Mitt's Bad Trip

If a Democratic strategist adopted an alias and described his vision of Mitt Romney's trip overseas, it wouldn't have been better than what's actually happened. We can give Mitt credit for one bit of truth: He didn't want his trip to mirror Barack Obama's overseas adventure in the summer of 2008, which saw oversized crowds giving him thunderous ovations, and it certainly didn't. Remember that the McCain camp's only response was that the US didn't need a rock star president. To solidify that aspiration, McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate where she became, you know the answer, a rock star.

Romney's trip appetizer, as it turned out, was his disparaging remark about the London Olympics, which look terrific on television, and that's where 99% (oh, that 99%) of the world's viewer's will come in contact with it. Will the games lose money? Surely. Will there be empty seats, fraudulent tickets and missed buses? Yes. Will it matter to those watching on TV? Not at all. What will matter, and has rightfully gained all of the headlines, is that Romney missed a free opportunity to act statesmanlike, responsible, upbeat, friendly and most important, presidential. He snuffed it badly.

Then it was on to Israel for the main course, which was a full blown endorsement of the most contentious issues facing the Israeli's and Palestinians. Mitt called Jerusalem the capital of Israel, even though it's a divided city, and said that the real reason why Palestine is behind Israel is its culture. The Jerusalem line is one that many American politicians use to galvanize Jewish support for their candidacies, but the US is not going to be able to unilaterally, or bilaterally with Israel, determine that city's status. No Palestinian politician will agree to it and the larger Muslim Middle East will fight to the death to preserve and defend its holy sites against an Israeli assumption of Jerusalem.

It's the culture remark that tells us more about Romney than we probably want to know. How much does culture determine a people's success or failure? In the United States, culture has been used both historically and currently to explain why African-Americans live in poverty or have a stunningly high rate of single-parent families or a high obesity rate or why they want to live in segregated communities, not to mention that they made good slaves and like to eat certain foods. Likewise, the culture argument has been used to paint Jews, Irish, Italians, Poles, Latinos, Asians (with and without regional breakdowns) and the LGBT community as, well, you probably know the stereotypes. All of them are false. All of them are ugly. All of them have been used to discriminate against and paint groups as un-American and dangerous.

Onto that pile of malodorous claptrap comes the well-shod foot of the presumed Republican nominee.

“Culture makes all the difference. Culture makes all the difference,” Romney said, repeating the conclusion he drew from the book, by David Landes. “And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things.”

Thus, if culture makes all the difference, then it must mean that Palestinians want to live in the dangerous, fetid, unsettled, poverty-stricken land that they do. If they had a different culture, then they wouldn't. Never mind the politics, the sanctions, the wall, trade embargoes and blowing up the houses of relatives who are suspected or convicted of being terrorists. It's culture.

Now, don't get me wrong here. I'm Jewish. I support Israel 100% and believe that its existence is vital to the region and the world. But I'm not going to chalk up Israel's economic vitality and thriving society to culture alone or as the most important factor in its success. Israel has a terrific friend in the United States, and we're in a position to funnel billions of dollars in aid to its government and provide a likewise amount in weapons and defense. Much of the Middle East was supported by the Soviets during the Cold War, and when the USSR collapsed, so did many of those country's economies. Add in the rise of Islamic terrorism and you have a situation where many people weren't even able to make a cultural choice for their country. It was made for them by a ruling elite (Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia) or a religious movement that had more guns than anyone else (Afghanistan, Iran, the PLO).

And yet, to Romney, it's culture that is the main determinant of a country's success. That strikes me as condescending, discriminatory and wrong. It's convenient to blame culture because then you get to define the elements of that culture. So Palestinians are deficient and Israelis are superior. In Syria, Alawites must be superior because they have the government and the weapons, but if Assad losses, that must mean that the rebels, and their concomitant groups are superior. Countries that receive enough rainfall to water their crops must have superior cultures, while arid areas must be deficient. OK, you get the point (and you most likely did 3 paragraphs ago).

The desert was light and fluffy, courtesy of Romney's staff in Poland that was probably upset at all of those inconvenient questions about his trip, so they said some naughty things. But the damage has been done. Romney had hoped to make this trip about his commander-in-chief credentials and it became about everything but that. If these were isolated events, we could forgive Mitt, but with all of the other silly things Romney has said during the campaign, we need to begin worrying that he would damage more than his campaign. That's something we truly cannot afford.

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Presidential Polls: Obama, Romney Will Win, Lose

The polling in the presidential race over the past week has led to some interesting analysis, and depending upon your view of the numbers both candidates can claim to be winning, which also means that both are losing.

The latest RealClearPolitics composite shows the president with a small lead, but his aggregate score of 46.4 is rather low for an incumbent and gives Mitt Romney many opportunities to catch and surpass him. A case in point is an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll out Tuesday showing Mr. Obama with a 49-43% lead. The problem is that the poll oversamples Democrats by 11 points, 46-35%. My sense is that Democrats will not turn out in November in those numbers, so the poll is not as representative as it first appears. The other issue is that the poll uses registered voters (RV) as opposed to likely voters (LV), which at this point in the campaign might be worthless.

Another poll released on Tuesday by PPP/Daily Kos/SEIU shows the race to be tied at 46%, which would be great news for Romney if not for some troubling poll internals. First, it assumes that Romney will attract 17% of the African-American vote and 39% of the Latino vote. By November, that might be possible, but other polls show President Obama garnering support from those groups that approaches 80-90%, so this poll might be a bit optimistic. Further, the poll oversamples Democrats by 7%, which, again, is possible, but it also shows that 32% of respondents identify themselves at members of the Tea Party. That's high. Finally, this is an RV poll using automated technology and did not call cell phones. All of this adds up to a poll that has a lot of holes in it for both sides to peek through a spin as they please.

The national tracking polls give us little to go on, with Rasmussen giving Romney a 1 point lead and Gallup giving that same lead to Obama.

The real action is with state polls, and for the most part these have been good news for the president. A Rasmussen poll of Michigan gives Obama a 48-42% lead using likely voters, and a Survey USA/KSTP poll  of likely voters in Minnesota has Obama up 46-40%. Good news for Obama, but it shows a decline in his support from previous Minnesota polls which could be a signal of slippage or statistical noise. Your choice, it seems, depending upon which way you lean. A SurveyUSA poll of Florida using likely voters has the president with a 48-43% lead, but the same release showed Republican Senate candidate Connie Mack leading Democrat Bill Nelson by 48-42%. That kind of ticket splitting doesn't make sense, so we'll need another Florida poll to sort that out.

There has also been some considerable punditry about where this race is heading despite the polling. Two schools of thought seem to be controlling the debate. One says that the negative ads that Obama is running in swing states, combined with an improving economy in those states, will lead to his reelection. The other thought is that Obama has spent almost $100 million dollars on negative ads and only has a small lead on Romney and no poll has him at 50% or above on the national level (some state polls do have both candidates with sizable leads depending on the state). Both camps are looking for any significant movement in the polls, but won't likely see much until mid-August when Romney unveils his pick for Vice president and the conventions get under way in earnest.

Of course, it's the states that matter most in our electoral system and Obama is going to want to lock down as many of his 2008 wins as possible, and the above discussion suggests that he's moving in that direction. Still, polls are close in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina (where Romney leads) and Pennsylvania. This is where the election will be won or lost and Romney has yet to advertise seriously in any of those states (he can't until after the GOP convention).

Stay tuned for more as the polls are released.

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Control Guns

I have a proposition for anyone who thinks that our state and national gun laws make sense and/or adhere to the legal intent of the Second Amendment. Wake up Thomas Jefferson, John (and Sam if you'd like) Adams, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, George Washington and any other member of the founding class not named Aaron Burr. Give them a week or so to acclimate themselves to the modern day United States, and then ask them if this is what they had in mind when they debated and wrote the Constitution: 

Unhindered by federal background checks or government oversight, the 24-year-old man accused of killing a dozen people inside a Colorado movie theater was able to build what the police called a 6,000-round arsenal legally and easily over the Internet, exploiting what critics call a virtual absence of any laws regulating ammunition sales.

With a few keystrokes, the suspect, James E. Holmes, ordered 3,000 rounds of handgun ammunition, 3,000 rounds for an assault rifle and 350 shells for a 12-gauge shotgun — an amount of firepower that costs roughly $3,000 at the online sites — in the four months before the shooting, according to the police. It was pretty much as easy as ordering a book from Amazon. 

He also bought bulletproof vests and other tactical gear, and a high-capacity “drum magazine” large enough to hold 100 rounds and capable of firing 50 or 60 rounds per minute — a purchase that would have been restricted under proposed legislation that has been stalled in Washington for more than a year. 

I didn't think so either.

With all due respect to the current Supreme Court, which ruled in the case, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA et al. v. HELLER, (No. 07-290) 478 F. 3d 370, affirmed,  that possessing a handgun is an individual right (and in the process overturned two centuries of precedent), the framers could not have seen this development. They were rational, reasonable men. They knew that freedom and liberty were just and correct goals, but that they had limits.

Tell that to the NRA. I support the NRA's existence and even most of its goals. We do have a right to a well-regulated (there's a dormant phrase) militia and people do have a right to hunt and protect themselves. But what James Holmes amassed was not meant for hunting, protection or self-defense. He planned and carried out a massacre of innocent people at a time when they were relaxed and vulnerable. There are clearly lots of things wrong with him that society can't anticipate or cure. He had a fairly clear record and was a brilliant student. Ominous music didn't play when he entered a room. But did he have the right to those guns? Is that what the Second Amendment protects? I think not.

After the shootings at Virginia Tech, there were many gun rights advocates who suggested that the answer to the problem was more guns. They said that if students and faculty members were armed, that they could shoot the shooter and limit the carnage. That debate has been reignited. Is this the kind of society we want to live in? Where anyone (after background check and safety course) can carry a concealed weapon anywhere? Do more guns equal less violence?

Anyone hunting for a political debate on this issue will go hungry until at least November 7 because gun rights advocates are already suspicious of President Obama and Mitt Romney doesn't want to say anything provocative or alienate his base. Meanwhile, gun control politicians such as Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York continue to press the issue. Honestly, I'd feel safer in a midtown Manhattan movie theater than in a multiplex in a state with fewer gun laws. Call me crazy.

But back to the framers. I understand that they feared a tyrannical national government that would encroach on people's liberties, so they included an amendment that left to the states the right to have its citizen's armed. I get that. What they didn't intend was that citizens would have free reign to arm themselves to the teeth with weapons that threatened the public order. They would have drawn a line at Holmes's arsenal because it's detached from the intent of the amendment. We have limits on speech, religion and state's rights. It's only logical that we look at the totality of our gun laws and ask ourselves if they adequately protect us from people who seek to do us harm. At this moment, the answer is no.

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