| Morning Jolt – October 1, 2012 By Jim Geraghty Programming note: Today I'm off to Texas for a quick trip to appear on Glenn Beck's GBTV. The studio looks like some sort of amazing dream. . . complete with an Oval Office set used in past movies. Jim Missing: Hundreds of Thousands of Registered Democrats in Swing States Wait, this doesn't fit the narrative. "Don't boo, vote," President Obama often says in his stump speech whenever crowds boo a Romney plan. The off-hand call to vote may be by design. It comes amid a precipitous decline in Democratic voter registration in key swing states — nowhere more apparent than in Ohio. Voter registration in the Buckeye State is down by 490,000 people from four years ago. Of that reduction, 44 percent is in Cleveland and surrounding Cuyahoga County, where Democrats outnumber Republicans more than two to one. "I think what we're seeing is a lot of spin and hype on the part of the Obama campaign to try to make it appear that they're going to cruise to victory in Ohio," Cuyahoga County Republican Chairman Rob Frost said. "It's not just Cuyahoga County. Nearly 350,000 of those voters are the decrease in the rolls in the three largest counties, Cuyahoga, Hamilton and Franklin." Frost points out that those three counties all contain urban centers, where the largest Democrat vote traditionally has been. Ohio is not alone. An August study by the left-leaning think tank Third Way showed that the Democratic voter registration decline in eight key swing states outnumbered the Republican decline by a 10-to-one ratio. In Florida, Democratic registration is down 4.9 percent, in Iowa down 9.5 percent. And in New Hampshire, it's down down 19.7 percent. Ahem. Remember who was telling you this first, and by that I mean me, on Monday. Note that Ohio does not register voters by party, so we don't know with absolute certainty that the majority of those 490,000 people who are no longer registered to vote are Democrats . . . but it certainly seems likely. Also note that in a lot of these states, the Democrats may still have a raw advantage in number of registered voters in their party, but the margin is down, in some cases dramatically, from 2008, and in a few key states, such as Iowa, the GOP now has the advantage. John Hinderacker at Power Line adds, "And all of the polls show that Romney is doing well with independent voters; far better, obviously, than with Democrats. This is just one more example of how inconsistent the data are, on the basis of which the Democratic Party media are boosting Barack Obama's campaign." One or two cautionary notes — some polls have Romney ahead among independents by solid margins, some have him ahead by only a few percentage points. And sometimes Romney doesn't lead at all, such as in the Columbus Dispatch poll in Ohio: "The president is ahead among independent voters by 3 points and is attracting slightly more GOP support than Romney is getting from Democrats." (Byron York observes, "One weird thing in CD poll: Look at breakdowns, and you'll learn that John Kasich wasn't elected governor in 2010.") Either way, the dip in the voter-registration numbers looks like one more reason why media, pollsters, and candidates should not expect a Democratic turnout on par with the one we saw in 2008. That should not be interpreted as, "Romney's definitely going to win this thing"; it just means there's a media narrative of an impending Obama landslide that just doesn't have the evidence to support it yet. Holding an Election During a 'Global Intifada' David Ignatius is one of those columnists you need to read, because even if you don't agree with his take on things, his sources seem to give him fascinating nuggets you don't find anywhere else. The theme in his Sunday column is that the world has no idea what to expect from Obama's foreign policy in a second term, and that's just the way the president wants it. Less than six weeks before the election, the Obama campaign's theme song might as well be the old country-music favorite "Make the World Go Away." This may be smart politics, but it's not good governing: The way this campaign is going, the president will have a foreign affairs mandate for . . . nothing. The "come back after Nov. 6" sign is most obvious with Iran. The other members of the "P5+1" negotiating group understand that the United States doesn't want serious bargaining until after the election, lest Obama have to consider compromises that might make him look weak. So the talks with Iran that began last May dither along in technical discussions. . . . The Obama arm's-length approach is evident with Egypt and the other nations convulsed by the Arab uprising. The United States is launching an innovative economic-assistance program to help Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood government. But you don't hear much about it this election season. Nor is there much public discussion of the covert U.S. effort to aid the Syrian rebels, or the war in Yemen, or the god-awful mess in Iraq. There are two possible reasons for Obama's vagueness in discussing these issues. The first is that Obama hasn't thought that deeply about how he wants to respond to all of these simmering crises, and he figures he'll cross that bridge when he comes to it. Alternatively, Obama knows darn well how he wants to handle these issues, and he knows they would be politically damaging — so he's keeping them under wraps until he's safely reelected. Neither option is particularly reassuring. But here's where Ignatius' column gets really interesting: I'm told that the talk in the Libyan underground is about a "global intifada," like what the new al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has been preaching for the past five years. But ask U.S. officials about that subject, and you get a "no comment." To be blunt: The administration has a lot invested in the public impression that al-Qaeda was vanquished when Osama bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011. Obama would lose some of that luster if the public examined whether al-Qaeda is adopting a new, Zawahiri-led strategy of interweaving its operations with the unrest sweeping the Arab world. But this discussion is needed, and a responsible president should lead it, even during a presidential campaign. When you hear the phrase "global intifada," you can respond one of two ways. One: Eh, big deal, these jihadists are always big talkers making grandiose threats, this is more of the same. Two: In the past month, at four separate U.S. diplomatic missions, the American flag has been torn down by angry mobs and the crowd has put up the black flag of Islam in its place: in Cairo, in Tunisia, in Yemen, and of course in the fatal attacks at our consulate in Benghazi, Libya. The same deal happened at the German embassy in Sudan. We've seen protests, often violent, outside U.S. embassies, consulates, and companies in the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Greece. In country after country, we're evacuating our non-essential diplomatic staff and reinforcing security where we can. Wouldn't the phrase "global intifada" be a pretty good term to describe what we're seeing before our eyes? And no, despite the fact that you're hearing almost nothing in the U.S. mainstream media, the threat hasn't gone away: The Philippines says it has moved to secure Western embassies in the country as it monitors potential threats to their citizens following a security alert raised last week. On Friday, the US embassy warned that an unspecified threat against Americans in the capital Manila had been detected by "reliable security forces". Australia, Britain and Canada on Saturday joined the US in issuing a security alert, warning Westerners to be on guard amid fears they could get caught up in an attempted attack against Americans. Philippines deputy presidential spokeswoman Abigail Valte said the US embassy had asked Manila for additional security. "As a matter of precautionary measures, we responded to their request to augment security," Valte said on government radio on Sunday, adding that it had also "responded quickly" to improve security for the other missions. Kirsten Powers in a Daily Beast piece that deserves a ton of attention this week: "Nothing about the constantly evolving tale the Obama administration has been weaving about the attacks in the Middle East makes sense, unless it is seen as a deliberate attempt to mislead Americans into believing al-Qaeda has been decimated, as President Obama has been known to assert. After dancing on Osama bin Laden's grave for a week in Charlotte, the administration was faced with the reality that the war on terror is still quite on." Univision: Eric Holder Es un Contrabandista de Arma Grande Univision: Now doing the work that English-language press won't do. At 7 p.m. on Sunday, Univision says it'll air a blockbuster investigation detailing the impact of the deeply flawed gunrunning investigation, which operated between Oct. 2009 and January 2011. The Spanish-language channel says the "Aqui y Ahora" program will expose the true deadly toll of a covert program where US officials allowed over 2,000 high-powered rifles to "walk" into the hands of violent Mexican cartels. Expecting American interest, Univision will caption the program in English. In the US, "Fast and Furious" is most noted for its ties to the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and for political fallout over the extent of involvement of the Obama administration, including Attorney General Holder. But in Mexico, the program may reignite furor over how a US government that had promised to try to halt the border gun traffic instead covertly contributed to it. "Americans have been getting a lot of information about the possible cover-up in the Justice Department, the tragedy of Brian Terry getting killed, but what about the Mexicans?" says Miami-based Gerardo Reyes, Univision's director of investigative reporting, in an interview Saturday with the Monitor. "The sinister part of this, and I know it sounds very hard, is that the success of this operation depended in part on the fact that the guns were used in Mexico to kill," says Mr. Reyes. "In order to reach the target of the operation, which was identifying the drug traffickers who were using the guns, [ATF agents] were waiting for the guns to be used. And how are guns used in Mexico? Killing people. I talked to an ATF agent who said there was no other way to explain it." ATF is the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. By cross referencing gun tracing data, Univision identified 57 weapons linked to murders and crimes in Mexico, and used that data to highlight "the face of the tragedy in Mexico," says Mr. Reyes. "Univision isn't messing around, showing tons of bodies and blood soaked crime scenes," observes Katie Pavlich, who literally wrote the book on this topic. The Spanish-language article version of the televised report can be found here. ADDENDUM: The DNC surpasses my parody from Friday, as their spokesman Brad Woodhouse spins debate expectations: "Mitt Romney has had a lot more time to debate, the president has not debated in the past four years in terms, of a campaign debate. I think the president will hold his own, but he's not known for sound bites." To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com National Review, Inc. | 
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