasized.  But he got a standing ovation at the end, which few reported.  (CNN’s Wolf Blitzer did note that Romney came, but Zero didn’t.)

*When Obama said in an interview broadcast Tuesday that Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez "is not a serious threat," Romney punched back fast and hard.  And when Zero said yesterday his problem is that he failed to tell a good story, Romney smacked him around.

Romney isn’t the perfect candidate.  But he’s the best we’ve had since Reagan; he’s running against an even weaker candidate than Reagan did, in a political environment more favorable to Republicans than it was in 1980. If you want to see what a bad campaign looks like, remember McCain in 2008, or look here.

************

The House voted, 244-185, Wednesday to repeal Obamacare, with five Democrats, two more than last year, joining all the Republicans.  Obamacare is killing Democrats, says Democrat pollster Pat Caddell.  Public support for Obamacare is not likely to increase when people learn it will cost three times as much as Zero advertised, and will cause an awful lot of doctors to quit the practice of medicine.  No wonder liberal journalists want Republicans to stop talking about it.

************

It’s hard to be a bigger hypocrite than Barack Hussein Obama, but Attorney General Eric Holder succeeds.  To get into Holder’s speech to the NAACP denouncing "racist" voter ID laws, journalists had to show photo ID.

Americans approve the contempt citation against Holder, 53-33, according to an ORC poll for CNN.  So, apparently, does comedian Jay Leno.  "It was so hot, Eric Holder was smuggling water pistols," he said.

************

Speaking of hypocrites, Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, D-Fla, chair of the Democratic National Committee was in Boston Monday to demand that Mitt Romney release his tax returns.  But she won’t release hers.  Here’s Debbie Dimwit dancing around the question on a Boston tv station:

Debbie Dimwit has attacked Mitt Romney for having a Swiss bank account.  But she’s invested in Swiss banks and foreign drug companies, her disclosure forms indicate.  House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, and shadow president Valerie Jarrett made megabucks in offshore investments.

************

The House Ethics Committee voted unanimously to investigate the Dem Senate candidate in Nevada. 

To make sure she won’t ever have to live in Nebraska, the wife of Bob Kerrey, the Dem Senate candidate there, has been badmouthing the Cornhusker state. 

To the surprise of many, the GOP Senate candidate in Hawaii has a good chance to win. 

It’s looking good for the GOP in Wisconsin, too.  Dem Senate candidates are running like scalded dogs from Zero’s plan to increase taxes.

************

The scuttlebutt is that Mitt Romney may name his running mate soon, and it could be Condoleeza Rice.  Jack Wheeler and I used to be very high on Condi, but we agree she ended up being a lousy national security adviser, a worse Secretary of State. 

Condi is a remarkable woman, but I wouldn’t hire her to organize a two car funeral.  That said, she might be a good veep, because the vice president has no management responsibilities.  She’d probably be a good candidate, because she speaks well and is easy on the eyes; her skin pigmentation complicates the Dems’ "Republicans are racists" meme, and her favorables/unfavorables are an eye-popping 66-24.

************

Dems say Obama is criticized only because he is African-American.  But some of Zero’s most enthusiastic black supporters in 2008 are saying now that he isn’t all that black.

************

There is an Obama conservatives can love, says my favorite Reagan historian. 

************

A German study of tree ring data indicates the world has been cooling for 2,000 years, which throws a bucket of cold water on hysterical claims that this summer’s heat wave was caused by global warming.

************

Talk about heart-warming news: Trust in television news has fallen to an all time low.  Andrea Mitchell is much of the reason why.  Here’s John Sununu laughing at her. 

   
************

There’s more, but I’ve run out of space.  Let me conclude by saying that this week, the glass is way more than half full.  I plan to fill mine with Anchor Steam from the new beer bar in the local supermarket (in another sign of progress, Pennsylvania has relaxed its blue laws, making this possible). 

If the mullahs don’t get him, Jack should be back at his post next week