Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

SIGN COMPARING OBAMA AND ROMNEY

Photographed at the intersection of M-40 near Saugatuck, MI., this sign says a lot, and says it succinctly.  (HT: Brian)

UPDATE: - A friend emailed me a link to a website with more good signs,  including the following:

STANLEY KURTZ - "ARE REPUBLICANS FOOLING THEMSELVES?"

I share Stanley Kurtz's concerns.  The only way to cut through the media filter that continually masks Obama's hard left vision for America is for Romney to stress the ideological battle underlying this election.  He can't assume the American people see it clearly.  I've highlighted sentences that I think need emphasizing in Kurtz's piece.

Overall, the Democrats put on an effective show. With the possible exception of the McGovern convention, this was the most left-leaning Democratic gathering in memory. Some of that may have been counterproductive, particularly on social issues. To the extent that Republicans dismiss this convention as either a failure or relatively meaningless, however, I think we’re fooling ourselves.

This election could go either way. If Obama squeaks by, he will have done so with the help of a Democratic party that has taken a large, open, and disturbingly leftist turn. I think we’re missing the significance of that. It is completely accurate to say that the Democrats are pushing a bogus reformulation of the American way of life — slapping a bunch of flags on their Julia ad and turning classic conceptions of civic and religious community into covers for a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Unfortunately, this way of thinking is becoming the new normal in this country, and Obama and his convention have only helped to cement the change.

Conservatives can puncture these arguments all we like, but we can’t cut through the media filter. More than that, the conservative case can’t break through the left-controlled education system that has profoundly shaped the Millennials. True, youth unemployment is giving many second thoughts about Obama, yet it’s been more a matter of sapping Millennial enthusiasm than of changing attitudes and ideas.

Do demographics doom the expansive liberal welfare state, regardless? In some sense, they do. Yet if Obama is in the driver’s seat as our fiscal woes mount, he will use the crisis to further his restructuring. California is our advance guard — our Greece — yet their budget crisis is two months away from prompting one of the boldest redistributionist transformations this country has seen in years (even if barely anyone knows it yet).

Only the Romney campaign can cut through the cultural, educational, and media filters and force a debate over the Obama Democrats’ bogus redefinition of the American dream. The media can ignore what conservatives say, but they still have to cover the candidate. With the exception of his welfare ads, however, the Romney campaign has avoided an assault on Obama’s ideology. Romney’s entirely plausible strategy is to downplay the ideological battle (Ryan nomination notwithstanding).  [A terrible mistake to my way of thinking.  I agree with Kurtz]

As the Romney campaign sees it, the tiny sliver of remaining undecided voters consists of mildly disillusioned former Obama supporters, or at least voters who personally like Obama. Coaxing these folks to “break up” with their erstwhile beau means not making them feel like they were fools to buy into Obama’s vision to begin with. That cuts against any effort to unmask the president’s overweening leftist ambitions. Let’s just say that the president’s a nice guy who’s in over his head instead.

Okay, but Michelle Obama did a very effective job of pressing undecideds to give her nice-guy another try. And the convention as a whole did a better job of redefining government as nice-guyism writ large than Republicans would like to admit. Charles Krauthammer says that the counter to all this is exposing Obama as “a deeply committed social democrat” using his presidential power to enact the same “ambitious left-wing agenda” he “developed in his youth.” Well, yes. So far as I can tell, however, this sort of argument is the last thing the Romney campaign wants to make right now. Don’t want to drive away that tiny sliver of Obama’s wavering admirers.

I can’t say for certain that Romney’s strategy is wrong. But I do think it’s far riskier than we realize. Treating Obama as a nice guy in over his head, rather than a smart leftist who knows exactly what he’s doing, leaves the Democrats’ bogus narrative about government unanswered. America is changing, and Republicans are naive to rely on the public to simply recognize the problems in the Democrats’ claims without significant help from our nominee.

Republicans won big in 2010 by defining Obama as an overweening ideologue. Yet that was the Tea Party’s doing, not the Republican establishment. In those days, Romney even jumped on the tea-party bandwagon with some surprisingly cutting observations about Obama’s leftism. Obama may not have pivoted after the 2010 election, but Republicans did. They toned down their attacks on the president’s ideology, and to some extent helped to build up the very wall of “likeability” they now fear to scale, even as the president rejected the Clintonian way and stayed to the left. Were Republicans smart to hold their fire? Romney did try out the argument that Obama is moving us toward European-style social democracy during the primaries, but he’s dropped that now in favor of the kinder and gentler “break up” approach.

Republican reticence on these issues has been going on for a while. Beginning with John McCain in 2008, the party establishment has done a weak job of challenging the core Democratic narrative of the causes of the financial crisis. Clinton laid the foundations of the subprime meltdown, and Obama himself was in on the ground floor of the fiasco. If the public is willing to cut Obama some slack for the economic problems he inherited, that is partly because we’ve allowed him to define the problem to begin with.

I don’t have access to the Romney campaign’s focus-group and survey data. Maybe they’re right to try to pry away those erstwhile Obama supporters in only the gentlest of ways. Yet I worry that the Romneyites are fooling themselves. Technocrats and fixers from a state where liberals dominate, they are neither inclined or prepared to show how the Obama Democrats are slowly redefining American exceptionalism into the European social democratic dream. Romney may squeak by on bad unemployment numbers and gentle coaxing of undecideds, but patriotic veneer the Democrats have managed to slap on their leftism is worrisome. If Obama wins, it will be because we allowed him to get away with it.

FAMILY RESEARCH COUNCIL'S UPDATE

From FRC:

Natural Barn Killers

First, the government started supervising preschoolers' sandwiches. Now, it's monitoring children's chores. What's next--picking out my four-year-old's bedtime story? Give them an inch, and they'll take an acre--preferably on the family farm. That's where the latest crop of regulations is headed, if the Labor Department gets its way. Secretary Hilda Solis is convinced that "children employed in agriculture are some of the most vulnerable workers in America," so she and her team wrote 200 pages of rules dictating what kids can and cannot do on American farms.

The list is so over the top that it bans anyone under 18 from working in grain elevators, feed lots, silos, stockyards, and livestock auctions. Operating power tools like screwdrivers, milk machines, or tractors? Also off-limits. Any work that "inflicts pain on an animal" is also outlawed, even though the department doesn't stipulate what that means. Would branding or tagging cattle be taboo? What about veterinary work?

Apparently, these activities are all at Solis's discretion. Her department's press release is clear, "[The government] charges the secretary of labor with prohibiting employment of youth in occupations that she finds and declares to be particularly hazardous for them." Notice there is no mention of families or the parents' responsibility to keep children safe. Under this policy, even kids' chore charts will be dictated by a Washington bureaucrat. Solis insists that her agency is "working to prevent unnecessary child injuries or deaths."

But considering the latest data, what may be unnecessary is her legislation. "The reported farm-related injury rate for youth under 20 fell by nearly half from 2001 to 2009, a U.S. Department of Agriculture survey found." I find it hard to believe that the mortality rate of a teenager working on a family farm is higher than the mortality rate of the ones walking the streets of America. If the government is really concerned about child welfare, maybe it should focus on those children--not the ones learning the value of a hard day's work.

And while Solis's "Fair Labor Standards Act" would provide some exemptions for kids who work on their parents' property, farming is multi-generational business. Under these rules, families couldn't teach the trade to grandchildren, nieces, nephews, or other relatives. Hasn't this administration done enough to destroy small business? Does it have to constrict its workforce too?

Tennessee's leaders are so livid about the regulations that they passed a bill that blocks the state from enforcing Solis's changes. "This is a prime example of D.C. way overreaching their limited powers," said Assemblyman Jeremy Faison. In Congress, conservative members are pushing a measure called Preserving America's Family Farms Act that would stop Solis's rules before they start. Like us, they're concerned the government is not only trampling on family's rights, but it's also robbing this generation of the valuable experience they gain working on a farm. As one parent said in the public comment period, " It's much better to teach these young people to work at an early age than have them getting into trouble in town because there's nothing to do." What's more, it could have the unfortunate effect of steering more kids away from agriculture because it clamps down on their involvement in groups like 4-H.

The bottom line is that these decisions belong to the family--not the Feds. The government doesn't need to swoop in and rescue children from their own relatives. In this or any legislation, family rights are the last things Washington should put out to pasture.

Conservatives Engage in Some Hire Learning

Most conservatives have been anxious to see how the Romney campaign would react now that the strongest social conservative, Sen. Rick Santorum, is out of the race. Would the Governor try to fill the void left on values issues or would he stick to his more moderate approach? Some people believe that question was answered last week with the selection of Richard Grenell as Mitt Romney's foreign policy spokesman. Grenell, who served in President Bush's administration, specialized in the U.N., but the areas where he disagreed with his old boss are what concern conservatives most.

Grenell, who has been very open about his homosexual lifestyle, publicly condemned the Bush administration (shortly after leaving it) for opposing a U.N. resolution urging the full acceptance of homosexuality. While Bush (like nearly two thirds of the U.N. member states) refused to endorse the measure endorsing homosexuality, President Obama signed it shortly after taking office. Since then, his State Department, under the direction of Hillary Clinton, has tossed aside the cultural and religious beliefs of other countries to promote homosexuality as a basic human right, while downgrading the importance of religious liberty. Clearly, the strategy is for the State Department to force these policies (which most U.S. states reject) on the international stage and then build pressure on the U.S. to adopt measures like Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and same-sex "marriage."

In a recent column for the Washington Blade, Grenell hinted at where he falls on the marriage issue when he criticized gay and lesbian Democrats for supporting President Obama despite the fact that he hasn't done enough to redefine marriage. Still others point to Grenell's long-time partner and his desire to tie the knot, "It's not an option for us... but hopefully someday soon it will be." While past performance is not a guarantee of future results, there is strong evidence that Grenell would lobby for foreign policy more in line with the current administration than the last Republican one.

Me: Drudge linked today to this article:   EEOC Extends Job Protection to Transgender recipients

Mitt Romney Attacked by Former Head of the Massachusetts Republican Party

In the interest of even-handedness, since I've posted negatives on Mike Huckabee, I should also post serious criticisms of Mitt Romney.  Here is Byron York reporting:

A scathing attack on Mitt Romney today from Jim Rappaport, the former head of the Massachusetts Republican party who just held a conference call with reporters to announce his endorsement of Rudy Giuliani. Rappaport praised Giuliani's record in New York and said Romney "has a strong record of showmanship as opposed to actual performance." Discussing Romney's relationship with the Massachusetts state legislature, Rappaport said of the former governor, "His word is no good…Mitt Romney would say one thing in a meeting and literally go out of the meeting to the press and tell the opposite story. There was no desire in the legislature to be accommodating to him because they couldn't trust him." Romney, Rappaport continued, "will be clear today on what he believes today, and he'll be clear tomorrow on what he believes tomorrow, but they may be different things."