About Me

In writing the "About Me" portion of this blog I thought about the purpose of the blog - namely, preventing the growth of Socialism & stopping the Death Of Democracy in the American Republic & returning her to the "liberty to abundance" stage of our history. One word descriptions of people's philosophies or purposes are quite often inadequate. I feel that I am "liberal" meaning that I am broad minded, independent, generous, hospitable, & magnanimous. Under these terms "liberal" is a perfectly good word that has been corrupted over the years to mean the person is a left-winger or as Mark Levin more accurately wrote in his book "Liberty & Tyranny" a "statist" - someone looking for government or state control of society. I am certainly not that & have dedicated the blog to fighting this. I believe that I find what I am when I consider whether or not I am a "conservative" & specifically when I ask what is it that I am trying to conserve? It is the libertarian principles that America was founded upon & originally followed. That is the Return To Excellence that this blog is named for & is all about.

Thursday, August 27, 2015

A Dangerous Time Of False Hope For Republicans

"Let's tell the truth here – this crop of Democrat candidates is terribly weak.  It's a joke.  It's a complete disaster for the Democrat Party."  - Bobby Jindal - Louisiana Governor & Republican Presidential candidate – from a press release on August 10.
 
"I'm a yellow dog Democrat." – common statement from Democrats, including many I know, meaning they would vote for a yellow dog before they would vote for a Republican.
 
 
After the August 6 FNC Republican primary debates one subscriber wrote "I have a new lineup.  Whoever wins should hire all the candidates" meaning to him they were all impressive compared to the Democrat ideology he detests.  And they were impressive especially when compared to the Republican fields the past several cycles.
 
Even so this primary debate season is a very dangerous time of false hope & short memory for Republicans – see Bobby Jindal quote above.  The Democrat field in 2012 – namely BO only – was the weakest imaginable because BO had four years in office in which he revealed his socialistic, fascist, ruinous plans he had been implementing to destroy America.  And he won in what Laura Ingraham called for Republicans a "gimmee election."  So we have to be careful with Governor Jindal's appraisal of the Democrat field & understand that @ this point in our history it may not matter who the Democrat nominee for president is.
 
Please remember that what drives the majority of voters to the polls in the 2016 presidential election will not be about the topics the 17 candidates so ably debated – see below.  It will be about Free Stuff Or Freedom - You Can't Have Them Both as Sarah Palin so eloquently explained on 9/12/12.
 
We all know the electoral college advantage that Democrats have in that 209 electoral votes of the needed 270 are virtually guaranteed for Democrats & that 54% of the 2012 electorate were women – a repeat of which favors Democrats regardless of their candidate.
 
In 2012 Mitt received 47% of the popular vote which included 59% of the white vote – which in & of itself should tell you something since Mitt lost by 4.98 million votes (spread out into a 126 electoral vote deficit.)  Complicating matters for Republicans is that the white vote declines about 2% every four years.
 
Mitt received 27% of the Hispanic vote, 26% of the Asian vote, & 38% of the millennial vote in 2012.  See graphic below of this losing trend as these groups' influence only increases.  It will take a major move up from this performance with these groups for the Republican nominee to even be competitive in the general election. 
 
 
The above not only lays out a problem for the Republican party but more importantly a problem for America.  A problem properly or accurately stated is half way solved & the Democrat opponents have not begun to identify the problem portrayed above let alone attempted to solve it. 
 
For example - the aforementioned FNC top ten tier debate included the topics of pledging support for the Republican nominee or @ least not running as a third party candidate, electability of candidates, the importance of being a governor, do we want another Bush?, women's looks, feeding red divisive meat to the GOP base, NJ's credit rating downgrades, making abortion illegal, banning homosexual marriage, blaming Republicans for the formation of ISIS, expanding Medicaid in Ohio, earned legal status for illegal aliens, & the Mexican government sending criminals, rapists, & drug dealers to America.  All interesting topics (that will build FNC TV ratings) but not ones that when addressed will turn the country around.  The undercard debate did @ least include one 15 minute segment devoted to the economy that gave Carly Fiorina a chance to distinguish herself from the field.
 
But why not one question about whether the Republican candidates thought BO, & by extension, any of the current Democrat candidates for president have an agenda purposely designed to ingrain a permanent underclass of government dependent people on the citizens of the American republic.  Were the FNC moderators oblivious to what has been happening after six years in plain sight of one anti-American example after another or were they just trying to build ratings for their TV show with provocative questions on mostly irrelevant topics?
 
Whether asked or not - until Republican candidates start to clearly articulate an eloquent, effective, & persuasive counter to BO's destructive lies, that will certainly be carried forward by the 2016 Democrat nominee, that have been perpetrated on America the last six years – especially the freedoms that are one by one being taken from us every day – Republicans are working @ a disadvantage by campaigning on the enemies' terms discussing every question except the ones that matter.
 
All of the above minority groups favor Democrats & are dependent on government programs as per BO's purposeful design.  That is the first thing that needs to be addressed clearly & directly – not peripherally.  Republicans may start with a 209 electoral vote deficit & 47% of the population favoring government handouts but that has to change if Republicans expect to win.  A successful candidate must show where this condition has ended before – a democracy moving from the penultimate stage of apathy to dependence to the final stage of dependence back into bondage which are the two stages America teeters on.  BO's immediate goal is to take America to a one party system by obliterating capitalism & he would like to hand pick his successor to carry this goal forward.
 
Winning the 2016 presidential election for a candidate who will make a difference for America is about how many of the 150 million Americans who live in households that receive some kind of government assistance can comprehend that the government programs they have become dependent upon are not sustainable & whether or not they can dare great enough to help turn this mindset around; whether they can see that the deliberate extinguishment of individual rights & moral principles that America was founded upon will ultimately come home to enslave them unless there is a dramatic change; whether they can come to realize that middle class prosperity & the chance to move to higher standards of living is tied to getting the education & training needed to command employment that will propel the creation of wealth forward in America; or whether they can learn that this is the one brief moment in all of human history, so far, that mankind has had a chance to be free & that they are in jeopardy of throwing this chance away by letting statists take it from them.
 
Of course finding suitable answers to the above is a long shot because it really depends on finding one person who can reach even some of these 150 million government dependent people to get the mindset going in the opposite direction from "I'm entitled, I deserve, I'm a victim" to one of self responsibility.  The prerequisite of this change in mindset is to show the benefit of laissez-faire capitalism that results from limited government.
 
But the passive supporters of the status quo are always the majority – these people hope the status quo won't change & they're not motivated enough to do anything about it one way or the other. 
 
Our fragile future will be determined for the better if one person of tremendous intellectual integrity & decisive action can fight through the media & statist fog & grasp the problem with high efficiency & then lead us out of the morass of lies we have almost succumbed to.  Such a person will return us to the liberty to abundance stage of our history following the libertarian principles the country was founded upon & originally followed.
 
 

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

The Passing Of Whitney Ball

It is with extreme sorrow that I write about the passing of Whitney Ball – my friend & colleague in liberty.
 
Whitney was the CEO of DonorsTrust, a philanthropic organization she founded in 1999 to promote liberty through limited government, personal responsibility, & free enterprise. 
 
Whitney was a role model in libertarian philanthropy protecting donor's intent – my work with Whitney pertained to higher education in the field of chemical engineering.  She had previously worked for The Philanthropy Roundtable & the Cato Institute.
 
There have been many tributes to Whitney's life & devotion to America – including those of Nick Gillespie, James Piereson, & Steven Hayward.
 
Whitney's dear friend Adam Meyerson notified her friends of the passing of this "remarkable woman of valor, entrepreneurial energy, principled leadership, loving kindness, & unstinting commitment to liberty."
 
One of my favorite moments with Whitney occurred shortly after the RTE post on December 21, 2009 that ended "As the great Whitney Ball wrote to Carol & me earlier this month – 'As this year of government encroachment comes to an end, may your holiday season be filled with the hope of true & abiding liberty."'  As a subscriber to the blog Whitney called me shortly after this post was presented & told me it was the first time she had ever been called "the great."  When it came to promoting liberty I told Whitney more than once she was "more me than me."
 
To lovers of liberty everywhere – my condolences.
 
 
 

Sunday, August 16, 2015

Excerpts From Huckabee's Airtime @ FNC Debate

Mike Huckabee was one of the few presidential candidates in the August 6 FNC debate who did not claim to be "the only one" to do something – Dr. Carson's claim to be "the only one to separate Siamese twins" does set him apart.
 
I went through the transcript of the referenced debate & pulled out the below excerpts from Governor Huckabee's almost 7 minutes of airtime.  Judge for yourself how important Huckabee's definitive positions are to you. 
 
Some show Governor Huckabee supporting issues similar to other candidates but for reasons that provide a distinction – but Huckabee is the only candidate who unabashedly supports both the FairTax & the Founders' intent regarding the role of the Judiciary Branch – both of which become more important every day to restoring our fading prosperity & waning freedom while contributing to turning around the nation's collectivist course that she is presently on.
 
Excerpts from Mike Huckabee's airtime @ the August 6 FNC Republican primary debate:

1.  A lot of people are talking about defunding Planned Parenthood, as if that's a huge game changer. I think it's time to do something even more bold. I think the next president ought to invoke the Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the constitution now that we clearly know that that baby inside the mother's womb is a person at the moment of conception.

The reason we know that it is is because of the DNA schedule that we now have clear scientific evidence on. And, this notion that we just continue to ignore the personhood of the individual is a violation of that unborn child's Fifth and 14th Amendment rights for due process and equal protection under the law.

It's time that we recognize the Supreme Court is not the supreme being, and we change the policy to be pro-life and protect children instead of rip up their body parts and sell them like they're parts to a Buick.

2.  It's not too big to shrink. But the problem is we have a Wall Street-to-Washington access of power that has controlled the political climate. The donor class feeds the political class who does the dance that the donor class wants. And the result is federal government keeps getting bigger.

Every person on this stage who has been a governor will tell you that the biggest fight they had was not the other party.  Wasn't even the legislature.  It was the federal government, who continually put mandates on the states that we had to suck up and pay for.

And the fact is there are a lot of things happening at the federal level that are absolutely beyond the jurisdiction of the Constitution. This is power that should be shifted back to the states, whether it's the EPA - there is no role at the federal level for the Department of Education.

3.  And I'm still one who says that we can get rid of the Internal Revenue Service if we would pass the FairTax, which is a tax on consumption rather than a tax on people's income, and move power back where the founders believed it should have been all along.

4.  Well, lets all be reminded, 60 million Americans are on Social Security, 60 million. A third of those people depend on 90% of their income from Social Security. Nobody in this country is on Social Security because they made the decision when they were starting work at 14 that they wanted to trust some of their money with the government.

The government took it out of their check whether they wanted them to or not. And, if person goes to 65, they're going to spend 51 years with the government reaching into their pocket at every paycheck.

Now, here's the point, whose fault is it that the system is screwed up?   Is it the recipients, or is it the government?  And, if Congress wants to mess with the retirement program, why don't we let them start by changing their retirement program, and not have one, instead of talking about getting rid of Social Security and Medicare that was robbed $700 billion dollars to pay for ObamaCare.

It's always that the government figures that they can do this off the backs of people, many of whom are poor, and depend on that money, and I just think it's fundamentally lying to people and stealing from them, and we shouldn't be doing it.

5.  Well, you ask about how we fund it.  One of the reasons that Social Security is in so much trouble is that the only funding stream comes from people who get a wage.  The people who get wages is declining dramatically. Most of the income in this country is made by people at the top who get dividends and — and capital gains.

The FairTax transforms the process by which we fund Social Security and Medicare because the money paid in consumption is paid by everybody, including illegals, prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, all the people that are freeloading off the system now.

That's why it ought to be a transformed system.

6.  Ronald Reagan said "trust, but verify."  President Obama is "trust, but vilify."  He trusts our enemies and vilifies everyone who disagrees with him.

And the reason we disagree with him has nothing to do with party.

It has to do with the incredibly dangerous place that this world is gonna be as a result of a deal in which we got nothing.

We didn't even get four hostages out. We got nothing, and Iran gets everything they want.

We said we would have anywhere, anytime negotiations and inspections, we gave that up.  We said that we would make sure that they didn't have any nuclear capacity, we gave that up.

The president can't tell you what we got.  I'll tell you what the world got.  The world has a burgeoning nuclear power that didn't, as the Soviets, say "we might defend ourselves in a war."  What the Iranians have said is, "we will wipe Israel off the face of the map, and we will bring death to America."  When someone points a gun at your head and loads it, by God, you ought to take them seriously, and we need to take that seriously.

7.  The military is not a social experiment. The purpose of the military is kill people and break things.

It's not to transform the culture by trying out some ideas that some people think would make us a different country and more diverse. The purpose is to protect America.  I'm not sure how paying for transgender surgery for soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines makes our country safer.

We've reduced the military by 25 percent under President Obama.  The disaster is that we've forgotten why we have a military. The purpose of it is to make sure that we protect every American, wherever that American is, and if an American is calling out for help, whether it's in Benghazi or at the border, then we ought to be able to answer it.

We've not done that because we've decimated our military.  We're flying B-52s.  The most recent one that was put in service was November of 1962.  A lot of the B-52s we're flying, we've only got 44 that are in service combat ready, and the fact is, most of them are older than me.  And that's pretty scary.

8.  It seems like this election has been a whole lot about a person who's very high in the polls, that doesn't have a clue about how to govern.

A person who has been filled with scandals, and who could not lead, and, of course, I'm talking about Hillary Clinton.

I think America is in trouble, but it's not beyond repair. But it's going to take leadership who sees the greatness of this country, and who believes that once again we can be one nation, under God.

I'll be my best to do that, and thank you for your support.

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Trump On Sanders

Socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, running in the Democrat primaries, is drawing anywhere from 15,000 to 28,000 people to his rallies – dwarfing Hillary's audiences & even exceeding those of Trump's.  Even more important Sanders now leads Hillary in the August 7 to 10 Franklin Pierce University/Boston Herald poll in NH 44% to 37%.  Biden had 9%.  Sanders trailed Hillary 44% to 8% in a March poll conducted by the same outfit.
 
In the August 7 to 11 CNN/ORC International poll in Iowa it is Trump 22%, Carson 14%, Walker 9%, Cruz 8%, Huckabee & Carly tied @ 7%, Jeb, Rand, & Rubio tied @ 5%, & Christie 3%.
 
The Sanders Seattle rally, that drew 15,000 people, was disrupted by protesters who took over the rally as Sanders retreated to the back of the stage.  Click here to learn what Trump thought about that.
 
 

Monday, August 10, 2015

Carly Overwhelms Chris Matthews

Several people in this readership have gone out of their way to tell me that presidential candidate Carly Fiorina has positively impressed them – & that was even before the undercard Republican primary debate last Thursday in which 82% of a FNC flash telephone survey conducted after that debate proclaimed she had won it. 
 
Click here to learn how Carly overwhelmed MSNBC's Chris Matthews in an interview shortly after the debate in which Matthews questioned Carly about calling Hillary a liar during the debate.  The last few seconds of the video show how compelling & in command of the facts Carly is as testified by Matthews.
 
 
 
 

Saturday, August 8, 2015

Trump & A Third Party

"I cannot say.  I have to respect the person that, if it's not me, the person that wins.  If I do win, and I'm leading by quite a bit, that's what I want to do.  I can totally make that pledge. If I'm the nominee, I will pledge I will not run as an independent . . . We want to win, and we will win.  But I want to win as the Republican.  I want to run as the Republican nominee . . . I will not make the pledge at this time." – Donald Trump responding to the first question @ the August 6 Republican Primary debate on FNC when the moderator asked the candidates to raise their hands if they could not pledge to support the eventual GOP nominee & not run as an independent against that nominee.  Only Trump raised his hand.
 
click on graph to enlarge
 
The top-ten tier Republican Primary debate on FNC on Thursday started with a fireworks question designed to get rid of Donald Trump in short order – see above.
 
FNC got what they wanted out of the debate – 24 million total viewers (16% of the homes with a TV according to Nielsen) with 7.9 million being in the targeted key advertising demographic of 25 to 54 year olds.  This is the largest TV primary debate audience in history – the first Republican Primary debate in 2012 drew 3.2 million viewers (5% of homes with a TV).
 
But to put this all in perspective there are over 320 million people in America & the 20,000 seat Quicken Loans Arena was almost full for the event – good for a cable TV event but not so good for America or a Cavaliers home basketball game respectively.

The debaters were chosen based on the Real Clear Politics' average of five recent national polls, with Trump (24.3%) scoring higher than Bush (12.5%) & Walker (9.5%) combined; Kasich brought up the rear as #10 with 2.8%.

Two unscientific online polls found Trump the winner of the debate – Trump received 47% of Time magazine's 55,000 votes & more than half of over 360,000 votes favored Trump in a Drudge Report poll.  Establishment Republicans & a Luntz focus group right after the debate were no where near this positive – in fact they were downright negative regarding Trump.

The above NY Times graph shows the amount of airtime each candidate received.  The darker bars indicate responses that were longer than the 60 seconds allotted.

In the undercard FNC debate (with six million viewers) featuring candidates 11 through 17 Carly Fiorina received 82% of a FNC flash telephone survey conducted for about two hours after that debate.

Socialist candidate Bernie Sanders wondered why there was not one word about income inequality, climate change, Citizen's United, or student loans.  I wondered why there was not one question asking whether or not the candidates thought BO had deliberately tried to damage America & the citizenry's standard of living the past six & a half years or why there was so little, if any, mention of a system of pure, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism that will undo all the harm BO has purposely done to America.

But getting back to Trump & his possible third party run.  Trump knows he is not liked by the establishment Republican Party & really did not say anything during the debate that he hadn't said before. 

Friday morning, on MSNBC, Trump further explained his opening remark above – "If someone gets in that I like & if I'm treated with respect, I would not run as an independent.  But I want to leave the option open, just in case that doesn't happen."

Now there are plenty in this readership who did not vote for McCain or Romney for the same reason Trump is leaving his options open - Ron Paul made a similar remark in 2012 about not pledging his delegates to a nominee who he totally disagreed with.

So in fact what Trump is saying about possibly "leading by quite a bit" months from now is that he would reserve the right to run as a third party candidate if the GOP decided they did not want him in the party under any circumstances.  Trump is really saying that in that case the other Republican candidates should drop out – not him.

 

Saturday, August 1, 2015

Ideal Presidential Candidate Will Campaign On Two Main Issues

"A system of pure, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism has never existed anywhere."  Ayn Rand writing in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
 
click on graph to enlarge
 
From 1968 through 1988 the GOP (Republicans) won the popular vote in five of six presidential elections – the predominate thought being that no matter how lopsided the House & Senate makeup favoring Democrats was during this time period the country preferred a strong leader in the White House epitomized by President Reagan.
 
Since 1992 the GOP has lost the popular vote in five of six presidential elections & the trend has all the earmarks to continue in 2016.
 
Look back into history to the 1790s when the Federalist Party seemed invincible – with Presidents George Washington & John Adams presiding over our first 12 years as a Republic – except the Federalist Party didn't last twenty five years.
 
By 1798 the Federalists had split into two wings – the Adams wing & the Hamilton wing & this split allowed their common opponent to win the presidency in the election of 1800 which marked the beginning of the end for the Federalists.
 
The Adams-Hamilton split of two centuries ago is very similar to the GOP split today regarding the establishment wing & the Tea Party – couple this split with the GOP running the most flawed presidential candidate imaginable in 2012 explains how BO could so easily win reelection in a country that had slide to the apathy to dependence stage of the Death Of Democracy
 
Adams-Hamilton precluded a fourth Washington term much like George H W Bush brought out Perot & Buchanan to prevent a fourth Reagan term.
 
There are many signs the GOP could be going the way of the Federalists.
 
First, many U.S. born children of illegal immigrants will be eligible to vote for the first time in 2016 – this will certainly not favor the GOP who won only 27% of the Hispanic vote in the 2012 presidential election.  Groups like United We Stand which represents undocumented immigrants plan an all out fight to help the Democrat nominee.
 
Second, demographics continue to overtake the GOP – this time millenials will equal baby boomers as a share of eligible voters for the first time ever in 2016.  Not only are the millenials a generation of people who were born after Reagan left office but a recent post on RTE showed that college students could not identify Reagan upon being shown a famous photograph of the 40th president.  These are people who will cancel out your vote.
 
This means there are an equal number of eligible voters who worked & experienced the prosperity of the 80s & 90s balanced out with young people saddled with thousands of dollars of student loan debt who are prone to favor the Democrat line of tapping the public treasury with one program or another while enjoying plenty of leisure time off.
 
Third, over the past 25 years Republicans have counted on low turn outs in winning many local or state elections – turn out in 2016 should be 50% higher than that of an off year election. 
 
For instance Governor Scott Walker won the governorship of Wisconsin three times in four years in what has become a Democrat stronghold (Ryan could not win his own home state as the GOP VP candidate in 2012).  All of Walker's victories were in non-presidential elections when the turn out was low – 54.5% in 2014 when Walker last won versus 73.2% in 2012 when Ryan could not help carry his home state.
 
Couple all of these trends & facts with the baked in electoral college advantage Democrats have (209 electoral votes that can be taken for granted regardless of who the Democrat candidate is) & the GOP has a very narrow path, if any, to the presidency.
 
In less than a week, on Thursday August 6, the first of eleven Republican primary debates moves the presidential race to the next level where the candidates confront each other on FNC – 1 hour debate @ 5 PM ET for the lower tier candidates & 9 PM to 11 PM ET for upper tier candidates (the top ten candidates based on an average of five national polls).  The upper tier debate is a ninety minute debate meaning that FNC is selling thirty minutes of air time for commercials – FNC is a capitalistic network that loves high ratings.
 
With seventeen GOP primary candidates the process of finding the GOP presidential nominee promises to be a long one.  The Democrat nominee looks to be a woman (54% of the electorate in 2012 were women – another plus for Democrats even if Carly becomes the GOP nominee) or a socialist (about half the country is fine with socialism with most millenials never having been taught anything about capitalism).
 
The 2012 presidential election was not about the Arab world, the budget deficit or national debt, the creation of jobs, China's military build up, Venezuela, the price of gasoline, or even Dubya.  It was about how people dependent on government will survive today & next week – so many intellectuals miss this Death Of Democracy point which will henceforth be the central point of every presidential election until America either reverses the welfare state path we are following or succumbs to the the final stage democracies deteriorate to - dependence back into bondage.
 
Of course America lost the 2012 election & afterward BO's purposeful destruction ratcheted up with attacks on 1) people of religious faith (called out for discrimination against homosexuals with fines totaling $135,000 in one case), 2) policemen trying to do their jobs (not one high profile case presented to date where someone died who followed a policeman's instruction – which is something most of us were taught to do when we were about six years old), & 3) businesses (mandated higher minimum wage laws & government regulations on paid sick leave plus paid leave to both parents of new children & employees caring for sick family members – all of which are deterrents, as BO intends, to business hiring).
 
We know that the welfare issue will be front & center in 2016 to once again try to carry the day for Democrats but has anything changed this time to call on human dignity & the basic sense of right & wrong to overcome the welfare issue.  Such as - will the Iran nuclear deal against Israel infuriate enough Jewish people to vote Republican instead of the usual 70+% for Democrat;  will the high ObamaCare premium increases for 2016 be enough to turn off people who realize they are not getting something for nothing with subsidized healthcare insurance; will Planned Parenthood's barbaric taking of organs from fetuses & selling them to the highest bidder turn enough stomachs for some to abandon the Democrat Party; &, will the list of senseless murders by illegal aliens roaming free in sanctuary cities be enough to have Hispanics realize that BO's & the DOJ's selective enforcement of laws will one day turn on them also. 
 
I distinguish the above issues from ones that have never moved the needle to change voting patterns – like the chronically high Black teenage unemployment rate.  Blacks vote Democrat no matter what & depression era Black teenage unemployment rates like June's 31.8% are just one example.  So issues like Hillary using her private e-mail server while Secretary of State, the IRS's targeted investigations of conservative groups, the Benghazi murders, or foreign country contributions to the Clinton Foundation will most likely again be of no electoral consequence to voters who are looking for the candidate that will best continue their government dependent benefits & incomes following the 126 government welfare & poverty programs identified by the Cato Institute – see graph above.  Click on Why Income Inequality Has Not Increased In America to see there has been no increased income inequality in America from 1987 to 2012 when measured by real spending per person by income quintile – the best measure of a person's well being.  This is just the way government dependent people intend to keep it.
 
For anyone other than a Democrat to win the presidency in 2016 will take a herculean effort – but we see above a few possible hints of light because BO may have pushed the envelope too far too quickly with the Iran deal & the others listed.  Couple changes in voting because of these issues with reaching out & changing the minds of just a few percent of Mitt Romney's "47% of the people (who) will vote for BO (in Mitt's case) no matter what...these people are dependent on government, believe they are victims entitled to government handouts, & pay no income tax."  Mitt identified the problem precisely but failed to try to reach these people – inexcusable.  Had Mitt received 10% of the Florida Black vote instead of 4% he would have won Florida & a swing of 58 electoral votes.
 
Whether looking for government handouts or gainful employment the economy is the biggest issue for most people.  The ideal presidential candidate that will start to emerge from the August 6 debates is one who will campaign on two main issues – 1) clearly explaining that BO's fundamental transformation of America has been & continues to be a deliberately led onslaught of one issue after another that is destroying America's place in the world & accordingly all of our standards of living – like the median drop in annual household income the past several years & the fact that small & medium sized businesses are dying faster than they're being born – each candidate can pick their own issues – they're all there on RTE, & 2) a system of pure, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism that will undo all the harm BO has purposely done to America.  Point #2 is a tall order since Ayn Rand tells us this has never been done before.