Karl Rove On Wonderboy's 2012 Re-election Prospects

Karl Rove wrote a fine piece in his Wall Street Journal column last week concerning Wonderboy's standing with various demographic groups, relative to his 2008 numbers. Rove's contention is that the relatively slim 6% margin of victory may be easily overwhelmed by the cumulative effects of Wonderboy's poll numbers among various voting segments- minorities, women, income, age groups, etc.

I think Rove is correct. Being a national political figure, Rove isn't really in a position to write something which I suspect he believes, but can't publicly express. But I can.

I believe many white independent moderates and slightly-liberal or moderate Republicans, especially those with college educations or more and above-average incomes and/or wealth voted for the Junior Illinois Senator out of guilt and a misplaced sense of the importance of imagery.

Given the chance to vote for a black (Democratic) candidate who wasn't Shirley Chisolm (the true first black presidential candidate), nor Jesse Jackson, those whites jumped at the chance for personal and group cleansing of their presumably-inherited racial guilt for past American enslavement of blacks.

After all, as Joe Biden said of Wonderboy, he speaks well and he's "so clean." Yes, the president dresses well, cracks jokes and appears hip and cool.

In opposition, a cranky John McCain ran one of the worst presidential campaigns in memory. Unlike the voluble, energetic challenger to George W. Bush of 2000, the 2008 vintage McCain reminded you of your ornery grandfather. Then there was that stupid campaign suspension to run back to Washington during the financial crisis. Until then, he was actually slightly ahead in the polls.

Between Wonderboy's counting on nearly every black vote, which wasn't seen by the media as racist, as it would be for a white to get all the white votes, the guilt felt by educated, wealthy whites, and McCain's personality and campaign mistakes, it's a wonder that the margin of victory for the First Rookie was only 6%.

I don't know the numbers- Rove would- but I believe that a good deal more than 6% of the electorate will be whites that won't need to feel that guilt anymore, and from whom the magical Obama pixie dust of 2008 has been shed.

Without the need to vote for the first seemingly-presidential-looking and -acting black, these whites, who may comprise as much as 10-15% of the voting electorate, are more likely to back any credible opponent of the current Oval Office occupant's who has presided over a worsening economy and unemployment numbers.

Race and racially-based voting isn't something your average, high-profile professional political handler or operative can risk discussing in public media venues. But any thinking person who follows politics knows it exists, that it affected the outcome of the 2008 election, and that it's absence in 2012 could well be enough, on its own, to doom Wonderboy's bid to become a two-term president.

More Consequences from ObamaCare- But Are They Unintended?

Karl Rove wrote a nice editorial in the Wall Street Journal last week summarizing the latest estimates of how many currently-insured Americans who are covered through their jobs will be losing that coverage under ObamaCare. It's not pretty. But is it unintended?

Rove presented the financial math, explaining that company-paid health care for a family of four is an average $9,773, while the penalty for dumping such coverage will only be- initially- $2,000. Of course more than merely today's uninsured will end up with federal coverage.

Last year, Douglas Holtz-Eakin estimated that 35 million American workers would have their health care insurance dropped by their employers. The National Center for Policy Analysis weighed in with their estimate of  "87 million to 117 million" such newly-uninsured employees. Now McKinsey estimates the number to be between 80 million and 100 million.

The original Congressional estimate was just 24 million workers being shunted to the federal option.

Rove then went on to quantify the extra costs these larger estimates imply for ObamaCare. Holtz-Eakin's number would add about $200B to the originally-estimated $500B cost, the NCPA's larger number would add $2T for the program's first decade. These added expenses come on top of what was initially, but fraudulently, claimed to be a deficit-reduction bill. In reality, when Medicare cost savings double-counting are eliminated and various other taxes unrelated to health care are stripped out, the law obviously will be a net new cost to the federal budget.

Rove's point was simply that it's going to be much more expensive.

My point is that the expected discharge of perhaps as many as 100 million workers, or nearly a third of the US population, into the new federal program, will effectively end private health care insurance. But if you think that measely $2,000 fine per worker is going to remain fixed, think again.

Once Congress and the various new agencies charged with implementing ObamaCare get a sense of how much unanticipated, but, I believe, actually welcomed new participants are dumped by corporate America, they will duly announce a need to increase the per/worker penalty in order to pay for the extra plan participants.

Maybe the penalties will rise to the average loaded cost per/person of the federal policies. In which case you'd have corporate America maneuvered into not only paying what they paid before ObamaCare, but now forced to pay more, uncontrollably, via penalties, while the federal government exercised total control over the health care choices of the bulk of Americans.

I wish I could write that I believe this predicted tide of workers dumped into ObamaCare was unexpected, but I think it was both expected and desired.

Forget about Wonderboy's promise that under his bill "if you like your health care, you can keep it." He knew that was never going to be true, and I believe he made sure that ObamaCare was designed so that corporations would make it a lie. Watch him avoid responsibility and blame corporations for dumping their workers in order to save money, once again depicting them as evil.

Makes you rethink wanting to be a shareholder of any publicly-held US firm, doesn't it, when Wonderboy is obviously out to ruin them?

Karl Rove On Wonderboy's MidTerm Campaigning Ineptitude

Karl Rove wrote a nice piece in his weekly Wall Street Journal column the other day regarding Wonderboy's recent campaigning mistakes.


Why should we be surprised with Rove's assertions that Wonderboy is now making horrific mistakes in his midterm electioneering? Think about how the First Rookie got to the White House.


Prior to running for President, he'd only run once for federal office. That was when he bushwacked his mentor to get the Democratic Senate nomination, then happily stood by and allowed his Republican opponent's sealed divorce records to be used in the campaign. His comment when they appeared in the Chicago dailies was something like,


'When I heard/read about the divorce records, I went to get fitted for my swearing-in suit.'


Almost immediately upon arriving in the Senate, he began running for President.


This guy hasn't had a seriously issues-based, non -race-based campaign yet. Why should he know anything about presidential campaigning for other Congressional members?

Isn't his entire appeal and character based on- himself? His anointed minority ascension to the nation's and free world's most powerful job?

Can this guy even identify with anyone else deemed so far beneath his magnificent self?

Rove's editorial included some pretty terrific passages, including these,

"Last Saturday at a West Newton, Mass., fund-raiser, the president said, "facts and science and argument [do] not seem to be winning . . . because we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared."


In a penetrating piece in the New York Times Magazine on Oct. 12, Peter Baker profiles a president who "believes he is the smartest person in any room," according to one prominent Democratic lawmaker. He and his aides think that the core of their difficulties is "a communications problem" and the result of a "miscalculation" that the president could "forge genuine bipartisan coalitions."


Then there is this priceless quote involving a Democratic Representative,


Earlier this year Rep. Marion Berry of Arkansas warned moderate Democrats of a midterm bloodbath comparable to 1994. "Well, the big difference here and in '94 was you've got me," he reported the president as having said. "We're going to see how much difference that makes now," Mr. Berry added. Yes, we will."



See what I mean?

It would seem that Wonderboy is so arrogant as to miss the reality of his own shockingly fast rise to power, and the uniquely temporal reasons for it. Thus, he can't really understand any politics that isn't about his personality or race or presumed unrivaled intellectual brilliance.

Rove is correct in assessing the president's Congressional campaigning shortcomings, but it shouldn't really come as any big surprise.

More Lies From Max Baucus

Today's release of the latest CBO "scoring" of Max Baucus' Senate Finance Committee health care bill had the chairman grinning, claiming the bill is "paid for."

Yeah, right. More lies from Washington. More lies from Baucus.

Baucus' bill and statements are misleading on so many levels.

For example, Karl Rove pointed out the following in just a few minutes on Sean Hannity's Fox News program last night.

-The current Senate bill mandates huge taxes on so-called "Cadillac" health care plans. Many people possessing these plans are union workers, and the House has vowed that it will not tax these plans. So you either have taxes that Wonderboy said won't be levied, or a bill that suddenly is about $200B more in the red.

-The so-called 10-year scoring back loads "benefits," but front loads taxes, so the true spending is not counted, it being in further out years beyond the initial ten years.

-The usual, mythical cuts in current Medicare "waste and fraud" are used to pay for hundreds of billions of dollars of the bill's expenses. Since Congress has never seen fit to actually reduce any of this "waste and fraud," it is simply not credible that, now, it will vanish, to fund this bill.

-This bill is only a Senate markup. It is calculated to simply make it out of the Senate and into conference with the House. The true, final bill will bear little resemblance to this one, so the CBO estimate won't really be relevant next month.

But even with all these financial considerations, this bill is wrong on some basics.

As with all the Democratic health care proposals, they ignore the easy, low-cost, non-system-wrecking options which include: provide tax preferenced health care premium treatment to all; allow interstate marketing of health insurance; institute tort reform to lower costs of defensive medicine; remove mandates, so people can buy precisely the insurance they desire.

None of these appear anywhere in Baucus' useless bill. Instead, it's a major grab for federal power to displace personal choice and liberty.

Baucus and the other Senate Democrats, and any Republican who votes for this pig, should be voted out of office.

Karl Rove Vs. Alan Colmes Last Week On Fox News

Alan Colmes is the resident liberal on Fox News, co-heading the Hannity & Colmes evening program. As such, he's the token liberal for the network. Too bad they chose such an unintelligent, slow man for that role.

Last week, during one of his many appearances on that program, Karl Rove tangled with Colmes over the question of how McCain's stands on various issues, if not in line with Bush's, means Bush has been 'wrong.'

The format of the H&C program is that liberal guests are interviewed first by conservative anchor Sean Hannity, while conservative guests get tossed inane questions by liberal Colmes. Thus, Rove always talks with Colmes first.

These days, Karl Rove is on Bill O'Reilly's and H&C's programs about three times per week, if not nightly. The episode which caught my attention recently involved Colmes attempting to grill Rove on some topic- foreign policy, financial regulation, economics- take your pick, with which John McCain disagrees with some part of the current administration's past or present actions.

Colmes' disingenuous tactic, which he evidently thinks is deep, clever and effective, is to pose a conundrum to Rove along these lines,

'President Bush said (or did) X during his administration. That didn't work. Does John McCain agree with Bush, which means he also is wrong? Or does he disagree, meaning he's breaking ranks and admits Bush was wrong. Which is it?'

Of course, Colmes knows Rove was a major participant in the Bush administration for years, so these sorts of questions are also directly baiting Rove to argue over issues with which he may have been directly involved.

What is so sad is that Rove easily sidesteps Colmes with the always-correct, and true, reply,

'Alan, it's not that simple. President Bush had to deal with the world as it was at the time solutions were required over the past eight years. John McCain will have to deal with the world as it is today and for the next four years. Thus, he may have different views on how to solve problems today which we approached differently during the Bush administration.'

It's a fair and effective response. Moreover, Rove delivers it with a smile, almost winking to the audience that he isn't going to take advantage of the mental midget who asked the leading, ill-constructed question.

Unfortunately, Colmes does this with every Republican whose path he crosses, hoping vainly to lure somebody into his simplistic world in which, despite shifting sands of time and power, all prior decisions must be either sustained, or attacked, as right or wrong now, by any member of the Republican party.

Hopefully, at some point in the future, Fox will recruit a smarter man than Alan Colmes to fence with Hannity and the program's conservative guests.