This article, written by a Rabbi from New York, says it all. A
sad state of affairs.
The
most charitable way of explaining the election results of 2012 is that
Americans voted for the status quo – for the incumbent President and for a
divided Congress. They must enjoy gridlock, partisanship, incompetence,
economic stagnation and avoidance of responsibility. And fewer people voted. As
I write, with almost all the votes counted, President Obama has won fewer votes
than John McCain won in 2008, and more than ten million off his own 2008 total.
But
as we awake from the nightmare, it is important to eschew the facile
explanations for the Romney defeat that will prevail among the chattering
classes. Romney did not lose because of the effects of Hurricane Sandy that
devastated this area, nor did he lose because he ran a poor campaign, nor did
he lose because the Republicans could have chosen better candidates, nor did he
lose because Obama benefited from a slight uptick in the economy due to the
business cycle.
Romney
lost because he didn’t get enough votes to win.
That
might seem obvious, but not for the obvious reasons. Romney lost because the
conservative virtues – the traditional American virtues – of liberty, hard
work, free enterprise, private initiative and aspirations to moral greatness –
no longer inspire or animate a majority of the electorate. The notion of the
“Reagan Democrat” is one cliché that should be permanently retired.
Ronald Reagan himself could not win an election in today’s America.
The
simplest reason why Romney lost was because it is impossible to compete against
free stuff. Every businessman knows this; that is why the “loss leader” or the
giveaway is such a powerful marketing tool. Obama’s America is one in which
free stuff is given away: the adults among the 47,000,000 on food stamps
clearly recognized for whom they should vote, and so they did, by the tens of
millions; those who – courtesy of Obama – receive two full years of
unemployment benefits (which, of course, both disincentives looking for work
and also motivates people to work off the books while collecting their
windfall) surely know for whom to vote; so too those who anticipate “free”
health care, who expect the government to pay their mortgages, who look for the
government to give them jobs. The lure of free stuff is irresistible.
Imagine
two restaurants side by side. One sells its customers fine cuisine at a
reasonable price, and the other offers a free buffet, all-you-can-eat as long
as supplies last. Few – including me – could resist the attraction of the free
food. Now imagine that the second restaurant stays in business because the
first restaurant is forced to provide it with the food for the free buffet, and
we have the current economy, until, at least, the first restaurant decides to
go out of business. (Then, the government takes over the provision of free food
to its patrons.)
The
defining moment of the whole campaign was the revelation (by the amoral Obama
team) of the secretly-recorded video in which Romney acknowledged the
difficulty of winning an election in which “47% of the people” start off
against him because they pay no taxes and just receive money – “free stuff” –
from the government. Almost half of the population has no skin in the game –
they don’t care about high taxes, promoting business, or creating jobs, nor do
they care that the money for their free stuff is being borrowed from their
children and from the Chinese. They just want the free stuff that comes their
way at someone else’s expense. In the end, that 47% leaves very little margin
for error for any Republican, and does not bode well for the future.
It
is impossible to imagine a conservative candidate winning against such
overwhelming odds. People do vote their pocketbooks. In essence, the people
vote for a Congress who will not raise their taxes, and for a President who
will give them free stuff, never mind who has to pay for it.
That
engenders the second reason why Romney lost: the inescapable conclusion that
the electorate is dumb – ignorant, and uninformed. Indeed, it does not pay to
be an informed voter, because most other voters – the clear majority – are
unintelligent and easily swayed by emotion and raw populism. That is the
indelicate way of saying that too many people vote with their hearts and not
their heads. That is why Obama did not have to produce a second term agenda, or
even defend his first-term record. He needed only to portray Mitt Romney as a
rapacious capitalist who throws elderly women over a cliff, when he is not just
snatching away their cancer medication, while starving the poor and cutting
taxes for the rich. Obama could get away with saying that “Romney wants the
rich to play by a different set of rules” – without ever defining what those
different rules were; with saying that the “rich should pay their fair share” –
without ever defining what a “fair share” is; with saying that Romney wants the
poor, elderly and sick to “fend for themselves” – without even acknowledging
that all these government programs are going bankrupt, their current insolvency
only papered over by deficit spending. Obama could get away with it because he
knew he was talking to dunces waving signs and squealing at any sight of him.
During
his 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out to Adlai Stevenson:
“Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!” Stevenson called back:
“That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!”
Truer
words were never spoken.
Similarly,
Obama (or his surrogates) could hint to blacks that a Romney victory would lead
them back into chains and proclaim to women that their abortions and birth
control would be taken away. He could appeal to Hispanics that Romney would
have them all arrested and shipped to Mexico (even if they came from Cuba or
Honduras), and unabashedly state that he will not enforce the current
immigration laws. He could espouse the furtherance of the incestuous
relationship between governments and unions – in which politicians ply the
unions with public money, in exchange for which the unions provide the
politicians with votes, in exchange for which the politicians provide more
money and the unions provide more votes, etc., even though the money is gone.
He could do and say all these things because he knew his voters were dolts.
One
might reasonably object that not every Obama supporter could be unintelligent.
But they must then rationally explain how the Obama agenda can be paid for,
aside from racking up multi-trillion dollar deficits. “Taxing the rich” does
not yield even 10% of what is required – so what is the answer, i.e., an
intelligent answer?
Obama
also knows that the electorate has changed – that whites will soon be a
minority in America (they’re already a minority in California) and that the new
immigrants to the US are primarily from the Third World and do not share the
traditional American values that attracted immigrants in the 19th and 20th
centuries. It is a different world, and a different America. Obama is part of
that different America, knows it, and knows how to tap into it. That is why he
won.
Obama
also proved again that negative advertising works, invective sells, and harsh
personal attacks succeed. That Romney never engaged in such diatribes points to
his essential goodness as a person; his “negative ads” were simple facts, never
personal abuse – facts about high unemployment, lower take-home pay, a loss of
American power and prestige abroad, a lack of leadership, etc. As a politician,
though, Romney failed because he did not embrace the devil’s bargain of making
unsustainable promises, and by talking as the adult and not the adolescent.
Obama has spent the last six years campaigning; even his governance has been
focused on payoffs to his favored interest groups. The permanent campaign also
won again, to the detriment of American life.
It
turned out that it was not possible for Romney and Ryan – people of substance,
depth and ideas – to compete with the shallow populism and platitudes of their opponents.
Obama mastered the politics of envy – of class warfare – never reaching out to
Americans as such but to individual groups, and cobbling together a winning
majority from these minority groups. Conservative ideas failed to take root and
states that seemed winnable, and amenable to traditional American values, have
simply disappeared from the map. If an Obama could not be defeated – with his
record and his vision of America, in which free stuff seduces voters – it is
hard to envision any change in the future. The road to Hillary Clinton in 2016
and to a European-socialist economy – those very economies that are collapsing
today in Europe – is paved.
A
second cliché that should be retired is that America is a center-right country.
It clearly is not. It is a divided country with peculiar voting patterns, and
an appetite for free stuff. Studies will invariably show that Republicans in
Congress received more total votes than Democrats in Congress, but that means
little. The House of Representatives is not truly representative of the
country. That people would vote for a Republican Congressmen or Senator and
then Obama for President would tend to reinforce point two above: the
empty-headedness of the electorate. Americans revile Congress but love their individual
Congressmen. Go figure.
The
mass media’s complicity in Obama’s re-election cannot be denied. One example
suffices. In 2004, CBS News forged a letter in order to imply that President
Bush did not fulfill his Air National Guard service during the Vietnam War, all
to impugn Bush and impair his re-election prospects. In 2012, President Obama
insisted – famously – during the second debate that he had stated all along
that the Arab attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi was “terror” (a lie that
Romney fumbled and failed to exploit). Yet, CBS News sat on a tape of an
interview with Obama in which Obama specifically avoided and rejected the claim
of terrorism – on the day after the attack – clinging to the canard about the
video. (This snippet of a “60 Minutes” interview was not revealed - until two
days ago!) In effect, CBS News fabricated evidence in order to harm a
Republican president, and suppressed evidence in order to help a Democratic
president. Simply shameful, as was the media’s disregard of any scandal or
story that could have jeopardized the Obama re-election.
One
of the more irritating aspects of this campaign was its limited focus, odd in
light of the billions of dollars spent. Only a few states were contested, a
strategy that Romney adopted, and that clearly failed. The Democrat begins any
race with a substantial advantage. The liberal states – like the bankrupt
California and Illinois – and other states with large concentrations of
minority voters as well as an extensive welfare apparatus, like New York, New
Jersey and others – give any Democratic candidate an almost insurmountable edge
in electoral votes. In New Jersey, for example, it literally does not pay for a
conservative to vote. It is not worth the fuel expended driving to the polls.
As some economists have pointed generally, and it resonates here even more, the
odds are greater that a voter will be killed in a traffic accident on his way
to the polls than that his vote will make a difference in the election. It is
an irrational act.
That
most states are uncompetitive means that people are not amenable to new ideas,
or new thinking, or even having an open mind. If that does not change, and it
is hard to see how it can change, then the die is cast. America is not what it
was, and will never be again.
For
Jews, mostly assimilated anyway and staunch Democrats, the results demonstrate
again that liberalism is their Torah. Almost 70% voted for a president widely
perceived by Israelis and most committed Jews as hostile to Israel. They voted
to secure Obama’s future at America’s expense and at Israel’s expense – in
effect, preferring Obama to Netanyahu by a wide margin. A dangerous time is
ahead. Under present circumstances, it is inconceivable that the US will take
any aggressive action against Iran and will more likely thwart any Israeli
initiative. That Obama’s top aide Valerie Jarrett (i.e., Iranian-born Valerie
Jarrett) spent last week in Teheran is not a good sign. The US will preach the
importance of negotiations up until the production of the first Iranian nuclear
weapon – and then state that the world must learn to live with this new
reality. As Obama has committed himself to abolishing America’s nuclear
arsenal, it is more likely that that unfortunate circumstance will occur than that
he will succeed in obstructing Iran’s plans.
Obama’s
victory could weaken Netanyahu’s re-election prospects, because Israelis live
with an unreasonable – and somewhat pathetic – fear of American opinion and
realize that Obama despises Netanyahu. A Likud defeat – or a diminution of its
margin of victory – is more probable now than yesterday. That would not be the
worst thing. Netanyahu, in fact, has never distinguished himself by having a
strong political or moral backbone, and would be the first to cave to the
American pressure to surrender more territory to the enemy and acquiesce to a
second (or third, if you count Jordan) Palestinian state. A new US Secretary of
State named John Kerry, for example would not augur well. Netanyahu remains the
best of markedly poor alternatives. Thus, the likeliest outcome of the upcoming
Israeli elections is a center-left government that will force itself to make
more concessions and weaken Israel – an Oslo III.
The
most powerful empires in history all crumbled – from the Greeks and the Romans
to the British and the Soviets. None of the collapses were easily foreseen, and
yet they were predictable in retrospect.
The
American empire began to decline in 2007, and the deterioration has been
exacerbated in the last five years. This election only hastens that decline.
Society is permeated with sloth, greed, envy and materialistic excess. It has
lost its moorings and its moral foundations. The takers outnumber the givers,
and that will only increase in years to come. Across the world, America under
Bush was feared but not respected. Under Obama, America is neither feared nor
respected. Radical Islam has had a banner four years under Obama, and its
prospects for future growth look excellent. The “Occupy” riots across this country
in the last two years were mere dress rehearsals for what lies ahead – years of
unrest sparked by the increasing discontent of the unsuccessful who want to
seize the fruits and the bounty of the successful, and do not appreciate the
slow pace of redistribution.
If this
election proves one thing, it is that the Old America is gone. And, sad for the
world, it is not coming back.
