Groundhog Day in America - We Are Back to Square One after this Election

By Victor Davis Hanson - Democrat Barack Obama won a moderately close victory over Mitt Romney on Tuesday. But oddly, nothing much has changed. The country is still split nearly 50/50. There is still a Democratic president, and an almost identically Democratic Senate at war with an almost identically Republican House, in a Groundhog Day America. Obama’s win did not really reflect affirmation of his first term, given that the president made only halfhearted efforts to defend Obamacare, the stimulus, huge Keynesian deficits, and his attempts to implement cap-and-trade. So if there is a second-term agenda, even Obama supporters don’t quite know what it will be. Unlike the hope-and-change campaign of 2008, Obama’s theme this time around was that George W. Bush had been awful and Mitt Romney would be far worse. The Obama campaign spent almost $1 billion to brand the latter as a veritable felon who callously let people suffer without health insurance. In textbook community-organizing fashion, Obama won the election by brilliantly cobbling together factions with shrill warnings of supposed enemies everywhere. Young women were threatened by sexist Neanderthal males. Minorities were oppressed by neo-Confederate tea partiers. Greens were in danger from greedy smokestack polluters. Gays were bullied by homophobic Evangelicals. Illegal aliens were demonized by xenophobic nativists. And the 47 percent were at the mercy of the grasping 1 percent. Almost any American could fall into the category of either an Obama-aligned victim or a Romney-aligned oppressor. How, then, can a reelected President Obama put the fractured American Humpty Dumpty together again after it has been shattered by such a nasty campaign? Certainly, it will no longer work for the president merely to wax eloquent on the need for more civility. Instead, his congressional opponents will expect more hardball Chicago politics and will probably reply in kind. Yet Obama is going to need bipartisan help to solve a number of menacing crises. His $1 trillion deficits cannot continue for another four years without wrecking the country. A staggering national debt of nearly $17 trillion must also be reduced before our currency is rendered worthless and the interest on the vast borrowing overwhelms the budget. Sequestration looms, with massive cuts in defense and entitlements on the immediate horizon, reminding us that we can live neither with the disease of massive borrowing nor apparently with the medicine of radical cuts and higher taxes. If most Americans are willing to consider allowing paths to citizenship for law-obeying illegal aliens who were brought here as children, then they should be equally adamant about deporting illegals who have committed felonies or have become wards of the state. But does anyone believe such a balance will really be the basis for compromise? The dread of Obamacare has already helped to spike insurance premiums. No one yet quite knows how the massive wave of new regulations will affect patients, doctors, and hospitals. Nearly three years after the bill’s passage, the public is still not happy with even the idea of it. Abroad, most believe that Iran will become a nuclear power unless it is stopped during Obama’s second term. Obama’s choices are bad versus worse: a nuclear-armed Iran bullying the Middle East with a sword of Damocles permanently suspended over Israel’s head, or a preemptive war to defang the theocracy, leading to an almost certain wave of terrorism in the Middle East and a flaming Persian Gulf. There must be truth-telling soon over the terrorist killing of our ambassador and three other Americans in Libya. A mostly pro-Obama media — in fear of endangering the president’s reelection bid — postponed questioning the preposterous administration narrative of a spontaneous demonstration gone awry over an obscure video. But the facts of the worst terrorist attack on Americans since 9/11/01 remain stubborn things and won’t go away. Al-Qaeda has not been dismantled, but is still killing Americans. Libya is not a model of a democratic Arab Spring, but mired in tribal chaos. Key administration officials — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, especially — will have to explain why prior warnings from Libya were ignored, with fatal consequences. Others, like Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, U.N. ambassador Susan Rice, Vice President Joe Biden, and perhaps the president himself, must tell us why for so long they claimed that the violence was spontaneous, when they knew, or should have known, it was preplanned terrorism. Yet not everything ahead is bleak. Vast new gas and oil finds could soon make America energy independent. The American economy is cyclical and may finally rebound on its own — if Obama just leaves it alone and stops regulating and borrowing. Popular lore attests that insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results. Let’s hope that the same Democratic president, the same polarized Congress, and the same divided country do something differently from what they did in the last, lost four years. — Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2012 Tribune Media Services Permalink

It's Done! We don't have time to lick our wounds!

Dear Fellow Patriots--

This election should have never been as close as it was!  It should have been a SLAM DUNK! Yet, we lost the race by a margin of 50% to 48%.  But we cannot allow it to be a decisive defeat.

Voters on Tuesday waited for up to five hours to cast their ballots in parts of Virginia, as political candidates urged residents of the key battleground state to stick it out.

It was close because our nation has changed.  In fact, it changed years ago and I believe this election simply reflected reality.   Are we outnumbered?  Yes!  Can we do anything about it?  Yes!

Obama‘s failure to accelerate the improvement of the economy should have been a dominant reason for not re-electing him. In spite of his shortcomings, we had millions of Americans who chose to stand in long lines, sometimes for several hours, during the rain or snow to pull the lever to re-elect Barack Obama. 

Have we lost the country?

In October, I reposted Star’s blog stating that Obama's bubble was far from bursting, with approval ratings still above 50 percent while our economy was spiraling out of control.

For a couple of years, we've talked about the demographic shift impacting our country's policies.  Obama knew that the demographic change would secure his re-election. He won in spite of liberals selling entitlements to an ever enlarging voter block in exchange for votes and values.

The Democratic Party knew that they could count the entrenched entitlement populations who long ago abandoned hope for prosperity in return for the "safety" of a guaranteed subsistence living that the government offered them. But using threats, outright lies and fear-mongering, Obama and the statists behind him gathered millions of more supporters from young single women, Latinos, Muslims, and young student populations.  The election this week bore the fruit of those efforts.

Well, it's time to stop talking, because the shift has happened. Now is time for action!

You've heard me say it over and over: America will not change until we bring the truth into the communities where it has never been heard before.

A young black man finally faced the truth about Obama the night before the election.  He finally understood the meaning of the effect of pro-growth limited government policies.  He told me he could not vote for Obama because he was afraid that a lot of others would lose their jobs, and Obama’s values did not align themselves with his. I cried because the revelation came too late to impact the outcome of this election, but I know by his response that this decision was well thought out.  He is only one of many who, when faced with the TRUTH, will do the right thing.  This was someone who I had known was an Obama supporter.  If there is one person like this, how many others are today dealing with regret for their past inability to see the built-in destruction of their enslavement to this completely radicalized party?

How can we have a country run on individual responsibility when fewer and fewer citizens know what these values are?  As shameful as the Democratic Party’s convention was, when the camera panned the audience, the Democrats intentionally showed a diversity of people which appeared to reflect America.  Even during Obama’s speeches, you saw that same display of diversity. That representation was not there to the same degree during Romney speeches.

That does not mean we do not have diversity in the Republican Party.  We do.  But, perception becomes reality when viewed by the uninformed. And the diversity we know about includes people who have achieved their success through hard work and commitment to the Constitutional checks on government that were created to ensure that government will not be allowed to trample on a free peoples' right to opportunity and equal protection from that very government.

The political action committee, CharlottePAC.org will take the message to upwardly mobile. Latinos and young Milleniums who need to understand the truth about welfare and entitlements and how those programs are designed to enslave us by making us dependent on the Democratic Party just to get their votes.  CharlottePAC.org will help to redefine how prosperity is achieved in this nation. We will explain the American exceptionalism of this great nation and the Constitution.  I knew that by building an organization that fights for the truth, the way our nation was founded, we could restore our country as our founders envisioned and liberate Americans.

I still believe in this goal. Do you?

Don't despair.  

We don't have time to lick our wounds. It's time to fight where the battle is actually taking place -- in our nations' communities that are held hostage by liberal elites and shifting America's reliance on individual responsibility.

The road ahead will not be easy.  But we're not giving up.  One election will not stop us. Now, with implementation of ObamaCare on the horizon, the problems inherent in the law will become more manifest.  We’ve suffered a setback, but we are not giving up on our principles.

"Never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.''  Winston Churchill.

The message is getting out in Memphis Apostle Alton Williams, Pastor World Overcomers.

~Brought to you by CharlottePAC.org