An interesting analysis

John O'Sullivan in the Spectator discusses Obama's narrow and rather bitter victory and muses about the future. Nothing specific but not as depressed and hopeless as some analyses.

Even I'm depressed

Usually I am angry or amused in a bitter sort of fashion or coldly sarcastic. But there is no way of getting past it: I am truly depressed and keep thinking about the terrible days of the seventies the repeat of which I had hoped never to see again.

Having written that paragraph about twelve hours ago I have had some time to think about things. I am a little less depressed but that may be a.) because I am sick of hysteria on both sides of the fence or b.) because, as an American Anglospherist friend said, I am 3,000 miles away from it. Mind you, he added, however bad things were  on his side of the Pond, he was not ready to swap them for the joys of the Coalition and the EU. Wise man.

All I can say in my own defence is that I remained doubtful about Romney's victory but was becoming mildly optimistic. No, he was not ideal but a good deal better than what is and stays in the White House. The final figures, together with the turn-out are still to come but the Electoral College vote is 303 to 206. Not a landslide but a comfortable victory for the man who has been in charge of some of the most disastrous policies of the last few years and his second in command, who habitually forgets where he is or who he is speaking to. The popular vote is close, something like 51 per cent to 49 per cent but, again, final figures will come. Obama got 9 million fewer votes than last time, which is a figure to bear in mind. Then again, it would appear that Romney got fewer votes than McCain did. We shall see.

What astonishes me is not that people voted for Obama - people vote different ways for different reasons -  but the hysterical joy being displayed by so many supporters and the equally hysterical cries of "Obama will fix it". You, ladies and gentlemen, have just re-elected the Administration that has presided over a completely dysfunctional and ever more debt-ridden economy with an ever lower rate of employment, a dysfunctional foreign policy that has resulted in the murder of an American ambassador, an ever more disunited country and you are hysterical with joy. Is that because so many Hollywood celebrities are happy?

On the other hand, I do not think America is or is about to become Communist or even Socialist. Big state cronyism is a bad thing, economically, socially and ethically but it is not Soviet Communism. Get a grip, people. Nor is it possible for a big, strong and basically rich country to be destroyed and annihilated by one bad Administration though it is very bad. No country gets annihilated just like that. Heck, even Belgium cannot destroy itself.

My prediction for what it is worth is that President Obama will do very little in the second term, partly because few president do anything much in the second term and partly because he just doesn't do much, which is a problem in itself, particularly in foreign affairs where things will go from bad to worse. To be fair to Obama, he promised nothing in his campaign and did not refer to Obamacare, still not in place and being challenged in various states or the porculus stimulus, which has proved to be a disaster. The economy is going to get worse, the entitlement mentality will grow until there will be no money to pay for it and the debt will continue to spiral.

Just for starters, here are a few items of news:

Boeing has announced large restructuring and lay-offs on the day after the election, having one assumes been asked to hold the news back. Suddenly, we are being reminded that the Treasury "expects the federal government to hit its legal debt limit before the end of this year--which means before the new Congress is seated--and that "extraordinary measures" will be needed before then to keep the government fully funded into the early part of 2013". Should be interesting. Then there is the usual flurry of falling stock and shares at the thought of a Democrat President and a Republican House but we shall know more from the pattern as it emerges in the next few days. Dow's immediate reaction was to plummet so, perhaps, it was a more serious worry. It didn't get any better though I am not sure we can blame the woes of European stock markets on the US election alone.

Meanwhile, serious conservatives, many of whom supported Romney with gritted teeth and because of the possibilities Paul Ryan presented are beginning to pick themselves up. Ryan, incidentally, is back in the House of Representatives.

First off, I received this e-mail from Jim Geraghty of the National Review (no, it is not a private e-mail but his daily update):

Looking back, we could justify 2008 to ourselves: the economic meltdown, fatigue of eight years of George W. Bush. The McCain campaign had a slew of problems, and the opposition promised America a chance to make history with the first African-American president. They had hope and change; we had an elderly vet who was never an economics-focused guy at a time when the economy was collapsing.

In 2010, we saw epic Republican gains in that smaller turnout traditional to a midterm election, and we persuaded ourselves -- I certainly persuaded myself -- that 2008 was a historical anomaly, a confluence of factors that created a perfect storm for Obama and the Democrats. Things would be set right.

In 2008, Obama had been elected on the promise of things to come. In 2012, he would be judged on his record.

The American people looked at that record and said, "Eh, looks pretty good, four more years of that."

After Fast and Furious. And Benghazi. And the stimulus. And Solyndra. And Obamacare.

All very true and inexplicable. Even less explicable is the fact that the opinion polls, which proved to be surprisingly accurate as to the  vote, said over and over again that the majority of people disliked Obama's policies, did not think that the country was going the right way and did not think they were better off than they had been four years previously. Then they went ahead and voted for the status quo: Democrats in the White House, a Republican House of Representatives and a Democrat Senate though that was due largely to a couple of idiots who talked utter rubbish about women, rape and abortion and should have been booted out immediately.

Ed Morissey spends a little time figuring it all out and coming to no conclusion. On the whole different parties in different parts of the political structure is no bad thing and I have no problems with legislative gridlock but President Obama who has shown dislike, ignorance and contempt for the US Constitution is rather given to Executive Orders and he may well proceed to have a few in the next couple of years, which is all he has at his disposal, realistically speaking. Those, as I was reminded by another knowledgeable American friend, can be easily revoked by a Republican President.

Stratfor's George Friedman thinks gridlock will be disastrous for foreign policy. Not as disastrous as ill-thought out intervention in Libya into which Obama was suckered by former President Sarkozy and the Boy-King.

Then there are all the various analyses of what went wrong, why it happened, and so on, and so on. I did not read all of them (there is a limit to my geekery, though readers of this blog must wonder some times) and I shall link to a few, only.

Ron Radosh is always worth reading, especially as he says much of what I thought of as well. He puts it better and goes into many other points. A good deal of interesting stuff in his analysis of the voting pattern but I don't think it was the sight of President Obama in a bomber jacket (copying Bush much?) that made people vote for him though that probably put an end to Governor Christie's presidential ambitions. The GOP does not forgive any more than any political party does.

Then there is the Latino or Hispanic vote that is becoming an issue. It seems that GWB got 41 per cent of the Hispanic vote, McCain 31 per cent and Romney 27 per cent. The movement is in the wrong direction and, given the demographic factor, that needs to be addressed. Radosh cites the Judis and Teixeira theory of the "emerging Democratic majority" that is really based on an alliance of the various minorities. This theory gets bandied about but is addressed comprehensively by Megan McArdle who makes the obvious point with some interesting details that nothing ever stays the same in politics and those alliances have a way of dissolving. The Republicans could think of addressing some of the individual groups' problems and encourage ambition in them.

Incidentally, while I don't think Romney was a particularly good candidate (though somewhat better than feared) I don't think he was "uniquely bad" and he was the best of a very weak field. His weakest point, I suspect, was that he was Governor of Massachussetts and a New Englander. They are not popular in the rest of the country as GWB, for one, understood very clearly and worked hard to reinvent himself as a Texan, which was despised by Europeans but remained fairly popular in his own country.

The point about the immense tax hike that is coming is probably accurate and will be a nasty shock to all who will wail in the time-honoured fashion of the electorate that this was not what they had voted for.

Another, less well argued piece on the Hispanic vote is by Heather MacDonald in the National Review and she links to her own longer article in the City Journal. I am not sure what she advocates the Republicans should do as it all seems a bit hopeless both politically for them and socially for the Hispanics. Her argument that Hispanic idea of family values is different from the Republican one is sound enough but the whole article  really argues that those family values have long ago broken down and when Hispanics say they think the government should be involved, they really mean that the government should take over where their own structures have collapsed.

Finally, we have an article on why the GOP has failed with American Indians, that is immigrants from the Indian Sub-Continent, despite politicians like Nikki Hailey and Bobby Jindal. Even more hopeless - unless the GOP ceases to be the GOP, according to this article, it will never attract the Indian vote. But, one might respond, if it ceases to be the GOP, it will not attract any other vote.

And there was plenty of other vote. The Republicans were not annihilated and did not lose as badly as some would have us believe. (That's quite apart from the problems President Obama has inherited from his predecessor, President Obama.)

Michelle Malkin gives twenty reasons why the election went better than some say and they have to do with Governors and other electoral matters in the states. In the US other things matter apart from the federal government.

In a slightly different vein, Dan Mitchell gives seven silver linings and three reasons to be unhappy.

And that's really it for the time being, except for a couple of articles. Brendan O'Neill comes up trumps in explaining that Obama's victory is that of an elite because there are now two elites around and Obama tapped into the second one that is the government, the media and academe. Of course, this is rarely mentioned by the media who prefer to present themselves as the opposition but it is true, nonentheless.

Let me end this blog with a link to a typically fighting posting by my friend Lexington Green on Chicago Boyz, entitled It Is NEVER Over. Nor is it.

Last few comments

I promise not to write about the American elections throughout Tuesday. No point, really, Over here we shall have no results before Wednesday, in any case, and if predictions are correct, we might carry on chewing our fingernails till well into Thursday or, God forbid, even after.

However, let me leave you with a few thoughts about the way news have been handled on this side of the Pond, which includes Britain and Europe. Der Spiegel is tying itself into knots, which is very pleasant to watch. No matter who wins, America will lose, they cry, as it has been destroyed by "total capitalism". One could say that even in its bleak hours, America is doing better than Europe that does not have "total capitalism" but I suspect Der Spiegel knows that.

American power had declined, they add in another article though why it should have done so under the great and wonderful President Obama is hard to tell. But, never fear, their coverage is even-handed. Why they even have an article about what Romney's foreign policy might be. Of course, it is really an interview with President Clinton's less than successful Secretary of State, Madeleine Allbright, but one can't have everything. Specifically, one can't have an interview with Condi Rice about Obama's existing foreign policy.

Interestingly enough, my friend Michel Gurfinkiel writes about exactly that, though with reference to the French media.

“Yesterday, we followed Barack Obama’s campaign,” a young woman [on RTL, one of France's main radio channels] said. “Today we turn to Mitt Romney’s campaign.” All right. Except that “following Romney’s campaign” amounted, incredibly, to an interview with a certain Dr. Gordon, who explained that most Americans were grateful to President Obama for having introduced Obamacare. Especially those women who otherwise would have been deprived of any access to birth control. Some journalist at RTL then explained that Romney would abolish Obamacare. And the report was over.

They don't even notice, he adds and neither does the public. (I may say the same thing about the British media and the British public who are astonished that anyone could be so mad, insane and evil as to support a challenger to Obama.) Gurfinkiel gives an interesting and accurate analysis for this ridiculous adoration of a highly incompetent incumbent:

Sympathy for Obama is rooted in the deepest layers of the French collective psyche, right and left. He is supposed to stand for a tame, less dominant, less assertive America; and France, like many other former great powers — from Russia to China, from the Hispanic realms to the Islamic Umma — is driven by resentment against Anglo-Saxon dominance at large, and American great power in particular. That was, after all, Charles de Gaulle’s core political legacy (much more than the need to tame Germany) and the not-so-secret rationale for his Faustian alliance with both communism (Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese) and Islam. In the 1960s, when de Gaulle actually presided over France, a sizable part of the French opinion understood that a powerful America had in fact helped France to be reborn, to remain free in the face of communism, and even to become a great power again (just like Germany or Japan). That current never materialized into a sustaining political force, however, and it gradually ebbed away.

He then explains what exactly motivates this French psyche, how journalists abide by it and why it has become so all-encompassing. Read the whole piece.

Finally, we come to our own BBC. Well, OK, not all our media is quite as bad as the BBC but this one really takes the biscuit. In all solemnity they published an article by the old-style Marxist Martin Jacques, erstwhile editor of Marxism Today and at present "a visiting senior research fellow at the London School of Economics, IDEAS, a centre for the study of international affairs, diplomacy and grand strategy. He is also a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and a fellow of the Transatlantic Academy, Washington DC". Oddly enough, the BBC does not see fit to mention this, especially not the position in Beijing.

His "point of view" is that China is more democratic than America but it is framed as a question, which is described even by John Rentoul (not someone on the right of the political spectrum) as being the best QTWTAIN he has come across for a long time.

It would appear that Mr Jacques has been giving a whole series of talks published on the BBC websites in which he has proved to his own and his masters' satisfaction that the Chinese government enjoys greater legitimacy than any Western elected one and there is greater satisfaction with its performance as described by people who are not allowed to criticize the party. (The last phrase is my own.)

I would expect nothing else from and old-time Marxist propagandist. Sadly, I probably expect nothing else from the BBC either.

No, Obama is not a shoe-in

Actually, I am even more optimistic though still cautious. It seems that Wayne Rooney has endorsed Obama. That ought to mean that Romney will walk it except for the sad truth that very few Americans will know who this person is. I note that my own team. QPR is playing at home this week-end. Could there be any mileage out of constructing a questionnaire and asking the players to tell me what they think about the Presidential election as well as whom they might endorse?

The Economist has endorsed Obama but that was to be expected. Really, have they ever endorsed a Republican?

What interested me is the fact that Der Spiegel has woken up to the fact that there might well be a President Romney as of the third week of January. They were not over-impressed by Obama's performance in the debates, especially the first one and have made the odd regretful noise about all that hope changing into something very different, but, somehow it obviously did not occur to them that it might lead to Romney winning.

Germans have long since made up their minds about Mitt Romney. Only 5 percent would give him their vote if they had one, they say.

The result of the most recent poll by Forsa is far from surprising. When America votes, the German heart traditionally beats for the Democratic candidate. To many, the Republicans are suspect: cocky, Christian-conservative, narrow-minded and often hawkish -- at least according to the widespread cliché. Some 92 percent of Germans, the poll found, would vote to return incumbent Barack Obama to the White House.

They are worried about Romney's foreign policy ideas, which, they say are opaque. Apparently, they are not worried about Obama's proven foreign policy failures.

A couple of pictures

This is still about the American Presidential campaign and some of the more ... ahem ... interesting aspects of it.

This graphic appeared on the Obama/Biden site and was removed after a certain amount of fuss but not before somebody thoughtfully took a screen shot.

And here is the response.

What I find odd is that women might find it possible to vote for the Democrats and for Obama in particular after that sort of political statement.

Things are hotting up

On the other side of the Pond the Republicans are celebrating the outcome of the first Presidential debate that left Obama (minus TOTUS) in tatters even according to his warmest supporters in the media (i.e. most of the media). There are far too many links to put up as the opinion seems to be unanimous.

The rest of the world, meanwhile, is ... well, not exactly celebrating the fact that four years of Obama's presidency have not produced a better and more peaceful or free situation. A war between Syria and Turkey is looming. Make that was looming and is now almost in full flow.

Aren't the media wonderful?

Kevin Myers has an excellent article in the Irish Independent that takes apart an interview with Robert Fisk. Mostly he takes apart Fisk himself but the interviewer, Pat Kenny gets it in the neck, too.

You could argue that taking Robert Fisk apart (or fisking as it is popularly known) is akin to shooting fish in a barrel but, for some incomprehensible reason, the man is still being taken seriously by large swathes of the media.

The whole article is worth reading as there are far too many goodies in it to quote but here is one that made me laugh out loud:

It was typical of the adolescent level of this self-loathing that Robert Fisk referred to Mitt Romney's recent address in Jerusalem, in which, said Fisk, the US republican candidate "made the extraordinary racist comment that the Israelis were ahead of the Palestinians, i.e, the Palestinians were an uncivilised people, presumably because they had brown eyes and weren't Christian".

Curiously enough I can think of a large number of Israelis who have brown eyes and are not Christian. (I can also think of some who are Christian and who are not subjected to the sort of horrors Palestinian Christians are, but let that pass.)

While we are on the subject of the media and its curious coverage of events, let us have a quick look at what is going on in the Presidential elections on the other side of the Pond where an extraordinary amount of attention has been paid to a tape of Romney speaking at a private fund-raising event and making some comments about people who live off the state probably not voting for him. To be fair, our media has been going dulalee over that story as well and ignoring various unappetizing matters to do with the sitting President.

Well, you know, it seems that the "unedited" tape has one or two minutes missing. Here is Legal Insurrection pursuing the story. An awful lot can be said in one or two minutes, as I know all too well, having been an interpreter at various times.

Circumstances remain unclear

Here is the Guardian article that brings the story of the American ambassador's murder in Libya up to date, in so far as it is possible. The circumstances, they rightly say, remain unclear.

One witness told the Guardian on Wednesday that a mob fired at least one rocket at the US consulate building in Benghazi and then stormed it, setting everything ablaze. "I was there about an hour ago. The place (US consulate) is totally destroyed, the whole building is on fire," said Mohammed El Kish, a former press officer with the National Transitional Council, which handed power to an elected parliament last month. He added: "They stole a lot of things."

Kish, who is from Benghazi, blamed the attack on hardline jihadists. He said locals in Benghazi were upset by the activities of Islamist groups and would revolt against them. He also said the US consulate was not well protected, unlike the fortified US embassy in the capital, Tripoli. "It wasn't that much heavily guarded. In Tripoli the embassy is heavily guarded."

Will they revolt against the Islamist groups? Perhaps. Let us hope, this time round we stay out it all.

President Obama's Statement is exactly what one would expect in the circumstances. It is hard to know what else he could have said. The big question is, what will he do now, bearing in mind that there is this pesky election coming up.

UPDATE: Hotair quotes CBS news which tells us the unsurprising fact that it is more than likely that the Libyan security forces indicated to the extremely well armed militants (of course, none of the groups were disarmed after Gaddafi's capture and murder) where they were evacuating the American ambassador and other staff.

Wanis al-Sharef, a Libyan Interior Ministry official in Benghazi, said the four Americans were killed when the angry mob, which gathered to protest a U.S.-made film that ridicules Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, fired guns and burned down the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

He said Stevens, 52, and other officials were moved to a second building, deemed safer, after the initial wave of protests at the consulate. According to al-Sharef, members of the Libyan security team seem to have indicated to the protesters the building to which the American officials had been relocated, and that building then came under attack.

More marines have been sent to the shores of Tripoli to protect American personnel. How many were there in the first place, one would like to know.

Even worse than we thought last night

I opened my e-mails and saw the following report from the Washington Times: 

Libyan officials say the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans have been killed in an attack on the U.S. consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi by protesters angry over a film that ridiculed Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.

The officials say Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed Tuesday night when he and a group of embassy employees went to the consulate to try to evacuate staff. The protesters were firing gunshots and rocket-propelled grenades.

All of the officials — three in all — hold senior security positions in Benghazi.

They are deputy interior minister for eastern Libya Wanis al-Sharaf; Benghazi security chief Abdel-Basit Haroun; and Benghazi city council and security official Ahmed Bousinia.

This is not good news for President Obama. He ought to think about President Carter and Iran.

News from around the world - 2

Meanwhile we also have news from the United States where 9/11 is a day of solemn memory and many remember what they and others were doing on that day. Candidates in the forthcoming election have pledged not to campaign on this day. To be quite precise, they seem to have pledged not to put up negative ads on the day but most people took it as a pledge not to campaign.

Well, they may have pledged but at least one broke that pledge. President Obama decided that the day was of no real importance and sent his best weapon, Bill Clinton, to campaign in Florida.

No negative ads, so that's OK. Well, not really negative. Or maybe a little negative but nothing serious.

However, this may well annoy a lot of people though not, it would appear, those who can see nothing wrong with their great hero.

It seems that both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama tweeted just once each yesterday. Romney's said:

On this most somber day, America is united under God in its quest for peace and freedom at home and across the world.

Unexciting but also unexceptionable and suitably solemn. President Obama's tweet (the only one on 9/11) was somewhat different:

The election is in 8 weeks. Sign up to volunteer: OFA.BO/s3tXFz

Well, tweeting is there to say what is on your mind without a second thought.

Another action President Obama thought essential to carry out on 9/11 was to release a special message to the Arab Forum

Obama offers thanks to the Emir of Qatar--showboating some rather halting Arabic skills in addressing "His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani"--and praising the inspiring democratic example of the Arab Spring, which happened to leave the absolute monarchy of Qatar untouched.

He also offers support for his envoys, including Attorney General Eric Holder, who is attending the Arab Forum conference as the chief U.S. representative. The Arab Forum's goal is to recover assets stolen by formerly autocratic regimes, including Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. (But not Qatar.)

Still, one has to be fair to President Obama. He may spend every waking moment on thinking about his campaign (and has done so since the day he was inaugurated) but he does not care whether he gets the Jewish vote, until now solidly Democrat, or not.

Having, in the past insulted Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel in a way one does not insult the leader of any foreign government, and certainly not His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, this time President Obama has simply refused to meet him, pleading some diary clash.

Well, I said this yesterday

The votes that will matter in the second round of the French presidential election will be those that Marine Le Pen gathered.

Leftist candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon told a post-vote rally that they must unite together on May 6 to beat the incumbent president, without mentioning Hollande by name. Socialist contender Hollande has already received the endorsement of Green candidate Eva Joly.

That could have been predicted and, indeed, was by all. Similarly, Bayrou's supporters will now move over to Sarkozy.

Given M. Hollande's promises to wreck the French economy it is not surprising that, according to Reuters, has worried investors. Undoubtedly, they are hoping that what, according to a reader of this blog who has been watching developments carefully, was an 8 per cent swing to left-wing parties in general, will, in a fortnight's time, turn into a victory for Sarko. Not that the economy under his guidance has been doing all that well and not that he had brought in any of the necessary reforms but, perhaps, if he does snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, he will have had a nasty fright.

I wonder ...

The news that Sarah Palin has decided not to run for the Republican Party's candidacy is not exactly a surprise though somewhat more so than Prime Minister Putin's decision to take on the mantle of presidency in Russia. (OK, that's a joke. I am not comparing the two and please don't send comments telling me that there is no difference between them.)

She is most definitely not retiring from politics but intends to continue her somewhat anomalous but perfectly understandable position of being the most outspoken promoter of small government, free trade and low taxation. So far so good. Undoubtedly many people will try to interpret her decision and the explanation she gave Mark Levin (she has learnt her lesson about unfriendly reporters).

Via Instapundit we come to an interesting article on American Thinker, which calls the decision the right one and the performance pitch-perfect

Last night, Sarah Palin's statement -- and her breaking news interview with Mark Levin -- stressed some extremely important ideas. As such, her not running might well be among the least important topics she touched on. Yes, I know that's the news that everybody was waiting for -- but what interested me most was what Palin said about her vision for America and how she said it. It was crafted very intentionally --and it was simply pitch-perfect.

Palin spoke of ideas and priorities. These were above and beyond what particular position she -- or anyone else -- might play in our arena of ideas. That she's still very much in the arena -- and planning on making a difference -- is obvious.

So, what have we here? That rare bird, a politician to whom future of country matters more than her own immediate career? A politician who is playing a deep and, so far, successful game? Either way, she is not the ditz-headed moron that the MSM and the left (but I repeat myself) like to portray but then we knew that.