Romney Can't Beat Obama After South Carolina

Republican hopeful Mitt Romney will have two big problems if, as expected, he clinches the Republican nomination for the November election: his business background and Hispanic voters.

While most of the media focus on the first, Romney's biggest problem will be the second.

Right now, political pundits in Washington are focusing on Romney's past as former head of Bain Capital, the private equity firm that critics -- including fellow Republican contender Newt Gingrich -- say raided corporations and laid off thousands of workers during his tenure.

The Obama campaign is already salivating at the possibility of using this line of attack against Romney in November. At a time when jobs are the No. 1 U.S. problem, and when Romney presents himself as a successful private sector leader who could turn around the economy, depicting Romney as a job destroyer would go to the heart of the Republican campaign's narrative.

But the former Massachusetts governor may be able to fend off attacks on his performance at Bain Capital by convincing voters that he created more jobs than he eliminated, and that most of the companies he took over ended up healthier than before. That will be a my-figures-versus-your-figures debate, which may very well end in a draw that would neutralize the Democrats' job-killer campaign.

On the other hand, winning over the Hispanic vote will be a much tougher battle for Romney, because it will be a fight that will take place in the realm of people's emotions, which are much harder to twist than facts.

A November poll of Latino voters by the Univisión network found that Romney does not fare well among Hispanics. The poll showed that if the elections were held today, Obama would beat Romney by 67 percent to 24 percent.

The conventional wisdom among pollsters is that no Republican candidate can win the White House with less than 40 percent of the Hispanic vote. Former President George W. Bush won the 2004 election with 40 percent of the Hispanic vote. In the 2008 elections, Republican candidate Sen. John McCain, a moderate on immigration issues, got 31 percent of the Hispanic vote, and lost the election.

Will Romney be able to win 40 percent of the Hispanic vote when, in his efforts to win the extreme right of the Republican party in the nomination process, he has taken much harder-line stands than McCain did in 2008? It will be very difficult for him to do it, most pollsters say.

In sharp contrast to McCain in the last election, Romney is strongly against an immigration reform that would give a path to citizenship to undocumented immigrants who have lived here for decades and meet certain conditions such as learning English and paying back taxes. He also strongly opposes the Dream Act, which would allow undocumented youths who were brought to this country as small children to earn legal status if they go to college or join the military.

While immigration doesn't rank at the top of Hispanic voters' concerns, candidates' stands on immigration tend to mold their feelings toward politicians, and Romney's harsh rhetoric against undocumented workers during the recent debates have left many Latinos feeling, "this guy doesn't like us."

My opinion: If there are no surprises and Romney wins the Republican nomination, he will need to make a dramatic move to win the Hispanic vote. Moderating his rhetoric or stressing that his father was born in Mexico -- where his family of Mormon missionaries had moved -- won't suffice. There is just too much TV footage of the Republican presidential hopeful coming across as bashing Hispanic undocumented workers and their children.

There is speculation that Romney could choose Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as his running mate, in hopes of capturing the Latino vote. But that won't work. Rubio is against a comprehensive immigration reform, opposes the Dream Act and has supported Arizona's draconian immigration law. Except for Cuban-Americans, he is unlikely to be seen by most Hispanics as "one of us."

Romney's best bet would be to pick former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is popular in Florida and would help the Republicans win the state, speaks fluent Spanish, is married to a Mexican and is much more moderate than Romney and Rubio on immigration issues.

Barring a daring move like that, Romney can't beat Obama. Right now only a worsening economy can beat Obama.

Obama Takes Millions In Corporate Donations

Don't let Obama fool you, he takes in millions from corporate donations.  While Obama plays to his base preaching against capitalism and against private business, Obama is more than willing to take money from those big, bad, and corrupt corporate elite.  Don't be fooled either about this, Obama is worth millions in personal wealth.  So with all this being the facts is it fair he takes off to Hawaii on a private vacation for three weeks when so many Americans are unemployed?  Is it fair Michelle spends hundreds of thousands on designer cloths in Paris, not just from Paris, but actually in Paris with so many Americans are in desperate conditions?  As usual as a good Marxist lefty Obama says one thing then does another.

As reported in The Wall Street Journal:

President Barack Obama, who has been characterized as anti-business by his political opponents, has received more in campaign contributions from business executives this year than any Republican presidential candidate.

Obama raised $5.6 million from executives, or about a third of all their donations through Sept. 30, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Republican candidate Mitt Romney raised $5.2 million, far outpacing his primary challengers. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the front-runner in the latest national polls, raised about $272,000, or 5 percent of Romney’s total.

The findings illustrate the powers of an incumbent president with an established fundraising apparatus, and the diversity of political preferences among business leaders. Executives from communications and technology firms led Obama’s donor list. Romney’s professional ties to the private-equity fund Bain Capital LLC, which he founded, fueled his receipts.

Though Obama has criticized the excesses of Wall Street financial firms and their executives, he always has had “a large donor component that was linked to corporate America,” David Magleby, a political scientist and visiting scholar at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, said in an interview.

Penny Pritzker, a Chicago billionaire businesswoman and chairman of Pritzker Realty Group LLC, led Obama’s fundraising efforts in 2008. Matthew Barzun, a former CNET Networks Inc. executive, leads fundraising for Obama’s re-election campaign.

We Need Gingrich As President

Our nation is being suffocated with debt and its citizens crushed by the repetition of failed policies. America must end the insanity coming out of Washington and begin the road to recovery by defeating President Obama on Nov. 6, 2012.

The most important election of our lifetime is now less than a year away. As Iowans, we have the great responsibility in choosing the next president of the United States. We have the unique and privileged opportunity to speak with presidential candidates personally. I have been fortunate enough to meet with the entire slate of 2012 Republican candidates on more than one occasion. This election cycle in particular, Republicans should all be proud of the tremendous depth our candidates display as they compete for our party's nomination.

We have seen the consequences of electing politicians who lack experience and leadership. To return America back to prosperity, we need a leader with experience implementing bold solutions. We need a leader who has shown that they know how to get America working again.  That leader is Newt Gingrich.

Unlike the current administration, Newt is not blind to the difficulties facing our nation in this perilous time. The 21st Century Contract with America shows a deep understanding of the scale and scope of the problems facing America. Under Gingrich's leadership as speaker, Congress passed the first balanced budget in a generation. In four years, Gingrich oversaw the creation of a stable economic environment that created 11 million jobs, while reforming welfare programs, restoring funding to strengthen our defense capabilities, expanding NIH research programs, and repaying over $400 billion in federal debt.

Putting Americans back to work needs to be the administration's highest priority. 

While our current administration disagrees, a Gingrich administration will ensure that America's focus on job-creation never waivers. Instead of baseless rhetoric and empty promises, Newt has practical and innovative ideas to solve some of our toughest problems. Nothing will help our deficit or protect our future more soundly than transitioning Americans from a government-dependent economy to an independently productive economy.

Newt himself is the torchbearer for the growth agenda in the 2012 elections. He will not divide America and try to bring all of us down to the same level. He will set our sights on an America that encourages all people to rise and rewards all who do rise. Toward that end, Newt Gingrich is offering the most exciting, Reaganesque, pro-growth plan of any candidate. Moreover, should not the principal question of 2012 be: Can America afford anything less than the strongest strategy for growth in today’s precarious global economy?

We know what President Reagan’s program enabled the American people to accomplish: 17 million new jobs, 92 straight months of above-average growth and $15 trillion in new wealth, producing a $4,000 increase in real median family income, better than before or after the Reagan years. While the deficit rose early on, by the end of his term, thanks to powerful growth in the economy, it had fallen to 2.9% of GDP, a fraction of today’s deficit.

Just imagine what America could accomplish with the Gingrich Plan: with real spending restraints, real regulatory reform and a strong dollar, a 12.5% corporate tax rate, equaling Ireland’s near-lowest in the world, 100% expensing, an optional 15% flat tax, zero tax on capital gains and inheritances, an all-out drive for American energy and the choice of personal Social Security accounts for young people. Logic compels us to believe that with these bold solutions, Americans will once again surpass expectations and shock the world.

The journey to restore America must begin with limiting government, as well as empowering and ennobling every individual. We not only empower but we ennoble when we honor the dignity, worth and potential of every person, born and unborn. We are not subjects of any elites, we are citizens, each born with a purpose and endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights. This is what Newt Gingrich believes. This is the idea he has fought for throughout his public life. This is why he has stood in the line of fire, again and again, on behalf of Ronald Reagan and the conservative cause. More than any other candidate, Newt Gingrich has won decisive victories, and can again, for individuals and families, and for a freer, stronger, more prosperous America at home and in the world.

Why We Must Say No to Romney

Iowans have been duped and it is not their fault.  They were charmed by a quasi-conservative flim flam artist with a history of lies and baloney talking, and a history of Obamaesque socialism.  There is a liberal in the conservative hen house and many refuse to admit it.  I assure you Mitt Romney is no conservative and refuses to admit America is an exceptional nation.

If you were building a Republican presidential candidate from a kit, imagine what pieces you might use: an athletic build, ramrod posture, Reaganesque hair, a charismatic speaking style and a crisp dark suit. You'd add a beautiful wife and family, a wildly successful business career and just enough executive government experience. You'd pour in some old GOP bromides - spending cuts and lower taxes - plus some new positions for 2008: anti-immigrant rhetoric and a focus on faith.

Add it all up and you get Mitt Romney, a disquieting figure who sure looks like the next presidential candidate as a Republican and most surely must be stopped.

Romney's main business experience is as a management consultant, a field in which smart, fast-moving specialists often advise corporations on how to reinvent themselves. His memoir is called Turnaround - the story of his successful rescue of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City - but the most stunning turnaround he has engineered is his own political career.

If you followed only his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, you might imagine Romney as a pragmatic moderate with liberal positions on numerous social issues and an ability to work well with Democrats. If you followed only his campaign for president, you'd swear he was a red-meat conservative, pandering to the religious right, whatever the cost. Pay attention to both, and you're left to wonder if there's anything at all at his core.

As a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1994, he boasted that he would be a stronger advocate of gay rights than his opponent, Ted Kennedy. These days, he makes a point of his opposition to gay marriage and adoption.

There was a time that he said he wanted to make contraception more available - and a time that he vetoed a bill to sell it over-the-counter.

The old Romney assured voters he was pro-choice on abortion. "You will not see me wavering on that," he said in 2008, and he cited the tragedy of a relative's botched illegal abortion as the reason to keep abortions safe and legal. These days after his disastrous bid in 2008, he describes himself as pro-life.

There was a time that he supported stem-cell research and cited his own wife's multiple sclerosis in explaining his thinking; such research, he reasoned, could help families like his. These days, he largely opposes it. As a candidate for governor, Romney dismissed an anti-tax pledge as a gimmick. In this race, he was the first to sign.

People can change, and intransigence is not necessarily a virtue. But Romney has yet to explain this particular set of turnarounds in a way that convinces voters they are based on anything other than his own ambition.

In the 2008 campaign for president, there were numerous issues on which Romney had no record, and so voters must take him at his word. On these issues, those words are often chilling. While other candidates of both parties speak of restoring America's moral leadership in the world, Romney has said he'd like to see America mirror “the care and respect for individuals as seen in Europe”.  In other words, turn America into a nanny state like Greece and other European nations that have gone broke with their “care and respect”.

When New Hampshire partisans are asked to defend the party’s conservative principles and defend America’s exceptionalism they should talk about our ability to see the candidates up close, ask tough questions and see through the baloney. If a candidate is a phony, we assure ourselves and the rest of the world, we'll know it.

Mitt Romney is such a candidate. New Hampshire Republicans and independents must vote no.

US Best Days Yet to Come

Much nonsense has been written in recent years about the prospects of American decline and the inevitable rise of China. But it was not a declining power that I saw in recent weeks as I jetted from the Middle East to the Far East through two of America's pivotal geographic commands — Central Command and Pacific Command.

The very fact that the entire world is divided up into American military commands is significant. There is no French, Indian or Brazilian equivalent — not yet even a Chinese counterpart. It is simply assumed without much comment that American soldiers will be central players in the affairs of the entire world. It is also taken for granted that a vast network of American bases will stretch from Germany to Japan — more than 700 in all, depending on how you count. They constitute a virtual American empire of Wal-Mart-style PXs, fast-food restaurants, golf courses and gyms.

There is an especially large American presence in the Middle East, one of the world's most crisis-prone regions. For all the anti-Americanism in the Arab world, almost all the states bordering what they call the Arabian Gulf support substantial American bases. These governments are worried about the looming Iranian threat and know that only the United States can offer them protection. They are happy to deal with China, but it would never occur to a single sultan or sheik that the People's Liberation Army will protect them from Iranian intimidation.

In the Far East, a similar dynamic prevails. All of China's neighbors happily trade with it, but all are wary of the Middle Kingdom's pretensions to regional hegemony. Even Vietnam, a country that handed America its worst military defeat ever, is eager to establish close ties with Washington as a counter to Beijing.

What of America's two most important allies in Northeast Asia — South Korea and Japan? Not long ago, relations with Seoul were frosty because it was pursuing a "sunshine policy" of outreach to North Korea that the George W. Bush administration (rightly) viewed as one of the world's most dangerous rogue states. 

More recently, relations with Japan became strained after the election of the Democratic Party of Japan in 2009 on a platform of cozying up to China, rethinking the 50-year-old alliance between the U.S. and Japan shortly after Yukio Hatoyama assumed power, and moving U.S. bases out of Okinawa. Now Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has had to undertake an embarrassing U-turn by agreeing to an earlier plan that would move a U.S. Marine Corps air base from one part of Okinawa to another but keep it on the island.

In justifying his reversal, Noda said that "we cannot afford to reduce the U.S. military deterrence" because of "political uncertainties remaining in East Asia." There is no shortage of such uncertainties with the Chinese navy becoming increasingly assertive in moving into Japanese waters and with North Korea, which has missiles that can easily hit Japan, sinking a South Korean naval ship with the loss of 46 sailors.

The latter incident naturally has focused attention in Seoul and served to accelerate the reaffirmation of close American-Korean ties that had already begun with the election of the more conservative President Lee Myung-bak in 2008. The anti-Americanism that had been prevalent in South Korea only a few years ago has all but disappeared, and it is not only (or even mainly) because of President Obama's vaunted charm. It is largely because South Korea has tried detente and found that it did nothing to moderate the aggressive behavior of the North Korean regime.

China is South Korea's largest trade partner by far, but Beijing shows scant interest in reining in Kim Jong Il. The greatest fear of Chinese leaders is that North Korea will collapse, leading to a horde of refugees moving north and, eventually, the creation an American-allied regime on the Yalu River. Rather than risk this strategic calamity, China continues to prop up the crazy North Korean communists — to the growing consternation of South Koreans, who can never forget that Seoul, a city of 15 million people, is within range of what the top U.S. commander in South Korea describes as the world's largest concentration of artillery.