We’re treated to a barrage of polls treating us to how a republican primary candidate would fair against Obama in the general election.  Its worth noting that more than 90% of the public has yet to vote in a republican primary and polls are about as relevant as placing a bet in Vegas on who will win the World Series this year.

Most of the news about these polls are intended to show all of us that Mitt would win or have the best chance to win against Obama, of course when the nominee is chosen the same polls and media will show that person behind by double digits in the polls.

The polls haven’t been accurate for years and there is really no point in them other than the media uses them to feed their news machine.  Other than that they are meaningless in terms of gauging where the electorate truly is on the issue of who should be the next president.

I’ve watched with keen interest since Iowa as the so called “enlightened” in the Republican establishment have told us that Mitt Romney is “the most electable” in the general election to beat Obama.  So let us reflect for a moment at the times that the Republican establishment has been right about who’s electable and who’s not…

2008 John McCain – Uh no guess not, with all due respect to McCain’s service to our great country he is just not a leader that Republicans want.

2000 John McCain – See above.

1996 Bob Dole – Again another great man who has served his country well but is not viewed as a conservative.

1992 George HW Bush – Yes I include Bush 41 on this list and the reason being is that in 1988 he ran and was elected largely on Reagan’s coat tails and then spent the next four years as a moderate on domestic issues and was ousted for it in 1992 when he had to run on his own record.

1976 Gerald Ford – Its interesting to note that Ford never won even a statewide election in his political career.  He was elected to the House of Representatives thirteen times but passed up chances to run for the Senate or run for Governor in his native Michigan.  Interesting to note that the Republican establishment chose Ford over Reagan in 1976 leading to its doom and four years of Jimmy Carter.

Not exactly a track record to run on…

Why the history lesson you ask?  Well this year the mainstream media and the unions need to do more work than usual to get Obama re-elected.  Obama’s record is so bad it almost makes the Carter years look like the golden age, in addition to that you have clear and blatant corruption that makes Clinton and Nixon look honest.  Obama doesn’t have a single issue he can successfully run on so when that happens you have to marginalize your competition.  Obama needs to run against Mitt Romney because he knows that conservatives won’t support a Northeast Liberal like Romney, Romney is nothing more than the modern day Bob Dole or the 2012 version of John McCain.

Obama’s greatest fear is that he has to run against a conservative that is a solid debater and someone that can communicate effectively.  Insert Newt Gingrich, now we are aware of Newt’s baggage but you have to admit that he is a solid communicator that makes debates interesting and he would eat Obama for lunch in a debate.  This strikes fear in two groups of people, first the left.  Obama, the media, and the unions can’t afford to have a solid conservative running against Obama in November.  The second group is the blue blood republicans.  Those people that are supposedly the pillars of republican wisdom who don’t want the Reagan conservatives thinking they control this party. 

So while the establishment tries to ram Romney down our throats I remember something I learned from Rush Limbaugh a long time ago.  Conservatism works every time its tried…

It’s interesting to look at the differences between Republican Primaries and those of friends on the left. Republican candidates that have gone on to win and become President are Conservative candidates that are generally right wing and run as right wing through the primary process then move slightly to the center for the general election.

On the other side Democrats have a traditional record of being hard core liberal for the primaries which is no real surprise, and they traditionally have hard core left wing views that the majority of the country has rejected time and again but then they run as an outsider, a moderate, and they often succeed in fooling the so called “independents” into believing they’re somehow enlightened which couldn’t be any further from the truth.

So this year the “front runner” Mitt Romney is the liberal candidate attempting to do what traditionally has been unsuccessful on the Republican side. Be liberal, move to the right for the primaries, and then move back center after the nomination is secure. The problem with this line of logic is that it hasn’t ever succeeded. It has failed every time it’s been tried. McCain in 2008, Dole in 1996, Ford in 1976 (even though he was the incumbent because of Nixon’s resignation..) And the list goes on.

So what do we take from history? If voters on the republican side are serious about replacing Obama then they will elect a conservative like Santorum or to a lessor degree Newt in the primaries because those candidates and now Romney will have the best chance to beat Obama in November…

Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman will announce this morning that he’s backing out of the race for the Republican Nomination. The Governor has been camped out in New Hampshire for the last several months trying to make people believe he’s conservative and go figure no one bought it so in a last act the Gov will endorse Massachusetts liberal former Governor Mitt Romney.

This just further proves that we need some widespread reform of the nominating process. The fact that over 90% of the country won’t get to choose the candidate they want for President. The Northeast Liberal establishment tells us that Romney has the best chance to beat Obama. Unfortunately that’s just not true as Romney has more in common with Obama than different.

Unfortunately my friends it appears to be shaping up as another 2008, 1996, etc where we stand up a weak kneed non conservative to be a sacrificial lamb insuring the re-election of a hard core liberal…

While Mitt Romney squeaked out an eight point win last night in Iowa clearly the winner was Rick Santorum. We are very pleased to see a true conservative come out of nowhere and peak at the right time.

It appears that Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry will be getting out at this point and that does nothing but help Santorum.

Now Romney will win New Hampshire however it will be interesting to see if Santorum can get within 10 points. If he can show strong in New Hampshire then it is possible for him to win South Carolina and Florida.

Going to be an interesting month!

So it’s that time again where every four years we ask the question, “Is it time to reform the primary system?”.  The current system has a series of caucuses and primaries are cobbled together and removes the voices of 98% of the country because many candidates count so heavily on Iowa and New Hampshire and if they don’t get traction there then bail out.  This keeps most of the country from having a voice in who they truly want by letting two or three states make the decisions for the whole country.

 

Having a single election day works fine for the general election every four years, why not do the same for the primaries?  If you have say the second Tuesday in March as the primary, or June, etc.  Pick a month in the spring or early summer and set the primary election day.

 

Nothing against Iowa, New Hampshire, and others but there is absolutely no sense in having a couple of small states making decisions for the whole country, in the early days it made more sense because of travel and things like that where logistically it was difficult to learn about candidates before the primary election but in the modern age where most of the country knows more about these people than we’d ever like to know it seems like it would be fine to have the primary on one day nationwide…

Beware of the semantics lesson going on with congressional democrats these days.  The latest buzz phrase is “increase revenue”.  They know that the public has no tolerance for raising taxes right now so they talk about increasing revenue for which they mean to increase taxes.  It’s the usual mantra, “the rich need to pay their fair share”, of course this completely ignores the fact that nearly half of all Americans already pay $0 in taxes and that the top 10% of wage earners already pay more than 70% of the taxes in this country…

Dems continue to ignore history that tells us to cut taxes to increase revenue…

The media seems to be panicking with all the conservatism on display in the recent debates along with Obama’s falling poll numbers. This is evidenced by the flurry of speculation surrounding NJ Gov Christie who keeps testing the water to see if anyone can stomach another Northeast liberal republican in the race, isn’t Romney enough???

The President’s senior advisor David Plouffe demonstrated the administrations ignorance of the Tea Party as well as the mood in the country today when he made the following statement:

Republican leaders are putting the demands of 30 Tea Party members over 300 million Americans.
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Not quite David.  The statement should have read that 30 Tea Party members are putting 300 million Americans before unreasonable spending demands of the Democratic leadership in the Senate and irresponsible economic policies put forth by the White House.

The President finds himself in probably the most difficult foreign policy jam that he is likely to face.  In fact I think it may be the most difficult one that any President has faced in the last twenty years.  First of all the President brings much of this on himself but Presidents Bush (41), Clinton, and Bush (43) bear some responsibility for this as well.  Obama owns a good portion of the responsibility because of his incredibly weak foreign policy.  Obama has seen to it that the we have almost no credibility at all with other nations, he’s punted or taken the easy way out of every issue thus far and our friends no longer believe that we’ll support them, and our enemies have no fear that we’ll stand up to them.

Now why is this situation particularly difficult you ask?  Well the Palestinians have a history or violence when they don’t get their way.  Palestinian President Abbas has competing factions with Hamas, Fatah, etc and in order to keep his own house in order has to make a bold move.  He can’t be seen negotiating away territory to the Israeli’s because Hamas and their backers in Iran and Syria (among others..) will have his head.  So he goes out and insists on UN recognized statehood, France and the UK probably don’t want to see this anymore than the US but don’t have the courage to outright veto it on the security council.  Russia and China will oppose anything the US is for and is for anything the US is against.  They will do anything to make the US look bad.

So if the US outright veto’s the Palestinian bid for statehood then we’re likely to see renewed violence against US interests and Israel not to mention our other allies in the world.  The Saudi’s will likely inflict more pressure on the US in the way of oil production and there is a much greater threat that the violence won’t be limited to that part of the world. 

If the President votes for it then he loses the next election.  Not a big deal because he’s already likely to lose that anyway, but if votes for statehood then he will almost assuredly lose the Jewish vote for him and his party.  Aside from the politics though he runs the risk of really angering the Israeli’s who have the ability to stop listening to the typical US calls for restraint.  If that happens there is a very real danger of a wide conflict spanning many Arab nations.  A conflict that Israel could win if they ignore US and European interference and that is something they are more likely to do.

Yes previous administrations have contributed to this problem by simply believing you can negotiate your way out of it.  When viewed in that context we really have to go back to the Carter administration as the centerpiece of the problem.  It really was created there anyway but every President since has failed to lead on this issue and instead relied on a State Department view that you can negotiate your way through any issue to avoid conflict in spite of the fact that history teaches us otherwise.

Obama has been busy the last several days trying to convince Abbas to abandon this idea.  That just won’t happen because if he does he will be seen as a puppet of Obama and will likely be ousted by hardline factions of Hamas and the violence will resume.  About the only thing Obama could do is abstain and ride out the storm.  Abbas would get what he wants (because no one else would veto it..) and the only casualty would be that Obama looks ineffective and weak.  No big deal there because he already looks like that…