Tag: Doc Thompson

After this, Sherrod Brown Must Step Down: Jim Renacci just destroyed him in an Ohio debate–it wasn’t even close

These statewide debates are always very polite, but in that context Jim Renacci’s first debate with the three-term senator from Ohio Sherrod Brown was a disaster for one of the most liberal members of the senate. You can see the whole debate below but if you just go to the end the summation will be quite clear, Sherrod Brown walked off the stage and left the building not even giving interviews after Jim Renacci tore him to pieces. Renacci was very well prepared and stayed on issue the entire time. It was quite clear that Jim Renacci knows how to win these kinds of tough elections, which is why President Trump personally picked him to run against Brown. But it was surprising just how much on his heels Brown was during the entire debate, except for one time when Renacci brought up the domestic abuse case that had been hanging around Sherrod Brown’s neck for over thirty years. At that point Brown turned to Renacci and indicated that he should be ashamed of himself for even bringing that up because his ex-wife had forgiven him long ago. But the effect of that line left a very uncomfortable stench in the air that Renacci had successfully exposed.

As a nation we had just watched Brett Kavanaugh have to explain his high school year books when a woman from way back then accused him of rape and it was Democrats themselves who indicated that Kavanaugh just for the accusation of such a monstrosity should be removed from consideration for Supreme Court. Yet Sherrod Brown had the audacity to look at Jim Renacci and say that his challenger should be ashamed of himself for considering specific factual evidence of domestic abuse coming from the Brown household. It really didn’t matter if the ex-wife forgave him, what did matter as established by Democrats is that it happened at all. In the Kavanaugh case it was his word against hers, in this case there is evidence and court documents. If Sherrod Brown had abused women 30 years ago, he was still prone to do so according to logic. So why wouldn’t Brown be knocked out of contention for the senate race in Ohio just by the modern definitions of the #METOO movement? That’s what we’ve all been told by Democrats is supposed to happen.

The reason Brown’s statement to Renacci about the domestic abuse had such an ominous appeal to it that left the room gasping for air because it put on full display a truth we all know, but don’t often see in the light of day. We know there is a double standard in the media between Democrats and Republicans and how the media applies rules of conduct for each. Obviously, the media leans heavily to the political left and they won’t jeopardize a liberal senate seat in Ohio, they are more than willing to give Brown a free pass. And they planned to help Sherrod Brown out with his #METOO problem. His ex-wife was certainly willing to help out but we have seen out of the political left intense hypocrisy applied to President Trump and many others over much less than what Sherrod Brown did. Even at the worst-case scenario if President Trump did have a fling with Stormy Daniels and some other women and it was all consensual, we were told that those events made him not fit for the presidency. But with Brown we were supposed to buy into his sincerity when he looked hurt that Renacci even brought it up. Up until that moment I hadn’t been thinking too much about Sherrod Brown’s domestic violence problems from the past, but by the way he looked at Renacci and expected a different set of rules, it was quite clear that there is a lot more to the story than the media was willing to adhere to.

On every topic Brown was on the back of his feet, it was clear that he didn’t come prepared for the debate. And when Renacci pushed Brown on the lack of work that Brown actually did for Ohio Brown gave a fine example of his behavior right after the debate when Renacci worked the press completely alone. Brown didn’t stay for any questions. Likely he didn’t feel he needed to with a big lead in the Real Clear Politics poll, but as we know, that’s not very reliable. More than that, I think Renacci hit him too hard on the domestic violence issue and it cause trouble at home, and Brown had to fix that rather than talk to the press. Whatever the situation, Renacci showed that he was a much more stable person, and a much harder worker interested in the job. Renacci won the night in both deed and action, it was a brilliant performance.

The choice between Brown and Renacci is very simple. Brown demonstrated that as a guy who had been in Washington for over 30 years that he still hasn’t a clue as to what makes an economy work. Workers don’t have any jobs if not for corporations, so by making big business an enemy, how can anybody expect to create jobs? I mean anybody with basic economic understanding knows that progressive talking points like “global warming,” “tax the rich.” and “being friends with Wall Street” are stupid and idealistic, not rooted in any kind of reality. If workers don’t have jobs because all the employers have been taxed to hell and back and pushed out of the United States, then what good are they? Even for a polished politician Sherrod Brown sounded like a kid in the 1st grade trying to explain economics, he didn’t seem to understand even the basics. But Renacci was an accountant by trade and he knows numbers. He made Brown look like a complete idiot in all economic discussions.

Yet the zinger of the evening was the domestic violence problem for Sherrod Brown. His own party has set the stage for his voluntary removal from office. They established the criteria he must live up to. It reminds me of the Bill O’Reilly situation when liberals were so happy that they used allegations of sexual misconduct to get the long time and popular newsman knocked off the air at Fox News. Then Democrats realized that they had people in their party doing much worse, like big time fundraiser Harvey Weinstein. After Democrat men started dropping like flies the #METOO movement cooled off a lot. Conservatives live pretty good lives, they can throw rocks in glass houses a lot better than Democrats and liberals had to realize that they had opened a can of worms they couldn’t endure themselves. But they reopened that can with the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and now one of their precious senators in Sherrod Brown was guilty of much, much worse—and the facts were there to prove it. That leaves Democrats with no choice really, one way or another they are going to lose that liberal Ohio senate seat because under the modern terms of #METOO, Sherrod Brown must step down. He is not fit to serve—otherwise liberals can never use such an allegation ever again. Just think if Donald Trump looked at his accusers and said what Brown did, that they should be ashamed of themselves for even bringing up something from his past for political reasons? Liberals can’t have it both ways, and Renacci hit the center of the issue during the debate because he dared to ask the question—a question that Democrats cannot answer without giving everything else up. Is one seat worth all that to them? I don’t think so.

If Renacci pushes this issue Democrats will have to abandon Brown, and that little revelation is what emerged from that first debate in Ohio between Renacci and Brown. Brown is vulnerable emotionally on the issue and that sets the stage for a very interesting upcoming three weeks.

Rich Hoffman

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The Trump Strategy: Changing the way politics is conducted forever

It was different this last time, when President Trump visited the Warren County Fairgrounds to deliver a speech in favor of several GOP candidates that were on the ballot for November 2018’s midterms. I’ve seen Trump in person a few times since he had been elected president in 2016 but this campaign rally at the very unusual building on the fairgrounds site provided an almost cinematic appeal as if some Hollywood production designer had brought all these strange elements together for the benefit of the story than just happenstance. It was a Friday night in the historic town of Lebanon, Ohio and it was lightly raining, with a snow mix falling with the raindrops and President Trump was stoking the minds of thousands of people who had packed into every available spot to listen to him give essentially the same speech over and over again. But nobody cared, they were happy to be there and didn’t seem to ever want the event to end. For this particular venue I had a really fantastic seat, one just outside the television cameras and on a high perch so I could see everything that was going on. I could even see the president arrive and leave from behind the show’s façade and for me it was perfect because it facilitated my high thoughts on the matter with great conductivity.

In the short run the threat was real, Republican voters needed to hit the voting booths and support the candidates that Trump was speaking for. But from my perspective a lot had changed since the last rally I attended at U.S. Bank Arena in October of 2016 and this one in Lebanon in October of 2018. For the first time in my lifetime Republicans had a good, positive brand and they had a President who could sell it. Trump has actually changed the way campaigns work—he has changed the rules of the game itself into something that Democrats will not be able to follow. They don’t have the energy or the message leaving Trump in command of the political process for what will turn out to be the first half of the 21st Century.

I think it’s quite amazing that Donald Trump is willing to attend so many rallies across the country in order to build a team that he can work with in 2019 on the legislative side. He’s almost acting like a college coach recruiting star athletes for a football team. The tireless work he has been willing to put into the effort is truly stunning for anybody. And that effort showed in the event organization and even the crowd. There was a lot to complain about. During the speech some people actually passed out and needed medical help. But the show went on as the medical staff gathered up the sick and took them away to be cared for. And nobody complained. The Secret Service didn’t overact. The crowd wasn’t overly dramatic, and Trump never even paused. The show just went on and everyone was focused on the success of the evening.

There is no way for the two sides of politics, the liberal view and the conservative view to work out differences between each other for a sustainable republic. The two sides are not equal, they do not have shared values to build a foundation of friendship from. In the Republican Party that has been the problem from the beginning, if there were any compromises that had to be made it was always from the Republicans because they were always the only side functioning from value to barter with. Liberals were all for the abandonment of values, so they never gave anything up and that left Republican supporters always feeling shortchanged. But now there some wins under Trump’s belt and there was more to this rally because the foundations of success were there to talk about, as opposed to just a bunch of theories from two years prior. Now there was a track record and the obvious view of many more things that could be accomplished. And the Democrats had nothing to offer but complaints and emotional desires to be considered equally important. Trump’s Republican Party was willing to stick its head up out of the ground and to actually emerge into the light of day unafraid and be pace setters and that is something you don’t see every day.

Yet the show itself was very slick, the volunteers were enthusiastic and the base of support was willing to do their part and show up at each of these rallies a whole day before just to get a good place in line. While people waited volunteers handed out swag to the audience all of it well-managed and constructed. The sheer logistics to pull off one of these shows by the support staff is quite staggering. What was involved for just the Lebanon event was enough to impress, but the very next night Trump was in Richmond, Kentucky doing nearly the same thing with a lightly modified speech. Trump had done several rallies during that week in different parts of the country all of them just as complex and with similar people willing to brave the elements and waiting times to attend. In the case of Lebanon, I noticed later that the local media markets were very happy with the Trump visit, they gave him great coverage for at least two days before and after. Trump’s changes to campaigning gave local media the two things they always wanted, so the coverage turned out to be fair and positive. First were the traffic shutdowns, the news loves to talk about traffic jams and the President’s motorcade shut down traffic during rush hour all the way from downtown Cincinnati to Lebanon, Ohio over 30 miles to the north. Then the second things were the feel-good stories about how the positive rallies made people feel to be near a sitting president. I could see a brilliance in Trump’s strategy that was always there for anybody to attempt, but now Trump has made it a Republican method.

And that brought the whole thing to a kind of grand fortissimo, the difference between Republicans and Democrats fundamentally. Democrats were essentially seeking to ride the Vico cycle into the future, the endless cycle of human endeavor going from theocracy, to aristocracy, to democracy then to anarchy only to return over and over again to the beginning. Republicans however are the opposite, they are about human pro-growth and continued expansion into the future. Democrats are the hippies of Woodstock while the Republicans are the scientists trying to expand mankind’s reach to the moon. The vision from each party is not conducive and are at odds with each other and a choice has to be made. We can’t have it both ways. For me personally, I’ve always been a pro-growth guy. It makes me very sad to think that all the work we’ve done through art, literature and engineering would be tossed away only to dig at the ground like a pathetic primitive and not understand the complexities of the universe. But until Trump, Republicans didn’t know how to sell a pro-growth agenda, so the plight of the primitives dominated politics leaving Republicans to chase after. But now those roles have been reversed and it looks like a great opportunity is unfolding in front of us, and at the center of it is the remarkable Manhattan builder himself who has a pro-growth message that people can finally relate to. And the effect is obvious, and lasting. It’s a very exciting time indeed.

Rich Hoffman

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The Power Behind the Trump Name: Democrats are in real trouble

Just for perspective when news coverage of something like President Trump’s visit to Lebanon, Ohio occurs network news always feels they have to cover equally the Democratic response. I suppose they think it avoids the optics of appearing to lean to one side instead of the other. But with something like Trump coming to a Northern Cincinnati suburb of great historic value, so many people showed up that it essentially shut down the city as people poured into the fairgrounds of Warren County just a few miles north of the famous Golden Lamb profusely. In fact dear reader, as you are reading this, I am at that event and as far as you can see its Trump Republicans who have swarmed in from all over the countryside. Yet the news coverage of this massive rally featured a kind of Democrat response, a rally of their own called “We Deserve Better” which had about four people and a cat show up. I didn’t think there were any Democrats in Warren County, but a few showed up, and their rally looked pretty pathetic in comparison. Not even on the same level of politics which I thought said a lot about the reality of the upcoming midterms.

As I’ve said from the beginning of this latest political season, it’s going to come down to voter turnout of course. Democrats are energized, but honestly, I think we are seeing what’s left of their party on the news every night. They are fluffing themselves up to look relevant, but in all actuality, they aren’t. Just as the Channel 9 people in Cincinnati felt they had to cover the Democrat response to the Republican rally–truthfully there aren’t enough people in the Cincinnati market who even care anymore to justify the airtime. That is why Trump is able to draw these huge crowds who are more than a little enthusiastic to show up on a chilly October night in Ohio to watch a president two years into office give a stump speech for fellow Republicans. There isn’t anybody like that in the Democrat Party now or in the foreseeable future and that has further coalesced Republicans around Trump. I think it’s quite clear that the amount of people who showed up to see Trump exceeded expectations. Meanwhile, the Democrats were trying to fluff up their feathers to appear as an equal party offering alternatives to the Republican proposals, but people know now what they are really about, it’s socialism and now that they cat is out of the bag, most Americans just aren’t comfortable supporting such a concept on American soil. And it shows with the support of the Democratic Party.

Yes, you can tell a lot about enthusiasm from the population by the size of their rallies. For instance, when I wrote about this very topic two years ago as Trump was looking to be knocked out of the presidential race by the Access Hollywood tapes I was at the rally at U.S. Bank Arena which filled up to the luxury boxes. Hillary had come the week before and had a hard time filling up the little space just a few blocs down the road in downtown Cincinnati between the Ohio River and the Banks development. There is a little park there and Hillary gave a speech and they had to push everyone in tight to make the crowd look bigger on television. I could see then that nobody cared about the Access Hollywood tapes. Trump was different and he was re-writing the rules of politics, rules that the Democrats had controlled for nearly 100 years. Trump had changed them all for the better in just a few months on the campaign trail as president.

I’d like to say that you can believe polls, but here’s the problem with them, pollsters have to call many thousands of people in order to get a statistical sampling of a few hundred, because most people they call don’t want to participate. Of that percentage it is well-known that Republicans don’t answer their phone whereas Democrats are more prone to do so. Democrats are very social creatures, that’s why they lean toward collectivism and political socialism. Conservatives are self-reliant and are often busy with something productive, so they don’t take calls from phone numbers they don’t recognize. Pollsters under pressure to get constant results to the networks that buy them have to produce the results they can get rather than wait for a proper number of Republicans to answer the phone, and that’s how all these polls get screwed up. I don’t think most of the races around the country are as close as they try to make them sound. Networks do with all the races just as they did with the Trump rally, they try to make Democrats look like a viable competitor. But in all actuality the Democrats aren’t even a blip on the map.

I continue to be impressed with Donald Trump, he knows his stuff and nobody outworks him, that’s for sure. This past week he did a rally almost every day and on Thursday before this event in Lebanon he had Kenya West at the White House which really gave some positive media coverage.  It is good marketing to show access to this president, and it was very smart of event organizers to have the wherewithal to string these events together in this way. But Trump gets the credit for having the stamina to pull it all off. The guy just never stops working and it shows. The desperation that the Democrats are now showing is that they don’t have a way to match that energy and they are getting frustrated.

Granted the Lebanon Trump rally is in very conservative country, I’m not sure there are any Democrats who live in the surrounding area. But Trump has shown time and time again that he can pull the same kind of numbers in inner cities and in places where Democrats are running things. In this case, Trump was stumping for so many politicians it made sense to have a rally in the middle of all their districts to accommodate everyone. But to even make a decision like that you have to have the power behind the name to most utilize the President’s presence. Lebanon was a perfect place to have a rally, and it’s a good thing too, because they needed the room for all the people who showed up. Seeing the crowd up close and the energy that was coming from them it is very obvious that things aren’t nearly as close as the media would like to make things appear. That doesn’t mean that Republicans can afford to stay home on election night, but that if they show up Democrats won’t be winning anything. They are a tired party selling an old message of socialism that isn’t very exciting and they are getting torched politically by Donald J. Trump. Even with everything Trump has been through over the last couple of years, he has endured the worst of it and the storm clouds are finally starting to break and his supporters are still there, which was quite obvious in Lebanon, Ohio on October 12, 2018. It looks to me after this next election that Democrats won’t be looking for a president to run against Trump. They will be looking for candidates just to run for local positions, and they won’t be able to find them, because the party itself is about to become extinct. The media won’t say that because they want the ratings of a perceived race between them and Republicans. But I’ll say it.

Rich Hoffman

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The Grim Reality for Democrats: Kathy Wyenandt loses steam in a local election which reflects the national implications for her party

I couldn’t help but notice that Kathy Wyenandt’s campaign sign was gone from the billboard she had been renting near my home on RT.4 in Liberty Township where she is running against George Lang for the 52nd District House seat. The old billboard was nice, and expensive and she started with her message early in September 2018. She thought like a lot of Democrats did that this whole thing was going to be easy. After all her experience told her that the 2013 Lakota levy had passed and she had led that tax increase. In reality I had to break her heart on the matter when we spoke privately later after a debate. The Lakota levy of 2013 didn’t pass by just 1% because people all of a sudden wanted to raise taxes on themselves. It was because a large portion of the resistance who was working with me wanted to play nice with the other side, so the no vote side was less inclined to show up to vote on election night. It was a simple numbers game, it was my job to evoke people’s passions to get them to the polls, even if I had to call people names. The Lakota levy didn’t pass because of anything Kathy did, but because of what the tax fighters didn’t do. She only benefited, and we had that talk personally. People are often surprised when they meet me that I’m actually a very nice person, not some crazed lunatic. But clearly after that night where she and George Lang debated her behavior changed as did that of her supporters. Sure you can still see a sign for her here and there but the energy had gone out of her campaign. Her premise from the beginning was wrong, she was a moderate running in a conservative area as a Democrat. She was a woman running against a white man and Democrats thought that was enough. Her levy supporting friends at Lakota had been treating her as a celebrity since 2013 for a levy victory when in fact it wasn’t anything they did to secure a victory, other than convince my supporters to play nice and reunite the community under the flag of Lakota. George Lang in the debate had done well with her and after the depth of just how hard it was going to be to win the 52nd District seemed to have dawned on her. And now with just a few weeks ahead of the election the money was hard to come by to renew her billboard until the election. Now it’s gone leaving only a tattered empty place with peeling paper in its place and every time I see it now I think of how it is a good metaphor for the Democrat Party.

Recently Vennessa Enoch caught me in a parking lot asking for my vote. She was a nice black woman running as a Democrat against Warren Davidson, and she obviously didn’t know who I was. Of course I was polite to her but she could see by my face that it was a mistake to hand me any campaign literature. She seemed like a nice enough lady but it was clear she didn’t know the game she was playing. The Democrats in Southern Ohio and up into counties past Columbus really thought that women were so stupid as to vote as a collective association—that girl power was a viable political strategy. Since Trump had been elected Democrats continued to think that they’d split up the women vote by offering women as candidates, such as Vennessa Enoch and Kathy Wyenandt. I don’t think Vennessa had been told by her Democratic friends that people weren’t going to like her just because society said they had to like a black woman. That voting for a person for congress in Warren Davidson’s district was going to take a lot more than that. We weren’t so stupid to vote for a liberal just because they were women or black. Those are not traits that effectively win elections, they never have been and they certainly aren’t now. Women love Trump and they specifically like the kind of Republican Party that is forming under the Trump umbrella. For examples just go to Instagram and do a search for Babes for Trump or God Guns and Freedom and you’ll see what I mean. A new kind of sexual expression is taking place where suddenly its cool for women to wear bikinis and use their bodies as billboards for Trump and Republicanism in general. Women were not doing this for John McCain, Mit Romney, or George Bush, this is a very new thing and it comes as a byproduct of having a winning approach to elections in general. There are a lot of women who love the kind of men that are emerging from the Trump administration and the Democrats are not on that wagon.

I noticed a tremendous difference in Republican attitudes at a recent event at Premier Shooting and Training where they had a Second Amendment celebration night there. For one, it was unusual to have all those top-level Republicans in the same place at the same time where fundraising wasn’t the primary objective. Some of the guys there had been around for a while, but there was something very different about them now that Trump was the head of the Republican Party. There was a swagger present that I hadn’t seen before in all the many years that I had been doing these kinds of things. Back at that Lakota levy period that Kathy Wyenandt was so proud of we had a meeting after the third attempt that went down in flames in the fall of 2011 that we should lighten up, that we had too much Tea Party in our No Lakota Levy campaign. Of course, everyone knew I wanted to punch harder than we had been. The district was not respecting voters with continued attempts at a tax increase. My friends who were all top Republicans in Butler County wanted to mend fences for the sake of business. Back then the leader of the Republican Party in Butler County was John Boehner and he was a very moderate Republican who wanted to play by the rules that Democrats established. I tried to tell them what was coming, but nobody wanted to hear it then, and only now are they seeing it. The energy that put people into voting for key elections was swagger, and confidence—not compromise and conciliation.

As I watched Republicans rejoice at a hard-fought victory over the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation I could see that finally what I had been saying for years was starting to really sink in. Trump’s election and the results of success that have followed have won over most of the key Republicans I knew in Ohio. They had adopted to this new leader of the Republican Party and were seeing success. Meanwhile Democrats were still playing an old game of identity politics that only appealed to a small minority of voters. People hadn’t voted for Hillary Clinton just because she was a woman and they weren’t going to vote for Kathy Wyenandt just because she was attractive and pleasant. Republicans for the first time in their lives could go on Instagram and see lots of mostly naked Republican women in red white and blue bikinis hold guns and Bibles all too happy to show their support for President Trump and its that kind of energy that wins elections. People over politics or some other socialist message isn’t going to work. The world had changed and Democrats were too stupid to see it. That is the reason they threw everything they had at Brett Kavanaugh and why with only a few weeks left to close the deal their campaigns in local races like the ones in Southern Ohio are running out of gas—because they didn’t understand the situation they were getting into.

Republicans should win most of their races easily around the country. There will be some surprises here and there but in essence if Republican voters show up and vote, they will easily outnumber the Democrats. There just aren’t that many Democrats, they are a minority party with a sloppy message of old socialism that only lazy people like. The new Trump Republicans are much cooler all of a sudden and if that energy fuels voter turnout, Republicans will gain seats in the House and Senate, not lose them. And I predict that there will be many more billboards going vacant for Democrat candidates in the near future. They didn’t learn from the mistakes of the past even when the evidence was quite clear. I could tell in my conversations with Kathy and Venessa that nobody on their side had talked to them the way I was which isn’t good. It’s not that I was mean or anything, but just to frame the situation they were stepping into, obviously nobody had done that for them. Because the Democrats thought all they needed was women to vote against men and their ticket to the future would be punched. What they didn’t calculate was that there were many, many women more than willing to take off their clothes and use their bodies for billboards for Trump’s Republicans and that would prove to be the deciding factor for the upcoming midterms. And it wasn’t crusty old men providing that energy, it was women, young and vivacious and looking for winners. And those winners are not in the Democratic Party, that’s for sure.

Rich Hoffman

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This is What Winning Looks Like: Now we need more of it on Election Day

What an astonishing display that was. When it was clear that the senate had the votes to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the way that the political left acted really all during the hearings, but especially right after was astonishing. That is what a minority that has been fluffing their feathers like a peacock to appear much larger looks like when their bluff is called. I would advise all Republicans in the future to do what Judge Kavanaugh had to do in those hearing, and that was to get a little mad and nasty, because it is the only language the other side understands, which is why they keep saying that he shouldn’t have done it. “Judicial temperament” my ass, they want a punching bag in Republicans that they can easily beat, which is what they have had all this time.

It allowed them as a minority party to appear to be an equal contender. But God bless Donald J. Trump for calling them out on it and for bringing to politics an honesty that has never been there before. If not for Donald J. Trump leading the charge in support for Brett Kavanaugh, we still wouldn’t have a judge on the Supreme Court. When the political left, or anybody for that matter, tries to convince us that Brett Kavanaugh should have sat there and taken the unsanctioned role that was trying to be placed upon him—that he was a sexual predator—what you are hearing are villains attempting a hostile take over of our country and their screams of anguish once they have failed.

I would point out several revelations that were made over the last month by Democrats, which I have been saying and the evidence is just now catching up—they are losing as a party. They are on the verge of complete collapse. It’s not enough to say that they are morally and financially bankrupt, they are losing their support everywhere. They have no ideas, they have no smart candidates, and they have no appeal. All they have are these protests where they threaten violence if nobody listens to them, or in cornering senators in elevators in an attempt to push them with force into an altered way of thinking. Talk about bullies, the Democrats are everything the proclaim to protect us from. They are the ultimate mob boss that charges you for protection—protection from them. But when people stop fearing them they have no way to understand what to do because everything about them is in their ability to control the message by threatening fear to impose their will, and that just isn’t how our “republic” was designed to function.

Essentially what we are seeing are a bunch of uneducated people in Democrats who think that America is a democracy ruled by majorities of protestors as opposed to the reason of representatives who vote on behalf of their constituents. That’s why they attacked Susan Collins in the hallway and into the elevator, to terrify her by force into voting in ways that her constituents back home would find repulsive. Then when it didn’t work they threw a fit like a bunch of spoiled brat kids. This behavior to Democrats is how policy is made, it is how they think a country should be run, and it has never been exposed in a rawer way than during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.

I think I said it on a radio show before Donald Trump was elected that the Democratic Party was on their last leg, which sounded outrageous in 2016 as Trump was climbing toward the Republican nomination. But his way of attacking them whenever attacked has worked, and it has led the Republican Party to a place now that it has never been since before Teddy Roosevelt was in office at the turn of the last century. Most Americans are conservative leaning people but they let Democrats protest and insult their way into power, but that power was always on wet paper and could easily be destroyed. But it took a personality like Donald Trump to finally win the White House and show other Republicans how to conduct themselves defensively. Brett Kavanaugh is very much a product of the Trump era, nobody in their right mind would expect him to sit there and take what the Democrats were giving him. If he did take it then he would have sanctioned an evil that the Democrats were trying to place on him, that he was a sexual predator. Yet Democrats have been the party of sexual predators. This same trick they have tried to apply to conservatives, that they are racists, or that they have some relationship to Hitler—when all along it was they who were both. For so many years conservatives have been lulled into believing they should turn the other cheek and that was when Democrats just cut off their heads, metaphorically speaking. And that blood sport has fueled funding and election wins for Democrats because it appeared to be a winning strategy.

But nobody has won like Trump has, with everything they have thrown at him the economy is doing very well, unemployment is at a record low, there is nothing to the multiple investigations into his life that anybody has been able to exploit and even after sticking his name next to Brett Kavanaugh during the worst of the hearings Trump’s approval rating shot up to 51%. In every conceivable way the Democrats and liberalism in general has failed miserably. So yeah, it felt very good to see Brett Kavanaugh confirmed to the Supreme Court. It was one of the most exciting days that I’ve ever watched in politics. It was wildly fulfilling, in similar ways that it felt good to watch Trump win the presidency on that famous night.

But I’d say dear reader that the upcoming election has the potential to feel even better. Imagine the day after the election where Democrats had to look down the long barrel of future history and see that they had no place in it. When it would be obvious to everyone that they didn’t even have a role in American politics because what they stood for were not ideas that are conducive to Americans? Democrats are moving as they have for a long time, toward socialism and outright Chinese communism. That was their plan from the beginning and what they wanted in America, even up until yesterday before the vote of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court was a 1949 revolution like what happened in China. Only to have that they would have to shame Republicans into the corners of their offices hiding from the world as they were called all types of nasty names such as “Nazis” or “sexual predators” and that white males were supposed to shut up and get out-of-the-way of women who were going to take over all politics and businesses because someone looked at their boobies.

https://twitter.com/overmanwarrior/status/1048755730461937664

As conservatives we were supposed to accept this bizarre reality and sanction their power grab through guilt that was not our own. Yet we held together and Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court anyway, just as Trump has held strong and continued to get wins for America that would not be possible by any other kind of president. Yes, this is what it looks like to be winning. But it’s not over yet, Republicans must vote on election day and show up in force to speak their mind. It’s about time that Democrats realize that they can’t scream and shame their way into power. They have to win elections the right way, and that is what is getting ready to really hit them in the face. But it’s up to us to make that happen and to have the resolve to put the dagger through their hearts. It’s time.

Rich Hoffman

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Another Great Jobs Report: The horse race of economics doesn’t tell the whole story

It was another good jobs report, 134,000 jobs were created in the month of September with the unemployment rate trickling down to 3.7 percent, the lowest in 49 years! All that with a major hurricane hitting the mainland of America, which is pretty amazing. The Trump economy is ticking along nicely, and we are all feeling it these days, if it weren’t for the distracting Kavanaugh hearings, the fictitious Mueller investigation and the general poo pooing that comes out of the media every minute of every day, Americans could be said to be having the time of their lives. It is a time of great prosperity that has surpassed expectations in almost every fiscal way possible. Another consecutive month of positive reporting’s that have continued to increase since the tax cuts at the end of 2017.

Stocks did take a bit of a hit; home markets are down as the Fed has increased interest rates yet again. The Federal Reserve and other market analysts still do not seem to understand what is happening, to them they disbelieve that the market can be this bullish without a downturn as the tend to believe in cyclical tides of cash flow. But these kinds of positive indexes are not created by moving money around and social controls such as interest rate evaluations, they are born from real optimism and creative intellectual growth which comes from a culture that “makes wealth” not one who simply manages it.

Wealth creation is specifically a human trait. No other animal in the universe that we know of presently can do it. It is an act of imagination, the concept of product development for the use of other lifeforms is specifically confined to the roll of imagination which only humans possess to any degree of usability. Many scientists like to profess that dolphins and whales are very intelligent creatures, but when was the last time you saw a dolphin design a car? Being intelligent isn’t the only ingredient needed for wealth creation, it is important to have a vast imagination as a culture because what comes forth from it is the creation of new ideas. Wealth creation is simply a measure of that creativity.

On the same day that the jobs report came out for September it was reported that China was putting spy chips into Apple products and those sold by Amazon. That pushed stocks down for those companies, and the $15 minimum wage at Amazon certainly didn’t help. But this brings to mind the simple question about why China feels they must spy on Americans and attempt to sabotage American companies. Well, it comes back to the basic problem that all Chinese have in their culture, they lack an imagination. The nature of their communist culture has suppressed individual thought, their school systems collective obedience has not taught them how to think, only how to conform, not individual development, and that has destroyed their intellectual capacity as a nation. You can see the trend as China used their leveraged capitol gained in the pre-Trump years to purchase many studios in Hollywood and shifted the house movie picks more toward collectivist enterprises, the net result has been a decaying Hollywood product. The lack of imagination is obvious as sitcoms are reaching back into the 80s to resurrect comedies that worked, like Rosanne, and Murphy Brown. New content is hard to come by in a collectivist culture.

But due to the enterprising spirit of the Trump administration assisted by tax cuts many in America who still possess imaginations are creating products and delivering them to markets expanding the economy. Of those 134,000 jobs reported those are mostly private sector jobs where someone is making new flashlights, car batteries, and golf clubs. Not centrally planned state sponsored government jobs administratively focused. When jobs like that are created there is of course an overflow effect that grows into the following month as more jobs trickle down into every demographic group. When leftists attempt to suggest that there is no such thing as “trickle down economics” they are doing so with the same vigor that attempted to associate Brett Kavanaugh to gang rape. These are just not concepts rooted in reality.

I haven’t talked about Star Wars in a while, but I couldn’t help but think of all these concepts while watching the Blue Ray of Solo: A Star Wars Story, which I thought was one of the best Star Wars films I’ve seen since the 80s. But in going through the bonus content of the release it was obvious that the filmmakers were a long way away from the kind of filmmaker George Lucas was back then. Everyone was just going through the motions and trying to copy what the original filmmakers had created. There was nothing really original in that movie which is partly why Star Wars is losing its magic. In a lot of ways the left leaning politics of the modern employees at Lucasfilm and Disney are suffering from the same ailments as the country of China—a lack of imagination. In the case of Lucasfilm, they have so many tools to work with, yet they just can’t seem to get the job done because they are lacking intellectual imagination. Even though George Lucas admittingly copied off old television shows like Flash Gordon, there was a lot of imagination to provide fresh perspective to the old material. That is not the case now, all we get from Lucasfilm and Disney is an homage to our childhoods. Modern kids don’t care about our childhoods, they have so many other things to occupy their minds, especially video games. So what ends up on a movie screen is a copy of a copy of a copy made by people who are truly underdeveloped intellectually, and it shows in the product.

But Hollywood is the old world, the Trump economy is empowering many new companies that will replace the old models well into the future and that is truly exciting. With the kinds of jobs growth that we are seeing consistently now for many months it is easy to project where all this will end up. We’re not talking about a typical Bull Market, but a long sustainable growth market that will add trillions of dollars of new wealth that will be sustainable well into the future. That is exciting news, but you might not hear it presented that way on the mainstream news—and the reason would be due to the lack of a crises in the information. If you ever listen to a horse race announcer, you would have to understand that their job is not so different from a typical news reporter from the mainstream press. They have to talk up the downsides, such as stocks that dipped because of interest rate hikes, or tariff talk—but if you plot out the results from turn 4, usually the clear winner is easy for all to see and this jobs report is no different. With the creation of new jobs, it means that the imagination of America is being stirred again and those side effects will show up in all aspects of our culture, from our music to our movies—to even our clothing choices. There is a lot to be excited about, but the means of communicating that to mass audiences is missing, because it doesn’t tend to keep people tuned in to the horse race. But in essence, this September jobs reports says that our bets are safe and that the horse we have been rooting for is winning by a mile.

Rich Hoffman

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Jim Renacci is a Really Great Guy: If 2nd Amendment supporters voted for him, he’d beat Sherrod Brown easily

Every time I have met Jim Renacci I have grown to like him more and more. Usually it’s the opposite effect, the more you get to know someone, the more you find that their little flaws start depreciating your opinion of them. But not Jim Renacci. He has grown on me in a very positive way and I find that when he leaves back to wherever he needs to go next that I actually want to spend more time around him. Even saying all that nice stuff I was very impressed that he came up to me at a fire pit where we were having some fabulous hamburgers fresh off the grill at Premier Shooting and Training Center to shake my hand and talk to me a bit. It was a casual event with only a few hundred people around, most of them were running for office of some kind, but because the event was a 2nd Amendment celebration Jim Renacci flew all the way out from Washington D.C. to attend. At the end of the night he flew back, so he was only around for a few hours, and part of that he came over and stood around the fire with my family enjoying a brief moment of correspondence. Just hours before he was all over Fox Business talking about the Kavanaugh hearings and he was still wearing the same suit, not having time to change. After talking to my family and a few other people he gave the short speech seen below, then went back to the airport.

I’ve known a lot of politicians and it has only been recently where I have found that I like some of them personally. The reason is that we have all emerged into this current circumstance together but doing different things to help restore our republic, so we have that in common to build relationships off of. Ten to fifteen years ago I was not into the group of politicians that were around back then. I was not a John Boehner guy or a supporter of most of the trustees and commissioners. But that has changed quite a lot over the last decade as the Tea Party movement forced an evaluation at the Central Committee level that was hard-fought and heavily debated. Then Donald Trump was elected, and that certainly created a philosophic shift that made the event at Premier Shooting uniquely special. It has also cleared the decks for Jim Renacci to run for some of these big seats as a genuinely good man as opposed to just another political hack. That is why I enjoyed talking so much to Jim Renacci. He’s just a good person.

But as Jim said about his fight with Sherrod Brown, even though Sherrod Brown has been working the state of Ohio for decades as an elected representative and is favored to win his senate seat back that Jim Renacci is challenging him for, Brown could easily lose if only the 2nd Amendment supporters of Ohio came out and voted for Renacci. You can forget about the union vote, you can forget about all the radical Democrat protestors, you can forget about all the supporters of Sherrod Brown—if just the 2nd Amendment people showed up on election day to vote for Jim Renacci he would win easily. So why not make that happen?

Jim Renacci could have easily have said of the Premier Shooting event that he had been too busy to attend. He wasn’t even in town. He had every reason in the world not to come really, but because he respects the 2nd Amendment so much, he took time out of his very busy day to fly back to Ohio and spend some time with a small crowd at a gun range. It occurred to me as he came by to see me personally that if he was willing to go through all that trouble, why in the hell wouldn’t 2nd Amendment enthusiasts be willing to go to the polls and vote on election night? Its not asking too much. If they did, Jim Renacci would easily beat Sherrod Brown and Donald Trump would have one more senator to work with on the Hill. Ironically, the same held true in every district where the races between Republicans and Democrats were tight. The difference maker could really be gun supporters who pushed candidates over the top for Trump.

In the great book on strategy, The Art of War, the basic premise is that most conflicts are won before anybody ever takes the battlefield. In many ways the only reason Sherrod Brown has won all these many times is because voter turnout is low. People are often busy with other things, so they aren’t interested in voting. But when it comes to values, Jim Renacci represents far more people in Ohio than Sherrod Brown. Democrats learned a long time ago that they best way to leverage conditions as a minority in their direction is to frustrate voters into believing that no matter what they do, elections will keep solutions out of the reach of everyday people. The focus then becomes an us versus them on every issue, such as the 2nd Amendment where we are always afraid that the liberals are going to come after our guns, so we put our defenses in the places where they desire, not where they would serve us best. But really, all we need to do as gun supporters is to put our efforts behind a candidate like Jim Renacci and the gun grabbing from the political left would be over. It really is that simple. Too simple for people to believe, but that is the situation.

As I said, Jim Renacci is just a good person, I have enjoyed getting to know him a bit and if there is any justice in this world, he will beat Sherrod Brown in the upcoming election. But given the amount of gun owners and supporters that there is in Ohio there really isn’t any reason that there should be an “if.” We have the power to make Jim Renacci’s election a “when,” with an easy win against Sherrod Brown. Gun owners and 2nd Amendment supporters far outnumber all other activist groups. The biggest weakness is that conservatives and gun enthusiasts tend to be very individually based, they don’t march in herds like Democrats do, so that makes them harder to organize for voting purposes. But if they could only do that one little thing and show up to vote for Jim Renacci and all the other Republicans on their ticket they would not only preserve their gun rights from the radicalism of the gun grabbing left, but they could advance those rights in productive ways. And all they need to do for that to happen would be to realize that they easily outnumber their opposition, and to just take care of business at the ballot box. There is no reason to worry about gun grabbers going from door to door to take our guns when the conflict can be ended right here and now with a simple—bloodless election. The only thing holding 2nd Amendment supporters back is the knowledge that the power to win all these elections is truly in their hands. All they have to do is use it.

Rich Hoffman

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Not All Republicans are Weak like Jeff Flake: What anger can mean in the strategy of winning elections

It has helped me immensely to know people who work in the fields of sword swallowing, magic acts, and performing as Hollywood stunt men because it has contributed uniquely to my endeavors as a political analyst. I know the tricks of the trade and can apply them on a massive scale for which these Brett Kavanaugh hearings reflect. Why do you think dear reader that Democrats wanted an F.B.I. investigation into the accusers of the next Supreme Court Justice? Well, yes, obviously—to delay the vote for confirmation so that they might have hope to take the House and Senate and knock away President Trump’s ability to nominate a conservative voice on the high court. That much is obvious to even casual observers. But did you notice how all the F.B.I corruption stories have dropped off the radar, there hasn’t been any talk about Rod Rosenstein, or Robert Mueller and even James Comey has stuck his head back out of the sand to weigh in on the mandates of an F.B.I. investigation into Kavanaugh’s high school days. Perhaps we might next learn from the illustrious F.B.I. that young Brett Kavanaugh wet his pants while in kindergarten and had to sit in time out to consider what he had done as the next breaking scandal.

These people aren’t as stupid as they would have you believe. The efforts behind the entire Brett Kavanagh debacle is a Democratic based that wants to rebuild the reputation of the F.B.I. so that they can continue to be their personal attack dogs. After knowing what the F.B.I. has done to President Trump and his supporters why would we want them looking into the past of Brett Kavanaugh? This is the same agency that let Hillary Clinton off with destroyed evidence so that she could run for president but clamped down on General Flynn and Paul Manafort with every grain of sand the F.B.I. could pour on the scales of justice to convict them—even if they had to water down that sand a bit to create some artificial weight to the matters. Democrats are hoping that the state will support them with newly uncovered evidence that might disqualify Brett Kavanaugh—perhaps he might have cut in line at a White Snake concert in the 80s, or maybe rolled through a stop sign. The Democrats can only hope. Even better yet they might find that Brett Kavanaugh committed murder and that the public will crucify him to death without discovering that the only thing he killed was a bug plastered on the grill of his car while leaving a drive-in movie which they still had in 1983. Yet even more than that is the obvious attempt to get the F.B.I. off the front pages of newspapers and put them back into the role of being the ones investigating again. The Democrats must have people believe in the F.B.I. to allow them to control all the scandals they are personally guilty of for which the government agency provides cover.

The totality of the cries for the F.B.I. to get involved in the Kavanaugh case is purely to market them as a credible agency once again after they tried to overthrow through a coup of legalisms the Trump administration. The only hope that Democrats have is to gain seats and a majority by the time that the F.B.I. turns up nothing on Kavanaugh, but by then it will be too late. Democrats could then try to impeach President Trump and none of this would matter anymore, and the F.B.I. would have its reputation restored well enough to keep their villains out of jail with the Democrats back in power. That is their dream after all.

Jeff Flake is everything that we hate about politics because he forgets what his role is in our republic. We are not a democracy where a pure majority rules just short of the ambitions of anarchy. I watched Jeff Flake’s interview on 60 Minutes and saw there a man who had forgotten he had come to assume that as an elected representative it was his job to reach across the aisle to Democrats and give them a voice at the table of reason. He stated that politics had become so corrosive and hate filled that if he were running for re-election that it would doom his career. What he left unsaid was that he thought the American people were too stupid to know better and that he was the one who knew what they did not—that cooperation and love was what the world needed more, even when villains were trying to undo the country. For him it was more important to show understanding toward his political enemies than fury. I’m sure Jesus would agree with him, but we saw what happened to him. Unfortunately for all the turn the other cheek do gooders, this fight requires bravery and action. When a bunch of radicals yell at you in an elevator trying to make you sanction their accusations with a head pointed at the floor and a look of pain on your face because compassion has ruled your senses. Sometimes you have to hit back. You can’t let them back you into a corner against your will, you must defend yourself with equal or superior force. Until that happens these people will exploit that weakness in Republican approach. They use force and look to the F.B.I. to protect them. If we use force we are prosecuted to the furthest extent of the law just for looking mean at them. That must stop. With Jeff Flake yielding to their pressure he just empowered them to do much worse in the future. In an attempt to be fair to people completely out of their mind with hate and aggression, the Republican Party has indicated that the intimidation works, so they will get worse in the future. At least until they get to my house or community. I’m just giving them a fair warning. Not everyone in the Republican Party is as weak as Jeff Flake.

The whole thing is a scam on a massive scale, it is being sold as the pursuit of justice, but in all reality, the entire goal is to subdue justice. Democrats are using every trick in the book to try to run out the clock in hopes of regaining power, and to restore the reputation of the F.B.I. so they can continue to use them as their personal machine of coercion. Their deal is to get the F.B.I. off the hook and to be there for them when they need to run the Trump administration out of office. That is their gamble. But as I look at the various poll numbers and the voter turn-out indicators, I can only wonder what kind of day it will be after the election when the Democrats fail to achieve their objectives? I have never seen Republicans angrier than I have recently and it is really uncertain how that will translate to vote results. The Democrats have gone all in on this Kavanaugh thing because it is literally their last chance to stay alive as a party. That is the reality behind their magic tricks of deception. When the smoke clears I think they will be shit out of luck. The public is going to catch them in these tricks and the embarrassment will last forever.

Rich Hoffman

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Why I Reject Feminism: Women can be lying deceitful villians too

Just for the record the rules of conduct in these modern times where all white men are to be criticized for everything while all women of all colors are supposed to be elevated and considered beyond refute is a condition I reject. The language and the rules of application are not valid in my opinion and I live my life beyond their reach. If rationality is considered in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings we are to believe that just because the Supreme Court nominee is a white man, we are supposed to be suspicious of everything about him, and yet we are to listen to his accuser Dr Ford, just because she is a woman. Under this line of thinking we are to believe anything that Ford might say, even if she were to utter that the moon was made out of cheese, and that is the fault of the entire women’s movement—that women are just as prone to deception as men, so there is no merit to the claim that one is morally superior to the other. Feminism by itself is not a value judgment—just because a human being has female sexual parts, doesn’t make them suddenly good people who could never tell a lie. And of course, we all must accept that all women are good all the time before we can accept their assertion that all white men need to be removed from power because they can’t be trusted—because one ridiculous notion opens the door for all the others that follow. Personally, I don’t accept the first notion at the first door of that thinking. Women are no better than men, nor the other way around. Sexual roles have no foundation in the discussion of power positions in government.

Many people who want to play the game of modern politics cringe at some of the things I say and do because they are not in step with these modern assumptions. But I would argue that in a short time all these thoughts about women power will subside back into reality. I was watching a person who is considered a rather outspoken feminist the other day drive her pickup truck to the store where her male partner was there to receive a ride home. I found it very interesting to watch her move into the passenger’s seat while he took the controls of the truck. At the most basic foundations of human interaction between the sexes, most women unless they are hateful militants who have given up on attention from the males of their lives will yield some powers in a relationship to their men so that to play the role of their sexuality, the submissive yielding to the physical dominate. It’s a very primal emotion that has nothing to do with intellect other than for the necessity of procreation. Knowing that, I simply don’t play the game at all. I’ll say what I want and the way I want to say it because such language speaks to people at their core concerns. I tend to be respectful of all people anyway, so not playing by the rules that feminists have constructed in their modern power grab doesn’t cause me any consternation. That is, until they try to impose themselves on my life in an individual way, and that’s where the trouble begins.

The trend of human society is toward more independence, that started essentially with the advent of gunpowder. Once people could get their hands on their own gunpowder, they didn’t need the power of the state to protect them from enemies. But in the modern context where social media has decentralized power, people no longer need big communication companies to speak to each other, and they can conduct such communication anywhere and at all times, power like this give enormous power to individuality and it doesn’t know or care about sexes. It is an intellectual evolution that is emerging independent of any political urgency. The women’s movement of today only has power from left over political moves started under the umbrella of progressivism. It is a movement created by emotion and desire for more state control when in reality the human race is moving more towards individuality—even in how goods and services are purchased.

Feminism is the last attempt of any statist society to unify portions of the human race toward mass collectivism. The gamble by those advocates is that men will follow because they biologically want the opportunity to mate, so they will follow the women into the abyss. But women aren’t so stupid, only a minority have signed up for the message of feminism. Many young women feel they must pay tribute to the elders, but intellectually, there isn’t much in feminism that speaks any kind of real truth to keep them loyal to the movement. When they go to Wal-Mart with their boyfriends and husbands, they still are inclined to let him drive the pickup truck. They may speak anti-man talk to their girlfriends and political activists, but when the lights go out in their bedrooms, they want a man to comfort them.

I have more women in my life than most people do, I tend to promote women into important positions not for any political concern, but because the ones I have known over time work hard and dedicate themselves to their tasks. On a day-to-day basis I haven’t thought about it much but looking at my own life I have a lot of women in it yet I don’t feel I need to pander to any of them with some false definition of feminism. I treat them the way I would a man and that keeps everyone honest. And I certainly don’t feel I have to tone down my own masculinity to make them feel more comfortable. I am who I am and if they want me to treat them fairly, I expect the same, and it works well. That is ultimately where all these political movements will take us anyway, because common sense demands it.

That leaves this modern attempt to demonize all men as corrupt and immoral just another overreach that will push people toward the opposite direction politically. All women are not honest just as all men are not. Women lie and cheat just as men do—but we cannot turn away from reality just because politics wants to empower women and dominate men under the rules of statism. The evidence in such deceitful practices can be seen in every woman who proclaims that she wants independence and social respect for living life without a man, but then moves over and lets the men in her life drive the pick-up truck out of respect for is dominate sexuality, which she wants in the bedroom. Political movements never have a chance of working if they are not based in reality—and the feminist movement never has been. It was based on a desire for some women who found themselves bitter husks of sexuality to impose on the world an idea that nobody really wanted, not men or women. So when I refuse to acknowledge the premise of the feminist movement understand that the reason why is that it has no basis in reality. It is just a late power grab by the state to unify people under a method of collectivism that is sliding day by day into the recesses of history. Freedom and independence are the cornerstones of all politics in the future—and those attributes do not know any sex—only intellects.

Rich Hoffman

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The Great Debate for the Ohio 52nd House Seat: Winning, losing, and the game of politics

Killing the opposition with kindness is a viable political strategy and it was used by Kathy Wyenandt when she helped get the Lakota levy of 2013 passed, which increased property taxes dramatically in Liberty and West Chester Townships in Butler County Ohio–part of what is the 52nd District for which she is now running against George Lang for that House seat. Back then I advised against it but in the three previous levy attempts for which I directly ran, the no voters won. But a large part of the business community that was with me on trying to fight high taxes wanted to get along with the people on the pro levy side for which Kathy Wyenandt had been tasked to get passed after a fourth attempt. If everyone had listened to me, the levy would have been defeated, but to Kathy’s credit, she changed the behavior of her opposition and she managed to squeak out a 1% margin of victory, which was just enough to give Lakota teachers the big pay increase they had been looking for pushing their average pay well up and over $75K per year. And she was back to that same strategy in her debate with George Lang which was held at the Miami University Learning Center at the VOA Park on Tuesday the 25th of 2018. What follows is video coverage of that debate for voters to use to make their decisions.

As I have said before, I’m a George Lang supporter. Needless to say I think George is the far better candidate for the 52nd House Seat which he currently holds. I could caution him about playing nice with Kathy Wyenandt because it only helps her. But given the way this debate went, I don’t think he has anything to worry about. Essentially the best case Wyenandt made for herself during the debate was to say “I helped pass the 2013 levy at Lakota which cost property owners a lot of money in increased taxes and I want to go to Columbus to help fix it.” When it comes to all the other issues that go on in the 52nd District she wasn’t very interested. Clearly her passion was education. But on all other matters she wasn’t up to speed. So George’s seat is not in jeopardy. He still needs to campaign and do the work because Kathy is a competitor. But she just isn’t ready for a seat like the 52nd in Columbus.

But I did find that I liked Kathy Wyenandt. She knows that her personality is one of her best assets and after speaking with her after the debate for a good bit of time it was clear to me that she wasn’t a hole in her head Democrat. She is someone I could work with and maybe when this whole thing is over maybe we can tackle that school funding issue in Columbus on behalf of all of Ohio. I recently had a nice talk with Jenni Logan the treasurer at Lakota, and at this debate had similar good talks with Linda O’Conner and Ann Becker who like Kathy all want to solve problems. With the minds involved I think it might just be possible to tackle this school funding problem utilizing George Lang’s 52nd House Seat. The elements are all there for some sharp people to finally solve that issue and I think we might be able to do that.

But as I explained to Kathy when she asked me what I thought we needed to do to solve the school funding problem I of course said what I always have, that teachers are making too much money and we need to establish a per pupil education cost that Ohio can allocate funds to before we could ever begin to solve the problem at the state level. Just like any business, sure we can pay teachers six figures if that’s what we decide but what percentage can a school have of such expensive teachers. And to what effect if any does tenure play—does it help or hurt the education process—those are the real questions. But just asking Ohio property owners for a blank check for education isn’t ever going to get the job done. There are a lot of assessments that labor unions don’t want to deal with and no politician wants to touch the issue, so that is why Ohio has an unconstitutional school funding system. That is the conditional situation. I think the way to fix it would be for non-politicians to sponsor the fix and let the politicians write the bill by tagging on later. After Kathy is done with this campaign maybe we could work something out. I’d be open to putting up a bunch of ideas on a white board like we would in any business problem and see where it takes us.

As far as politics go, and she and I talked about this too, her approach is that people are sick and tired of politics as usual, that they want civility in their public officials. I would argue no. Let me put this in a way everyone can relate to. Everyone knows I love the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and they were on Monday Night Football this week playing the Pittsburg Steelers. I was so mad in that game that I nearly threw my television out the front window of my house. The Bucs almost won, but not enough and it disgusted me to no end to see the Buc players shaking hands with the Steeler players after the game, because I was so angry that I wanted to see someone punching someone out, to reflect my feelings on the matter. Politics is a lot like sports in our culture, for better or worse. Trump certainly understands that. If you want to rally people to your cause you must get them aligned with primitive emotion. Playing nice only helps the underdog who can only hope to keep a close race and that voter turnout will be in their favor. To win elections however, you have to make sure voters will show up to vote for your cause, and to do that you have to get them excited in the same way they might be driven to watch a sports game like football. In the end one side wins and one side loses. Monday night Steelers fans were elated that they held their slim lead until the end of the game. Bucs fans were devastated. I almost threw my $5000 television out the window in full rage. Does this kind of thing help the political discourse and solve problems? Well, I’d argue yes, because in politics you must have fundraisers and people like to bet on winners in the great horse races. And you must have majority parties in power for the cooperation of a republic to work right. It’s nice to think that people will be voted in and vote their hearts, but so long as the political philosophies of Americans are so different, party rule will be the primary strategy of determining policy, and of picking winners and losers. Until all Americans have a unified philosophy they can all agree on, politics will be another sport that people pick a side and root for.

I finished my conversation with Kathy Wyenandt saying that she didn’t sound like a liberal, she likes seeing money-making ideas evolve, so she’s not anti-business by any measure. She explained that she was conservative about most things but socially she leaned liberal. I find that’s the case with a lot of moms, the job of parenting especially for females evokes a lot of empathy. But empathy isn’t always the best way to solve problems either. Being able to understand the position of someone else isn’t always required to solve a problem, it can in fact be a hindrance. But I found it difficult to not like Kathy Wyenandt. I’m sure she will do great things if she continues to want to involve herself in public life. But I have the feeling she might be more effective free of public constraints. It takes all kinds of people to make things happen on a big scale, and as far as her passion goes to education, that is a big issue. But it’s certainly just one that concerns the 52nd District of one of Ohio’s richest areas.

All in all the debate was a good one, it showed two nice people running for the same position. George Lang has lots of experience and is battle hardened for life in Columbus where the not so nice side of politics is always present. And George knows how to navigate those dangers and still get things done. He’s very resilient without becoming pessimistic. He doesn’t worry about being all things to all people, he generally just does his best and it usually keeps him always on top. Kathy is another matter, while in this race her strategy is good in not wanting to draw blood in the campaign against George, and running as a liberal conservative in Butler County trying to be the nice person people can vote for, the reality is that her approach would be decimated in Columbus. I admired her ambition, but she needs a few steps to get there. I caught parts of her personality while we were talking that said she wouldn’t be so happy with the game of politics that are required to run an important House seat. Its one thing to say the system is corrupt, but it became that way for a reason—because under it all is the sport of politics itself. I myself have a hard time shaking hands with people I compete against, especially so soon after a big game. And in politics you have to do that kind of thing every day. I help where I can due to my temperament. I know what I’m good at and I put my efforts there. I think Kathy has a lot of that in her too. A school levy is one thing, it’s a single point issue that evokes great emotion in one side against the other. But running for a House seat involves lots of layers of politics and issues that are always changing, and it takes a certain kind of person to tackle those kinds of things. One thing that I learned from the debate was that George Lang was certainly the one who should be in that 52nd District seat in Columbus. But I also learned that I liked Kathy Wyenandt and that perhaps she may get what she wants done for schools done better outside the parameters of public office. Perhaps after this election a new journey will unfold, and it just might bring together people who were former enemies for a whole new challenge that would certainly be worth the undertaking.

Rich Hoffman

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