U.S. News and World Report rounded up the top 10 political gaffes of the past election, including Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” and Richard Mourdock’s what “God intended” comments about abortion, Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” video put-down and “binders full of women” reference, and President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” phrase and open-mike assurance to then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that Obama would have “more flexibility” after re-election. And no gaffes roundup would be complete without Vice President Joe Biden, who made the list with his shocking warning to black voters that Romney would “put y’all back in chains.” GOP hopeful Newt Gingrich also won a spot for saying that “by the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon.”
Donald Trump blasted Mitt Romney’s support of the “self-deportation” of illegal immigrants (a policy developed by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach) as “crazy” and “maniacal.” “It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote,” Trump said (actually, 71 percent). He said that Democrats don’t have a good policy for dealing with illegal immigrants, “but what they did have going for them is they weren’t mean-spirited about it.” He said Republicans need clear proposals that address “people wanting to be wonderful, productive citizens of this country.”
The nearly 1 million Americans who’ve signed online secession petitions, including one for Kansas with more than 8,700 names, may be merely blowing off steam after a bitter election defeat. But advocating secession as a remedy is symptomatic of what ails the nation, our editorial today argues. With the election over and the winners and losers identified, people should be pulling together at all levels to work through divisions. The nation and its economy cannot afford more of the partisan sniping that has debilitated Congress and pitted red states against blue ones.
How much do Kansas voters differ from voters nationally? A lot. Political science professor Bob Beatty noted some of the striking differences reflected in exit polling, including: Mitt Romney won the male vote in Kansas by a whopping 40 points (69 to 29 percent). Nationally, Romney won men by 7 points (52 to 45 percent). Among younger voters, ages 18-29, Romney won by 13 points in Kansas (54 to 41 percent), while nationally Obama won those voters by 23 points. One big difference between Kansas and national demographics is race. Nationally, white voters made up 72 percent of all voters, and they went for Romney by 20 points (59 to 39 percent). In Kansas, whites were 87 percent of all voters and went for Romney by 31 points (64 to 33 percent). White men went for Romney by 27 points nationally (62 to 35 percent), but in Kansas 74 percent of all white men voted for Romney, giving him a 50-point advantage over Obama.
Despite the fact that President Obama campaigned on raising taxes on the rich, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said that “Republicans in the House and Senate think we have a voter mandate not to raise taxes.” But new opinion polls show again that the public supports higher taxes on the wealthy. A Hart Research survey found that 56 percent of Americans support ending the Bush tax cuts for those making more than $250,000, while 39 percent favor continuing the cuts for everyone. Meanwhile, exit polling in eight swing states also showed even more support for ending the tax cuts for the wealthy, ranging from 57 percent in Florida and Ohio to 64 percent in Nevada and Wisconsin. Even Fox News commentator and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol argued that the GOP should be open to a tax increase on the wealthy. “It won’t kill the country if Republicans raise taxes a little bit on millionaires,” he said.
The liberal conventional wisdom is that “Republicans are now Radio Shack to their Apple store, ‘The Waltons’ to their ‘Modern Family,’” columnist Ross Douthat wrote. But they may be misreading the future. “The progressive bias toward the capital-F Future, the old left-wing suspicion of faith and domesticity, the fact that Democrats have benefited politically from these trends – all of this makes it easy for liberals to just celebrate the emerging America, to minimize the costs of disrupted families and hollowed-out communities, and to treat the places where Americans have traditionally found solidarity outside the state (like the churches threatened by the Obama White House’s contraceptive mandate) as irritants or threats. This is a great flaw in the liberal vision, because whatever role government plays in prosperity, transfer payments are not a sufficient foundation for middle-class success.”
The favorability ratings of President Obama, Mitt Romney and the Democratic Party all increased after the election, while the GOP’s ratings stayed mostly flat. In a new Gallup poll, 58 percent of those surveyed had a favorable opinion of Obama (up from 55 percent before the election), and 50 percent had a favorable view of Romney (up from 46 percent). Democrats had a 51 percent favorability rating (up from 45 percent), while the Republican Party had a 43 percent rating (up from 42 percent).
When speaking last week at the Kansas Agri Business Expo in Wichita, talk-show host and 2008 GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee (in photo) blamed the GOP’s loss this election on the harshness of Republican rhetoric, not on the party’s underlying message. Huckabee has been more sensitive about issues of poverty and race than many Republican leaders. But is it really only the tone that is the problem, not the message – particularly on immigration and women’s issues? At a book-signing event in Kansas City, Mo., this past weekend, Huckabee criticized “the Republican Party’s complete abandonment of Todd Akin.” Huckabee stood by Akin after the Missouri congressman said that victims of “legitimate rape” rarely get pregnant because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
How effective were the conservative groups and political action committees that spent hundreds of millions of dollars this past election? “The U.S. Chamber of Commerce won 1 of 13 races it invested in; the Club for Growth, 2 of 6; FreedomWorks, just 2 of 16. American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS went a combined 3 for 17 in their races,” Time magazine’s Swampland blog reported.
“We need to stop being a dumb party, and that means more than stop making dumb comments,” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said about Mitt Romney blaming his loss on “gifts” that a “very generous” President Obama gave to African-Americans, Hispanics and young people. Romney’s comments, reminiscent of his earlier remarks that characterized 47 percent of Americans as moochers, also earned four Pinocchios from the Washington Post fact-checkers. “We don’t mean to knock a man when he’s down,” they wrote. “But Romney’s comments suggest that his understanding of the election results needs some serious rethinking.”
Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen dubbed Florida the “joke state” for having taken four days to declare that President Obama had won its electoral votes. “We can’t count on Ohio or any of the swing states to bail us out again in 2016, so what are our options?” he asked. “In case you were wondering, the U.S. Constitution makes no allowance for a state to exempt itself from presidential elections in order to avoid national ridicule. Nor is there any legal mechanism by which Florida’s 11 million registered voters might have their ballots shipped somewhere safe to be counted – say, Kansas.” Hiaasen must not have heard about election night in Sedgwick County, which had seen no election results released by the time Obama won re-election.
Other than Mitt Romney, no one may have had a worse election than Karl Rove. Most of the candidates supported by the former Bush White House adviser and his political action committees were defeated. So what lessons does Rove (who will speak in Wichita later this month at the Kansas Livestock Association convention) take from the defeat? He wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Republicans need to learn from the Democratic get-out-the-vote effort, and that Republicans “must avoid appearing judgmental and callous on social issues.” He also said the GOP “must reduce the destructiveness of the presidential primaries,” and perhaps limit its number of primary debates. And he suggested holding the GOP national convention in late June instead of late August.
As of Thursday morning, more than 7,600 people had signed a petition asking the federal government to “peacefully grant the state of Kansas to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own new government” – though many of the signers don’t live in Kansas. But as Gov. Sam Brownback noted, “Kansas is and will always remain a state in the United States of America.” And as House Minority Leader Paul Davis, D-Lawrence, told the Lawrence Journal-World: “I don’t think anyone in their right mind wants to have a secession debate.” What’s disturbing is that more than a few Kansans apparently do want that debate.
Paul Ryan’s election night wasn’t all bad. He lost the vice presidency, but state law allowed him to be on the ballot for Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District, too. He won re-election easily and returned to work Tuesday as House Budget Committee chairman. He told ABC News that President Obama won “fair and square,” but that the election was no mandate to raise taxes. “There are other ways of getting more revenue into our government without damaging the economy, and that’s the kind of thing we hope to achieve,” Ryan said, suggesting that they “take away the loopholes.” Ryan also said Mitt Romney’s campaign was “exactly the kind of campaign that I would’ve run had I been on the top of the ticket” – gracious talk, but not what Republicans looking to win in 2016 will be looking for.
If laughter is the best medicine, this video of 2012 campaign humor might be the antidote for an ugly and discouraging campaign season.
Washington Post writer Chris Cillizza’s list of winners and losers from Tuesday’s election wasn’t surprising. Among the winners: President Obama (of course), women and young voters, Bill Clinton, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. (whose warnings about the GOP’s Hispanic problem were proved correct), and the polling by big media organizations. The losers included the Republican Party, tea party champions (which cost the GOP Senate seats) and Donald Trump (“Please. Just. Stop.”).
Who was one of the biggest losers in Tuesday’s election? Karl Rove. “The Republican strategist who created the model for the outside money groups that raised and spent more than $1 billion on the Nov. 6 elections saw almost no return for their money,” Bloomberg News reported. Not only did Mitt Romney lose, nearly all of the U.S. Senate candidates that Rove’s groups backed also lost. Even Donald Trump mocked Rove, saying on Twitter: “Congrats to @KarlRove on blowing $400 million this cycle.” Conservative billionaires (including Trump) also had a bad election. Sheldon Adelson spent more than $50 million, and all the candidates he backed lost. In addition to the tens of millions spent on the presidential race, groups backed by the Koch brothers supported an anti-union initiative in California that lost and a failed attempt to oust three state Supreme Court justices in Florida.
Hispanic voters – especially in states such as Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico – were a key reason why President Obama was re-elected. Not only did more Hispanics vote this year than in 2008, but exit polls indicated that a higher percentage of them voted for Obama than four years ago. No doubt Mitt Romney regrets his decision during the GOP primary to embrace Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (in photo) and his policy of “self-deportation.” The GOP also should rethink its hard-line stances on immigration if it doesn’t want to keep losing national elections.
Kansas didn’t share in Tuesday’s re-election of President Obama, seeing its six electoral votes go to Republican Mitt Romney. If Obama’s win suggests a desire on American voters’ part to stick with the status quo, it also promises more debilitating partisanship. It could be a long four years. The nation needs quick and decisive action from its president and Congress on the spiraling debt, mounting entitlement obligations, stalled economy and other fiscal issues. Foreign affairs, especially in the unpredictable Middle East, will require cool heads and carefully measured and coordinated responses. With the GOP-led House still defined by its antagonism for Obama and especially Obamacare, and the Senate still in Democratic hands, the prospects are bleak for bipartisan problem-solving. The need for a new generation of Bob Doles and Tip O’Neills will be urgent.
Polls show a dead heat between President Obama and Mitt Romney, but Romney has a key edge that may put him over the top on Election Day: voter enthusiasm. More than three-quarters of Republican and Republican-leaning voters said they are likely to vote, compared with 62 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters, according to a new Pew Research Center poll. Obama has large leads over Romney on the questions of which candidate connects well with ordinary Americans (Obama up by 28 percentage points), takes consistent positions on issues (15-point lead) and takes more moderate positions (12 points). But that won’t matter much if people who feel that way don’t vote.
Spending by independent groups (the vast majority of which favors conservatives) has surged this election cycle, the website OpenSecrets.org reported. As of Tuesday morning, $838 million had been spent on independent expenditures so far during the 2012 campaign by third-party groups, many of which don’t have to disclose their donors. In the 2008 presidential election cycle, $138 million was spent on independent expenditures. The spending increase was fueled in large part by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which allowed corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money on political expenditures.
Hurricane Sandy is prompting questions about how Mitt Romney would approach emergency management, especially given that he said during a 2011 primary debate that disaster relief might be better handled by states. “Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better,” he said then, adding that it was “simply immoral” to rack up debts and pass them onto our children. A Romney campaign official said Monday that the candidate would not abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but that “as the first responders, states are in the best position to aid affected individuals and communities, and to direct resources and assistance to where they are needed most. This includes help from the federal government and FEMA.”
Kansas could see a 36 percent reduction in federal Medicaid dollars over the 2013-22 period, or about $12 billion, if policies advocated by GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and running mate Paul Ryan go into effect, the Kansas Health Institute News Service reported. Nationwide, federal Medicaid spending would drop $1.7 trillion between 2013 and 2022 if the policies are implemented, according to a new report from the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. Of that total, $932 billion would come from repealing the Affordable Care Act, and $810 billion would come from converting Medicaid to a block grant program for states and capping the amount of federal aid each state could receive.
The presidential race remains a dead heat, according to the Real Clear Politics latest average of 10 different national polls. Mitt Romney is slightly ahead, 47.8 percent to President Obama’s 47.1 percent. Neither candidate has more than a 3-percentage point lead in any of the polls, which is within the margins of error of the polls.
U.S. News and World Report rounded up the top 10 political gaffes of the past election, including Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” and Richard Mourdock’s what “God intended” comments about abortion, Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” video put-down and “binders full of women” reference, and President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” phrase and open-mike assurance to then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that Obama would have “more flexibility” after re-election. And no gaffes roundup would be complete without Vice President Joe Biden, who made the list with his shocking warning to black voters that Romney would “put y’all back in chains.” GOP hopeful Newt Gingrich also won a spot for saying that “by the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon.”
