Two-thirds of likely voters say President Obama has kept his 2008 campaign promise to change America — but it’s changed for the worse, according to a sizable majority.
A new poll for The Hill found 56 percent of likely voters believe Obama’s first term has transformed the nation in a negative way, compared to 35 percent who believe the country has changed for the better under his leadership.
The results signal broad voter unease with the direction the nation has taken under Obama’s leadership and present a major challenge for the incumbent Democrat as he seeks reelection this fall.
Conducted for The Hill by Pulse Opinion Research, the poll comes in the wake of last month’s Supreme Court decision that upheld the primary elements of Obama’s signature healthcare legislation.
It found 68 percent of likely voters — regardless of whether they approve or disapprove of Obama — believe the president has substantially transformed the country since his 2009 inauguration.
#6. “When Mitt Romney was governor, Massachusetts was No. 1 in state debt. $18 billion in debt. More debt per person than any other state in the country.” — from an attack ad titled “Number One” that was posted June 12, 2012 on the Obama campaign’s official YouTube page
While this statement is factually accurate, it leaves out a big part of the picture.
Massachusetts owed a notoriously large state debt for a long time, certainly before Romney ever set foot in the governor’s office. Part of the reason the Bay State’s debt is so high, as PolitiFact points out, is because many projects that in other states would be funded by counties are funded by the state in Massachusetts.
Secondly, as anyone who’s ever lived in Massachusetts will tell you, “the Big Dig” — a highway and tunnel construction project that was started in the 1980s and has cost over $20 billion — has been a budgetary nightmare for decades. The Boston Globe estimates the project won’t be paid off until 2038 at the earliest. No matter who’s governor of Massachusetts, the Big Dig is still an incredibly expensive project, with the interest alone costing the state billions….
#3. “[Under Romney] Massachusetts plunged to 47th in job creation.” — David Axelrod, Obama campaign senior advisor, on CBS’s ‘Face The Nation,’ June 3, 2012
Romney’s been pummeled with this statistic, first during the Republican primaries and now by the Obama campaign (see here, here and here). Factually, it’s accurate to say that Massachusetts was 47th out of 50 states for job growth from December 2002 through December 2006 — PolitiFact verified the statement using Bureau of Labor Statistics. But there are different ways of looking at the numbers, and, as noted above, Romney inherited a state that was already in deep economic trouble.
While the rate of job growth in Massachusetts was lower than the rate for the country as a whole during that time, the number of jobs in the state did increase under Romney’s tenure.
#2. “Our businesses have created almost 4.3 million new jobs over the last 27 months.” — Obama during a presidential address in Golden Valley, Minn. (June 2, 2012)
Obama has made this claim many times recently (see here, here and here, and see Sarah Jessica Parker say it here), but again, he isn’t giving the whole picture. We called Josh Bivens, an analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, to see what the missing context was. Bivens told us that Obama neglected to mention the 500,000 jobs that were lost in the public sector over the same time period.
It is probably true. It is no secret that doing business in the United States is very expensive and more risky because of government meddling. There are lots of companies that in order to survive had to leave and that is not Mitt’s fault.
Remember how many Heinz plants the Kerry’s moved overseas?
The only way to fix this problem is with a new, simpler, flatter tax code, regulatory reform and the size of government cut a lot, much like the Deficit Commission said. Without doubt, if we had those reforms companies would keep more jobs at home, yet what party always stands in the way of these common sense reforms?
Of course when companies get driven out of the country or shut down by onerous government or just flat out abuse such as what the Obama Administration did to Gibson Guitar the elite media doesn’t have much to say about that do they?
Remember the stimulus money that went to an electric car company in Finland, and subsidized loans to Brazil to drill in deep water when he was preventing our people from drilling, or how General Electric, whose CEO Jeff Immelt sent jobs overseas shortly after he was appointed Jobs Czar by President Obama?
Mitt Romney’s financial company, Bain Capital, invested in a series of firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India.
During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“On Labor Day, Obama and Mitt Romney were just about tied around 45 percent in ballot tests. Now Obama leads by about 48 percent to 43. Perhaps that’s just the damage done by the primary campaign. But what if it’s the result of getting to know the candidates better?”
Or the result of carpet-bombing the nations with countless millions in dishonest negative ads about the stalwarts of the Republican Party, thus undermining confidence in the Republican Brand altogether?
“I guarantee you if Santorum was considered a threat, they’d be pulling out quotes from him and twisting them and turning them, and turning him into a pretzel, too. If they thought Ron Paul was a threat … they’d be turning him into a pretzel, too. Romney pulled the same thing with Fred Thompson.
He pulled the same thing with Rudy Giuliani. Ladies and gentlemen, if you are conservative, if you are tea party activists, you’ve got to step back and say, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ All these commercials aimed at destroying opponents, not in communicating facts, not in advancing our principles, not focused on Obama, who’s the problem, but turning people into monsters.”
This has been the plague for Mitt Romney’s election “victories”. In areas he wins the vote turnout is below 2008 levels where many conservatives, who had little faith in John McCain, stayed home. This low turnout problem has followed him in counter per country and state per state. In part, it is his own fault as he has carpet-bombed the states he has done well in with millions of dollars of dishonest negative ads. More and more pundits, including this very writer, said that the idea of Romney’s electability is a myth, and that he just doesn’t have what it takes to close the deal.
CHICAGO (CBS) — Turnout for Tuesday’s Illinois primary in Chicago was a meager 24 percent, officials said.
It was the lowest turnout for a presidential primary in the past 70 years.
Election officials said a lack of contested races was behind the lackluster activity at the polls.
“It’s very, very disappointing,” said Langdon Neal, chairman of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners. “I think what it indicates is that a lack of a contest on the Democratic side at the top of the ticket really did cause our voters not to be engaged in this election.”
Four years ago, Barack Obama was in a heated primary race with Hillary Clinton. This year, Obama has his sights set on the general election. Meantime, GOP front-runner Mitt Romney, who rolled to an easy win in Illinois over his main rival, Rick Santorum.
But that didn’t equate to enthusiasm for Romney, an expert said.
“You could draw a larger crowd at a Green Bay Packers rally in downtown Chicago than what Mr. Romney delivered yesterday in Illinois,” U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Wednesday on CBS This Morning.
This is what Mitt Romney’s carpet-bombing states with misleading negative ads within the party does. It is likely that Mitt Romney cannot win in November and this poll is exactly why more and more in the GOP are hoping for a brokered convention.
These data are from a Gallup poll conducted March 8-11, 2012. The 35% of Republicans who at this point say they would vote “enthusiastically” for Mitt Romney for president if he were to win the GOP nomination is identical to the 35% of Republicans who said the same about Romney back in late January/early February 2008.
In that same 2008 poll, however, 47% of Republicans said they would vote enthusiastically for John McCain, who ended up as that year’s GOP nominee. In short, Romney’s enthusiasm deficit in 2008 has carried over to his current campaign, with the difference being that none of the other nominees this year are generating any more enthusiasm among Republicans than Romney is.
Republicans are also less enthusiastic about voting for their party’s current pool of candidates than Democrats were about voting for their potential nominees in both 2008 and in 2004. More than half of Democrats in 2008 said they would vote “enthusiastically” for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton if either were to win their party’s presidential nomination. Forty-five percent of Democrats in late January/early February 2004 said they would vote enthusiastically for John Kerry for president.
The vote turn out is the same everywhere Romney wins; below 2008 levels. Meaning that if Romney is the nominee we should brace ourselves for a second Obama term. In Illinois the turnout was the lowest it had been in 70 years.
Zeke Miller had this chart up on BuzzFeed last night outlining television spending by super PACs supporting the four remaining Republican candidates for president. Romney’s spending advantage is no secret, but at a glance like this, it is pretty jarring.
This is a disaster. Political science text books make it clear that what Newt accomplished with the Contract With America is one of the greatest acts of political genius in history…and Mitt is on the wrong side of it.
This is not some reporter or blogger saying this and it sure isn’t Alex Jones, this is Larry Sabato who is the most quoted political scientist alive. Sabato writes many of the political science texts used in universities. While this writer believes that many professors are full of it, Sabato has credibility in spades.
We have heard it time and time again, “RomneyCare was a choice for Massachusetts as an experiment, but doing it nationally is a bad idea, likely won’t work, and is unconstitutional”. This is what Mitt Romney has been saying since the Iowa debates (LINK), but the video taped evidence shows that Romney was supporting a national insurance mandate up to at least 2009.
In the videos Mitt Romney says that his plan helps keeps costs down, but the record shows that the RomneyCare policy team was not really interested in keeping costs down, and as the record shows the cost of healthcare in Massachusetts has far exceeded the rest of the country (and YOU are helping to pay for it). Even if RomneyCare or such a plan could help keep costs down in theory; the simple truth is that getting control of healthcare (a sixth of our economy) is too much of a temptation for politicians to regulate favors, kickbacks, ideological experiments etc into the system. Government cannot be trusted with that much power as we have seen with socialized health care around the world and are already seeing in ObamaCare.
Mitt Romney not being honest about this is nothing new to our readers as we reported:
Romney: Requiring people to have health insurance is “conservative” – LINK …
….on January 9th, but these videos bring a new attention to this important story.
“Well that’s what we did in Massachusetts and that is we put together an exchange, the president is copying that idea. I’m glad to hear that. We let people buy their own private insurance. Most people can afford to buy that insurance once you have an exchange that allows them to do that in a cost effective basis. And then for those that are low income you help them buy their own private insurance. But you don’t set up a government insurance plan because it’s going to end up costing billions of dollars in subsidy. It’s the wrong way to go.”
Related:
New York Magazine: How Romney Advocated Obamacare and Lied About It – LINK
Newsmax: RomneyCare and ObamaCare Are Identical – LINK
MIT Economist: ObamaCare is RomneyCare with three more zeros – LINK
Romney Supporter Florida AG Pam Bondi Says Mitt Wants RomneyCare In Every State – LINK
You paid the high cost of RomneyCare in Massachusetts – LINK
This is a must see video. Levin makes one crucial point after another:
Romney just got virtually tied in his home state of Michigan, by Rick Santorum who has little money and next to no organization to speak of.
What kind of Republican Party agrees to 20 debates and has most of the run by CNN and NBC, both of whom try to keep the debates focused on non-issues and quibbling?
I have more questions:
How can we nominate Mitt Romney when he cannot energize the base, he does not energize independents, and turnout in areas he wins end up being below 2008 levels when many conservatives had decided to stay home?
How can the GOP sit there and let Romney trash many of its best leaders with lies and half truths for not being perfectly conservative, when Romney cannot come close to meeting the same standards for conservative purity he holds other candidates too? Mitt Romney trashes Rick Santorum for supporting “No Child Left Behind”, yet Romney supported it; Romney trashed Rick Perry saying that one cannot be too against illegal immigration, yet just a couple of years ago Romney was talking Amnesty on Meet the Press; Mitt Romney trashes Rick Santorum for losing his Senate seat by 18 points in the ’06 Democrat landslide, yet when Romney ran for Senate he lost by 16 points and that was a year Republicans did well?
How can Mitt Romney challenge Obama on ObamaCare when Romney’s own staff helped Obama craft it and implement it? How can Romney challenge Obama on the failed stimulus when he was luke-warm on it in the hardcover version of his book? How can Romney challenge Obama on his assault on the Catholic Church when Romney did something similar in Massachusetts? How can Mitt Romney challenge Obama on class warfare when Romney is already praising the progressive income tax and saying that the 1% should pay more? How can Romney challenge Obama on flip-flopping?
This list goes on and on.
I am also concerned because I am watching David Axelrod, who is a trained propagandist hired gun not unlike myself, very closely and I see that he has Mitt Romney psychologically pegged. Have no doubt that Axelrod understands the book on Mitt Romney.
The “No Child Left Behind Act” has been a colossal failure. While the testing in the act did indeed give is a better idea of just how bad public schools are failing our children, it made the problem worse because school districts and teachers started teaching the test, and thus weren’t truly educating. This is something I have seen first hand.
Teaching is a missionary vocation. When the federal government and/or a bureaucratic and/or a union mentality is introduced that kills the missionary attitude and spirit. This is why our current public school model is failing more than it is succeeding.
No, absolutely not. Of course not.
There was no requirement in Massachusetts for the Catholic Church to provide morning-after pills to rape victims. That was entirely voluntary on their part. There was no such requirement.
BCI finds the opposite to be true. Their synopsis:
In 2005 Romney vetoed a bill to provide access to the so-called “morning-after-pill,” knowing his veto would be overridden, but months later, he decided Catholic hospitals did have to give the morning-after pill to rape victims. Key points to note:
Romney had publicly claimed the bill did not apply to private religious hospitals
He reversed his own July 2005 veto against abortifacients by signing an October bill seeking a federal waiver to expand distribution of Plan B abortifacients.
On December 7, 2005, Romney’s Department of Public Health said that Catholic and other privately-run hospitals could opt out of giving the morning-after pill to rape victims because of religious or moral objections
On December 8, 2005 Romney reversed the legal opinion of his own State Department of Public Health, instructing all Catholic hospitals and others to provide the chemical Plan B “morning after pill” to rape victims. He was quoted as saying, ““I think, in my personal view, it’s the right thing for hospitals to provide information and access to emergency contraception to anyone who is a victim of rape.”
Please note the principled leadership shown by Romney here. For it, against it, rinse, repeat.
BCI’s conclusion:
When Romney was asked in the debate if he had required Catholic hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims and had infringed on Catholics’ rights, he responded, “No, absolutely not. Of course not.” That was untrue.
When Romney said “for the Catholic Church to provide morning-after pills to rape victims…was entirely voluntary on their part”, that was also untrue.
For him to suggest to the citizens of the United States on national television that Cardinal O’Malley and the Catholic Church would “voluntarily” provide morning-after pills is an egregious misrepresentation of Catholic Church teachings and an egregious misrepresentation of what actually happened in this situation.
BCI hopes that the media and other candidates call him out on this.
It’s a matter of public record. Not only did Romney destroy conscience protections, a la the Obama administration, but he lied outright about it as recently as two days ago. This should disqualify him as a serious candidate.
Have GOP officials in the state of Maine have stolen the Maine caucuses for Romney?
This is disturbing.
Via Political Arena contributor Warren Roche:
In Waldo County, Maine vote totals from 17 of the county’s 18 towns were reported by Maine state GOP officials as zero votes cast which is clearly not true. The one Waldo County town where results have been reported is the town of Belfast, Maine. The only reason why Belfast’s votes were counted was because someone from Belfast (see this video) checked on the state GOP’s website to see results and saw that ALL 18 towns in Waldo County, including Belfast, showed zero votes cast for anyone! The Belfast caucus counted their votes publicly and everyone in Belfast KNEW that Ron Paul had won Belfast with Romney coming in 3rd. When Belfast GOP officials checked with the state GOP they were told the report of zero votes was in error and would be corrected. When the person from the Belfast GOP asked what results the state GOP had for Belfast the state GOP representative read back vote totals which reported the opposite of the actual vote, showing Romney winning Belfast with Ron Paul coming in 3rd!
Two Maine counties, Washington and Hancock, postponed their caucuses due to weather. Those caucuses will be held this Saturday, February 18. Yet, according to the Maine GOP, Romney has already won Maine, albeit by only 194 votes.
Video via WXIX TV in Maine:
Meanwhile, Waldo County Republicans have called for the censure of Maine State GOP Party Chairman Charlie Webster for his part in this fraud.
Even at 15 percent, the rich will pay more. For argument’s sake, someone who earns $100,000 would pay $15,000 in taxes, while someone who makes $100 million would pay $15 million. Delicate calculations confirm that $15 million exceeds $15,000. The rich will pay more dollars in taxes, but as a proportion of income equal with everyone else. Hello, “fair share.”
Gingrich also would chop America’s corporate tax from 35 percent (the industrial world’s second highest, after Japan’s) to a flat 12.5 percent, which would tie Ireland’s as the lowest and most competitive among developed nations. Coupled with immediate, 100 percent expensing of capital purchases, such a stimulus would unleash dramatic economic expansion — rather than the Obama-style “stimulus” that yields bankruptcies, layoffs, and FBI raids.
Compared to Gingrich’s gutsy blueprint, Romney’s exhibits the caution that has made the former Massachusetts governor the “Oh, well, if we must” choice, even among his supporters.
While Romney would ditch the death tax and cut the corporate tax to 25 percent, he would preserve today’s income-tax rates. He would scrap taxes on interest, capital gain, and dividends, but — echoing Obama — only for those making less than $200,000. – [Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton – the vast majority of those who make over $200,000 in what the IRS calls “earned income” are small and medium sized businesses. Mitt’s plan is so mild that it cannot do the economic heavy lifting to get us out of this morass. Speaking in economic terms, Obama’s plan is an economy killing machine and Mitt Romney’s is only marginally better.]
Recently we saw Donald Trump blast Rick Santorum for losing his Senate seat by 18 points in the Democrat 2006 landslide.
Ummm hey Donald, when Mitt Romney ran for Senate he lost by 16 points. And the same year Rick Santorum lost, Romney was polling so bad he dropped out of the race.
Indeed. Romney is not selling us a product, he is just carpet bombing the other candidates with almost 100% of his ads being negative. Why should we vote for Mitt Romney? What policy heavy lifting has he gotten done for conservatives? This is a must see.
Can you imagine? When Rick Santorum was running in 1994 for the Senate. He won his house seat against a Democrat in a 3 to 1 Democrat district and he ran as a Conservative. He ran statewide in 1994 as a Conservative in a relatively blue state, a heavy union state. And in 1994 he was talking up Ronald Reagan. Go over a few states, or up a few states, and there you have Massachusetts, at almost exactly the same time, if not exactly the same time, Romney was running for the Senate against Kennedy, TRASHING Ronald Reagan. Distancing himself from Republicanism. Called himself an Independent PROGRESSIVE if I recall correctly. Now THIS Romney is attacking Santorum from the Right, as if he’s the Conservative and holds the high ground. Mitt Romney is not questioning Santorum’s Conservative credentials. He is attacking Rick Santorum from the Right. This is what is so damned annoying, because it is so disingenuous.
Because Romney has now taken in the last few years solidly Conservative positions, even though he can’t articulate them very well past one line in the Declaration of Independence (Come on America. Let’s go. Come on. I’m for America. Come on. Let’s go. Hey. Everybody. Line up. Lets just go) Anyway, the point is, Santorum was a true Conservative. You don’t have to agree with everything he voted for; everything he says. I get all that. Honestly I do. But that’s not the point. His principles were not negotiable. His principles were not mush. You could disagree with a vote here and say that vote does not line up with your Conservative agenda. I get that. I really do. But he was a very high, what was he in the 90’s with the American Conservative Union, if not 100% with pro-life groups and so forth. Romney was mush. He’s Jello. So now he’s going to attack Santorum as a Liberal while Romney is posing as a Conservative. This is why I’m so sick of this and disgusted with it…
I look at Rick Santorum at so many things that he did and tried to do from a Conservative perspective throughout his career and I can’t think of very many that Romney did. I’d even look at Newt Gingrich. You can attack him for a thousand things but one thing you cannot say is that he wasn’t a Conservative speaker. He was a Conservative speaker. Even though people may not have liked certain foibles and all the rest, the fact of the matter is, Gingrich gave us the House back and Gingrich lead a Conservative house and he did it in a way that was more Conservative than the way Boehner is leading this house. And he’s attacked from the Right by Romney too! So while Gingrch was trying to do the right things in the House, Romney was a Liberal; excuse me, a PROGRESSIVE; an Independent. So Romney attacks Gingrich from the Right when Romney at the time was on the Left and he attacks Santorum from the Right when Romney at the time was on the Left. Now he’s Mr. Conservative. How do you get away with this?
I’ll tell you how you get away with it. A massive amount of money to flood underfunded campaigns, a lot of media support, old media and, yes a lot new media which has been sucked right into this like the old media. And everybody just says well that’s just the way campaigns work, negative negative, you know, you’ve just gotta be a big boy…
This idea that Romney can attack bonafide Conservatives, at least they were, from the Right when he was on the Left is just so crazy. I hope you folks in Minnesota and Missouri and the other states coming up, I hope you remember this because you are now going to be flooded with ads telling you that Santorum was no damned good, he was a gutter snipe. Oh, he was a sell-out. He was a this or that. You remember those ads are paid for by a man and people who support a man who was all but trashing Ronald Reagan and when he ran against Ted Kennedy tried to move to the Left of Ted Kennedy; when Gingrich was running the House of Representatives and fighting Clinton and when Santorum was fighting the Democrat machine in Pennsylvania, a formidable machine, to win the Senate as a Republican. Just remember!
Oh, and by the way, the Romney people like to say that Santorum lost his reelection in 2006 by 17 points or 18 points. But in 1994 Romney lost to Kennedy by 16 points. Well guess what. Obama is every bit Kennedy and Kennedy was Kennedy. So, I’m asking you, is this the kind of nominee that you want?”
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
Political Arena 