I have pasted some interesting election commentary below. Let’s start with Rush Limbaugh, who explained the election in just 8 words:
“In a Nation of children, Santa Claus wins.”
“Do you realize that Barack Obama’s message is that the people who are making it possible for him to be Santa Claus in this country aren’t working hard enough so he’s going to tax them more?”
“Say what you want, folks: Mitt Romney did offer a vision of greatness, a vision of traditional America, a vision of an American recovery and return to prominence.” But it was rejected.
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Michael Walsh at NRO:
First, the Republicans should never again agree to any debate moderated by any member of the MSM, most especially including former Democratic apparatchiks like Stephanopoulos. What used to be the American journalistic establishment — and I spent 25 years in it — is now out and proud and fully committed to the Obama Way. For them, this was the moment they’d been waiting for since the 1960s, their chance to (as they see it) change the course of American history, to be participants instead of just observers and stenographers, and if they had to first compromise, and then abandon, their stated principles of objectivity and neutrality, so what? The game was worth the candle. They will go to their graves feeling good about themselves.
…[Republicans] can’t win without a media operation that can neutralize the 15 to 20 points that MSM advocacy regularly contributes to the Democrats. The only way to beat the media is to replace the media — and if you don’t think the media won this election for Obama, you’re delusional.
Finally, as for Romney, whose political career is now over, I have mixed feelings. Like John McCain, he never really took the fight to Obama and, more important, Obamaism; he spectacularly refused to engage the Democrats on an ideological level, to explain why conservative principles are better than the chimera of “progressivism,” ….And with the intelligence community leaking damaging details about Benghazi on a near-daily basis, he inexplicably took the entire issue off the table. He’s a good man, but a bad candidate, albeit the “most electable” of an unelectable lot.
In the end, though, Mitt lost because he and his team were incapable of grasping one simple, terrible fact: Far too many Americans today don’t want a job, they want — again, to use Obama’s term — revenge.
They just got it.
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Veronique de Rugy at NRO:
The status quo won last night. I am sure that both sides will spend the next few months trying to understand what happened and what lessons they should draw from yesterday’s election results, and I suspect that there is a long list of valid reasons that explains why Governor Romney lost.
However, I would like to suggest that one of these reasons may be that voters’ enthusiasm for the Republican party has faded as the party embraced big-government policies. In fact, in spite of what Republicans lawmakers say about or think of themselves, they have not been the party of small government for long time, and people know it. Obviously politicians try to come across as wanting a a smaller government than Democrats, but that’s not enough. Actions matter too, and on that front, Republicans have shown that they aren’t really willing to cut spending or to shrink the size of government. In recent months alone, Republicans voted for a huge new farm bill, voted against getting rid of Solyndra-type loan-guarantee programs, voted to reauthorize the Ex-Im Bank, approved sugar tariffs, and more.
I think that it’s also unfortunate that on the issues of spending and the size of government, this campaign was fought only in the middle; there were talks of saving Medicare, not touching Social Security, and promises to increase defense spending while protecting federal education spending.
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Ann Coulter:
No one can be blamed for the hurricane that took the news off the election, abruptly halting Romney’s momentum, but Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock can be blamed on two very specific people: Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock.
The last two weeks of the campaign were consumed with discussions of women’s “reproductive rights,” not because of anything Romney did, but because these two idiots decided to come out against abortion in the case of rape and incest.
After all the hard work intelligent pro-lifers have done in changing the public’s mind about a subject the public would rather not think about at all, these purist grandstanders came along and announced insane positions with no practical purpose whatsoever, other than showing off.
While pro-lifers in the trenches have been pushing the abortion positions where 90 percent of the country agrees with us — such as bans on partial birth abortion, and parental and spousal notification laws — Akin and Mourdock decided to leap straight to the other end of the spectrum and argue for abortion positions that less than 1 percent of the nation agrees with.
In order to be pro-life badasses, they gave up two easy-win Republican Senate seats.
No law is ever going to require a woman to bear the child of her rapist. Yes, it’s every bit as much a life as an unborn child that is not the product of rape. But sentient human beings are capable of drawing gradations along a line.
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Andrew McCarthy on “Immigration and Delusion”:
Could you find a more sharp disagreement between genuinely smart folk than in the competing description of Hispanic immigrants offered by Heather Mac Donald and the editors of the Wall Street Journal? Here is the Journal this morning:
Immigrants should be a natural GOP constituency. Newcomers to the U.S.—legal or illegal—tend to be aspiring people who believe in the dignity of work and self-sufficiency, and they are cultural conservatives. They are not the 47%.
Here is Heather yesterday:
If Republicans want to change their stance on immigration, they should do so on the merits, not out of a belief that only immigration policy stands between them and a Republican Hispanic majority. It is not immigration policy that creates the strong bond between Hispanics and the Democratic party, but the core Democratic principles of a more generous safety net, strong government intervention in the economy, and progressive taxation. Hispanics will prove to be even more decisive in the victory of Governor Jerry Brown’s Proposition 30, which raised upper-income taxes and the sales tax, than in the Obama election.
Heather is clearly right. Anyone who has followed her work on this topic for years knows her sobering insights are based on extensive, on-the-ground research and careful analysis. The Journal, which often reflects the views of the Republican establishment, bases its immigration views on wishful thinking. And not just its immigration views. Today’s bromides about “aspiring people who believe in the dignity of work and self-sufficiency” are of a piece with the Journal’s similar soft-spot for the “Arab Spring” and Muslim outreach. These GOP fantasies are similarly based on the wishful thinking that Islamists are also “cultural conservatives” sure to forge freedom-embracing democracies when empowered in the Middle East and become model Americans when courted here — sure to assimilate seamlessly into our society rather than seek to change it fundamentally.
Falling in love with your own high-minded rhetoric is no substitute for clear-eyed examination that takes the world as it is, not as we would have it. In point of fact, Islamists, like many Hispanic political activists (think: La Raza), are statists. As I’ve detailed in The Grand Jihad and, more recently, Spring Fever, their thoroughgoing alliance with the American Left is ideologically based — it is not a product of insensitive messaging or “Islamophobia.” Islamists revile finance capitalism, favor redistributionist economic policies, and endorse nanny state regulatory suffocation as well as an ever-expanding welfare state. This is not because Leftists made inroads while conservatives idled. It is because — though this often seems unimaginable to the Journal — Islamists, like many Hispanic activists, are the vanguard of a different culture that they passionately believe is superior to the culture of individual liberty.
There is no single-issue quick-fix to the challenge of ushering them into the Republican coalition. Rather, there is a choice to be made: either convince them that they are wrong, meaning make the unapologetic case for liberty and limited government; or fundamentally change who you are, meaning accommodate their statism.
The fact that this choice is easy to identify does not mean the right alternative is easy to implement. Convincing skeptics of the long-neglected case for freedom is going to take a long time — you can’t cede your leading institutions to statists for decades and expect to turn things around over night. But the second alternative, the one that is so easy — and obviously for some, so tempting — is surrender and steep decline. Accommodation only works in a normal political order where both sides have the same core values but differ on how to validate them. It does not work when one side is looking to vanquish the other.