What We Know

Reclamation
Aides to the president said Mr. Obama would use the final days of campaigning to deliver his closing argument. A spokesman for the campaign said the president would focus on the need to “reclaim” middle-class security after a decade of policies that have “undercut” the lives of many Americans. (NYT, 11/1/2012)

A decade of policies? Well, OK, let's do the math. Obama owns 40% of that decade.


Shifted
Much of the Democratic Party’s vast reservoir of condescension is currently focused on women, who are urged not to trouble their pretty little heads about actual problems but instead to worry that, 52 years after birth control pills went on the market and 47 years after access to contraception became a constitutional right, reproductive freedom is at risk. This insult may explain the shift of women toward Romney. (George Will, Washington Post, 10/31/2012)

Will's piece today brilliantly makes the case for the defeat of Obama. We could quote the entire column - the references to Biden are just hilarious - but this paragraph caught our eye. Democrats pander to women no less than they pander to blacks, Latinos, students, teachers, you name it. 


Lurking
But beneath the last-minute embrace of comity lurks a central fact about American politics now: Democrats, a more moderate and diverse party, believe in compromise far more than Republicans do.

While polls find that six in 10 Democrats regard themselves as moderate or conservative, nearly three-quarters of Republicans say they are conservative. And tea-party Republicans, who loom so large in primaries, are especially averse to giving any ground. (E.J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post, 10/31/2012)

Meanwhile Dionne serves up this whopper. We especially note the Democrats compromise on healthcare (see Coulter below).


Freeze Frame
The reason we have Obamacare is not because the public was clamoring for the federal government to take over health care. It's because the Democrats had 60 senators. In the frozen ideology of the left, it doesn't matter if anyone wants government health care. 

Democrats had been waiting around for 50 years to win huge majorities in the House and Senate and the presidency, so they could check off this box on "FDR's Unfinished Business." 

Unlike all other major legislation in the nation's history, Obamacare was passed exclusively by one party that had just won an aberrationally large majority in Congress. Not a single Republican in either the House or Senate voted for it. (Ann Coulter, 11/1/2012)

Now that is what Dionne calls compromise!


Shape Shift
In a surprise announcement, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Thursday that Hurricane Sandy had reshaped his thinking about the presidential campaign, and he announced that he was endorsing President Obama.    Mr. Bloomberg, a political independent in this third term leading New York City, has been sharply critical of both Mr. Obama, a Democrat, and Mitt Romney, the president’s Republican rival, saying that both men have failed to candidly confront the problems afflicting the nation. But he said he had decided over the past several days that Mr. Obama was the best candidate to tackle the global climate change that the mayor believes contributed to the violent storm, which took the lives of at least 37 New Yorkers and caused billions of dollars in damage. (NYT, 11/1/2012)

Proving the necessity of term limits, Mayor Bloomberg serves up this gem. "I was undecided about the candidates until Hurricane Sandy came along and then it hit me." If the election had taken place one week sooner, New York's most confused billionaire could have endorsed Romney saying: "Well the weather has been seasonal, therefore I support Mitt."