Gillespie Deploys MacArthur Strategy

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Ed Gillespie is a modern day Douglas MacArthur. Let me explain.

On September 15, 1950, MacArthur led a force of mostly United States Marines in an amphibious assault at the largely undefended port of Inchon that was located far behind enemy lines. The North Koreans had closed in on American forces around the city of Pusan and the UN forces needed a break-out strategy. The strategy to go on offense helped to turn the tide of the war and the United Nations forces were able to drive the North Koreans back to their portion of the peninsula.

What MacArthur did was a lot like what Ed Gillespie has reportedly done with the Romney campaign. He decided that the best defense was a very good offense. Continue reading →

Imperfect Men Give Us Imperfect Government

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

There is a reason that Kevin Yoder, the Kansas Republican, swam in the Sea of Galilee instead walking on top of it. It is the same reason that Todd Akin is now in extremely hot water. Neither is perfect, unlike the fella who walked on water a couple of thousand years ago.

Both Yoder and Akin were perfectly good members of Congress. Yoder, a freshman member of the Appropriations Committee, has been particularly impressive for his legislative judgment and his mature approach to his work in Congress.

Akin was impressive enough to win a tough, three way primary for the privilege to take on Claire McCaskill, a very vulnerable member of the Democratic majority who has made more than her fair share of ethical mistakes. Continue reading →

Bad Day for GOP

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

It’s time for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to get their arms around the Republican Members of the House and give – at least some of them – a Leroy Jethro Gibbs slap to the back of the head.

Yesterday was a day that should have featured the Obamas answering questions about the charges of crankiness, stubbornness, and general dysfunction among the White House and Chicago campaign staffs.

We’ll come back to that later.

Instead it was all about Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) who was asked during a TV interview whether he thought abortion was justified in cases of rape. Continue reading →

Edwards Beats Drum for Reform: A Review

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

Mickey Edwards has always marched to a different drummer. He was a Republican Member of Congress, who didn’t quite fit in with the new breed of neoconservatives that came to dominate the Republican Party in the 1990s. He marched in the same parade as they did. But he sometimes had to do one of those skip steps to keep in sync with his fellow marchers. He instinctively could not conform.

So it comes as no surprise that Edwards, in his latest book, The Parties Versus The People, argues that we rethink the whole concept of party politics and the influence it has over American government. But Edwards is no longer marching to a different drummer. He is a drummer.

Continue reading →

There Should Not Be A Law

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

When you travel, you get a chance to get reacquainted with the USA today, and on the front page of that newspaper, the headline blared “61 bills, Congress is on pace to make history with the least productive legislative year in the post World-War II era.”

Okay, it’s a long headline. And the headline pretty much sums up the story by my friend Sue Davis. It should come as no surprise that the Congress and the current President found little to agree on. And with the Senate pretty much taking the year off (they haven’t passed a budget in three years, for example), this story doesn’t necessarily fit into the “news” category. Continue reading →

Gaming Poll Data: Biden a Bust

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

USA Today invested good money surveying people who are not going to vote in this year’s elections. Why? So they could find out how Barack Obama would do in November if everyone did vote.

According to this survey among the people who will not be voting, Obama beats Mitt Romney 43% to 14%. Yes, I know. There is a certain Alice-in-Wonderland aspect to all this, but let’s keep going.

The 800 person sample was not exactly an exact cross section of America.

For instance the sample contained 351 people who were registered to vote, and registered with one of the two major parties, but said there was no more than a 50/50 chance that they would participate. Of those 351 people, 242 (30%) said they were registered Democrats. 109 (14%) said they were Republicans. Continue reading →

Did Obama Ever Run a Lemonade Stand?

BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from Telemachus.com

This presidential election is going to be about 1 thing and one thing only: ‘Do you believe that America is built on the notion that free people engaging in free enterprise is the BEST thing we can do as a nation…or that everything flows from the federal government?’

That is pretty much it, ladies and gentlemen. We have always had the debate in our national elections over more or less ‘control’ from a centralized authority in Washington starting with the debates in the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Continue reading →

Olympian Babies

BY GARY JOHNSON
Reprinted from Loose Change (TCBMag.com)

Teenagers, a breed unto themselves. We’ve all been “there,” self-absorbed, emotionally flammable—a weird space equipped with steroidal physicality, hormonal monsoons, and magical blinders that make us think we know more than we do. It’s one reason why teenagers shouldn’t be paraded out in public too often. Case in point: McKayla Maroney.

McKayla is 16 years old. In my world, a baby. No question, Ms. Maroney is an incredible physical talent, capable of athletic accomplishments most kids her age are not. Kids sometimes shock us with their acumen. One recalls a 6-year-old Tiger Woods hitting 250-yard drives, or an 8-year-old Michael Jackson dancing his bejeezus off on Ed Sullivan—gifted children capable of pushing the outer limits of performance and skill. In the end, though, they’re still little kids and mostly emotional midgets. Continue reading →

Ryan Right Choice for Romney

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

The selection of Rep. Paul Ryan to be Gov. Mitt Romney’s running mate was an excellent choice.

Nevertheless, the press corps happily bought into the Obama campaign’s early response that, as the Washington Post’s Dan Balz wrote: “There was no one on Romney’s short list of contenders they wanted to run against more than the chairman of the House Budget Committee.”

The great thing about that statement is: It would have worked no matter whom Romney had picked. In this age of everything anyone has ever said or even thought about anything being available instantaneously on-line, there is no such thing as a candidate that can’t be savaged in a 30 second ad by one SuperPAC or another. Continue reading →

An Essay: Incivility Not A Problem; A Crisis

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

People are not sure what to call it—excessive partisanship, bad behavior, negativism, gridlock, polarization, stridency, intolerance, ideological extremes.

It is collectively, incivility and it is, arguably, worse now than it has been in American history.

Something must be done about it.

Pundits such as the Washington Post’s George Will and the Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone have argued otherwise. Barone, for example, recently bemoaned the bemoaners of what he called ‘hyperpartisanship’ in American politics, suggesting that the problem is not as bad as it may seem and attempts to rectify it in the past have just made matters worse.

Continue reading →

Portman Best VP Pick

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

John Nance Garner, the former Speaker of the House who would be promoted to become Franklin Roosevelt’s Vice President, called the higher job akin to a “warm bucket of spit.”

But that was Garner working with FDR.

A Vice President doesn’t have to just wait around for his boss to keel over. Some Vice Presidents actually do work.

Dick Cheney was an activist Vice President. So was Al Gore, as was George H.W. Bush. Joe Biden strives to be an activist, although he better serves as the Court Jester for Obamaworld.

Continue reading →

More Pinnochios Needed for Ad

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

The SuperPAC supporting Barack Obama, PrioritiesUSA Action, has produced an ad showing a man who claims is wife died of cancer because the steel plant at which he worked was closed by Mitt Romney.

When he lost his job, Joe Soptic says, he lost his health insurance. “A short time later,” he says, his wife got sick, but didn’t tell him because they didn’t have insurance. By the time he took her to the hospital she was diagnosed with cancer from which she died about two weeks later.

Continue reading →

Getting to Know Sikhism

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

A Sikh man wearing a turban.

“The one thing you must know about us. We are not Muslim.” That was the opening statement from the leader of a delegation meeting with my former boss, Speaker Hastert.

In the days following the 9/11 attacks, Sikhs were being attacked by outraged Americans who didn’t have any idea of the vast differences between the turban-wearing Sikhs and Arabs who wear different kinds of headwear.

Speaker Hastert met with a delegation of Sikh leaders and let the media come in to help them publicize their plight. Continue reading →

Campaigns, Conventions, Summer Vacations

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

August in Your Nation’s Capital slows to a crawl. The Congress is gone – which is good news for the Republic. In normal years the President and Vice President head for some shore somewhere.

Well, George W. didn’t. He headed for Crawford, Texas which meant the national press corps got to hang out in Waco for weeks at a time. Compare and contrast that with going to Martha’s Vineyard for a Presidential vacation and you can see why political reporters tend to be Democrats. Continue reading →

Syria is Serious, Indeed

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, abruptly resigned as the special peace envoy to Syria.

Abrupt is the correct word, because Annan’s brief only extended until the end of this month. The current UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, said he would try to find a replacement for Annan to complete the term of the “mandate.”

Annan said, in his statement of resignation: “At a time when we need – when the Syrian people desperately need action – there continues to be finger pointing and name calling in the Security Council.” Continue reading →

Romney’s Olympic Moment

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

One thing we know for certain is that the British can’t handle the truth, especially coming from an American.

Mitt Romney repeated what has been widely reported in the news, even to folks who haven’t been paying much attention, and you would think he said that Queen Elizabeth wears Army boots.

We will see how this Olympics turns out.

Private security couldn’t handle the security, so David Cameron had to mobilize his troops to provide back-up. There were questions if the Immigration Service was going to go on strike.

And let’s face it. London is very crowded and very expensive and pretty broke.

Romney didn’t sugar-coat things. And that caused quite a stir amongst the British tabloids. Continue reading →

Obama “You Didn’t Do That’ Speech Defines Him

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

There has been much written about President Obama’s speech in Roanoke, VA, on July 13. What drew so much attention was this: “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet…”

There is some discussion as to what “that” refers, whether it is the small business or the “unbelievable American system”. But semantics is a distraction.

The debate should be over the speech itself, not its sentence construction. Continue reading →

Hating Business Not Good Business

BY GARY JOHNSON
Reprinted from Loose Change (TCBMag.com)

“Therefore I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous to me, for all is vanity and vexation of the spirit.”—Ecclesiastes 2:17

“Corporations: an ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.” Though Ambrose Bierce, a sensationalist writer working for William Randolph Hearst, said it a century ago, it could easily have shown up on any number of signs at rallies across the United States and Europe this year. If 2011 was the year of the Rabbit, 2012 is the year of Business Haters.

Jack Welch, outspoken and legendary former CEO of General Electric, is touring the country with his wife, which is nice. She’s Suzy, an author and former Harvard Business Review editor. Though General Electric has mostly abandoned Welch’s Continue reading →

Capitalism on Trial

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

The Obama campaign has decided to concentrate all of its fire on Mitt Romney’s years at Bain Capital. As a result, it manufactured story after story about decisions made by Romney and his partners that led to greater profitability at the company, but also the heartache that often comes with that profitability.

For the Obama campaign, this isn’t just about Bain Capital, which most acknowledge was a well-run and ethical company. This is a bigger argument about the nature of capitalism in society today. Continue reading →

Romney Reality Differs from Perception

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

From Cleveland, Ohio
Midwestern Legislative Conference

Donna Brazile and I did our very popular “He said; She said” act in Cleveland for legislators from the Midwest. We will take the act somewhat further on the road next week when we reprise it in Edmonton, Alberta for the Western Legislative Conference.

The buzz among the political cognoscenti is how much damage the Romney campaign has suffered from the attacks on his time at Bain Capital. The problem is, there is no evidence – thus far – that the attacks have had any effect. Continue reading →