Freedom Line Blog

Mets fans and Phillies fans in particular might like my American Spectator column today, wherein a Volleyball Mom channels her husband channeling Tug McGraw. Said Volleyball Mom:

And my husband kept saying that we need to be like Tug, that we ‘gotta believe.’ We gotta believe Romney’s gonna win. We gotta believe the country isn’t doomed. We gotta believe the Constitution still matters. Gotta believe, gotta believe, gotta believe. …

And, wrote I:

Ya gotta believe Romney will win because citizens are tired of crushing debt, high energy prices, a large drop in household net worth, and several downgrades of the federal government’s credit ratings.

But Americans believe in more lasting things, and more positive things, than a mere need to stop bad times and bad tidings. We hold dear some noble ideals, noble ideas, and noble aspirations. Ya gotta believe — we gotta believe — in some of the great truths recognized in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers. We should believe them not because they are recognized in those great documents, but because they already were truths before the writers of those documents had the wisdom to recognize them, and because they remain true today and always will…..

In light of yesterday’s release of a video of a race-baiting Barack Obama seemingly at odds with the image of a “post-racial” president that has been so carefully constructed, it is worth again looking at more evidence that there is a “real Obama” that most of the public just doesn’t know. A few weeks back, the Washington Examiner did a lengthy series on the subject, well worth a read. Read through the ten-part series to find how he earned big money defending a slumlord AGAINST poor people who the slumlord turned out of housing in below-zero temperatures … and about how Obama in the state Senate and as president made a habit of funneling government money to cronies of his, who in turn rained down campaign cash on “The One.” And much, much more. Great stuff.

That’s what Curt Levey of the excellent Committee for Justice recommends in an insightful op-ed today. Well worth a read, both for its analysis and for its advice to Romney. If I get a chance this evening or tomorrow, I will add my own thoughts on this topic in a subsequent post here.

Robert Costa at NRO has a great column out today about what the Romney insiders hope their candidate accomplishes in tomorrow’s debate. Excellent reporting, interesting content.

But I am moved to make the same point Jonah Goldberg of NRO made a few days ago:

[T]he Romney campaign is shaping up to be something special. It seems to be part of their strategy never to miss a chance to tell the press why they’re doing what they’re doing. … The Romney campaign is so careful not to distract the voters with actual ideas and arguments — or, heaven forbid, ideology — that it seems at times determined to run on stage directions alone.

Why is anybody inside or close to the campaign coming anywhere near telling outsiders what they hope Romney accomplishes in the debate and how he intends to do it? Unless this is all a clever misdirection play (which I seriously doubt), this lets the Obama team know exactly what to prepare for. It’s as if a head football coach did an interview before a big game and said: “Well, we really want to blitz a lot on defense, because we aren’t really satisfied with our pass rush without the blitz; and on offense, you can expect to see a lot of play-action passes because we want them to think we’re running when we’re really gonna throw the ball…. Oh, and by the way, we’ve also been practicing lots of screen passes.”

Imagine if Ronald Reagan’s team had said in advance of the second Mondale debate that everybody should be looking for a good one-liner to deal with the “age issue.” How stupid would that have been?

If I were Romney, I would send an edict to his entire team that they are no longer allowed to discuss anything about campaign strategy, tactics, “positioning,” or the like. Problem is, once he put out such an edict, the next report leaked through “friendly” media outlets would be about how bold a step Romney just took by ordering all of his advisors not to talk about campaign tactics, and about how they expect the no-tactics strategy to bolster the campaign’s standing with part-time self-employed Hispanics in Colorado……

I didn’t say it; Pat Caddell did. He has a darn good point — or, rather, a number of darn good points, about the perfidy of the press, the weakness and fecklessness of the GOP establishment, and, using the exact phrase I first heard used by my friend, columnist Deroy Murdock, way back when he was in college, about how Mitt Romney has a proclivity to “dare to be cautious.”

Please click through to that link. Great stuff.

Last week two different outlets were kind enough to invite me on their news shows. In these interviews, I explained why I think Romney has fallen slightly behind, and how I think he can start to turn it around. First, on the Christian Broadcasting Network, which generously interviewed me for about 3 minutes, 45 seconds, I give my fullest advice, which I can boil down to this: Connect the dots better. Here, my part starts at the 7:59 mark.

Chris Stirewalt’s “Power Play” show on Fox News Online also gave me some air time. The key part of Chris’ introduction of my segment starts at precisely the 10-minute mark, and I myself come on air here at the 10:40 mark.

So I’m not the greatest TV guy, not great with short sound bites — but please watch and see if I got my main points across.

It’s amazing how many different styles, lengths, and messages are part of the new political ad landscape. Here’s an example that goes beyond the usual 30-second or 60-second spot, into a 270-second segment. Fairly impressive stuff. Also worth noting is the strong appearance by former Democratic Congressman Artur Davis. I don’t know why the Romney campaign doesn’t make more use of him.

This phenomenon of new ad approaches, from a purely neutral standpoint, is well worth watching. How well will these new approaches work? I bet some of them work well…..

John Podhoretz wrote the column I was intending to write. “[T]he release of these tax records,” wrote Podhoretz, “leaves no doubt about one thing: Mitt Romney is an extraordinarily, remarkably, astonishingly generous man. A good man. Maybe even a great man.”

Well, yes.

The media kvetching about Romney’s tax returns is so misplaced as to be sickening. The story isn’t that Romney paid “only” 14.1 percent of his income in taxes. The story is WHY that rate was comparatively low. The measure of a man isn’t how much he pays in taxes; some of us, after all, think that much of the money paid in federal taxes is wasted. If I had a million dollars and a choice of whether to let the feds spend it or to give it to a charity I trust, I would give it to a charity without a second thought. The charity will do more good with it than the feds will. More people will benefit, and the benefits will be more lasting.

For the idiotic media (forgive the redundancy there) to carp about the “low” taxes is for them to buy into the notion that tax-paying is somehow noble while (and this is a really strange but growing sub-belief on the left) that charitable giving is somehow selfish. How twisted! How morally depraved.

For Mitt Romney to have donated so much money to charity is indeed a mark of his great decency as a human being. I welcome the comparisons with the Gores’ and Bidens’ pathetically low amount of giving, and with Bill Clinton trying to claim a tax deduction for the donation of used underwear (yuck!). (Yes, Clinton really did that — or at least Hillary did, with regard to Bill’s used underwear. But this was before anybody might have wanted to test it in a lab….)

Romney, a private man, apparently has been donating huge amounts to charities long, long before he ran for public office. These donations are those of the heart, not of a cynical mind. It’s about time he gets some credit for it.

The University of Mobile held a “Constitution Day” event this week to celebrate the 225th anniversary of the great document’s signing, with me emceeing an address by and discussion with the superb federal appellate court judge William H. Pryor, in front of university students plus 120 pupils from nearby high schools. It inspired me to write this column. A sample passage:

The United States and its Constitution serve as one big laboratory of republican government. When the Constitution was written, most of the world’s people thought true republics were by their very nature unstable, destined to be short-lived and to lead to either anarchy or tyranny. The men of Philadelphia, and then the American people who put into practice the system the founders designed, proved otherwise. Indeed, we continue to prove that representative democracy works. It can assure freedom, ensure a high degree of justice, and promote societal stability, simultaneously.

It remains for us to make sure that we ourselves in the United States do not let down our guard. Just because our Constitution has worked for so long does not mean, in the words of the title of a famous book on the Constitution, that our government is “a machine that would go of itself.”  The Constitution only provides a framework by which American citizens can protect our liberties; The Constitution does not do the work all by itself.

Great advice for Romney, to save his floundering campaign.

The release of the four-month-old video of Mitt Romney saying some monumentally stupid and insensitive things (note the plural) drives home this point: This candidate needs help. He doesn’t “get it,” his campaign folks don’t get it, and his own strongest supporters probably don’t get it either. He needs outsiders to come in and slap him upside the head (figuratively speaking). He did bring in an outsider in the superb Pete Wehner, but then jettisoned Wehner’s big speech draft without so much as a nod toward the idea that ANYbody else has actual ideas worth actually talking about.

I could name about a dozen people who could help set Romney on the right track. For what it’s worth, I (egotistically) volunteer myself. I have some good experience on this front, and what Romney needs is somebody who isn’t in awe of him and certainly who won’t toady to him.

Of course, that’ll never happen. But what should happen is that they should call in SOMEbody to shake things up. Otherwise, the Romney campaign will continue to represent the unbearable lightness of being — and it will lose.

Ashton, citing Troy earlier, writes that foreign policy definitely matters in an election. I agree with both of them. That is one reason I thought Jon Kyl should be on the short list for Veep, and why I insisted, against all common wisdom, that Rick Santorum should also be considered. Romney definitely could use somebody with acknowledged “chops” on foreign and defense matters right now. (I hasten to add that I remain THRILLED that Ryan is the running mate; I think he is absolutely terrific, but just for other reasons.)

But here is where I am going to suggest that Romney throw a real long ball. I have been thinking of this all year, no matter who the nominee was; indeed, I have thought of it in past presidential cycles too, but never decided it would be a useful game changer… until now.

I think Romney should choose, and publicly name, who his Secretary of State will be. I don’t think this has ever been done before, pre-election, so it would attract a ton of attention — and, since obviously Romney would choose whomever he chooses with an eye both on competence and on the political advantages the person would offer (in terms not of electoral votes or anything crass like that, but in terms of demonstrating good executive judgment on Romney’s part for making such a wise choice), the attention would almost all be of the positive sort.

Romney could then, in effect, outsource almost all statements on foreign affairs to the Sec. State-designee, who surely could run rings around the Obamites every time he/she goes on the air as a Romney surrogate.

At least a half dozen names suggest themselves as people who would be immediately accepted across the spectrum as a designee of substance and gravitas. (The only disadvantage of this is that Romney would politically be precluded from naming somebody who is a lightning rod for controversy, such as John Bolton, whereas a Bolton choice in the usual way, after the election, would still be possible.)

The one name, by the way, I would put at the top of the list is the same one I started this post with; Jon Kyl. Few people in Washington, and almost nobody on the right, are afforded such universal respect as Kyl is. And he could really pound home the issue of missile defense (probably bolstering the Polish-American ethnic vote in the Rust Belt while he was at it), on which he is extremely well versed, and explain why our abandonment of Poland and other Eastern European nations on this issue was such a horrible mistake. And Kyl sort of bridges the divide on the right between what some wrongly call the “Neo-cons” and those who are more isolationist: Kyl is not really identifiable in any one camp, other than being clearly “Reaganite.”

Regardless of who the choice would be, it would look good for Romney: bold, innovative, and presidentially decisive and confident, willing to let the public judge his choice before the election and giving a sense of his leadership style.

It’s worth serious consideration.

At the University of Mobile’s Center for Leadership, I reflect on 9/11 and its lessons.

I wrote the piece and handed it in just before news came about the uprisings in northern Africa. As it turned out, these sentences were apropos:

Worse, some of our national leaders seem to misunderstand, to this day, what 9/11 was all about. These leaders still push forward some sort of moral semi-equivalency, in which they quickly zip through boilerplate language about how America was wronged on that day but then start listing all the ways we need to be more “sensitive” to the concerns of the rest of the world – concerns as expressed by world leaders who were not fairly elected by their own people, who do not allow their people the basic freedoms or human dignity that Americans take for granted, and who have never done a single thing to earn any level of sympathy, empathy, or respect.

This, of course, is a false equivalency. Our nation is better than other nations, because we do guarantee freedom and limit the powers of the government and of individual leaders within that government.

I just saw CNN run a clip of John Kerry castigating Mitt Romney for Romney’s criticism of the Obama administration re the statement from the embassy in Cairo. Kerry, blowing enough hot air to power his own windsurfing excursion, called Romney “irresponsible” and “reckless,” among other harsh adjectives. He said Romney spoke without knowing what he was talking about, and that Romney was way out of line.

Kerry isn’t the one to talk. May I remind him of a little incident where he said he knew fellow American soldiers, apparently in large numbers, who “personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country”?

That statement from Kerry was a vicious, vile, reckless, irresponsible, damnable lie. It should have disqualified him forever not just from public life, but from all polite company forevermore.

Meanwhile, Romney was right: The embassy statement was craven and pathetic, and it was fully in line with longstanding messages, also craven and pathetic, coming from the Obama administration since Day One — and even largely consonant with the tenor of statements TODAY from Hillary Clinton, who again spent the entire opening of her statement wasting time blasting a stupid online movie rather than dismissing it in one quick sentence and then moving on to what still, even after that segment of her statement, was an inadequately worded bit of advocacy of American rights, interests, and goodness.

Kerry, Clinton, and Obama know absolutely nothing about promoting American interests or about defending our people or our rights.

Good video.

Charlie Cook is right on target this morning in criticizing the messaging and tactics of Mitt Romney’s campaign.

Only in the last few days has the Romney campaign begun buying any time in swing states on local cable systems, something the Obama team has been doing for months. While one campaign has been looking for every nookand cranny to reach votersand has been doing so for some time, the other didn’t bother until after the conventions. Go figure.

The Romney campaign made the extraordinary decision to not try seriously to connecttheir candidate with voters on a personal level untiltheir convention. As dubious as that decision was, they were rewarded by having a convention shortened by a day due to a hurricane, then compounded the error of waiting until the convention by putting much of what was most needed to be seen in the 8and 9 p.m. hours, when the only viewers would be C-SPAN fans. Wow! The biographical filmand the testimonials of people whose lives had been touched by Romney were powerful, necessary,and largely unseen. Instead, the Romney campaign treated them to the Clint Eastwood debacleand a serviceable speech by Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida that should have been made earlier, not chewing up precious broadcast airtime.

Meanwhile, I have a column out today at The American Spectator that predicts a narrow win for Barack The One Obama. But it’s close enough that Romney could turn things around — if he starts running a smarter campaign:

Now, how can Romney pull off the victory anyway? By mobilizing discrete groups of voters who might be unexcited or might wish a pox on both parties, but who will be motivated to turn out (rather than stay home, or go hunting, or whatever)and vote for a candidate who shows commitment to a particular issue stance.

Taking a page from Newt Gingrich’s playbook, Romney could easily identify such issues where a clear majority of voters agree with conservatives.

Late last week, for the University of Mobile’s Center for Leadership, I tried to delve a bit more deeply into current controversies about media “fact checkers.” It’s not just the media, but society in general, that seems to have an increasing problem understanding even what constitutes a “fact” in the first place.

A taste:

Second, a statement can be inaccurate without being a “lie.”…. Situation two: President George W. Bush was inaccurate when he said Saddam Hussein still had an active program of “weapons of mass destruction” when the United States began its liberation of Iraq – but he didn’t lie. A lie by definition involves deliberate intent to deceive; but every single bit of evidence shows that Bush and every other major political figure of both parties believed Saddam was hiding numerous WMDs. (As a matter of fact, Iraq still did possess WMDs, but only in small amounts.)  It is a fact that Saddam once had many such weapons, that he tried to manufacture and/or acquire more of them, that he had used them in the past, that he even fooled his own senior Iraqi military officials into believing he still had them, and that he never showed proof that he had disposed of them. If Bush believed Saddam still had WMD, then he wasn’t lying. Period. He was just mistaken.

I found this post at NRO to be very encouraging (follow the link), in light of all my own writings and speeches on the subject.

I haven’t yet read a lot of the pundit reviews of Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech last night, but I gather that most people are giving it solid grades. Unfortunately, I dissent. In ordinary circumstances, I would give it just a ‘C,’ and even considering that Romney’s task was a bit different than that of many nominees… and that he did a pretty good job at meeting the needs involved in those differences (i.e., he needed to, and did, “humanize” himself more than he has done before)… I still give him only a ‘C+’ for the overall effectiveness of his speech in terms of his long-term campaign needs. And I’m one who always has thought of ‘C’ grades not as “decent” but as “pretty bad.”

I thought it was predictable, repetitive, and nowhere near substantive enough.

I won’t go into detail, just because if some Obama researcher is diligent enough to be trolling this site, I don’t want to give him direction as to where I thought the specific weaknesses were.

I did think that he delivered the speech as well as anybody could expect. And I think that for short-term purposes, the speech was more in line with a ‘B’ than a ‘C’ — in other words, that he made an overall good impression. But I don’t think it was an impression that will have major lasting benefit in a way that significantly improves his chances at winning in November. Yes, it sets the stage for incremental gains that actually do survive the rough and tumble of the next two months of campaigning — and incremental might be enough in a race this close — but I was looking for something that undecided and/or persuadable voters could grab hold of and really embrace, in a way that could cause a surge in Romney’s favor. I saw none of that. I expect no big surge. A small swelling of support maybe, but no big surge.

Sorry.

I missed this two weeks ago, but it’s worth noting. Nancy Nord, commissioner of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, had an excellent column in the Aug. 20 Washington Times that detailed the left’s addiction to over-regulation.