Salon: Steve Kornacki- ‘The GOP’s Emerging Bob Dole Problem’

Source:Salon Magazine– is Mitt Romney the Bob Dole of 2012?

Source:FreeState MD 

“A flood of new data points to one clear conclusion: At least for now, President Obama and his Republican opponents are heading in opposite directions.

A CBS News/New York Times poll released last night puts Obama’s approval rating at 50 percent — his best performance in that survey since the spring of 2010 (not counting last May’s brief bin Laden bounce). The poll also shows Obama enjoying his best score since the summer of ’10 on his handling of the economy and his best score since at least late 2009 (when the question was first asked) on job creation, and finds voters more optimistic than they’ve been in nearly two years on the overall direction of the economy.

This comports with other recent surveys. According to RealClearPolitics’ database, three polls released in the last two weeks have the president’s job approval at or over 50 percent. Before this, you have to go all the way back to the very end of the bin Laden bounce, in mid-June, to find a single poll with Obama that high. (In that same span, three surveys put his approval rating below 40 percent.) The relationship between Obama’s improving fortunes and the economic headlines of the past few months — declining unemployment since last September punctuated by a jarringly strong January jobs report — seems undeniable.”

From Salon Magazine

Bob Dole probably made a mistake running for President in 1996. He wasn’t too old, but he was pass his time as far as where the country was, who was President and the situation of the country and the fact that he was leading the opposition at a time when the country liked who was in charge. But that he should’ve won in 1988 and I agree with him there.

The Bush attack machine took Leader Dole down in South Carolina. Just like the Romney attack machine took down Newt Gingrich in Florida this year.And had George H.W. Bush team’s not done those things, chances are Bob Dole is the 1988 Republican nominee for president. And Mitt Romney is no longer the frontrunner this year.

Leader Dole in 1996 was trying to convince the country of something they weren’t, which was unhappy: unemployment 5%, high economic growth, falling budget deficit, the country was at peace.

In 2012 what Mitt Romney is trying to do is convince the country of something that Barack Obama isn’t: soft on defense, socialistic, dictator, anti-American, wants to make the country like Europe, etc. I’m not going to layout all the false charges, because hopefully you have better things to do with your time and I would like to keep you awake for the whole post, but you get the idea.

But to tell you this is exactly why the Far-Left doesn’t like President Obama, Occupy Wall Street, the so-called Progressive Caucus, MSNBC talk and company (the real Socialist-McGovernites in America) because Barack Obama isn’t any of these things that the Far-Left in America wants him to be.

While at the same time, Mitt has been unable to convince the country why he should be President and stand up for himself. And answer the charges that are thrown at him. What he does instead is try to change the subject, with his attack machine. And he’s paying a heavy price for it.

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C-SPAN: Washington Journal With Susan Swain- Christopher Hitchens & Tom Davis (1996)

Source:CSPAN– British writer, columnist, author, political satirist Christopher Hitchens.

Source:FreeState MD 

“Hosted by Susan Swain. Rep. Thomas Davis and Mr. Hitchens talked about current issues including the re-election of President Yeltsin and issues pertinent to the Clinton and Dole campaigns. Credit to:CSPAN.”

From CSPAN

To put it simply: the best way to help poor people move to the middle class and become self-sufficient and not need public assistance for their daily survival, is to give them temporary financial assistance and child care, so they can survive in the short-term, yes, but to move them out of poverty, they need education to give them an opportunity to get their GED or go back to high school, as well as go to college like a technical school, so they can get the education and skills that they need, so they can get a good job to support themselves and their family’s. And then finally job placement, help them find a good job that they are qualified for. So they can support themselves and their family’s on their own and no longer need public assistance.

Along with deficit reduction and balancing the Federal budget, Welfare reform of 1996, is President Bill Clinton’s biggest achievement. It moved millions of people who would probably still be on Welfare Insurance today or working multiple minimum wage jobs just to barely survive today.

Had it not been for the 1996 Welfare To Work Law, millions of people who were on Welfare Insurance twenty years ago, now have good jobs today and some of them even own their own business’s or manage a business.

Then Governor Bill Clinton who made Welfare reform a big part of his 1992 presidential campaign, didn’t make a big push to pass a bill out of Congress his first two years. When he had a Democratic Congress, including a forty-seat majority in the House.

Even though President Clinton had good ideas on Welfare reform, like education, job placement, and child care, so these single parents could leave the home to go to school or look for work, his calculation was probably that he would never get the votes at least in the House, because the Far-Left flank in the Democratic Party there would never go along with a bill that had time limits for Welfare deficit reduction, the crime bill, Family Medical Leave and of course the nightmarish debacle of health care reform. All things he passed in his first two years except for health care reform.

It took a Republican Congress for President Clinton to finally incorporate his ideas as well as Republican ideas to make it law. And it was by far the best legislation that a Republican Congress in modern times has ever passed.

What we tried in the 1930s and 1960s with anti-poverty programs, where you essentially just give low-income low-skilled people money and expect nothing from them, that the “cycle of poverty” would just go away on its own, clearly did not work.

Sixty-years later poverty was still a big problem in America which is why it was reformed. But in the 1990s we finally saw record reductions in poverty down to as low as 13%. One of those reasons being the economic expansion of that decade. But if you’re low-income and low-skilled, you won’t see the benefits of any economic expansion. Which is a big reason why Welfare reform was so important, because it empowered low-skilled people to get the skills that they need to get themselves out of poverty and into the middle class.

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