The Single Chart That Can Sink Obama's Re-Election Effort

Published: Fri, 09/07/12

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In This Issue:

The Single Chart That Can Sink Obama’s Re-Election Effort By Richard C. Young
You’re Headed for a One-Term Presidency By E.J. Smith
The Labor Divide The Editors
Fire Marshal Barack By Steve Schneider
One and Done By E.J. Smith
The Warren-Obama Progressive Agenda The Editors
Things Could Be Worse! The Editors

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The Single Chart That Can Sink Obama’s Re-Election Effort

Weeks of Unemployment is a solid measure of the health of the economy and structural employment. My chart gives you a bird’s eye look all the way back to when Bob Feller pitched for the Cleveland Indians. That’s a lot of history.

Today, shockingly, you can see that Americans are unemployed at twice the historic norm in terms of number of weeks unemployed. I have been advising small business owners for nearly five decades and have never witnessed as ugly an employment scene as we have today. Mitt Romney will have no problem putting this information in front of voters. And the Obama team has zero plausible explanation beyond abject ineptitude.

The Obama administration has failed America. Income re-distribution through higher taxes is a Marxist-oriented chestnut that should have American voters grinding their teeth.

In 2008, the inept John McCain garnered 169 Electoral College votes (based on new EC count). I am going to assume Mitt Romney can win this group. For now I have omitted Missouri. Romney will then need an additional 101 EC votes to pick up the 270 total to win the presidency. At current reading, the task looks well in hand. Based on people power, I calculate that Romney can win Wisconsin (10) behind a push from Ryan, Thompson and Walker; Michigan (16) Romney stomping grounds; Ohio (18) behind Kasich and Portman; Virginia (13) behind McDonnell; and Florida (29) behind Scott, Jeb Bush and Rubio. That’s 86 add-on votes, leaving Romney only 15 votes shy of victory.

Both Bushes carried Indiana. Behind Mitch Daniels, Romney should be able to carry Indiana. Romney is now 4 EC votes shy. That leaves Iowa (6), New Hampshire (4), New Mexico (5), North Carolina (15), and Missouri (10) to provide the final EC votes to put Romney over the top. Iowa and North Carolina are Right To Work states, which can play well for Romney. A Romney victory in any one of the final five will put Romney in the White House And I am not including potential Romney state Colorado (7), which was won by the Bush team.

Keep the message focused on employment or lack there of, and Mr. Romney should sail into the White House with impunity.

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You’re Headed for a One-Term Presidency

“You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” the late Steve Jobs told President Obama. In the biography Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson writes, “[Jobs said] To prevent that . . . the administration needed to be a lot more business-friendly. He described how easy it was to build a factory in China, and said that it was almost impossible to do so these days in America, largely because of regulations and unnecessary costs.”

Kimberley Strassel of The Wall Street Journal writes, “Voter backlash to the president’s liberal policies gave Republicans the House in 2010, but the more immediate effects were in the states. Of the 29 current Republican governors, 21 have taken office since 2010. Midterm voters also gave the GOP unified control of 26 state legislatures, providing their newly elected leaders the firepower to pursue their reform agendas.”

Since President Obama took office, Indiana has become the 23rd right-to-work state and doesn’t appear ready to vote for him a second time. Indiana is an island oasis for business, surrounded on all sides by forced-union states. It’s hard to believe that in this country there are 27 states where you can be forced to join a union as a condition of your employment.

But what’s deceiving about the right-to-work states is that collective bargaining in the public sector is allowed in 16 of them. That means collective bargaining in the public sector is allowed in 43 states. It’s no wonder that 37% of public-sector union employees belong to a union, compared to only 7% in the private sector.

That leaves only seven states that are right-to-work and that have laws on the books preventing collective bargaining in the public sector: Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. Surprisingly, two of these freedom-loving states—North Carolina and Virginia—voted for Obama in 2008.

I’m sure the jobless in Charlotte, North Carolina, are aware of the success BMW is having just an hour and a half south on I-85 in open-for-business South Carolina. Let’s not forget Obama’s National Labor Relations Board attack on Boeing in South Carolina, which I’m sure rubbed a lot of workers the wrong way in neighboring North Carolina. The unemployment rate in North Carolina has remained above the national average during the Obama tenure. Those looking for work should be the ones protesting at the Democratic convention this week.

Business owners in Virginia won’t forget President Obama’s “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that” speech in Roanoke. As our friend, a business owner in Virginia, said in an email to Richard C. Young, “Dick, what a shame. Here we are in the land of Thomas Jefferson and this guy can get the slack-jawed fools to cheer at his every word. It’s good to know that the government was there to help me when we were starting the company. I left Connecticut in no small part because of the barriers they set up in the form of high taxes and pro-union politics. If this guy gets back in office, we are [%^$&$#].”

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The Labor Divide

The election of 2012 is shaping up to be a battle between the public sector and the private sector. Big government versus small business. The support of blue-collar union labor could decide the outcome of the election. Will union employees support their public sector comrades or the businesses that keep them employed?

In 2011, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie came together with New Jersey Senate President Stephen Sweeney to reform that state’s pension and healthcare laws. Sweeney shunned public sector union pleas for him to maintain the status quo. But Sweeney isn’t a union buster; he’s an agent for the Ironworkers union. Sweeney and other local private sector union members around the country are rightly asking themselves why they should pay more in taxes each year to support their public-sector comrades and coming away with the answer that they should not.

Private sector union membership has been falling for decades. One contributor to that decline has been the rise of public sector unions, which in turn have supported larger government. Bigger governments require higher taxation and borrowing, thereby robbing the private sector of capital and driving manufacturing and other traditionally union dominated labor out of the country to less expensive locales. After this inevitable chain of events, is it any wonder many private sector union members supported Governor Scott Walker’s reform of public sector union contract law in Wisconsin?

In 2012, private sector union workers will need to decide whether or not they are going to support ever-larger government budgets that demand higher taxation from them or support an end to the Obama administration’s reign of fiscal terror. Perhaps Mitt Romney chose Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate to appeal to the blue-collar union members he will need to win the presidency. Ryan, who has won elections in a district where the UAW is a major force, seems to appeal to independent voters.

America’s taxpayers are on the hook for what public-sector unions are paid. Voters need to elect public advocates who will fight for the smallest, most efficient government possible.

>> read more

Fire Marshal Barack

“Don’t worry folks, I’m a Fire Marshal”

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One and Done

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The Warren-Obama Progressive Agenda

The progressive senate candidate from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, spoke at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night. Her speech was a view through the lens of the progressive wing of the Democrat Party. Warren has been disingenuously criticizing Senator Scott Brown, her opponent, as inflicting a “war on women.” Hypocritically, Warren began her speech by kowtowing to former President Bill Clinton. After completing her praise, Warren began a tirade against the free market, claiming that hardship befalls normal folks because “the game is rigged against them.”

You may recall Obama’s “You didn’t build that” speech. Warren originated the theme, and it has become the progressive rallying call of 2012. According to Warren, Obama, and the progressives they represent, Americans should be grateful that government allows them to succeed. But in truth everything the government has, has been taken from hardworking Americans. Citizens owe the government nothing.

During a meeting at a supporter’s home in 2011, Warren urged Americans to acquiesce to new taxes.

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there – good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea – God Bless! Keep a Big Hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Warren continued the theme in her DNC speech.

President Obama believes in a country where we invest in
education, in roads and bridges, in science, and in the future
so we can create new opportunities so the next kid can make it
big and the kid after that and the kid after that, that’s what
President Obama believes.

(APPLAUSE)

And that’s how we build the economy of the future. An
economy with more jobs and less debt, we root it in fairness.
We grow it with opportunity. And we build it together.

What does the Marxist-tinged Warren/Obama progressive agenda mean for average Americans? If you put the words “and we build it together” into the progressives’ translator, what you actually get is “you pay more taxes.”