Scaring a dead grandma to death
Scaring a dead grandma to death
My grandfather was a true blue FDR Democrat as were many of his generation, including I might add Ronald Reagan. My grandfather "came of age" during the depression raising a family and like nearly everyone of that generation he struggled just to get by. To that generation of Americans and to some degree their children the whole "social contract" philosophy of governance if not sacristan was at least ingrained.
This predisposition towards government's "social contract" with citizens was reinforced by LBJ's Great Society of the mid sixties so it is not surprising that the idea of any changes to programs like Social Security or Medicare would be anathema to people of that generation.
Democratic politicians doing what Democratic politicians have done for a generation, demagogue any proposals to reform or touch these programs with the assurance that in doing so they will turn elderly voters against any politician who might dare touch the "social contract".
This is why the Democrats and the Obama campaign are all but salivating over Mitt Romney selecting Paul Ryan as his VP nominee. Regardless of the absolute and undeniable need to reform these programs to insure their very existence, they feel that they can turn elderly voters against the Republican ticket especially in key states like Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania all of which have large elderly populations and are critical swing states. Ryan being the primary architect to entitlement reform, the Democrats feel that this is a perfect opportunity to pull out the old tried and true demagoguery stick and beat the Republicans into submission and defeat.
There is just one problem with this strategy, it not only won't work, it will be counter productive, rather than scaring seniors it more likely motivate them in the opposite direction. The fact is the Democrats along with most of the pundit class on both sides is fighting the last war and generals who fight the last war generally loose the one that they are now in.
You see my grandfather died over twenty years ago. The older generation that this trick of "scaring granny" worked effectively on is being replaced by a newer generation of seniors that have neither the life experience or the political views of my grandfather's so called "greatest generation".
This is not all that difficult to see it actually is quite obvious. The fact that talking heads and politician's seem to ignore this obvious change only goes to show how out of touch they truly are with what is going on in the nation they claim to observe and govern.
A simple study of voting patterns would show this to anyone who cared to look, The political make up of older Americans has been trending more and more Conservative and Republican for the last thirty plus years but has begun to accelerate more in the last decade as the "younger elderly" begin to replace the "older elderly" so to speak. In 2000 Gore received 50% of the over 65 vote while Bush got 49% about what you would expect based on both the closeness of the election and the previous Democratic domination with older voters. By 2004, another very close election, but the tide had really begun to turn when it came to older voters, and Bush beat Kerry among the over 65 vote 52% to 47%.
To show how the political leaning of seniors has changed, in 1988 when George H W Bush beat Dukakis by seven points in a near landslide he only carried the over 65 vote. by 1%. The full switch over from Democratic domination of the older vote came in 2008. Whereas George H W Bush could only get 1% of the over 65 vote while winning the election by 7% in 1988, just 20 years later McCain beat Obama by 8% (53-45) among the over 65 voter while loosing the election to Obama by 8%.
Obviously the political leanings of older voters have shifted to the right. After all isn't that what the media and the progressives have been saying for the past three years, the Tea Party is nothing but old white folks? Well it isn't but they do have a very large role in the movement.
At the beginning of the month Fred Newport the editor and chief of Gallup Polling, in discussing the presidential race made the following observation, (emphasis mine)
Obama’s core support comes from nonwhites, young people, those with postgraduate educations, those with very low incomes, those who are not religious, those who are not married, and women. Romney’s core support comes essentially in the obverse groups -- in particular, whites, older Americans, the very religious, and those who are married.
Polling for years has shown that older Americans are trending more to the right than the general population. Obama's lowest approval ratings are always among the elderly. Just one example, without getting into the specifics of the poll itself, is the most recent IBD/TIPP poll which shows Obama up by 7 (46-39) over Romney nationally, but among those over 65 Romney leads 49-40, and all polling has reflected this for some time.
Virtually every poll you see that shows the breakdown by age shows Romney not only ahead with older voters, he generally is far ahead. This isn't just some national trend it is true in the battleground states as well. In a recent Survey USA poll of Florida shows Obama leading (48-43) but loosing to Romney by 10% among those over 65 (53-43)
So not only is Obama least popular among the elderly, Romney's greatest support is among the elderly both in individual states and nationally. Not only that but last month Rasmussen Report showed that Paul Ryan's favorably among over 65 voters was 52/29, that is 52 favorable.
The reason for this is obvious, like my grandfather who "came of age during the FDR years, the current crop of seniors "came of age" during the Reagan Revolution, and they have not forgotten what they learned. Consider this, anyone today between the age of 60 and 80 in 1980 was between the ages of 28 and 48, the prime of their lives. Increasingly today;s seniors were the ones who benefited most and saw first hand what supply side economics can do for an economy and their Reagan generation 401K's. Today's seniors not only remember the Reagan Revolution they were the ones who voted it into affect, they were the Reagan Revolution.
So Obama and the Democrats now think that these same people who lived and experienced what they (Progressives) are now trying to destroy are going to suddenly to be demagogued into voting for them? I don't think so. The Ryan pick intensifies today's seniors support for Romney not diminishes it, Ryan is a Reagan Republican where Romney was always suspect.
Even right leaning pundits seem to be blind to the fact that the the elderly voters in America are actually the least likely to be swayed by the attacks about to be unleashed, once again, against common sense. As I said the Democrats and much of the media is living in a political world that has past them by, they are trying in affect to scare dead grandmas. Unfortunately for them today's grandma's carry signs and vote overwhelmingly Republican.
*************************
Create your own visitor map
()()()()()()()()(()())()()()()()()()()()
Interesting Pics 2012
#######
Jer's Photo of the Day
Photos and Photo Art by Sebastianjer
*************
History in Pictures
()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()
NOT EXACTLY FRONT PAGE NEWS
########
The religion of Climate Science
****
Good Reads
###
TODAY'S QUOTE
Reader Comments
Page: 1 — Blog Index
Is Obama Just or Unjust?
By Jack Kerwick
President Barack Obama is not a "nice guy."
From Republican campaign strategist Ed Rollins and Republican House Speaker John Boehner to Republican presidential contenders John McCain and Mitt Romney, far too many Republicans have fueled the popular perception that Obama is a nice guy.
This perception is an illusion. But it is a most dangerous illusion, for it has permitted our President to advance his militantly leftist agenda.
In The Republic, Socrates engages several friends in a discussion over the nature of justice and its relationship to the good life. The question to which they attend is:
Which is more beneficial for its possessor, justice or injustice?
Glaucon, a brother of Plato, contends that the unjust man is actually better off than the just man -- so long as he is not recognized as an unjust man. Injustice is superior to justice, Glaucon reasons, because the unjust man knows no limits while the just man imposes constraints upon himself. So, for example, the just person will abide by the terms of a contract even after he realizes that he may have more to gain by violating them. The unjust man, in sharp contrast, will have no such reservations.
But if the unjust man is recognized as such, then others will not only deprive him of the opportunity to treat them unjustly; in addition to this social ostracism, he could as well face legal punishment.
To substantiate his position, Glaucon alludes to the legendary figure of Gyves.
Gyges was said to have been a poor, obscure shepherd who happens to stumble upon a magical ring, a ring that endows him with the ability to become invisible at will. With his new found power, Gyges manages to have the King murdered, seduce his wife, and assume control over the kingdom.
Glaucon's point is clear. As long as a person is thought by all to be just, his unjust character is essentially invisible. He then has both the ability and the will to pursue his wants at all costs -- including and particularly the cost of treating others unjustly.
Thus, injustice is better than justice, and the unjust person is better off than the just person -- as long as injustice goes undetected.
This debate that transpired close to 2500 years ago assumes new significance in light of the rise of Barack Obama.
Obama became nationally recognized eight years ago when he gave the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention. Immediately, something like a trans-partisan consensus emerged on the speech's inspirational character, and both Democrat and non-Democrat alike began to view Obama as a rising star, a "new" kind of politician.
Even in 2008, when Obama became a presidential contender in the Democratic primaries, few and far between were those Republicans who were disposed to assail him with just a fraction of the aggression with which they attacked Hillary Clinton. In fact, Obama was regularly being depicted by Republican commentators as the beleaguered contestant in that race, the unsuspecting and undeserving victim of the Clinton killing machine.
Then Obama became the Democrats' presidential nominee.
He became the focus of Republicans' attacks, it is true, but even so, the tendency on the part of his opponents -- including John McCain -- to qualify their criticisms with assurances that Obama was a good and talented man persisted.
When Obama became the first black American president, it seemed that the entire planet erupted in rapture.
And Republicans went right along with it, joining the celebration of this "historic" election.
Obama's election to the office of the presidency promised to redeem America of her checkered racial history. He was going to be our first "post-racial" president, a bipartisan politician who would usher in a new millennium full of "hope and change."
To this day -- after four years of a disastrous first term comprised of effort after effort to fulfill his promise to "fundamentally transform" the country -- Obama's personal likeability numbers remain reasonably high. And though it has been a couple of months since he has said as much, even the presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney had expressed on more than one occasion his admiration for Obama as a person: "He's a nice guy; he's just in over his head."
Romney is no longer referring to Obama as a nice guy. Indeed, he should not, for in doing so, he flatters no one while revealing himself to be astonishingly naïve.
Given the relentless campaign that Obama is currently waging against him, and, specifically, the latest super PAC ad that implicates Romney in the death of the wife of a steel worker, it is no longer possible (if it ever was) to sustain either the claim that Obama is a nice guy or the claim that Romney really believes that he is a nice guy.
Obama is most emphatically not a nice guy.
Some of us -- those of us who actually looked into Obama's past -- have always known this.
In Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, the lead character's love interest tells him: "It's not who we are underneath, but what we do, that defines us." Nice guys, or good guys, do not do the sorts of things that Obama has done over the course of his career.
A nice guy does not ally himself with all manner of anti-Americans, from unrepentant domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers to self-avowed "Black Liberation" theologians like Jeremiah Wright.
More tellingly, a nice guy doesn't ally himself with anti-Americans while trying to convince voters that he is actually a great American patriot, let alone someone who deserves to become the President of the United States of America.
In other words, a nice guy is not a person who is chronically deceptive.
A nice guy does not make promises -- like the promise of a "transparent" administration -- that he does not keep.
A nice guy does not seek, as Obama successfully sought to do in 1996 while running for a State Senate office in Illinois, to eliminate three of his Democratic rivals from the ballot while invalidating the legions of signatures that they accumulated in voters' petitions.
A nice guy doesn't use his position of power to bully the operators of businesses and coerce millions upon millions of people to acquiesce in "the fundamental transformation" -- the destruction, as David Limbaugh more aptly puts it -- of their homeland, their lives.
A nice guy doesn't exacerbate racial tensions by availing himself of "the race card" whenever it suits his purposes to do so.
And a nice guy most certainly does not exploit the tragedy of a person's death by baselessly accusing his competitor of being complicit in it.
Like Gyges, Obama has heretofore managed to preserve for himself the image of the just man. But unlike Gyges, that façade is cracking.
If we would only open our eyes and connect the dots, we will readily discover for ourselves that Obama is not a just man at all.
I could not have been more elated to hear Paul Ryan had been picked. He has always been my hopeful. But honestly I thought a snowball in hell had a better chance.
I can not relate how happy I am to hear this.
Now instead of voting against Obama I can now at least vote For Ryan :O)
Viewing: 1 - 5
Page: 1 — Blog Index