“Thoughts that
do often lie too deep for tears.” Wordsworth. A line of poetry
that stuck in my head years ago and now seems the only phrase to
describe my feelings on this Tuesday night of November 6, 2012. The
news arrives around 11pm. Obama wins Ohio. It's over. Obama has
been reelected. We are now, as Mark Steyn puts it, “in the suicide
phase of advanced western society.” Europe has been in this phase
for some time, and with this election, we have joined them.
It is the end of
America. Beforehand, when I tried to imagine the possibility Obama
would win, that was my conclusion. Realistically, now that it has
happened, there's no reason to think otherwise. The America I
believed in, that I assumed would always be there, is gone.
Something happened while we weren't paying attention. Reagan once
said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from
extinction,” and mine (the Baby Boomers) is the generation that
lost it. We didn't pass the meaning of freedom on to our children,
or at least not to enough of them, and now the end has come.
Nothing now would
stop the implementation of Obamacare, so what could be done? My life
expectancy was suddenly a bit shorter. A few minutes before the news
came, I had owned my knees, my colon, my pancreas, my prostate, my
hips---all the things that go wrong as a guy gets older. Something
on that list would, more than likely, kill me someday. But at least
I owned them! Now a person I didn't know, somewhere in the federal
government, would decide what was to be done with them. Cancer
treatment? Well, maybe. Depends on your age, of course. What kind
of value do you bring to the table with your remaining years? A new
knee? Well, how cost-effective would that really be, for America?
You may want a new knee, Mr. Kubacki, but let's be realistic.
Where's the “value-add” for the rest of us?
Sam and Bella and
Gabriel and Max were in the house, representing the “youth,” I
suppose. They were pleased. They had all voted for Obama. Later,
it would be revealed that those under thirty had voted overwhelmingly
for Obama. Another sign of the apocalypse. They are the ones who
will be victimized the most when we are all impoverished, when
America's streets become so very dangerous, when jobs cannot be
found, when all the doctors come from Lahore rather than Johns
Hopkins, when money no longer can be depended upon to hold its value,
when no one can afford to retire except the favored few at GE and
Goldman Sachs and Google, or those who work in academia or
government.
Since 1965, under
LBJ, the Left has claimed not only that government can take care of
us but that government should take care of us. Have they
found enough believers and indoctrinated enough schoolchildren so the
philosophical battle is now irretrievably lost? Maybe. That's the
way it seems, in any event. As we see from Europe, government
control of medicine is a huge step in the process. Once citizens no
longer own their own bodies, the relation between man and government
is changed, and there's no obvious way back. Once a sufficient
quantity of the populace buys into the cocoon of dependency, it's not
a matter of politics anymore. Adopting Leftism is a moral choice,
not a political one, and when enough people make that leap from
independence and self-sufficiency, the fundamental values of society
change. Everything changes. As we have seen in Europe, people stop
going to church. They stop having children. They stop taking care
of the old and the infirm. That's too much trouble, or it's the
government's job, or it interferes too much with your Starbucks time.
*****
For weeks before
the election, I was predicting a Romney victory, largely on the basis
of Obama's weakness as an incumbent. When first-term presidents run
for reelection, I confidently pointed out, one of two things happens:
either he gets more votes than he did the first time or he loses the
election. It had never happened in America that a sitting president
got fewer votes the second time around, but squeaked by. Never.
There are reasons
for this. Every election is different, but elections in which there
is an incumbent president tend to be about the incumbent. If the
citizenry is generally pleased with his performance, there will be
new supporters and more votes (e.g., George Bush, Bill Clinton). If
the people are disappointed, some folks who voted for the guy the
first time around will not vote, or will even vote for his opponent.
The opponent is not exactly irrelevant, but he is of secondary
importance. As the wise guys put it, an election like this is a
referendum on the incumbent.
And if that is
true, then Obama was rejected. After all, he got about four million
fewer votes in 2012 than he did four years ago.
But that's not how
it works, of course. We can and we will argue about the meaning of
the numbers and the extent of Obama's “mandate,” but in a
two-party system there's only two guys who have any chance to win and
one of them wins and the other one doesn't. None of us should kid
ourselves about what happened. Obama won. Obamacare prevailed. Joe
Biden will remain a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.
And Mitt Romney
was a stone loser. He's a nice guy and he has many fine qualities,
but even though America didn't like Obama quite as much this time
around, Romney still lost. Obama was rejected, and Romney still
lost. And he deserved to.
Much has been
written about Obama's cynical campaign. The race-baiting (“Put
y'all back in chains”), the exploitation of “low-information”
women over contraception and abortion, the class warfare about
Romney's business success. Certainly the Obama campaign was a
disgrace, but in its own polite Republican way, the Romney campaign
was every bit as cynical. With its relentless focus on “job
creation,” the idea often seemed to be that Romney would
(personally) get you a job or make you one or somehow place you at a
desk or an assembly line or a delivery truck somewhere.
This strategy was
always doomed. If you had a job, why would you vote for Romney?
And if you didn't have a job and the bills were piling up and the
collection calls were filling up your answering machine, who would
give you the unemployment benefits and food stamps and welfare
benefits to carry you through? Obama, of course! It's absurd for a
Republican to base a campaign on what he can give voters because
Republicans will NEVER win that battle against Democrats. As we have
seen, there is literally no limit to the amount of public money
Democrats will spend to buy votes. Obamaphones? Two years of
unemployment checks? Millions of people added to the Social Security
disability rolls? And none of this is really new. FDR pioneered the
process, doubling the federal budget to put public works money in
every state and almost every town in order to ensure his continued
reelections. Today, Obama simply prints money to accomplish the same
thing. And the Democrats have a monopoly on it. This is a playing
field on which Republicans can never compete.
The reason we were
given to vote for Romney was that a) he understood business and b) he
was NOT Obama. But for Republicans to win, doesn't there have to be
something more than that? Where was the soaring rhetoric? Where
was the condemnation of the Left's push to make us all smaller while
making the government bigger? Where was the rage at America's sudden
support for the most backward and misogynist political philosophy to
be found in the Middle East? Where was the demand, in the face of
numerous scandals and cover-ups, that the rule of law be respected?
Maybe these are
more complicated ideas than “I'll find YOU a job,” but they
weren't that complicated. When a federal program winds up
killing a US border agent and several hundred Mexican civilians, the
story should be told. When financial laws are flouted so the vast
assets of a car company can be seized and handed over to political
allies of the president, Republicans must have the courage to object,
and in no uncertain terms. There are principles at stake and they
are principles that used to be regarded as important. In any event,
these principles are the only weapons Republicans have to deploy in a
political contest. The assumption that conveying a philosophy to the
American people is impossible, that it's a sucker's game, was a
fundamental error---conveying a philosophy, and being true to that
philosophy, is all the Republicans have ever had.
Maybe Romney just
couldn't do it because he is not a conservative and he doesn't
understand the ideas and he cannot comfortably express them, but it
had to be done. Presidential elections must be about bigger things.
Even the Democratic campaign was about bigger things (e.g.,
collectivism). And though Obama has always been reluctant to outline
his beliefs explicitly, there could be no mistake at this point about
the direction he seeks.
From the beginning
of the primaries, Romney was a candidate who refused to engage any of
his opponents on the issues but instead attacked them personally.
And one by one (Cain, Bachman, Gingrich, Santorum...), he picked them
off. All of them were flawed, it is true, but as the Republican
party turned to first one, then another, then another, the one thing
that should have been clear is that very few Republicans actually
wanted Romney. He was the proverbial child whose parents had to hang
a pork chop around his neck so the family dog would play with him.
And then he was the only one left and we all decided (me included)
that, at least, he was better than the alternative.
His deficiencies
as a candidate all seem so obvious now, but we ignored them because
he was not Obama.
Even apart from
his political views, or lack of them, was the problem that he was
identified from the get-go with Massachusetts. Republicans cannot
win a national election without the South, and Southerners find it
almost impossible to view Northeastern effete types as serious human
beings. This was one of John Kerry's problems, and it was also Mitt
Romney's. Southerners can respect learning and do not really dislike
the Harvard- or Yale-educated, but there is always a suspicion that
they lack a certain necessary quantum of common sense and manliness.
“Harvard boys have their uses,” Roy Blount, Jr. once said, “but
you would never let them play in the Orange Bowl.”
Ultimately, Romney
lost both Florida and Virginia, and these were two of the states
Obama won in 2008 that any Republican had to win in 2012. He
probably lost those states not for any particular ideological reason,
but because he was perceived as a silly guy from Cape Cod who didn't
know a Dr. Pepper from a mint julep and had never tasted either one.
As a general matter, this was Romney's problem across the country,
and not merely in the South. He got more votes than McCain did, but
in the wrong places. He lost all the Democratic strongholds by fewer
votes, but he still lost them. This is what happens to a Republican
moderate. They lose blue states by less, and they also lose some red
states that a conservative could win. There are always too many
voters who WILL NOT take a candidate like Romney seriously.
*****
As I await the
meltdown, with little hope that the country I grew up in will be
recognizable even a few years from now, I find myself focusing on
smaller issues, the sort of things that might matter if I am
completely wrong about our immediately future. Voting, for example.
If there are more elections to come in America, it would be nice if
they were 1) honestly run, and 2) fairly reflected the views of
individual citizens.
The fraud bothers
me. It has always bothered me, but the difference in 2012 is that no
one seems to be concerned about it. Cheating has become normal. In
Philly, in 59 voting divisions, Romney got no votes, for a total of
19,605 to 0. In Chicago, 37 precincts voted only for Obama, with a
total of 17,007 – 0. In Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) there were 16
divisions that went 100% for Obama, for a total of 5439 – 0. There
were 112 other divisions where Obama got more than 99% of the vote,
with approximate totals of 50,000 to 295.
These numbers are
impossible. Studies have shown that almost 2% of all ballots are
spoiled. Accidental voting for the “wrong” candidate is one of
the ways this can happen, and it happens regularly, everywhere. It
is not possible that 19,605 votes in 59 Philly divisions were cast
for Obama and none was cast for Romney. Even if everyone in those
divisions had wanted to vote for Obama, Romney would have
received several hundred mistaken, accidental votes. That he did not
is proof that fraud was present, and is now embedded as an
institutional aspect of our modern system of voting, at least in
Democratic fiefdoms.
It is as if
cheating were now an acceptable part of the process. The Left,
simply because it was their partisans who perpetrated it, have no
interest in discussing it. For Republicans, it is impolite to
mention what happened in Philly and Cleveland and Chicago because the
fraud cannot be disconnected from the black cities and neighborhoods
where it occurred.
And though the
numbers themselves demonstrate the cheating, the “defense”
offered by local politicos is even more disgraceful. It is something
along the lines of: “Black people will only vote for Obama, so
these numbers are not surprising at all. We're amazed if somebody
votes for the white guy.”
All of which
begins to detail the more serious problem. While the 19,605 – 0 is
proof of cheating, there is no reason to doubt the exit polls
indicating that in 2008, 96% of black voters chose Obama and that 93%
did in 2012. These numbers should fill all of us with a profound
sadness. Is this really what black people in modern America have
done with the right to vote, secured for them only with the blood of
their ancestors? The Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, lynchings,
the decades-long political fights over suffrage for black
Americans---and this is what happens? Block voting for a man because
of his skin color? Tribalism? The vote for Obama (and excuses for
vote fraud that benefited him) are a stain on black Americans. Are
black voters as a group so cowardly that they are unable to think
(and vote) for themselves?
After all, it's
not like 96% of black Americans agree with Obama, is it? A large
majority of black voters in California voted against gay marriage
four years ago, even as they were voting en masse for Obama. And
they certainly don't agree with his (pro-infanticide) views on
abortion. Since black women are five times as likely as white women
to have an abortion, there is a political movement (which once
included Jesse Jackson) that condemns abortion as genocide. Black
voters are actually more anti-abortion than other demographic
categories, yet they give 96% of their votes to the the most radical
pro-abortion politician in American history?
More to the point,
there is NO issue on which 96% of black people agree with Obama
because 96% of black people in America do not agree on anything. For
example, 96% of black people in America do not agree that Tupac is
dead.
*****
If it sounds like
I have little hope for America's future, I suppose that is true.
There is certainly nothing in the current debate over the “fiscal
cliff,” in which both sides are studiously ignoring the real issue
of spending and budget deficits, to provide any reason for optimism.
More precisely, the problem for a guy like me is the inability to see
past the coming meltdown and figure out what will be important
and what I should worry about. That's the frightening bit. What
will our piece of the world look like after
the riots and after the
defaults and after the money
disappears and after the
insurrections? When all of history converges on a singular point,
there is no way to predict what will happen on the other side of that
point. This is true even if we are looking backwards. What did the
universe look like before the Big Bang occurred? No one
knows. No one even knows how to begin to think about how one might
go about attacking such an issue in a rational way. What America
will look like on the other side of Obama is a question only for
madmen.
Regarding the
“fiscal cliff” and the impending tax increases (the largest in
American history), it is tempting for us conservatives to demand
Congress hold the line and fight Obama on taxes, especially since
Republicans still control the House, the constitutional font of all
revenue bills. The Republican record here, however, is nothing to be
proud of. They could have refused to increase the debt ceiling, but
they didn't. Boehner could have insisted on real cuts in spending,
but he didn't want to or he got suckered but in any case it didn't
happen. So why would anyone think the Republicans will get serious
now? I certainly don't. They have already started to cave, in fact,
and are negotiating against themselves. Obama is the President and
the Senate is controlled by Democrats..Wouldn't the expectation be
that these forces propose a plan for the “fiscal cliff” that the
rest of us could consider? Instead, all the questions are put to the
Republicans.
The better course,
both fiscally and politically, is to let Obama have his way. Let the
Obamacare taxes all go into effect and let him impose whatever tax
rate he wants on the hated rich. Death taxes? Sure. Big Pharma?
Outta here. Medical device companies? Crush them. Family farms?
Seize them all for taxes. Since the Republicans in the House are
unwilling to take a meaningful stand, there is much to be said for
having them simply stand aside. The European economy is in a state
of near-collapse, and the sooner we get there ourselves, the sooner
we will be forced to face reality. The federal government now
borrows $188 million per hour, so the end is certainly near.
Why not let Obama have his way and have it all come crashing down now
rather than six or seven years from now? When unemployment doubles,
when benefit payments are cut, when our dollars are worth
nothing---at that point, something will change. Life in America may
have to get a lot worse before it gets better, but the abyss now
seems inevitable, so let's jump.
Copyright
2012Michael Kubacki
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