Although HE has disappointed me in the past (they endorsed Thompson for President even though Thompson was one of a handful of GOP Senators to vote against Clinton's impeachment), I admire Ann Coulter, she works there, so I thought I'd take a look at their report.   They cover ten folks and no Mitt Romney.  Huh????

Well, I bolted off an email to John Gizzi, the Political Editor at HUMAN EVENTS and I share it below:

John,

I can’t say I was surprised you did not include Romney in your McCain Veepstakes Report but it was disappointing nonetheless. Perhaps you might reconsider? Did you know that Townhall.com is doing a poll and Romney is leading by twenty points ahead of Palin and Hutchison (tied @ 2nd)?.

While picking VP should not be a popularity contest, shouldn’t Human Events include one of our most popular Republicans, and the man who came in 2^nd during the 2008 GOP Primary, on your short list??

I know you’ve think Huckabee came in 2^nd but that’s odd considering 1) Romney graciously left the race when it was obvious McCain would win, 2) Huckabee, inexplicably, ungraciously, stayed in the race and 3) Romney would have cleaned Huckabee’s clock in delegates, states and votes had he stayed in.

Think of it this way, the game was over after Super Tuesday. The lights in the gym were dimmed to encourage folks to go home, the best players left to prepare for the next game, most fans were gone and Huckabee's still running up and down the court, in the dark, posing for the few remaining reporters, shooting baskets and claiming the baskets he happened to make still counted toward the final score. Yeah, right.

So, please reconsider your decision to keep Romney out of the VP narrative. You could issue a special “Romney Report” outlining all the reasons Romney should also be considered.

My top ten reasons Romney should be VP:

1.      Most of us who support Romney do so because we think he’s a decent man, a great husband and father and the best Presidential candidate to come along in 24 years.

2.      Unlike all the Veeps in your report, Romney looked in the mirror years ago and felt confident enough to run for President. All of your folks looked in the mirror, lowered their sights and ran for Governor of LA, MN, MS and SC. Romney put himself out there, in JFK’s arena, competed in debates, endured national press scrutiny and won the hearts and minds of millions around the country – they didn’t. Pawlenty, Palin, Jindal – they all should be applauded for advancing conservatism but they did not feel confident to run for President – Romney did.

3.      Romney raised over $100 million across the country from California to Utah to Texas - they haven’t. Romney has had great success managing large companies, the International Olympics and Governor of the 13th largest state - the other candidates have been Governor, that’s it. Romney has experience running a strong, organized national campaign - at most, they have experience running a one-state campaign.  Romney has tens of millions of supporters - they don’t. Romney can help deliver IA, MI, MN, ME, CO, NV, UT & probably NH - they deliver one state each.

4.      Romney’s great success in the private sector makes him the perfect VP to help McCain help America win the global economy. Romney’s a private-sector superstar who successfully counters Obama’s populism with free market solutions to people’s everyday problems. Having both a Harvard MBA & Law degree doesn’t hurt either.

5.      I’ve heard rumors, propagated by Huckabee et al, that Evangelicals may bolt if McCain picks a Mormon. I’m shocked folks are still listening to the Huckster given his really, really bad sense of humor when making jokes about Obama being shot at.  Make no mistake, Huckabee has a problem with Romney’s religion and has soured many evangelicals on Romney but not all of them.  Bottom-line, the base of the GOP are patriots that are comfortable with anyone of any color of any gender who attends any church. Those that aren’t comfortable with the Church their party’s V.P. nominee attends should evolve or find another party.

6.      McCain was having trouble raising money until Romney sponsored a fund raiser for McCain in Salt Lake City and another with President Bush at Romney’s home in Deer Valley, UT.  Romney has raised lots of money and has lots of money – that could be useful when the Soros-backed-MoveOn.org crowd start to cause trouble.

7.      As far as the electoral college, Romney will help McCain exactly where he needs help the most: Michigan (Obama now +4.3) and Colorado (Obama now +1.2) - two of the four states Karl Rove says are key (McCain's already ahead in the other two - VA & OH).  Romney beat McCain in the GOP primary 59% to 19% in CO and 39% to 30% in MI, where Romney’s father was governor.

8.      In FL, 600,000 voted for Romney - those votes could be crucial in a general election.  Bush won FL by less than 1000 votes in 2000.

9.      McCain lost big time to Romney in 5 of 10 states with less than 5% margin of victory for Bush in 2004: IA, NV, MI, MN & CO.

10. Net, net - Romney on the ticket may add 47 to 61 electors.  Bush beat Kerry by only 34 electors.

So, John – does that sway you at all? Might the great national conservative weekly have room in the tent for a leader that could do so much for the GOP ticket?

Take care…Matt

I don't have much hope Mr. Gizzi will add Mitt to their short list but I believe you have to express yourself, you have to put your view out there, regardless of whether you have a guarantee it changes anything.  Hey, you never know.

Last Thursday night, I hosted a “McCain Nation” event - a house party, of sorts, for conservatives.  Living in the state with more Obama supporters per person than any other (Vermont), I appreciate any occasion to meet and greet people who support Jessica's Law and don't feel warm and fuzzy about impeaching President Bush.

Thank you, Cindy McCain, for your comments about the women of Rwanda.  After all they’ve been through, they certainly deserve all the support we can give them (see Justice 4 Rwanda). 

At their upcoming convention, Democrats will make lots of speeches pointing to the “booming Clinton economy of the 1990s” as proof that Democrats can be trusted with the economy.

The problem is the booming 1990s economy began March 1991, 22 months before Clinton took office. 

Like Obama, Clinton promised “Change” during his 1992 campaign for President.  However, later, after the country saw what kind of change Clinton had in mind, voters overwhelmingly rejected Clinton’s policies by electing, for the 1st time in 40 years, a Republican majority in Congress that kept taxes and spending down and forced Clinton to balance the federal budget.

So the credit for the “booming 1990s economy” really belongs to Bush 41 and the ‘94 Republicans. 

So, my question is this:  Will the McCain Campaign debunk the myth of the “booming Clinton economy” so Obama and the Democrats can’t take credit for it anymore?

Charlie Black agreed with my analysis.  I was thrilled!  Perhaps he was just flattering a supporter, in front of 15,000 other supporters, but it was thrilling to offer a senior McCain advisor, directly, my advice for taking away the economy, as an issue, from the Democrats in the General Election.  (I wonder if Mitt Romney was listening - our choice for McCain’s VP!)

Anyway, Mr. Black went on to say that the ‘94 Republicans quickly entered into a balanced budget agreement, with the then-weakened Clinton, to fulfill their promises in the Contract with America, and that that agreement laid the groundwork for historic budget surpluses in the late 1990s.  He also said that he had recently heard Obama’s surrogates on TV talking about how great the Clinton years were for the economy and the country.   

Clinton didn’t create 22 million jobs - the booming economy that he inherited from Reagan and Bush 41 did.

I hope and pray that I’ve planted a seed that will encourage McCain campaign strategists to come up with an ad, or a major speech, that will debunk the booming-Clinton-economy myth and put the 1990s in proper perspective.  Many feel a President doesn’t have much influence anyway on a $13 trillion dollar economy.  I’m sure Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, Cisco and other great American companies feel they had a bigger influence on 1990s economy. 

Nevertheless, President Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and hundreds of other Democrat leaders, pundits and supporters in the media often boast how “magnificent Clinton was on the economy”, how “Clinton created 22 million new jobs”, that the economy is a glorious part of his legacy and that evil Bush came along and ruined all the good work Clinton had done in the ’90s.

These are all lies that need to be confronted & corrected. 

So, to the extent that any political leader can take credit for increasing the GDP, and the resulting job growth, it is the pro-growth policies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush that kept the 1990-91 recession shallow & short - in effect extending the booming Reagan economy into the 1990s.  Credit the 1994 Congressional Republicans for forcing Clinton to keep taxes and spending low and balancing the federal budget - all things that tend to help an economy.  One must also give some credit to Ross Perot for making federal budget deficits a big focus of the 1992 and 1994 campaigns.  Whatever you think of Ross Perot, he made it “sexy” again to demand fiscal responsibility from our elected officials.   

In any event, the credit does not belong to the Clintons.

Democrats, if they’re to be honest, must use the Carter economy for guidance on what an Obama economy might look like.   Like Carter, Obama will, if elected, have both houses of Congress led by Democrats.  Like Carter, Obama’s energy plan is to make our own oil companies the enemy, to seize their “excess” windfall profits, to implement new taxes on oil & gas (aren’t they expensive enough already?) - everything except what’s needed most:  lifting the ban on offshore (OCS) and ANWR drilling effective immediately.

Originally posted on June 27, 2008.  This is my fourth revision.

Here’s my plan:

1. Sell 1% of the SPR, per month, until oil is < $100 barrel again.  
2. Spend the SPR money, about $1 billion / month, to jump-start alternatives like Picken’s wind project, solar and hydro. 
3. Make a 9pm EST Primetime announcement that the U.S. will begin drilling in the OCS and ANWR effective immediately.  Make it a national priority to help oil companies get rigs out to those sites!  Use military when necessary, interrupt shipping lanes - rally the nation - this is important & urgent!  Let's act like it!
4. Offer $100 billion for the first person or company to invent an inexpensive  way to retrofit existing cars to get > 100 mpg.  It’s great if auto makers offer new cars that get high mpg but for every new car sold there are thousands already on the road. 
5. Build the largest nuke plant in the world in the Nevada desert, right next to the Yucca Mountain Repository, and plug into the national grid.  Why risk transporting the nuke waste any farther than necessary?
6. Identify the 10 worst users of energy, efficiency-wise, make them famous and use carrots and sticks to make sure the list is completely different next year.
7. Abandon all efforts at biofuels - that was a really stupid idea.  Not only is producing food energy-intensive but we need all the food we produce to feed people, not cars.  USE FOOD FOR PEOPLE.
8. Remove regulatory burdens preventing new oil & gas refineries from being built and existing ones from being expanded. 

So why do we need an energy plan?  Is there a crisis?  Some prominent Democratic leaders, including Barack Obama, would like you to believe high energy prices are punishment for 5% of the world’s population using 25% of the world’s oil or bitter medicine necessary to force us to finally do the right thing:  conserve. 

This explains their lack of action. 

Others, including myself, have a different take on things:

America does great things with the energy it consumes!

The U.S. economy produces over $13 trillion of goods and services  - more than Japan, Germany, China & the U.K. combined!  We create most of the world’s great inventions.  We produce most of the world’s food - food is energy-intensive.  We use lots of energy to help maintain a fantastic military that helps keep the world safe.  Our incredible economy creates lots of wealth, a big chunk of which is donated to help feed and clothe the rest of the world. 

We also produce most of the world’s medicines, music, movies and manufactured goods.  Does that surprise you?  You may have been misled into thinking the U.S. has lost all it’s manufacturing to China.  Actually, in real dollars, American manufacturers produced $1.53 trillion worth of goods in 2005—up from $900 billion in 1992.  Let me repeat, we manufacture 70% more goods than we did in 1992 in real dollars - that takes energy, lots of it. 

So, why shouldn’t we use the most energy?   We create the most goods and services (and inventions, music, film, food, medicines, aircraft, etc..)  In addition, we’re extremely efficient using our energy.  In 1999, we were able to produce all the goods we did in 1972, and then some, with 74% less energy.  In other words, Mr. Obama, we already conserve, have been for years, we just call it being “efficient”, and we do it to save our companies, and families, money. 

We should celebrate our economy and what we produce, not feel guilty about much energy we use to produce it!

This plan has huge benefits for the United States:

1. Selling SPR oil and opening up the OCS and ANWR sends a huge message to world oil markets that the U.S. is finally serious about using all it’s available resources to meet it’s energy needs.  Although the OCS/ANWR oil will not be delivered immediately, speculators trade on trends and the trend for oil prices will finally start heading down. 
2. Exactly how much will prices drop?  Oddly enough, a Democrat in Congress may have answered that question.  Peter Welch (D-VT),  sponsored H.R. 6022 to stop adding oil to the SPR.  He says that, not purchasing 70,000 barrels per day, “may reduce gas prices 5 to 24 cents per gallon”.  Every Senate Democrat voted for it, including Obama and Hillary, and Bush signed it.  So, Democrats have agreed, on record, that 1) supply and demand affects gas prices (I had doubts Democrats believed the science of modern economics) and 2) exactly how much the price of gas drops (21 cents) for every 100,000 barrels of oil.  Remarkable!
3. Using Congressmen Welch’s math, just selling SPR oil should save another 49 cents / gal.  Do you know anyone that wants to save 49 cents a gallon?  I DO!!  As far as OCS/ANWR, we looked at the 2006 OCS Assessment and the 1987 ANWR report, which indicated, OCS/ANWR may yield 2 to 4 million barrels per day.  Again, using Rep. Welch’s math, the OCS/ANWR oil may push the price of gas to below $1 per gallon.   It may not be that dramatic but the more U.S. oil we produce, the lower the worldwide price - it’s economic science.   
4. This should drop not just the price of oil, but nearly all U.S. consumer items.  Lower prices and a solid plan should help calm consumer fears about the future of the U.S. economy.  Right now, the Democratic Congress stands in the way of a solid drilling plan and that stalemate’s making consumers very uncertain, and increasingly, more angry.  
5. The SPR has about 700 million barrels of oil so 1% is 7 million bbls.  At $142 per bbl, selling 7 million bbls from the SPR will produce about $1 billion dollars per month for investment in alternative energy .  Oil, gas, coal, natural gas and nuclear will meet our near term needs (next thirty years) while we transition to alternative energy (wind, solar, hydrogen, liquefied coal).
6. Aggressive domestic drilling replaces foreign oil with domestic and that prevents hundreds of billions of US dollars from going to countries hostile to our interests, lower our trade deficit,  and creates hundreds of thousands of US jobs.
7. The more oil produced in the U.S. the more control we have over how it is produced.  For example, U.S. deep sea drilling standards minimize damage to the environment if there’s an accident.  Right now, we have no control over how a well drilled off the coast of Nigeria is regulated.
8. Abandoning bio fuels will reduce pressure on food prices and help get food to those who need it most.
9. This plan generates billions of dollars for alternative energy research without any money from the federal budget - this helps keep our deficit down, interest rates down and the dollar up - all good for U.S. consumers.
10. One nice side benefit of increased domestic production is that all our allies, Europe, Japan, Australia, South America, Afghanistan, will also benefit from lower worldwide oil prices after we increase US output.  They will be grateful that we have finally taken pressure off not just gas price but prices overall and avoided a worldwide recession, if not depression.