PrairiePundit

Charlie Cook: Bad Decisions Came Back to Haunt Democrats in Midterms Americans reeling from the economy still resent the policy choices that President Obama and congressional Democrats made early on. The Democrats wasted their political capitol on Obamacare and cap and trade, and they are still paying the price.

Washington Times: President Obama’s former defense secretary says in a new book that both the president and then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton acknowledged in front of him that they opposed the Iraq surge because of presidential politics. Robert Gates, who led the Pentagon for President George W. Bush and then stayed on for the first 2 1/2 years of Mr. Obama’s tenure, also said Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was regularly wrong about his views on international affairs. SEE ALSO: Ex-Defense Secretary rips Obama in memoir: He ‘doesn’t believe in his own strategy’ In excerpts posted on The Wall Street Journal’s website, Mr. Gates bristled at much of Washington, including having to submit to pointed questioning from members of Congress, managing the internal turf conflicts at the Pentagon and trying to avoid the White House’s desire to micromanage everything. And the former secretary said that Mr. Obama himself seemed to dislike having to deal with uniformed officers. “Bu...

Yahoo:   The Washington Examiner recently reported on an academic study on the 2008 presidential election entitled "The Palin Effect" that examined the effect of then Gov. Palin on the John McCain campaign. Its conclusions run counter to conventional wisdom. The cliché, advanced by the media and the now infamous HBO TV show "Game Change," was that Palin helped to cost McCain the election because of her "controversial" personality. In fact, typical of most vice presidential running mates, Palin had a marginal but largely positive effect on McCain's standing with the voters. She certainly did not drive away independents and moderates, who along with Republicans approved and liked her. This analysis pretty much tracks with the effect of a vice presidential running mate has for most presidential elections. Opponents of an opposing ticket occasionally make the serious mistake of focusing on the person on the bottom of the ticket. Voters make decisio...

Washington Times: President Obama received more than $110,000 from IRS employees for his 2008 and 2012 campaigns, topping all rival candidates, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis.  Federal Election Commission records show that IRS employees gave Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney about $25,000 — less than half the amount received by Mr. Obama. The GOP’s 2008 presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, collected only about $6,000 from IRS employees, the center found. ... It was their harassment of conservatives that was far more helpful to Obama's voter suppression efforts.  In addition several critics of the administration were targeted for audits which suggest the rot goes well beyond the tax exempt status area.

Washington Post: The 2012 election is shaping up to be more polarized along racial lines than any presidential contest since 1988, with President Obama experiencing a steep drop in support among white voters from four years ago. At this stage in 2008, Obama trailed Republican John McCain by seven percentage points among white voters. Even in victory, Obama ended up losing white voters by 12 percentage points, according to that year’s exit poll. But now, Obama has a deficit of 23 percentage points, trailing Republican Mitt Romney 60 percent to 37 percent among whites, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News national tracking poll . That presents a significant hurdle for the president — and suggests that he will need to achieve even larger margins of victory among women and minorities, two important parts of the Democratic base, to win reelection. Overall, Romney has edged ahead in the contest, garnering 50 percent of likely voters for the first time in the campaign, according...

Gallop: ...   In order to compare Obama's support today with 2008, the data in the graph below for both 2008 and 2012 are re-percentaged on the basis of support for the Democratic and Republican candidates only, excluding "no opinion" responses and support for minor third-party candidates. The 2008 results reflect an additional adjustment to align Gallup's final likely voter result with the election outcome. ... There is no good news for Obama in these numbers.  Eveny where he is still ahad in a group, he id down significantly from 2008.  The -22 in the South really pops out at you since he was nearly even in that part of the country four years ago.  Now that the fund raising season is over, I guess we want be seeing him in Texas.

Power Line: The  Daily Caller  has obtained and posted video (video below) of a 2007 speech by Barack Obama in Hampton, Virginia. Speaking to an audience of black ministers, and using a black dialect only marginally more authentic than Joe Biden’s, Obama claims that the U.S. government shortchanged Hurricane Katrina victims because of racism. As the Daily Caller says, “the effect is closer to an Al Sharpton rally than a conventional campaign event.” Obama’s factual claims about alleged shortchanging of Hurricane Katrina are false. Obama states: Down in New Orleans, where they still have not rebuilt twenty months later, there’s a law, federal law — when you get reconstruction money from the federal government — called the Stafford Act. And basically it says, when you get federal money, you gotta give a ten percent match. The local government’s gotta come up with ten percent. Every ten dollars the federal government comes up with, local government’s gotta give a dollar. ...

Erick Erickson: I think this Tucker Carlson exclusive is damning. But it is damning not of Barack Obama. Conservatives already knew who he really was and is. The video is damning of the media. The media created the post-racial narrative of Barack Obama. The media invested its energies in it. Sure, they got an assist from the Obama campaign, but it was the media. Tonight, Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller released the video of Barack Obama and the media yawned that it was old news. Media outlets threw up links of where they had covered the speech in 2007. Yawn. In 2007, while running for President of the United States, Barack Obama told a black audience, in full pander dialect, that the then white President and his government did not view black residents of New Orleans as part of the “American family.”  ... On this tape, Barack Obama is just a typical race baiting politician. He’s playing on the fears of a crowd and picking racial scabs that he and so many other Democr...

It was a fantasy land all along.

Obama has changed his tune in the last four years and now sees merit in negative ads.  That is what happens when you are running behind and your o=policies have not worked.

Breitbart: REWARD: $50,000 FOR 'KHALIDI TAPE' OF OBAMA AT ANTI-ISRAEL PARTY The tape has been in the possession of the LA Times for about four years, but they are unwilling to let the rest of the world know what was said at the gathering that included Obama.

The Hill: A top campaign official who worked for Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) 2008 presidential bid and helped select his running mate said Sunday that Mitt Romney's tax returns "do not look anything like the average American," but held nothing which prevented him from being on the ticket. Steve Schmidt, McCain's former campaign strategist, who viewed Romney’s tax returns when the presumptive nominee was being vetted for the vice presidential slot in the last cycle said Romney was an “extremely wealthy man.” He said Romney had turned over 23-years’ worth of tax returns to the McCain campaign to vet that were extremely complex. But Schmidt also said there was nothing in the documents that would have precluded McCain from picking Romney. "Mitt Romney went through this process and what I can tell you is that he's a person of decency with the highest ethical character and background," Schmidt said. "There was nothing that was disquali...

Power Line: CAN A CANDIDATE LIE HIS WAY TO THE PRESIDENCY? Then one of his themes was "Yes we can."  At the link you can see a great Ramirez cartoon showing Obama with his pants on fire.

Stanley Kurtz: On the evening of January 11, 1996, while Mitt Romney was in the final years of his run as the head of  Bain Capital , Barack Obama formally joined the New Party, which was deeply hostile to the mainstream of the Democratic party and even to American capitalism. In 2008, candidate Obama deceived the American public about his potentially damaging tie to this third party. The issue remains as fresh as today’s headlines, as Romney argues that Obama is trying to move the United States toward European-style social democracy, which was precisely the New Party’s goal.  In late October 2008, when I wrote here at National Review Online that Obama had been a member of the New Party, his campaign sharply denied it, calling my claim a “ crackpot smear .” Fight the Smears, an official Obama-campaign website, staunchly maintained that “Barack has been a member of only one political party, the Democratic Party.” I rebutted this, but the debate was never taken up by the m...

Jack Kelly: Barack Obama is the smartest man with the highest IQ ever to be elected to the presidency, historian Michael Beschloss told radio talk show host Don Imus in November of 2008. "So what is his IQ?" Mr. Imus asked. Mr. Beschloss didn't know. He was just assuming.   Many shared that assumption. Adjectives frequently applied to Mr. Obama are "smart" (278 million hits on Google), "intelligent" (62 million) and "brilliant" (24 million).   There is little evidence to support it. Mr. Obama went to Harvard, but so did George W. Bush, who some liberals consider dumber than dirt. The president won't release his transcripts, so we can't judge by his grades. Mr. Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review, but when he was selected, popularity mattered more than scholarship.   Mr. Obama joined an undistinguished law firm, where he tried no cases. So no help there. Many cite the president's oratorical skills, but he oft...

Ed Klein talks with Bill Whittle in an interesting interview about his book.  I think the material he uncovered about Obama, and the people around him is a must see video.  For some reason the mainstream media is desperately trying to ignore his book, even though Klein is no right winger.  It just happens that conservatives are the most interested in what his book reveals.

The Hill: Obama raised most from private equity, hedge funds in 2008 That was before he became an anti capitalist anti profit President.

While no one went to jail, Obama's actions suggest these guys did not get their money's worth.

Doug Ross looks at the several iterations of the bio showing it being updated for significant events, but the birthplace part was not changed until Obama announced he was running for President.

Byron York: Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose "God damn America" sermon set off a firestorm during the 2008 campaign, agreed not to publish an account of the episode until after President Obama's 2012 re-election campaign, according to an interview Wright conducted with the author of a new book on Obama.  Wright said he made the decision at the urging of a friend and mentor, the prominent University of Chicago emeritus professor Martin Marty. In the interview, Wright told Ed Klein, author of  The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House , that he keeps a cardboard box of documents and notes detailing his experiences beginning in March 2008, when the controversy over his sermons began.  "It's a painful box to look at," Wright said. "Marty had me over to his home for dinner in January [2010]," Wright told Klein. "He said to me, 'Are you keeping notes on what's happened to you in this Obama campaign?'  I said, 'Yes, sir, I am....