Battle For America a new movie by Dick Morris.
Looks like a very informative file by Dick Morris and the dangers of Obama.
http://battleforamericamovie.com/
Showing posts with label dick morris. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dick morris. Show all posts
Monday, October 04, 2010
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
THE TEA PARTY RESCUES AMERICA by Dick Morris
THE TEA PARTY RESCUES AMERICA
For a decade, the left owned the streets. Subsidized by George Soros and energized by the Clinton impeachment in the 90s and the Iraq War since, it dominated the Internet and grass roots campaigning. Michael Moore's movies - however misguided - enthused their ranks and catalyzed their efforts. ACORN worked to commit massive voter fraud in the guise of stimulating voter turnout and the New Black Panthers worked to intimidate those with whom they disagreed. President Barack Obama was the result.
Now, finally, conservatives are answering with their own grass roots efforts in the Tea Party movement. Tea Party activists are bringing the battle to stop big government spending and taxes to the streets and parks of America.
And its working! The Tea Party movement, working closely with Americans for Prosperity (AFP), mobilized people against the Obamacare proposal and, in the end, will cost the Democrats their Congressional majorities - a fitting price for defying the will of the people.
Democrats are so threatened that they are demonizing the Tea Party as eccentric, extreme and racist. Speaker Pelosi compared them to the Nazis. These are the cries of those about to lose an election - big time!
Now a new film, The Tea Party Movie, shows the anatomy of the group and explains its motivations. With almost no funding or paid staff and all decisions made at the local level, the Tea Party people are reshaping American politics. A bottom-up movement, they are restoring values to our politics.
The film, sometimes moving, sometimes funny, and always interesting is available online at http://www.teapartymovie.com. Do yourself a favor and watch it!
And, on September 12th, pack your bags and migrate to Sacramento, St. Louis, or Washington DC for the three mega-rallies sponsored by the Tea Party folks. Its time to get out of the grandstands and onto the playing field. We need a massive show of participation and enthusiasm to kick-off, animate, and catalyze the effort to throw the big spending socialists out of Congress in November! Go to http://teapartypatriots.org/Recycle/Recycle.aspx to learn more about the rallies. Organize your friends and neighbors to go and attend!
The Tea Party is not only electing Republicans, it is cleansing them. Their victories in intra-party contests in Utah, Colorado, Nevada, and South Carolina shows that they are no happier with big spending Republicans than with Democrats of a similar persuasion. Many worried that the Tea Party would be a third party movement, splitting the vote and electing the Democrats. No way. Instead, they are winning their primaries and purifying the Party.
What a great time to be alive and what a wonderful group to support!
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on DickMorris.com on August 16, 2010
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns!
For a decade, the left owned the streets. Subsidized by George Soros and energized by the Clinton impeachment in the 90s and the Iraq War since, it dominated the Internet and grass roots campaigning. Michael Moore's movies - however misguided - enthused their ranks and catalyzed their efforts. ACORN worked to commit massive voter fraud in the guise of stimulating voter turnout and the New Black Panthers worked to intimidate those with whom they disagreed. President Barack Obama was the result.
Now, finally, conservatives are answering with their own grass roots efforts in the Tea Party movement. Tea Party activists are bringing the battle to stop big government spending and taxes to the streets and parks of America.
And its working! The Tea Party movement, working closely with Americans for Prosperity (AFP), mobilized people against the Obamacare proposal and, in the end, will cost the Democrats their Congressional majorities - a fitting price for defying the will of the people.
Democrats are so threatened that they are demonizing the Tea Party as eccentric, extreme and racist. Speaker Pelosi compared them to the Nazis. These are the cries of those about to lose an election - big time!
Now a new film, The Tea Party Movie, shows the anatomy of the group and explains its motivations. With almost no funding or paid staff and all decisions made at the local level, the Tea Party people are reshaping American politics. A bottom-up movement, they are restoring values to our politics.
The film, sometimes moving, sometimes funny, and always interesting is available online at http://www.teapartymovie.com. Do yourself a favor and watch it!
And, on September 12th, pack your bags and migrate to Sacramento, St. Louis, or Washington DC for the three mega-rallies sponsored by the Tea Party folks. Its time to get out of the grandstands and onto the playing field. We need a massive show of participation and enthusiasm to kick-off, animate, and catalyze the effort to throw the big spending socialists out of Congress in November! Go to http://teapartypatriots.org/Recycle/Recycle.aspx to learn more about the rallies. Organize your friends and neighbors to go and attend!
The Tea Party is not only electing Republicans, it is cleansing them. Their victories in intra-party contests in Utah, Colorado, Nevada, and South Carolina shows that they are no happier with big spending Republicans than with Democrats of a similar persuasion. Many worried that the Tea Party would be a third party movement, splitting the vote and electing the Democrats. No way. Instead, they are winning their primaries and purifying the Party.
What a great time to be alive and what a wonderful group to support!
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on DickMorris.com on August 16, 2010
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns!
Thursday, August 05, 2010
THE COMING CATASTROPHE: STATE GOVERNMENTS
THE COMING CATASTROPHE: STATE GOVERNMENTS
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on DickMorris.com on August 5, 2010
As Congress reconvenes next week to pass a $26 billion bailout of state and local governments entombed in their own deficits, we witness a foretaste of the crisis that will be the central event of the first half of next year: the collapse of state governments.
As long as the Democrats control Congress, they will continue to rubber-stamp Obama's requests for bailouts of profligate states. But when the Republicans take control, they will be less than forthcoming. Republicans will ask the central question: Why should taxpayers from states that have cut their budgets and observed spending restraint, pay for the extravagances of the other states? Why should forty-seven states have to pay for California, New York, and Michigan?
State government employment has risen by 16 percent since 1995 and overly generous Medicaid and other spending has climbed alongside it. Pension obligations, initially incurred as a cheap alternative to pay raises for public workers, are increasingly driving state budgets over the brink.
State and local governments and school boards are hostages to the public employee labor unions that control their finances through their contracts and their politics with their donations and votes. These nominally democratic government bodies are as much under the sway of their union captors as the auto companies are of the UAW.
When a Republican Congress turns off the spigot of federal bailouts, the municipal and state bond markets are going to take the hint and stop buying state paper at any interest rate. California will find its debt has become unmarketable and will come begging Congress for relief. First it will seek federal money and then its demands will escalate into a federal guarantee of its state debt.
The Greek financial crisis will come to our shores in the form of state bankruptcies.
Hopefully, Republicans will not be so weak-kneed as they are in the face of the current shortfall and next week's demand for aid. With two Senators caving in, the Democrats were able to pass their aid bill and send it to the House next week.
The Republican solution to state financial distress should be simple: The Party should insist on a change in the federal bankruptcy law providing for a procedure for state bankruptcy (none now exists). This process must call for abrogation of all state and local public employee union contracts as is usually done in private sector bankruptcies. By freeing states and local governments (including school boards) of their union obligations on wages, work rules, staffing, and pensions, they have a chance to survive and, indeed, to prosper. But merely subsidizing these massive expenditures just prolongs the misery of the states in question.
The collapse of overspending state governments must trigger the diminution of the power unions hold over their budgets and their politics. Their coming bankruptcies offer an opportunity for reform and the Republican Congress - backed by newly elected Republican state governments - give us precisely the opportunity we need to effectuate it.
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns!__
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on DickMorris.com on August 5, 2010
As Congress reconvenes next week to pass a $26 billion bailout of state and local governments entombed in their own deficits, we witness a foretaste of the crisis that will be the central event of the first half of next year: the collapse of state governments.
As long as the Democrats control Congress, they will continue to rubber-stamp Obama's requests for bailouts of profligate states. But when the Republicans take control, they will be less than forthcoming. Republicans will ask the central question: Why should taxpayers from states that have cut their budgets and observed spending restraint, pay for the extravagances of the other states? Why should forty-seven states have to pay for California, New York, and Michigan?
State government employment has risen by 16 percent since 1995 and overly generous Medicaid and other spending has climbed alongside it. Pension obligations, initially incurred as a cheap alternative to pay raises for public workers, are increasingly driving state budgets over the brink.
State and local governments and school boards are hostages to the public employee labor unions that control their finances through their contracts and their politics with their donations and votes. These nominally democratic government bodies are as much under the sway of their union captors as the auto companies are of the UAW.
When a Republican Congress turns off the spigot of federal bailouts, the municipal and state bond markets are going to take the hint and stop buying state paper at any interest rate. California will find its debt has become unmarketable and will come begging Congress for relief. First it will seek federal money and then its demands will escalate into a federal guarantee of its state debt.
The Greek financial crisis will come to our shores in the form of state bankruptcies.
Hopefully, Republicans will not be so weak-kneed as they are in the face of the current shortfall and next week's demand for aid. With two Senators caving in, the Democrats were able to pass their aid bill and send it to the House next week.
The Republican solution to state financial distress should be simple: The Party should insist on a change in the federal bankruptcy law providing for a procedure for state bankruptcy (none now exists). This process must call for abrogation of all state and local public employee union contracts as is usually done in private sector bankruptcies. By freeing states and local governments (including school boards) of their union obligations on wages, work rules, staffing, and pensions, they have a chance to survive and, indeed, to prosper. But merely subsidizing these massive expenditures just prolongs the misery of the states in question.
The collapse of overspending state governments must trigger the diminution of the power unions hold over their budgets and their politics. Their coming bankruptcies offer an opportunity for reform and the Republican Congress - backed by newly elected Republican state governments - give us precisely the opportunity we need to effectuate it.
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns!__
Saturday, April 10, 2010
OBAMA IS LEADING US INTO SOCIALISM
OBAMA IS LEADING US INTO SOCIALISM
(An excerpt from the new book 2010: Take Back America -- A Battle Plan by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, on sale Tuesday, April 13th and available for pre-order (of an autographed copy) at Amazon.com
http://bit.ly/a54B1t
or BN.com now!
http://bit.ly/bwzCWw
In her poem “The New Colossus,” inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazarus wrote: “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.”
Americans embraced that image of a nation that welcomed those who wanted to work hard and grow and build their lives. But Barack Obama has replaced this call for self-reliance with an offer of security and serenity protected, subsidized, and sheltered by the government. Obama heralds his arrival on the battlefield of our politics not with a cacophony of confrontation, but with a lulling siren song designed to sedate and anesthetize us while he transplants our essence and replaces it with something else entirely. His sirens—the modern equivalent of those voices that tried to lure Ulysses onto the rocks and to his death in Homer’s Odyssey—sing the same soothing lullaby that has long since lulled Europe and Japan into a trance.
THE SIREN SINGS: Put aside your ambition. Don’t work so hard. Slow down and live a little. Don’t worry. Give the government your insecurities. Let us take care of them.
BUT REALITY ANSWERS: If we go back to being a nation of childlike dependents, relying on a parental government, we will become poorer and poorer, having to make do with less and less. Government cannot create jobs or wealth. It can only take from some and give it to others. And if people cannot keep their own money, they will stop working, innovating, taking the risks that are key to survival and growth—and we will all have less.
THE SIREN SINGS: You’re not alone in the world. You have your community to surround you and a safety net below you. We have anticipated all the vagaries of life, all of its uncertainties, and have made provision for them.
BUT REALITY ANSWERS: It’s the fear of failure, as much as the dream of success, that motivates us all to work hard, compete, and succeed. If life holds no perils, there’s little to get us out of bed in the morning. While we must protect those who cannot help themselves, for most of us it’s the fear of bad outcomes—as much as the lure of reward—that impels our labor.
THE SIREN SINGS: Give up some of your sovereignty and independence. You won’t need it anymore. Your leaders will show you what to do. You must surrender what you have to the community. We are all in this together. We are a unit, an entity. We will share the sacrifice, take care of each other, and let our government point the way.
BUT REALITY ANSWERS: Government does almost everything worse than private business. The U.S. Postal Service is a joke compared to FedEx and UPS. The Veterans Administration hospitals are a disgrace to the men and women who have served us. Our government cannot control our borders. It can’t even distribute flu shots to those who need them. Private and church schools educate better, for less money, than public educational institutions do. State universities are drowning in their own bureaucracy. And the list goes on. Only in the military, police, and firefighting services—with their extraordinary standards of martial discipline, self-sacrifice, unit cohesion and morale—does the public sector excel.
THE SIREN SINGS: Abandon the delusions of your religious faith. They are old, for a different time. You don’t need them anymore. Secular humanism has made them unnecessary. Turn away from the spurious rituals and the false security they offer. Embrace the real security of a committed community led by enlightened experts.
BUT REALITY ANSWERS: We each have a God-sized hole in our hearts and souls. Without faith, some people turn to addiction; others lose themselves in narcissism. Some become workaholics, others compulsive gamblers, and still others status-seekers who make the acquisition of material goods their own yardstick in life. Where religion falters, self-involvement takes the place of child-rearing, and birth rates drop. Values decline—and an increase in crime, sexually transmitted disease, and suicide are the result.
THE SIREN SINGS: You don’t really need your democracy anymore. Let us experts run things. We know better than you what you need and we have the knowledge to get it for you. Turn away from the cantankerous politics of shrill debate. Trust those who act with benign knowledge of what is best for you.
BUT REALITY ANSWERS: The experts covet power, and power corrupts them as easily as it does anyone else. Bureaucracies become obsessed with self-perpetuation and soon lose sight of the populations they are supposed to serve. They develop cozy relationships with the power brokers in big companies to form a consortium of business and government to control our lives. It is only through democracy that we can fight their tyranny.
Pre-order a signed copy by clicking HERE.
http://bit.ly/a54B1t
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns! __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
(An excerpt from the new book 2010: Take Back America -- A Battle Plan by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, on sale Tuesday, April 13th and available for pre-order (of an autographed copy) at Amazon.com
http://bit.ly/a54B1t
or BN.com now!
http://bit.ly/bwzCWw
In her poem “The New Colossus,” inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazarus wrote: “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.”
Americans embraced that image of a nation that welcomed those who wanted to work hard and grow and build their lives. But Barack Obama has replaced this call for self-reliance with an offer of security and serenity protected, subsidized, and sheltered by the government. Obama heralds his arrival on the battlefield of our politics not with a cacophony of confrontation, but with a lulling siren song designed to sedate and anesthetize us while he transplants our essence and replaces it with something else entirely. His sirens—the modern equivalent of those voices that tried to lure Ulysses onto the rocks and to his death in Homer’s Odyssey—sing the same soothing lullaby that has long since lulled Europe and Japan into a trance.
THE SIREN SINGS: Put aside your ambition. Don’t work so hard. Slow down and live a little. Don’t worry. Give the government your insecurities. Let us take care of them.
BUT REALITY ANSWERS: If we go back to being a nation of childlike dependents, relying on a parental government, we will become poorer and poorer, having to make do with less and less. Government cannot create jobs or wealth. It can only take from some and give it to others. And if people cannot keep their own money, they will stop working, innovating, taking the risks that are key to survival and growth—and we will all have less.
THE SIREN SINGS: You’re not alone in the world. You have your community to surround you and a safety net below you. We have anticipated all the vagaries of life, all of its uncertainties, and have made provision for them.
BUT REALITY ANSWERS: It’s the fear of failure, as much as the dream of success, that motivates us all to work hard, compete, and succeed. If life holds no perils, there’s little to get us out of bed in the morning. While we must protect those who cannot help themselves, for most of us it’s the fear of bad outcomes—as much as the lure of reward—that impels our labor.
THE SIREN SINGS: Give up some of your sovereignty and independence. You won’t need it anymore. Your leaders will show you what to do. You must surrender what you have to the community. We are all in this together. We are a unit, an entity. We will share the sacrifice, take care of each other, and let our government point the way.
BUT REALITY ANSWERS: Government does almost everything worse than private business. The U.S. Postal Service is a joke compared to FedEx and UPS. The Veterans Administration hospitals are a disgrace to the men and women who have served us. Our government cannot control our borders. It can’t even distribute flu shots to those who need them. Private and church schools educate better, for less money, than public educational institutions do. State universities are drowning in their own bureaucracy. And the list goes on. Only in the military, police, and firefighting services—with their extraordinary standards of martial discipline, self-sacrifice, unit cohesion and morale—does the public sector excel.
THE SIREN SINGS: Abandon the delusions of your religious faith. They are old, for a different time. You don’t need them anymore. Secular humanism has made them unnecessary. Turn away from the spurious rituals and the false security they offer. Embrace the real security of a committed community led by enlightened experts.
BUT REALITY ANSWERS: We each have a God-sized hole in our hearts and souls. Without faith, some people turn to addiction; others lose themselves in narcissism. Some become workaholics, others compulsive gamblers, and still others status-seekers who make the acquisition of material goods their own yardstick in life. Where religion falters, self-involvement takes the place of child-rearing, and birth rates drop. Values decline—and an increase in crime, sexually transmitted disease, and suicide are the result.
THE SIREN SINGS: You don’t really need your democracy anymore. Let us experts run things. We know better than you what you need and we have the knowledge to get it for you. Turn away from the cantankerous politics of shrill debate. Trust those who act with benign knowledge of what is best for you.
BUT REALITY ANSWERS: The experts covet power, and power corrupts them as easily as it does anyone else. Bureaucracies become obsessed with self-perpetuation and soon lose sight of the populations they are supposed to serve. They develop cozy relationships with the power brokers in big companies to form a consortium of business and government to control our lives. It is only through democracy that we can fight their tyranny.
Pre-order a signed copy by clicking HERE.
http://bit.ly/a54B1t
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns! __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
URGENT ACTION NEEDED ON HEALTH CARE
URGENT ACTION NEEDED ON HEALTH CARE
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on DickMorris.com on July 17, 2009
In two weeks, Obama's health care plan is likely to become law, ending medicine as we know it in the United States! Unless we can stop him, our own personal access to medical care will be attenuated (no matter if we can pay for it ourselves) and we will all be subject to bureaucratic rationing.
Seeing his popularity draining away rapidly, President Obama has cynically decided to ram through the complex health care legislation in two weeks, without debate or amendment. He is going to give up the attempt to win sixty votes in the Senate and will use the budget reconciliation procedure - which is only used for budget bills - to push it through with fifty votes.
His plan would:
• Force employers either to offer health insurance to their employees or pay a tax of 8% of their payrolls. This would apply to all with payrolls of $250,000 a year or more (basically every business)
• Reduce medical fees to the Medicare Schedule Plus 5%, driving doctors out of the profession and increasing the need for rationing.
• Raise taxes on all making more than $250,000 a year ($350,000 for a couple) with a surcharge. Rates will go as high as 45%.
• Set up a government owned health care plan to compete with private plans. Getting a subsidy, it will soon put the private plans out of business and we will have a single payer Canadian style system.
In Catastrophe, we enumerate the disaster of the Canadian health care system. A cancer death rate 16% higher than in the US. A colon cancer rate 25% higher due to waits for colonoscopies and a death rate once afflicted that is 41% as opposed to 32% in the US. An eight week wait for cancer radiation therapy.
We are organizing a media campaign to target swing state Senators to delay or kill the Obama bill. We will concentrate on:
Montana - Baucus and Tester
North Dakota - Dorgan and Conrad
South Dakota - Johnson
Nebraska - Nelson
Arkansas - Pryor and Lincoln
Louisiana - Landrieu
North Carolina - Hagan
Indiana - Bayh
Connecticut - Lieberman
Maine - Snow and Collins
The text of the ad will be:
"How can Obama care for fifty million new people without more doctors? By cutting access to care for the elderly. End Medicare as we know it. The government decides who gets hip, knee, or heart surgery. Eight month wait for colonoscopies. In Canada, an eight week wait for cancer radiation. Say no to Obama's plan. Write Senator Evan Bayh today so you can still see your doctor tomorrow."
On Monday or Tuesday, we will e mail you info on how to donate to our campaign. We need to raise $4 million in one week to impact this vote. With those funds, we can saturate these states and send the moderate Democrats scurrying for cover. But we need your quick response.
The stakes have never been higher.
Thank you.
Milton Friedman: Obama Policies Will Destroy Our Nation
https://www.newsmaxstore.com/nm_mag/free_mischief.cfm?PROMO_CODE=82C4-1
Is Obama a Socialist?
http://news1.newsmax.com/obama_socialist2/?PROMO_CODE=82C6-1
Take Action; Be Prepared. Go Here for Your FREE Emergency Radio
https://www.newsmaxstore.com/nm_mag/radio_free.cfm?PROMO_CODE=82C5-1
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns!
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on DickMorris.com on July 17, 2009
In two weeks, Obama's health care plan is likely to become law, ending medicine as we know it in the United States! Unless we can stop him, our own personal access to medical care will be attenuated (no matter if we can pay for it ourselves) and we will all be subject to bureaucratic rationing.
Seeing his popularity draining away rapidly, President Obama has cynically decided to ram through the complex health care legislation in two weeks, without debate or amendment. He is going to give up the attempt to win sixty votes in the Senate and will use the budget reconciliation procedure - which is only used for budget bills - to push it through with fifty votes.
His plan would:
• Force employers either to offer health insurance to their employees or pay a tax of 8% of their payrolls. This would apply to all with payrolls of $250,000 a year or more (basically every business)
• Reduce medical fees to the Medicare Schedule Plus 5%, driving doctors out of the profession and increasing the need for rationing.
• Raise taxes on all making more than $250,000 a year ($350,000 for a couple) with a surcharge. Rates will go as high as 45%.
• Set up a government owned health care plan to compete with private plans. Getting a subsidy, it will soon put the private plans out of business and we will have a single payer Canadian style system.
In Catastrophe, we enumerate the disaster of the Canadian health care system. A cancer death rate 16% higher than in the US. A colon cancer rate 25% higher due to waits for colonoscopies and a death rate once afflicted that is 41% as opposed to 32% in the US. An eight week wait for cancer radiation therapy.
We are organizing a media campaign to target swing state Senators to delay or kill the Obama bill. We will concentrate on:
Montana - Baucus and Tester
North Dakota - Dorgan and Conrad
South Dakota - Johnson
Nebraska - Nelson
Arkansas - Pryor and Lincoln
Louisiana - Landrieu
North Carolina - Hagan
Indiana - Bayh
Connecticut - Lieberman
Maine - Snow and Collins
The text of the ad will be:
"How can Obama care for fifty million new people without more doctors? By cutting access to care for the elderly. End Medicare as we know it. The government decides who gets hip, knee, or heart surgery. Eight month wait for colonoscopies. In Canada, an eight week wait for cancer radiation. Say no to Obama's plan. Write Senator Evan Bayh today so you can still see your doctor tomorrow."
On Monday or Tuesday, we will e mail you info on how to donate to our campaign. We need to raise $4 million in one week to impact this vote. With those funds, we can saturate these states and send the moderate Democrats scurrying for cover. But we need your quick response.
The stakes have never been higher.
Thank you.
Milton Friedman: Obama Policies Will Destroy Our Nation
https://www.newsmaxstore.com/nm_mag/free_mischief.cfm?PROMO_CODE=82C4-1
Is Obama a Socialist?
http://news1.newsmax.com/obama_socialist2/?PROMO_CODE=82C6-1
Take Action; Be Prepared. Go Here for Your FREE Emergency Radio
https://www.newsmaxstore.com/nm_mag/radio_free.cfm?PROMO_CODE=82C5-1
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns!
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Morris: STICK TO YOUR GUNS, REPUBLICANS
RESISTING O'S WORLD - STICK TO YOUR GUNS, REPUBLICANS
By DICK MORRIS / EILEEN MCGANN
Gen. Colin Powell is wrong to say that the Republican Party must move to the center: Now is not the time to try for triangulation.
This is a time for the party to stand firm on its principles until this nation again comes around to the GOP's way of thinking. This process will be driven by the consequences of President Obama's program.
The challenge brought by Obama is no longer just theoretical: He means to pass the ultimate leftist agenda and has the votes to do so.
As a result, our nation will be unrecognizable well before the 2010 elections. Business will march to a beat drummed in Washington. The top producers will be hounded by confiscatory taxation. A majority will pay nothing or receive government welfare. Our health-care system will be destroyed. Illegal immigrants will be well on their way to citizenship.
Obama's brave new world will be the subject of the 2010 elections. We believe that his Congress will be swept from power as a result.
We think that inflation will join a lingering recession -- giving us recess-flation -- and that high unemployment will continue. Voters will recognize the damage to their health care as bureaucrats weigh in to prevent them from getting the care they need. Our security and defense failures may well have cost us Pakistan, and the nightmare of a nuclear-armed terrorist state may have already come true (even before Iran).
All America will be watching the Obama fallout, and Republicans must be seen as a clear alternative -- a strong voice for reversal of the harm the president will have inflicted -- if they are to benefit from this catastrophe.
If the GOP is seen as a moderate force, a party just looking to split the difference, voters will cynically conclude that there is no distinction between the parties.
There is a season for triangulation and a season for confrontation. When America faces a new challenge -- such as what the financial crisis now poses -- we look to the left and right for new answers. We want the debate to rage. Those who seek to paper over are ignored. Such was the fate of the first President Bush in 1992 and of Sen. John McCain in 2008.
But once the debate has raged and the alternatives have been fleshed out, voters want a consensus, a Hegelian synthesis, on how to move in a new direction. They want to extract the best from each alternative and combine them. This is triangulation (a term coined by Dick).
To ignore the demand for synthesis and insist on continuing the debate is to suffer the fate of Sen. Bob Dole in 1996 and Sen. John Kerry in 2004.
This process -- polarization, debate, synthesis and action -- is how America has always moved ahead. We are not Japan; we use the debate to see the options. And we are not Italy or France; we come to conclusions and act upon them, eventually leaving the debate far behind.
Now another great debate has been born. The thesis is democratic socialism. The antithesis is free-market capitalism.
The Obama Democrats have posed the challenge. It's up to the Republicans to fight along these lines. Compromise is not an option, yet.
At some point, the synthesis will set in. But now is the time for clear alternatives and sharp disagreement. Only later can we hope to extract America from the leftist clutches into which it has fallen.
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns!
By DICK MORRIS / EILEEN MCGANN
Gen. Colin Powell is wrong to say that the Republican Party must move to the center: Now is not the time to try for triangulation.
This is a time for the party to stand firm on its principles until this nation again comes around to the GOP's way of thinking. This process will be driven by the consequences of President Obama's program.
The challenge brought by Obama is no longer just theoretical: He means to pass the ultimate leftist agenda and has the votes to do so.
As a result, our nation will be unrecognizable well before the 2010 elections. Business will march to a beat drummed in Washington. The top producers will be hounded by confiscatory taxation. A majority will pay nothing or receive government welfare. Our health-care system will be destroyed. Illegal immigrants will be well on their way to citizenship.
Obama's brave new world will be the subject of the 2010 elections. We believe that his Congress will be swept from power as a result.
We think that inflation will join a lingering recession -- giving us recess-flation -- and that high unemployment will continue. Voters will recognize the damage to their health care as bureaucrats weigh in to prevent them from getting the care they need. Our security and defense failures may well have cost us Pakistan, and the nightmare of a nuclear-armed terrorist state may have already come true (even before Iran).
All America will be watching the Obama fallout, and Republicans must be seen as a clear alternative -- a strong voice for reversal of the harm the president will have inflicted -- if they are to benefit from this catastrophe.
If the GOP is seen as a moderate force, a party just looking to split the difference, voters will cynically conclude that there is no distinction between the parties.
There is a season for triangulation and a season for confrontation. When America faces a new challenge -- such as what the financial crisis now poses -- we look to the left and right for new answers. We want the debate to rage. Those who seek to paper over are ignored. Such was the fate of the first President Bush in 1992 and of Sen. John McCain in 2008.
But once the debate has raged and the alternatives have been fleshed out, voters want a consensus, a Hegelian synthesis, on how to move in a new direction. They want to extract the best from each alternative and combine them. This is triangulation (a term coined by Dick).
To ignore the demand for synthesis and insist on continuing the debate is to suffer the fate of Sen. Bob Dole in 1996 and Sen. John Kerry in 2004.
This process -- polarization, debate, synthesis and action -- is how America has always moved ahead. We are not Japan; we use the debate to see the options. And we are not Italy or France; we come to conclusions and act upon them, eventually leaving the debate far behind.
Now another great debate has been born. The thesis is democratic socialism. The antithesis is free-market capitalism.
The Obama Democrats have posed the challenge. It's up to the Republicans to fight along these lines. Compromise is not an option, yet.
At some point, the synthesis will set in. But now is the time for clear alternatives and sharp disagreement. Only later can we hope to extract America from the leftist clutches into which it has fallen.
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns!
Friday, April 03, 2009
The Coming Depressflation and YOUR Money
The Coming "Depressflation"...And YOUR Money
Dear Fellow American,
Have you ever heard of a "depressflation"?
No surprise if you haven't. It's a term I coined myself, to describe the imminent -- and inevitable -- result of the Democrats' plans for "rescuing" the economy.
Think 1970s-style "stagflation" but much, much worse: massive inflation, even hyperinflation, together with Depression-like economic stagnation. A depressflation.
Why is this inevitable? Because with a bi-partisan consensus that deficits are vital in fighting the crisis (or easing the pain) there is no constraint on Obama and his party. The sky is the limit on spending, to the tune of a trillion-plus dollars over the next two years alone.
And there are only two ways to pay for it: (1) printing more money, which causes inflation, and (2) hiking taxes, which kills investment, businesses and jobs.
Then the question will be: When will we realize that government intervention is magnifying, not solving the problems that caused the crisis? When will the patience of the public with Obama's remedies run out?
My guess is that it won't be until 2012 -- or after.
In the meantime, however, there are ways to protect yourself and your family from the coming "depressflation."
It's crucial to understand: Hard times for America does not necessarily mean hard times for you. As a very wise investment expert of my acquaintance, Nicholas Vardy, likes to say, "No matter what the state of financial markets, there is always a strategy out there that can make you money."
The key, Vardy explains, is to recognize opportunities wherever they may be and, more importantly, detach yourself from old investment themes that no longer work.
Vardy himself, an American based in London, is a master at crafting such cutting-edge investment strategies -- which he then passes on to subscribers to his Global Stock Investor investment newsletter.
So, for instance, back in mid-2007 Vardy was months ahead of the curve in spotting the coming boom in "soft" (agricultural) commodities -- recommending stocks like Canadian fertilizer giant Potash, which shot up quickly in price before coming back down to earth, by which time his subscribers had safely banked profits of 82% in just over three months time.
And that's nothing compared to the magic Vardy performed for his subscribers during these past few months, now on record as some of the worst in Wall Street history.
Consider this: Since October 2008, which wiped out close to $7 trillion in shareholder wealth, Vardy's Global Stock Investor portfolio's open positions are up as much as 11%.
Compared to the 7% decline in the Dow during the same time, that's incredible.
How does Nicholas Vardy do it? If I knew, I'd be in his business, not mine. But I'm sure those countless hours he spends sharing investment ideas with Europe's top money managers has something to do with it -- not to mention his graduate degrees from Stanford and Harvard.
Don't get me wrong: Nicholas Vardy is no elitist snob. Though he makes his "real" money managing money for a few wealthy clients, he also likes to "spread the wealth" -- not through higher taxes (sorry, Obama), but by helping people like you and me make profitable investments.
Full disclosure: I receive a percentage of each subscription sold, but even if I didn't, I'd want you to know about this amazing service. Nicholas' advice is rock solid. If you check into it, you'll thank me later.
Let's face it, the next few years will be tough ones for America. But, to repeat, they don't have to be tough ones for you -- if you find and follow sound investment advice like the brilliant investment strategies in Nicholas Vardy's Global Stock Investor. I urge you to give it a try.
Dear Fellow American,
Have you ever heard of a "depressflation"?
No surprise if you haven't. It's a term I coined myself, to describe the imminent -- and inevitable -- result of the Democrats' plans for "rescuing" the economy.
Think 1970s-style "stagflation" but much, much worse: massive inflation, even hyperinflation, together with Depression-like economic stagnation. A depressflation.
Why is this inevitable? Because with a bi-partisan consensus that deficits are vital in fighting the crisis (or easing the pain) there is no constraint on Obama and his party. The sky is the limit on spending, to the tune of a trillion-plus dollars over the next two years alone.
And there are only two ways to pay for it: (1) printing more money, which causes inflation, and (2) hiking taxes, which kills investment, businesses and jobs.
Then the question will be: When will we realize that government intervention is magnifying, not solving the problems that caused the crisis? When will the patience of the public with Obama's remedies run out?
My guess is that it won't be until 2012 -- or after.
In the meantime, however, there are ways to protect yourself and your family from the coming "depressflation."
It's crucial to understand: Hard times for America does not necessarily mean hard times for you. As a very wise investment expert of my acquaintance, Nicholas Vardy, likes to say, "No matter what the state of financial markets, there is always a strategy out there that can make you money."
The key, Vardy explains, is to recognize opportunities wherever they may be and, more importantly, detach yourself from old investment themes that no longer work.
Vardy himself, an American based in London, is a master at crafting such cutting-edge investment strategies -- which he then passes on to subscribers to his Global Stock Investor investment newsletter.
So, for instance, back in mid-2007 Vardy was months ahead of the curve in spotting the coming boom in "soft" (agricultural) commodities -- recommending stocks like Canadian fertilizer giant Potash, which shot up quickly in price before coming back down to earth, by which time his subscribers had safely banked profits of 82% in just over three months time.
And that's nothing compared to the magic Vardy performed for his subscribers during these past few months, now on record as some of the worst in Wall Street history.
Consider this: Since October 2008, which wiped out close to $7 trillion in shareholder wealth, Vardy's Global Stock Investor portfolio's open positions are up as much as 11%.
Compared to the 7% decline in the Dow during the same time, that's incredible.
How does Nicholas Vardy do it? If I knew, I'd be in his business, not mine. But I'm sure those countless hours he spends sharing investment ideas with Europe's top money managers has something to do with it -- not to mention his graduate degrees from Stanford and Harvard.
Don't get me wrong: Nicholas Vardy is no elitist snob. Though he makes his "real" money managing money for a few wealthy clients, he also likes to "spread the wealth" -- not through higher taxes (sorry, Obama), but by helping people like you and me make profitable investments.
Full disclosure: I receive a percentage of each subscription sold, but even if I didn't, I'd want you to know about this amazing service. Nicholas' advice is rock solid. If you check into it, you'll thank me later.
Let's face it, the next few years will be tough ones for America. But, to repeat, they don't have to be tough ones for you -- if you find and follow sound investment advice like the brilliant investment strategies in Nicholas Vardy's Global Stock Investor. I urge you to give it a try.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
OBAMA'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU
OBAMA'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU
By DICK MORRIS
Does President Obama truly believe that he can castigate and condemn Wall Street on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and then secure its cooperation on the other days of the week?
Does he not understand that when he ignites a public furor over AIG bonuses and then incites Congress to pass a punitive tax, he sends shivers down the spines of every other corporate executive who makes a lot of money?
Does he seriously believe that Wall Street investors will not worry that their winnings, should they join the Treasury as partners in risky investments, would be subject to public abuse, publicity and confiscatory taxation?
Of course he realizes that his rhetoric makes it unlikely that his program will succeed. He obviously gets it that the entire concept of a public-private partnership is impossible amid a climate of waging class warfare, taxing the rich and heaping contempt on anyone who makes money. The president is quite bright and certainly understands that you cannot shake hands with your right while you launch a roundhouse with your left.
So why does Obama persist in his aggressive rhetoric? Why does he continue to treat Wall Street as something out of Dante's Inferno?
Because he's just not that into you! He doesn't really care if the public-private partnerships work out.
He sends Geithner out to announce the program because he doesn't want to make it his own. When he announces a stimulus plan or a new spending bill, it's Obama's moment before the teleprompter. But the public-private partnerships he leaves to his Treasury secretary to announce.
The most rational explanation for Obama's puzzling conduct -- sabotaging his own program by way of his own rhetoric -- is that he truly wants to be forced to nationalize the banks in pursuit of his ultimate goal of a socialist economy.
Obama has to oppose nationalization today in order to achieve it tomorrow. He has to show the country and the world that he is doing all he can to help the private sector to sort things out with government help. He must ostentatiously invite the hated demons of Wall Street to join him in rescuing the banks in order, later, to say that he did his best to avoid having to take over the banks. Only then will nationalization be an acceptable alternative -- when he has run out of other options.
Meanwhile, he makes sure the private sector won't play ball by going after their bonuses, sending an implicit message to the other executives on Wall Street that reads: Stay away.
Even when he takes over the banks, as he almost inevitably will, he is going to have to dress up the nationalization as a temporary measure forced on him by the economy and the previously unrealized depth of the problem. He will cite the example of Sweden, where the government nationalized the banks only temporarily and returned them to private hands quickly.
You can't be for nationalization. But Obama hopes to accomplish it nonetheless.
Already, in the TARP and TALF programs, we can see how eager he is to use government power to manipulate the once-private sector. Consider the mandates piling up on any financial institution that takes government funds: limits on executive pay, corporate travel and conferences; a strong Buy American recommendation; and aggressive action to get them to make consumer loans. Can affirmative action, low-income lending and diversity outreach be far behind?
If Obama can bring banks and the healthcare industry under government control, we will have de facto socialism. Is this Obama's goal? It is obviously where he is headed.
Is Obama a socialist? Rather than throw around labels, let's do the math. The best measure of whether an economy is government- or private sector-oriented is the percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP) that flows through government expenditure. Before the current fiscal crisis, the major nations stacked up as shown in the chart on page 27.
Obama's stimulus package, alone, comes to about 6 percent of GDP, vaulting the United States past Japan to 40 percent on the list above. If we add in the extra spending in the supplemental appropriations bill and the likely increases for healthcare, the total government percentage will rise well past 40 percent and probably close in on the United Kingdom's 43.
That's pretty socialistic, but Obama has three more years to get us up around Germany and really ruin our economy!
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns!
PLEASE FORWARD THIS E-MAIL TO FRIENDS AND FAMILY AND TELL THEM THEY CAN GET THESE COLUMNS E-MAILED TO THEM FOR FREE BY SUBSCRIBING AT DICKMORRIS.COM!
By DICK MORRIS
Does President Obama truly believe that he can castigate and condemn Wall Street on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and then secure its cooperation on the other days of the week?
Does he not understand that when he ignites a public furor over AIG bonuses and then incites Congress to pass a punitive tax, he sends shivers down the spines of every other corporate executive who makes a lot of money?
Does he seriously believe that Wall Street investors will not worry that their winnings, should they join the Treasury as partners in risky investments, would be subject to public abuse, publicity and confiscatory taxation?
Of course he realizes that his rhetoric makes it unlikely that his program will succeed. He obviously gets it that the entire concept of a public-private partnership is impossible amid a climate of waging class warfare, taxing the rich and heaping contempt on anyone who makes money. The president is quite bright and certainly understands that you cannot shake hands with your right while you launch a roundhouse with your left.
So why does Obama persist in his aggressive rhetoric? Why does he continue to treat Wall Street as something out of Dante's Inferno?
Because he's just not that into you! He doesn't really care if the public-private partnerships work out.
He sends Geithner out to announce the program because he doesn't want to make it his own. When he announces a stimulus plan or a new spending bill, it's Obama's moment before the teleprompter. But the public-private partnerships he leaves to his Treasury secretary to announce.
The most rational explanation for Obama's puzzling conduct -- sabotaging his own program by way of his own rhetoric -- is that he truly wants to be forced to nationalize the banks in pursuit of his ultimate goal of a socialist economy.
Obama has to oppose nationalization today in order to achieve it tomorrow. He has to show the country and the world that he is doing all he can to help the private sector to sort things out with government help. He must ostentatiously invite the hated demons of Wall Street to join him in rescuing the banks in order, later, to say that he did his best to avoid having to take over the banks. Only then will nationalization be an acceptable alternative -- when he has run out of other options.
Meanwhile, he makes sure the private sector won't play ball by going after their bonuses, sending an implicit message to the other executives on Wall Street that reads: Stay away.
Even when he takes over the banks, as he almost inevitably will, he is going to have to dress up the nationalization as a temporary measure forced on him by the economy and the previously unrealized depth of the problem. He will cite the example of Sweden, where the government nationalized the banks only temporarily and returned them to private hands quickly.
You can't be for nationalization. But Obama hopes to accomplish it nonetheless.
Already, in the TARP and TALF programs, we can see how eager he is to use government power to manipulate the once-private sector. Consider the mandates piling up on any financial institution that takes government funds: limits on executive pay, corporate travel and conferences; a strong Buy American recommendation; and aggressive action to get them to make consumer loans. Can affirmative action, low-income lending and diversity outreach be far behind?
If Obama can bring banks and the healthcare industry under government control, we will have de facto socialism. Is this Obama's goal? It is obviously where he is headed.
Is Obama a socialist? Rather than throw around labels, let's do the math. The best measure of whether an economy is government- or private sector-oriented is the percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP) that flows through government expenditure. Before the current fiscal crisis, the major nations stacked up as shown in the chart on page 27.
Obama's stimulus package, alone, comes to about 6 percent of GDP, vaulting the United States past Japan to 40 percent on the list above. If we add in the extra spending in the supplemental appropriations bill and the likely increases for healthcare, the total government percentage will rise well past 40 percent and probably close in on the United Kingdom's 43.
That's pretty socialistic, but Obama has three more years to get us up around Germany and really ruin our economy!
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns!
PLEASE FORWARD THIS E-MAIL TO FRIENDS AND FAMILY AND TELL THEM THEY CAN GET THESE COLUMNS E-MAILED TO THEM FOR FREE BY SUBSCRIBING AT DICKMORRIS.COM!
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Dick Morris: MARK LEVIN'S TIMELY REMINDER
MARK LEVIN'S TIMELY REMINDER
By Dick Morris
In more normal times, we would not need Mark R. Levin's treatise Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto. We would know which side to be on and the points in his Manifesto would be, well, manifest.
But in this day, when a socialist sits in the White House, committed to expanding what Levin calls the "soft tyranny" of government regulation to every aspect of our economic and corporate life, we all need to read and remember what Levin writes in his new book.
Levin defines, again for us, what it means to be free and in the private sector. Why do we need this reminder? Don't we all remember from the Reagan days?
But the more you read Levin's remarkable book, the more you realize how we have all been lured into socialism, how much we have already surrendered. Liberty and Tyranny makes us understand who we are, where we want to go, and what the detours we must eschew along the way are.
He begins by eloquently defining what it means to be for us to live in civil society as free people:
"...the individual in civil society strives, albeit imperfectly, to be virtuous - that is restrained, ethical, and honorable. He rejects the relativism that blurs the lines between good and bad, right and wrong, just and unjust and means and ends."
The very comprehensiveness of Levin's book reminds us of the broad offensive of the Obama Administration. It aims not simply to expand government, but to contract our freedom. Levin spells out how. Freedoms we take for granted - like being able to provide medical care for your family - are at risk in this new socialist regime we have elected.
The leading contribution of the Levin book is to define and explain "soft tyranny." It is soft tyranny that requires us to sit by passively while our ethic of cultural assimilation is replaced by a permanent enshrining of diversity. It bids we let our rights to our own property, that we have worked for and acquired, be sublimated to government power disguised as human rights. It asks that we elevate the demand for equality over that for economic initiative and the incentives which propel them. Soft tyranny wants us to wait on a global consensus to act, even when inaction leads to genocide in Bosnia, homicide in Iraq and nuclear armaments in Iran.
But there are no posters for socialism. It advances masked. Its soft tyranny is presaged by a20softer seduction as its coils tight around us. Mark Levin's book explains what the soft tyrants are trying to do and how we can fight back.
One would wish we didn't need such a book at this time. But we do!
Get Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto
http://www.amazon.com/Liberty-Tyranny-Conservative-Mark-Levin/dp/1416562850
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns!
By Dick Morris
In more normal times, we would not need Mark R. Levin's treatise Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto. We would know which side to be on and the points in his Manifesto would be, well, manifest.
But in this day, when a socialist sits in the White House, committed to expanding what Levin calls the "soft tyranny" of government regulation to every aspect of our economic and corporate life, we all need to read and remember what Levin writes in his new book.
Levin defines, again for us, what it means to be free and in the private sector. Why do we need this reminder? Don't we all remember from the Reagan days?
But the more you read Levin's remarkable book, the more you realize how we have all been lured into socialism, how much we have already surrendered. Liberty and Tyranny makes us understand who we are, where we want to go, and what the detours we must eschew along the way are.
He begins by eloquently defining what it means to be for us to live in civil society as free people:
"...the individual in civil society strives, albeit imperfectly, to be virtuous - that is restrained, ethical, and honorable. He rejects the relativism that blurs the lines between good and bad, right and wrong, just and unjust and means and ends."
The very comprehensiveness of Levin's book reminds us of the broad offensive of the Obama Administration. It aims not simply to expand government, but to contract our freedom. Levin spells out how. Freedoms we take for granted - like being able to provide medical care for your family - are at risk in this new socialist regime we have elected.
The leading contribution of the Levin book is to define and explain "soft tyranny." It is soft tyranny that requires us to sit by passively while our ethic of cultural assimilation is replaced by a permanent enshrining of diversity. It bids we let our rights to our own property, that we have worked for and acquired, be sublimated to government power disguised as human rights. It asks that we elevate the demand for equality over that for economic initiative and the incentives which propel them. Soft tyranny wants us to wait on a global consensus to act, even when inaction leads to genocide in Bosnia, homicide in Iraq and nuclear armaments in Iran.
But there are no posters for socialism. It advances masked. Its soft tyranny is presaged by a20softer seduction as its coils tight around us. Mark Levin's book explains what the soft tyrants are trying to do and how we can fight back.
One would wish we didn't need such a book at this time. But we do!
Get Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto
http://www.amazon.com/Liberty-Tyranny-Conservative-Mark-Levin/dp/1416562850
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns!
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
OBAMA FEELS HEAT IN POLLS
OBAMA FEELS HEAT IN POLLS
By DICK MORRIS
Published on March 17, 2009
He may not be paying much attention to the stock market, where $11 trillion of pensions, investments and 401(k)s have been destroyed, but you can be sure that President Obama is paying attention to the polls showing diminishing support for his policies.
Of course, in presidential polling, all numbers are not equally important. Obama got 52 percent of the national vote. So when his approval drops, as it has, from 65 percent on Inauguration Day to 56 percent now (according to Rasmussen), he is playing with house money. Most of those who are coming to negative conclusions about his administration didn't vote for him in the first place.
But there are ominous signs in the data.
So far, Obama's administration has been characterized by two main programs: the stimulus spending and bank bailouts. But the polls indicate problems with each pillar of his package.
The public generally approves of his stimulus proposals. CNN found that voters approved of his economic program in general by 59-40, while Pew Research discovered that they backed his stimulus program specifically by 56-35.
But the problem is that voters don't think the stimulus package will work. CNN's poll, while showing broad approval of his programs, also found that voters did not believe his economic proposals would work, by 22-64. In fact, the CBS survey data indicates that 48 percent feel that the "economy would improve without government intervention," while only 41 percent agreed that intervention was "necessary."
If voters approve of the stimulus program, even while they are pessimistic about its impact and question its necessity, they are downright hostile to the bank bailouts. CBS found that they disapproved of the bailouts by 37-53 and noted that "48 percent are mostly resentful toward Obama's policies toward banks and financial institutions." While Pew found 48-40 approval of the bailouts, it also noted that 87 percent are "bothered by the bank bailout."
So Obama has one program that is popular but won't work and another that is downright unpopular.
And his presidency is dependent on how they work out.
Clinton could sustain his presidency with small-bore initiatives. But Obama can't. Stem cell research is well and good, but it's not the central concern of the nation at the moment.
Some news organizations like to compare how Obama is doing with how other presidents fared. Specifically, at this point in their presidencies, George W. Bush was at 58 percent approval while Clinton stood at 53 percent. By that measurement, Obama's 56 percent would seem in the normal range.
But Clinton won with only 42 percent of the vote in 1992, and Bush got 49 percent. Obama, of course, won 52 percent of the vote. So here's how the vote-to-popularity ratio stacks up:
• Clinton: Vote 42%; Job Approval 53%; Difference +11%
• W. Bush: Vote 49%; Job Approval 58%; Difference + 9%
• Obama: Vote 52%; Job Approval 56%; Difference + 4%
...not very good.
And let's remember that Clinton lost control of Congress in 1994 while Bush's presidency -- heading downward -- was saved by his excellent response to Sept. 11.
But presidential popularity is not going to be the key determinant of Obama's political success or failure. The unemployment rate is going to fill the role of political harbinger. And that front is unlikely to be favorable. Despite the current reports of a false dawn -- based on ratings that, while still dropping, have slowed somewhat in their descent -- we are in for a long, hard haul in trying to turn this economy around. And Obama's vigorous pronouncements that he plans to raise taxes in two years are not going to help induce the economy's most prodigious spenders -- the wealthy -- to step up to the checkout counter.
Obama's fate is deeply linked to the economy. These days, that's like being tied to an anchor.
By DICK MORRIS
Published on March 17, 2009
He may not be paying much attention to the stock market, where $11 trillion of pensions, investments and 401(k)s have been destroyed, but you can be sure that President Obama is paying attention to the polls showing diminishing support for his policies.
Of course, in presidential polling, all numbers are not equally important. Obama got 52 percent of the national vote. So when his approval drops, as it has, from 65 percent on Inauguration Day to 56 percent now (according to Rasmussen), he is playing with house money. Most of those who are coming to negative conclusions about his administration didn't vote for him in the first place.
But there are ominous signs in the data.
So far, Obama's administration has been characterized by two main programs: the stimulus spending and bank bailouts. But the polls indicate problems with each pillar of his package.
The public generally approves of his stimulus proposals. CNN found that voters approved of his economic program in general by 59-40, while Pew Research discovered that they backed his stimulus program specifically by 56-35.
But the problem is that voters don't think the stimulus package will work. CNN's poll, while showing broad approval of his programs, also found that voters did not believe his economic proposals would work, by 22-64. In fact, the CBS survey data indicates that 48 percent feel that the "economy would improve without government intervention," while only 41 percent agreed that intervention was "necessary."
If voters approve of the stimulus program, even while they are pessimistic about its impact and question its necessity, they are downright hostile to the bank bailouts. CBS found that they disapproved of the bailouts by 37-53 and noted that "48 percent are mostly resentful toward Obama's policies toward banks and financial institutions." While Pew found 48-40 approval of the bailouts, it also noted that 87 percent are "bothered by the bank bailout."
So Obama has one program that is popular but won't work and another that is downright unpopular.
And his presidency is dependent on how they work out.
Clinton could sustain his presidency with small-bore initiatives. But Obama can't. Stem cell research is well and good, but it's not the central concern of the nation at the moment.
Some news organizations like to compare how Obama is doing with how other presidents fared. Specifically, at this point in their presidencies, George W. Bush was at 58 percent approval while Clinton stood at 53 percent. By that measurement, Obama's 56 percent would seem in the normal range.
But Clinton won with only 42 percent of the vote in 1992, and Bush got 49 percent. Obama, of course, won 52 percent of the vote. So here's how the vote-to-popularity ratio stacks up:
• Clinton: Vote 42%; Job Approval 53%; Difference +11%
• W. Bush: Vote 49%; Job Approval 58%; Difference + 9%
• Obama: Vote 52%; Job Approval 56%; Difference + 4%
...not very good.
And let's remember that Clinton lost control of Congress in 1994 while Bush's presidency -- heading downward -- was saved by his excellent response to Sept. 11.
But presidential popularity is not going to be the key determinant of Obama's political success or failure. The unemployment rate is going to fill the role of political harbinger. And that front is unlikely to be favorable. Despite the current reports of a false dawn -- based on ratings that, while still dropping, have slowed somewhat in their descent -- we are in for a long, hard haul in trying to turn this economy around. And Obama's vigorous pronouncements that he plans to raise taxes in two years are not going to help induce the economy's most prodigious spenders -- the wealthy -- to step up to the checkout counter.
Obama's fate is deeply linked to the economy. These days, that's like being tied to an anchor.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Morris :does Obamaknow what he is doing?
BOGGLED BAM - CAN PRESIDENT GET JOB DONE?
By DICK MORRIS / EILEEN MCGANN
The furor over the huge federal spending under President Obama - a $1.75 trillion deficit, 13 percent - obscures an even more basic question: Does he know what he is doing?
That is, does he know how to do anything other than spend?
His stimulus package, of course, took no special ability: He left the details to Democrats in Congress. But his two other major initiatives - his banking - and mortgage-relief plans - are both flawed and unlikely to solve their respective problems.
Indeed, they're so wide of the mark as to prompt questions not of Obama's ideology but of his basic competence.
The bank-bailout plan seems to be largely stillborn. Having wished that the private sector would flock to invest in toxic assets if offered the right incentives, the Treasury secretary is still hoping. Crossing his fingers seems to have replaced effective policy in his planning.
To date, no massive infusion of private-sector capital seems in view and Washington is doing little more than writing checks to prop up the failing banks. That doesn't take a genius. But the difficult task of relieving the banks of toxic assets so they can rekindle the flow of loans seems to be beyond the ability of the president and his administration.
Perhaps Obama privately isn't so concerned about the banks or the businesses that need the credit markets restored. Those are Republican interest groups, right? But he surely must want his mortgage-rescue plan to work - the homeowners facing foreclosure tend to be Democratic constituents.
But this plan, too, falls far short of the mark.
Incredibly, it excludes anyone who has lost their job and can't afford to make their payments even if they were to spend 31 percent of their income trying to do so. If you can't come close to affording your mortgage, even if only because of a (hopefully temporary) loss of employment, forget about it: Obama is not going to help you.
Nor will he help you if your mortgage exceeds your home's value. One out of five mortgages now falls into this category - and the continued fall in property values will put more and more homeowners in it. But they can expect no help from Obama's rescue plan.
Why would a liberal be so callous? Why would he leave so many out in the cold? Could it be that the administration simply can't figure out how to help these folks? That the president couldn't devise a counter to his financial advisers, who presumably wanted to exclude these folks?
It was Clinton-era Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros who urged Fannie Mae to spend 42 percent of its money buying mortgages for lower-income people and who suggested that they no longer require down payments. And it was his successor, Andrew Cuomo, who upped the ante to 50 percent of the Fannie Mae portfolio.
After Democrats inveigled people to buy homes they could not afford, how can they justify passing a plan that excludes them from assistance?
It appears that Obama is at sea when it comes to financial policy, economic-recovery planning and credit-rescue efforts. We're stuck not only with a socialist but seemingly an incompetent one.
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns.
Published in the New York Post on March 16, 2009
By DICK MORRIS / EILEEN MCGANN
The furor over the huge federal spending under President Obama - a $1.75 trillion deficit, 13 percent - obscures an even more basic question: Does he know what he is doing?
That is, does he know how to do anything other than spend?
His stimulus package, of course, took no special ability: He left the details to Democrats in Congress. But his two other major initiatives - his banking - and mortgage-relief plans - are both flawed and unlikely to solve their respective problems.
Indeed, they're so wide of the mark as to prompt questions not of Obama's ideology but of his basic competence.
The bank-bailout plan seems to be largely stillborn. Having wished that the private sector would flock to invest in toxic assets if offered the right incentives, the Treasury secretary is still hoping. Crossing his fingers seems to have replaced effective policy in his planning.
To date, no massive infusion of private-sector capital seems in view and Washington is doing little more than writing checks to prop up the failing banks. That doesn't take a genius. But the difficult task of relieving the banks of toxic assets so they can rekindle the flow of loans seems to be beyond the ability of the president and his administration.
Perhaps Obama privately isn't so concerned about the banks or the businesses that need the credit markets restored. Those are Republican interest groups, right? But he surely must want his mortgage-rescue plan to work - the homeowners facing foreclosure tend to be Democratic constituents.
But this plan, too, falls far short of the mark.
Incredibly, it excludes anyone who has lost their job and can't afford to make their payments even if they were to spend 31 percent of their income trying to do so. If you can't come close to affording your mortgage, even if only because of a (hopefully temporary) loss of employment, forget about it: Obama is not going to help you.
Nor will he help you if your mortgage exceeds your home's value. One out of five mortgages now falls into this category - and the continued fall in property values will put more and more homeowners in it. But they can expect no help from Obama's rescue plan.
Why would a liberal be so callous? Why would he leave so many out in the cold? Could it be that the administration simply can't figure out how to help these folks? That the president couldn't devise a counter to his financial advisers, who presumably wanted to exclude these folks?
It was Clinton-era Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros who urged Fannie Mae to spend 42 percent of its money buying mortgages for lower-income people and who suggested that they no longer require down payments. And it was his successor, Andrew Cuomo, who upped the ante to 50 percent of the Fannie Mae portfolio.
After Democrats inveigled people to buy homes they could not afford, how can they justify passing a plan that excludes them from assistance?
It appears that Obama is at sea when it comes to financial policy, economic-recovery planning and credit-rescue efforts. We're stuck not only with a socialist but seemingly an incompetent one.
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns.
Published in the New York Post on March 16, 2009
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Dick Morris: THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY: HERE COMES SOCIALISM
THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY: HERE COMES SOCIALISM
By DICK MORRIS
2009-2010 will rank with 1913-14, 1933-36, 1964-65 and 1981-82 as years that will permanently change our government, politics and lives. Just as the stars were aligned for Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson and Reagan, they are aligned for Obama. Simply put, we enter his administration as free-enterprise, market-dominated, laissez-faire America. We will shortly become like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, or Sweden -- a socialist democracy in which the government dominates the economy, determines private-sector priorities and offers a vastly expanded range of services to many more people at much higher taxes.
Obama will accomplish his agenda of "reform" under the rubric of "recovery." Using the electoral mandate bestowed on a Democratic Congress by restless voters and the economic power given his administration by terrified Americans, he will change our country fundamentally in the name of lifting the depression. His stimulus packages won't do much to shorten the downturn -- although they will make it less painful -- but they will do a great deal to change our nation.
In implementing his agenda, Barack Obama will emulate the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Not the liberal mythology of the New Deal, but the actuality of what it accomplished.) When FDR took office, he was enormously successful in averting a total collapse of the banking system and the economy. But his New Deal measures only succeeded in lowering the unemployment rate from 23 percent in 1933, when he took office, to 13 percent in the summer of 1937. It never went lower. And his policies of over-regulation generated such business uncertainty that they triggered a second-term recession. Unemployment in 1938 rose to 17 percent and, in 1940, on the verge of the war-driven recovery, stood at 15 percent. (These data and the real story of Hoover's and Roosevelt's missteps, uncolored by ideology, are available in The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, copyright 2007.)
But in the name of a largely unsuccessful effort to end the Depression, Roosevelt passed crucial and permanent reforms that have dominated our lives ever since, including Social Security, the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, unionization under the Wagner Act, the federal minimum wage and a host of other fundamental changes.
Obama's record will be similar, although less wise and more destructive. He will begin by passing every program for which liberals have lusted for decades, from alternative-energy sources to school renovations, infrastructure repairs and technology enhancements. These are all good programs, but they normally would be stretched out for years. But freed of any constraint on the deficit -- indeed, empowered by a mandate to raise it as high as possible -- Obama will do them all rather quickly.
But it is not his spending that will transform our political system, it is his tax and welfare policies. In the name of short-term stimulus, he will give every American family (who makes less than $200,000) a welfare check of $1,000 euphemistically called a refundable tax credit. And he will so sharply cut taxes on the middle class and the poor that the number of Americans who pay no federal income tax will rise from the current one-third of all households to more than half. In the process, he will create a permanent electoral majority that does not pay taxes, but counts on ever-expanding welfare checks from the government. The dependency on the dole, formerly limited in pre-Clinton days to 14 million women and children on Aid to Families with Dependent Children, will now grow to a clear majority of the American population.
Will he raise taxes? Why should he? With a congressional mandate to run the deficit up as high as need be, there is no reason to raise taxes now and risk aggravating the depression. Instead, Obama will follow the opposite of the Reagan strategy. Reagan cut taxes and increased the deficit so that liberals could not increase spending. Obama will raise spending and increase the deficit so that conservatives cannot cut taxes. And, when the economy is restored, he will raise taxes with impunity, since the only people who will have to pay them would be rich Republicans.
In the name of stabilizing the banking system, Obama will nationalize it. Using Troubled Asset Relief Program funds to write generous checks to needy financial institutions, his administration will demand preferred stock in exchange. Preferred stock gets dividends before common stockholders do. With the massive debt these companies will owe to the government, they will only be able to afford dividends for preferred stockholders -- the government, not private investors. So who will buy common stock? And the government will demand that its bills be paid before any profits that might materialize are reinvested in the financial institution, so how will the value of the stocks ever grow? Devoid of private investors, these institutions will fall ever more under government control.
Obama will begin the process by limiting executive compensation. Then he will urge restructuring and lowering of home mortgages in danger of default (as the feds have already done with Citibank).
Then will come guidance on the loans to make and government instructions on the types of enterprises to favor. God grant that some Blagojevich type is not in charge of the program, using his power to line his pockets. The United States will find itself with an economic system comparable to that of Japan, where the all-powerful bureaucracy at MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) manages the economy, often making mistakes like giving mainframe computers priority over the development of laptops.
But it is the healthcare system that will experience the most dramatic and traumatic of changes. The current debate between erecting a Medicare-like governmental single payer or channeling coverage through private insurance misses the essential point. Without a lot more doctors, nurses, clinics, equipment and hospital beds, health resources will be strained to the breaking point. The people and equipment that now serve 250 million Americans and largely neglect all but the emergency needs of the other 50 million will now have to serve everyone. And, as government imposes ever more Draconian price controls and income limits on doctors, the supply of practitioners and equipment will decline as the demand escalates. Price increases will be out of the question, so the government will impose healthcare rationing, denying the older and sicker among us the care they need and even barring them from paying for it themselves. (Rationing based on income and price will be seen as immoral.)
And Obama will move to change permanently the partisan balance in America. He will move quickly to legalize all those who have been in America for five years, albeit illegally, and to smooth their paths to citizenship and voting. He will weaken border controls in an attempt to hike the Latino vote as high as he can in order to make red states like Texas into blue states like California. By the time he is finished, Latinos and African-Americans will cast a combined 30 percent of the vote. If they go by top-heavy margins for the Democrats, as they did in 2008, it will assure Democratic domination (until they move up the economic ladder and become good Republicans).
And he will enact the check-off card system for determining labor union representation, repealing the secret ballot in union elections. The result will be to raise the proportion of the labor force in unions up to the high teens from the current level of about 12 percent.
Finally, he will use the expansive powers of the Federal Communications Commission to impose "local" control and ownership of radio stations and to impose the "fairness doctrine" on talk radio. The effect will be to drive talk radio to the Internet, fundamentally change its economics, and retard its growth for years hence.
But none of these changes will cure the depression. It will end when the private sector works through the high debt levels that triggered the collapse in the first place. And, then, the large stimulus package deficits will likely lead to rapid inflation, probably necessitating a second recession to cure it.
So Obama's name will be mud by 2012 and probably by 2010 as well. And the Republican Party will make big gains and regain much of its lost power.
But it will be too late to reverse the socialism of much of the economy, the demographic change in the electorate, the rationing of healthcare by the government, the surge of unionization and the crippling of talk radio.
By DICK MORRIS
2009-2010 will rank with 1913-14, 1933-36, 1964-65 and 1981-82 as years that will permanently change our government, politics and lives. Just as the stars were aligned for Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson and Reagan, they are aligned for Obama. Simply put, we enter his administration as free-enterprise, market-dominated, laissez-faire America. We will shortly become like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, or Sweden -- a socialist democracy in which the government dominates the economy, determines private-sector priorities and offers a vastly expanded range of services to many more people at much higher taxes.
Obama will accomplish his agenda of "reform" under the rubric of "recovery." Using the electoral mandate bestowed on a Democratic Congress by restless voters and the economic power given his administration by terrified Americans, he will change our country fundamentally in the name of lifting the depression. His stimulus packages won't do much to shorten the downturn -- although they will make it less painful -- but they will do a great deal to change our nation.
In implementing his agenda, Barack Obama will emulate the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Not the liberal mythology of the New Deal, but the actuality of what it accomplished.) When FDR took office, he was enormously successful in averting a total collapse of the banking system and the economy. But his New Deal measures only succeeded in lowering the unemployment rate from 23 percent in 1933, when he took office, to 13 percent in the summer of 1937. It never went lower. And his policies of over-regulation generated such business uncertainty that they triggered a second-term recession. Unemployment in 1938 rose to 17 percent and, in 1940, on the verge of the war-driven recovery, stood at 15 percent. (These data and the real story of Hoover's and Roosevelt's missteps, uncolored by ideology, are available in The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, copyright 2007.)
But in the name of a largely unsuccessful effort to end the Depression, Roosevelt passed crucial and permanent reforms that have dominated our lives ever since, including Social Security, the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, unionization under the Wagner Act, the federal minimum wage and a host of other fundamental changes.
Obama's record will be similar, although less wise and more destructive. He will begin by passing every program for which liberals have lusted for decades, from alternative-energy sources to school renovations, infrastructure repairs and technology enhancements. These are all good programs, but they normally would be stretched out for years. But freed of any constraint on the deficit -- indeed, empowered by a mandate to raise it as high as possible -- Obama will do them all rather quickly.
But it is not his spending that will transform our political system, it is his tax and welfare policies. In the name of short-term stimulus, he will give every American family (who makes less than $200,000) a welfare check of $1,000 euphemistically called a refundable tax credit. And he will so sharply cut taxes on the middle class and the poor that the number of Americans who pay no federal income tax will rise from the current one-third of all households to more than half. In the process, he will create a permanent electoral majority that does not pay taxes, but counts on ever-expanding welfare checks from the government. The dependency on the dole, formerly limited in pre-Clinton days to 14 million women and children on Aid to Families with Dependent Children, will now grow to a clear majority of the American population.
Will he raise taxes? Why should he? With a congressional mandate to run the deficit up as high as need be, there is no reason to raise taxes now and risk aggravating the depression. Instead, Obama will follow the opposite of the Reagan strategy. Reagan cut taxes and increased the deficit so that liberals could not increase spending. Obama will raise spending and increase the deficit so that conservatives cannot cut taxes. And, when the economy is restored, he will raise taxes with impunity, since the only people who will have to pay them would be rich Republicans.
In the name of stabilizing the banking system, Obama will nationalize it. Using Troubled Asset Relief Program funds to write generous checks to needy financial institutions, his administration will demand preferred stock in exchange. Preferred stock gets dividends before common stockholders do. With the massive debt these companies will owe to the government, they will only be able to afford dividends for preferred stockholders -- the government, not private investors. So who will buy common stock? And the government will demand that its bills be paid before any profits that might materialize are reinvested in the financial institution, so how will the value of the stocks ever grow? Devoid of private investors, these institutions will fall ever more under government control.
Obama will begin the process by limiting executive compensation. Then he will urge restructuring and lowering of home mortgages in danger of default (as the feds have already done with Citibank).
Then will come guidance on the loans to make and government instructions on the types of enterprises to favor. God grant that some Blagojevich type is not in charge of the program, using his power to line his pockets. The United States will find itself with an economic system comparable to that of Japan, where the all-powerful bureaucracy at MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) manages the economy, often making mistakes like giving mainframe computers priority over the development of laptops.
But it is the healthcare system that will experience the most dramatic and traumatic of changes. The current debate between erecting a Medicare-like governmental single payer or channeling coverage through private insurance misses the essential point. Without a lot more doctors, nurses, clinics, equipment and hospital beds, health resources will be strained to the breaking point. The people and equipment that now serve 250 million Americans and largely neglect all but the emergency needs of the other 50 million will now have to serve everyone. And, as government imposes ever more Draconian price controls and income limits on doctors, the supply of practitioners and equipment will decline as the demand escalates. Price increases will be out of the question, so the government will impose healthcare rationing, denying the older and sicker among us the care they need and even barring them from paying for it themselves. (Rationing based on income and price will be seen as immoral.)
And Obama will move to change permanently the partisan balance in America. He will move quickly to legalize all those who have been in America for five years, albeit illegally, and to smooth their paths to citizenship and voting. He will weaken border controls in an attempt to hike the Latino vote as high as he can in order to make red states like Texas into blue states like California. By the time he is finished, Latinos and African-Americans will cast a combined 30 percent of the vote. If they go by top-heavy margins for the Democrats, as they did in 2008, it will assure Democratic domination (until they move up the economic ladder and become good Republicans).
And he will enact the check-off card system for determining labor union representation, repealing the secret ballot in union elections. The result will be to raise the proportion of the labor force in unions up to the high teens from the current level of about 12 percent.
Finally, he will use the expansive powers of the Federal Communications Commission to impose "local" control and ownership of radio stations and to impose the "fairness doctrine" on talk radio. The effect will be to drive talk radio to the Internet, fundamentally change its economics, and retard its growth for years hence.
But none of these changes will cure the depression. It will end when the private sector works through the high debt levels that triggered the collapse in the first place. And, then, the large stimulus package deficits will likely lead to rapid inflation, probably necessitating a second recession to cure it.
So Obama's name will be mud by 2012 and probably by 2010 as well. And the Republican Party will make big gains and regain much of its lost power.
But it will be too late to reverse the socialism of much of the economy, the demographic change in the electorate, the rationing of healthcare by the government, the surge of unionization and the crippling of talk radio.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
DEMOCRATS CLOSE IN ON 60 VOTES
DEMOCRATS CLOSE IN ON 60 VOTES
By DICK MORRIS
Published on DickMorris.com on November 12, 2008
With the election a week old, Norm Coleman's lead in Minnesota keeps dropping with each day. And now, for the first time, the official recount is underway. Is the left stealing votes? One get suspicious when every day brings new ballots that favor Franken over Coleman.
There is nothing we can do about Minnesota (or Alaska, where Stevens' margin is under attack as well) but there is a great deal we can -- and must -- do to protect the 60th Republican seat in Georgia.
Saxby Chambliss won with less than 50% of the vote on Election Day and now faces a runoff on December 2nd. His opponent, Jim Martin, is a traditional liberal Democrat who will be a rubber stamp for Harry Reid in squelching Republican filibusters of Democratic tax and spending legislation. We must keep Chambliss in office!
Please take the time to go to GOPTrust.com and donate money for an independent expenditure for Chambliss to keep the Democrats shy of the 60 votes they need to rule the nation. With Chambliss' vote, we can be secure that the socialist agenda of Obama will not pass Congress. Rarely has so much ridden on one vote. If the Democrats, who have already won 57 seats in the Senate, can reverse the counts on Stevens and Coleman, they will have 59 votes. Chambliss is the 60th.
There are only three weeks until the runoff election. Democrats, aided by ACORN, specialize in maximizing the turnout among liberals and minorities. We need to fund the conservative opposition to stop them from taking the decisive seat in the Senate. Please donate now to GOPTrust.com so we can wage this battle....and win!
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns!
By DICK MORRIS
Published on DickMorris.com on November 12, 2008
With the election a week old, Norm Coleman's lead in Minnesota keeps dropping with each day. And now, for the first time, the official recount is underway. Is the left stealing votes? One get suspicious when every day brings new ballots that favor Franken over Coleman.
There is nothing we can do about Minnesota (or Alaska, where Stevens' margin is under attack as well) but there is a great deal we can -- and must -- do to protect the 60th Republican seat in Georgia.
Saxby Chambliss won with less than 50% of the vote on Election Day and now faces a runoff on December 2nd. His opponent, Jim Martin, is a traditional liberal Democrat who will be a rubber stamp for Harry Reid in squelching Republican filibusters of Democratic tax and spending legislation. We must keep Chambliss in office!
Please take the time to go to GOPTrust.com and donate money for an independent expenditure for Chambliss to keep the Democrats shy of the 60 votes they need to rule the nation. With Chambliss' vote, we can be secure that the socialist agenda of Obama will not pass Congress. Rarely has so much ridden on one vote. If the Democrats, who have already won 57 seats in the Senate, can reverse the counts on Stevens and Coleman, they will have 59 votes. Chambliss is the 60th.
There are only three weeks until the runoff election. Democrats, aided by ACORN, specialize in maximizing the turnout among liberals and minorities. We need to fund the conservative opposition to stop them from taking the decisive seat in the Senate. Please donate now to GOPTrust.com so we can wage this battle....and win!
Go to DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns!
Dick Morris on SARAH PALIN SAVED GOP FROM LANDSLIDE DEFEAT
SARAH PALIN SAVED GOP FROM LANDSLIDE DEFEAT
By DICK MORRIS
Published on TheHill.com on November 11, 2008
As Richard Nixon wrote, "history is written by liberals," but the story of the 2008 campaign is too important to cede to them the analysis of what happened. A close analysis of the returns indicates several key realities:
a) Sarah Palin made a vast difference in McCain's favor. Compared to 2004, McCain lost 11 points among white men, according to the Fox News exit poll, but only four points among white women. Obama's underperformance among white women, evident throughout the fall, may be chalked up, in large part, to the influence of Sarah Palin. She provided a rallying point for women who saw their political agenda in terms larger than abortion. She addressed the question of what it is like to be a working mother in today's economy and society and resonated with tens of millions of white women who have not responded to the more traditional, and liberal, advocates for their gender.
b) Turnout did not increase substantially. Despite predictions (by me and others) of a vastly greater voter turnout, it didn't happen. About 127 million people voted in 2008, compared to 122 million in 2004. By contrast, turnout rose by almost 20 million between 2000 and 2004. The emphasis on early voting and the heavy participation in primaries indicated the likelihood of a huge increase in turnout, but, on Election Day, the turnout was modest.
c) The black vote made a huge difference; but young people did not. Obama, as expected, generated a big increase in African-American voter turnout. Fox News's exit polls estimate that blacks constituted 13 percent of the turnout in 2008, compared with 11 percent in 2004 and 10 percent in 2000. But voters under 30 years of age were still the same 11 percent of the vote that they were in 2004. The surge of young voters, which was supposed to animate Obama's rise, failed to happen.
d) The turnout efforts of groups like ACORN made a huge difference. Ultimately, it was the difference in voter turnout among Republicans and Democrats that, in addition to the higher black vote, elected Obama. According to Curtis Gans of American University, Republican turnout dropped from 30 percent in 2004 to 28.7 percent of the electorate in 2008, while the Democratic proportion of voters rose from 28.7 percent to 31.3 percent. Much of this increase came from newly registered voters, many as a result of ACORN's efforts. Voter registration rose by 6 million in 2008, which may have accounted for virtually all the increase in turnout.
The message for conservatives is clear: The focus of Democrats on grassroots activism, begun in 1998 by MoveOn.org, was crucial to the Obama election. Instead of relying on the Republican Party to carry the message to the electorate, conservatives must organize their own grassroots movements -- like GOPTrust.com -- and boost turnout and enthusiasm among those who share their worldview. The backbreaking tasks of registering voters and getting out the vote are key to winning elections in the post-media era. Online networking and building of cyber-roots organizations is the way to go in competing in the new politics we face today.
Will the Republican Party get its act together to compete? Who knows. Will conservatives take matters into their own hands and build the kind of organization and Internet base that the liberals have over the past 15 years? They better. Unless we want to witness a fundamental change in our laws, society and culture, conservatives had better get busy and emulate their leftist brethren in building organizations to tap into their base. In the '80s, groups like the National Rifle Association and the Moral Majority filled this need. Today, new groups must move to the fore to fill the void. And they better do it fast!
By DICK MORRIS
Published on TheHill.com on November 11, 2008
As Richard Nixon wrote, "history is written by liberals," but the story of the 2008 campaign is too important to cede to them the analysis of what happened. A close analysis of the returns indicates several key realities:
a) Sarah Palin made a vast difference in McCain's favor. Compared to 2004, McCain lost 11 points among white men, according to the Fox News exit poll, but only four points among white women. Obama's underperformance among white women, evident throughout the fall, may be chalked up, in large part, to the influence of Sarah Palin. She provided a rallying point for women who saw their political agenda in terms larger than abortion. She addressed the question of what it is like to be a working mother in today's economy and society and resonated with tens of millions of white women who have not responded to the more traditional, and liberal, advocates for their gender.
b) Turnout did not increase substantially. Despite predictions (by me and others) of a vastly greater voter turnout, it didn't happen. About 127 million people voted in 2008, compared to 122 million in 2004. By contrast, turnout rose by almost 20 million between 2000 and 2004. The emphasis on early voting and the heavy participation in primaries indicated the likelihood of a huge increase in turnout, but, on Election Day, the turnout was modest.
c) The black vote made a huge difference; but young people did not. Obama, as expected, generated a big increase in African-American voter turnout. Fox News's exit polls estimate that blacks constituted 13 percent of the turnout in 2008, compared with 11 percent in 2004 and 10 percent in 2000. But voters under 30 years of age were still the same 11 percent of the vote that they were in 2004. The surge of young voters, which was supposed to animate Obama's rise, failed to happen.
d) The turnout efforts of groups like ACORN made a huge difference. Ultimately, it was the difference in voter turnout among Republicans and Democrats that, in addition to the higher black vote, elected Obama. According to Curtis Gans of American University, Republican turnout dropped from 30 percent in 2004 to 28.7 percent of the electorate in 2008, while the Democratic proportion of voters rose from 28.7 percent to 31.3 percent. Much of this increase came from newly registered voters, many as a result of ACORN's efforts. Voter registration rose by 6 million in 2008, which may have accounted for virtually all the increase in turnout.
The message for conservatives is clear: The focus of Democrats on grassroots activism, begun in 1998 by MoveOn.org, was crucial to the Obama election. Instead of relying on the Republican Party to carry the message to the electorate, conservatives must organize their own grassroots movements -- like GOPTrust.com -- and boost turnout and enthusiasm among those who share their worldview. The backbreaking tasks of registering voters and getting out the vote are key to winning elections in the post-media era. Online networking and building of cyber-roots organizations is the way to go in competing in the new politics we face today.
Will the Republican Party get its act together to compete? Who knows. Will conservatives take matters into their own hands and build the kind of organization and Internet base that the liberals have over the past 15 years? They better. Unless we want to witness a fundamental change in our laws, society and culture, conservatives had better get busy and emulate their leftist brethren in building organizations to tap into their base. In the '80s, groups like the National Rifle Association and the Moral Majority filled this need. Today, new groups must move to the fore to fill the void. And they better do it fast!
Saturday, August 23, 2008
more from dick morris on the presidential race
THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE THAT HASN'T YET STARTED
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
This column will be published on FOXNews.com on August 22, 2008.
In following a presidential race, the most important way to understand what is happening is to follow voter responses to open ended questions. Those are questions which ask "What do you like the most about Barack Obama?" and "What do you like the least about Barack Obama." These questions, which let voters tell pollsters what they think in their own words offer the best way to figure out what is really going on.
Fortunately, the Fox News tracking polling for the election has now included these questions and the results offer an excellent insight into the current state of the race.
Oddly for a race that has been going on for two years and holds the nation rapt in attention, the contest is still in a very, very primitive phase. Voters' level of awareness of the issues or of the candidates is quite limited. Neither campaign has done much to project its issues or its message and the attacks on one another, which increasingly dominate the dialogue, show little resonance among most voters.
Overwhelmingly, the thing voters like the most about Obama is that he is new, a fresh face, for change, intelligent, inspiring, a good speaker, outspoken, and charismatic. 57% of all voters use one of these phrases to describe him, including 48% of Republicans and 55% of Independents. But only 13% of all voters cite any specific position of Obama's including his signature opposition to the war in Iraq. Only 2% mentioned the war in citing what they liked about Obama and only 1% cited the economy and jobs. So Obama is still a personality running for office and the voters have yet to identify him with any policy or proposal. And the one identification he used to have -- opposition to the war -- has faded. But Obama has vast potential appeal. Even though the Fox News poll gave him only a three point lead over McCain, four voters in five cite something they like about Obama in open ended questions (including 66% of Republicans and 78% of Independents).
Opposition to Obama is also centered on fears of his youth, inexperience, and lack of qualifications. 31% of all voters, 33% of Independents, and 29% of Democrats cited this concern in open ended questions. But just as Obama's positive ratings do not include much in the way of specific mentions of his issue positions, so his negatives don't either. Only 19% of all voters said they disliked his liberalism, connection with Rev Wright, radicalism, religious views, elitism or even said they disagreed with him about anything. Another 8% disliked his flip flops on issues. =2 0But the potential for Obama to fall apart is also enormous. 78% of all voters, including two-thirds of all Democrats and four-fifths of all independents cited something about Obama that they did not like.
So everybody basically agrees that Obama is a new fresh face who advocates change but is too inexperienced and lacks some or all of the qualifications needed for the job. The question of which part of this statement outweighs the other is the issue on which the election hinges.
But just as Obama has not succeeded in identifying himself with any specific issue, idea, or proposal (and voters might be asking, as they did of Gary Hart, "where's the beef?) so McCain and the Republicans have failed to link him to extreme liberalism, radicalism, Rev Wright or any of the identifications they have been trying to pin on the Democrat. Both campaigns have almost totally failed to move past square one on Obama.
For McCain, it's pretty much the same story. 33% of all voters see him as experienced and qualified (including 26% of Democrats and 34% of Independents). 10% like his military record. 7% praise his honesty. And 9% say they approve of how he would handle foreign policy.
But McCain's negatives are the flip side of his positives. 24% of all voters and 26% of Republicans and 20% of independents say he is too old. And another 23% feel he is too conservative, too close to Bush, or too supportive of the war. 4% criticize his flip flops.
So Americans of all parties have reached a consensus that Obama is young, charismatic, intelligent, articulate, and in favor of change but also that he is too inexperienced, possibly too liberal, and less qualified than they would like
And they also have come to a common agreement, also cutting across party lines, that McCain is experienced, able, an heroic veteran, and honest but also that he is too old, possibly too conservative, and perhaps too pro-war.
Just as 80% of all voters find something to praise in Obama and 78% find something to criticize, so 80% have something good to say about McCain and 82% have some criticism to make.
This broad agreement on the pros and cons of each candidate and the willingness of even their partisans to consider their negatives and of their enemies to concede their positives is highly unusual and underscores why the race is so close.
But it also suggests that it is very volatile. Either campaign can paint the other with issue negatives if they start going about it effectively.
It is a glaring omission that only 1% cite Obama's tax positions as a negative and that nobody mentioned his opposition to offshore oil drilling.
Likewise, how odd that only 15% cited specifically McCain's support for the war and his connection with Bush as a negative.
On the other hand, neither Obama's health care nor McCain's energy proposals have registered with the voters and few can name any specific issue position for either man of which they approve.
For a campaign that has been going on for two years, how odd that voter opinions of the candidates are still so unformed and general.
Go To DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns!
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
This column will be published on FOXNews.com on August 22, 2008.
In following a presidential race, the most important way to understand what is happening is to follow voter responses to open ended questions. Those are questions which ask "What do you like the most about Barack Obama?" and "What do you like the least about Barack Obama." These questions, which let voters tell pollsters what they think in their own words offer the best way to figure out what is really going on.
Fortunately, the Fox News tracking polling for the election has now included these questions and the results offer an excellent insight into the current state of the race.
Oddly for a race that has been going on for two years and holds the nation rapt in attention, the contest is still in a very, very primitive phase. Voters' level of awareness of the issues or of the candidates is quite limited. Neither campaign has done much to project its issues or its message and the attacks on one another, which increasingly dominate the dialogue, show little resonance among most voters.
Overwhelmingly, the thing voters like the most about Obama is that he is new, a fresh face, for change, intelligent, inspiring, a good speaker, outspoken, and charismatic. 57% of all voters use one of these phrases to describe him, including 48% of Republicans and 55% of Independents. But only 13% of all voters cite any specific position of Obama's including his signature opposition to the war in Iraq. Only 2% mentioned the war in citing what they liked about Obama and only 1% cited the economy and jobs. So Obama is still a personality running for office and the voters have yet to identify him with any policy or proposal. And the one identification he used to have -- opposition to the war -- has faded. But Obama has vast potential appeal. Even though the Fox News poll gave him only a three point lead over McCain, four voters in five cite something they like about Obama in open ended questions (including 66% of Republicans and 78% of Independents).
Opposition to Obama is also centered on fears of his youth, inexperience, and lack of qualifications. 31% of all voters, 33% of Independents, and 29% of Democrats cited this concern in open ended questions. But just as Obama's positive ratings do not include much in the way of specific mentions of his issue positions, so his negatives don't either. Only 19% of all voters said they disliked his liberalism, connection with Rev Wright, radicalism, religious views, elitism or even said they disagreed with him about anything. Another 8% disliked his flip flops on issues. =2 0But the potential for Obama to fall apart is also enormous. 78% of all voters, including two-thirds of all Democrats and four-fifths of all independents cited something about Obama that they did not like.
So everybody basically agrees that Obama is a new fresh face who advocates change but is too inexperienced and lacks some or all of the qualifications needed for the job. The question of which part of this statement outweighs the other is the issue on which the election hinges.
But just as Obama has not succeeded in identifying himself with any specific issue, idea, or proposal (and voters might be asking, as they did of Gary Hart, "where's the beef?) so McCain and the Republicans have failed to link him to extreme liberalism, radicalism, Rev Wright or any of the identifications they have been trying to pin on the Democrat. Both campaigns have almost totally failed to move past square one on Obama.
For McCain, it's pretty much the same story. 33% of all voters see him as experienced and qualified (including 26% of Democrats and 34% of Independents). 10% like his military record. 7% praise his honesty. And 9% say they approve of how he would handle foreign policy.
But McCain's negatives are the flip side of his positives. 24% of all voters and 26% of Republicans and 20% of independents say he is too old. And another 23% feel he is too conservative, too close to Bush, or too supportive of the war. 4% criticize his flip flops.
So Americans of all parties have reached a consensus that Obama is young, charismatic, intelligent, articulate, and in favor of change but also that he is too inexperienced, possibly too liberal, and less qualified than they would like
And they also have come to a common agreement, also cutting across party lines, that McCain is experienced, able, an heroic veteran, and honest but also that he is too old, possibly too conservative, and perhaps too pro-war.
Just as 80% of all voters find something to praise in Obama and 78% find something to criticize, so 80% have something good to say about McCain and 82% have some criticism to make.
This broad agreement on the pros and cons of each candidate and the willingness of even their partisans to consider their negatives and of their enemies to concede their positives is highly unusual and underscores why the race is so close.
But it also suggests that it is very volatile. Either campaign can paint the other with issue negatives if they start going about it effectively.
It is a glaring omission that only 1% cite Obama's tax positions as a negative and that nobody mentioned his opposition to offshore oil drilling.
Likewise, how odd that only 15% cited specifically McCain's support for the war and his connection with Bush as a negative.
On the other hand, neither Obama's health care nor McCain's energy proposals have registered with the voters and few can name any specific issue position for either man of which they approve.
For a campaign that has been going on for two years, how odd that voter opinions of the candidates are still so unformed and general.
Go To DickMorris.com to read all of Dick's columns!
Monday, June 23, 2008
Dick Morris has a new book "Fleeced"
Dick Morris has a new book "Fleeced"
should be an enlighteng book
looks like there a chapter of what to do about it.
Fleeced: How Barack Obama, Media Mockery of Terrorist Threats, Liberals Who Want to Kill Talk Radio, the Do-Nothing Congress, Companies ... Are Scamming Us ... and What to Do About It (Hardcover)
by Dick Morris (Author), Eileen Mcgann (Author)
should be an enlighteng book
looks like there a chapter of what to do about it.
Fleeced: How Barack Obama, Media Mockery of Terrorist Threats, Liberals Who Want to Kill Talk Radio, the Do-Nothing Congress, Companies ... Are Scamming Us ... and What to Do About It (Hardcover)
by Dick Morris (Author), Eileen Mcgann (Author)
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