Singing the Blues with Barack Obama

Now we are coming down to the wire. There are only a dozen or so days left before Election Day. Polls have Romney ahead and the trend is with him. One battleground state after another is falling. Over the past 150 weeks, since November 2009, when Americans were polled as to job approval, or whether Obama should be reelected, fewer than 50 percent have favored the president. The only weeks he polled above 50 percent were the week our troops shot Osama bin Laden and the week following the Democratic National Convention. No president with such a string of unfavorable ratings can expect to be reelected. I fear the White House is catching on. Obama is a goner, unless the Democrats can turn out the vote in select cemeteries around the country.

Now comes John Fund with a new book to tell us that voter fraud is a real possibility in 2012, and for years to come, if Americans do not get serious about the problem of stuffing the ballot box. In "Who's Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote At Risk," written with Hans von Spakovsky, Fund outlines the problem. He talks about how voter fraud played an important role in recent history, for instance, in the passage of Obamacare. He talks about a salutary trend in the states favoring photo identification. Much as we demand photo identification before buying alcohol, cashing a check, or, in our larger cities, entering an office building, we ought to require it of voters. Yet some, in the main Democrats, complain that this is bigoted. It is nothing of the kind. It is an instance of taking democratic process seriously. It assures the value of every vote that is cast.

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute. He is the author most recently of "The Death of Liberalism," published by Thomas Nelson, Inc. To find out more about R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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