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George W. Bush: “Benevolent Spirit” Can Guide Debate

December 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

U.S. Navy photo by Senior Chief Photographer's Mate 2nd Thomas Coffelt

DALLAS — During his opening remarks Tuesday at a daylong conference on immigration and the economy, former President George W. Bush urged the nation’s leaders to debate immigration reform with compassion and kindness.

In a brief appearance at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Bush did not advocate for a specific solution. But his statements indicated he supports policies similar to those he championed during his presidency, when immigration reform was last debated in Congress.

“America can become a lawful society and a welcoming society at the same time,” Bush said at the event, which was organized by the George W. Bush Institute and the Federal Reserve Bank. “As our nation debates the proper course of action on immigration reform, I hope we do so with a benevolent spirit and keep in mind the contributions of immigrants.”

Those contributions include “new skills and new ideas,” he said, adding that immigrants “fill a critical gap in our labor market.

“Not only do immigrants help build the economy, they invigorate our soul,” he said at the gathering of students, scholars and economists.

Bush did not take questions following his remarks. But his introduction appeared to set the tone for the panelists, whose focus was more on reform and its potential boon to the economy and less on law enforcement and border security.

Analysts said after last month’s general election that Republicans, including those who espoused hard-line views on illegal immigration, should recognize the growing voting power of the country’s minority population, including Hispanics who champion immigration reform, and find a solution.

Clint Bolick, a lawyer and the director of the Goldwater Institute‘s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation, warned of what he said were poorly thought-out schemes by state legislatures to fix immigration within their own borders. If the trend persisted, he added, the problem would be too few immigrants to perform low-wage labor as opposed to too many.

“Alabama tried a nifty way” to address immigration with a disastrous result to the state’s GDP, he said, referring to the state’s recently passed bill that allows law officers to check immigration status. Portions of the bill are currently unenforceable and tied up in federal courts but the state’s agriculture economy suffered resounding labor losses after the bill was signed.

As far as immigrant youths, the focus of President Obama’s deferred action policies that grants legal status and a reprieve from deportation to certain younger undocumented immigrants, Bolick said the country needed to move more quickly than the DREAM Act. That legislation would provide a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented youths who meet certain guidelines. Bolick said the immigrants, who he said are American for all intents and purposes, should be given citizenship sooner than what the proposed legislation would allow.

Last week, outgoing U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, introduced the Achieve Act, which would create a new visa for undocumented youths who attend college or serve in the military to receive legal status and a work permit. It does not, however, allow for a pathway to citizenship.

At its conference last weekend United We Dream, an immigrants’ rights group whose affiliates include the University Leadership Initiative based at the University of Texas at Austin, reiterated its demand for Congress to pass the DREAM Act. The group also decided to push for reform beyond the DREAM Act.

“The DREAMers are leaders within their communities and their families.  They know firsthand the sacrifices their parents made to provide opportunities for their children,” Lynn Tramonte, the deputy director for the progressive America’s Voice Educational Fund, said in a prepared statement. “They are incredible spokespeople for their families, and will once again transform the immigration debate.”

According to a fact sheet released by the Bush Institute, immigrants accounted for more than half of the country’s labor-force growth from 2003 to 2012. Of the 8.4 million new workers, 4.4 million were immigrants. The center also said that in 2011, 11 percent of the country’s immigrants earned a graduate or professional degree, 1 percentage point higher than the country’s native-born residents.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://www.texastribune.org/immigration-in-texas/immigration/george-w-bushbenevolent-spirit-can-guide-debate/. Texas Tribune donors or members may be quoted or mentioned in our stories, or may be the subject of them. For a complete list of contributors, click here.

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Against the Grain, Texas GOP Dominated on Election Day

November 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore

Democratic victories across the nation left Republican voters and activists with the political version of a hangover last week. In the alternate universe known as Texas, they are blaming the Champagne.

Republicans here are celebrating another statewide sweep. They held onto huge majorities in the Legislature and the Texas congressional delegation. And at a time of increasing angst about their ability to thrive as the Hispanic population grows, the Texas Republican Party has fielded the first Hispanic U.S. senator from Texas — Ted Cruz.

“Thank God for Texas,” Chris Turner, a Republican consultant, said in a post-election speech to Republican activists in a conservative suburb of Austin. He said, joking, that the state might consider using stimulus money “to build a moat around our northern border.”

Nationwide, conservatives watched as Democrats scored come-from-behind victories in some red-state U.S. Senate contests and thinned out the Republican Party’s majority in the U.S. House. Victories by gay rights proponents and supporters of legalized pot did nothing to lift their spirits.

They could take solace, though, in the nation’s second-largest state, where full-throated conservative Rick Perry has been governor for a dozen years and no one is betting he will be replaced by a Democrat anytime soon. Perry was not on the ballot this year, so the big question on Election Day was the margin of victory in Texas for the men at the top of the ticket, Mitt Romney and Cruz. It turned out to be about 57 percent each.

Texas is the only majority-minority state that is reliably Republican, and it has gone longer without a Democrat in statewide office than any other state, according to PolitiFact Texas.

“We are the tomato in the blue sea,” said Peggy Venable, a conservative activist and director of the Texas branch of Americans for Prosperity. “We truly are different. I had people across the country that called me last night saying, ‘I’m moving to Texas.’”

There are some caveats to the victory narrative. Just as Republicans had some bright spots nationally, Democrats in Texas are crowing about a handful of electoral successes here.

In the state’s only congressional swing district, state Rep. Pete Gallego, D-Alpine, was declared the winner against U.S. Rep. Francisco “Quico” Canseco, R-San Antonio, though Canseco has not conceded. State Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, whose defeat would have brought Republicans one vote shy of an unbreakable two-thirds majority in that chamber, hung on in a district drawn to elect a Republican. And, with an influx of minority voters over the last decade, there will be more Democrats in the Legislature as a result of a redistricting process.

Scattered among the state’s election results are some warning signs for Republicans looking at a future that might not be as accommodating to their policy prescriptions and sometimes harsh rhetoric on hot-button social issues.

At the top of the ticket, Democrats were either tied with or dominating Republicans in four of the five largest counties, forcing Republicans to count on ever-larger margins in predominately white suburban and rural areas to stay on top.

Democrats, meanwhile, picked off three Republican incumbents in legislative races, but none of their own lost re-election contests. Three Republican incumbents also lost races — to little-known Democrats with Hispanic surnames — for seats on the 4th Court of Appeals in heavily Hispanic South Texas.

In a state where Hispanics make up 38 percent of the population — and about half of the non-adults — results like that worry some Republicans.

“This election cycle was a preview of what’s coming and what is here already in some areas of the state of Texas,” said state Rep. Aaron Peña, R-Edinburg, who did not seek re-election. “If Republicans don’t adapt to the changing demographics, then they will die.’’ He said with the rapidly changing population and political environment, that could happen sooner rather than later.

Anthony Holm, a Republican consultant in Texas, said a hard-line stance on immigration in particular has hurt Republican efforts to woo Hispanics, who tend to be socially conservative and pro-business.

“If we took that off the table, we would get a lot of their votes,” Holm said. “We have to find a way to get immigration resolved that we can live with.”

The drift toward more strident debates over illegal immigration is a relatively recent phenomenon in Texas. Republican leaders, including former President George W. Bush, traditionally stood apart from their national counterparts on the issue, using a softer approach favored by businesses that are dependent on migrant labor.

As president, Bush sought a guest-worker program that ultimately failed because of opposition from fellow Republicans. A decade later, during the 2012 Republican presidential race, Perry, his successor as Texas governor, famously stood by his support for a 2001 law that gives young illegal immigrants in-state college tuition rates. But Romney pounded him for it, and Perry paid a hefty price during the primary season.

Both Perry and Cruz, now senator-elect, have harshly criticized President Obama’s executive order allowing the same type of young immigrants — those who were brought here illegally by their parents but have stayed out of trouble — to get two-year work visas.  Cruz called the order “lawless” and said during the campaign he wanted a President Romney to overturn it.

Texas was not among the states where a news media consortium conducted exit polls, so how much Hispanic support there was for Cruz in his Senate race remains an open question. A review of the returns from several overwhelmingly Hispanic border counties in South Texas suggest he slightly outperformed Romney.

In Webb County, which includes Laredo, Romney got 22 percent of the vote, compared with 31 percent for Cruz; the presidential nominee got 30 percent of the vote in El Paso County, while Cruz won 36 percent.

While Romney and Cruz got lopsided support from white voters, as the presidential ticket did nationally, pre-election surveys by Mike Baselice suggest Romney did 12 to 15 percentage points better with Hispanics in Texas than in California. Obama’s big share of the Latino vote in California more closely mirrors his performance in battleground states.

After comparing surveys from California and Texas, Baselice also said Hispanics self-identify as moderate and conservative at significantly higher rates in Texas. In California, 37 percent of Hispanics call themselves conservative, 30 percent say they’re moderate and 33 percent embrace the liberal label.

In Texas, 46 percent of Hispanics say they are conservative, 36 percent are moderate and 18 percent say they are liberal, Baselice said.

For Democrats, the day when Hispanics vote in high enough numbers to help put them back into statewide competition cannot come soon enough. Richard Morrison, a Democrat, barely won his re-election as a Fort Bend county commissioner — over a Republican abandoned by his own county party after records showed he had voted in both Texas and Pennsylvania three times, an alleged felony.

“Someone is going to have to come down here and invest significant money on turning out the Latino population. It’s going to take about $25 million,’’ Morrison said. “Until they do that we’re just going to be in the same spot.’’

Texas Tribune donors or members may be quoted or mentioned in our stories, or may be the subject of them. For a complete list of contributors, click here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://www.texastribune.org/texas-politics/2012-elections/against-grain-tx-gop-dominated-election-day/.

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Obama Has Granted Clemency More Rarely Than Any Modern President

November 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Photo courtesy of Pete Souza

A former brothel manager who helped the FBI bust a national prostitution ring. A retired sheriff who inadvertently helped a money launderer buy land. A young woman who mailed ecstasy tablets for a drug-dealing boyfriend, then worked with investigators to bring him down.

All of them and hundreds more were denied pardons by President Obama, who has granted clemency at a lower rate than any modern president, a ProPublica review of pardons data shows.

The Constitution gives the president unique power to forgive individuals for federal offenses. While pardons do not wipe away convictions, they can restore a person’s full rights to vote, possess firearms and obtain business licenses, as well as remove barriers to certain career opportunities and adoptions. For many applicants, a pardon is simply an opportunity for a fresh start.

But Obama has parceled out forgiveness far more rarely than his recent predecessors, pardoning just 22 individuals while denying 1,019.

He has given pardons to roughly 1 of every 50 individuals whose applications were processed by the Justice Department. At this point in his presidency, Ronald Reagan had pardoned 1 of every 3 such applicants. George H.W. Bush had pardoned 1 in 16. Bill Clinton had pardoned 1 in 8. George W. Bush had pardoned 1 in 33.

Obama also has been stingy with commutations, applications for early release by those still serving federal prison sentences.

Under Reagan and Clinton, applicants for commutations had a 1 in 100 chance of success. Under George W. Bush, that fell to a little less than 1 in 1,000. Under Obama, an applicant’s chance is slightly less than 1 in 5,000.

He has commuted the sentence of one individual, a woman with terminal leukemia whose case was championed by Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin.

“This idea of ‘tough on crime’ took root around the time of Ronald Reagan and it is striking that President Obama is showing so much less mercy than Reagan,” said Jeffrey Crouch, a political science professor at American University and the author of “The Presidential Pardon Power.”

Matthew Lehrich, a spokesman for the Obama administration, said in a statement Thursday that the president took his power to grant clemency “very seriously.”

“Each recommendation received from the Department of Justice is carefully reviewed and evaluated on the merits,” Lehrich said.

To determine who receives clemency, Obama, like his predecessors, relies on recommendations from the Office of the Pardon Attorney, the arm of the Justice Department that reviews applications. The office — led by Pardon Attorney Ronald Rodgers, a former military judge and federal prosecutor — rarely dispenses endorsements, however.

Several administration officials who agreed to discuss pardons on the condition of anonymity said the president pardoned nearly every person recommended by Rodgers for approval in his first two years in office, but that such applicants were few and far between. While the number of applicants has increased in recent years, Obama — based on Rodgers’ recommendations — is denying more people more swiftly than any of his recent predecessors, the data shows.

RonaldReagan

GeorgeH.W. Bush

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Source: Office of the Pardon Attorney, Department of Justice

“I don’t think he has been given the same opportunity, by this process, to look at these petitioners as his predecessors were,” said Mark Osler, a law professor at St. Thomas University in Minneapolis who launched the country’s first law clinic for commutations.

Currently, two government officials said, there are about a dozen positive recommendations and hundreds of negative ones waiting for the president to act on.

At least one commutation request is pending. The White House also has asked for a fresh review of the case of Clarence Aaron, who is serving a triple life-sentence, without parole, for his role in a drug conspiracy. ProPublica and The Washington Post published a story about Aaron’s case in May.

Obama last granted pardons in November 2011, weeks before ProPublica and the Post published a series of stories that found that between 2001 and 2008, white applicants were nearly four times as likely to be pardoned as minorities. African American applicants fared the worst, almost never receiving the pardons office’s recommendation. The Justice Department has commissioned an independent study to examine ProPublica’s findings.

Given the potential for political blowback, presidents often do not grant pardons while running for re-election. Presidents Obama, Clinton and the first President Bush did not pardon anyone during their campaigns for second terms.

Still, Obama’s views on clemency remain largely unknown as he has not publicly commented on this presidential prerogative.

Judge Abner Mikva, an early mentor of the president who served as Clinton’s first White House counsel, said that before the 2008 election he and Obama had discussed Clinton’s pardon of financier Marc Rich. The pardon for Rich, whose ex-wife was a major donor to Democrats, was seen as a damaging political favor, even by many Clinton supporters.

“I do remember a lengthy discussion about Marc Rich and it wasn’t so much about the power as it was about how even a good president can be corrupted by the pardons process,” Mikva recalled. “I think Marc Rich looms larger with Barack Obama than with other presidents because I think he was very, very dismayed by the Marc Rich pardon and the basis on which it appears to have been granted.”

Since the ProPublica series, there have been growing calls to reform the pardons process from civil rights groups, legal experts and current and former public officials.

Former Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich, a Republican working for Romney’s presidential campaign, said he is set to start a law school clinic for pardons at Catholic University in Washington.

Paul Rosenzweig, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, recently authored a study that recommends taking the clemency process out of the Justice Department’s hands.

“Moving the office outside of the Department of Justice would restore the pardon function to its traditional status as an exercise of pure presidential authority,” wrote Rosenzweig, who served as a policy adviser in the Department of Homeland Security during the Bush administration. “Including staff who are not exclusively career prosecutors would bring a more balanced perspective to the decision making and would eliminate the natural and understandable institutional tendency of prosecutors to be confident in the rectitude of their own judgment.”

The Justice Roundtable, a group sponsored by the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations that seeks candidates for presidential clemency, also has begun work on a blueprint for reform.

Any individual convicted of a federal crime can apply for a pardon five years after completing his or her sentence.

Katie Barribeau applied five years ago but was denied by Obama in mid-2011.

In 2001, when she was 22, Barribeau was arrested for helping her boyfriend mail ecstasy from a military base in Germany back to the United States for sale. Confronted by military investigators, she immediately confessed and cooperated. In exchange for her assistance, she was sentenced to five years of probation and a $1,000 fine for conspiracy to import ecstasy.

In the decade since, Barribeau has had no further legal troubles. She left the Army, returned to the United States and completed college in Wisconsin. Today she is married and a manager at the Green Bay company where she has worked for the last 10 years.

Barribeau said she deeply regretted her involvement in the drug scheme and that a pardon would help her in several important ways. Her company frequently holds meetings in Canada, which she cannot attend because of her conviction. She and her husband are trying to start a family and some states bar those with federal felony records from adopting.

“I want to vote, I want to have the kind of career opportunities that I have worked hard for and I want to be a new mother,” she said in an interview. “But I wonder sometimes, what if I can’t get pregnant, what if I want to adopt? Is this going to prevent me from being a mom?”

Still, the pardons office recommended her for denial, writing that she “lacked the maturity to resist being manipulated by others.” Their evidence? She helped a different former boyfriend purchase a snowmobile for $6,000 and was still paying off the credit card debt when her application was pending. In a confidential memo to the White House obtained by ProPublica, the pardons office said Barribeau needed more time to demonstrate she had been fully rehabilitated.

The pardons office does not disclose its reasoning to applicants and Barribeau was stunned when we shared the contents of the memo with her.

“I had a rough patch and it was a first offense that I was terribly sorry for,” she said. “But I don’t want it to be on my record for the rest of my life, I want a second chance.”

On the same day that Obama denied Barribeau’s pardon application, he also turned down a request from James Poteete.

Poteete, a retired municipal worker from the Arkansas hamlet of Morrilton, pleaded guilty in 1997 to a count of failing to file a currency transaction report for his role in what turned out to be a friend’s money-laundering scheme. He was sentenced to three years of probation and a $3,000 fine, which he paid immediately.

Poteete has no other criminal history and wrote on his application that he sought a pardon so he could obtain a hunting license and “for peace of mind.” But the pardons office found reason to deny him too. Although he completed his sentence 11 years earlier, lawyers in the office deemed it too soon to consider forgiveness. “Additional time is needed to establish rehabilitation worthy of pardon,” the office wrote in a memo to the president.

The pardons office looks favorably on community service and wrote that Poteete had “no civic involvement,” though Poteete had worked as a police officer, a sheriff and then with his town’s public works department. His application included character references from the current police chief and sheriff, as well as the sheriff of a neighboring town.

“I waited seven years after my probation was over before I applied. I don’t see how I need more time,” Poteete said in an interview.

Poteete called it “a shame” that so few individuals are pardoned. “I can’t believe Obama pardoned just 22 people,” he said. Still, he said he would try again in the spring, when the two-year wait period for reapplying is up. “There is no doubt that I will reapply .”

Mary Price, of Families against Mandatory Minimums, a non-partisan Washington group that advocates for sentencing reform, said worthy applicants deserved the president’s consideration.

“These are people who completed their sentences, who have since led good lives and are asking this administration for a second chance and this administration is turning its back on them,” Price said. “I cannot believe there are fewer deserving people today than there were during the administrations of his predecessors.”

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Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? Answers, Finally

November 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Photo courtesy of Madison Guy

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Apparently, if you’re six years old, “to get to the other side” is an acceptable and singularly humorous answer to this age-old question which seems to date from a New York magazine article published around 1850.

The answer may also depend upon whom you ask. So, if some well-known personalities were asked “Why did the chicken cross the road?”, they might respond along these lines:

Dick Cheney: It was fleeing from me. I tried to wing it with my AK-47, but took out the KFC sign half a mile down the road instead.

George W. Bush: I don’t know about things like that – Laura doesn’t let me cross the road alone. But I hope the poor chicken doesn’t misunderestimate the traffic.

Al Gore: I invented the chicken.

Ron Paul: That’s none of our concern. Chickens should be free to cross roads without government intervention.

Sarah Palin: Fry baby, fry!

Arnold Schwarzenegger: I don’t know the answer, but I can tell it’s a girlie chicken by the way it walks.

Michael Moore: After being confined, abused, and repressed by capitalistic poultry farmers, the chicken was escaping to freedom, to star in my new movie “Eggo.”

Paris Hilton: Just because I’m, like, umm, gorgeous and an heiress, I still have my own views about chickens and roads. Let me check with my agent to see what I think.

Lindsay Lohan: It crossed? Dang, I must have missed it.

Charlie Sheen: Winging!

David Letterman: And the number one reason the chicken crossed the road – it was fleeing when it saw this week’s CBS ratings.

Dr. Phil: The issue is not why the chicken is crossing, by why we’re enabling it to engage in risky activities.

Samuel L. Jackson: Clearly, this is one dumb mother clucker.

Darth Vader: It was crossing over to the Dark Side. May the sauce be with you.

Bill Gates: In this age, we shouldn’t have to worry about real chickens and potential poultry highway carnage. The next version of Windows will feature an app where a virtual chicken can safely cross simulated roads.

The United Nations: We will send a team of poultry inspectors to the road site in question and determine if a crossing is viable.  Then we will form a committee to determine if the chicken crossing should be internationally sanctioned. This may take 2 or 3 years at which time we will make an unenforceable recommendation.

Woody Allen: I can’t look at chickens. I get the urge to move to Rhode Island.

Superman:  It was my fellow crime fighter Super Chicken, in disguise as Cluck Kent.

Mel Gibson: Bloody chickens! They’re responsible for all the bad eggs in this world.

Martha Stewart: It was trying to escape my crockpot. I wanted it for a recipe I was testing for my new book, “Cooking with Conviction.”

Pat Robertson: Only the good Lord knows. But this is typical of liberal, feminist poultry that are clearly being tempted by the devil to stray from their homes and family. Repent, chicken, or God will appear in the form of a speeding ’86 Buick and strike you down.

Tiger Woods: It was probably scared of me. I used to hit a lot of birdies and eagles.

Kirstie Alley: Because I was chasing it. Why? Three words: Chicken Pot Pie.

William Shatner: “ChicKHAAAAAANNN!!!”

DeForest Kelley: I don’t know, I’m a doctor, not a chicken plucker. Wait! Look out for that car! Oh no… he’s dead, Jim.

Dr. Suess: I do not like chickens on the road I do not like them with a toad I do not like them with green beans I do not like them with collard greens I do not like them in my commode.

Steven Wright: I met this grouchy chicken by the side of the road today. I think it was brooding.

Donald Trump: You’re fried!

Bill O’Reilly: It was walking in my No Spin Zone and I hit it. Stupid chicken! Okay, so the secular, union-loving, veggo, anti-gun totting, pro-choice, global warmer, far left nutjobs have no problem allowing chickens to just wander recklessly across roads. They don’t care what damage it did to my car, ALRIGHT? Oh, so it’s MY fault that the chicken got hit? Get OFF the roads, chickens! And that’s a memo.

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Poll Denial: 50 Shades of Crazy

October 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto

In 2004, Democrats were so out-of-their-minds angry with George W. Bush that we could not believe polls that showed our guy losing. It couldn’t be that Bush was running a better campaign or that we didn’t give two rips about John Kerry. The polls had to be wrong.

Media Matters attacked Gallup and CBS/New York Times polls in September 2004 as “skewed,” and MoveOn.org took out a full-page ad in the Times criticizing Gallup’s “flawed methodology.”

“This is more than a numbers game,” stated MoveOn. “Poll results profoundly affect a campaign’s news coverage as well as the public’s perception of the candidates.”

Now the poop’s on the other boot. Mitt Romney‘s gaffes keep pumping air under Barack Obama’s convention bounce, and Republicans say that the same polls that liberals complained about in 2004 are, you guessed it, “skewed.” A website called UnskewedPolls.com changes turnout projections to remove what it sees as an over-sampling of Democrats. Not surprisingly, if you take out a lot of Democrats, Romney is winning.

So why would Gallup, CBS and The New York Times skew their polls?

“They want you thinking your side’s lost,” said Rush Limbaugh. “They want you thinking it’s over for what you believe. And that makes you stay home and not vote. That’s what they’re hoping.”

You can read all about it in “Fifty Shades of Crazy.”

As a Democratic consultant, I spend a good chunk of my week on conference calls with campaigns from Alaska to Florida, and a lot of what we talk about is poll results. Over the years, I have easily been on hundreds of these conference calls, and if I had a quarter for every time we “skewed” a turnout model to improve poll numbers I wouldn’t have enough money to buy a newspaper.

“Believing that some perceived liberal media bias has made its way into the polling industry, where reputations and paychecks rely on accuracy, shows a stunning disconnect from reality,” said Democratic pollster Bryan Dooley.

Here’s how it really works. Polls control for age, race, gender and geography. If you know that roughly 52% of voters are women, but only 49% of your poll respondents are women, you give more weight to their answers to balance it out. This is called “weighting” a poll, and it’s what you hear conservative critics claim liberals are forcing the media to do with party self-identification in order to deflate Republican turnout.

But party self-identification is not like age, race, gender or geography in that it can change for an individual during a campaign. I’ve seen how party self-identification on a poll rises and falls like a water level as public opinion changes while age, race, gender, and geography remain constant. In 2008, the wave broke my way. In 2010, a red tide wiped out a lot of my congressional clients. This year, every poll I’ve seen has shown an uptick in people identifying themselves as Democrats since the conventions.

This is the giant zit on the Republicans’ bald-faced lie. Saying you should “control” for party self-identification is just as invalid as changing a poll because you think there should be more people supporting Mitt Romney, said Stefan Hankin, a DC-based pollster. UnskewedPolls.com is “weighting something that changes on a week to week basis which you never want to do,” said Hankin. “Look, just because you want something to be true and you can come up with some ridiculous justification does not make it real.”

The news could be even worse for Republicans, says Democratic pollster Zac McCrary. “The polling produced by reputable pollsters is being conducted using the same core methodologies used in 2004 or 2010 when the polling data would have largely foreshadowed Republican success,” said McCrary. “The real concern for Republicans shouldn’t be that polls are overstating Democrats but that polling may be undercounting Democrats because of the difficulty of reaching cell-phone only voters who are disproportionately more Democratic than land-line voters.”

The simple fact is that Democrats don’t need to conspire with the media to make Republicans look bad. Romney does that all by himself when he opens his mouth and Mitt happens.

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“Those Who Know Him Best”

September 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Photo courtesy of Austen Hufford

In 1976, with voters still fuming over the Watergate scandals and Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, President Ford faced a tough uphill fight against a newcomer with anti-Washington credentials, former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter. I remember a TV ad the Ford campaign’s brilliant media team of Doug Bailey and the late John Deardourff crafted to plant doubts about the not-well-known Democratic nominee:

“Those who know Jimmy Carter best are from Georgia. That’s why we thought you ought to know …” And what followed was the viewers seeing on-screen and hearing a voice read a scroll of Georgia newspapers such as the Savannah News, the Augusta Herald and the Marietta Journal, with the announcer adding for each, ‘… endorses President Ford.”

The argument was uncomplicated. If the candidate’s neighbors and friends who have know him the longest have doubts about him, then maybe I, as a voter, ought to have a few second thoughts.

That Ford ad, not surprisingly, had no influence on Georgia voters, some 67 percent of whom voted that November for favorite son Carter. In fact, most presidential nominees, perhaps aided by hometown pride, do carry their home states — or at the very least run better there than they do nationally.

In 2008, John McCain won Arizona, just as Barack Obama carried Illinois and Hawaii. In 1984, Democrat Walter Mondale, who lost 49 states to Ronald Reagan, still won Minnesota, his home state.

Two exceptions do come to mind. In 1972, Democrat George McGovern won just over 37 percent of the national vote against Richard Nixon and also lost 49 states, including his home state of South Dakota, where the Democrat ran eight points better than he did nationally. In 2000, Al Gore by 4 percent of the vote lost his home state of Tennessee — and, with it, the White House — to George W. Bush.

The last candidate to win the White House while losing his home state was President Woodrow Wilson, who despite being re-elected failed to carry New Jersey.

Why all this could be relevant in 2012 is contained in the most recent Suffolk University poll (the same poll that in 2010 accurately forecast Republican Scott Brown’s upset win to succeed Ted Kennedy in the Senate) of voters in Massachusetts, where Mitt Romney has lived for 40 years and where he served as governor from 2003 until 2007. True, Massachusetts is a deep blue state, but Romney, according to the survey, trails Barack Obama among likely voters by a landslide 64 percent to 31 percent.

Democratic partisanship cannot fully explain why, when asked to rate Mitt Romney personally, just 32 percent of his home state electorate judges him favorably and some 60 percent of voters judge Romney unfavorably.

No presidential nominee in U.S. history has ever risked receiving such a cold shoulder on Election Day from, to paraphrase the 1976 Ford campaign, “those who know him best.”

Mitt Romney is smart, successful and exceptionally well-educated. He is by all reports a really good husband, father, grandfather and friend. He is handsome and well-spoken, not completely unimportant factors. Yet in the most recent Pew Research national survey, when voters were asked “which presidential candidate connects well with ordinary Americans,” 66 percent named Obama and just 23 percent said Romney.

One possible explanation comes from a Republican friend who compares the current campaign to an old advertising story. In an effort to corner the U.S. dog food market, a pet food CEO assembled a team of the world’s best canine nutritionists to develop the new dish and deployed the most brilliant packaging people to present the new product. He hired a crack advertising team, which created a dog food jingle half the nation was humming, and using the best sales force, got the new dog food the best shelf placement in U.S. supermarkets. Sales of the new dog food were abysmal. Nobody could explain why. The angry manufacturer was disbelieving, until his secretary leveled with him:

“The dogs don’t like the dog food.”

That may be one explanation.

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John Stossel: What I Ask of Romney and Obama

September 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Photo illustration courtesy of Donkey Hotey

The Republican Convention ended on the theme “Believe in America.” That sounded nice, but it was just another platitude. Mitt Romney‘s speech was filled with platitudes: “We will honor America’s democratic ideals. … We’re united to preserve liberty.”

Please.

Liberals and conservatives have real differences. We should state them.

America is going broke, and tough decisions must be made. To save our future, we must slow the growth of entitlements and military spending. Mitt Romney was silent about that.

Sure, “Believing in America” means individuals get to decide how to run the businesses we create. But it should also mean that we get to run the rest of our lives, too: whom we marry, what we do for recreation, what substances we ingest, how big our soft drinks are. Mitt Romney said nothing about that.

I want to believe that if Romney is elected, he will finally impose some fiscal discipline and fight to put America on a sustainable course — but his Tampa speech gave me no confidence that he would.

Instead, he pandered, saying, “As governor of Massachusetts, I chose a woman lieutenant governor, a woman chief of staff, half of my cabinet and senior officials. …”

So what? What does that have to do with America’s problems? Was that supposed to persuade people that Republicans don’t wage “war on women”? It won’t.

If conventions are mere infomercials, Republicans should at least do them well.

It’s offensive that politicians force taxpayers to pay $18.3 million to subsidize these pep rallies. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., tried to end the subsidies, saying, “There is no justification for spending public funds on booze, balloons and confetti.” He’s right. But Congress ignored him.

The Republicans did some good things in Tampa, like showing two debt clocks and allowing speakers like Ted Cruz to say, “Rights are secure only when government power is restrained.” But then Mitt Romney spoke. He said nothing of significance.

“Believing in America” means objecting when politicians claim they solve our problems. Romney said he has a “plan to create 12 million jobs.” Huh? Why not 13 million? Why not 50? Promising 12 million is an absurd conceit. When politicians say, “Yes, we can,” we should say: No, they can’t! Government fails, but individuals succeed.

The Dems are worse. What do they stand for? They say they believe in a progressive, liberal society, but to them that means a giant government that pretends to solve problems, causes new ones and then spends even more to appear to solve those problems.

I say “appear” because they never actually do it.

President Obama came in full of promises. What’s he accomplished? He expanded George W. Bush’s dangerous debt. Government spending sets peacetime records. He proposed nothing serious to bring Medicare under control. He didn’t curtail our role as world policeman — on the contrary, the administration routinely bombs several populations by remote control. Military spending continues to grow.

Here’s what I wish Obama would say this week:

“I was wrong to expand government the way I have. I overreached. Modern liberalism put us on an unsustainable course. I will save America by restoring limited government that keeps the peace but then leaves free people alone.”

Hey, I can hope.

Mr. President, like you, I believe in social justice. But I believe in Thomas Jefferson’s idea of social justice: a free society where people are unimpeded by bureaucrats and politicians; where people freely trade goods and services — that is, cooperate — without anyone telling us what to do.

It means that the government won’t engage in what Frederic Bastiat called “legal plunder”— taking resources from some (mostly working people) to bestow them on others.

That’s genuine liberalism — original liberalism. You, Mr. President, have bought into the upside-down distortion of liberalism, where government runs things (much of it on behalf of cronies — the well-heeled and well-connected) and the rest of us follow directions.

That’s not liberalism. Let’s call it what it is: corporatism, state socialism, crony capitalism. Liberalism is about liberty: individual freedom and free markets.

Only that can bring us the real hope and change that freedom represents.

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John Stossel: There Ought Not to Be a Law

August 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I’m a libertarian in part because I see a false choice offered by the political left and right: government control of the economy — or government control of our personal lives.

People on both sides think of themselves as freedom lovers. The left thinks government can lessen income inequality. The right thinks government can make Americans more virtuous. I say we’re best off if neither side attempts to advance its agenda via government.

Let both argue about things like drug use and poverty, but let no one be coerced by government unless he steals or attacks someone. Beyond the small amount needed to fund a highly limited government, let no one forcibly take other people’s money. When in doubt, leave it out — or rather, leave it to the market and other voluntary institutions.

But this is not how most people think. Most people see a world full of problems that can be solved by laws. They assume it’s just the laziness, stupidity or indifference of politicians that keeps them from solving our problems. But government is force — and inefficient.

That’s why it’s better if government didn’t try to address most of life’s problems.

People tend to believe that “government can!” When problems arise, they say, “There ought to be a law!”

Even the collapse of the Soviet Union, caused by the appalling results of central planning, didn’t shock the world into abandoning big government. Europe began talking about some sort of “market socialism.” Politicians in the United States dreamt of a “third way” between capitalism and socialism, and of “managed capitalism” — where politicians often replace the invisible hand.

George W. Bush ran for president promising a “lean” government, but he decided to create a $50 billion per year prescription drug entitlement and build a new bureaucracy called No Child Left Behind. Under Bush, Republicans doubled discretionary spending (the greatest increase since LBJ), expanded the drug war and hired 90,000 new regulators.

Bush’s increases in regulation didn’t mollify the media’s demand for still more.

Then came Barack Obama and spending big enough to bankrupt all our children. That fueled the tea party and the 2010 elections.

The tea party gave me hope, but I was fooled again. Within months, the new “fiscally conservative” Republicans voted to preserve farm subsidies, vowed to “protect” Medicare and cringed when Romney’s future veep choice, Rep. Paul Ryan, proposed his mild deficit plan.

It is unfortunate that the United States, founded partly on libertarian principles, cannot admit that government has gotten too big. East Asian countries embraced markets and flourished. Sweden and Germany liberalized their labor markets and saw their economies improve.

But we keep passing new rules.

The enemy here is human intuition. Amid the dazzling bounty of the marketplace, it’s easy to take the benefits of markets for granted. I can go to a foreign country and stick a piece of plastic in the wall, and cash will come out. I can give that same piece of plastic to a stranger who doesn’t even speak my language — and he’ll rent me a car for a week. When I get home, Visa or MasterCard will send me the accounting — correct to the penny. We take such things for granted.

Government, by contrast, can’t even count votes accurately.

Yet whenever there are problems, people turn to government. Despite the central planners’ long record of failure, few of us like to think that the government which sits atop us, taking credit for everything, could really be all that rotten.

The great 20th-century libertarian H.L. Mencken lamented, “A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. … Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general … are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.”

There is nothing government can do that we cannot do better as free individuals — and as groups of individuals working freely together.

Without big government, our possibilities are limitless.

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The GOP Wants Fewer People to Vote for Them

August 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore

The Republican primary has been over for months now but it’s hard to tell. The presumptive nominee (I’ll get to stop writing that phrase in a couple of weeks … hopefully), Mitt Romney, is still campaigning like he’s trying to convince his own party he’s Mr. Right, Mr. Right-Enough—or in his case Mr. Right…Now.

“What America is not is a collective where we all work in a kibbutz,” Romney said at a fundraiser in Chicago this week. “Instead it’s individuals pursuing their dreams and building successful enterprises which employ others and they become inspired as they see what has happened in the place they work and go off and start their own enterprises.”

America, not a collective: Not a place where people work together, according to Romney. Just a place where bosses are untethered by the shackles of pensions, environmental concerns or worker safety regulations so they can create magical towers of tax-free enterprise which “employs others.”

Willard M. Romney, the Everyman.

Romney is not trying to be popular; he’s running for president on the Republican ticket. He’s still trying to get Republicans to like him and Republicans now make up less than 35 percent of Americans. Reaching outside of their “big tent,” Romney spoke at an National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) event, and after being booed by the crowd he explained it was because the attendees at the NAACP event want free stuff. He loves free stuff (like tax-free!) but finds it distasteful in people not clever enough to borrow money from their parents for college.

Romney’s international tour was of a whopping three countries. Notably at least one didn’t boo him. In the immortal words of George W. Bush, “Don’t forget Poland!”

Romney doesn’t appear to be trying to win the support of the majority of Americans (or the world for that matter). He appears to be playing for the affections of a few key shareholders. Romney is a niche candidate of a tiny percent of Americans who think working for a living describes what your money does for you.

Let’s take stock of the groups Republicans are no longer attempting to appeal to: Wage earners. Women in their child-bearing years. People with pre-existing conditions. Unions. Public workers. The unemployed. Monogamous gay couples. The under-employed. Moderate Republicans. Muslims. Latinos. Oh and independent voters. We’re not going to see a “Romney Democrats” group pop up before November, save maybe a political wonk’s Halloween party.

Romney is nominee no one really likes. Fewer people will vote for Mitt. The only chance for a mediocre candidate to win the majority of votes is for fewer votes to be counted. Voter ID laws have become vogue in states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, South Carolina and Indiana. All of a sudden the Grand Old Party is concerned about voter fraud, even though the Republican National Lawyer Association can only point to 311 cases in the last decade. Other estimates put the number in the tens.

Way more Americans have won gold medals than have voted fraudulently. So Republicans must “fix” this non-problem (in places which just so happen to swing states/counties/districts) by making it as difficult as possible to cast a ballot.

On ABC’s This Week, Washington Post columnist George Will called early voting “deplorable” because it interferes with campaigning. The horror! You know what interferes with voting? Having a j-o-b. Early voting is the easiest way for blue-collar workers to be able to have their vote counted. Less early voting, fewer people who earn a paycheck at the polls. And that’s deplorable if you’re a Republican in the 2012 election cycle.

Republicans are working very hard to get fewer votes. Instead of stacking the deck, they’re just trying to disenfranchise all the cards who disagree with them (you know, the majority of the country). It’s a reasonable strategy as their presumptive nominee (gah!) brands himself as the small government/voting bloc candidate who likes being able to fire people.

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Traffic Jam on the Low Road

August 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

To the elected public executive running for re-election — whether mayor, governor or president — there remain just two alternative campaign strategies to victory: the High Road or the Low Road.

The High Road case for re-election goes like this: Look at all we have done together in our first term. Because of my policies and leadership, our people are more prosperous, our community is more united, and, not coincidentally, Sunday school attendance is at an all-time high.

When instead unpleasant reality intrudes and there are no bows to be taken for a long list of widely acclaimed successes, the endangered incumbent candidate resorts more often to the Low Road route to re-election. This can be prefaced with a frank admission: Look, I admit that things have not always worked out the way you and I had planned. But the Other Guy, my election opponent, is the sort of wretch who would foreclose on the Little Sisters of the Poor and get his kicks from sticking bamboo shoots under the fingernails of widows and orphans. He must be stopped!

In case you have been in a cave or in solitary for the past couple of months, the 2012 campaign is now officially a traffic jam on the Low Road.

The campaign of our last re-elected president, Republican George W. Bush, outsourced its 2004 Low Road job to a mendacious band of deep-pocketed hit men who smeared the Silver Star-worthy courage-in-Vietnam combat of Democrat John Kerry. The fraud of contemporary national campaigns is that these so-called “independent” political action committees (PACs) organized to support a candidate are anything less than an indirectly controlled subsidiary of the candidate’s own campaign.

We saw that dramatically and disgustingly this past week when Priorities USA Action, a PAC backing President Obama and headed by Bill Burton, former White House spokesman and Obama 2008 campaign operative, suggested in a TV commercial that Mitt Romney contributed to the 2006 death from cancer of Ranae Soptic, whose husband, Joe, had lost his job and health benefits in 2001 when Romney’s company Bain Capital closed down GST Steel where Joe Soptic had been employed.

The disgust to this slur was both immediate and intense. Obama campaign officials spent hours denying any control or influence over the “independent” PAC or familiarity with the Soptic family (“we don’t have any knowledge of the story of the family”) even though, just two months earlier, the Obama campaign itself had organized a conference call for reporters featuring former steelworker Joe Soptic testifying how Romney’s Bain Capital had, for a quick-buck profit, callously robbed him and his co-workers of their livelihoods and their pensions.

This is a long way from the hope and idealism of the 2008 Obama crusade that inspired millions. Four years later, disappointment is widespread even though up to now there appears to be more disaffection than defection.

Romney is no blameless victim. Personally and intensely disliked by practically every Republican who has ever run against him, he can be careless with the truth: charging, for example, that Obama has opened up “no new trade relations” with other countries in spite of the obvious facts that Obama, over the opposition of many Democrats, negotiated and won ratification of separate trade treaties with South Korea, Colombia and Panama. Still, such offenses cannot be compared to accusations of contributing to a cancer victim’s death.

The ultimate cost of the Low Road campaign is more than a dispirited and even disillusioned electorate, which it all but guarantees. The real problem is that when the down-and-dirty campaign is over, there has been no agreement reached between the voters and the leaders about what we must now do together as a nation. The only agreement reached is that the Other Guy, who lost, was somehow just worse. Precious little hope there.

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