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Posts Tagged ‘Election’
November 6th, 2018 at 11:27 am
Ramirez Cartoon: Vote
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Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

September 12th, 2014 at 10:18 am
David Horowitz: Stop Playing Nice Guy, Republicans
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In our piece this week entitled Senate Democrats and Scorched-Earth Judicial Politics , we note the way in which Senate Democrats habitually play hardball, whereas Republicans tend to play Nerf.  Disturbingly, the Democrats’ methods paid off just days ago:

Just days ago, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which Reid and Obama had packed after ending the Senate filibuster, voted to rehear en banc the Halbig v. Burwell decision from earlier this year…  The full court’s unjustified decision to rehear the case en banc not only unnecessarily obstructs and delays Supreme Court resolution, it appears to be a transparently politicized decision to rescue ObamaCare.  On that note, Harry Reid openly congratulated himself when asked whether his Senate tactics underlie this turn of events by saying, ‘If you look at simple math, it sure does.'”

Famed conservative author David Horowitz agrees in an excellent Washington Times piece today entitled “Why Nice Guys Finish Last in Politics:  Politics is War, but Some GOPers Just Don’t Get It.” His observations are worth quoting at length:

Going into the 2016 election, you can count on Republicans to stay ‘positive,’ to emphasize policy, and above all, not to hit the Democrats where it hurts.  You can also count on Democrats to do just the opposite.  Because they always do…

Democrats have a massive punch in the mouth for Republicans, and it’s always the same punch.  Republicans are painted as racists, sexists, homophobes, anti-poor, selfish and uncaring.  Note that this is a moral indictment.  It defames the character of Republicans like the corporate predator and dog-abuser Mitt Romney.  The only answer to an attack like this is to attack Democrats with an equally potent indictment of their moral character…

How difficult is it to understand this:  If you are perceived by voters as racist or even just selfish and uncaring, they are not going to have the same interest in your policy advice, as Mitt Romney found out in 2012.  Here is what Republicans need to understand to win:  Politics is street war, and there are no referees to maintain the rules – and the ones that infrequently pop up (such as CNN’s Candy Crowley during one of the last presidential debates) are there to bury you.  Attack your opponents before they attack you.  Attack them with a moral indictment;  if well-executed, it will win the day.

And remember that even if you fail to do this to them, they will certainly do it to you.  You can count on that.”

Americans can determine for themselves whether Horowitz’s advice is wise.  But they must also acknowledge that Republican presidential campaigns in recent decades have been more notable for their moderation than their tenacity, whereas the opposite is true of Democratic campaigns.  And which party has won five of the past six popular presidential votes, after the landslide Reagan and Bush victories of the 1980s?

March 4th, 2014 at 6:05 pm
Newest ObamaCare Delay Further Politicizes Medicine

The Hill is reporting that the Obama administration will extend for an additional year the ability of insurance companies to offer consumers plans that do not comply with Obamacare requirements. The current one-year extension is set to expire in October of this year, about a month before the 2014 midterm elections.

It is universally acknowledged that the reason for the extended extension is so that Democrats up for reelection can avoid having to explain to voters why the cheaper insurance plans they like are being canceled and replaced with more expensive options.

As one insurance industry source told The Hill, “I don’t see how they could have a bunch of these [cancellation] announcements going out in September, [n]ot when they’re trying to defend the Senate and keep their losses at a minimum in the House. This is not something to have out there right before the election.”

When the legality of a person’s health insurance depends on the timing of a political campaign, it’s obvious that health care has become politicized.

But while subjecting millions of Americans’ insurance plans to the expediency of a political party is certainly bad, the fact that no year seems to be a good year to fully implement Obamacare offers something like a silver lining. The whole point of terminating non-compliant insurance plans between October 2013 and January 2014 was to inflict maximum damage a year before voters went to the polls. The thinking was that other issues would eventually overshadow the anger and price spikes, allowing Democrats to avoid the consequences of entrenching their favorite policy.

Going forward, it’s hard to see how the Obama administration won’t become addicted to its own avoidance behavior. Though barred from seeking a third term in office, Obama will be under enormous pressure from Hillary Clinton and other Democratic presidential candidates, as well as members of Congress, to continue delaying enforcement until after the 2016 elections. After all, letting Obamacare go into effect will provide Republicans with a perfect campaign issue. Why not keep it off the table?

However, if that’s the tack they take it paves the way for another GOP line of attack – If Obamacare is too horrid to live with before an election, it certainly can’t be tolerated after.

After years of politicizing medicine by not enforcing its own law, the Obama administration may succeed in convincing Americans that Obamacare isn’t worth the pain it will inflict.

December 10th, 2013 at 1:48 pm
How the GOP Can Win Asian Voters

The Los Angeles Times has a fairly one-sided story reporting on the GOP’s nascent attempt to recapture Asian voters ahead of the 2014 elections.

According to the Times writer, while Asians would seem like natural Republican voters since when compared to other groups they are “wealthier and better educated than the general population and have a long tradition of entrepreneurship,” their support for government intervention and loose immigration laws has swung them towards Democrats.

The solution, implies the article, is for Republicans to become more like Democrats.

For obvious reasons I won’t address that argument. Instead, I’ll propose an alternative.

Rather than compete with Democrats over who can give away the most goodies, why not change the frame to who can remove the most obstacles to success?

It’s an open secret that elite universities impose caps on the number of Asian students they will enroll, despite the fact that Asians make up 28 percent of National Merit Finalists even though they are only 5 percent of the population.

For proof, consider the fact that over the last ten years the percentage of Asian students has plateaued at each Ivy League school suspiciously at 16 percent, while enrollment at universities using race neutral admissions procedures – e.g. UC Berkeley, UCLA and Cal Tech – boast percentages around 40 percent, in step with the Asian community’s population increase over time.

Last year, an Asian student shut out of Harvard and Princeton filed a complaint with the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights. If the findings go public, elite higher education could be exposed to some embarrassing revelations.

All this to say that Republicans – and conservatives in particular – could use the well documented discrimination against Asians in university admissions as a way to reach out to a voting bloc with a message of opportunity for hard work.

Republicans talk a lot about meritocracy and the Opportunity Society. This would be a good issue to make it real.

Let the other party tie its success to parceling out caps and quotas. Republicans can win by helping individuals help themselves.

September 24th, 2013 at 6:35 pm
ObamaCare’s Employer Mandate Delay is Purely Political

Sarah Kliff, a liberal health policy blogger at Wonkblog, explains why the Obama administration won’t delay the individual mandate like it has other elements of ObamaCare.

“…all the delays so have one thing in common: They erased political headaches for the law while barely denting the number of people that the health overhaul will cover in 2014,” writes Kilff. “The delays Republicans are asking for now would cause major political and substantive headaches for the law while sharply reducing the number of people it covers.”

The political headaches Kliff alluded to include vociferous opposition by businesses to the employer mandate. That’s because, once implemented, the employer mandate – the requirement to provide government-approved health insurance on any firm employing 50 or more full-time workers or pay a fine – will very likely result in shedding jobs to avoid compliance costs.

“This predictable employer response is a very good reason to want to postpone the mandate until after the midterm,” wrote Walter Russell Mead said when the employer mandate delay was announced this summer. “Nobody wants to run as an ally of the job-killing President whose policies led your voters’ employers to dump their health insurance.”

It’s both refreshing and appalling to see an ObamaCare cheerleader like Kliff admit that the only kind of acceptable delays are the ones that politically advantage the Obama administration.

No wonder opponents see the only real solution to ObamaCare’s metastasizing problems as repealing and starting over.

August 16th, 2013 at 1:51 pm
ObamaCare’s Voter Registration Ploy Will Spawn Lawsuits

Democratic strongholds like California, Vermont and New York have been quick to use ObamaCare’s state-based insurance exchanges as an excuse to register voters.

State officials are claiming that 1993 National Voter Registration Act (aka the “Motor Voter Act”) requires combining election prospects with health insurance, but the reality is much murkier.

To start, ObamaCare is silent on voter registration. “The health care law spans 974 pages and regulates nearly one-fifth of our economy,” Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA) wrote in a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services, “yet nowhere in the law is voter registration mentioned.”

Then there’s the Motor Voter Act itself.

As written, the law “requires states to offer voter registration at government offices, most commonly departments of motor vehicles,” explains the Detroit Free Press. “With the exchanges, which are in some ways a new kind of government office, some are questioning whether the law applies to them.”

But unlike a state’s motor vehicles department, not all ObamaCare exchanges are standard government agencies. The paper continues, “In some states, the exchange will be a nonprofit; in others it will be part of the state’s health or human services agency. And in many Republican-controlled states, the federal government will operate the exchanges.”

The lack of uniformity is already leading to differing interpretations about whether the Motor Voter Act applies, which in turn is spawning lawsuits.

With this much uncertainty leading to costly court battles, states and their taxpayers would be much better served leaving the question whether Motor Voter applies to ObamaCare for academics to debate.

The alternative is an expensive and unnecessary distraction.

March 9th, 2013 at 4:07 pm
How Gallup Poll Misfired on 2012 Presidential Election

A very well-written report at the Huffington Post details how a few decisions by Gallup administrators caused the venerable polling company to miss key pockets of support for President Barack Obama in the run-up to last November’s presidential election.

Going into Election Day, Gallup had Mitt Romney leading Obama 49-48, but the actual result was 51-47. According to analysis by HuffPost, the reason for the bad call was because Gallup’s polling methods failed to keep up with how Americans are using their telephones.  This is potentially a huge problem because calling via telephone is the primary method for contacting people for public opinion polls.

Since the number of people screening calls by using unlisted landlines and/or cell phones has risen dramatically over the last few years, polling firms who fail to find a way around the barriers run the risk of missing large segments of voters who are avoiding unsolicited calls.

It just so happens that people using unlisted numbers only (i.e. not cell phones as well) planned to vote for Obama last year by a margin of 58 to 36 percent.  But because Gallup’s methodology didn’t correctly measure this subpopulation, the company never got a chance to put this data in their polls.  Consequently, Gallup’s opinion polls did not accurately reflect the intentions of the voting public which ultimately influenced who won the presidency.

Gallup is no stranger to embarrassing poll predictions.  The famous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline from 1948 was based on polling data that stopped being collected two weeks before Election Day.  The thought was why keep polling if the predictions haven’t changed?  Of course, that decision didn’t account for the voters who broke late for Truman and made the false headline iconic.

Gallup rebounded from the fiasco to become arguably the world’s most reliable polling agency.  As the process of regaining that crown unfolds, this new breakdown is a good reminder to heed the words of the Gipper – “Trust, but verify” when it comes to public opinion polls.

November 6th, 2012 at 8:26 pm
What Happens If Gambia Loses Its Marbles?

If the voting returns remain close, and there’s a recount of paper ballots Foreign Policy reports that it could be worse:

In The Gambia, a country in West Africa, each voter is given exactly one marble, which they place in one of the large marble collecting jars that are set up for each candidate.

“The polls workers are listening because when the marble goes into the jar, there’s a ding. And if there are two dings, maybe somebody came in with extra marbles in their pocket, so they call the police,” she said.

Asked how Gambians do a recount with the marble-based voting system, McCormick said, “I have no idea.”

November 2nd, 2012 at 3:05 pm
More Evidence of Democratic Voter Fraud

Though buried at the end of an article, even the New York Times can’t hide the truth:

Still, the Republicans have had legitimate complaints, election officials say. Groups associated with the Democrats have sometimes been overly aggressive in voter registration, paying people for each voter registered or offering bonuses for larger numbers of registrations. This has led to fraud. Ms. Platten, the Democratic county elections board director, said she had seen multiple registrations for the same person whose Social Security number had been shifted by one digit.

“In the end, that hurts the Democrats,” she said, “because we throw those votes out. I’ve begged them to stop.”

Chances are they won’t, and we’ll be in for a long legal slog if the votes are close in swing states on Election Night.

September 24th, 2012 at 1:28 pm
Elizabeth Warren and the Truth about Environmental Hoaxes

Last week, in her first debate with U.S. Senator Scott Brown (R-MA), Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren tried to nationalize their contest in terms designed to solidify her support from Bay State environmentalists:

“Senator Brown has been going around the country, talking to people, saying, you’ve got to contribute to his campaign because it may be for the control of the Senate.  And he’s right.  …  What that would mean is if the Republicans take over control of the Senate, Jim Inhofe would become the person who would be in charge of the committee that oversees the Environmental Protection Agency.  He’s a man that has called global warming ‘a hoax.’  In fact, that’s the title of his book.”

To be fair to Senator Inhofe, who, as the Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works is in line to lead the panel if Republicans become the majority, the full title of his book is The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.

The hoax Inhofe describes is the use of Climategate-manipulated science to legitimize massive increases in taxes and regulation.

In its war on coal, the EPA has been at the forefront of the environmentalists’ push to tax and regulate an entire industry out of existence; most specifically by requiring coal operators to adopt expensive and experimental manufacturing techniques that are already making it necessary to lay off workers and close down plants.

By parsing Inhofe’s insight about how global warming alarmists politicize science to justify liberal policies, Warren was trying to substitute Inhofe’s complete rejection of global warming for Brown’s position on the issue.  In fact, Brown thinks global warming/climate change/something is happening.  But like Inhofe, he thinks that getting the job market growing again trumps spending billions of dollars on policies built in part on scientific fraud.

Brown shouldn’t shy away from this issue so long as he frames it correctly.  The environmental activists that Warren was playing to won’t be voting for him anyway.  But the independents that put Brown in office two years ago know that job-killing taxes and regulations don’t make sense; especially in an era of chronic unemployment.

September 14th, 2012 at 1:19 pm
Foreign Policy Does Matter in This Presidential Election

A month ago Troy’s column asked “Will Foreign Policy Still Matter in the Presidential Election?”  At the time, Mitt Romney had just picked Paul Ryan as his vice presidential running mate, and all eyes were on domestic issues like the economy and entitlement reform.

But as ever, Troy saw the big picture by reminding us that, “If recent years have taught us anything, it’s that the issues on which a presidential election are fought can be poor predictors of the ones that dominate the subsequent presidency.”

The 9/11 attacks remain the paradigmatic example.

Now, with Islamist attacks on American diplomatic outposts spreading beyond Libya and Egypt to Yemen, Sudan, and Tunisia, American foreign policy – and each presidential candidate’s view of it – is getting a workout.

It’s about time.

September 1st, 2012 at 3:26 pm
Republicans Damn Obama with Faint Praise

Jonathan Allen of Politico sums up the highly successful line of attack Republicans aimed at President Barack Obama during their nominating convention:

If Republicans landed a punch on Obama, it was the kind of strategic body blow that a skillful pugilist deploys to gain better position for the rest of the fight.

No roundhouse, no jaw-splitter, no knockout. It was the kind of shot aimed at subtly shifting momentum and softening up the opponent in a way that may not be evident to the casual observer.

Allen is right and Obama’s camp knows it.  That’s why they’ve been running a character assassination campaign against Mitt Romney – felon, murderer – instead of talking about any of the President’s accomplishments.

The simple fact is there aren’t any successes directly attributable to Obama worth talking about.  The more the Romney team can make this election a “good man, bad president” referendum on the incumbent, the more likely it is that Obama will be a one-term wonder.

July 24th, 2012 at 7:04 pm
An Answer to the Transparency Question

Victor Davis Hanson makes a modest proposal:

So how much do we wish to detour from the issues to know about the background of either candidate Romney or incumbent Obama? Some sort of compromise seems in order. If transparency is really what the public demands, and if these issues distract attention from a necessary debate over the economy, then in bipartisan fashion let us now demand full disclosure from both candidates: ten years of income tax returns from each, full and complete access for journalists to all known medical records of each, and complete release of all undergraduate and graduate grades, test scores, and other records.

Romney may not wish to release a decade’s worth of careful tax planning and investment that might reveal him to be more concerned about making money and keeping most of it than about outsourcing or foreign bank accounts. Obama may likewise be embarrassed over a prior undisclosed ailment, or a relatively unimpressive Occidental or Columbia record that would belie his media reputation as the “smartest” man ever to serve as president in the nation’s history. Perhaps for much of August we might hear that Romney had a gargantuan Swiss bank account, or more bankers in the Caribbean than we had surmised. Maybe Obama smoked more marijuana than he has admitted to or received lots of Cs and even some Ds in International Relations — grades that would make it almost impossible for most students to get into Harvard Law School.

I predict that if they do release their records, each man reinforces the central objection to his candidacy: Mitt gets hit for his money; Obama for his record.

July 5th, 2012 at 1:35 pm
Roberts’ ObamaCare Decision a Job Creator?

It’s no secret that Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion in the ObamaCare case last week is already helping President Barack Obama on the campaign trail by giving the unpopular law constitutional legitimacy.

But Fox News reports that Roberts’s opinion may also help the President make another boast: ObamaCare is a job creator.

Much bigger than the mandate itself are the insurance exchanges that will administer $681 billion in subsidies over 10 years, which will require a lot of new federal workers at the IRS and health department.

“They are asking for several hundred new employees,” Dorn said. “You have rules you need to write and you need lawyers, so there are lots of things you need to do when you are standing up a new enterprise.”

For some, though, the bottom line is clear and troubling: The federal government is about to assume massive new powers.

According to James Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, federal powers will include designing insurance plans, telling people where they can go for coverage and how much insurers are allowed to charge.

“Really, how doctors and hospitals are supposed to practice medicine,” he said.

The health department is still writing regulations, which can be controversial in and of themselves. One already written, for instance, requires insurance plans to cover contraception. It has been legally challenged by Catholic groups in a case likely to end up in the Supreme Court.

So, there are likely to be many more chapters to go in the saga of Obama’s health care law

And none of it would be possible without the Chief Justice.

June 20th, 2012 at 1:46 pm
Executive Privilege Means Obama Owns Fast & Furious

Today marks a dramatic turn in the Fast and Furious scandal with the Obama White House announcing this morning that the documents sought by House Republicans are protected from disclosure by executive privilege.

For the first time since news broke of the Department of Justice gun-walking fiasco, the President of the United States is claiming an interest in DOJ’s internal deliberations about a program that purposefully armed Mexican drug cartels and ultimately allowed a drug runner to murder a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

In the short term, the president’s announcement may make House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa’s contempt vote closer than it would have been, if some members decide that an executive privilege claim inoculates Holder from punishment.  My guess is that Obama’s announcement will embolden Republicans on the committee to go ahead with the contempt vote and give Democrats a talking point after they lose.

In the long term, today’s executive privilege claim finally elevates Fast and Furious into a surefire campaign topic for the fall.  As long as the scandal was defended as a policy decision gone bad – especially one that was until today linked to the previous Republican administration – it was unlikely that conservatives would make Fast and Furious into a campaign theme.

But now that’s changed for two reasons.  First, as of today DOJ has rescinded its claim that Bush’s Attorney General Michael Mukasey knew about Fast and Furious, thus admitting that the idea and its consequences belong completely to the Obama administration.  Second, Obama’s claim of executive privilege means that he is now claiming ownership of the program.

I suspect that the documents being withheld would make the case for the resignation or impeachment of Eric Holder or another high-ranking DOJ official.  Claiming executive privilege helps delay the reckoning, but it opens the door for Mitt Romney and others – most notably Issa and other congressional investigators – to ask White House officials directly – and President Obama indirectly – about the president’s knowledge, involvement, and approval of Fast and Furious.

Game on.

June 2nd, 2012 at 4:54 pm
Wisconsin Likes Walker, Could Boot Obama

Byron York explains why President Barack Obama is not campaigning on behalf of Tom Barrett, the Democrat running against Republican Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin’s recall election on Tuesday:

The latest poll on the recall battle shows why Obama is staying away. It’s not just that he doesn’t want to appear with a loser. Perhaps just as importantly, there is no advantage for Obama to risk his own popularity by making a high-profile visit to oppose policies that are finding increasing favor with voters.

The new poll, from Marquette University Law School, shows Walker leading Barrett 52 percent to 45 percent. Beyond the horse race, the Marquette pollsters also asked about specific elements of Walker’s reforms. It turns out some of the key elements of those policies — reforms Obama strongly opposed — are now winning the day.

Those policies include:

  • 75% of voters in favor of “requiring public employees to contribute to their own pensions and pay more for health insurance.”
  • 55% of voters in favor of “limiting collective bargaining for most public employees.”
  • 54% of voters thinking Wisconsin is better off in the long run because of the changes in state government

With these numbers and 52% of voters preferring him, Scott Walker appears likely to keep his job.  If Wisconsin voters start to apply the same poll questions to Obama’s failed economic policies – forty months of 8% unemployment, doubling the national debt in just one term in office – they’ll come to the opposite conclusion about the President.

No wonder he doesn’t want to be seen in Wisconsin.

May 18th, 2012 at 7:56 pm
Ryan: Obama Practicing ‘Lost Decade Economics’

When asked by the Washington Examiner about the policy choices facing American voters this election, Paul Ryan painted a picture of stark contrasts, beginning with the Obama Administration’s high-tax, high-spending approach:

“Those kinds of packages won’t succeed in preventing a debt crisis. We’ll pass one round of austerity, that won’t work, then the bond markets will get us, then we’ll do another round and another round, just like what Europe is going through now. We will have chosen to go on the path to decline and we’ll have a lost decade,” Ryan explained. “We see the president and his party are basically practicing lost decade economics,” he finished.

Moving to the Republican alternative, Ryan explained, “We think we have one more great chance, if the elections go the right way, to turn this thing around once and for all. And address it, the right way, up front. With real entitlement reform, restructuring these programs. Real tax reform to get back to growth. We want growth we want opportunity, we want reform, so that we fix this the American way.”

In terms of jobs and economic opportunity, it certainly has been a lost half-decade under President Obama.  Doubling down on more of the same for another presidential term would likely consign an entire generation of workers to a lifetime earnings amount much lower than their parents.

President Obama may be willing to tolerate being the first leader to see a generation of kids live below their parents’ standard of living since World War II.  (What else explains his campaign’s “Life of Julia” foolishness?)  However, my suspicion is that a majority of voters are not interested in either Lost Decade Economics or much less a lost generation of opportunity.

Good sound bites convey truth in a memorable way.  Kudos to Ryan for correctly identifying the likely result of Obama’s wasteful policies.

May 3rd, 2012 at 6:54 pm
Massachusetts’ Warren Checking All the Liberal Boxes

John Fund nails liberal Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren for being a consistent fraud.  In the last week her bid to unseat Scott Brown has taken two steps backward with the revelation that although she listed herself as a Native American for over a decade as a law professor, she – at most – is only 1/32 Cherokee; and even that connection is in dispute.

The incident confirms Warren as a practitioner of the liberal art of claiming multiple diversity status; in her case as a woman and a Native American.

Just as revealing is her decision year after year to pay Massachusetts’ lower state income tax rather than a voluntary higher rate as she insists wealthy people like her should do.

Fund’s conclusion:

Warren is free to believe that she has Native American ancestry, just as she is free to keep as much of her money as she is legally entitled to. But her choices in filling out forms are instructive. In checking the boxes claiming Native American status for so many years and in not checking the box to pay a higher state income-tax rate, she has revealed more than we need to know to brand her as yet another sanctimonious liberal who wants to have it all ways.

If Warren’s misfires keep up, Scott Brown will once again benefit from running against an unusually self-destructive liberal.

May 2nd, 2012 at 7:03 pm
Maybe Romney Should Choose Labrador for Running Mate

No, I’m not suggesting Romney atone for his past sin of strapping his family dog to his car on vacations by making a canine his running mate.  (Though most veeps at campaign time are called attack dogs.)

Rather, I’m reacting to an intriguing interview between Juan Williams and Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID), a Tea Party congressman from the Class of 2010 who also happens to be Mormon and from Puerto Rico.

He opposes the DREAM Act, but is a staunch advocate for reforming the cumbersome legal immigration process.  As Williams says, Labrador “has been involved in trying to block virtually every one of President Obama’s major legislative initiatives.”  He also “openly mused” about supporting a Tea Party challenger to Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) when it looked like Boehner might cave-in to President Obama’s demands to avert a government shutdown last summer.

As for how Labrador would advise Romney to reach out to Hispanic voters after a bruising primary season:

“I would tell, Romney, as I would tell anybody, is that we need to start talking about being a party of inclusion, we need to start talking about how we’re a, a party for legal immigration, that we actually want to reform the system so people can actually come to the United States in a legal, safe way.”

Sounds like a reasonable pitch to me.

April 30th, 2012 at 5:37 pm
GOP Convention: Ron Paul Revolution?

The Daily Caller explains the (tortured) delegate math that is giving GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul – yes, he’s still running – control of state delegations to the national convention; and with them, the ability to impact Mitt Romney’s march to the nomination.

Texas Rep. Ron Paul claimed another come-from-behind caucus victory this weekend, announcing that approximately 74 percent of the delegates to Louisiana’s state GOP convention will be Paul supporters.

Louisiana has a unique system of selecting delegates to the Republican National Convention. Twenty delegates are selected based on the results of the state’s March 24 primary and another 26 delegates are based on the outcome of the state’s caucus process.

If you’re confused it’s probably because you remember that Rick Santorum won 49 percent of the Louisiana primary vote back in February.

And that’s not the only Santorum victory that ultimately went to Paul:

Earlier this month, Paul won 20 of 24 delegates awarded by Minnesota congressional district conventions. Paul had received a significant 27 percent of the vote in the state’s Feb. 7 caucuses, but Santorum had won nearly every county in a major blowout.

According to The DC, Paul is also on the verge of winning a majority of the GOP’s delegates from Iowa, even though he came in third behind Mitt Romney and Santorum in the Hawkeye State.

Moreover, there are as many as six other states where Paul is poised to control a majority of delegates even though he didn’t win a majority of the primary votes cast in any of them.

If you, like me and perhaps Mitt Romney’s crew, considered Paul’s campaign an afterthought, it may be time to move the Veepstakes chatter to the backburner and ask a much more interesting question – What, exactly, does Mr. Paul want in exchange for his endorsement at the GOP’s Tampa convention?