WASHINGTON — This election is not turning out the way President
Barack Obama had expected. Perhaps that is why he has looked so
uncomfortable in his three debates with the suddenly debonair
Governor Mitt Romney. Possibly President Obama had expected
something more from the former governor of Massachusetts, the
former CEO of the 2002 Winter Olympics, the former head of Bain
Capital — and, incidentally, is not Bain Capital assuming the same
demonic role in this contest between Obama and Romney as
Halliburton industries once played in the campaigns of Bush-Cheney?
It is, I suppose, an asset that in all their years of adult life
neither Obama nor Joe Biden have ever suffered any exposure to the
dark doings of private-sector employment, none whatsoever. It is a
dispensation that has kept them pure, almost virginal.
The President in his high-minded innocence aspired to something
more in this presidential race, something higher. I think he wanted
to experience the clash and bang of Great Ideas in these debates.
First, he would propose his view of a healthy prosperous America
with budgets balanced and deficits receding. Then the challenger
would admit to his view of the world. Romney would manfully step
forward and envision the endless breadlines that his economic
policies would engender. There would be the Hoovervilles, the soup
kitchens, the scenes of little children, their noses running,
huddled waiting in Dickensian stupefaction for their parents to
return from the pollution-belching factories, perhaps with a loaf
of bread for their starving families, PERHAPS NOT. Meanwhile, zoom,
zoom, the millionaires and billionaires motor by in their Bentleys
and Rolls Royces, and Priuses.
Frankly the way that these debates have turned out has got to
leave the President feeling a little low. Why could not Romney
admit to his audience the other night that he has not a clue to
running foreign policy? Why does he not admit to having no idea as
to the name of the capital of Ghana or the Gross National Product
of Burkina Faso? Why is Mr. Romney so dishonest? A good healthy
debate is what President Obama was seeking and for all his
high-minded efforts he has gotten deception and arrant lies. He
should have known that the Republicans would come up with a
candidate like Romney. After all, was it not the Republican Party
that came up with Richard Nixon?
Now we are coming down to the wire. There are only a dozen or so
days left before Election Day. Polls have Romney ahead and the
trend is with him. One battleground state after another is falling.
Over the past 150 weeks, since November 2009, when Americans were
polled as to job approval or whether Obama should be reelected
fewer than 50 percent have favored the President. The only weeks he
polled above 50 percent were the week our troops shot Osama bin
Laden and the week following the Democratic National Convention. No
president with such a string of unfavorable ratings can expect to
be reelected. I fear the White House is catching on. Obama is a
goner, unless the Democrats can turn out the vote in select
cemeteries around the country.
Now comes John Fund with a new book to tell us that voter fraud
is a real possibility in 2012 and for years to come if Americans do
not get serious about the problem of stuffing the ballot box. In
Who’s Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote
At Risk, written with Hans von Spakovsky, Fund outlines
the problem. He talks about how voter fraud played an important
role in recent history, for instance, in the passage of Obamacare.
He talks about a salutary trend in the states favoring photo
identification. Much as we demand photo identification before
buying alcohol, cashing a check, or, in our larger cities, entering
an office building, we ought to require it of voters. Yet some, in
the main Democrats, complain that this is bigoted. It is nothing of
the kind. It is an instance of taking democratic process seriously.
It assures the value of every vote that is cast.
