Freedom Line Blog

Romney takes it. Here’s why. Video from WKRG-TV in Mobile, AL.

Mitt Romney will win this election, 284-254.

My columns and blog posts here and at The American Spectator show a steadily improving Mitt Romney, growing into the persona of a president.

I liked his choice of Paul Ryan, here. And here.

Here I praised Romney’s policy stances. And here I defended his criticism of the Obamites’ early statements apologizing for the video.

But Romney the candidate still had a ways to go. That’s why I damned his convention acceptance speech with faint praise. And I criticized his “messaging” too — just hours before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in Africa. But Romney then stepped up his game, and I noticed.

And here I defended his criticism of the Obamites’ early statements apologizing for the video.

Meanwhile, I continued flaying Obama. And I wrote that Romney’s image (first few graphs) did not do justice to his potential to be an excellent president:

Let there be no mistake: Gov. Romney is by all believable accounts a man of great personal decency and generosity, and there can be no doubt about his competence as an administrator and organizational leader. Mere money changers might get rich pushing financial paper, but Romney’s history is different: He put both money andexpertise into real goods and services, acting not just as a bettor on somebody else’s skills but instead as an abettor of other people’s dreams, using his own management skills as a force multiplier for sales, profits, and, yes, new jobs. His Bain Capital company did not just trade financial capital; it invested human capital in a way that allowed other human capital to flourish in abundance.

I also noted Romney’s great personal charitableness. And, just when the polls and momentum were the worst for Romney, two days before the first debate, I wrote that he still could turn it around. The next day, the day before the debate, I let a Volleyball Mom make the case for Romney. (Of course, Romney won the debate.) A week after that, Volleyball Dad channeled Tug McGraw to say that fans of Romney “gotta believe!”

We now look at Mitt Romney, and we see a man who understands the enterprising nature of American people who value just such freedom to pursue their own, self-chosen goals. We see a winning candidate who aspires to unleash the energy of the entrepreneur, and who inspires the great capabilities and patriotism of the most accomplished Olympians. We see a leader who has known tremendous success and wants to share it — to use his knowledge of how success is gained in ways that enable us to find that success for ourselves, by emulation but not by regimentation. And we see a soon-to-be president who will not — nay, never — be intent on “transforming” us into a nation of his own fevered imagination, but who will instead be determined to create the conditions where we can improve the America we already love, through our own choices, to fulfill our own visions.

I also thought Romney effectively gained ground in the second debate. (But I again criticized him for leaving some issues unmentioned, as I had done a few days earlier as well.)  And in part at least in the third debate, too, largely due to his better closing argument.

Longtime Romney foe Deroy Murdock noted all the kind things Romney has done, and I chimed in here about “Mitt the Nice.” Finally, in Pensacola, Romney absolutely soared.

Here’s how I concluded that last linked column, which is about as good a place to end this blog post as I can find:

This was a candidate not just “hitting his stride,” but rather one elevating his own game and elevating the entire campaign’s sense of what American aspirations should be. Gov. Romney suddenly has the look and feel both of a winner and, more importantly, of a true leader, worthy of the nation he would serve. Turn on the lights; the good work is just beginning.

Cross-posted at AmSpec with additional commentary, I have a column up right now at USA Today that looks into what might be the most horrid tax in ObamaCare.

I think I understand correctly that this link, right here, will not suffice for readers to watch this 48-minute documentary called “The Machine,” unless you subscribe to The Blaze TV. BUT… BUT… There IS a free two-week trial, so that helps. Anyway, what this is is a 48-minute -long indictment of the Obama/Holder Justice Department and a warning against vote fraud. It is superbly produced. It is marred only by my presence in it throughout as one of the interviewees.

In addition to interviewing me at some length, the documentarians interviewed DoJ whistleblowers J. Christian Adams and Christopher Coates (who are the heroes of the piece), columnists John Fund and Thomas Sowell, and the Rev. C.L. Bryant, among others. The documentary chronicles the corrupt and racialist (not racist, but racialist) agenda of Eric Holder and his Justice Department minions — and it is rather explosive, I do believe.

Again, it’s 48 minutes long, but you might find it well worth watching.

Polls show great public approval for Barack Obama’s “handling” of Superstorm Sandy. I see nothing other than a president doing his job… plus a little posturing. Now, how do I know it’s posturing? Because his supposedly grave concern now is belied by his past actions when responding to disasters.

When Nashville suffered horrific flooding in 2010, where was Obama? Nowhere to be found. He certainly didn’t visit, and didn’t do much to urge the rest of the country to come to Nashville’s aid.

Where was Obama when Hurricane Isaac devastated several parishes in Louisiana?  Unfortunately, making racial issues out of hurricane response is a favorite pastime of the President’s…and despite his earlier standard of the imperative of “waiving the Stafford Act,” he still refuses to waive the Stafford Act for Isaac victims.

When the BP oil spill happened, even James Carville blasted Obama’s apparent lack of interest or energy in responding, and Obama was quickly at loggerheads with Gov. Bobby Jindal, and he proceeded to defy even Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu by putting a moratorium and then still slow-walking permits on new Gulf drilling — in defiance of a federal judge’s order, so egregiously that the Obama administration was found officially in contempt of court.

Of course, in a disaster in large part of the administration’s own making (a sin of omission of course, not commission — by repeatedly declining requests for more security), Obama or someone on his team refused to send assistance to the consulate in Benghazi, Libya even as a terrorist firefight continued there for seven hours while Americans were in danger, and then his team falsely blamed the attack on a video and otherwise tried to pretend it was anything but an Al Qaeda or terrorist effort, and continues to stonewall/engage in a horrific cover-up about what truly happened.

All of these failures in disaster response contrast with Mitt Romney’s record of immediately taking charge to find (successfully) the lost/kidnapped child of an associate — and to rescue people whose watercraft sank on Lake Winnepesaukee, and otherwise to respond forcefully and or thoughtfully and from the heart to numerous other personal tragedies suffered by both friends and strangers.

So, excuse me for being cynical about Obama’s “great” response to Sandy. When an election is on and his momentum is slowed, he does well for the cameras. Otherwise, he just can’t be bothered.

Read about it here.

All over the country, there are reports of problems getting ballots to military personnel and contract civilians working abroad. This has been a problem for two years, largely because the Obama administration refuses to fully enforce the law requiring a certain set of procedures to help the ballots get there on time, etctera.

Last week, I was on local WKRG-TV to talk about this.

This continues my work on this; two years ago, I was on Fox News several times to discuss these problems.

This refusal/failure on the administration’s part is an outrage.

Well worth a quick read, from the policy director for the long-term Katrina-relief efforts.

If somebody ran a poll question like that, the crazies would be out yelling about “racism” at the top of their lungs. Today, though, CNN ran a viewer poll asking: Why do so many white voters oppose Obama? Really? Really? Yes, really.

So who is it, after all, who is playing the race card?

Look, is it more remarkable that about 59 percent of white voters oppose an incumbent president during a time of a lousy economy and several deathly scandals abroad (Libya, Mexico), or that 97 percent of black voters support the incumbent during such a time?

Why is the onus always on the white votes to explain why they “oppose” a president who happens to be black?

This is sickening. CNN should be ashamed.

Columnist Deroy Murdock has been very, very tough on Mitt Romney for the past five years, but today he finds a slew of heartwarming stories about the former Massachusetts governor.

Well worth a read.

In light of yesterday’s column, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley helpfully weighs in on the RESTORE Act, here:

The Alabama Gulf Coast experienced significant environmental and economic harm from the BP oil spill. BP and the other responsible parties must be held accountable for those damages. The Restore Act gives state and local officials the power and the responsibility to use BP money to most effectively restore both the environmental and economic strength of our region. Governor Bentley supports and appreciates Congress’s desire to see these decisions made at the state and local level. While both NRDA and the Clean Water Act are critical tools for recovery from the BP oil spill, the Governor will oppose any effort by the federal government or by BP to undermine the principle of local control by artificially reducing the amount of money that flows through the Restore Act.

An absolutely brilliant ad, in 15 seconds.

At the University of Mobile’s Center for Leadership, I review the record showing that limited government leads to stronger economies. There much more in the column than the following passage, but here’s a taste:

Indeed, historians are hard-pressed to show any time in American history when major domestic-discretionary spending growth actually generated a stronger economy. But when Reagan cut discretionary spending in the 1980s, combined with his tax cuts, the economy did superbly. When the Newt Gingrich Congress passed major spending cuts in 1995-96, the economy again boomed.

I agreed with multiple focus groups last night, and not with the narrow margins pro-Obama in the straight polls, that Romney emerged from the debate last night in a slightly better position than he went in.

In short, he won. He is now in decent shape to eke out a victory.

That said, I think he and his campaign have committed serious political malpractice by not repeatedly and effectively attacking Obama on ObamaCare, either in the debates or in commercials or in TV interviews. It should be especially easy to blast the dozen-plus taxes on the middle class within ObamaCare (including the quasi-tax of the individual mandate, which remains deeply unpopular) — and not just easy but downright simple to blast him on the medical device tax, to which I keep referring in multiple posts and columns here and elsewhere. Of the many, many, many, many opportunities and issues the Romney campaign has left lying on the table, unused, this is the one with the least complications, the most levels of upside, and the least (meaning zero) downside.

Again, I do think Romney has won both debates. I do think he has a slightly better chance now than Obama does to win this election (my last “forced count” had him at 272 electoral votes to 266 for Obama, but that changes every other day). I think his campaign overall is far sharper than it was a month ago.

But Lord Almighty, how can he fail to take advantage of such a big Obama weakness?

Repeat after me: “ObamaCare puts a major punitive tax on pacemakers, asthma inhalers, insulin pumps, and prosthetic limbs like those that make such a difference to our wounded warriors. Even former Democratic Senator Evan Bayh has written that the tax already is costing hundreds of jobs, not to mention all of the negative health effects on people the tax will hurt. Where’s the compassion in that?”

Come to think of it, maybe the wounded warrior aspect of this will give Romney an opening in the “foreign policy” debate……

Good news and bad news about the movie Atlas Shrugged II. The bad news first.  Samantha Mathis is, alas, nowhere near as good a Dagny Taggart as Taylor Schilling was in part one of the movie saga. Mathis tries hard, but she just doesn’t come off as tough enough, as angular enough, as enough of a force of nature, as Dagny needs to be. Schilling, in the first flick, got it pretty darn well, although she wasn’t perfect. Jason Beghe is okay in the new one as Hank Rearden, although not quite as good as the very, very good Grant Bowler in the first one. And so on down the line, with all the actors in the second not quite living up to (or badly failing to live up to in a few cases) what were surprisingly decent performances in the first, and with the plot not moving anywhere near as insistently or smartly as the plot in the first. (One note: While the actor playing the evil Wesley Mouch in the second doesn’t quite fit the book’s version of Mouch the way the first actor did, he DOES add a useful dimension: Take away the gray, and he has looks remarkably similar to Tom Perez, the dishonesty and ill-motivated head of the civil rights division in the corrupt Obama/Holder Justice Department. He also is believable a bad, bad dude. It’s sort of creepy.)

Matter of fact, in rewatching the first one the night before I watched part II, I found it remarkably effective.

But, on to Part II: As in the first flick, part II does a superb job of attacking statism. So much of what it portrays, with remarkable faithfulness to Ayn Rand’s novel, is frighteningly similar to things we see these days from Obama Land. It is easy to imagine a “State Science Institute” under Obama with outsized and illicit power. It is easy to see Obama’s team pushing various pieces of legislation outlawing forms of economic competition, freezing wages and prices and even job status, and doing all sorts of other things the bad guys do in Atlas Shrugged II. So much of the rhetoric from the statists in the fictional account is so similar to the rhetoric from statists in real life in the United States that one cannot help but see the slope down into tyranny as a very real possibility.

I don’t think a lot of Americans will see the movie, but anybody who does see it who isn’t already convinced of the evils of statism should come away from the movie with a newfound appreciation for liberty. And while the movie isn’t a thrill a minute, it does definitely hold one’s interest and does definitely provide decent entertainment value. Indeed, my wife and I both found it more entertaining, more worth seeing, than the vast majority of what Hollywood turns out these days.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I am no Randian. I do not come anywhere near her in terms of faith: I am a devout Christian; she is an atheist. I utterly reject her rejection of philanthropy, compassion, etcetera. I do not worship the dollar, or even make a fetish of it. I find a great deal of her philosophy to border on being monstrous. And I utterly reject her idea of people of talent going “on strike” in order to let the world collapse and then pick up the pieces.

In short, I do not agree with many of Rand’s prescriptions. But I DO agree, wholeheartedly, with many of her diagnoses of statist ills, dangers, and evils. Her version of a dystopia is far too close to today’s emerging realities to be comfortable. Her warnings are well worth hearing, even if she then prescribes snake oil rather than the best, most effective medicine.

All of which is a diversion from the main point of this post: First, please do go rent part one of Atlas Shrugged, the movie. Then go to the theater to see Atlas Shrugged II, and bring a “swing voter” friend or two.

All of you will enjoy it, and your friends might be swayed in the direction of freedom.

You can’t make this stuff up. You just can’t.

Deroy Murdock has an absolutely devastating column detailing the depth of the Obama administration’s irresponsibility and dishonesty leading up to and following the murder of four Americans in Libya last month. You just have to read this whole piece.

Great two paragraphs:

[Former security officer Eric Nordstrom ultimately concluded that “we were not going to get resources until the aftermath of an incident. And the question that we would ask is again, ‘How thin does the ice need to get until someone falls through?’”

These inconvenient truths would have obviated Team Obama’s “bin Laden is dead, al-Qaeda is comatose” reelection theme. Thus, the same government that apparently leaks secrets to make the president look tough evidently oozed falsehoods to keep him from looking weak.

This is not, not, not a prediction, but rather an analysis of where I think the presidential race stands right now. In other words, if the election were held today, this is how I see it.

Right now, I have Obama/Biden getting 237 electoral votes, and Romney/Ryan getting 235, with 66 electoral votes in states I consider true toss-ups. Wow. Could not be closer.

Now, some may fault me for this part of it, but I have Florida leaning Romney rather than toss-up. I’ve always thought Romney would win Florida. On the flip side, I still have Pennsylvania and Michigan leaning Obama, even though I really do think Romney has a shot at nabbing one of them. But his shot at them is no better than Obama’s shot at Florida. Still, in the states where I do have debatable leaners, Romney’s chances for surprises in his favor have 36 electoral votes, vs. Obama’s chances at just 29. So in the iffy leaners, Romney’s chances for growth are greater.

Now, among other leaners, I still think Romney has outside chances of surprising in Oregon, New Mexico, and Connecticut, all of which I place now in Obama’s hands. On the other side, the pro-Romney leaners that are at least long-shot options for Obama are just two: Missouri and Montana. Romney’s pick-up chances in this category are 18 electoral votes, Obama’s just 13. Again, slight advantage Romney.

Now, of the 66 EV toss-up states, here is the breakdown:

Virginia, 13 EV: All along I have thought Obama would pull out Virginia, but things are looking far better for Romney there than I had anticipated. I continue to make this a true, dead-even toss-up. Not even a tiny advantage to either side.

Ohio, 18 EV: If somebody had me in a head-lock and forced me to say how this would go, I’d say Obama, by the slimmest of margins.

New Hampshire, 4 EV: Same headlock, different result. My gut says Romney takes it.

Wisconsin, 10 EV: My head says absolute toss-up, my gut says Romney.

Colorado, 9 EV: I really think Romney will take this one, but I had it as toss-up just to be on the safe side.

Nevada 6 EV: I think Obama will take this one, but the “safe side” analysis applies.

Iowa, 6 EV: Head says true toss-up; stubborn polls say probably Obama; gut strongly says Romney. Put it with VA in the true toss-up category.

Result, of the ones I have labeled toss-ups, if I were to go on a limb, I’d give 24 EV to Obama (Ohio and Nevada), 23 EV to Romney (Colorado, New Hampshire, Wisconsin), and 19 still absolutely unsure (Iowa and Virgina).

So, to do all the math and allocate all the leaners and even the leaners-rated-tossups the way I have done (noting that Romney has slightly more “surprise” chances among leaners than Obama does), we come out to 261 Obama, 258 Romney, with Iowa and Virginia outstanding. Iowa alone would put neither over the top. Virginia would win it for either one. So, if the election were held today, I’d say that whoever wins Virginia will win it all.

But it’s tighter than two peas in a pod inside one of those freezer bags where the air has been completely siphoned out.

I had a big story today at the Daily Caller about how Barack Obama first was directly told that the Bush administration was releasing federal money to Louisiana post-Katrina and letting LA use that same federal money as the Stafford Act “match” for the rest of the federal recovery money — in other words, that the locals actually put up not one red cent — but declared himself unsatisfied even with that. THEN he, Obama, voted AGAINST a bill that provided Katrina recovery funds while waiving the Stafford Act. Then, in the now-infamous Hampton University speech, he blasted Bush for not waiving funds that Bush already had de facto waived and that the Senate then had waived while Obama had voted against the bill providing the waiver.

NOW, with Obama as president, he has REFUSED to waive the Stafford Act for LA victims of Hurricane Isaac.

One’s head spins at the multiple hypocrisies.

But now I would like to hash out some details. It is true, as Media Matters has reported, that Obama had voted for an alternative version of the Katrina relief bill that also waived the Stafford Act “match” requirements. The overall bill provided not just Katrina relief but also provided for better military support related to the war in Iraq. Obama voted for a bill that did all that while requring a specific timeline for troop withdrawal for Iraq, and issued a statement saying he had voted against the bill that actually did pass because it provided for no such timeline. But this is not a good excuse; in fact it raises serious questions about his judgment.
Why?

Because Obama’s desired timeline requirement would have been imposed just as the famously successful “Surge” in Iraq was going on and in a key phase. The timeline would have undermined the Surge. And Obama’s holier-than-thou intransigence wasn’t popular even among the anti-war crowd in his own party in the Senate: The bill that passed without a timeline did so by an 80-14 vote, including overwhelming support among Democrats.

Among those liberal Democrats who voted for the bill waiving the Stafford Act, despite its lack of an Iraq timeline, were Joe Biden, Richard Durbin of Obama’s home state of Illinois, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Majority Leader Harry Reid, and West Point graduate Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a military procurement expert who had voted against authorizing military activities in Iraq in the first place.

By the time of the vote, of course, Obama was running for president. He was obviously playing up his timeline thing as a sop to the liberal base of his party for presidential primary purposes; while most Democrats, as we have seen, obviously thought it irresponsible to vote against the bill that actually passed just in order to make a point — an ill-timed, indeed dangerously timed point — about wanting to pull the troops home.

In short, Obama’s explanation doesn’t mitigate against the charge of hypocrisy; it just adds irresponsibility on top of the hypocrisy.

Michael Barone has a superb column about the serial law-breaking by Barack Obama:

Campaigns aren’t allowed to accept donations from foreigners. But it looks like the Obama campaign has made it easier for them to slip money in. How much foreign money has come into the Obama campaign? Schweizer and Boyer say there’s no way to know.

The campaign, as my former boss pollster Peter Hart likes to say, always reflects the candidate. A campaign willing to skirt the law or abet violations of it reflects a candidate who, as president, has been doing the same thing.

Examples abound….

Barack Obama was a lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. But he seems to take the attitude familiar to me, as an alumnus of Yale Law School, that the law is simply a bunch of words which people who are clever with words can manipulate to get any result they want.

In public speeches he has defended such policies by shouting, “We can’t wait!” The results are good, or at least politically convenient, so why be held back by a few words written on paper?

The Constitution was written by men who had a different idea…..

This column has a devastating compendium of examples. More amazingly, much of Obama’s law-breaking has been to implement policies that are or should be unpopular. There’s no good reason for Mitt Romney not to “call him out” on them.