Half-Full Report – Feb. 12, 2016

by Rod D. Martin
February 12, 2016

The Half-Full Report is Dr. Jack Wheeler’s weekly column at To The Point News. Rod is filling in for Jack this month.

The loser:

The polls had been pretty clear for a while: Hillary was going to lose New Hampshire. We all knew it going in.

But a 22 point loss? That’s…extraordinary.

It has become painfully clear that Hillary stole Iowa: it was a statistical tie either way, of course, but scoring the win mattered both psychologically and in delegate count, and Hillary’s minions did what they do. Likewise this week, crushing defeat or not, the New Hampshire super delegates are all pledged to her: ignoring the vote in their own primary, Hillary actually ended the night with more of the state’s delegates than Sanders.

If that’s not a corrupt system, nothing is. And this from “the party of the people.”

Still, having to cheat – and actually doing it – is no way to build a mandate. Hillary is down for a reason. Conservatives may find her corruption amusing, but “Progressives” (read: Socialists) are absolutely livid. And that bodes ill for the race ahead.

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So how did Hillary do in depth? It wasn’t pretty: she lost nearly every demographic group, and every income group except for families earning (insert laughter here) over $200,000 per year.

Sanders won both men and women. He won those with and without college degrees. He won gun owners as well as gun banners. He won both previous primary voters (whom Hillary carried in 2008) and first-timers. He beat her with both liberals and her own base of so-called moderates.

Hillary can take some comfort that she did win those 65 and older. But Sanders won voters aged 18-29 by a crushing 70% in Iowa, and he bested that feat in New Hampshire, winning 83%.

Yes, it’s disconcerting that so many young people are in love with a Socialist. But between now and November it’s Hillary’s problem to overcome. So far, the 18-29 group has constituted about 19% of the Democrat electorate. NPR reported yesterday that in South Carolina, young black voters may put a great big hole in Hillary’s firewall. And it only gets worse from there.

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Oh, and did I mention women? Yes, Hillary lost them too, by 11 points, to a 74 year old white guy. She lost an incredible 82% of younger women, who apparently are unimpressed by the need for Hillary to bring Sixties feminism to the White House.

To paraphrase Madeleine Halfbright, they’re all quite happily headed to their special place in Hell.

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Some very smart people, including Leon Wolf, think all of this is irrelevant, that this is Sanders’ high water mark. FiveThirtyEight points out quite a few reasons, the chief of which are contained in the polling data below:

Still, if even NPR sees significant slippage in South Carolina, Hillary has her work cut out for her. It’s hard to miss that that chart includes states more than two months out; momentum could change those dramatically.

It is highly significant that Hillary lost the one-third of all voters who said “honesty and trustworthiness” were the most important qualities in a candidate. How badly? 95% to 5%. Yes, Benghazi and Emailgate are taking their toll.

It’s this statistic that pushed Sanders to the high end of the pre-primary polling. There’s no reason to think other Democrats will feel differently.

More to the point, Hillary’s inevitability (version 2.0) is assumed largely because of the overwhelming loyalty of black voters. But this is as yet untested, in a demographic that is especially hard to poll. She’ll probably win South Carolina: of that I have little doubt. But by how much? That is not so clear.

What is clear is that as the process rolls on, the number of states in which black voters control the outcome drops off dramatically. Half of the Super Tuesday delegates will be chosen in states that have very little black vote at all. If Sanders breaks even or wins Super Tuesday, Hillary’s chances become grim.

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On the Republican side, Donald Trump won quite as expected. Ted Cruz outperformed a bit, coming in third. John Kasich’s “win” for second place is likely to be his last, but should keep him in the race long enough to divide RINO support for a good while yet.

Still, the most interesting story is the money. The five candidates Cruz beat – Bush, Rubio, Carson, Christie and Fiorina (the latter two now dropped-out) – spent a combined total of $72.1 million just in New Hampshire.

Cruz spent $580,000.

Why, you may ask? New Hampshire is the fifth most liberal state. It has something like three and a half Evangelicals. It was a stupid place to waste resources. So fiscal conservative that he is, he didn’t.

Net result? Ted spent $18 per vote for a third place finish. Jeb spent $1,200 per vote for fifth. And Cruz goes into South Carolina with more cash on hand than all his opponents (except possibly Trump) combined.

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Hats off to Marco Rubio for taking sole responsibility for his loss. It was the standup thing to do. It was also smart politics (as this paragraph illustrates).

That said, the “Marco Robot” meme has stuck, and his dismal fifth-place showing has Establishment Republicans openly doubting their wisdom in backing him. Jeb’s enormous New Hampshire ad buy focused fire quite effectively on his one-time protégé, and you can expect that bloodbath to continue into South Carolina.

For whatever it’s worth, 2008 McCain campaign chief Steve Schmidt says Rubio’s campaign has “effectively collapsed.”

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Particularly shocking to many of us in the last GOP debate before New Hampshire was the declaration – by both Bush and Rubio (the latter of whom flip-flopped this afternoon) – that they favor drafting women. No doubt this will be a major issue in Evangelical South Carolina and the SEC primary.

To paraphrase Pat Buchanan, a country that forces its women to fight its wars is not worth defending. But there were the two Establishment standard bearers, right there on national television, caving into a PC-ethic that tosses honor, decency, and of course conservatism overboard.

Interestingly enough, a big majority of women opposes being drafted. Unfortunately, like so many boyfriends pushing an abortion on their girlfriend, a majority of men now support it, apparently RINOs included. (Ted Cruz rightly called the idea “nuts.”)

This is a sad measure of how far left those the media calls “the extreme right” really have become: no one pushed these men to support drafting women; and indeed, both made clear that they saw it as a civil rights issue. The left has boiled the RINO frog, and a good bit of America with it, and only Cruz truly represents anything resembling the America we’ve known and ought to stand for.

Republican “War on Women”? This is it.

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N.B., Donald Trump has remained oddly silent about the whole thing.

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In the category of “funny because it’s true,” this has been going around the interwebs since New Hampshire:

Similarly, HFR friend Richard Norman notes that the D.C. supporters of self-identified Socialist Bernie Sanders held their Tuesday “People’s Victory Rally” at the Karl Marx Café. The Bolshevik Revolution is in full swing.

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Trump’s continued attacks on Ted Cruz’s eligibility hit a snag this week, when some clever people figured out that the Founding Fathers defined “Natural Born Citizen” in a way that expressly includes him. I elaborate on this in the video below: you’re going to love it (or even if not, you need to know it). This is an issue that needs to be settled; and better yet, it’s an issue that has been settled. By George Washington and James Madison.

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Before moving on, just one more item on Cruz. This headline, penned by the Socialist wingnuts over at Think Progress, has been making the rounds on social media all day: “Ted Cruz Promises to Create the Most Right-Wing Supreme Court in History”.

This is, of course, the singular issue of 2016. There’s a very good chance that the next President might appoint as many as five Justices. Ginsburg (D) is 82, Scalia (R) and Kennedy (I) are 79, Breyer (D) is 77, Thomas (R) is 67. Any of them could eat one Big Mac too many, and any of them (or their younger peers) could get hit by a bus.

If Ted Cruz appointed a replacement for Kennedy, that by itself would be enough to remake American jurisprudence. The same is true if Hillary or Bernie did it. But if either side were to appoint any large fraction of the slots just named, it would be – and indeed it will be – a new American revolution.

We need to make sure it’s not a Socialist one. Or this.

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If that’s not enough to give you pause, the Islamist “Rapefugee” crisis continues unabated, roiling governments across Europe. We all know which side America’s Progressives are on, which is no small part of Donald Trump’s appeal.

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Finally, Elon Musk announced this week that he intends to go to Mars within ten years.

If NASA were to say the same thing, we’d all yawn. When Musk says it, it’s very likely to happen.

The plausibility of Musk’s statement lies not merely in his track record, but in his recent successes creating and landing reusable rockets. Imagine what an airline ticket would cost if you had to build a new 737 every time you flew.

Currently, an Atlas V launch costs about $150 million. Elon’s Falcon 9 can do the same thing for $70 million (amazing what innovation and entrepreneurship can do outside the space-industrial complex). But if Elon is able to see his new invention through, he’ll be able to reduce the cost of a launch to just $700,000.

Elon has a tiny fraction of the government’s, Boeing’s and Lockheed Martin’s resources. They’ve all been at it for decades longer. So one has to wonder: why didn’t they figure out how to land a rocket in, say, about 1980?

Likely answer: government was paying a “single payer” price, and no one was complaining. For 60 years, it’s been Medicare Meets Space. And just as with socialized medicine, you lost. Back of the envelope math suggests that the difference in price would have added up to a savings equivalent to the cost of another Apollo program.

In other words, by stifling innovation, your government robbed you of about $108 billion. We could have gone to Mars on that. We could have bought 1,100 F-35 fighter jets for that, or 40 nuclear submarines, or 28 World Trade Centers, or the entire annual budget of the American Heart Association for 141 years.

But the real issue isn’t the lost money: it’s the lost opportunity. People crossed the Great Plains in Conestoga wagons. But they called that most fertile of lands “the Great American Desert” because with then-existing technology it was largely unusable.

It took the transcontinental railroad to settle what became America’s breadbasket, to feed the growing cities, to tap the vast mineral wealth of a continent, to unite our nation from sea to shining sea. From a handful of settlements hugging the East Coast, cheap rail and steamboat transport spawned an era of opportunity and technological advance like nothing the world had ever seen, and forged the greatest power on Earth.

And it all happened in about the same time we’ve squandered since Sputnik.

This is why the 2016 election is important. It’s certainly about the dangers we see. But it’s also about the lost opportunities socialism will steal from us, opportunities we’ll never see. We owe our children, and the whole world, better than that. We are, after all, “the last best hope of Earth.”

— This article originally appeared at To The Point News.