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October 8, 2012 · By Star Parker · 0 Comments
Can there be political bubbles like financial bubbles?
Financial bubbles, inflated by hopes and dreams, burst when reality negates any possibility that those hopes and dreams will be realized. At that point, sky-high stock or bond or real estate prices come crashing down to earth.
Can the same thing happen in politics? Can a skilled politician, who has become popular with soaring rhetoric and promises, deflate when it starts becoming clear that he is not going to deliver?
Of course, I am thinking about our president.
Mitt Romney demonstrated in the first presidential debate that the considerable gap between President Barack Obama’s rhetoric and his performance makes him a vulnerable candidate.
Yet, the president’s bubble is far from bursting.
Romney, in the debate, was aggressive but deferential toward Obama. He was deferential because, despite the poor state of the country after almost four years of the Obama administration, Barack Obama is still a popular president.
Recent polling shows his approval remains around 50 percent. At similar stages in the presidencies of the last two presidents voted out after one term, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, their popularity ratings were in the 30s.
What accounts for Barack Obama’s Teflon? How is it that, after almost four years of terrible economic results — high unemployment, sluggish growth, huge deficits and mounting national debt — that Obama’s persona is not more tarnished?
Shouldn’t today’s economic facts on the ground be sufficient to puncture the Obama bubble?
One part of the answer to this puzzle is the changing demographics of the country.
The United States today is a nation that is much less white, much less married and less traditional than it once was. These are growing trends and each reflects in at least some large part constituencies with values supportive of Obama’s worldview — activist government and moral relativism.
What was once the exception to the rule in America — not being white, not being married, not having traditional views on family, sex and abortion — is now becoming the rule. And these constituencies are becoming sufficiently large to elect a president.
National Journal released a poll right before the debate showing Obama and Romney dead even nationwide — 47 percent each — among likely voters.
The poll shows Obama’s white support at just 38 percent.
Obama was elected in 2008 with 43 percent of the white vote. It appears that he could be re-elected with even less.
In Gallup’s polling of last week, Obama’s approval among white voters stood at 39 percent.
He gets 38 percent approval among those who attend church weekly compared to 55 percent among those who attend church seldom or never.
And his approval among married voters is 40 percent compared to 57 percent among those not married.
According to data compiled by the Tax Foundation, the large majority of those now filing tax returns in the United States are single. In 1960, 65 percent of all tax filers were married and 35 percent single. In 2010, it was reversed — 61 percent of filers were single and 39 percent married.
When Obama pushes for taxing the rich, he’s not just pitting those with the highest incomes against everyone else. He’s pitting married against singles. Eight of 10 tax filers in the top 20 percent of earners are married. The majority of filers at the middle income and below are single.
It’s really a cultural divide, one you can be sure that Obama is very aware of, that is keeping his bubble inflated.
The fact that Obama’s support is still this strong despite his terrible record sends a clear warning to those looking for a new birth of American freedom.
Romney and Rep Paul Ryan should consider taking these constituencies on directly — blacks, Hispanics, singles — and explaining why America’s future hinges on shutting down the government plantation.
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Ryan T. Anderson has a great series of articles about marriage at Ricochet, released in conjunction with his new book, co-authored with Sherif Girgis and Robert P. George, What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense. Anderson discusses why marriage matters, what marriage is, and why government has a role in protecting marriage from being undermined or counterfeited.
Last Friday, an 84-year-old President Reagan appointee, North Carolina Federal Judge James C. Fox, issued a ruling declaring the state’s “Choose Life” license plates to be an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, giving the ACLU its desired victory against the message, “Please don’t choose to kill your pre-born baby.”
Phillips Brooks was born DECEMBER 13, 1835. The bishop of the Episcopal Church in Massachusetts, Phillips Brooks took a trip to the Holy Land in 1865, and wrote home: "After an early dinner, we took our horses and rode to Bethlehem...Before dark, we rode out of town to the field where they say the shepherds saw the star. It is a fenced piece of ground with a cave in it (all the Holy Places are caves here), in which, strangely enough, they put the shepherds..."
In 2013, $2.2 trillion of the $3.65 trillion budget will be on so-called “mandatory” spending — a Washingtonian euphemism for automatic spending. It just operates on autopilot, and even increases of its own accord as a function of the rising population that qualifies for benefits and built-in cost-of-living adjustments. But is such a design constitutional?
Taxpayers are footing the bill for thirty five union officials at the U.S. Department of Transportation, which spent $4.8 million dollars in union salaries in 2012, paying an average salary of $138,175 per year according to a report released by Americans for Limited Government today.
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"We don't intend to turn the Republican Party over to the traitors in the battle just ended. We will have no more of those candidates who are pledged to the same goals as our opposition and who seek our support. Turning the party over to the so-called moderates wouldn't make any sense at all." - Ronald Reagan, Nov. 10, 1964 |
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