The Incredibly Shrinking President

During the late summer and fall of 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas faced off in a series of seven Senatorial election debates, one each in the seven Congressional Illinois districts of that day and held from August 21 to October 15. Douglas was the incumbent Senator and Lincoln was a publicly unknown challenger. Debate moderators were unheard of in that time. Rather, debates were a stand up affair in which each debater sought to win the audience to his argument while attacking the weaknesses in his opponent’s argument. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, each man used the academic discipline of argumentation to favorably influence the voter audience, although in 1858 Senators were chosen by state legislatures, not by popular election.

Debate format in 1858 gave 60 minutes to the first to speak, 90 minutes to the second, and then the first debater was given an additional 30 minute to respond. Lincoln and Douglas alternated in going first although Douglas began four of the seven debates.

In contrast to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the election debates of modern times are media events in which the debaters and the moderators have almost equal standing. Not infrequently the moderators control the debate so tightly that it doesn’t allow the debaters to sell themselves and their contrasting positions to the voters; instead the audience hears a series of talking point prompts put forward by the moderators to satisfy their (sometimes partisan) interests and goals. Because of these modern “debate” formats, we hear little skilled argumentation and instead hear a lot of hype and sound bites.

That happened extraordinarily less in last Wednesday’s Denver debate between Romney and Obama. It quickly became apparent that Obama was unable to think on his feet when confronted by an aggressive opponent, falling back on stump speech lines as he became increasingly frustrated and angry. The moderator, Jim Lehrer, a former PBS news anchor who likely has liberal leanings, was savaged by the media after the debate for “losing control” to two of the strongest personalities in America.

In my opinion the debate moderator should have done just as Lehrer did – ask a fairly open-ended question and then let the debaters have at it. Several times Lehrer did try to cut off debate, only to have one of the debaters overrule him in order to finish a comment or to respond to comments made by the other debater. Lehrer simply closed his eyes, and with a “what the heck” look on his face, let the debate go to the next hiccup where he was successful in getting back the moderator role and introduce the next topic. Viewers learned and saw more than would have happened if Lehrer had covered his agenda and exercised tight control.

What torqued the media and the Left in the aftermath of the debates was that the format did allow the moderator to jump in and save Obama’s bacon when Romney had him on the ropes. And on the ropes is where he spent most of the 90-minute debate. It became quickly evident that Obama didn’t understand that the debate, which was seen by 67 million people, was putting the implications of his demeanor and body language on national display.  He was subdued and professorial in his responses. He looked disgusted, scribbled notes rather than looking at Romney as he spoke, and was so clueless that at the end of the debate, he smiled and thought he’d won. His debate prep team thought otherwise. They didn’t even attend the press room gathering after the debate.

Romney, on the other hand, was upbeat and prepared as evidenced by his frequent multi-pointed answers – Point 1, Point 2, Point 3 … – showing that his responses had been thought through and were well-organized. He looked at Obama both when he was speaking and when Obama was speaking. He smiled throughout the debate and at one point said, “It’s fun, isn’t it.” Romney was the last of the two to leave his podium and the stage, giving the impression that he was dominant – the alpha male. He smiled as his family joined him on stage and he well aware that he’d won.

The polling after the debate confirmed the Romney “win.” Among Republicans, Romney was the winner by a margin of 95 points (97% versus 2%), but even Democrats conceded a Romney win by ten points (49% versus 39%.) Most importantly, Independents gave the win to Romney by a whopping 51 points (70% versus 19%), and their vote will determine the election.

A Pew poll after the debate had the Obamaphiles in tears. Before the debate, Obama was leading Romney by a 51 to 43 margin which morphed into a four-point Romney lead of 49 to 45 after the smoke cleared. With less than 30 days to go before the election, Obama’s debate performance had given Romney a 12-point turnaround from trailing by eight points to leading by four. Tall in the saddle before the debate, Obama became the incredibly shrinking man after it.

Expecting a knockout punch that again would send a tingle up his leg, the anticipated schadenfreude failed to materialize, sending Chris Matthews into a meltdown:

I don't know what he was doing out there, he had his head down, he was enduring the debate, rather than fighting it. Romney, on the other hand, came in with a campaign. He had a plan, he was going to dominate the time, he was going to be aggressive, he was going to push the moderator around, which he did effectively, he was going to relish the evening, enjoying it. What was Romney doing tonight? He was winning!

Romney was dominant, but Obama spoke four minutes longer because he couldn’t collect his thoughts while on the ropes.

Andrew Sullivan, an outspoken Obamaphile, was practically on suicide watch. After seeing the latest Pew polls, he wrote:

Seriously: has that kind of swing ever happened this late in a campaign? Has any candidate lost 18 points among women voters in one night ever? And we are told that when Obama left the stage that night, he was feeling good. That's terrifying. On every single issue, Obama has instantly plummeted into near-oblivion. He still has some personal advantages over Romney – even though they are all much diminished. Obama still has an edge on Medicare, scores much higher on relating to ordinary people, is ahead on foreign policy, and on being moderate, consistent and honest (only 14 percent of swing voters believe Romney is honest). But on the core issues of the economy and the deficit, Romney is now kicking the president's a - -.

Democrat Buzz Bissinger, a contributor to the Daily Beast blog, wrote that he was switching his vote to Romney because the Denver debate showed a tired, clueless Obama who is "no longer the chosen one. He is just too cool for school in a country desperate for the infectiousness of rejuvenation." During the debate, Bill Maher tweeted “I can't believe I'm saying this, but Obama looks like he DOES need a teleprompter. Maher, who gave $1 million to an Obama super PAC, said he believed Obama “took my million and spent it all on weed.”

Chris Cillizza who blogs for the Washington Post wrote Obama’s performance "raised a bigger question: Is he overrated as a candidate?" and Stacey Dash, a black actress told her 250,000 twitter followers that they should "Vote for Romney. The only choice for your future." She got pummeled afterward for being a traitor to her race and party.

Al Gore blamed Obama’s poor performance on the altitude of Denver. I was expecting him to blame global warming.

The thing that got all of the Obamaphiles’ panties in a wad is they seem not to really know their man. Keep in mind that before becoming President of the United States at 47 years of age, this man had accomplished nothing of significance. He immediately clamped a lid on anything that would shed light on who he was before becoming a public figure. Even his college grades and papers and those of his wife were off limits. He surrounded himself with a coterie of sycophant advisors who made him believe that, unlike King Canute, he could turn back the tide. For almost four years, the media has failed to call him or his administration to account for their actions or lack of them. Perhaps what 67 million people saw on the Denver debate stage is the real Obama. But it sure seemed like the real Romney showed up.

Obama complained that debate prep was a “drag.” Visiting a Nevada field office during a break from preparing, he couldn’t remember how many days remained before the election. George Will hit the nail on the head by recently saying Obama is not known as a martyr to the work ethic. Romney campaign coordinator, former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu called Obama “lazy” after his debate performance. On a recent talk show, the host said Obama got angry with John Kerry (who played the part of Romney in the prep) because Kerry’s jabs got under Obama’s thin skin causing him to say, “’To hell with this bull s- - - ‘and he went outside of his Nevada resort suite to shoot baskets.” (I haven’t been able to source that quotation independently so it may be shaded.)

But post-debate stories have been leaked to reporters that Obama doesn’t like debates, and that he was unhappy having to debate Romney whom he views with disdain. Apparently Obama believes he can hold on to the White House displaying no more substance than he exhibited in 2008 … except that in 2008 voters were ready for a change and their choice was between a tired old man or a hip black guy, while in 2012 he has a contender who is as smart or smarter than he.

Obama has all of the symptoms of first termer disease. After four years of living in an isolated bubble surrounded by people who rarely challenged his ragged ideas, possessing the power of the presidency with its carefully orchestrated photo ops, speeches to adoring fans, and the perks of Roman emperor, and further compounded by an exaggerated vanity which caused him to characterize himself without blushing as “eye candy” during his last appearance on The View, Obama believes his own baloney. He has lost a sense of the American mainstream, if he ever had it. He doesn’t know how to deal with opposing ideas and that showed in Denver.

I think Bill Maher was right. The man can’t function without a teleprompter. His famous grandiloquent rhetoric has always been crafted by professional writers. They never were his words. This Emperor has no clothes.

In Denver Obama spewed ideology rather than logically grounded arguments to explain his intellectual position on issues. He doesn’t know how to debate or sell ideas because his close advisors are hood ornaments, not counterweights. Whenever it was his turn to speak during the debate, he fell back on stump speech clichés and straw man arguments as he so often does when characterizing opponent views – except in this situation the opponent wouldn’t let him get away with it. Obama should have read the Lincoln-Douglas debates as preparation. He would have better understood how the craft of argumentation is practiced.

Not only has Obama surrounded himself with close advisors whose experience is confined to government, but also they don’t understand how the economy works. Thus, even if Obama were inclined to learn from them, he couldn’t. They don’t know what they don’t know, and neither does he. His understanding of the economy in the debate was so awful that at one point Romney said that he had been in business 25 years and had no idea what Obama was talking about regarding outsourcing.

When the debate topic turned to energy, Obama complained about the “$4 billion the oil industry gets in corporate welfare.” Romney corrected him and said:

The Department of Energy has said the tax break for oil companies is $2.8 billion a year. And it’s actually an accounting treatment, as you know, that’s been in place for a hundred years … this $2.8 billion goes largely to small companies, to drilling operators and so forth.

“… as you know”? Obama doesn’t know. Romney piled on the facts – and understood them. Obama has failed to grasp the facts after four years of being surrounded by them.

Obama’s bashing of “corporate welfare” gave Romney the opening he was apparently waiting for. He contrasted “corporate welfare” with Obama’s policy – the $90 billion spent on green energy projects in three years:

… don’t forget, you put $90 billion, like 50 years’ worth of [oil subsidy] breaks, into solar and wind, to Solyndra and Fisker and Tester and Ener1 ... I had a friend who said you don’t just pick the winners and losers, you pick the losers, all right? … And these businesses, many of them have gone out of business … I think about half of the ones [you] have invested in have gone out of business … a number of them happened to be owned by people who were contributors to your campaigns.

Ouch! That hurt.

Romney noted that Obama wasted his first two years passing ObamaCare without a single Republican vote. He contrasted his own experience as Governor of Massachusetts, saying if he had said “it’s my way or the highway” he wouldn’t have been able to get a lot done:

First of all, I like the way we did it in Massachusetts. I like the fact that in my state, we had Republicans and Democrats come together and work together. What you did instead was to push through a plan without a single Republican vote. As a matter of fact, when Massachusetts did something quite extraordinary – elected a Republican senator to stop ObamaCare, you pushed it through anyway.

So entirely on a partisan basis, instead of bringing America together and having a discussion on this important topic, you pushed through something that you and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid thought was the best answer and drove it through. What we did in a legislature 87% Democrat, we worked together; 200 legislators in my legislature, only two voted against the plan by the time we were finished.

What were some differences? We didn’t raise taxes. You’ve raised them by $1 trillion under ObamaCare. We didn’t cut Medicare. Of course, we don’t have Medicare, but we didn’t cut Medicare by $716 billion. We didn’t put in place a board that can tell people ultimately what treatments they’re going to receive [the IPAB]. We didn’t do something that I think a number of people across this country recognize – put people in a position where they’re going to lose the insurance they had and they wanted. Right now, the CBO says up to 20 million people will lose their insurance as ObamaCare goes into effect next year. And likewise, a study by McKinsey and Company of American businesses said 30% of them are anticipating dropping people from coverage.

So for those reasons – for the tax, for Medicare, for this board, and for people losing their insurance – this is why the American people don’t want ObamaCare. It’s why Republicans said, do not do this, and the Republicans had the plan. They put a plan out, a bipartisan plan. It was swept aside.

I think something this big, this important has to be done on a bipartisan basis. And we have to have a president who can reach across the aisle and fashion important legislation with the input from both parties.

When Lehrer asked Romney and Obama how each would solve a list of problems facing the country, all of Obama’s solutions were government solutions, whereas, Romney’s solutions were private sector solutions. Obama’s plan to get the economy rolling is more government spending despite the country’s mounting debt and deficits. Romney’s plan is to unshackle private industry, domestic energy production, and changes in regulations and tax policy. When Obama tried to take credit for the oil boom of the past couple of years, Romney reminded him that it had all occurred on privately-owned land and that Obama’s administration had closed down public lands.

The Lincoln-Douglas debate topics ranged over many issues but slavery dominated the debate. Likewise the Romney-Obama debate ranged over many issues but the role of government dominated the debate. What we will choose on November 6 is one of two contrasting and conflicting views on the role of government. Romney sees the federal government as necessary but facilitative. Obama sees federal government as omnipotent and regulatory. Romney sees taxes as a way to pay for government; Obama sees taxes as a way to reengineer society. Romney sees problems solved mostly by state government. Obama sees them solved in Washington. Romney views the American pursuit of profit and a better life as a social good.  Obama views individualism with suspicion, convinced that it benefits a select few.

As Romney summarized the role of government:

We believe in maintaining for individuals the right to pursue their dreams and not to have the government substitute itself for the rights of free individuals. And what we’re seeing right now is, in my view, a trickle-down government approach, which has government thinking it can do a better job than free people pursuing their dreams. And it’s not working.

After the debate, Obama tried to make the best of having been trounced by ridiculing the “very spirited fellow who showed up on the stage claiming to be Mitt Romney.” His campaign team has unleashed Big Bird on the Romney camp. The Obama war chest will shortly surpass $1 billion to elect him to a $400,000 a year job. And over the past four years, the rock star president has waved to fawning, cheering crowds in his unending election campaign, pumping his ego into believing he would eviscerate an intellectually inferior presidential misfit in the Denver debate.

Instead, Clint Eastwood’s empty chair showed up.

The Race Goes Racist

It was inevitable that the 2012 presidential race would turn racial. Why inevitable? Because racism was the winning formula for Obama’s 2008 victory. Since Obama can’t run on his record now that he’s been in office for the past four years, why not recycle what worked four years ago – intimidate and silence critics of his policies by calling them racists?

Race is a sensitive subject in the US and is growing more politically correct by the minute; therefore, be assured that I am writing this blog as sensitively as I can without dodging the race issues which the Democrats and their enablers in the media are trotting out once again.

So let’s start with this question, which I hope you will agree is fair to ask. A candidate runs for president. He has no experience in governing a city or state, running a business – no experience in managing an organization of any type that would qualify him to fill the most powerful leadership position in the world. His legislative experience is limited to a state senate seat, in which his knowledge and interest in his state’s issues evokes only a “present” when votes are called, except he did vote "nay" in opposition to a proposed law banning live-birth abortion. He briefly held a US Senate seat but didn’t engage in any of its responsibilities since he began immediately to conduct a presidential campaign. His opponents have pointed out that he has associated with some very controversial characters in his past, including a domestic terrorist and a pastor/mentor whose sermons are areligious, anti-American, hate speeches. The candidate is white. What are the chances he will win his party’s nomination, not to mention the office of the presidency?

I believe any reasonably thoughtful person would answer “none.”

Yet Barack Obama won his party’s nomination and later persuaded a majority of voters to choose him to lead our nation. His rationale for being the candidate of choice? Hope and change. Oh sure, he talked a lot about what he wanted to change, but there was nothing in his background to suggest that he could implement his program. He had no leadership experience with which to manage the awesome office he was to assume. So, why was he elected to it?

I believe his campaign star-quality hipness helped, but excluding the hard Left Democrats who vote party over candidate regardless, I think all others, if honest, would say their vote for Obama was based in some way on the fact that he was a black man – not because of the two candidates he was the most qualified. For those people, a vote for Obama was historic in a country with a history of racism.

There are two sides to the racism coin. There’s the side that Condoleezza Rice spoke of at the RNC convention in which she said growing up in Jim Crow Birmingham – the most segregated big city in America at the time (and my birthplace) – that her parents couldn’t take her to a restaurant or theater or buy her a hamburger at the Woolworth lunch counter because she was a black girl. That comment, while true, broke my heart.

I have children and grandchildren. Children are without guile. They are morally good because they haven’t lived long enough to be otherwise. I see childhood as a magical time. Yet its daily fun and eager innocence will only last for a short period of a person’s lifespan. And for that reason, I consider it an affront to humanity to ever abuse a child, either physically or by stealing one minute of their magical innocence by denying them anything because of their skin color. Jesus gathered little children around him and said that the nature of heaven was like the nature of children: their innocence, their trust, their freedom from care. Racism is wrong – whether directed toward children or adults – because it can never be justified on a moral basis.

But just as discrimination against someone because of their skin color is wrong, discrimination for someone because of the skin color is just as wrong … and just as racist. That’s the other side of the ugly racism coin. Those who voted in 2008 for Obama primarily because having a black president was history-making were as racist as those who refused to vote for him primarily because he is a black man.

Perhaps some of those who chose Obama over McCain did so based on hope – hope that he would succeed in achieving racial accord where past white presidents had failed. Of all the problems facing this country in 2008, I don’t think many of us would have put racial harmony in the top ten, but it’s a fair issue to evaluate in retrospect. So I ask: is there more or less racial divisiveness today versus four years ago?

It’s just my opinion, of course, but I’d say Obama has done more to cause racial disharmony than any other president in the 224-year history of the Republic. I could cite many examples, but here is a recent one.

Two weeks ago, Obama signed an executive order to establish panels that would lead to a quota system limiting the suspension of black students from schools. Citing data that show black students are suspended more often than white students, the panels’ aim is to ensure that all racial groups receive equal school punishment regardless of individual behavior. In other words, Obama wants whites and blacks punished in equal proportions, despite differences in infractions that lead to suspension. Black kids are eight times more likely to be suspended than Asian kids, and white kids are about twice as likely to be suspended as Asians. Is it racist for a group of kids to be punished more or punished less based on their skin color or ethnicity – which cannot be controlled – rather than behavior which can be controlled?

The Obama administration wears race on its sleeve. That has been reflected among Obama’s protectors in the media and Congress. Any criticism of an Obama policy somehow mutates into racism. Nowhere was that as apparent as it was among the liberal commentariat during last week’s RNC convention in Tampa. Between what I saw and read, virtually every criticism of Obama’s stewardship of the country for the last four years can be made into a subliminal racist remark – so much so that a code word evolved to label it: dog whistle. You know, dogs can hear high frequencies unheard by humans, and in like manner a dog whistle racist remark goes right over the heads of ordinary folks, who accept the words for what they mean – except the commentariat, whose ears are specially attuned to dog whistle racism.

One reporter for the Tampa Bay Times had this to say:

I didn't see many chocolate chips in the cookie they were baking. In other words, as images were projected on massive video screens behind both speakers, I didn't recall seeing many people of color. They probably were there, but in the hour I watched, they didn't seem to come up much.

There’s no argument that the Republican Party has been trying to appeal to minorities to join their agenda. Thus, key speaking slots were given over to Mia Love, the black Republican mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah and US Representative hopeful, Artur Davis, a former Democrat and black American who spoke at Obama’s 2008 nominating convention, and Condoleezza Rice. Moreover, ten Latinos took to the convention stage, which included New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez, Texas senatorial hopeful Ted Cruz, and rising star, Marco Rubio. In an effort to close the gender gap, 14 women took part in speaking at the convention – which Debbie Wasserman-Schultz called the “shiny packaging” that the Republicans used to distract women voters from what’s inside the package – “a disaster for women’s future, extreme policies.”

No good deed goes unpunished.

Well, politics ain’t bean-bag and each party will predictably do what it thinks it must to expand its constituency. But instead of airing even parts of the speeches by Mia Love, Artur Davis, and Ted Cruz, MSNBC, which covered the convention, pulled away during their speeches to broadcast a commentary anchored by Rachel Maddow and a panel with Al Sharpton, Ed Schultz, Chris Matthews, Chris Hayes and Steve Schmidt, leaving the impression that Rice, former Secretary of State for George Bush was the only minority speaker. Audience pans showed few black faces. Coincidence? Maybe.

But throughout the convention, Chris Matthews, the Hardball spokesman for MSNBC, kept up a steady drumbeat charging Republicans with dog-whistle racist politics. He started off the Hardball convention coverage with an antique video of Ronald Reagan’s 1976 campaign in which he complained of welfare abuses, citing a “welfare queen” who had collected checks under 127 different names. “Welfare queen” was a dog whistle which “everyone” knew was directed at blacks, according to Matthews. Following that, he showed an on-screen 1976 newspaper clipping in which Reagan had referred to a “strapping young buck who purchased T-bone steaks with foods stamps” as outraged “working people” waited in line to check out at a grocery store. Matthews’ fined-tuned dog whistle detector immediately recognized the 36-year old incident as evidence of inherent Republican racism by calling the man a “buck” – euphemistically black.

Then Matthews dragged an old video of screwball and former KKK member David Duke who ran as a Republican for various Louisiana elective offices. (Wonder if Duke knew fellow KKK member and Democrat Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia?) Duke promised in the video, if elected, he would make welfare recipients work in return for receiving public support, (what a novel idea), get drugs out of their neighborhoods, and work to reduce illegitimate births.

No Hardball critique of the Republican Party would be complete without an appearance of George Wallace, and Matthews flashed a Wallace campaign brochure on the screen which promised to “curtail welfare programs that are designed to pay able-bodied individuals not to work.”

Then Matthews turned to Washington Post reporter, Nia-Malika Henderson, a black woman, and summarized these three dog whistles again, which, according to Matthews, “everybody thought” were racial code words and asked for her comment. Henderson opined that Romney and the Republicans had failed to attract the minority voters – “zero percent of the black voters,” she said. “[Romney] has to do better than John McCain did among white, middle class Americans.” So the only remaining strategy, Matthews concluded, was to scare the white voter into voting Republican.

Salon’s Joan Walsh was also a Hardball convention program guest. Matthews turned to get her comments. “The real problem the Republican Party faces is it is the white party – 89% self-identified Republicans, according to Gallup last year, were white in a country that is 63% white. [The Republicans] also have a problem with white middle class Americans because they don’t trust Romney.”

Matthews accused the Republican Party of dividing the country along racial lines – an interesting “Obamaphile pot calling the Romney kettle black” – and he warned MSNBC viewers to "be on the alert for the tribal messages, the war drums of racial division" which began with the speeches on Tuesday night.

Racism is the "San Andreas fault of this country," according to Matthews.

People who dance on it, exploit it, enjoy it, risk widening that divide, opening it up back to where it was so recently. Nothing is simpler. Nothing is more primitive than to beat the drums of tribal grievance ... welfare cheating, food stamp grabbing are all part of the lingo, along with the old calls for law and order and states’ rights and all the rest ... say what you want, the message is familiar, deeply redolent of the old demagoguery that stirs up the working white people against the black.

Matthews’ obsessed about racism through the end of his convention remotes: "I believe racial division has been this country's great scourge," he said. Racism "can't go away, but can be narrowed," as it was when Obama was elected president in 2008. Huh! Have Matthews and I been on the same planet for the past four years?

There’s so much more I could write about Matthews’ keenly-tuned dog whistle ears, but my purpose in this blog post is to show that allegations of Republican racism in the presidential race are widespread in the media. Writing for the “Huffing and Puffing” Post, Geoffrey Dunn, for example, had this to say about Thursday’s convention program:

Sources have confirmed that “Dirty Harry” himself, Clint Eastwood, is about to sweep into the Sunshine State to serve as the so-called “Mystery Speaker” tonight at the Republican Snooze Fest – better known as the Gathering of Pasty White People – in Tampa.

Is characterizing people as “Pasty White” racist?  Dunn continues:

Eastwood, of course, has a political resume of his own, having served a two-year term as mayor of the upscale and frighteningly white community of Carmel – with a population of 3,800, there were only eight African Americans recorded in the 2010 census – very close in size and demographics to Sarah Palin’s Wasilla, albeit without the meth labs and strip malls.

When a community’s distinguishing quality is “frighteningly white,” is that racist?

The press has called Eastwood’s performance at the RNC “bizarre.” I thought it was a funny impromptu by an 82-year old actor that was reminiscent of Henry Fonda’s performance in On Golden Pond when Fonda was about the same age.

MSNBC’s The Cycle had an on-air group discussion of Romney‘s assertion during a speech in Ohio that President Obama should “take [his] campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago.” Co-host Touré Neblett, a black man, saw explicit racial connections in Romney’s use of the words “anger” and “Chicago” which Neblett called the “niggerization” of the campaign. “That really bothered me,” he said. “You notice he said anger twice. He’s really trying to use racial coding and access some really deep stereotypes about the angry black man. This is part of the playbook against Obama, the ‘otherization,’ he’s not like us.”

The other panel members were momentarily stunned by the use of the “n-word,” and MSNBC, to their credit, required Neblett to make an on-air apology the following day. I saw the apology online. It lasted 12 seconds and not very repentant.

Here’s what Romney said that sent Neblett spinning out of control:

Everywhere I go in America there are monuments that list those who have given their lives for liberty. There's no mention of their race, their party affiliation or what they did for a living. They lived and died under a single flag fighting for a single purpose. They pledged allegiance to the United States of America. So, Mr. President, take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago and let us get about rebuilding and reuniting America.

CNN canned coverage of the speech after Romney's line about Chicago. Well, I guess the C-word can’t be used either.

Thomas Edsall, in an op-ed for the New York Times alleged that the Republican campaign has “two themes designed to turn the presidential contest into a racially freighted resource competition pitting middle class white voters against the minority poor.” The two themes? Eliminating the work requirement to receive welfare assistance and reducing Medicare spending by over $700 billion to help pay for ObamaCare.

In other words, it is racist to complain that a legally instituted law – welfare reform – signed by Democrat President Clinton, who falsely took credit for enacting it, is being eviscerated by illegal presidential waivers of the work requirement. And it is racist to warn current and potential recipients of Medicare that the already shaky program is to become a blood donor to ObamaCare. Medicare, according to Edsall, is “a program serving an overwhelmingly white constituency” whereas the blood donee, ObamaCare, provides “health coverage to the heavily black and Hispanic poor.” News to me.

Republican campaign references to the explosion of food stamp dependency – 15% of Americans or about 46 million people – has been deemed by the dog whistle monitors as racial. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s convention speech Wednesday night, which joked that Obama “was working to earn a spot on the PGA tour,” immediately jangled the dog whistle that political journalist Lawrence O’Donnell wears around his neck, earning him the Gotcha’ Award for catching the subtlest race slur. The golf joke meant “Obama equals Tiger Woods equals racism,” as O’Donnell saw it. Wow! I sure missed that one.

We’ve got two months to go and quite frankly I’m not looking forward to silly racial connections by the word police who hear “watermelon” when the candidates are talking about entitlements or hear “fried chicken” when they talk about the appalling unemployment rate, especially among minorities.

If I had my way, Romney and Obama would be required to confine every speech to how each of them would provide “a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” That’s why we invented this country 224 years ago.

In a recent attack of boredom from watching coverage of last week’s storms, I looked up the list of names for the 2012 hurricanes, which are assigned alphabetically and, in deference to touchy political correctness, alternately given male and female appellations. We’re up to “I” so far. Let’s see … Isaac slammed west of New Orleans as the convention was in progress, Leslie and Michael have already formed … that means Nadine and Kirk are coming up.

Kirk! Jumpin’ Jehosaphat! Kirk was the name of the famous captain of the Starship Enterprise, whose communications officer was Lieutenant Uhuru, who was black woman.

Obviously, hurricane naming is a dog whistle.

Wonder what Nadine means?