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Payne: President Thumb-in-the-Eye
Posted by hpayne on April 4, 2012
Mock Mitt Romney for using the term “marvelous.” Warn “unelected” Supreme Court justices that they will face political and economic consequences if they rule Obamacare’s individual mandate unconstitutional.
Scorn the same court sitting just feet away in a State of the Union address. Diss Michigan Republican Rep. Pete Hoekstra in the front row of his home district at a company ground-breaking. Invite Republican House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan to sit in the front row of your deficit-reduction speech and then gut him for his budget proposal. And so on.
With presidential behavior like this, is it any wonder Washington is more divided than ever?
“It’s condescending. It’s unpresidential. And he’s made it a pattern,” says Hoekstra, now a candidate for the U.S. Senate, who felt the back of the president’s hand in Holland two years ago when Hoekstra and Obama were invited by Korean battery-maker LGChem to open a new plant in Hoekstra’s district — a plant that had received assistance from Obama’s stimulus bill against the then-congressman’s wishes. Like the Supreme slaps, it is out of order for presidents to dump on congressmen at such ceremonies.
“It’s stupid,” says Hoekstra. “You don’t go into a congressman’s hometown and trash him.”
But it’s the Chicago way. And Obama’s poisoning of public discourse and personal attacks on fellow politicians has brought Washington to a virtual halt at time when the country is mired in the slowest post-recession recovery in post-WWII history.
“As soon as you make it personal, you make it hard to work,” says Hoekstra who points out that a divided Washington does not mean that important work can’t get done. “Obama is different than how Bill Clinton would have handled it.” How might Clinton have handled the Holland episode? “He would have said ‘I’m glad to see my friend Pete Hoekstra here. I know we have disagreements but we put those aside today.'”
Hoekstra is even more critical of Obama’s slap at Ryan, a crucial member of Republican leadership — who the president had personally invited to sit in the front row of a public press conference. “In Holland, at least I was invited by the company,” remembers Hoekstra. “But (for his budget presentation) he invited and trashed Paul Ryan.”
Unlike Clinton, that social activist’s in-your-face attitude has never been leavened by running a state. When Clinton lost his Democratic majority in 1994 to a Newt Gingrich-led Congress, he pivoted to governance. “Obama has never been able to switch to the reality of working with John Boehner,” says Hoekstra. “This president has never figured it out. This is why it’s hard.”
The Wall Street Journal described Obama’s attack on the court this week as “rare.” Rare as in it doesn’t happen. It’s why Washington lives under time-honored manners like members calling a fellow pol “my friend from Michigan.”
But Obama prefers the politics of division.
After Obama had gutted Hoekstra in 2010, Hoekstra recalls members of the press corps rushing up to him for comment — intuitively understanding that a line had been crossed. “You just got dissed by the president!” said one reporter. So did Ryan. And Romney. And the Supremes. And … it’s become all too familiar.
Payne: Union ‘city-busting’
Posted by hpayne on April 2, 2012
Democrats call Rick Snyder’s Detroit consent agreement “union-busting.” But a sober assessment of Detroit’s finances reveals that unions – as in other municipalities across the country – are “city-busting.”
Due to unsustainable benefit and pension costs, cities like Detroit now exist to serve Big Labor, not their citizens. Union liabilities have put the city underwater financially, stealing needed city revenue and leave citizens without proper city lighting and essential services like 9-11 response.
Pensions? What are those? For Detroiters paying the city’s bills, pensions are a generation-ago luxury – replaced by 401k retirement plans. Yet they are expected to feather Big Labor’s retirement nest even as they walk Jefferson Avenue in the dark. Those 401k retirement accounts are among the reasonable terms of Governor Snyder’s consent agreement for Detroit.
“Treasury’s proposed provisions (won’t be) surprising to the 93 percent of the American work force who do not belong to unions,” writes The Detroit News’ Dan Howes, ” do not assume seniority should always trump competence. ‘Snap-back’ provisions in wage reductions would not be permitted, bumping rights would be eliminated and new hires (to the extent there are any) would be required to pay into a municipal 401(k)-style defined contribution retirement savings plan and not accrue a pension.”
Yet on Planet Labor, such terms mean war.
“This is a power grab and a state takeover,” roared AFSCME negotiator Ed Mcneil Monday, ratcheting up the paranoid, racial rhetoric. “Employees are not going back to the bargaining table and let somebody rape them again. I don’t think the governor wants unrest in this city, but I think if you are going to force peoples’ hands I think you’ll probably see that.”
McNeil’s violent rhetoric masked equally outrageous claims that his union had made concessions necessary to rescue Detroit from its dire fiscal crisis. “We’ve done our job,” he told The Frank Beckmann Show citing alleged Ernst & Young approval for a city agreement with it unions that yield, ” at best, savings of only $47 million and $172 million for fiscal years 2012 and 2013, respectively,” according to the Treasury Department’s review team. This in a city facing $200 million annual deficits and debt payments of $580 million a year.
The governor’s office knows of no Ernst & Young stamp of approval. The union concessions “don’t go far enough,” repeated Snyder spokeswoman Geralyn Lasher. “They don’t address the long-term. We need a long-term solution that the states and private industry have already done.”
Example? By law state employees must pay 20 percent of their health benefits. In the private sector, the split is 30-70. On Planet Detroit? Nothing.
This is city busting. And Detroit is not alone. Stockton, California also stands on the brink of bankruptcy thanks to union city-busting.
“(Stockton) recognizes more than 100 different categories of ‘additional pay’ that employees can earn to boost their salaries but that still make basic compensation packages appear reasonable to the outsider,” reports Steve Malanaga of the Manhattan Institute in The Wall Street Journal ” Stockton safety employees with 30 years of service receive 90 percent of their highest working salary as a pension, with cost-of-living adjustments up to 2 percent annually for the rest of their lives. . . . Stockton couldn’t afford this rich program even in boom times, so officials played risky investment games. Now Stockton is stuck with interest costs on top of pension obligations that pile an additional 48 percent onto basic employee pay. Thus a public safety worker earning $70,000 annually costs the city another $33,000 in interest and pension-borrowing costs. ”
From Stockton to Pontiac to Detroit, American cities are in crisis. And union-busting isn’t the problem.
Payne: Obama snuffs coal power
Posted by hpayne on April 1, 2012
“These regulations lock out coal for a long time to come,” DTE Energy Vice President of Environmental Management Skiles Boyd told WJR-Radio Detroit last week about the Obama administration’s new global warming rules.
So much for “all of the above” energy strategy that the president has been touting this month to counter rising energy prices. Boyd says that EPA’s rule of radically reducing – by three-quarters – utility CO2 emissions to 1,000 pounds per megawatt of electricity (a standard only natural gas can meet) effectively bans new coal-fired plants and will inevitably lead to higher energy costs as the country is forced to switch to natural gas for base-load supply. Coal is America’s cheapest energy source and the United States – the so-called “Saudi Arabia of coal” – sits on some the world’s largest coal deposits and is the world’s second largest producer of coal behind China.
The reaction to Obama’s edict was swift from coal-producing states.
“This move by the EPA can lead to only one conclusion ” the Obama administration is trying to end the use of coal as we know it,” said West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin in a press release. “This regulation will devastate West Virginia and our region by reducing jobs and unnecessarily increasing the cost of power for our citizens. I will not stand for it.”
And that’s a Democrat talking.
What Tomblin describes as EPA’s “attack on coal” comes from a Democratic EPA headed by Green religious zealout Lisa Jackson. Telegraphing the Obama Administration’s legislation-by-executive branch fiat after Democrats lost Congress in November, 2010, Jackson told a The National Council of Churches convention in December of that year that the EPA had a “moral obligation” to heal the planet and “build on the religious and moral reasons for being good stewards of our environment.”
Tomblin does not share Jackson’s religion – nor does he share her expansive view of executive branch power. “Those decisions reside within the Congress, not an unelected bureaucracy,” says the governor of a state where the coal industry employs 20,000 workers. “Even though a federal court last week told the EPA that it was acting beyond its power, the EPA continues to act beyond its authority and in a short-sighted manner that will hurt our economy and cost our country jobs.”
While coal makes up 45 percent of American electricity production, manufacturing states like Michigan are particularly dependent on it, with 70 percent of the state’s electricity needs coming from the abundant, cheap domestic resource. DTE’s Boyd says only so-called “carbon capture” coal technologies could meet Jackson’s new limits on greenhouse gases, but “the technology is still under development.” Translation: It’s unaffordable.
Boyd fears that by, forcing the utility industry to put all its eggs in the natural gas basket, the Obama Administration is putting the country at the mercy of “an industry that is historically very volatile.” Boyd notes that the natural gas industry has discovered vast new resources in the U.S. this decade, but that now that exploration is also coming under assault from the EPA.
How strong is Obama’s green religion? Even in the middle of an election year, he is apparently willing to sacrifice Democratic allies – and their states – to the altar of global warming.
Payne: ‘Fundamentally transforming the United States of America’
Posted by hpayne on March 29, 2012
Give President Obama his due. He is fulfilling his campaign promise of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
Some myopic commentators have expressed surprise claiming that Obama sold himself as a moderate – but they weren’t paying attention. From his radical, patronizing 2007 speech to the Detroit Economic Club promising that he would force them to build hybrid cars to his 2007 promise of “universal health care by the end of my first term” to Joe Biden in 2008 pledging “no new coal plants here in America,” this is a Democratic ticket that has consistently believed that America needed an Extreme Makeover.
This week, that transformation was in full view as Obama’s nationalization of the health sector clashed with Constitutional principles before the Supreme Court and as Obama’s EPA decreed an end to coal power.
This is sweeping stuff. And yes, Obama has exercised disturbing, authoritarian means to get there including procedural sleight-of-hand to ram through the partisan health care bill, an unconstitutional individual mandate, and now executive branch emissions edicts that bypass the legislative process.
But liberals have not been shy that transformation includes end-running democratic process. Most famously, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, one of the leading intellectual influences on the Obama White House and author of “Hot, Flat, and Crowded,” has been openly jealous of Chinese Communist rule as a way of quickly imposing societal makeovers that force green technologies.
“We are the ones we have been waiting for,” President Obama said of his victory in 2008. He promised “change” and America is getting it good and hard.
Payne: Granholm hoodie fashion (not available for Detroit)
Posted by hpayne on March 27, 2012
On March 21, “The War Room” talk show host and ex-Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm made national headlines when when she posted a Facebook picture of herself in a hoodie “suiting up in solidarity with the ‘Million Hoodie’ March for Trayvon Martin.'”
How fashionable. And how revealing.
A review of Granholm’s Facebook page – where she comments regularly and promotes her show – finds not a single reference to the ongoing Detroit bloodbath in her home state of Michigan this year – a bloodbath that has claimed 63 lives, many of them children much younger than Martin.
Indeed, Granholm could not even move herself to condemn the killings of 9-month-old African-American Delric Miller on February 20, who was shot to death when someone sprayed his family’s Detroit home with an AK-47 assult rifle.
Instead, Granholm used her national platform to promote the Republican “War on Women” – a frequent theme of her Facebook posts and TV program. On February 24, just days after the horrific Miller shooting, she headlined that she “spoke with CNN’s Piers Morgan about why I think this war on women’s reproductive freedom isn’t a great argument in a general election.”
Does the War on Women use AK-47s?
Nor did she talk about the January 31 slaughter of black 12-year-old Kadejah Davis, who was killed during a drive-by shooting allegedly sparked by a senseless argument over a cell phone. Davis was one of 38 murders in Detroit in January alone. But as the news shocked Detroiters, Granholm seemed more concerned with other targets for her primetime program that evening, namely: “What do you think of the Democrats’ strategy to target extreme Tea Party candidates?”
The next day, she was still unmoved. “If you had a Super PAC, what would you name it?” she wrote. No hoodie. No yellow ribbon. Nothing for Detroit’s slain black children.
Why? Apparently, the only killing that motivates Granholm are white-on-black killings (never mind that Martin was shot by a Hispanic) – the kind that stir up political bases and pander to her party’s race industry, Sharpton & Co. Granholm’s politicization of the Martin case is consistent with her eight years as governor in which she championed trendy issues like green energy and “cool cities” even as Detroit topped the national charts in murder and the state’s budget went underwater.
On her first, January 31 “War Room” broadcast from Chicago – a city also plagued with black-on-black violence this year, Granholm ignored the city’s pain to “give you a look inside President Barack Obama’s campaign war room.” Outside, the war in Chicago’s black neighborhoods was claiming 40 lives in January.
“I couldn’t help but get a little choked up when I was talking about Trayvon Martin on tonight’s show,” Granholm wrote on Facebook March 22. “I keep looking at the pictures of the baby-faced handsome young man. His voice on that 911 tape crying for help is agonizing for any parent to hear. I have a wonderful teenage son too. He wears hoodies, carries his cell phone and likes skittles. If this were my son, by god. . . . But let’s face it, this would not happen to my son. This happened to Trayvon Martin because he’s black. My heart breaks for Trayvon’s parents.”
But not for the parents of Delric Miller or Kadejah Davis. They were victims of black-on-black crime. No One Million Hoodie marches in Union Square, New York for them.
Payne: Punt
Posted by hpayne on March 26, 2012
Even the clockwork punctual Snyder Administration could not meet the deadline to save Detroit. By law, the state’s Detroit Financial Review Board was to have made a recommendation – signed no later than Monday – on whether the governor should implement a consent agreement or appoint an emergency manager (EM). Monday came and went, and Andy Dillon’s team made no recommendation.
In short, they punted.
Nothing in Detroit works – so why should its state review board be any different? Their excuse? They had no consent agreement to rule on since the governor and city officials are still hashing out the details. There’s always an excuse in Detroit.
On a day in which Detroit’s beleaguered citizens should have gotten leadership, they got more chaos. More court appeals were filed by union stooges. Dillon’s board meeting was occupied by protestors yelling: “No justice, no peace!” The governor was openly mocked by Detroit civic leaders as they ramped up the racial rhetoric and nationalized the struggle (just as MIView writer Matt Davis predicted two weeks ago). Jesse Jackson announced he would bring his circus to town Thursday. And Detroit Reverend David Bullock bemoaned a “lynching of liberty” and accused Snyder of racism on par with the Trayvon Martin case.
“One half of Michigan’s African-Americans are under the emergency manager law. This is kind of like Trayvon Martin,” he told WWJ-News Radio. “If it looks like some kind of racial element is being implemented, then race plays a factor.”
Detroit has defied the rules for decades. Which is why it is in the situation it is today. Unsustainable public employee costs. Public corruption. Nonexistent family structure. Fifty percent adult illiteracy rates. And now the EM law.
“This is the last day we have to act, so we’re here today to address (the law),” Dillon told the raucous crowd. “We have a 10-day window … it is our hope that within this window. . . (we) come to an agreement.” He apparently was referring to a brand new 10-day window since it missed its Monday deadline.
But by law, shouldn’t that have triggered an EM?
The forces of disorder are winning. As they always do in America’s most dysfunctional city. Benton Harbor got an EM. So did Pontiac and Flint. Even New York City got a consent agreement almost identical to what the governor proposed 10 days ago. But none of it’s good enough for Detroit.
The governor says that he and city council are “just a few paragraphs away” from a consent agreement. He says he just needs a few more days. But WWJ-Radio’s Tim Skubick reported that Mayor Bing told Snyder that he would not accept a consent agreement with the words “consent agreement.” We’re not making this up. Those “few paragraphs,” in other words, are crucial. Snyder wants a consent agreement. Bing wants a “financial stability plan.” How then can the governor meet the law?
“We understand we have financial difficulties,” activist minister Malik Shabazz told the Detroit News as his cohorts shouted down Dillon’s team. “Give us the help we want, need and deserve, not the help you want to impose on us. We don’t want an emergency manager or a consent decree. This is white supremacy and we will fight you.”
As MIView columnist Bill Johnson says: “Let them go bankrupt.”
Payne: Those Obama Green Blues
Posted by hpayne on March 22, 2012
Green disciple President Obama on Thursday went to the heart of Oklahoma oil and gas country to proclaim himself a born-again carbon believer. He embraced the Keystone XL oil pipeline just days after taking credit for the American oil shale boom he once scorned – a revolution that now promises to bring 100 years of cheap oil resources to the United States.
“Right now, a company called TransCanada has applied to build a new pipeline to speed more oil from Cushing to state-of-the-art refineries down on the Gulf Coast. And today, I’m directing my administration to cut through the red tape, break through the bureaucratic hurdles and make this project a priority, to go ahead and get it done.” the president said. “Now, you wouldn’t know all this from listening to the television set.”
Nor would you know it from listening to him for the last five years.
It wasn’t supposed to work out this way. In 2007, Obama launched his campaign for president as a green missionary who would eliminate sinful carbon fuels in order to combat global warming, “one of the greatest moral challenges of our generation.”
In 2007 before the Detroit Economic Club, Obama chastised a roomful of auto executives for making immoral cars. He told them that alternative-fuel cars were the vehicles of the future and promised that, when he was elected, he would “demand that they revamp their production. All of us have a responsibility here, and all of us are required to act.” In 2008 Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden, declared that the era of coal was over. That same year, Obama’s future Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, told The Wall Street Journal that “somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” Upon entering in office in 2009, Obama and Biden went about implementing their plans for a Green Crusade, diverting up to $100 billion of the stimulus package to green tech from battery makers to solar panels. Obama hailed algae as tomorrow’s fuel while scorning the oil and gas revolution taking place from the Dakotas across to Pennsylvania. “‘Oil and gas will be important for the next few years,” he lectured Oklahoma oilman Harold Hamm, the discoverer of North Dakota’s huge Bakken oil fields. “But we need to go on to green and alternative energy. Chu has assured me that within five years, we can have a battery developed that will make a car with the equivalent of 130 miles per gallon.”
President Algae charged his EPA to go to battle against Hamm and his industry (Washington keeps “sticking a regulatory boot at our necks” says Hamm), shut down coal production, and strangle oil exploration. Dismissing those lost jobs, Obama echoed the words of green priest Al Gore in proclaiming a new era of green jobs.
Three years later, that vision is in shambles.
Obama’s Chevy Volt – the car the president saved GM to build – has been a flop, its production line idled by lack of demand. Repeating the disastrous, mid-decade green investments of Jennifer Granholm in Michigan, Obama’s federally-funding for firms from Solyndra to Beacon Power to A123 Systems resulted – not in a jobs boom – but in bankruptcies and laid-off workers.
With soaring gas prices and a stumbling economy threatening his re-election, Obama, ironically, is trying an election-year conversion. Desperate to counter his anti-energy image, he went all the way to Oklahoma for a silly photo-op in front of stacks of oil pipe to approve a project that doesn’t need federal approval. Like Mike Dukakis in his tank, President Algae looked ridiculous.
But his administration’s low point came in public hearings earlier this month when DOE High Priest Chu was forced to confess his high gas price sins, admitting that they were a drag on the economic recovery.
What a journey these Green Church elders have made. The high energy prices they once promised would spur economic growth, now threaten it. It seems that global warming is not the greatest moral challenge of Obama’s generation after all. Getting re-elected is.
Payne: Mitt Snyder
Posted by hpayne on March 21, 2012
Who is Mitt Romney? He is Rick Snyder.
Many conservatives seem perplexed that Romney can’t make himself into Ronald Reagan. But he is not a career pol. He is a career businessman who sees government as a broken company that needs a turnaround. An eight-year turnaround. After that, Romney is on to the next challenge.
Just like Snyder who is currently right-sizing the Michigan “corporation.” One Tough Nerd is putting systems in place, paying down long-term liabilities, and so on. His trips to The Detroit News are remarkably devoid of politics-speak. As are his foreign trade missions (for one, he goes on missions to places like China because it’s good business -unlike his union-tool predecessor who sacrificed business opportunities to party politics).
Those following Snyder’s tweets from Europe this week will find them indistinguishable from, say, an auto CEO touring his European operations. This is in stark contrast to Granholm whose trade missions to PC places like Norway were all about “transforming” Michigan to a “Green Belt” economy despite “Big Oil and their Republican cronies.”
The downside of this lack of political ideology is that CEO pols like Snyder and Romney are easily wooed by fads. Both, for example, have dabbled in the rhetoric of climate change and sustainability because they think it’s good for the company image. Think Alan Mulally at Ford who talks green even as his company makes money hand over fist on gas-guzzling F150s. Folks want their carmaker to be good stewards of the planet. Cynical? Off-putting? Yes and yes. But at its core, it is marketing, not serious policy.
Which is why it’s crucial that CEO pols have strong career pols behind them – like Paul Ryan (Snyder has Jase Bolger and Chuck Moss) – to make sure such marketing doesn’t become public policy. Meanwhile, the CEOs relentlessly make their “corporations” more efficient.
In this age of debt and deficits, CEO pols aren’t a bad model. Romney and Snyder are in the right place at the right time.
Payne: Bing’s airball
Posted by hpayne on March 20, 2012
“But the federal government also brought a lot of cash to the table,” answered Mayor Dave Bing in answer to why Obama’s emergency-manager-style takeover of the auto industry was any different from Snyder’s EM proposal to take over Detroit and put its fiscal house in order. It was a revealing moment in The Detroit News interview of Bing March 9.
This week Detroit’s mayor followed through on his Detroit bailout obsession, proposing a counter-consent agreement that asks for $137 million in state aid and the authority to raise more city tax revenue. At the same time, he refuses to give up his authority to run Detroit.
This is surely a non-starter with the governor – and contradicts the auto bailout model. Yes, the feds gave more money to Detroit automakers – but they also demanded full oversight, firing GM CEO Rick Wagner, giving Chrysler to Fiat, and turning over all authority to Washington’s auto task force with the ability to close plants, tear up union contracts, and sell assets. Just like the financial review board that Bing still rejects.
Indeed, the governor and State Treasurer Andy Dillon have already conceded the need for Detroit financial assistance – which is why they want control of a city that has proven inept at self-management. The insider buzz on Detroit’s chaos is that Dave Bing – the businessman who was supposed to bring competence to Detroit – is over his head.
His dismissive comments about city council and now his flailing consent retort are more evidence of that.
Under Bing’s plan, “the state would have to agree to support efforts sought by the city that could include: raising the city income tax ceiling; debt relief forgiveness by the state; bottled water licenses; and utility tax modifications. The state also would agree to support legislation allowing for collecting taxes on ‘non-resident wagering,'” reports The Detroit News.
Really? That Bing thinks the fireman rescuing Detroit “have to agree” to anything is remarkable. And that he thinks Detroit’s problem is under-taxation is out of touch with reality.
Payne: Obama can’t afford $4 gas
Posted by hpayne on March 15, 2012
Gas prices hit $4 a gallon in Detroit this week. And it’s the president’s fault. How do we know? Because that’s what Democrats have been telling us since 2008.
In May of Election Year 2008, with prices near $4 a gallon,
Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Michigan, was hand-picked by Democrats to deliver the party’s weekly radio address in which she slammed then-President Bush for the pain at the pump. “When President Bush took office in 2001, Stabenow said, gas cost $1.50 a gallon, a price which has shot up to more than $3.70 for regular gas and $4 for premium in her home state,” reported The Hill.
In Ejection Year 2012, the shoe is on the other political party with Barack Obama now the focus of gas price fury. But given his anti-energy record, the damage is likely to be deeper.
Calling Bush’s prices “a crisis for every American family,” Stabenow in 2008 pushed the Democrats’ broken record of more spending for alternatives and higher fuel economy mandates, claiming that “Republicans want more drilling, more consumption, and more tax giveaways for the big oil companies.”
Four years later, the “I can feel global warming when I fly” senator is still holding press conferences about high gas prices – but White House blame has curiously disappeared from her song sheet. The Blame Bush refrain had become as reliable a Midwest spring phenomenon as red robins, with gas prices heading sharply north as refineries shut down to change to (federally-mandated) seasonal blends amidst growing spring demand. From 2006-2008, Gov. Jennifer Granholm, an Obama clone on the glories of green energy, routinely drafted national petitions asking Bush to impose a windfall profits tax on “greedy” oil companies (the same oil companies that make up a substantial percentage of state pension portfolios because of their steady profits, it should be noted).
Now another White House resident is facing $4 a gallon gas. But this time it is the most-anti-carbon President in U.S. history, President Obama.
Where George Bush had a record of encouraging oil exploration (even as his presidency hit its nadir with his 2006 “addicted to oil” speech to counter his oilman image), Obama is on record supporting higher oil prices ” and in hiring the likes of Secretary of Solyndra Stephen Chu who apparently believes his agency should called the Department of High-Cost Energy.
The result is that this spring’s predictable gas jump has hit Obama’s popularity hard. “Gas prices are a main culprit,” reports The Washington Post of Obama’s negative numbers. “Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they disapprove of the way the president is handling the situation at the pump. (The Post) survey. . . finds 59 percent of Americans giving Obama negative ratings on the economy.”
Data from America’s 2008 flirtation with $4-a-gallon gas suggests Obama is particularly vulnerable on the issue. Why? Because even as Bush was suffering from $4 gas, opinion polls showed the public agreed with his solutions, primarily: Drill, baby, drill.
“Seven in 10 voters said soaring fuel costs – at $4.09 a gallon for regular this week – are having a significant or major impact on their lives and are swaying two-thirds of residents to back offshore drilling in Florida, California and other states with ocean shorelines,” found a July, 2008 Detroit News/WXYZ-Action News poll. “Nearly half said they’d even favor drilling for oil and gas along the Great Lakes.”
While Bush reacted to such polls by demanding more production, Obama has aligned himself with green extremists against the Keystone pipeline, drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and so on. Oil and gas companies have beat a path to The Detroit News offices during the Obama administration complaining of the Obama EPA’s hostility to energy exploration.
In the red and purple states of the Midwest, Obama’s green extremism is the color of high gas prices.
Payne: Mitt Romney, front-tripper
Posted by hpayne on March 14, 2012
Rick Santorum’s Missibama win Tuesday night refueled his insurgent candidacy even as Mitt Romney made a good southern showing and picked up more delegates. But Romney’s weakness as the GOP standard-bearer was exposed by what did not happen Tuesday.
On the same primary day, the Congressional Budget Office released blockbuster news about Obamacare. The CBO report found the costs of the unpopular law are double – an estimated $1.76 trillion over 10 years – the amount originally projected. In addition, the CBO reports that four times as many – four million – Americans will lose their employer health insurance by 2016, far more than the 1 million the administration estimated. And 1-2 million fewer people will gain access to the law’s subsidized exchanges than Obama claimed, forcing an extra 1 million citizens into the already out-of-control Medicaid program. The CBO numbers confirm the scandal that Obama cooked the numbers in order to ram Obamacare through in 2010.
Predictably, this news was largely covered up by an MSM that has run defense for Obamacare’s fundamental flaws.
But that’s where Romney must shine.
In the absence of MSM coverage, he can use his high profile to make news on important issues. But given his vulnerability on Obamacare’s twin, Romneycare, the former Massachusetts governor is reluctant to address Obamacare issues given the fact that Romneycare predicted Obamacare’s epic problems.
Tuesday was an opportunity squandered. Instead of its presidential frontrunner, the GOP addressed the CBO’s numbers with lesser lights. “Both fiscally and for the sake of our health care system, Americans cannot afford the president’s healthcare law,” said Georgia Rep. Tom Price, chairman of the Republican Policy Committee. “The CBO’s revised cost estimate indicates that this massive government intrusion into America’s health care system will be far more costly than was originally claimed. The law’s true cost to American taxpayers is part of a series of promises President Obama and Democrats in Congress made that will be broken.”
Those words would have made a bigger splash coming from Mitt in ’12 – and his scrum of media followers.
Instead, Obamacare is Santorum’s issue – a less disciplined candidate who has a tendency to stray into social issues. The predicament exposes Romney’s crucial campaign mistake – not disavowing Romneycare at the start of his 2012 campaign. Had he done so, he could attack Obamacare mercilessly – not just winning the GOP base with his conservative turn, but also using a unique platform (“states are for experimentation and the Obamacare experiment failed in my state,” he might have said) from which to educate the American public on the horrors of the most partisan, ill-conceived legislation in modern times.
That’s what party standard bearers are supposed to do.
Payne: Shut up, Levin argued
Posted by hpayne on March 12, 2012
Senator Carl Levin and his fellow senators haven’t passed a budget in three years. No wonder. Michigan’s senior senator is tending to more important things – like trying to boot Rush Limbaugh off Armed Services Radio for the talk show host’s infamous derogatory comments about a Georgetown student activist – comments that Limbaugh has since apologized for.
But apologies aren’t enough for Levin. El Rushbo must be shut up.
“I would hope the people that run it (Armed Forces Network) see just how offensive this is and drop it,” Levin old CNN in joining former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm in the anti- Limbaugh fatwa.
The demand puts Levin & Co. to the left of even Bill Maher, the Democrats’ favorite misogynist comedian. Maher – unapologetic and no doubt spooked about using similar language about female Republican candidates – asked for tolerance last week.
“Hate to defend #Rush Limbaugh but he apologized, liberals looking bad not accepting. Also hate intimidation by sponsor pullout,” Maher tweeted.
The MSM has tried to gate-keep news that the Left has set the standard of coarse language towards women, But in the alternative media age, the news is getting out. Maher’s fears were realized this week as Fox News exposed comic Louis C.K. – another in a long line of lefties who have made an art of disparaging righty women – who subsequently withdrew from the Radio and Television Correspondent’s Dinner.
The RTCA Dinner is an MSM institution and sometimes attended by Obama. Wouldn’t want to make the boss uncomfortable.
Payne: Bing’s longest season
Posted by hpayne on March 11, 2012
Mayor Dave Bing is a gentleman. He was a heckuva ball player. But watching him coach Detroit is like watching the 2012 Detroit Pistons. He knows what’s wrong, but he doesn’t have the horses to prevent a loss.
And 2012 is gonna be a heckuva bad season.
Nearly three months ago, Treasurer Andy Dillon issued a preliminary state review of city finances detailing a bleak picture of a metropolis heading for April insolvency. With long-term debt at $12 billion, the city was paying out $597 million in debt payments. That is, more than its Big 3 revenue fund generators – income taxes, property taxes, and casinos – combined ($538 million).
If the mayor and City Council didn’t get together, said the governor, the state would send in an emergency manager. Nothing happened. City Councilman Gary Brown said in late January that the city needed an immediate consent agreement. Nothing happened. In early February, Mayor Bing said he had a tentative agreement from unions for $100 million in cuts. No more details (and no plan to address long term liabilities).
The governor says he is waiting for Detroit to act. Today, Mayor Bing said he is waiting for Governor Snyder to act. Snyder says he needs a city budget plan to avoid an EM. Bing says he can’t negotiate specifics with unions if they know there’s going to be an EM who would discard their agreement.
So the city slowly sinks.
One thing is clear: Bing and the City Council don’t talk. Snyder may want a mayor-Council agreement, but Bing is contemptuous of Council. “(Ken) Cockerel has been there 15 years doing budgets, and they say I don’t know what I’m doing?” spat Bing at suggestions that Council has a budget plan.
So we wait for the governor. And if Council doesn’t like his consent agreement? Bing says they will have to take it or face an EM. “We can find jobs elsewhere,” said Bing of his staff. “I’m not so sure about (Council). They need the job.”
Van Conway, a Michigan turnaround expert who has helped reorganize municipalities and school districts, told the Freep the city’s condition is so dire only an EM can address its problems. That’s how Detroit automakers did it – Washington fired the CEO, took the company into managed bankruptcy, tore up union contracts, jettisoned assets, and put the company on a sustainable course. When asked if that was reassuring, Bing scoffed at the analogy. GM got billions in a federal bailout, he said, and though the automaker’s pension liabilities were large, they were not Detroit’s staggering 33:1 debt-asset ratio. By contrast, Grand Rapids debt-to asset ratio is just 39 cents to each dollar.
For all his protests against an EM, it looks like (as my colleague Dan Calabrese has pointed out in this space) that’s what Bing really wants. He needs Snyder to make the moves.
Pontiac emergency manager Louis Schimmel says a consent agreement for Detroit is a must. Bing agrees. Pontiac reached a consent agreement with the state – but didn’t live up to its terms. The city got an EM in 2009.
Who Wants to Be a Welfare Millionaire?
Posted by hpayne on March 8, 2012
A single Michigan mom on welfare was spending money on state lottery tickets, resulting in a $700,000 jackpot which she failed to report to the Michigan Department of Human Services so that she could continue to take food stamps, resulting in calls for a redundant law forcing state lotteries to report lotto winners to DHS.
What’s wrong with this picture? It is a wonderful illustration of how government works – or doesn’t work – in America today.
“I’m not saying it’s the right thing to do,” said Amanda Clayton’s mom, Euline Clayton, of her suddenly-rich daughter’s use of food stamps (see Brother Calabrese nearby). “But it’s nobody’s business if she’s not breaking the law.”
But she is breaking the law which is why DHS Director Maura Corrigan cut off Clayton’s food stamps upon hearing of the 24-year old’s lotto winnings.
“Under DHS policy, a recipient of food assistance benefits must notify the state within 10 days of any asset or income change. DHS relies on clients being forthcoming about their actual financial status,” said Corrigan in a statement. “If they are not, and continue to accept benefits, they may face criminal investigation and be required to pay back those benefits.” A department spokesman “while unable to address this specific case – confirmed that big asset gains make recipients ineligible for welfare.
Oh.
So how come Michigan Rep. Dale Zorn, R-Ida, and U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow are drafting more laws to prevent lotto winners like Clayton from doing what’s already illegal (Zorn’s bill actually came after another case of a Bay County man getting food stamps after his $2 million lotto pay day in 2010)? Because of the “Do Something” reflex that demands a politician react to an embarrassing headline.
This is how America gets new regulations, creating more paperwork – whether they are needed or not. Indeed, a mandate that the State Lottery report winners to the DHS – a responsibility already required of welfare recipients – puts the state on a slippery slope to extending welfare liability to employers as well as recipients.
If the State Lotto has to report winners, why not force employers to report the hiring of welfare recipients to DHS? If welfare queens aren’t reporting their lotto winnings, how do we know they are reporting new job income?
Which begs the question of why we have state-sponsored lotteries at all. Gambling rings were once prosecuted by U.S. law enforcement for running rackets that preyed on the poor. Today, government itself runs gambling enterprises – lotteries – that prey on the poor. So while the state of Michigan should be assisting Amanda Carney to get off welfare, it is instead advertising that she buy lotto tickets – costing money that should go to her children and time she should be spending getting a job.
You think getting welfare recipients off food stamps is hard? Wait until we mandate America’s middle class gets free contraceptives. Your government at work.
Algaeman to the rescue
Posted by hpayne on March 7, 2012
Despite massive federal subsidies, alternative fuel cars have been a disappointment. So on Wednesday, President Barack “Put algae in your tank” Obama promised to burn even more taxpayer dollars for alternatives.
Algaeman landed at a bailed-out Chrysler truck plant in North Carolina to save America from gasoline, which he called a “fuel of the past.” Huh? So passé is oil that global markets have bid its price to $120 a barrel in their thirst for more.
But from Planet Gore, apparently, you can see the future and so Obama pledged a whopping $4.7 billion to fund more alternative vehicles and more alternative infrastructure – including broadening his $10,000 tax credit to buy alt-fuel cars to include, not just the Chevy Volt he covets, but also cars powered by natural gas, and . . . biofuels like algae.
“We need to invest in the technology that will help us use less oil in our cars and our trucks,” said the president. But wishing for alternatives doesn’t make them work. Before President Algae there was President George “Cellulosic ethanol” Bush who pledged in 2007 billions to fund his vision of an alternative fuel future. But $1.5 billion of grants and loan subsidies later cellulosic is a bust – even with the help of big private investors like GM which have also invested heavily into cellulosic in order to atone for their carbon sins. Bush promised – no, mandated – 250 million gallons by 2011. How much did the industry produce? 6.6 million.
Seventy percent of that was supposed to come from Alabama-based Cello Energy – the Solyndra of cellulosic. “In 2009 a jury in a civil fraud case ruled that Cello had lied about how much cellulosic fuel it could produce,” reports The Wall Street Journal editorial page. “The firm produced little biofuel and in October 2010 it declared bankruptcy.” Undaunted, the Obama Administration has doubled down on more cellulosic subsides: $510 million for a Navy program, $134 million to Abengoa Bioenergy in Kansas, and $105 million for ethanol producer POET.
Green subsides? Bankrupt companies? Sound familiar?
Not to the Obamamedia lapdogs who followed the wonder president to North Carolina. They ignored history’s inconvenient truths.
They also ignored Costco’s elimination of its failed electric car charger program. Over 15 years, Costco has installed 90 chargers at (mostly California) stores, “but nobody ever uses them,” said Costco in ending the program last year. No matter.
“We’re going to give communities across the country more of an incentive to make the shift to more energy-efficient cars,” Obama said in committing $1b to alt-fuel stations today.
Been there, done that. Last year, California pledged $2.3 million in state money to fund parking lot chargers. “Why should we have anybody spend money on a program that nobody’s thought through?” said Costco in refusing to join Cal’s program.
Thrown your shoe through the computer screen yet? Want to hear more?
Algaeman announced that he was expanding the $10,000 tax credit for alternative cars beyond electrics to include natural gas and biofuel power. Why? Because natural gas billionaire T. Boone Pickens has been lobbying Republican and Democrats alike hard for natural gas car subsidies. So it’s a bipartisan boondoggle, get it? And biofuels include algae, which the president says might work because “you’ve got a bunch of algae out here.”
And we’ve got a bunch of carpets out here that could fly, too.
“I’m surprised that SNL hasn’t taken algae and turned it into a skit,” laughed Newt Gingrich in Georgia on Super Tuesday. Don’t be surprised. SNL is in the Obama tank with the rest of Obamedia.
Editorial: Obama’s Rush routine
Posted by hpayne on March 5, 2012
A year ago, liberal comedian Bill Maher unapologetically called Sarah Palin a “tw**” and piled on four months later calling her a “c***” and Michele Bachmann a “b**b.”
This as liberal talk show host Ed Schultz called Laura Ingraham a “slut” and Keith Olbermann called conservative commentator Michelle Malkin ” big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it.”
Outraged by this “War on Women,” did President Obama phone Palin, Malkin, Ingraham, and Malkin to sooth their pain as part of his national call for civility in the wake of Gabby Gifford’s shooting in January 2011? He did not.
His media allies ignored the insults as well.
Yet, this week, after CONSERVATIVE radio show host Rush Limbaugh let fly with ill-conceived comments about Sandra Fluke being a “slut,” President Obama called the Georgetown activist to express his sympathies. Such hot rhetoric – on the left and right – is the dally hurly-burly of talk radio and political comedy. Denounce it all – or none of it. The president’s calculated criticism of Limbaugh alone brought the predictable media attention – and an apology from Limbaugh.
But the president’s insincerity speaks volumes.
While Obama uses Fluke as a pawn in his political campaign, his Super Pac has accepted $1 million contribution from female-trashing Maher and other Democrats have received campaign contributions from Olbermann. President Obama has not demanded that his party return those monies.
Neither has he – nor anyone else in his party (most notably Michigan “Civility Cop” John Dingell) denounced the steady stream of hate and death threats directed at governors from Scott Walker to Rick Snyder. This is how President Obama uses his office to score cheap political points for his personal gain.
Editorial: ‘Tricky Dick’ Obama?
Posted by hpayne on March 1, 2012
A leading Democratic strategist and former pollster for Jimmy Carter decried Democratic efforts to defeat Mitt Romney in the Michigan Republican primary this week, lamenting that it was the first time an incumbent president’s campaign has meddled in an opposition primary since the Nixon Administration tried to derail Democratic frontrunner Ed Muskie in 1972.
Pat Caddell, one of the nation’s most respected political analysts, was also the youngest Democrat on Richard Nixon’s Enemies List by virtue of his position as a campaign staffer for 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern – the beneficiary of Nixon’s anti-Muskie tactics.
Today, he smells Tricky Dick in the 2012 Obama campaign.
In an interview with The Michigan View.com, Caddell repeated comments he made on Fox News Tuesday night after Romney won Michigan despite Democratic get-out-the-vote effort favoring his conservative opponent, Rick Santorum.
“We have not had a White House where the incumbent tried to affect the other side’s primary since Nixon,” says Caddell. “On the 40th anniversary year of Watergate, that’s worth pointing out. I am a Democrat and I am offended by it. There is a reason parties hold their own primaries to choose their own candidates.”
Caddell says that Democratic tactics in Michigan over the few weeks remind him of Nixon’s infamous efforts to undermine Muskie in the 1972 New Hampshire primary when Muskie was embarrassed by “The Canuck Letter,” a missive allegedly orchestrated by the Nixon campaign that ultimately led to the implosion of Muskie’s campaign and the nomination of McGovern – the left-wing candidate that Nixon trounced in the general election.
“Sending Democrats in to vote for Santorum was a concerted effort – and it was not because they liked him,” said Caddell referring to the extraordinary level of Democratic activity during the Republican primary from $250,000 in Obama Super Pac ads targeting Romney, to Obama’s red meat speech to the UAW in Washington on Election Day, to Obama allies writing anti-Romney op-eds in Detroit newspapers, to Democratic operatives like consultant Joe DiSano and state Democratic Party chair Mark Brewer urging Democrats to vote Santorum.
Caddell noted that open primaries see party crossover votes all the time – such as Democratic votes for John McCain in 2000 – but “because they like the candidate.” In Santorum’s case, Caddell points out that “Santorum carried liberals, but lost conservatives – even though he was the conservative candidate – to Romney by 19 percent.” Caddell says that was clear evidence of Democratic trickery.
While not alleging anything illegal, Caddell denounced Democratic tactics purely in the interest of derailing frontrunner Romney. Caddell says these tactics are consistent with “Obama’s Chicago hard-knuckle politics.” Those tactics have been seen in Michigan before when Obama’s Auto Task Force allegedly made political threats against Chrysler bondholders in order to force them to accept terms favorable to the UAW.
“Why doesn’t anyone hold this president accountable for this?” Caddell demanded. “Barack Obama says he’s for a new kind of politics.”
The Michigan View called the Obama White House which deferred all campaign questions to the Democratic National Committee. “(Caddell’s claims) are untrue,” said a Democratic Party official. “The DNC had zero participation in union turnout. It was Rick Santorum’s call for Democrats to vote.”
Indeed, Santorum appeared to piggyback on the Democratic Party’s “Operation Chaos” by making robocalls of his own to Democratic voters – a tactic that seemed to backfire late in the campaign as Romney took to the airwaves to denounce his opponent’s tactics.
“If I were Romney’s campaign manager,” said Caddell, “I would have been campaigning about the president’s interference in the primary – not Santorum’s dirty tricks.”
Other veteran campaign pros confirmed that it is highly unusual for presidential campaigns to interfere in opposite-party primaries. Michigan pollster and Republican strategist Steve Mitchell could not remember any such instance. He cited the Democratic votes for McCain in 2000 – but noted that Democratic efforts to get out the vote were encouraged by state Democrats looking to embarrass Michigan Governor John Engler. Stu Sandler, another Michigan political strategist, agreed with Caddell’s charge that Democrats were using Santorum to sabotage Romney.
“It’s uncommon for someone to jump party lines. When they do, it’s usually for the more moderate candidate,” he commented. “It’s hard to think of this ever having happened in a national campaign.”
Candidate Obama may have campaigned on change, but – as Caddell’s comments attest – his Chicago-style politics, like his Great Society-type programs, are increasingly a throwback to darker days.
Editorial:Mitt Snyder
Posted by hpayne on February 27, 2012
As the nation turns towards the Michigan primary on Tuesday, Mitt Romney’s tight fight to win his home state is an indication that Republican voters are still uncomfortable about what a “moderate’ Romney presidency will bring. The irony is that a resurgent Michigan this year is benefiting from technocratic Romneyism.
If you want to see what a Romney presidency looks like look no further than Michigan’s new businessman governor, the former private-equity millionaire Rick Snyder.
Like Romney, Snyder is a successful former CEO and private equity investor who came into office pledging to run state government like a business. Viewing his term like that of a turnaround expert tackling a failing firm, Snyder has put in place “metrics” and “dashboards” and other business systems that have addressed the state’s fundamental budget problems and reversed the state’s bond-rating slide.
Basking in the glow of a report from the Tax Foundation acknowledging that Michigan’s tax burden has improved from an awful 49th to impressive 7th, it’s hard to remember that Snyder barely made it through the GOP primary just two years ago – scorned by conservatives as a RINO imposter.
The Obama presidency is a replay of the disastrous, rudderless, red-ink Green cronyism of Democrat Jennifer Granholm, governor from 2002-2010. Granholm and Obama are American Idol selections – not executives. Their rhetoric soars, but their management is nonexistent. Reeling from Granholm’s eight lost years of infrastructure stimulus, green investments, and tax hikes, Michigan two years ago looked to a talented field of conservatives – and one moderate, millionaire businessman.
“One Tough Nerd Snyder” eschewed conservative rhetoric and told GOP primary voters that he would run Michigan as a business. His 10-point plan promised jobs, tax reform, a fixed government and lots of airy platitudes. He survived the primary only because Mike Cox, Pete Hoekstra, and Michael Bouchard split the conservative vote.
The Nerd likely became governor because – unlike businessman Dick DeVos four earlier – he didn’t have to run against incumbent Jenifer Granholm. Instead, Snyder faced Granholm’s divisive, cynical brand of political campaigning in the form of unknown Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero. He smeared Snyder as a jobs-to-China outsourcer and a Richie Rich who stole $23 million from Gateway Corp. to start a private equity firm.
Remember? It all seems so irrelevant to governing today. And govern Snyder has. In one year – with the help of a Republican legislature-he has put the budget on a sustainable path by concentrating on business metrics, simplified taxes, and reducing long-term liabilities.
After eight years of rudderless, Granholm turmoil, it has been refreshing. GOP die-hards still call Snyder a RINO. He’s too squishy on Obamacare. He wants to build an ill-advised bridge. He isn’t John Engler (except in his stunning list of legislative achievements). Like Rodney Dangerfield, he gets no respect. Except from a government and business community that can finally see a light at the end of Michigan’s fiscal tunnel.
Governor Snyder meet President Romney.
Editorial: Michigan: The technocrat vs. the idealist
Posted by hpayne on February 17, 2012
Novi – It’s the technocrat vs. the idealist. The capitalist vs. the Constitutionalist. The son of a successful Detroit auto CEO vs. the grandson of a Detroit auto worker. A man determined about fixing Washington vs. a man passionate about restoring America’s spirit. In the Michigan primary – and likely the Republican nomination- the GOP presidential race has come down to Mitt Romney vs. Rick Santorum.
On Thursday, the two different men locked horns on Michigan’s battlefield – a perfect battlefield to showcase their respective talents.
In the morning, Romney received the endorsement of fellow technocrat, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, who declared his fellow private equity CEO the right man at the right time to fix America’s structural economic problems. In an editorial board meeting with the Detroit News, Romney’s business acumen was on impressive display as he expertly diagnosed the auto industry’s problems, laid out a plan to reform health care beyond Obamacare repeal, and said that he had “lived conservatism” as a business expert who turned around companies and balanced budgets.
“If I’m president I want to be the ally of entrepreneurs and job creators,” Romney said. Then, alluding to Snyder’s restoration of Michigan to fiscal sanity: “I’d run the government like a business, like a household — like this state.”
At days’ end, Romney and Santorum met face to face at the Republican Party’s annual Lincoln dinner in Novi. And though it was Ann Romney – not Mitt (traveling in Ohio for another campaign event) – who represented her husband, the theme was the same. She touted him as the manager the nation needs. “I have seen him turn around companies,” she beamed.
“I turned to Mitt and said: I will do this again if you can fix it,” she said of her reluctance to go through another brutal presidential campaign even as she worried about the country’s fate. “Can you fix it?”
“Yes, I can,” her husband reassured her.
That theme of entrepreneurial exceptionalism resonates with Michiganders, a state that has produced some of the world’s iconic entrepreneurs and the companies that bear their names: Ford, Dodge, Penske. Romney’s father comes from that mold – as does Mitt, founder of Bain Capital.
But Rick Santorum has his own American success story to tell. It starts with his grandfather, an immigrant laborer who came to Detroit first as an autoworker (before settling in Pennsylvania as a coal miner).
Santorum’s speech before the Republican Lincoln dinner glowed with the pride of immigrant sons whose fathers came to Detroit to pursue the American Dream.
While Romney talks of American know-how, Santorum talks of its Constitutional foundation, of the “founding principles that make this country different than any other on earth.” In an emotional recitation of the country’s culture of freedom and of inalienable rights granted – not by the government – but by God, Santorum lamented a country that has lost its way. Santorum lamented how government welfare has destroyed the American family, replacing fathers with paternalistic government.
In the emotional heart of the speech, he said that as the father of seven children ranging from 20 to 31/2 “I probably shouldn’t be running for president.” But he said he felt called at a critical time. He said President Obama was wrong in finding national greatness in welfare public assistance programs. “Americans still come by the millions from all over the world” he said. “And they don’t come for the government programs. They had government programs where they came from.”
Taking on Romney and Obama – father of Obamacare, Son of Romneycare – Santorum said America faces a defining moment about the country it wants to be. The former senator’s stem-winder dripped with the passion missing from Romney’s technocratic speeches.
“I come from steel country. We feel that same pride about what we did to forge a great and powerful nation. You helped build America. You helped create wealth. You moved people,” Santorum said in forging a bond between Michigan’s identity and his own.” Show America you’re not done building here in Detroit. Show American our best days are ahead of us. ”
“Nominate someone who has that bold vision,” he said, his voice rising and the audience rising to its feet with it. Here came the Reaganesque chord they had been craving:”If you do, you will restore America, and we will be that shining city on the hill.”
If these are the last two men standing in this wild, rollercoaster primary, it is fitting that they begin that battle on Michigan soil. They represent the best of this country – sons of an entrepreneur and a laborer. And they are squaring off in an iconic state where skilled labor came to work for skilled businessman.
Romney vs. Santorum. Game on.
Editorial: Pete’s Democratic playbook
Posted by hpayne on February 8, 2012
Oh, this is rich. The party that perfected xenophobic, Red China-baiting politics is appalled that Republican Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra is China-baiting.
From the 2006 DeVos Smear-a-thon to the 2010 Snyder the Outsourcer to Senator Stabenow’s daily attempts to build a brick wall around the Pacific Rim, Michigan Democrats led by party chair Mark Brewer have played the China race card in order to mobilize their working-class base. It is base politics at its worst. Between the Yellow Peril and One Percenter envy, Democrats have their simplistic, perennial appeal to the vices of wrath and envy.
Hoekstra’s error, in other words, is that he playing from the Democrat’s one-note songbook. It’s so . . .Brewer-esque.
Hoekstra’s “really, really dumb” (in the words of GOP strategist Mike Murphy) use of a stereotypical Chinese actress before a stereotypical Chinese rice paddy background violates the first rule of political ads: Don’t use actors as ethnic stereotypes (even if it’s satire). Like Democratic ads, the spot singles out China ” not Japan or the U.K. or other foreign nations with substantial US debt holdings ” because them Chinese make yer blood boil.
But does anyone believe that Debbie Stabenow would have been called to the mat if she had used the name ad prop? Indeed, Bernero’s vile play of the China card in 2010 barely raised an MSM eyebrow, even as companies he himself recruited (a story we broke at MIView) to Lansing outsourced jobs just as Snyder’s Gateway once did.
As that example indicated, the China card is nonsense. China is a key market for Michigan goods – most conspicuously, it’s GM’s fastest-growing market. Hoekstra claims the race card is obscuring the ad’s larger message – but that larger message is flawed as well. As Paul Kersey writes at the Mackinac Center, the creditor is not the problem – it’s the debtor. It’s Washington.
If Hoekstra wanted to point overseas to illustrate the path on which “Debbie Spenditnow” has put America, he missed an opportunity during the Super Bowl to compare the U.S. to Obama’s cherished Europe. Greece, Italy, and other nations are imploding before our eyes because of the reckless polices of health care entitlement, crony capitalism, and union greed that Spenditnow & Co. have adopted.
Democrats are feigning outrage at Hoekstra’s ad. But the outrage is that the ad is right out of the Brewer Adworks.