By
Rabbi Steven Pruzansky
Posted on November 7, 2012
The most charitable way of explaining the election
results of 2012 is that Americans voted for the status quo –
for the incumbent President and for a divided
Congress. They must enjoy gridlock, partisanship, incompetence,
economic stagnation and avoidance of responsibility. And fewer
people voted. As I write, with almost all the votes counted,
President Obama has won fewer votes than John McCain won in 2008,
and more than ten million off his own 2008 total.
But as we awake from the nightmare, it is important to
eschew the facile explanations for the Romney defeat that will
prevail among the chattering classes. Romney did not lose because
of the effects of Hurricane Sandy that devastated this area,
nor did he lose because he ran a poor campaign, nor did he
lose because the Republicans could have chosen better
candidates, nor did he lose because Obama benefited from a
slight uptick in the economy due to the business cycle.
Romney lost because he didn’t get enough votes to
win.
That might seem obvious, but not for the obvious reasons.
Romney lost because the
conservative virtues – the traditional American virtues – of
liberty, hard work, free enterprise, private initiative and
aspirations to moral greatness – no longer inspire or animate a
majority of the electorate. The notion of the “Reagan
Democrat” is one cliché that should be permanently
retired.
Ronald Reagan himself could not win an election in
today’s America.
The simplest reason why Romney lost was because it is impossible to
compete against free stuff. Every businessman knows this;
that is why the “loss leader” or the giveaway is such a powerful
marketing tool. Obama’s America is one in which free stuff is given
away: the adults among the 47,000,000 on food stamps
clearly recognized for whom they should vote, and so they did, by
the tens of millions; those who – courtesy of Obama – receive
two full years of unemployment
benefits (which, of course, both disincentivizes looking for
work and also motivates people to work off the books while
collecting their windfall) surely know for whom to vote; so too
those who anticipate “free” health care, who
expect the government to pay their mortgages, who look
for the government to give them jobs. The lure of free
stuff is irresistible.
Imagine two restaurants side by side. One sells its
customers fine cuisine at a reasonable price, and the other offers a
free buffet, all-you-can-eat as long as supplies last. Few –
including me – could resist the attraction of the free food. Now
imagine that the second restaurant stays in business because the
first restaurant is forced to provide it with the food for the free
buffet, and we have the current economy, until, at least, the first
restaurant decides to go out of business. (Then, the government
takes over the provision of free food to its patrons.)
The defining moment of the whole campaign was the
revelation (by the amoral Obama team) of the secretly-recorded
video in which Romney acknowledged the difficulty of winning an
election in which “47% of the people” start off against him because
they pay no taxes and just receive money – “free stuff” – from the
government. Almost half of the
population has no skin in the game – they don’t care about high
taxes, promoting business, or creating jobs, nor do they care that
the money for their free stuff is being borrowed from their children
and from the Chinese. They just want the free stuff that
comes their way at someone else’s expense. In the end, that 47%
leaves very little margin for error for any Republican, and does not
bode well for the future.
It is impossible to imagine a conservative candidate
winning against such overwhelming odds. People do vote their
pocketbooks. In essence, the people vote for a Congress who will not
raise their taxes, and for a President who will give them free
stuff, never mind who has to pay for it.
That engenders the second reason why Romney lost:
the inescapable conclusion that the electorate is dumb –
ignorant, and uninformed. Indeed, it does not pay to be an
informed voter, because most other voters – the clear majority – are
unintelligent and easily swayed by emotion and raw populism. That is
the indelicate way of saying that too many people vote with their
hearts and not their heads. That is why Obama did not have to
produce a second term agenda, or even defend his first-term
record. He needed only to portray Mitt Romney as a rapacious
capitalist who throws elderly women over a cliff, when he is not
just snatching away their cancer medication, while starving the poor
and cutting taxes for the rich. Obama could get away with saying
that “Romney wants the rich to play by a different set of rules” –
without ever defining what those different rules were; with saying
that the “rich should pay their fair share” – without ever defining
what a “fair share” is; with saying that Romney wants the poor,
elderly and sick to “fend for themselves” – without even
acknowledging that all these government programs are going bankrupt,
their current insolvency only papered over by deficit spending.
Obama could get away with it because he knew he was talking to
dunces waving signs and squealing at any sight of him.
During his 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out
to Adlai Stevenson: “Senator, you have the vote of every thinking
person!” Stevenson called back: “That’s not enough, madam, we need a
majority!” Truer words were never spoken.
Similarly, Obama (or his surrogates) could hint to blacks
that a Romney victory would lead them back into chains and proclaim
to women that their abortions and birth control would be taken away.
He could appeal to Hispanics that Romney would have them all
arrested and shipped to Mexico (even if they came from Cuba or
Honduras), and unabashedly state that he will not enforce the
current immigration laws. He could espouse the furtherance
of the incestuous relationship between governments and unions – in
which politicians ply the unions with public money, in exchange for
which the unions provide the politicians with votes, in
exchange for which the politicians provide more money and the unions
provide more votes, etc., even though the money is gone. He could do
and say all these things because he knew his voters were
dolts.
One might reasonably object that not every Obama
supporter could be unintelligent. But they must then rationally
explain how the Obama agenda can be paid for, aside from racking up
multi-trillion dollar deficits. “Taxing the rich” does not yield
even 10% of what is required – so what is the answer, i.e., an
intelligent answer?
Obama also knows that the electorate has changed – that
whites will soon be a minority in America (they’re already a
minority in California) and that the new immigrants to the US are
primarily from the Third World and do not share the traditional
American values that attracted immigrants in the 19th and
20th centuries. It is a different world, and a different
America. Obama is part of that different America, knows it, and
knows how to tap into it. That is why he won.
Obama also proved again that negative advertising works,
invective sells, and harsh personal attacks succeed. That Romney
never engaged in such diatribes points to his essential goodness as
a person; his “negative ads” were simple facts, never personal abuse
– facts about high unemployment, lower take-home pay, a loss of
American power and prestige abroad, a lack of leadership, etc. As a
politician, though, Romney failed because he did not embrace the
devil’s bargain of making unsustainable promises, and by talking as
the adult and not the adolescent. Obama has spent the last six years
campaigning; even his governance has been focused on payoffs to his
favored interest groups. The permanent campaign also won again, to
the detriment of American life.
It turned out that it was not possible for Romney and
Ryan – people of substance, depth and ideas – to compete with the
shallow populism and platitudes of their opponents. Obama mastered the politics of envy – of class
warfare – never reaching out to Americans as such but to
individual groups, and cobbling together a winning majority from
these minority groups. Conservative ideas failed to take root and
states that seemed winnable, and amenable to traditional American
values, have simply disappeared from the map. If an Obama could not
be defeated – with his record and his vision of America, in which
free stuff seduces voters – it is hard to envision any change in the
future. The road to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to a
European-socialist economy – those very economies that are
collapsing today in Europe – is paved.
A second cliché that should be retired is that America is
a center-right country. It clearly is not. It
is a divided country with peculiar voting patterns, and
an appetite for free stuff. Studies will invariably show that
Republicans in Congress received more total votes than Democrats in
Congress, but that means little. The House of Representatives is not
truly representative of the country. That people would vote for a
Republican Congressmen or Senator and then Obama for President would
tend to reinforce point two above: the empty-headedness of the
electorate. Americans revile Congress but love their individual
Congressmen. Go figure.
The mass media’s complicity in Obama’s re-election cannot
be denied. One example suffices. In 2004, CBS News forged a letter in
order to imply that President Bush did not fulfill his Air National
Guard service during the Vietnam War, all to impugn Bush and impair
his re-election prospects. In 2012, President Obama insisted –
famously – during the second debate that he had stated all along
that the Arab attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi was “terror” (a
lie that Romney fumbled and failed to exploit). Yet, CBS News sat on
a tape of an interview with Obama in which Obama specifically
avoided and rejected the claim of terrorism – on the day after the
attack – clinging to the canard about the video. (This snippet of a “60 Minutes” interview was not
revealed - until two days ago!) In effect, CBS News fabricated evidence in order to
harm a Republican president, and suppressed evidence in order to
help a Democratic president. Simply shameful, as was the media’s
disregard of any scandal or story that could have jeopardized the
Obama re-election.
One of the more irritating aspects of this campaign was
its limited focus, odd in light of the billions of dollars spent.
Only a few states were contested, a strategy that Romney adopted,
and that clearly failed. The Democrat begins any race with a
substantial advantage. The liberal states – like the bankrupt
California and Illinois – and other states with large concentrations
of minority voters as well as an extensive welfare apparatus, like
New York, New Jersey and others – give any Democratic candidate an
almost insurmountable edge in electoral votes. In New Jersey,
for example, it literally does not pay for a conservative to vote.
It is not worth the fuel expended driving to the polls. As
some economists have pointed generally, and it resonates here even
more, the odds are greater that a voter will be killed in a traffic
accident on his way to the polls than that his vote will make a
difference in the election. It is an irrational act. That most
states are uncompetitive means that people are not amenable to new
ideas, or new thinking, or even having an open mind. If that does
not change, and it is hard to see how it can change, then the die is
cast. America is not what it was, and will never be
again.
For Jews, mostly assimilated anyway and staunch
Democrats, the results demonstrate again that liberalism is their
Torah. Almost 70% voted for a president widely perceived by
Israelis and most committed Jews as hostile to Israel. They
voted to secure Obama’s future at America’s expense and at Israel’s
expense – in effect, preferring Obama to Netanyahu by a wide margin.
A dangerous time is ahead. Under present circumstances, it is
inconceivable that the US will take any aggressive action against
Iran and will more likely thwart any Israeli initiative. That Obama’s top aide Valerie Jarrett
(i.e., Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett) spent last week in
Teheran is not a good sign. The US will preach the
importance of negotiations up until the production of the first
Iranian nuclear weapon – and then state that the world must learn to
live with this new reality. As
Obama has committed himself to abolishing America’s nuclear arsenal,
it is more likely that that unfortunate circumstance will occur than
that he will succeed in obstructing Iran’s plans.
Obama’s victory could weaken Netanyahu’s re-election
prospects, because Israelis live with an unreasonable – and somewhat
pathetic – fear of American opinion and realize that Obama despises
Netanyahu. A Likud defeat – or a diminution of its margin of victory
– is more probable now than yesterday. That would not be the worst
thing. Netanyahu, in fact, has never distinguished himself by having
a strong political or moral backbone, and would be the first to cave
to the American pressure to surrender more territory to the enemy
and acquiesce to a second (or third, if you count Jordan)
Palestinian state. A new US Secretary of State named John Kerry, for
example would not augur well. Netanyahu remains the best of
markedly poor alternatives. Thus, the likeliest outcome of the
upcoming Israeli elections is a center-left government that will
force itself to make more concessions and weaken Israel – an Oslo
III.
. The most powerful empires in history all crumbled –
from the Greeks and the Romans to the British and the Soviets. None
of the collapses were easily foreseen, and yet they were predictable
in retrospect.
The American empire began to decline in 2007, and the
deterioration has been exacerbated in the last five
years. This election only hastens that decline. Society is permeated with sloth, greed,
envy and materialistic excess. It has lost its moorings and its
moral foundations. The takers outnumber the givers, and
that will only increase in years to come. Across the world, America
under Bush was feared but not respected. Under Obama, America
is neither feared nor respected. Radical Islam has had a
banner four years under Obama, and its prospects for future growth
look excellent. The “Occupy” riots across this country in the
last two years were mere dress rehearsals for what lies ahead –
years of unrest sparked by the increasing discontent of the
unsuccessful who want to seize the fruits and the bounty of the
successful, and do not appreciate the slow pace of
redistribution.
