ATLANTA'S BLACK VOTERS WANT
CHANGE; WILL SUPPORT GOP IN 2016 (REAL VOTERS SPEAK OUT):
LIVE
INTERVIEWS FROM BLACK VOTERS IN EAST POINT, GEORGIA.
EAST POINT, GEORGIA NEEDS JOBS & COMMUNITY INVESTMENTS.
Due to failing
"OBAMANOMICS" policies and Democrat Politicians refusing to invest
back into communities heavily populated with BLACK lower income constituents,
many BLACK voters are strongly considering casting their ballots for a GOP
Presidential candidate in 2016.
Some young Employed BLACK Men
interviewed in the video posted above explain why they will indeed vote for a
Republican President this Fall.
One of the Men I interviewed in this video is originally from CHICAGO.
*** By the way CRIME and
Unemployment in East Point, Georgia is extremely HIGH.
The quality of Drinking and
Bathing WATER in East Point, Georgia is grade Fair to Poor. Especially in
communities further away from the Camp Creek Marketplace near College Park.
21st CENTURY OLDER BLACK DEMOCRATS OPPOSE CHANGE - 2016 ELECTION:
THOMAS SOWELL SAYS "INSANITY POLITICS" EQUALS NO CHANGE, NO RESULTS.
The late Scientist Albert Einstein once defined the word "INSANITY" as doing the same thing over and over again, while expecting DIFFERENT results.
The word "CHANGE" is defined as Being DIFFERENT.
However for most BLACK Democrat voters the word "CHANGE" is a dirty word especially as it relates to Politics.
Most older BLACK Democrats appear to be resistant to CHANGE and lack Objectivity in their thinking.
Perhaps this explains why Pres OBAMA targeted Younger voters in 2008 and 2012.
In fact most Older BLACK Democrats would rather DIE from a terrible disease then to consider supporting a REPUBLICAN candidate, even if voting for that GOP candidate is in the best interest of BLACK voters.
Will Older BLACK Democrat voters open their minds to CHANGE?
Or will they allow their Stubbornness to Silence and Devalue the voices of future BLACK Democrat voters?
In the article below Mr THOMAS SOWELL, a BLACK Social Theorist and Political Philosopher from North Carolina explains in detail why BLACK voters continue to foolishly cast their ballots for DEMOCRAT candidates.
Thomas Sowell discusses Black voters’ allegiance to the Democratic party and the failure of the GOP to make a robust case for Black votes.
Blacks have been the Democrats’ most reliable voting bloc for the last 50 years.
And let’s face it, with Barack Obama in the White House, that’s not going to change in the near future.
On the national level, Democrats typically get around 90 percent of the Black vote, even when a Black man isn’t running for president as a Democrat.
Al Gore got 92 percent of the Black vote in 2000; John Kerry got 88 percent in 2004.
These percentages aren’t just impressive; for Democrats, they’re imperative.
Since 1980, the percentage of White votes received by the Democrats’ candidate for president has usually hovered around 39 percent.
Unless Democrats maintain a vise grip on at least 90 percent of the Black vote, the party’s presidential prospects usually fade to oblivion. Both parties know this.
If the GOP peeled off just 5 or 10 percent of the Black vote, Democrats would be in perpetual electoral jeopardy, and not just at the presidential level.
Dr. Sowell discusses a few of the reasons why Blacks who support Democrats are voting against self- interest (and makes a more persuasive case than Thomas Frank did in What’s the Matter with Kansas? regarding Kansans’ support of the Republican party).
There are many more reasons. Consider just the following:
* Large, Arbitrary Minimum Wage Increases.
Milton Friedman once said that “We regard the minimum wage as one of the most, if not the most, anti-Black laws on the statute books.”
(A good argument can be made that the minimum wage vies for this title with the Davis-Bacon Act — uniformly supported by Democrats — mandating that prevailing wages be paid on government construction projects and passed for the express purpose of preventing blacks from competing with whites on public-works jobs.)
Sharp increases in the minimum wage price unskilled workers out of the labor market, a dislocation that falls most heavily on young black males.
Such increases impair the ability of unskilled workers to get the entry-level jobs that are the first rungs on the ladder of upward job mobility.
As someone once said, a wage, minimum or otherwise, presumes a job. Public Education and School Choice.
Millions of black kids are trapped in medieval public schools that are insulated from competition and suffocated by union rules.
Yet Democrats resist meaningful choice, insisting instead on that infallible remedy, “full funding.” #more#They’re encouraged, apparently, by how well that solution has worked in places like Newark, which spends $18,000 per student — among the most of any major public school system — but where only 30 percent of 8th graders can pass the annual proficiency test in math.
Or perhaps they’re brightened by the example of the D.C. public-school system, which also has among the highest per-pupil expenditures in the nation yet perennially returns among the lowest test scores.
Less than 25 percent of black 17-year-olds can read as well as the average white 17-year-old. Nearly 90 percent of black 17-year-olds score below the average white 17-year-old in math.
More than 90 percent of black 17-year-olds score below the average white 17-year-old in science.
The average black 17-year-old has the academic proficiency of the average white 8th grader.
These figures have proven impervious to increased spending.
In fact, in some cases the gap has widened as public school spending — in constant dollars — has increased.
But Democrats, beholden to unions, continue to oppose school choice and meaningful reform, thereby consigning another generation of blacks to educational purgatory. Affirmative Action.
Democrats are champions of racial preferences (see Eric Holder’s directive to the Dayton Police Department).
Since racial preferences in, e.g., college admissions most heavily favor blacks, it would appear, at first blush, that Black votes for Democrats are indeed self-interested.
But evidence continues to accumulate that affirmative action may be one of the greatest scams perpetrated on Blacks.
Studies by, for example, the Center for Equal Opportunity show that the racial preferences employed by some college admissions offices boost a Black applicant’s odds of admission over a similarly-situated white comparative by a factor of 200, often much more.
This results in what UCLA law professor Richard Sander calls the “mismatch effect” — i.e., Black students being admitted at schools in which they’re poorly qualified to compete.
Consequently, Black students are more likely to perform poorly and flunk out.
For example, Prof. Sander found that 50 percent of Black law students settle in the bottom 10 percent of their respective classes.
Black law students are two and a half times more likely than whites not to graduate, four times more likely not to pass the bar exam. Welfare and the War on Poverty.
Were this a shooting war, the Democrats would have surrendered in 1965.
As it stands, after 45 years and several trillion dollars, misguided if well-intended liberal policies have contributed to a toxic culture of grievance and dependency that, while not confined to a particular race, has been especially damaging to the Black underclass.
The list of issue conflicts between Democrats’ policy positions and the interests of black voters goes on and on: illegal immigration, abortion, Social Security reform, to name a few.
But don’t expect any noteworthy changes in Black voter allegiance in the near term.
A comment made by a Black law student after an affirmative-action debate in which I participated a few years ago illustrates just one of the many obstacles faced by Republicans.
The student acknowledged that affirmative action often harms its purported beneficiaries and that its proponents are, as he put it, “condescending and insulting.”
Even so, he asked. “How can we (blacks) support Republicans given the Republicans’ history toward blacks in this country?”
I pointed out that it wasn’t the GOP that had opposed Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
Nor was it Republicans who opposed the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery or the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing equal protection or the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteeing voting rights.
It wasn’t Republicans who opposed Teddy Roosevelt’s anti-lynching legislation, or that filibustered or otherwise opposed more than a dozen anti-lynching bills in the last century.
Republicans didn’t institutionalize Jim Crow or implement school segregation, poll taxes, or literacy tests. Bull Connor, Lester Maddox, Orval Faubus, and George Wallace weren’t Republicans.
* A higher percentage of Republicans voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act than did Democrats.
The student and the other Black students gathered around looked surprised.
One confessed that she would’ve bet that “Democrats” should be substituted for “Republicans” in each of the examples.
The GOP’s record concerning Blacks is far from unassailable, but that doesn’t explain black allegiance to Democrats.
That allegiance won’t change — Allen West and Tim Scott notwithstanding — as long as President Obama is the Democrats’ standard bearer.
And as long as Republicans don’t make an effort for the vote.
BLACK LOUISIANA SENATOR ELBERT GUILLORY SWITCHES TO REPUBLICAN PARTY:
HE WAS BORN BLACK, NOT A DEMOCRAT.
GUILLORY EXPLAINS WHY HE SWITCHED FROM DEMOCRAT PARTY TO SUPPORTING THE GOP.
Louisiana Senator Elbert Guillory (R-Opelousas) explains why he recently switched from the Democrat Party to the Republican Party. He discusses the history of the Republican Party, founded as an Abolitionist Movement in 1854. Guillory talks about how the welfare state is only a mechanism for politicians to control the Black community.
Louisiana state Sen. Elbert Guillory has switched political parties to become the first black Republican senator in the state since Reconstruction. The now-former Democrat from Opelousas made the announcement Friday in Baton Rouge at the @large conference, an event aimed at attracting black conservatives to the GOP.
"Is it a surprise, or is it the worst-kept secret in Louisiana? I am, as of this day, joining Frederick Douglass as a Republican," Guillory said at the event, after accepting the group's "Frederick Douglass" award.
This isn't the first time Guillory has made the party switch -- he became a Democrat in 2007 when he first ran for the state House of Representatives. However, his voting record remained staunchly conservative.
Last year Guillory, who heads the Senate Retirement Committee, carried the bills containing Gov. Bobby Jindal's proposed retirement overhaul, which was strongly opposed by Democrats.
On Friday, Guillory said he had come to disagree with the direction of the Louisiana Democratic Party, which he referred to as "the party of disappointment." He expressed his opposition with the party's stances on abortion, the Second Amendment, education and immigration.
"Today, the party of disappointment has moved away from the majority of Louisiana.
They have moved away from the traditional values of most Americans," he said. "Their policies have encouraged the high teen birth rates, high school drop out rates, high incarceration rates and very high unemployment rates."
After the event, Guillory shed some light on his decision, saying remarks by the state party chair this week influenced his decision.
During debate Wednesday on a bill to expand Medicaid coverage in Louisiana, Sen. Karen Carter Peterson said fellow lawmakers had told her they based their opposition to the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, on the race of the president and not on policy.
"The accusations of racism this week certainly helped push me over the edge. I thought that they were over the edge," Guillory said in an interview Friday. "It just showed me just how far out of tune I was, I am, with the Democrat Party."
The remarks were made Wednesday, the same day Guillory filed his paperwork to change parties.
Speaking after Guillory at the conference on Friday, Louisiana Republican Party Chair Roger Villere again called on Peterson to resign as head of the state Democratic Party.
"The bottom line is that it's never appropriate to demonize and even infer someone is racist for disagreeing with the president," Villere said. "Trust me, we have plenty of reasons to oppose Obamacare and race is not one of them."
The Democratic Party reacted swiftly to the announcement, characterizing Guillory's defection "a craven display of political opportunism" and calling on him to resign.
"This move isn't surprising given Guillory's record of saying one thing to his constituents and then voting another way," Stephen Handwerk, executive director of the Louisiana Democratic Party, said in a statement Friday.
"He should do the right thing and step down from his seat immediately since he has chosen to abandon the Democratic Party values that the voters elected him to represent."
Katrina Jackson, head of the Legislative Black Caucus also responded to the news, saying Guillory remains a "full-fledged member" and that inclusion in the group is not based on political party.
Guillory will be the only Republican member of the caucus.
With just one week of the 2013 session left -- and with a conservative voting record as precedent -- it is unclear what impact, if any, Guillory's party switch will mean for this year's remaining legislation.
Republicans already held a majority of the 39 seats in the state Senate. With Guillory, their numbers will increase to 25.
BLACK OLDER DEMOCRATS HATE CHANGE - 2016 ELECTION:
(INSANITY POLITICS)
The late Scientist Albert Einstein once defined the word "INSANITY" as doing the same thing over and over again, while expecting DIFFERENT results.
The word "CHANGE" is defined as Being DIFFERENT.
However for most BLACK Democrat voters the word "CHANGE" is a dirty word especially as it relates to Politics.
Most older BLACK Democrats appear to be resistant to CHANGE and lack Objectivity in their thinking.
Perhaps this explains why Pres OBAMA targeted Younger voters in 2008 and 2012.
In fact most Older BLACK Democrats would rather DIE from a terrible disease then to consider supporting a REPUBLICAN candidate, even if voting for that GOP candidate is in the best interest of BLACK voters.
Will Older BLACK Democrat voters open their minds to CHANGE?
Or will they allow their Stubbornness to Silence and Devalue the voices of future BLACK Democrat voters?
Thomas Sowell discusses Black voters’ allegiance to the Democratic party and the failure of the GOP to make a robust case for black votes.
Blacks have been the Democrats’ most reliable voting bloc for the last 50 years.
And let’s face it, with Barack Obama in the White House, that’s not going to change in the near future.
On the national level, Democrats typically get around 90 percent of the black vote, even when a black man isn’t running for president as a Democrat.
Al Gore got 92 percent of the Black vote in 2000; John Kerry got 88 percent in 2004.
These percentages aren’t just impressive; for Democrats, they’re imperative.
Since 1980, the percentage of white votes received by the Democrats’ candidate for president has usually hovered around 39 percent.
Unless Democrats maintain a vise grip on at least 90 percent of the black vote, the party’s presidential prospects usually fade to oblivion. Both parties know this.
If the GOP peeled off just 5 or 10 percent of the black vote, Democrats would be in perpetual electoral jeopardy, and not just at the presidential level.
Dr. Sowell discusses a few of the reasons why blacks who support Democrats are voting against self- interest (and makes a more persuasive case than Thomas Frank did in What’s the Matter with Kansas? regarding Kansans’ support of the Republican party).
There are many more reasons. Consider just the following: Large, Arbitrary Minimum Wage Increases.
Milton Friedman once said that “We regard the minimum wage as one of the most, if not the most, anti-black laws on the statute books.” (A good argument can be made that the minimum wage vies for this title with the Davis-Bacon Act — uniformly supported by Democrats — mandating that prevailing wages be paid on government construction projects and passed for the express purpose of preventing blacks from competing with whites on public-works jobs.)
Sharp increases in the minimum wage price unskilled workers out of the labor market, a dislocation that falls most heavily on young black males.
Such increases impair the ability of unskilled workers to get the entry-level jobs that are the first rungs on the ladder of upward job mobility.
As someone once said, a wage, minimum or otherwise, presumes a job. Public Education and School Choice. Millions of black kids are trapped in medieval public schools that are insulated from competition and suffocated by union rules.
Yet Democrats resist meaningful choice, insisting instead on that infallible remedy, “full funding.” #more#They’re encouraged, apparently, by how well that solution has worked in places like Newark, which spends $18,000 per student — among the most of any major public school system — but where only 30 percent of 8th graders can pass the annual proficiency test in math.
Or perhaps they’re brightened by the example of the D.C. public-school system, which also has among the highest per-pupil expenditures in the nation yet perennially returns among the lowest test scores.
Less than 25 percent of black 17-year-olds can read as well as the average white 17-year-old.
Nearly 90 percent of black 17-year-olds score below the average white 17-year-old in math.
More than 90 percent of black 17-year-olds score below the average white 17-year-old in science.
The average black 17-year-old has the academic proficiency of the average white 8th grader.
These figures have proven impervious to increased spending. In fact, in some cases the gap has widened as public school spending — in constant dollars — has increased.
But Democrats, beholden to unions, continue to oppose school choice and meaningful reform, thereby consigning another generation of blacks to educational purgatory. Affirmative Action.
Democrats are champions of racial preferences (see Eric Holder’s directive to the Dayton Police Department).
Since racial preferences in, e.g., college admissions most heavily favor blacks, it would appear, at first blush, that black votes for Democrats are indeed self-interested.
But evidence continues to accumulate that affirmative action may be one of the greatest scams perpetrated on blacks.
Studies by, for example, the Center for Equal Opportunity show that the racial preferences employed by some college admissions offices boost a black applicant’s odds of admission over a similarly-situated white comparative by a factor of 200, often much more.
This results in what UCLA law professor Richard Sander calls the “mismatch effect” — i.e., black students being admitted at schools in which they’re poorly qualified to compete.
Consequently, black students are more likely to perform poorly and flunk out.
For example, Prof. Sander found that 50 percent of black law students settle in the bottom 10 percent of their respective classes.
Black law students are two and a half times more likely than whites not to graduate, four times more likely not to pass the bar exam. Welfare and the War on Poverty.
Were this a shooting war, the Democrats would have surrendered in 1965.
As it stands, after 45 years and several trillion dollars, misguided if well-intended liberal policies have contributed to a toxic culture of grievance and dependency that, while not confined to a particular race, has been especially damaging to the black underclass.
The list of issue conflicts between Democrats’ policy positions and the interests of black voters goes on and on: illegal immigration, abortion, Social Security reform, to name a few.
But don’t expect any noteworthy changes in black voter allegiance in the near term.
A comment made by a black law student after an affirmative-action debate in which I participated a few years ago illustrates just one of the many obstacles faced by Republicans.
The student acknowledged that affirmative action often harms its purported beneficiaries and that its proponents are, as he put it, “condescending and insulting.”
Even so, he asked. “How can we (blacks) support Republicans given the Republicans’ history toward blacks in this country?”
I pointed out that it wasn’t the GOP that had opposed Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
Nor was it Republicans who opposed the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery or the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing equal protection or the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteeing voting rights.
It wasn’t Republicans who opposed Teddy Roosevelt’s anti-lynching legislation, or that filibustered or otherwise opposed more than a dozen anti-lynching bills in the last century.
Republicans didn’t institutionalize Jim Crow or implement school segregation, poll taxes, or literacy tests. Bull Connor, Lester Maddox, Orval Faubus, and George Wallace weren’t Republicans.
A higher percentage of Republicans voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act than did Democrats.
The student and the other black students gathered around looked surprised.
One confessed that she would’ve bet that “Democrats” should be substituted for “Republicans” in each of the examples.
The GOP’s record concerning blacks is far from unassailable, but that doesn’t explain Black allegiance to Democrats.
That allegiance won’t change — Allen West and Tim Scott notwithstanding — as long as President Obama is the Democrats’ standard bearer.
And as long as Republicans don’t make an effort for the vote.
Nyi Nyi Aung learned the news just before sunrise Saturday: The woman who has inspired him in his two-decade-long struggle was free.
Myanmar's military rulers released democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest Saturday, and across the globe, hope stirred again in the hearts of those who have been advocating for change in the authoritarian nation.
"She is the only one who has the patience, the ideas on how to solve the problem in Burma," Nyi Nyi said, refusing to use the name for his country favored by the junta.
But amid the joy, Nyi Nyi, a resident of the Washington area, voiced the same cautious optimism that rang from all corners.
Was Suu Kyi's release conditional? What will she be able to accomplish under the thumb of a hardline dictatorship that has stamped out voices of opposition and just held an election that has been widely criticized as a sham?
This was the third time the regime has released Suu Kyi from house arrest. Benjamin Zawacki, Myanmar expert for Amnesty International, noted that her last release had been unconditional and then she was thrown again into house arrest.
He said conditions could be rolled out as events on the ground unfold, and the government could interpret a given event or act as a justification to make an arrest.
Zawacki also labeled the move as a political calculation.
The regime is trying to reinvent itself as democratic, he said, first with the elections last Sunday and now with Suu Kyi's release.
There is concern, he said, that other countries will take the regime's bait and lessen their resolve to continue to take tough actions in the sanctions and human rights arenas.
Among those concerned is Nyi Nyi, who appealed on behalf of the Burmese people for nations like the United States to maintain pressure on Myanmar's regime to implement change.
"We are planning to stand by [Suu Kyi]," he said. "But we need everyone to keep up the pressure."
Michael Green, a Center for Strategic and International Studies expert on Asia and a senior Asia adviser to former President George W. Bush, said the move was calculated precisely to forestall international isolation punishment, including a possible U.N. commission that would probe human rights abuses.
It was not at all a sign, he said, that the regime is trying to patch things up with its internal rivals.
"I think the starting premise for this is the incredible loathing and fear that this regime has for Aung San Suu Kyi," Green said. "It knows almost no bounds. You can discount that this is a gesture at international reconciliation."
The audience for the move, he said, was external, a conscious effort to "drive a wedge" between countries that are inclined to support Myanmar, such as India and China, and countries such as the United States, Japan, Australia and European nations, which want tough action.
The hardline military junta took power in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, in 1962. It's difficult to predict what will transpire in the days and weeks ahead, but most agree that Suu Kyi's release is not likely to spur change right away.
"This is, at best, a single step forward on the proverbial thousand-mile journey," said Jared Genser, one of Suu Kyi's lawyers who is based in the United States.
"We should recall she's been out on numerous occasions before over the last 21 years, and nothing has changed in the country. And indeed, in the last several years, the military regime in Burma has not taken even a single step to try to demonstrate its willingness to compromise," he said.
Still, Nyo Ohn Myint, a committee leader in Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party, said there is no doubt that Saturday's release is a key moment in modern Myanmar history.
The regime is at a political crossroads, he said. It could be that Myanmar's generals are feeling overly confident after the election, an issue Myint said is a priority on Suu Kyi's agenda. Her release again puts momentum on the side of the opposition.
"She has tremendous political power," Myint said about his friend of two decades. "This is not the end of the story, only the beginning of the struggle."
Meanwhile, human rights activists as well as global leaders -- including President Obama -- reminded the world that there is a long struggle ahead to secure basic freedoms for the people of Myanmar.
Despite Suu Kyi's release, more than 2,200 other political prisoners were still sitting behind bars in Myanmar jails.
Navi Pillay, the U.N. human rights commissioner, called Suu Kyi's release a "positive signal" that the Myanmar authorities are willing to move forward with the serious challenge of democratic transition.
"Clearly, Aung San Suu Kyi can make a major contribution to this process," Pillay said, adding her disappointment that Suu Kyi was not allowed to participate in the elections.
She urged the authorities to release the other political prisoners as "a clear sign that the new government intends to respect human rights and forge a new future for the country."
For Nyi Nyi, the matter is highly personal.
He himself spent time in jail in Myanmar for his activism, and his mother, Sann Sann Tin, has been imprisoned since she was arrested in protests in 2007. Not a day goes by that he doesn't think of his 63-year-old mother's plight.
That's why the joy of seeing the images of Suu Kyi again addressing her supporters was marred.
"That's why we don't think of it as freedom for Burma," he said.
Axelrod reacts to Tuesday’s elections. Senior White House Adviser David Axelrod discusses whether Tuesday’s election results are a reflection of the first year of the Obama administration.
The White House distanced itself Wednesday from Democratic losses in two states, saying the races for governor hinged on local issues and were not a referendum on President Barack Obama.
The Republican victories Tuesday in Virginia and New Jersey energized the opposition and are a setback for Obama as he struggles to overhaul the U.S. health care system, win passage of climate change legislation, and build political support for his handling of the war in Afghanistan.
They could also be ominous for Democrats ahead of next year's midterm elections, when a third of the Senate, all of the House of Representatives and most governorships are on the ballot.
But White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that voters in both states went to the polls to work through "very local issues that didn't involve the president."
The presidential spokesman said that voters were concerned about the economy. He said "I don't think the president needed an election or an exit poll to come to that conclusion."
Tuesday's elections marked some good news for Republicans, who lost control of Congress in 2006 and lost the White House last year. It will help them raise money and recruit candidates to prepare for next year's election.
GOP finds its voice?
Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele said the victories demonstrated "a transcendent party" that was on the move again.
Steele told CBS's "The Early Show" that he believes the Republican Party has "really found its voice again" after sustaining damaging losses last year.
In Virginia, Bob McDonnell, a former conservative state attorney general, easily defeated R. Creigh Deeds to become the state's first Republican governor in eight years. The state, once a Republican stronghold, had elected Democratic senators in 2006 and 2008. Last year, Obama was the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since 1964. McDonnell won with nearly 59 percent of the vote.
McDonnell's Republican supporters were delirious. A victory party crowd screamed, waved signs and chanted "Go, Bob, go!" when he was declared the victor.
In a news conference on Wednesday, McDonnell announced his transition team, led by fellow Republican Bill Boling, who was re-elected lieutenant governor on Tuesday. McDonnell was also asked about the national implications of his victory.
“We made a decision early on after talking to people all around the state that what Virginians are interested in are jobs and the economy, kitchen table issues,” he said. “I can say that what we found is that people are less interested in partisanship than in results."
In the traditionally Democratic state of New Jersey, Republican Chris Christie, a former corruption-busting federal prosecutor, narrowly defeated Gov. Jon Corzine, a billionaire former Wall Street executive, by a margin of 49 percent to 45 percent. Independent candidate Chris Daggett had about 6 percent.
In both states, independent voters who had been crucial to Obama's victory last year voted overwhelmingly for the Republican candidate.
Democrats took some solace by winning the closely watched special election for a Republican-held vacant seat in the 23rd Congressional District in New York state that highlighted fissures between moderates and conservatives in Republican ranks.
Long before Tuesday's vote, the White House rejected suggestions that the gubernatorial elections would be tantamount to referendums on Obama. Indeed, the votes took place in just two of the 50 U.S. states. Local issues and personalities dominated campaigns.
Still, exit polls showed more than four in 10 voters in Virginia said their view of Obama factored into their choice. Those voters roughly split between expressing support and opposition for the president. The Obama factor was similar in New Jersey, though there were slightly more voters who said the president did not factor into their choice.
Obama had inserted himself into the races, campaigning for both Corzine and Deeds and appearing in their advertisements. But Obama's popularity has faded some since the early days of the presidency and clearly wasn't strong enough to make a difference in the campaigns.
That point will not be lost on moderate Democrats seeking re-election in conservative districts and states. They may be reluctant to back Obama on issues like climate change and health care if it means antagonizing local voters — especially if Obama lacks the political heft to carry them through the next election.
Interviews with voters leaving polling stations in both Virginia and New Jersey were filled with reasons for Democrats to be concerned and for Republicans to be optimistic, particularly about independents, who often determine the outcomes of U.S. elections.
Independents turn back on Dems
Independents played a critical role in Obama's victory last year. But after more than a year of recession, they fled from Democrats in the two states, where the economy trumped all other issues.
Associated Press exit polls showed that nearly a third of voters in Virginia described themselves as independents, and nearly as many in New Jersey did. They preferred McDonnell by almost a 2-1 margin over Deeds in Virginia, and Christie over Corzine by a similar margin.
Last year, independents split between Obama and Republican John McCain in both states.
Democratic Party Chairman Tim Kaine said the shift among independent voters was difficult to interpret.
"We're going to have to scratch our heads a little bit on that one," he told CNN. He added that Obama continues to enjoy even stronger support among independent voters than he has in the past.
In both states, the surveys also suggested the Democrats had difficulty turning out their base, including the large numbers of first-time minority and youth voters whom Obama attracted.
In other races Tuesday, voters in the northeastern state of Maine rejected a state law that would allow same-sex couples to wed. If supporters had prevailed, it would have marked the first time that the electorate in any state endorsed gay marriage.
With 87 percent of the precincts reporting, gay-marriage foes had 53 percent of the vote.
A number of cities selected mayors. Billionaire Michael Bloomberg won a third term as New York mayor in a closer-than-expected race against a Democratic challenger who stoked voter resentment over the way the incumbent changed the city's term-limits law so he could stay in office.
With all precincts reporting, Bloomberg defeated city comptroller William Thompson Jr. 51 percent to 46 percent.
Bloomberg called it a "hard-fought victory in a very difficult year" and promised that New Yorkers "ain't seen nothing yet" from him.
"I'm committed to working twice as hard in the next four years as I did in the past eight," Bloomberg said.
I had arranged to meet David Plouffe on Saturday afternoon at a Starbucks on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington. The night before, a copy of his new book, The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory, was waiting for me when I checked into my hotel at midnight. I flipped it open, read a few lines and was hooked. I spent the rest of the night reading it.
Plouffe has written the most important political book of the year (for reasons I'll get to in a moment). It's also completely gripping. It reads like a thriller. Even though you know how it ends, you quickly get caught up in every twist and turn of perhaps the most remarkable campaigns in American history.
Along the way, I found myself tearing up when I read about the campaign volunteer who had scrimped and saved ("Grabbed some ramen on the weekends... Didn't take the girl to a movie") so he could donate ten dollars to Obama, and laughed at the funny-in-retrospect tales from the trail (like David Axelrod's BlackBerry crashing at a crucial moment because of glazed donut getting stuck in the trackwheel.)
But it's not the insider look at the past that makes the book so important. It's what it shows us about the present -- and the effect it could have on the future.
Plouffe's book arrives at a crossroads moment for the administration -- exactly one year after the election, and one year before the 2010 midterms. A lot has happened in that year, as the audacity of winning has given way to the timidity of governing. But in recounting how the campaign team -- and the candidate -- not only had the audacity to win but was able to keep that audacity alive, day in and day out over the long nearly-two-year slog of the campaign, Plouffe has also shown the Obama White House the way forward.
The book is a powerful reminder of what the country voted for last year -- and could serve as the trigger for Obama and his team to refocus and remember why the election mattered so much.
Most of the attention the book has gotten so far has focused on the so-called "sexy" parts -- the saga of Reverend Wright, the furor over Bittergate, how Obama came to pick Biden over Hillary for VP. All of which is serving to obscure the key takeaway from the book: the fact that everything in the campaign flowed, as Plouffe puts it, from Obama's conviction that "the country needed deep, fundamental change; Washington wasn't thinking long-term... the special interests and lobbyists had too much power, and the American people needed to once again trust and engage in their democracy."
Plouffe hits this theme again and again in the book. And it's the first thing we talked about when we met (me looking bleary-eyed from my night of reading and underlining and writing in the margins; Plouffe looking relaxed and refreshed, a far-cry from the profoundly exhausted look he had the last time I saw him, in the midst of the presidential run).
The book is "not a victory lap," he tells me. "It's a reminder of how and why we won. We never forgot why we were running. That was our North Star. And we held that North Star in our sights at all times. We made many mistakes along the way, but we always remembered that we were running because, as Barack put it, the dream so many generations had fought for was slipping away."
Axelrod -- or "Ax" as Plouffe refers to him throughout the book -- summed up at the beginning of the campaign the core elements of the message that would guide them: "change versus a broken status quo; people versus the special interests; a politics that would lift people and the country up; and a president who would not forget the middle class."
Running a different kind of campaign became "shorthand" for the campaign. Whenever they found themselves drifting towards standard political behavior, they'd ask themselves: "If we do this, how is that running a different kind of campaign?"
As Plouffe told me: "We made sure that everyone we hired internalized our core message and defaulted to those touch points when making decisions. For our break-the-rules strategy to work, we all had to remain faithful to its principles all the time."
Plouffe kept returning to the mistakes they made, but only to highlight the campaign's saving grace -- its ability to course-correct, a vital survival mechanism for any successful campaign. Or successful White House.
Early in the book, Plouffe describes a tense meeting with the candidate in April 2007, after it became clear that Obama was having a hard time connecting with voters turning out to see him. Ax, Plouffe, and Peter Rouse were brutally honest with him. And the candidate agreed about the need "to find his authentic voice and reconnect with the fundamental concerns that drew him into the race in the first place. He had run to challenge the bankrupt and conventional politics of Washington, not master it."
Then there was the senior staff meeting after their dismal showing in Pennsylvania, where Obama announced: "I want us to get our mojo back. We've got to remember who we are."
Plouffe also mentions the difficult decision made right before the Iowa primary to decline John Kerry's offer to endorse Obama -- a move campaign insiders felt was the wrong message to send to voters looking for change. "In the end," writes Plouffe, "the tough decision we made was unquestionably the correct one. Just about every time we took the road less traveled, we benefited."
That included the decision, which Plouffe fought hard for, to have the campaign headquartered in Chicago because "D.C. is a swamp of conventional wisdom and insiders that can suck a campaign down, and we needed to think differently." Maybe the answer to the last nine months is to move the White House to Chicago.
Indeed, reading the book, I often found myself wondering what Candidate Obama would think of President Obama. Would he look at what the White House is doing and say, "that's what I and my supporters worked so hard for?"
How did the candidate who got into the race because he'd decided that "the core leadership had turned rotten" and that "the people were getting hosed" become the president who has decided that the American people can only have as much change as Olympia Snowe will allow?
How did the candidate who told a stadium of supporters in Denver that "the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result" become the president who has surrounded himself with the same old players trying the same old politics, expecting a different result?
How could a president whose North Star as a candidate was that he "would not forget the middle class" choose as his chief economic advisor a man who recently argued against extending unemployment benefits in the middle of the worst economic times since the Great Depression?
I'm referring, of course, to Larry Summers. According to a White House official I spoke with -- later confirmed by sources in the White House and on the Hill -- Summers was against the extension. And it took a lot of Congressional pushing back behind the scenes for the president to overrule him.
And, according to another senior White House official, when foreclosures or job numbers come up at the regular White House morning meeting, Summers' response is that nothing can be done. Nothing can be done about skyrocketing foreclosures or lost jobs.
Nothing can be done -- pretty much the opposite of "Yes we can," isn't it?
According to Plouffe, "reform is in Obama's DNA." Then how do you have in your inner circle a man who has "nothing can be done" in his DNA? Unless, of course, the problem on the table has to do with Wall Street, in which case "everything can be done, has been done, and will be done."
Obviously, an administration needs to hire people who weren't part of the campaign. But the danger comes in hiring those who don't even share the goals of the campaign. That's why The Audacity to Win is so desperately needed right now.
It reminds us that, not that long ago, the conventional wisdom was that Candidate Obama didn't have a chance and that Hillary Clinton's nomination was inevitable. That's the same conventional wisdom that tells us that President Obama doesn't have a chance at really changing things and that the ultimate victory of the entrenched special interests is inevitable.
But the Obama campaign didn't buy into the conventional wisdom then: "We had a mountain named Hillary Clinton in our path that we had to find some way to scale, get around, or blow a hole through," writes Plouffe. And the Obama White House doesn't have to give into the conventional wisdom now. It just has to get its mojo back.
One way the White House can do this is to have everyone there read Plouffe's book, filled as it is with page after page after page of reminders of who put Barack Obama in the Oval Office.
"We knew who we were," writes Plouffe, "a grassroots campaign to the core. We started with our supporters on the ground and they led us to victory." This grassroots effort "was a prime motivator for Obama to run, the belief that the American people needed to reengage in their civic life... Obama felt in his gut that if properly motivated, a committed grassroots army could be a powerful force. Over time, the volunteers became the pillars that held the whole enterprise aloft."
I asked Plouffe what happened to the 13 million people on the campaign's email list -- a list he compares to having "our own television network, only better, because we communicated directly with no filter to what would amount to about 20 percent of the total number of votes we would need to win."
"Volunteers have made 300,000 calls to Congress to support the president's health care plan, and held thousands of events around the country," he told me. "But it's hard to maintain the intensity of the engagement."
Of course it's hard. But, as he puts it in the book, "Obama had ignited something very powerful in young people throughout the country. If that spark could be preserved, I was convinced we'd be a much stronger country for it."
And no amount of rationalizing and sugarcoating can change the fact that the spark has not been preserved. And that we are a less strong country for it.
One of the reasons Plouffe gives in the book for the campaign deciding to forgo public funding was that, as he writes, "most painfully, taking the federal funds meant losing control of our secret weapon: we would have to largely outsource our entire grassroots ground campaign to the DNC." Which is exactly where the grassroots list -- rebranded as Organization for America -- is housed now. Painfully.
Plouffe talks about how the Obama team knew that in order to win, it would have to "attain the holy grail of politics -- a fundamentally altered electorate. We had to expand the electorate or we were cooked." With the help of their grassroots army, they did just that. Among people who had never voted before -- or who hadn't voted for a long time -- 71 percent voted for Obama.
Plouffe feels genuinely connected to the movement he helped unleash. "So many of the people," he told me, "who gave their heart and soul to the campaign were people who had given up on the system because they no longer believed they could trust politicians to deliver or really change anything. It is imperative for our democracy that these people are not disappointed. If they become disillusioned, they won't be coming back for a long while."
"I feel such an obligation to them," Obama told Plouffe during the campaign. "They believe in me. In us. In themselves. What keeps me going day after day? Besides a clear sense of why I am running for president, it's them, our volunteers. It is a special thing we've built here and I don't want to let them down."
I asked Plouffe if the president had read the book. "He read a couple of sections in it," he replied, "and even discovered a couple of things he didn't know."
Well, if the president wants to make sure he doesn't let down the millions who believed he really would change the rotten system, he should read the The Audacity to Win from beginning to end -- and rediscover a whole host of things he knows, but seems to have forgotten.
Then he can complete the journey from The Audacity of Hope and The Audacity To Win to The Audacity to Govern.
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