Earlier today the Mitt Romney campaign released a video of the 1994 debate he had with Ted Kennedy where a younger Mitt Romney argues against a government takeover of health care.

But in April 12, 2006 at a Faneuil Hall singing ceremony, Mitt Romney actually saluted Ted Kennedy, the very man he debated at Faneuil Hall in 1994 as a “parent” of healthcare. Then Romney celebrated Kennedy’s ability to get a federal monies for their signature health care bill. Now Romney makes a states’ rights appeal and says that the Massachusetts plan was for Massachusetts and didn’t involve the other states.

According to NBC News’ Michael Isikoff, White House visitors logs reveal that Romney’s health care advisers and experts repeatedly met with senior Obama administration officials in 2009, while Obama’s health care plan was being drafted.  Indeed when Mitt Romney argued that Barack Obama ought to have called him and asked him what worked and what didn’t, Romney neglected to mention that three of his own advisers decamped to Washington so Obama had little need to phone him.

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Joel Pollak, our editor-in-chief, asked Rick Tyler of Winning Our Future– Newt Gingrich’s Super PAC–about why Newt Gingrich and he are attacking Mitt Romney from the Left on his Bain Capital record. Tyler encouraged Romney to hold a press conference and explain some of the lingering questions surrounding his involvement at Bain Capital. Pollak then asked Tyler if Gingrich’s Super PAC would be returning the monies that Bain and its associates had contributed to Gingrich and the PAC.

The anti-Romney film they are discussing was made by Jason Killian Meath, a former associate of Romney’s top strategists, Stuart Stevens and Russ Schriefer and former contributor to Big Government. Adding a twist tot the project, Meath once worked for Mitt Romney during his 2008 bid for the presidency.  Jon Hunstman and Rick Perry piled on, while Rick Santorum declined on Sean Hannity.

The New York Times quickly noted Newt Gingrich’s own ties to the leveraged buy out industry whose model Gingrich has attacked. Gingrich once served on the advisory board of Forstmann Little, whose business model was effectively identical to Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital.

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Saturday, at the GOP debate, Romney claimed that his company and those Bain & Co. invested in had helped create 100,000 net new jobs.

That figure was contradicted by a figure of 10,000 jobs Romney had previously given in his 1994 attempt at unseating Ted Kennedy.

In June 1994, Romney ran the following ad.

“Mitt Romney has spent his life building more than 20 businesses and helping to create more than 10,000 jobs,” says a narrator. “So when it comes to creating jobs, he’s not just talk. He’s done it. . . . Doesn’t it make sense for us to have a senator with real-world experience?” (“Romney ads key economic expertise; But rival says TV campaign is thin on details,” The Boston Globe, June 15, 1994).

It’s a theme he repeated to David Nyhan of the Boston Globe in a June interview. “[Romney] says he created 10,000 jobs,” Nyhan wrote. (“To Mitt, it’s a vision thing,” David Nyhan, The Boston Globe June 22, 1994).

And Romney repeated it again in another ad that his campaign ran in September 1994.

“The private investigators Ted Kennedy hired to dig up dirt got it wrong.  The companies Mitt Romney ran provide generous health care benefits to all their employees and have helped create over 10,000 new jobs.  But Kennedy’s in big trouble — so now he’s stooping to twisted attacks — distortions — already called ’sleazy.’  Ted Kennedy is trying to destroy Mitt Romney even though Kennedy’s never held a job in the real world.  After 32 years, the last thing he can talk about is change.” (MASSACHUSETTS: TED HITS ROMNEY ON MORMON RACIAL POLICIES The Hotline September 28, 1994)

Now, in 2012, he and his surrogates are claiming that he created 100,000 net jobs.

So when did that happen?

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Left-of-everyone Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) has a leg up on the layman in matters of faith: Sherrod labored alongside Ted Kennedy for a government big enough to drown us all in its generosity. Sherrod is so charitable with your money, he fought for a “public option” in Obamacare!

At a September 2009 Organizing for America rally in Columbus, Ohio, Sherrod promised to pass a health care bill with a public option — because Saint Teddy knew it was good for us:

When discussing the late Ted Kennedy, “He easily could have walked away” is an unfortunate choice of words.

As we saw last week, Sherrod Brown’s take on Christianity features a central government equal parts asphyxiating and unaffordable. If citing Ted Kennedy is Sherrod’s idea of bolstering a faith-based argument, Sherrod is not a person we should defer to on “moral issues.”

Aside from the implication that Jesus hates limited government, why should we resent the Ted Kennedy standard for socialist healthcare? Teddy himself said it best after the 1969 drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne: “I regard as indefensible the fact that I did not report the accident to the police immediately.”

Ted Kennedy was a contemptible man whose name yielded Progressive victories logic and basic mathematics should have rendered impossible. Whether his failings are glossed over by the likes of Sherrod Brown out of Christian forgiveness or partisan convenience, Kennedy should serve as a moral gauge for no one.

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A bit less than a year ago, I posted piece entitled Is Barack Obama a One-Trick Pony? I raised this question with an eye to three thumbsuckers that had recently appeared – one on Politico by veteran commentator Elizabeth Drew; another, entitled Amateur Hour at the White House, written by Leslie Gelb for The Daily Beast; and a third, drawing on the remarks of these two well-known Democratic scribes, published in The Wall Street Journal by Peggy Noonan.

Noonan had two things to say – first, that no one among her liberal acquaintances really loved Barack Obama the way so many Democrats had loved Bill Clinton; and, second, that the Democrats were wrong to think that passing his healthcare reform would help him. In her view, the passage of “such a poor piece of legislation” would, in fact, do him almost irreparable harm. Moreover, she added, “There is the growing perception of incompetence, of the inability to run the machine of government. This, with Americans, is worse than Obama’s rebranding as a leader who governs from the left. Americans demand baseline competence. If he comes to be seen as Jimmy Carter was, that the job was bigger than the man, that will be the end.”

To this, I added, “The Democrats are getting what they asked for.”

In 2004, they tried a trick. If we nominate a man who won the Purple Heart in Vietnam, they thought, we will win. Never mind that John Kerry disgraced himself in the aftermath of his service in Vietnam, making unjust charges against his brothers-in-arms and resolutely thereafter refusing to apologize to those whom he had slandered. Never mind that he had no executive experience. Never mind that, as a US Senator, he was – to say the least – undistinguished. They wanted to win; and they gave not a thought to what sort of President he might be.

In 2008, the Democrats did the same thing. They had on their hands an inexperienced, recently minted US Senator from Illinois who was – as Joe Biden put it in a candid remark that typifies his propensity for speaking his mind without first thinking about the consequences – “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Never mind, they thought, Obama’s long-standing connections with William Ayers, the unrepentant mastermind of a domestic terrorist bombing campaign in the 1970s. Never mind Obama’s close association with the racist demagogue Jeremiah Wright. Never mind his lack of executive experience, his unfamiliarity with the private sector, and his ignorance of the ways of Washington. With the help of the pliable press, he could be sold – and the Americans would congratulate themselves on their lack of racial prejudice if they voted for him.

“Now,” I then wrote, “comes the reckoning. That is one problem. The other is that Obama’s one trick cannot often be played. As we have seen over the last few months, as he has tried to play this trick over and over and over again, the more we see of him, the less we are impressed. Franklin Delano Roosevelt never held his fireside chats more than three times a year. How many times has Obama demanded airtime from the networks in the last ten months? I shudder to think.” And to this, I added,

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Over the last twenty-two months, Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid have sown the wind. Today – if the polls are any indication – they will reap the whirlwind.

The portents have been there for a very long time. It all began on 19 February 2009 with a rant on CNBC on the part of Rick Santelli, which struck a nerve and occasioned the birth of the Tea-Party Movement. That the tide might be beginning to turn was made evident in mid-April of that year when the adherents of that movement successfully mounted demonstrations across the entire country, and the Democrats and their minions in the media began denouncing them as Astroturf, Nazis, racists, and tea-baggers. And to anyone who cared to notice, the seriousness of the opposition and the depth of their concern was made manifest that August when constituents confronted their Senators and Congressmen in town halls throughout the land and shouted them down. It was on 2 August 2009 that I first suggested that, if the Republicans embraced the Tea-Party Movement and articulated the grievances that had occasioned its emergence, a genuine political realignment might be in the offing.

As it happened – and it was by and large an accident – the Republicans were well-positioned to take advantage of this political opening. In January, 2009, many of the House Republicans and not a few of their colleagues in the Senate would have been willing to cooperate with the Democrats in promoting the agenda of the Obama administration. In 2008, they had received a drubbing at the polls, and they were appropriately cowed. But, campaign rhetoric aside, no one on the Democratic side was seriously interested in bipartisan accord. They had won the election; they persuaded themselves that they had a mandate; and though President Obama had presented himself to the voting public as a moderate, he and his fellow Democrats had not the slightest intention of seeking the middle ground. In the House, it would not have taken much to swing a sizable group of Republicans behind the Democrats’ program, but Nancy Pelosi was intent on revenge. So, when the so-called “stimulus” bill came up for a vote, she made sure that there were within it no earmarks for the Republicans, and out of pique nearly all of them voted against the measure.

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Scott Rasmussen now predicts that the Republicans will pick up fifty-five seats in the House. Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia still has the pick-up at forty-seven but says that, if forced to tweak the numbers right now, he would increase his estimate of Republican gains by single digits – which is to say, he agrees with Rasmussen.

There are pollsters out there who are playing games, as a glance at the polls for the Senate race in West Virginia should make clear – and, of course, it is easy to play games. If one wants to encourage the Left and discourage potential Republican voters and donors, all that one has to do is to base one’s poll on the presumption that the percentage of self-described Democrats within the voting public in 2010 will be equal to the percentage in 2008.

Sabato and his associates and Rasmussen are not, however, among the gamesters. Both are aiming at accuracy. Sabato and company have a reputation to uphold (and, in the academic world, that is all-important), and Rasmussen is a nonpartisan pollster who attracts clients by way of demonstrated precision. Neither outfit can afford to make a fool of itself.

I nonetheless think that both are greatly underestimating the size of the Republican surge. Both have reason to be cautious. For understandable reasons, neither is going to climb out on a limb; and both are basing their estimates on recent electoral history. If something is in the offing that exceeds the range of political oscillation in recent decades (including, notably, 1994), if we in American live in something other than normal times, they will miss the size of the surge.

It is good to remember that not a single Sovietologist predicted the collapse and dismemberment of the Soviet regime. History has a way of lulling us into sleep. What has been in recent times we tend to think will be in the foreseeable future. Then, every once in a while, suddenly, out of nowhere, a political earthquake arrives – and only in the aftermath do the experts notice that there were ample warning signs.

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One of the reasons Harry Reid is trailing Sharon Angle in his bid for reelection is an inability to listen to Nevada voters. As Senate Majority leader, Reid was instrumental in the Senate passing bills such as TARP, Porkulus and Obamacare, all of them passed over the objections of his Nevada constituents (as well as most Americans).

Nevada voters shouldn’t feel bad about their Senator not paying attention to their desires, because as the video below illustrates, Reid doesn’t pay attention to interviewers either

At a time when the American taxpayer is on the hook for trillions in current and future federal spending—when the Congressional Budget Office warns that the current rate of federal spending is “unsustainable”—liberal Democrats in Congress have earmarked over $68 million of taxpayer dollars for a Boston shrine to the late Senator Edward Kennedy.

In a detailed report, the Boston Herald describes the planned Edward M. Kennedy Institute as a “temple for Ted Kennedy built with pork.”

According to their account, congressional Democrats—especially Massachusetts senators John Kerry and Edward Markey—have been cramming earmarks for the project into various government funding bills. The Herald found that Kerry and Markey even intend to siphon $28.9 million of the institute’s funding from the Defense Department budget, with almost $19 million of that amount already signed into law.

Why do they think taxpayers should be paying for this shrine? A statement from a Kerry spokesman declared that the institute will bring “knowledge and good citizenship to thousands of young people.”

This has raised the ire of taxpayer watchdog groups. “If the Kennedy family wants to honor the senator, they should find a way to fund it themselves,” David E. Williams of Citizens Against Government Waste told the newspaper. Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense agreed that “this could be independently funded and doesn’t need to be getting taxpayer dollars.”

Indeed.

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As far as white people go, you couldn’t get much whiter than Teddy Kennedy. He was utterly luminescent. Running around in his boxer shorts, chasing the college girls his nephew William brought home that night, he must have appeared almost ghost-like. Yet when he proposed Nationalized Healthcare, we soundly rejected it.

I can’t think of a bigger white cracker redneck than William Jefferson Clinton. He grew up in a trailer, and had a pick-up truck lined with Astroturf. While he was fooling around in the Oval Office, his wife tried to get Nationalized Health Care passed. America hated that idea so much, that we turned over the House and Senate to the Republicans for the first time in 40 years.

But now that Barack Obama has managed to shove a deplorable piece of questionably constitutional legislation through the corrupt purchasable legislature, we are tarred as racists for criticizing his actions.

We weren’t even allowed to hope he failed. That remark caused a lot of ruckus over the past year. For some reason if you don’t want the President’s agenda to pass, you are rooting against the Nation. Yet for eight years our opponents were allowed to get away with the remark: “I support the troops but I don’t support the mission.”

It always sounded kind of dumb to me, like “I support the Cubs, I just don’t want them to win the World Series” (and in my lifetime, they’ve yet to disappoint). Now when we on the Right say that we support the President, but not his policies, we are ignorant bigots. Which brings us around to the most common rationale you hear on the Left. “They’re only opposed to Barack Obama’s health bill, because they don’t want a black guy in the White House.”

I beg to differ.

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Back in 1946, an ingenious advertising executive named Karl Frost suggested a simple, straightforward political slogan to the Massachusetts Republican Committee: “Had Enough? Vote Republican,” it read. This slogan was soon found on billboards all across the country, and in November of that year the Republicans picked up fifty-five seats in the House and twelve in the Senate, seizing control in both chambers.

By that November, the country had suffered under the New Deal for fourteen years, and Americans, understandably, were fed up. Moreover, as Michael Barone pointed out last May, “After World War II Democrats wanted to retain wartime high taxes, pro-union labor laws, and wage and price controls, all manipulatable for political benefit by political insiders. Republicans  . . . won big enough majorities to lower taxes, revise labor laws and abolish controls.”

Were I in the shoes of Michael Steele, I would buy up billboard space all over the country and slap up the same slogan – for something similar should be possible this November. The healthcare debate was over some time ago. When Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in January, it was made abundantly clear that Barack Obama and the Democratic Party had lost that debate decisively. Now, in the face of fierce public opposition, they have jammed the bill through Congress, and they have done so without the cover of a single Republican vote. For this – as William Daley, the mastermind of the Chicago machine, warned in an op-ed that appeared in The Washington Post on Christmas eve – they will pay dearly and not just this coming November.

Abraham Lincoln once observed, “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.” It is possible, of course, that events will intervene between now and November. It is conceivable that the healthcare bill and the manner in which it was passed in both the Senate and the House will be forgotten. But this is not likely. If the Republicans stick together, mount a principled opposition to the Obama administration on all fronts, and recruit first-rate candidates to run in every district at both the state and the federal levels in November, it is highly likely that there will be a political earthquake in this country on a scale not seen since 1932.

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Yes, the Chavez-supporting Bill Delahunt I wrote about several weeks ago is the same Bill Delahunt who when he was district attorney let Amy Bishop, the neurobiologist who gunned down her colleagues, get away with murdering her brother in 1986. Delahunt and the ex-chief of police are pointing fingers about who screwed up what, while the State’s U.S. Attorney looks into Bishop’s possible involvement with an attempted bombing. Brought into the mix most recently, is Amy Bishop’s mother, the political big wig, Judith, who may have had a role to play in the younger Bishop’s release.

It remains to be seen who dropped the ball on Bishop, but what’s without question is that Delahunt has been a horrible public servant — and that’s not even counting his failure to prosecute career criminal-murderer, Myles J. Connor Jr., who Delahunt not only failed to prosecute, but even went so far as to testify on his behalf!

No, unfortunately, Delahunt has a long, long record of shaddy ties and incompetence, as he tries to keep the country safe.

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The Chowdah Revolution is far from over, if recent reports are read critically.

And its scent has been picked up as far afield as Rhode Island and down on the Cape.

Delahunt with his "excellent friend"

This past week Congressman Patrick Kennedy announced that he will not be seeking reelection, ending 50 years of Kennedy incompetence in federal government. Like his father, the younger Kennedy had a strong penchant for strong drinks and driving — although he seems to have enjoyed pills as well.

Today, The Boston Globe reports that Cape Cod congressman Bill Delahunt (MA-10) might be the next to go. The Boston Globe seems to think that Delahunt’s ties to Chavez and a controversial home heating program will be helpful to him in his possible re-election bid. I have my doubts.  Two weeks ago, I wrote an analysis of Delahunt’s weaknesses. Here’s an exercept:

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The Massachusetts Special Election last week upended “conventional wisdom” about “who can/might/should/ or will win” and how traditional voting blocs may cast their ballots in upcoming elections.  This is not simply a look at “what happened,” but also what it means for the legislative agenda in Washington. In this poll, actual voters provide a roadmap for reform as Washington continues to debate how best to fix the economy, jump-start entrepreneurship, and shore up national security.

Some highlights from the poll:

*       Independent Women Voters: This demographic was key to the electoral outcome. They bucked their gender, with 67% of them supporting Scott Brown.  Majorities say that Congress should stop the current levels of spending and call for enacting provisions that make it more affordable for people to buy health insurance on their own, instead of through their jobs, in the same way people buy homeowners’ and life insurance (56%). Two-thirds of Indie women would allow small businesses to form groups to buy healthcare coverage at lower rates, and 45% want Congress to “start over” on healthcare reform; just 2% say continue with the reform “as is.”

*   Those who had frequently voted for Ted Kennedy in the past (63% of the sample) had some surprising opinions: 79% of them said providing tax cuts to small businesses for job creation will speed up the nation’s economic recovery; 47% say Congress should open healthcare negotiations for the public to observe.

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Originally published December 9, 2009.

In Tuesday’s primary election, Massachusetts Democrats chose as their Senate nominee a woman who kept a clearly innocent man in prison in order to advance her political career.

Martha Coakley isn’t even fit for the late Teddy Kennedy’s old seat. (What is it about this particular Senate seat?)

During the daycare/child molestation hysteria of the ’80s, Gerald Amirault, his mother, Violet, and sister, Cheryl, were accused of raping children at the family’s preschool in Malden, Mass., in what came to be known as the second-most notorious witch trial in Massachusetts history.

The allegations against the Amiraults were preposterous on their face. Children made claims of robots abusing them, a “bad clown” who took the children to a “magic room” for sex play, rape with a 2-foot butcher knife, other acts of sodomy with a “magic wand,” naked children tied to trees within view of a highway, and — standard fare in the child abuse hysteria era — animal sacrifices.

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[Ed Note: This is the first post to run at BigGovernment. It was published two-years ago today. It still seems relevant.]

In 1995, President Bill Clinton stood before the nation and proclaimed, “The era of big government is over.” The following year, the federal budget deficit stood at 1.4% of GDP. Thirteen years later, in 2008, the deficit had doubled, to just over 3% of GDP. This year, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the federal budget deficit will equal 11.4% of GDP.

As George Will would say, “Well.”

This is the real source of our “summer of discontent.” Yes, millions of Americans spent the month of August holding Tea Parties, attending town halls, organizing, marching and protesting against ObamaCare, i.e. Congressional and Administration proposals to reconstruct the entire health care sector. But to suggest that health care alone is at the root of this backlash is to miss the forest for the trees. To paraphrase Democrat strategist James Carville, “It’s the big government, stupid.”

Since last September when the financial markets stumbled, we’ve seen a Wall Street bailout, government takeovers of AIG, Citigroup, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, GM, Chrysler, and numerous banks. The Federal Reserve has opened its discount window to almost all-comers and has taken the unprecedented step of aggressively buying up the federal government’s own debt. Congress rushed through a “stimulus to nowhere,” moved closer to a “cap-and-trade” remake of the energy sector and openly talked about higher taxes and more regulation. (more…)