Five Ways Barack Obama Could Win A Second Term

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Illinois Review:

 

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By John F. Di Leo -

 

The economy is in a tailspin, with the worst statistics in decades, even after the Administration has made use of every statistical trick to tweak the way the numbers are calculated and reported.

 

With honest reporting, unemployment would be recognized as being close to 20%... the Administration would be recognized for the most mind-blowing corruption in history… and the foreign policy disasters of 2011 would be recognized as having turned over at least two more Middle East countries to the islamofascists and jeopardized our security in countless ways.

 

And yet… while such a record should guarantee the incumbent a resounding Carterite defeat in November, there are still at least five ways in which he could get a second term (not counting the slim possibility of martial law and the termination of free elections).

 

Option One: An Economic Boom

The economy roars back, unemployment plummets, and everybody's happy again. Well, we don’t have to “worry” about this one. The Obama Administration has taken hundreds of steps (you might even say "trillions") to ensure this doesn’t happen, from raising taxes and hidden fees in Obamacare and elsewhere during their glory days of the Pelosi Speakership… to the crippling regulations that have shuttered factories and discouraged start-ups… to the unprecedented borrowing that swiftly dried up America’s investment capital as surely as untold millennia turned the inland sea of the southwest into the desert you know as the Grand Canyon.

 

As miserable as it is to be living this depression, at least we don’t have to worry about economic blessings rebuilding President Obama’s reputation… though he and his spinmeisters will certainly do their best to manipulate the statistics, telling the most gullible among us that a change from a laughably inaccurate 8.6% unemployment rate is improving marvelously to an equally inaccurate 8.3% unemployment rate, even though even this miniscule claimed improvement is well within the margin of error.

No, there’s no doubt about it. This economy isn’t roaring back until some time after the Destroyer-in-Chief is out of office.

 

Option Two: An October Surprise

It is always possible for foreign affairs to make a sudden appearance on the scene at the end, making a president look more decisive, more presidential, more worthy of re-election. This could be a war, or a need for air strikes, or a daring rescue of tourists or college students or businessmen or embassy personnel. In a world as dangerous as ours today, there are dozens of countries in which such an event could appear.

 

And there is no question that some in the White House are analyzing ways to make the most of what occurs, or to manufacture something – something justifiable, worthwhile, and impressive, of course, showcasing America’s righteous use of power in the hands of The One. The ongoing Iranian nuclear threat, the ongoing Venezuelan incursions into Colombian territory (no, on second thought, he won't touch that one), the myriad efforts of islamofasciast terrorists to damage large or small on Western target… all these must present an irresistible temptation to some in the Administration, and if timed right and managed well, they could change the dynamic come Election Day.

Granted, a bad economy usually trumps foreign policy successes, as we remember from George H.W. Bush’s experience, and famously, Winston Churchill's experience across the Pond. But you never know; anything is possible, especially nowadays.

 

Option Three: A Weak Opponent

 

This is a two-party country (anyone who believes in third party involvement or third party voting at the presidential level needs to beware of flying pigs and dancing unicorns). There is therefore only one option for those who want Barack Obama defeated, and that’s the eventual Republican nominee, whoever he or she is.

 

At this point, it is likely – not guaranteed, but almost certain – that the Republican nominee will be someone with severe trouble with the Republican base, whose ability to draw from the middle and to convert Democrats is also suspect. Mitt Romney’s moderate history and Rick Santorum’s big-spending history scare conservatives; Newt Gingrich’s fondness for wacky ideas scares moderates and conservatives alike; Ron Paul’s foreign policy scares everybody.

 

Nobody is perfect, so the primary electorate must weigh their relative weaknesses against each other, hopefully settling on the one whose positives best make up for his negatives, the one they think most likely to convince the most non-Republicans to vote for him. The Republican primary electorate has a record of stubborn squeamishness in this regard, tending toward whomever the conventional wisdom (a.k.a. the enemy) tells them is the safest choice. Hence the Republican Party’s peculiar nomination record: since WWII, amazingly, the conservative party has only nominated two conservatives for the presidency.

 

If the Republican opponent isn’t an absolute dynamo, the combined forces of incumbency and the still-bewitched mainstream media could yet defeat him, despite all evidence. So the choice of a nominee is as important this year as ever.

Many in the punditry believe that anyone can defeat Barack Obama this year, so the primary electorate doesn’t have to be so squeamish this time. Don’t be so sure. And the primary electorate may not even have the final word on the matter; while the odds are severely against it, there could be a brokered convention from which a new dark horse could arise, a remote possibility on which many dreamers are pinning all their hopes this spring.

 

Option Four: Vote Fraud Triumphs

 

Vote fraud always plays a role in American elections. For all the pretenses of corrupt embarrassment Jimmy Carter, who has spent decades flying around the world purporting to be the great arbiter of honest elections (when not further meddling in the housing market at home), American elections have been growing progressively more corrupt since Carter’s presidency.

 

Contrary to the popular belief that the graveyard vote of Chicago is the only mote in the eye of the American political system, there are dozens of different methods for Democrat theft… the old-fashioned graveyard vote of Chicago’s south side is a dusty antique at the back of their toolbox.

Democrats get immigrants, legal and illegal, to vote before they have citizenship. They are famous for filling buses with patronage workers who go from polling place to polling place all day, voting on behalf of dead, moved-away, or downright fictitious names. They hold voter registration drives in prisons, even in states where felons are banned from voting. They have recruited such felons to stand outside polling places and scare voters away. They have been caught abusing the doped and dazed residents of nursing homes, the drunks of skid rows, the mentally handicapped. No form of abuse is too low for the Democrats as they fish for illicit votes (and just in case you’re wondering, there’s no need to fear a libel lawsuit for this paragraph, because court records from coast to coast serve as such clear evidence that a judge would have to toss such a lawsuit as frivolous).

 

Obviously there are honest Democrats, but the corruption of their party is so widespread that vote fraud has occurred – and been prosecuted - in practically every state in the union. In an effort to make fraud harder to catch, they have even done away with elections altogether in some places; Washington state for example has an almost entirely mail-in election, and more and more states use this criminal-enabling method through “early voting” and no-justification absentee voting.

 

While several Republican legislators have taken firm measures in recent years to reduce such fraud by requiring presentation of a state-issued or federal-issued ID to vote in person, few have moved beyond this necessary, but woefully incomplete, starting point.

Most disturbing of all, the Democrats have taken to pushing a program called National Popular Vote (NPV), an end-run around the Electoral College that would eliminate the constitutional protections against vote fraud that isolate each state’s votes.

Under the Electoral College system, no matter how many votes a machine may steal, it can only win its state once. So at least the fraud is isolated.

 

But with NPV, stealing a hundred thousand more than they need in Illinois, New York, or California, for example, would enable them to effectively steal the election by getting Republican states to force their electors to vote for the national popular vote winner even if the Republican won their state. And the NPV effort has already succeeded in getting numerous gullible and corrupt states, and even numerous gullible Republicans (like Illinois' own Jim Edgar!), to sign onto this suicide pact.

If we want a prayer of winning, we must both wipe out vote fraud and reverse the unconstitutional cancer of the National Popular Vote movement.

 

Option Five: The Republican Base Sits It Out.

 

Some Republicans are guaranteed to be dissatisfied with whoever is nominated; there is no question about that. Conservatives will think the candidate is too liberal; moderates may think the candidate is too conservative. Some may fear that the ethnicity, religion or background of the nominee will doom him, so they won’t bother to participate. Some may still vote for him, but won’t work for him, because he’s not their kind of Republican.

 

All these are recipes for disaster.

 

All the Republican needs to win in November is to pick up a few points from the middle. In light of the economic, social, and foreign policy destruction of this four-year national nightmare, there should be no trouble picking up those few points, as long as the Republican base holds together.

 

But if the Republican base is fractured – if we lose five or ten points because our own people aren’t happy – then we’ll never pick up enough converts to make up for it. The Republican base – that means the social conservatives, the economic conservatives, and the foreign policy conservatives, the self-described moderates, from paleocon to neocon to tea partier to libertarian to Rockefellerite – must hold together.

Even if the nominee isn’t perfect – and he won’t be, whoever he is – we need every vote to stop the nightmare. We can concentrate on moving forward afterward, but all patriots must agree that the first step is to stop the bleeding; we must defeat Barack Hussein Obama in November.

 

In Conclusion…

 

Some of this is clearly out of our control. Individual voters can’t change what happens in foreign affairs; can’t convince other states to mandate criminal sentences for vote fraud or to reject the pernicious corruption of NPV. But there is much that we CAN do.

 

We can, and in fact must, apply pressure to states' attorneys, police forces, and legislators in our own states to criminalize fraud and to defeat NPV. We can, and must, work throughout the primaries for whoever we believe to be the strongest candidate, then unite behind the Republican nominee after the convention.

 

And then all patriotic Americans must work through November, toward the election of a Republican president who – whoever he or she is – will most certainly fire Obama’s appointees, retract his executive orders, and sign the bills of the Republican Congress.

And simultaneously, we must work to elect as solid and effective a Republican Congress as possible, because they’ll be the policy drivers. Any Republican president will sign their bills; we need a good Congress to ensure that what they send him is as helpful as we can get.

2012 will not be an end in itself. The revolution that began in 2010 will take decades to accomplish, though it could be killed in its infancy after just two short years, if the Republican side of the divide fails to give it our full effort.

 

As my boss often reminds me at my day job, “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” The Democrats have done the damage they’ve done incrementally; we cannot expect to elect some superhero who can wipe out a century of villainy in a single term. We must change the country’s direction – pulling back from the cliff and setting back on the right course – and we must use the same incrementalism to move back toward the economic prosperity and cultural honor as the Framers designed for us.

 

Faster may well be better and more desirable, but think about it: you don’t get anywhere by staying home, just because you don’t like the speed limit signs along your route.