Following hard on the heels of the good “jobs” news from the mysterious disappearance of the American workforce, the Washington Post has another cheerleading story for the administration (“improved public confidence in his economic stewardship”) based on a “poll.” There’s just one little problem with the poll. It doesn’t disclose its sample. Cooked books, cooked polls. Ugh. What an ugly year 2012 is shaping up to be. Aren’t the “journalists” who “report” on “polls” and “jobs” like this embarrassed, even a little bit?

A few days ago, Mitt Romney was ahead in SC, and it was all about Saul Alinsky versus Gordon Gekko, but it turned out that Newt Gingrich won handily. Here’s some of what he had to say (we could not find a transcript of Gingrich’s victory speech in South Carolina, so we essentially created one below):

So many people who are so concerned about jobs, about medical costs, about the everyday parts of life, and who feel that the elites in Washington and New York have no understanding, no care, no concern, no reliability, and in fact do not represent them at all.

In the last two debates we had…where people reacted so strongly to the news media, I think it was something very fundamental that I wish that the powers that be in the news media would take seriously. The American people feel that they have elites who have been trying for a half century to force us to quit being American and to become some kind of other system, and the reaction…People completely misunderstand what’s going on. It’s not that I am a good debater, it’s that I articulate the deepest held views of the American people…

If Barack Obama can get reelected after this disaster, just think how radical he would be in a second term…there are a number of key issues we have to talk about with the President. I believe this campaign comes down to economics, including jobs, economic growth, balancing the budget, the value of money, comes down to national security, what threatens us and what to do about it, but the centerpiece of this campaign is about American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky…

What we are going to argue is that American exceptionalism, the Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, the American Federalist Papers, the Founding Fathers of America are the source from which we draw our understanding of America. He draws his from the Saul Alinsky, the radical left-wingers, and people who don’t like the classical America…

One of the keys issues, and I’m prepared to take this straight to the President and frankly, straight to the elite media…is the growing anti-religious bigotry of the elites…The second big theme that every South Carolinian understands is jobs, economic growth…I want to go into every neighborhood of every ethnic background in the country and say to the people very simply, if you want your children to have a life of dependency and food stamps, you have a candidate and that’s Barack Obama. If you want your children to have a life of indepedency and paychecks, you have a candidate and that’s Newt Gingrich…

Part of our long-term security interests is having an American energy policy. I want America to become so energy independent that no American President ever again bows to a Saudi King. Let me give you an example of a common sense conservatism that solves problems. You have well over $29 billion of natural gas offshore. As President I will authorize on the very first day the development of it. That natural gas will create jobs that, in Louisiana, average $80,000 apiece. In addition, it generates royalties. Part of the royalties should be used to modernize the port of Charleston, which affects 1 out of every 5 jobs in South Carolina.

But it’s not enough just to find the money. The Corps of Engineers bureaucracy is so long and so stupid that they currently take 8 years to study, not to do the project but to study the project. We fought the entire Second World War in 3 years and 8 months. Now if you can beat Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Imperial Japan in 3 years and 8 months, it is almost unimaginable that it now takes 8 years to study the project…

The President’s decision to veto the Keystone pipeline…you have to wonder how out-of-touch with reality this administration is…The President says, no, we don’t want you to build a pipeline from central Canada straight down, with no mountains intervening, to the largest petrochemical center in the world, Houston, so that we would make money on the pipeline, we would make money on managing the pipeline, we would make money on refining the oil, and we would make money in the ports of Galveston and Houston shipping the oil.

Oh no, we don’t want to do that because Barack Obama is taking care of his extremist left-wing friends in San Francisco. They think that will really stop the oil from getting out. No. Prime Minister Harper…is going to cut a deal with the Chinese, and they will build a pipeline straight across the Rockies to Vancouver. We will get none of the jobs, none of the energy, none of the opportunity. An American President who can create a Chinese-Canadian partnership is truly a danger to this country.

Gingrich certainly owes a great deal to the much-reviled media, and possibly to Romney’s mishandling of his tax issue. More surprises ahead no doubt, but even Romney partisans know that important changes are needed, and quick.

Michael Barone:

Franklin D. Roosevelt…served seven years as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the Wilson administration and four years as Governor of New York. But many considered him a lightweight, profiting on the fact that he was a distant cousin (his wife Eleanor was a closer cousin) of Theodore Roosevelt, a president considered great enough at that time to be worthy of being depicted on Mount Rushmore and the winner of the largest percentage of the popular vote for president of any candidate between 1820 and 1920. Theodore Roosevelt had written several impressive books (his account of the naval War of 1812 is still considered authoritative) before he was elected president and had resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to serve in combat in the Spanish American war at age 39. Franklin Roosevelt had written no books before 1932 and had stayed in the same civilian post rather than enlist at 38 when the United States entered World War I.

Franklin Roosevelt was the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1920 when the ticket lost by a 60%-34% margin to the Republican ticket of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, and Roosevelt nearly lost the 1928 governor election to Republican Albert Ottinger. Few journalists espied greatness in him. He was “Roosevelt Minor” to Mencken, who wrote, “No one, in fact, really likes Roosevelt, not even his ostensible friends, and no one quite trusts him.” Walter Lippmann, who supported the Democratic party as editorial page editor of the New York World in the 1920s, and who had known Roosevelt for more than a dozen years, described him as “a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be president”…

The 2012 Republican field does indeed look weak, at a time of great opportunity for the party. But so did the 1932 Democratic field. We can try to learn as much about these candidates as we can, but we cannot foresee the future. We must hope that at least one of these candidates turns out to have greater strengths and virtues than are now apparent. It’s happened before.

We understand that Mitt Romney won in Iowa by 8 votes, at least as of this writing. Meanwhile, “43% of Likely U.S. Voters would vote for the Republican in their district’s congressional race if the election were held today, while 38% would choose the Democrat instead.” We continue to have the feeling that, although the GOP generally seems to be well positioned, and the conventional wisdom is now that Romney is the odds on favorite to be the nominee, some enormous surprises lie ahead. We’ll see.

Jack Kelly in RCP:

You need a photo ID to get on an airplane or an Amtrak train; to open a bank account, withdraw money from it, or cash a check; to pick up movie and concert tickets; to go into a federal building; to buy alcohol and to apply for food stamps. Most Americans don’t think it’s a hardship to ask voters to produce one. A Rasmussen poll in June indicated 75 percent of respondents support photo ID requirements…

Republicans “want to literally drag us back to Jim Crow laws,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, D-Fla, chair of the Democratic National Committee. The NAACP has asked the United Nations to intervene to block state voter ID laws. It may have an ulterior motive for opposing ballot security measures. An NAACP official was convicted on 10 counts of absentee voter fraud in Tunica County, Miss., in July…

This year there have been investigations, indictments or convictions for vote fraud in California, Texas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina and Maryland. In all but one case, the alleged fraudsters were Democrats…

At least 55 employees or associates of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now have been convicted of registration fraud in 11 states, says Matthew Vadum of the Capital Research Center, who’s written a book about ACORN. Of 1.3 million new registrations ACORN turned in in 2008, election officials rejected 400,000.

What a waste of four years. The cling to power re-election strategy is to suppress attempts to enforce laws, and accuse the law enforcers of vile motivations. Hint: implicitly calling 75% of Americans names is not a sound strategy, even with the media on your side.

What a waste of four years. Economically, the administration has pursued a relentlessly disciplined agenda that is economically destructive. But in many ways, that’s not the worst of it. The country has a bad case of moral rot, and while there’s not much a president can do about that directly, he can certainly use the bully pulpit to advantage. Or not.

A man was given a great opportunity and squandered it. Oddly enough, it was the opportunity he campaigned on four years ago, but all that was just words. The largest irony is that the facts on the ground offered any number of opportunities for distinction if not greatness, but we’d bet that the administration’s senior team is so blinkered by ideology that they only saw their distorted version of the American reality.

Michael Barone:

One reason Iowa Democrats have been better prognosticators than Iowa Republicans is that more people participate in their caucuses. About twice as many people showed up for the Democratic precinct caucuses as for their Republican counterparts in 2008. In a state of three million people, a bare 119,000 Republicans showed up for the caucuses. Some 60% of them identified as evangelical or born-again Christians — a far higher percentage than in any presidential contest in any large non-Southern state that year.

With a week to go, there’s a three way tie among the candidates. That’s about 24,000 supporters apiece. What an absurd, idiosyncratic, unrepresentative way to cull the herd.

Gerald Seib in the WSJ:

When the Journal/NBC News poll last month asked Americans who they think is most to blame for current economic problems, both former President Bush and Wall Street bankers were fingered more often than was President Obama. That attitude gives some resonance to Mr. Obama’s argument — already oft-stated and sure to be repeated a lot in the campaign to come — that the Republican administration of George W. Bush allowed the country to fall into a deep economic ditch, and that it isn’t Mr. Obama’s fault it’s taking a long time to climb out. Second, whatever unhappiness exists with Mr. Obama’s economic record, there is ample reason to think Republicans are even less popular. Just over 40% of Americans have an unfavorable view of the president, but 48% hold an unfavorable view of Republicans.

We don’t claim to know what the electoral future holds, but basing opinions on GIGO polling data is ludicrous. The poll is 1000 adults, almost 20% of whom aren’t even registered to vote. The 2008 results of those who voted in the presidential election were 4/3 D/R , which is way out of line with the actual tally.

Finally, the D-to-R self-identification in the poll is 46-36 (including leaners), way out of line with the 35-35 actual results from exit polling. Weighting leaners so heavily D is clearly misleading since I’s flipped 33 points D-to-R in the most recent elecrtion. Are the people who write this nonsense lazy or complicit?

The administration is attacking South Carolina again as part of a comprehensive and lawless approach to the 2012 election. Its legal arm made the absurd claim that requiring a photo ID for voting is somehow discriminatory. The state says that the feds are using phony statistics for 207K of 240K voters. AP:

Department of Motor Vehicles executive director Kevin Shwedo said the state Election Commission knew it was using inaccurate data when it released reports showing nearly 240,000 active and inactive voters lacked driver’s licenses or ID cards. Shwedo sent the state’s attorney general an analysis showing that 207,000 of those voters live in other states, allowed their ID cards to expire, probably have licenses with names that didn’t match voter records or were dead.

Of course if your worldview is that discrimination is onmipresent but secretive, any measures to root it out are apparently justified, even if that means that arithmetic no longer matters. HT: PL

This chart from Gallup is very interesting. Big Government is seen by about half of Democrats as the biggest threat to the country, an increase of 50% since 2009. Hmmmm. What could have caused that? But the chart has even more to offer.

We’ve noticed the caterwauling by some conservatives over Newt Gingrich’s argument with Mitt Romney about the business practices of each other. Take another look at the chart above. The GOP alone has a love affair with Big Business, so it is not clear how Gingrich’s comments will play with a broader audience. The allures of Big Business can include money and power; in Big Politics, you can get all of that plus an excuse. Neither is to be trusted.

NYT:

preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class. All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic…

the Obama campaign and, for the present, the Democratic Party, have laid to rest all consideration of reviving the coalition nurtured and cultivated by Franklin D. Roosevelt. The New Deal Coalition — which included unions, city machines, blue-collar workers, farmers, blacks, people on relief, and generally non-affluent progressive intellectuals — had the advantage of economic coherence. It received support across the board from voters of all races and religions in the bottom half of the income distribution, the very coherence the current Democratic coalition lacks.

Maybe this can succeed as an election strategy, though we’re dubious in a world where Independents have so decisively flipped their allegiance. But it’s difficult to see how a victory by this coalition results in a coherent governing strategy (particularly if both the House and Senate go GOP).

Guardian:

World headed for irreversible climate change in five years…If the world is to stay below 2C of warming, which scientists regard as the limit of safety, then emissions must be held to no more than 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; the level is currently around 390ppm. But the world’s existing infrastructure is already producing 80% of that “carbon budget”, according to the IEA’s analysis, published on Wednesday. This gives an ever-narrowing gap in which to reform the global economy on to a low-carbon footing. If current trends continue, and we go on building high-carbon energy generation, then by 2015 at least 90% of the available “carbon budget” will be swallowed up by our energy and industrial infrastructure. By 2017, there will be no room for manoeuvre at all – the whole of the carbon budget will be spoken for, according to the IEA’s calculations.

Think of this: the difference between Have a Nice Day! and We’re Doomed! depends on 60 parts per million of the gas that plants breathe. That’s less than 1 out of 10,000 bits of air, as we tirelessly point out. If you think the earth is that fragile, well, good luck. Or maybe we’re just among the Gomers and Goobers of the world, as the WaPo reported: “It is not surprising that support for federal funding for clean energy drops among Republicans when their major source of information is a ‘news’ network that is pushing an anti-environment, anti-science, anti-government agenda 24/7.”

We don’t get what’s going on with the administration’s strategy of embracing OWS. Reasons: (a) there are twice as many conservatives than there are liberals in the United States, 40-20% or more; (b) moreover, according to Democrat observers, Independents are much closer to the R party than the D party, further increasing the dominance of conservatism in the electorate; and (c) here’s Joe Klein of all people talking about OWS, which “includes a generous measure of weirdos, ideologues and free-range troublemakers. A recent, unscientific New York magazine poll of 100 demonstrators found that 34% believed the U.S. government is no better than al-Qaeda.” (These findings are consistent with Doug Schoen’s.)

So we’re a center-right country, moving more right, and even committed liberals like Joe Klein can see that OWS are losers and worse. So what’s the administration’s strategy here? There may be some allies of the administration who envision that OWS protests may lead to increasing levels of violence one way or the other and that this will inure to the benefit of the D’s as the proletariat rises up. But the country described in the paragraph above is neither Venezuela nor Cuba. In a bid to restore order, it’s hard to see a majority choosing left-wing authoritarianism. A greater probability is the opposite outcome. Again, what’s the strategy here?

Oops, it’s not that darn cat. It’s those darn fat cats and VDH asks who they are:

Do they include the greedy doctors, who, the president once asserted, recklessly lop off limbs and yank tonsils for profits? Is my urologist a dreaded one-percenter? He found out what was causing my kidney stones but probably makes good money. Was a nearby farmer one, too? I bet he makes over $200,000 but, like many other growers in this area, has found a way to produce beef and cotton more cheaply…

was the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs a suspect billionaire? Should I be mad or grateful that he made billions by permanently replacing my old scissors, paste, and bottle of Liquid Paper of the 1970s?

Did Johnny Depp really have to earn $50 million last year alone — or Leonardo DiCaprio $77 million? Couldn’t they have settled for $2 million in salary in 2010, and thereby passed on a little bit of the savings to their ticket-buying fans? What kind of system would allow Oprah Winfrey or the late Michael Jackson each to accumulate nearly $1 billion? Is left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore — reportedly worth $50 million — a one-percenter? Why does such an enemy of capitalism need so much capitalist largesse?

Do this administration and its supporters really wish to separate millions of diverse Americans by a moral divide of the “few at the top”? Are liberals like Sens. John Kerry and Dianne Feinstein — among the richest in the U.S. Senate — in that elite group?

How about Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, together worth over $100 billion? They are certainly philanthropists. But their charities are predicated on two assumptions: They both apparently trust the private sector more than government to administer their vast estates, and neither sees much of a problem in avoiding billions in inheritance taxes that would one day be due to a now-broke federal treasury.

Is George Soros a “corporate-jet owner”? He nearly broke the Bank of England by shorting the British pound and was convicted in France of insider training. Rather than comply with new federal financial-disclosure regulations, he told some of his outside investors just to keep their money. Is Obama’s former director of the budget, Peter Orszag, a “fat-cat banker”? He left the administration to enter the “revolving door” of Wall Street, where he is now a rich banker for Citigroup.

There’s more than a little desperation in this pathetic approach to governance. The Hill: “The numbers say that voters don’t think he deserves reelection, he has no meaningful accomplishments, and the nation is headed off in the wrong direction under his watch. He is simply not viable by any measure.” Foolishness begets foolishness.

John Podhoretz is getting the vapors over the GOP field. Something similar seems to be going on over at Powerline. For some perspective, let’s flash back to January 2010 and the remarks of a retiring Democratic congressman from Arkansas:

Berry recounted meetings with White House officials, reminiscent of some during the Clinton days, where he and others urged them not to force Blue Dogs “off into that swamp” of supporting bills that would be unpopular with voters back home. “I’ve been doing that with this White House, and they just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me’.”

That didn’t work out so well, as you recall, with the 2010 D-to-R pickup far greater than the 54 seats in 1994, and Independents flipping by 33 points. Berry was prescient — one of the seats that flipped had been his.

The election is a year away. Republicans may blow it of course, but they’re not doing so now in our view. Indeed, there is a rather lively discussion taking place, with competing tax plans and so forth. Leading candidates have already said that (a) Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, and (b) global warming either doesn’t exist or isn’t very important — and the world hasn’t ended. Some observers are even having a little fun with the idea of a Cain/Romney ticket. Relax. There’s plenty of time to panic next year.

Las Vegas Review-Journal:

the bard of Searchlight stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate. In front of C-SPAN and everybody, he said — and I’m not making this up — “It’s very clear that private-sector jobs are doing just fine. It’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers”…Is Harry Reid out of his ever-loving mind?…In the two years Reid and President Obama have controlled Washington, government jobs have increased 13.5% to 2.1 million. During that same time, 2.5 million private-sector jobs were lost. The unemployment rate in Las Vegas is 13.6%. The national unemployment rate hangs at 9.1%. But the unemployment rate for government workers sits at a mere 4.7%

The desperate quality of Reid’s falsehoods and those of others in the administration is interesting. It tends to support the allegation that campaign funds from the public sector unions are in short supply and they will make up any crazy thing at all to remedy that.

Their internal polling must be horrendous, approaching Pauline Kael territory. We don’t think we’ve previously seen political commentary from Charlie Daniels or Hank Williams, Jr, for example.

Art Laffer in the WSJ:

Cain’s now famous “9-9-9″ plan is his explicit proposal to right the wrongs of our federal tax code. He proposes a 9% flat-rate personal income tax with no deductions except for donations to charity; a 9% flat-rate tax on net business profits; and a new 9% national tax on retail sales.

Mr. Cain’s 9-9-9 plan was designed to be what economists call “static revenue neutral,” which means that if people didn’t change what they do under his plan, total tax revenues would be the same as they are under our current tax code. I believe his plan would indeed be static revenue neutral, and with the boost it would give to economic growth it would bring in even more revenue than expected.

In the recent past, federal tax revenues from the personal and business income taxes, all payroll taxes, and the capital gains, gift and estate taxes have averaged $2.3 trillion, while gross domestic product has averaged about $14.5 trillion. The total revenue from these taxes as a share of gross domestic product averages around 16%. Sometimes it’s a good deal higher, as in the boom of the late 1990s, and sometimes its lower, as in today’s “Great Recession.” But a number in the 16%-19% range is as good as you’ll get under our current tax code.

By contrast, the three tax bases for Mr. Cain’s 9-9-9 plan add up to about $33 trillion. But the plan exempts from any tax people below the poverty line. Using poverty tables, this exemption reduces each tax base by roughly $2.5 trillion. Thus, Mr. Cain’s 9-9-9 tax base for his business tax is $9.5 trillion, for his income tax $7.7 trillion, and for his sales tax $8.3 trillion. And there you have it! Three federal taxes at 9% that would raise roughly $2.3 trillion and replace the current income tax, corporate tax, payroll tax (employer and employee), capital gains tax and estate tax.

The whole purpose of a flat tax, à la 9-9-9, is to lower marginal tax rates and simplify the tax code. With lower marginal tax rates (and boy will marginal tax rates be lower with the 9-9-9 plan), both the demand for and the supply of labor and capital will increase. Output will soar, as will jobs. Tax revenues will also increase enormously—not because tax rates have increased, but because marginal tax rates have decreased.

By making the tax codes a lot simpler, we’d allow individuals and businesses to spend a lot less on maintaining tax records; filing taxes; hiring lawyers, accountants and tax-deferral experts; and lobbying Congress. As I wrote on this page earlier this year (“The 30-Cent Tax Premium,” April 18), for every dollar of business and personal income taxes paid, some 30 cents in out-of-pocket expenses also were paid to comply with the tax code. Under 9-9-9, these expenses would plummet without a penny being lost to the U.S. Treasury. It’s a win-win.

A static revenue-neutral tax change requires static winners and losers. And this 9-9-9 plan has made certain that even on static terms those below the poverty line will be better off—period. Once the dynamics take hold, many of those below the poverty line will find good jobs and thus will rise above the poverty line and start paying taxes. This is the type of tax increase I wholeheartedly support.

We don’t particularly care which of the leading contenders gets the GOP nomination. After all, look what he’s up against. But we think a few things are noteworthy about Mr. Cain: (a) he keeps getting written off by insiders although not a single primary has taken place and the Tea Party really likes him; (b) he has sparked some welcome and long overdue debate in the unlikeliest of places; and (c) whatever you think of 9-9-9 it is a marketing masterstroke — every presidential candidate on stage in the GOP debate was forced to focus on one man and an economic plan for America that came from a guy that no one had ever heard of 60 days ago.

Doug Schoen’s polling firm visited OWS. Curiously, Schoen never explicitly mentions his findings that about a third of the crowd are self-identified Bolsheviks who yearn for a repeat of 1917 here in the USA:

Arielle Alter Confino, a senior researcher at my polling firm, interviewed nearly 200 protesters in New York’s Zuccotti Park. Our findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion. Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn’t represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence.

Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, virtually all (98%) say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and nearly one-third (31%) would support violence to advance their agenda. The vast majority of demonstrators are actually employed, and the proportion of protesters unemployed (15%) is within single digits of the national unemployment rate (9.1%)…

What binds a large majority of the protesters together — regardless of age, socioeconomic status or education — is a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas…Fewer than one in three (32%) call themselves Democrats, while roughly the same proportion (33%) say they aren’t represented by any political party.

So a third of the group are D, a third of the group are I, and a third of the group are what exactly? Schoen doesn’t say. How very odd for a pollster to withhold such an interesting bit of data.

The Sherlock Holmes story Silver Blaze is the one where the key clue was the dog that didn’t bark. The dog was silent. Mr. Schoen, a Clinton pollster, is silent too. He doesn’t name the political party or parties that 1/3 of the OWS crew belong to, though he does use the phrase “radical redistribution of wealth.” Gee, what party is that? It seems clear enough that a third of the group self-identified as Communists of one sort or another, but in our opinion Mr. Schoen didn’t want to embarrass his Democrat friends and clients by pointing it out too explicitly.

The administration has thrown in with the OWS types. No surprise there. But this isn’t Cuba or Venezuela. Schoen’s silence speaks volumes about the troubles that are in for the Democrats if they continue to go this route.

National Journal:

Herman Cain, the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, has seen a spark recently, spiking in national and state surveys. (Straw polls are meaningless: Just ask Ron Paul, who won many in 2008 yet failed to win a single caucus or primary.) But Cain appears to have little if any campaign infrastructure and few resources to take advantage of a surge. Additionally, many Republicans believe that President Obama’s lack of experience contributed to his problems in the White House; they argue that electing Cain would simply replace one inexperienced candidate with another. While it’s nice to talk about an executive track record, the question remains whether running Godfather’s Pizza or overseeing 400 Burger Kings in the Philadelphia region are sufficient preparation for becoming president of the United States and leader of the free world.

Fitting in campaign events around Cain’s long-planned book tour is certainly an interesting approach to the final stretch leading into the first caucuses and primaries—a time critical for fundraising and laying the groundwork for the grind that starts just after the first of the year. To be sure, a lot of conservatives like what Cain is saying and the way he says it, and they’re intrigued by his 9-9-9 tax plan (even though, as Bachmann points out, you flip it over and it becomes the devilish 6-6-6). But without money and an organization, he could be all dressed up with no place to go.

Cain seems to be functioning as a parking place for conservatives who have grown disillusioned or who harbor reservations about the previous flavors of the month. Until he demonstrates strength in some of these other dimensions (fundraising, campaign organization), it’s a good bet that Cain is little more than a place for conservatives to window shop while they decide what to do. If Gertrude Stein were alive, she might observe that with the Cain campaign, “there is no there there.”

In reality, there is an extraordinarily high probability that the Republican nominee will be either former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney or Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

The conventional wisdom would seem to suggest that Cook is right, at least about Romney. On the other hand, who would have thought that a guy you never heard of two months ago is now ahead of the incumbent 43-41% among likely voters (and has a 16 point lead among the critical demographic of voters over 65)? Strange times indeed.

We’ve heard OWS compared to the anti-war protests of the sixties and seventies. Let’s revisit a little bit of history from that earlier time to see whether the comparison is apt. As you know, the Vietnam War was a decade long conflict in which over 2.5 million Americans served, and 58,000 Americans died. Vietnam era draftees numbered 1.7 million (and they accounted for 30% of deaths in Vietnam).

From the early days of the Vietnam War, there was a small anti-war movement, perhaps similar in size to the small groups that today gather in public parks in various cities. It included some people sincerely troubled by the war, but as David Horowitz said, it was led by “Marxists and radicals who supported a communist victory.” Until 1967, the Vietnam anti-war movement was something of a sideshow. After that it began to grow significantly in numbers and organization, as a result of changes in the draft. The growth of the Vietnam anti-war movement was in large measure grounded in self-interest; a lot of college students didn’t want to go into the military after they graduated.

The protest movement became intense only after the draft expanded substantially in the young adult population (first to 29,000 a month and then to 42,000 a month by spring 1968), and after the passage of the Selective Service Act of 1967. That Act made it more difficult to get a draft deferment, and in fact created the violent and intense war protests at prestigious institutions, since it cancelled graduate school deferments, beginning with the fall 1968 student year. That gave rise to the takeovers at Columbia and elsewhere, and led to the huge marches on Washington and other protests. There is no similar catalyst for OWS.

As contemporaneous reporting in the Harvard Crimson demonstrated, the end of the deferments threw elite university students and professors into the frenzy of sit-ins, takeovers, and demostrations that began in 1968. The students were given cover by the biggest of big guns in the media, Walter Cronkite. He said in February 1968 that it was “increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” Who’d want to sign up for Cronkite’s version of the war?

So, despite rhetoric that claimed all sorts of moral high ground, a lot of the protesters simply wanted not to get drafted. You can agree or disagree with that sentiment, but it is clear from the numbers that many of the young people had a simple objective. It was realized in 1973 when the US ended the draft.

By contrast, what specific thing do the OWS people want? Mark Steyn’s guess is that “the ‘Occupy’ movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable lethargic pseudo-university with no return on investment…One of their demands is for a trillion dollars in ‘environmental restoration.’ Hey, why not? It’s only a trillion.” Since there is no clear demand for anything, the demands of this tiny group, such as they are, can never be satisfied. It’s hard to see what increased volume and hooliganism can lead to other than bad outcomes. (Jeff at Protein Wisdom says that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.)

Final point. It’s worth noting that while the mostly young protesters were pursuing their anti-draft goals forty years ago, the oldsters weren’t taking things lying down. Things didn’t out so well for George McGovern in 1972, though he did carry Massachusetts. So what’s the administration’s secret plan to avoid another disaster next year like the one they had last year?

More nonsense from these guys:

President Obama: “I will not take no for an answer” Last night, the American Jobs Act was filibustered by Senate Republicans. There was no vote on the actual bill. But it would have succeeded: the American Jobs Act has at least 51 votes — a clear majority — to pass the Senate. And a new poll shows that 63 percent of Americans support it, too. Today the President recorded a message he wants you to see, laying out where we go from here in the fight for jobs. The Republicans who voted yesterday to block this bill weren’t thinking about middle-class families. In fact, at last night’s GOP debate, one of their leading candidates actually refused to say he’d extend a payroll tax cut that puts more than $1,000 in the pockets of everyday working Americans. They might believe it’s in their political interest to oppose whatever the President proposes for the next 13 months, but we know that when it comes to jobs and restoring economic security, Americans can’t afford to wait. The American Jobs Act would get to work now, providing incentives for businesses to hire unemployed veterans, helping hire tens of thousands of teachers, cops, and firefighters, and rebuilding and modernizing our schools, railways, bridges, and airports. Even though it’s fully paid for and made up of proposals both parties have supported, Republicans yesterday said no.

Another 13 months of this? Pathetic. We really half believe our own fantasy that the Democrats will be running someone else next November.

Zogby:

Herman Cain has opened up a 20 percentage point lead among likely Republican primary voters in the race for the Presidential nomination, and also holds a narrow lead among all likely voters over President Barack Obama. Cain’s share of the GOP primary has jumped 10 percentage points since Sept. 26 and is now at 38%. Mitt Romney is second with 18%, followed by both Rick Perry and Ron Paul, at 12% each. The Oct. 3-5 IBOPE Zogby interactive poll also matches Cain, Romney and Perry against Obama. Cain led Obama, 46%-44%, while Obama is one-point ahead of Romney

The Politico article about Cain’s appearance on Lawrence O’Donnell’s MSNBC show included this sentence: “Given how much of Cain’s shtick is race-based, it’s not unfair to ask him what he was up to when civil equality was won.” Shtick?

If Cain were to become the GOP nominee, it would be amusing to see happen to the media what happened to Spinal Tap’s drummer at the Isle of Lucy festival.