For Romney, it's now or never in Denver

There I was, sitting at the bar with my eyes glued to the TV in Chicago’s LaSalle Street Station, waiting for the departure of the Rock Island’s Rocky Mountain Rocket to take me to Des Moines. It was Sept. 26, 1960, the evening of the first-ever televised presidential debate, between Vice President Richard Nixon and Sen. John Kennedy.

The debate was focused on domestic issues, just as it will be this Wednesday evening. A new age in American political theatre was about to begin.

This would be my fourth attempt to predict correctly the outcome of a presidential election. The previous two had been easy as Ike demolished Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956. But the race in 1960 was a completely different kettle of fish. President Eisenhower was seriously ill, and the nation’s economy was reeling from a succession of three recessions. The country appeared ready for change. But was it prepared to put its trust into the hands of such a young a man who had served only eight years in the Senate, and who was a Roman Catholic?

Nixon was the favorite, and following the two political conventions he had built a six-point lead in the polls over Kennedy. The question was whether the televised debates would enable him to cement that lead, or whether his rival could use the technological revolution that television had become to close the gap and seize the advantage.

We remember what happened. Kennedy was better prepared, more self assured and at ease with the media and the opportunity television offered. Nixon was exhausted, not feeling well, sweated profusely, had a five o’clock shadow and appeared angry. When that first debate was over, Nixon’s running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, said, “That son of a b---- just lost the election.” Cabot Lodge was right.

By the time all four of the debates were concluded, Kennedy had taken the lead. But it was that first debate, the one on domestic issues, that proved to be the turning point in what turned out to be an election that was decided by a razor thin margin of 0.1 percent, a difference of about one vote per precinct nationally.

As I left the bar for the train in Chicago that night 52 years ago, the Shadow told me, “Kennedy wins.”

The debate Wednesday in Denver is just as crucial for Mitt Romney as it was for Kennedy in 1960. He’s the challenger and he’s behind in all the polls. Not only did he not get any bounce in the polls as a consequence of the Republican Convention, he and his campaign are reeling from an array of punishing, self-inflicted body blows.

Romney was forced far to the right in order to dispatch his opponents in the Republican primaries this past spring. He comes across on the campaign trail and on television as wooden and stiff. That personal style, coupled with his immense wealth, have created a gulf that has prevented him from connecting with average Americans. And the recent revelation of the tape that shows him disdainful of almost half of the electorate has been a disaster.

But amazingly, he still has a chance to win. For that to happen, Romney is going to have to win the Denver debate. And he’s got to win it decisively. The reason that he still has a chance is because the Obama administration can’t run on its record.

The economic recovery is anemic. The danger of another recession is real. If that were not the case, the Fed would not be throwing the kitchen sink at the economy with its latest and most aggressive round of quantitative easing. Unemployment is relentlessly persistent and there is no light at the end of the tunnel, Bill Clinton’s homilies to the contrary notwithstanding.

The most salient consequences of the president’s signature stimulus and health care reform laws have been the polarization of the American people and the concomitant rise of the tea party radicals. Furthermore, the administration showed nothing but fecklessness in refusing to deal with the debt and deficit crisis that will again take the nation to the edge of the fiscal cliff shortly after the November election.

Romney’s opening exists only because of Barack Obama’s failures over the past four years. Thus, the question is: How does Romney thread the eye of the needle in Denver?

Surprisingly, the answer is obvious. He’s got to be both hopeful and specific with respect to fixing America’s broken economy. He’s got to say it can be fixed and then specify how it can be fixed. Doing that is politically risky, and that’s why neither he nor Obama have done so thus far. But it’s a risk Romney now must take or face inevitable defeat.

But if he does it in a coherent way, it will instantly expose the difference between him and the president. He will have set forth a specific plan that encompasses job creation, economic growth, tax reform and energy independence. When the public contrasts such a plan with the fact that Obama has no real alternative, the dynamic of the race will pivot in Romney’s favor.

There’s no tomorrow, Mitt.

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HSO: Our own little musical oasis

Like most of you, my wife and I love music and know precious little about it. A week ago, we, along with upward of a thousand of you, packed the Hendersonville Symphony Orchestra's Concert Hall at Blue Ridge Community College to spend an evening with the magnificent HSO.

Richard Kaufman, guest conductor, was invited by the music director and conductor of the orchestra, Thomas Joiner, who served as guest concertmaster and soloist for the evening. The HSO performed a selection of great musical themes from the movies.

For many in the audience, I suppose the highlight of the stunning performance was hearing again John Williams' terror-inducing theme from "Jaws" or the triumphant music from "Star Wars."

But for Judy and me, the highlight of the evening occurred when the HSO performed "The Ride of the Cossacks" from the film "Taras Bulba," which starred Yul Brynner. Magically, the HSO took us back to that warm summer evening in 1962 when we took Judy's grandmother to see "Taras Bulba" at a drive-in theater in Veedersburg, Ind. Half a century later, the HSO breathed life into Franz Waxman's brilliant musical score and reminded us of an evening that had almost slipped from our memory.

But here's the larger point, the more important point: Why would an internationally renowned conductor like Richard Kaufman come to Hendersonville twice in the past couple of months? On its face, it would seem to be at least anomalous, if not inexplicable. In fact, it's neither, and that's what makes it so important.

Although he would be the first to deny it, Kaufman is a superstar. Since beginning violin studies at age 7, he has left his uniquely talented mark on music and on audiences all over the world. I'll not come close to doing justice to his accomplishments by telling you that he is the conductor of the Orange County Pacific Symphony, pops conductor laureate with the Dallas Symphony, and has conducted orchestras including the Chicago Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra. On the international stage, Kaufman has conducted the London Symphony Orchestra as well as orchestras in Rotterdam, Liverpool, Malaysia, Krakow, Dublin and Calgary.

What keeps bringing Richard Kaufman back to Hendersonville is best captured in his own words. He told me, "Human emotions are the same for people no matter where they live, whether it be in Hendersonville, London or anywhere in the world. Music speaks to these deep emotions and to the desire to fill one's life with beauty, joy, comfort and an uplifted spirit. The HSO is fulfilling these desires in creative and innovative ways, including concerts of great music that touch the soul, and music education programs that introduce young people of all ages, backgrounds and socioeconomic environments to the exciting and life-changing world of symphonic music."

Each year, the HSO teams with the Henderson County Board of Education to provide live symphonic performances for third- and sixth-grade students. In addition, this program also reaches out to include charter and private schools as well as home-schooled students.

During the current concert season, the HSO is holding open rehearsals for Henderson County young people. This innovative effort provides those students with a behind-the-scenes look at concert preparations that culminates with refreshments and a lively question-and-answer session for the youths with members of the 90-plus member HSO. These innovative community outreach efforts aimed at young people have now been extended to the Hendersonville Boys and Girls Club, where the response has been large and enthusiastic.

And there's more. The Hendersonville Symphony Youth Orchestra (HYSO) is an educational arm of the HSO that provides advanced string orchestra and symphonic orchestra performance opportunities for middle and high school musicians.

The HYSO has three orchestras: the Prelude String Ensemble, the Sinfonietta String Orchestra and the HYSO Youth Symphony. The latter is a full symphony orchestra designed to prepare high school-age musicians for lifelong music making in college or community orchestras. Amazingly, the HSO devotes more than 15 percent of its budget to youth music programs, and that initiative reaches more than 2,500 children in our county.

The HSO is in its 41st year, and for the past 14 years it has flourished under the leadership of its remarkable music director and conductor, Maestro Joiner. He also serves as professor of violin and orchestra activities at Furman University, where he conducts orchestra, operatic and oratorio concerts each year. Additionally, he has served for 31 seasons as concertmaster of the Brevard Music Festival Orchestra.

Joiner puts it this way: "The opening of our 41st season at the Blue Ridge Concert Hall last Saturday was one of the most exciting, memorable programs of my tenure with the HSO. It just doesn't get any better than this! I have never been prouder of our orchestra."

Finally, the Shadow's having an idea. In very many of the churches in Henderson County, there is a rich abundance of musical talent and interest. If the HSO were to begin an outreach initiative to those churches, it is very likely that the HSO and the music programs in our churches would jointly benefit from such collaboration.

The HSO is an oasis, a musical oasis, in our midst. Experience it for yourself!

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Mitt is running a misguided campaign

Normally a presidential nominee gets about a 5 percent bump in the polls following his party's convention. Following the balloon drop in Tampa 10 days ago, Mitt Romney's bump was essentially zero percent. Something's wrong with the Romney campaign, and there is precious little time left to put it right.

As President Barack Obama's first term nears its end, there is no doubt that America is in peril. You don't have to take my word for it. Seventy percent of the nation believes we are not headed in the right direction. The economic recovery has been anemic at best. Unacceptably high unemployment persists, even in the face of massive stimulus spending. Federal deficit and debt levels have soared over the past four years.

And all of this has combined to keep President Obama's approval rating below 50 percent. History teaches us that when a president has an approval rating below 50 percent, he's vulnerable to defeat.

But all through the summer, the polls have shown that President Obama clings to a small lead. And more ominous for Romney is the fact that the president's lead is even larger in most of the dozen or so crucial battleground states that will determine who wins the election. Romney's campaign is deeply flawed, and amazingly it is increasingly clear that the nominee and his inner sanctum of advisers can't figure out what's wrong and fix it. I say "amazingly" because the problem and the fix are plainly evident.

It's not as if those in the Romney campaign haven't realized they are in trouble. Months ago, they wrongly assumed they could win simply by bashing a failed Obama administration. Over the summer, they learned that tactic was not sufficient to the task of winning the White House. Then, as the convention approached, they figured out that they needed to humanize Romney in order to attempt to counteract the widespread perception that he comes across as a patrician utterly lacking warmth and a connection with everyday Americans who are experiencing a world of hurt.

And they also belatedly figured out that Romney and the Republican Party don't play well with the most crucial bloc of voters in the coming election — suburban women. How these women vote in places like Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, the Virginia suburbs of Washington, Tampa, Charlotte, Philadelphia and Denver will spell victory or defeat for Obama or Romney.

And so Team Romney loaded the convention program in Tampa with personal vignettes about Mitt Romney's extraordinary life and also featured numerous prominent women to address these deficiencies. These were smart and essential moves, and there is no doubt they were successful. But the convention bump was negligible. What's missing?

President Obama's track record has been abysmal. His brilliant 2008 campaign centerpiece of hope and change was stillborn two months into his presidency when he voluntarily relinquished leadership of his stimulus and health care reform efforts to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. But those strategic miscalculations to the contrary notwithstanding, President Obama remains formidable because he is likable.

And he's the incumbent. For any challenger to defeat a sitting president requires that challenger to explain how he would do the job differently and more effectively. And that's what Romney has failed to do. This is a blunder of epic and fatal proportions.

Ever since Romney selected Paul Ryan to be his running mate, we have heard Ryan say that when they win, "We will lead." But he has not said how they will lead or what they will do. In his convention address in Tampa, Romney said he would make America energy independent by 2020. But he did not say how he would get that job done.

To win, he must specify how he will change Obama's policies regarding the economy and jobs. And until I hear a better set of ideas, I believe the content of The Shadow's past three columns on how to harvest and use the enormous amount of untapped natural gas and oil buried under America's feet is just what the doctor ordered for what's missing in Mitt's campaign.

Read those columns, Mitt. They will give you the specifics you need to deal simultaneously with the way forward on robust economic growth, job creation and energy independence. Once you tell the American people that the nation has 4.2 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas (enough to meet the nation's electricity demands for 575 years), 1.5 trillion barrels of oil, and estimated royalty revenues of $37.5 trillion, it will be game, set, match for your campaign.

Oh sure, the environmentalists will go nuts, but they're locked-in Obama votes, anyway.

The place to unveil this thunderbolt is the first presidential debate, which will focus on domestic issues at the University of Denver on Oct. 3. It will throw Team Obama on the defensive. And it will keep it on the defensive because it has no countervailing set of specific ideas. It will give millions of Americans the reason to vote for you that thus far you have not provided. And among those millions will be enough suburban women in states like Colorado, Ohio and Virginia who will enable you to win the states that you will otherwise lose.

It's now or never, Mitt.

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Our broken nation can be fixed

So now we know that America sits on top of vast reserves of recoverable oil and natural gas that, when brought to market, will make us energy independent and can reignite our faltering economy. Thus, the question is: How do we make that happen?

There are two obvious answers. The first is to leave it to the private sector. The second is to leave it to the federal government. These distinctly different answers have one thing in common: They are certain to fail. If we leave it to the energy companies, they'll get richer and little else will happen. If we leave it to the feds, it will become an endless nightmare of committee meetings and regulations.

No, to harness the energy that can light the way out of the nation's growing darkness, we need a new paradigm — a new chapter in American democracy. Let's call it the American Economic Renaissance (AER). AER would be chartered by Congress as a nongovernmental entity, like the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) was in 1863. But with vastly more authority than the NAS, the AER would exclusively control all of the $37.5 trillion in royalty payments from the oil and gas under federal land such as the Green River Formation! Let that thought sink in!

How would the AER put that money to work? For example, it's clear that America's complex infrastructure is falling apart. The most recent report card from the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the nation's infrastructure an overall grade of D. More specifically, they grade aviation a D, dams a D, rail a C-minus, schools a D, national power grid a D-minus, and navigable waterways a D-minus. The society estimates that the five-year cost to put all of this right is $2.2 trillion.

In the current stagnant economy, that $2.2 trillion price tag is totally out of reach. But with the AER in control of the $37.5 trillion in royalty payments, it's "chump change." Do you see the difference? And a national infrastructure rebuild and all the good jobs it would create is but one of scores of examples of the job-creating and economy-lifting projects that AER would make possible for decades to come with its access to the energy royalties.

And a mechanism exists that the AER could use to assure the money was well and properly spent. One of the few gleaming success stories in the federal government is the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH's job is to support biomedical research to cure disease. It began in 1938 with an annual appropriation of about $464,000. Today its budget is more than $31 billion. The NIH has for decades been the world's unquestioned leader in advancing biomedical knowledge and curing disease.

It spends its money wisely and well, and the bureaucrats at the NIH have virtually nothing to do with funding decisions. Instead the NIH convenes what it calls study sections that are made of the best scientists (private citizens) from our universities and medical centers. These scientists rank every proposed research grant for its scientific merit. Then the NIH pays the grant requests basically in ranked order of scientific merit until it runs out of money. All the bureaucrats do is write the checks.

The AER could employ a variant of this trustworthy system to award funding for a national infrastructure rebuild, and everything else that it would ultimately support. Can you imagine the number and diversity of jobs such an effort would create? It would be enormous and would go far beyond construction jobs to include a vast array of real and sustainable jobs.

The AER would, of course, have to be led by a remarkable individual. There are many in America who can provide the leadership that's required. One example is Gen. Colin Powell, a proven leader and commander, a patriot who would put the nation's interest above all else, a person who would command the respect and the fear of the power centers in government, Wall Street, the business roundtable and organized labor.

Will the formation of the AER be opposed? Indeed it will, and by a formidable and unholy alliance made up of environmental extremists, the coal industry and the federal government, regardless of which political party runs it. Such an alliance will be formidable. But it can be defeated by an aroused American citizenry that comes to understand that the AER will rebuild a shattered economy, create real jobs and assure our national security.

Some of you will say all this can't be done. Is that what you would have said to Gen. George Washington and his army at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-78? Is that what you would have said to Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves at the outset of the Manhattan Project in 1942? Is that what you would have said to a visionary president who in 1961 called for this nation to send a man to the moon and return him safely to Earth? When you lose sight of your past, you lose the ability to chart your future.

The nation's economic disintegration that began in 2007 shines a bright light on our national decline. In a study for the Pew Charitable Trusts, Phillip Swagel estimated that the nation lost $17 trillion between 2007-09. That's your money that Wall Street and the government flushed down the toilet. It could have paid off the entire national debt. If that isn't enough to motivate you, nothing will.

Oh, and one last thought. If you harbor the notion that either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney will handle this problem, you're whistlin' Dixie. If you poke Obama and Romney with a stick and say, "energy independence," they say respectively, "green jobs" and "I'm for it." Wow!

If you want to reverse America's decline, if you want a bright future for your children and your grandchildren, if you want economic prosperity and national security, then take back your country. Create the AER.

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