Monday, September 26, 2011

At Last, Elegance and Contemporary Styling for Medical Uniforms from Blue Sky Scrubs


I do not spend a lot of time in hospitals and medical offices, but when I do I immediately notice the quality and care invested in the professional uniforms.  In my book, life is too short for a medical professional to stand around in dumpy, dreary, depressing clothes when they can easily access the latest styles and colors through Blue Sky Scrubs by clicking on this link, http://www.blueskyscrubs.com/
Right now, you can check out the cotton scrubs offered by Blue Sky Scrubs and look through their extensive online catalogue. 

Research shows that dressing at an above average level for you job not only makes you feel better it improves the way your patients and clients react to you as well.  There is good reason for this.  When the patient sees how much attention you place on looking right, they understand that you will place similar attention into doing your job correctly too.  What better, more reassuring message could you send to a hurting world in a crisis environment?

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Looking for New Places to Answer Questions? Check Out Conserative Political Forum

Since I got myself kicked out of Quora, I have been looking for a good place to draft topics, write questions and provide answers.  I've stumbled over a new place called Conservative Political Forum that I want to recommend.  As we get ready for 2012, I think it is important to learn all this new networking technology now, and not at the height of the fight in October 2012. 

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Making Sense of Rick Perry on Social Security: Not So Hard to Leave It to the States

I adore Rick Perry.  I think he will make a great president.  I wish we could pick a presidential candidate without forcing him to rely on his weak point - debating in public. 

I was a little mystified by his answer on social security tonight and the gap between the words in his book and his understanding that states do exempt their public employees from social security.  Instead of getting all philosophical, I think it is simpler to simply observe that Perry made a mistake in his communications. 

As I understand it, Romney is arguing that it would be somehow physically impossible to give social security over to the states to handle.  Perry's response, as I understand it, was to argue - tonight - that many states are already substituting their own programs for those offered by social security.  I know this is true because of my own family experience.  My father, as a life-long state employee of California, was never a big contributor to social security.  Instead, his retirement needs were met by the state of California through its own retirement system. 

Somehow, however, this common sense observation got lost in translation tonight and Perry allowed Romney to score enough points that Romney came off looking like the winner tonight.  (Personally, I was more upset by Perry's comments regarding in-state tuition for the children of illegal immigrants.) 

Nevertheless, I'd like to see Perry double or triple the time he spend preparing for these debates.  I think he will remain the front runner because of his track record of job creation in Texas. I wish I could drive to Austin and give Rick Perry my advice.  I can only hope one of his staff members reads these comments and wakes up to the break down in communication that is making Perry look a little rocky in his presentation skills.


John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

New Rick Perry Ad Goes After President Zero


I had a chance to check out the new Rick Perry for president ad.  I was struck by the line that "we don't need a president who apologizes for America."  It reminded me of how much I have gotten tired of seeing Obama running down the United States.  I cannot get the unpleasant image out of my mind of Obama bowing down to various, unsavory foreign leaders including the Saudi king.

Obama's comfort with Hugo Chavez reminded me that Obama was also comfortable with Communist party members like his Hawaii mentor Frank Marshall Davis, retired domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers, or active socialist politicians like Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer. I have gotten really tired of Obama apologizing for American and I miss the days when we had a confident president who believed in American political culture and articulated anti-Communist ideals.  I miss having a president who promotes the institutions and values which have made our nation the greatest on Earth.

Perry's ad reminds me that Obama has been a drag on our country economically and spritually.  He has held back the growth and recovery of the U.S. economy and lost us two million private sector jobs.  He has dragged down our reputation overseas and left innocent people to the terror of Hamas, Al Queda and worse.  Obama has dragged down our pride in our nation by tearing down those who create wealth and jobs as if they were the enemy instead of the source of American vitality.  Perry's new ad captures this economic, spiritual and inspirational dissatisfaction.  Good for him.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Dr. Drew's True Confessions: The Conversion Story of a Repentant Ex-Marxist


I grew up poor and I thought it was unfair for me to be held back simply because of the mistakes of my parents. It drove me nuts, for example, to think that kids less intelligent, hard-working, and moral than me enjoyed vacations in Europe while I lived in a home with raw sewage in the backyard. I thought Marxist socialism would give young people in similar situations a more equal opportunity to enjoy the good things in life.

In retrospect, however, I didn't have anyone in my life to explain compound interest, or how to write a business plan, or how to apply computer technology to the most interesting questions. I think if my family had been part of a contemporary Christian church, then I would have had my questions answered and I would have made better decisions.

I got a track scholarship to attend Occidental College in Los Angeles. All the folks around me at Oxy seemed to think the best thing on earth that you could do with your life was to become a college professor. So I went with the program. I got a scholarship to attend graduate school where I got to study with the some of the best professors in the nation in American government and public policy.

My commitment to Marxist socialist thought, however, gradually came to an end by the summer of 1982 when I began to notice that there was a larger spiritual world which did not fit the materialistic atheist models of modern social science. It was a world of intuition, coincidence, and syncronicity which Marxism saw as only an illusion used to lubricate the workings of capitalist exploitation. I also figured out that my empathy for others was not a weakness...it was an extremely useful tool for generating guesses about how the world really worked.

As I became more spiritual I also started to have an unusual amount of success intellectually and academically. My thinking, writing, and observations knit together and I started to attract positive attention with my research on the causes and timing of welfare programs in the U.S.

In my case, I remember where I was the exact moment I realized I no longer believed in the ideals of Communism: I was walking through the basement of McGraw Hall at Cornell University in September 1983. I had just finished an argument with my radical thesis advisor. As I recall I began to believe that the problems associated with child abuse and neglect might be easily fixed through the use of European-style visiting nurse program. As best I can recall, my thesis advisor saw child abuse as a larger problem caused by the necessity to invest in the reproduction of social capital under conditions in which children were mistakenly seen as elements of private property as part of the larger cultural and legal structures which maintain the reproduction of oppressive class conflict. The solution to child abuse, in his model, would involve paying attention to much greater issues involving the distribution of power and wealth in a modern industrialized society. (Or something like that...) Whatever the details of that argument, I remember the encounter left me thinking he was ideologically blinded and alarmingly out-of-touch with reality.

In my research, I had inadvertantly discovered a bizarre failing in modern political science. I was able to show that much of what we consider our modern America - schools, parks, Boy Scout and Girl Scout programs, and aid for families with dependent children - was largely a consequence of the earlier effort to enforce child labor laws. I know this sounds completely obvious...but the social science development literature of the 1960s and 1970s had been written without any reference to the role of child labor law enforcement as a key step in the modernization process.

Based on my historical research, I disconfirmed the Marxist hypothesis that welfare programs arose out of class struggle. My research showed they arose as an unintended consequence of the completely independent prior decision to stop child labor.

I ended up teaching at Williams College in MA, the nation's top rated liberal arts college. I won an award from the American Political Science Association for my thesis. It is now published in book form.

Today, I'm married. I'm proud that I attend a Baptist Church that overlooks the Pacific Ocean. I have my own management consulting business. Right at this moment, I'm struggling to get up to speed on this new social networking technology...and I'm excited that it provides a way to get around the mainstream media.
 
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Left Wing Blogger Now Asking Who is John Drew? Dr. Drew's Responses

Last year, I was surprised - and somewhat honored - to see that Anna Stoddard the blogger at "Oh, For Goodness Sake" put together a biography on me. The article is here

http://ohforgoodnesssake.com/?p=7349

I thought this forum was a good place to republish a public response to the issues raised by the article by Stoddard, an elderly retiree from New York now living in Mexico. For my immediate, same day, reaction to Stoddard's error-filled article see my story at Patriot Action Net.

The first thing to say is that I was Ann Coulter's T.A. which means I was responsible for grading her papers, grading her exams, and leading her small group discussion sections. I was actually working for her American government professor, Theodore J. Lowi. So, I was actually Lowi's teaching assistant and Coulter was one of my very first students. I think she can also communicate how she saw me evolve from being a young radical extremist into a being a moderate, non-Marxist social scientist. Poor Anna Stoddard, writing in Oh, For Goodness Sake, cannot seem to figure this out and never modified the text even as I brought this issue to her attention almost immediately after she first wrote her article.

(Literally, I called this error to her attention on the same day she wrote this awful smear job, but she did not even acknowledge this bizarre error until 9/19/2011.)

Second, I really was never rejected for tenure as Ms. Stoddard indicates in Oh, For Goodness Sake. The situation was worse than that. The folks at Williams took me off the tenure track in 1989 and really did not even let me compete for tenure. Their story is that my research was sub-par. The irony, of course, is that a month or so later I won the William Anderson Award from the American Political Science Association for the best doctoral dissertation in the nation in my field. My story is that they were hostile to me because I was a man, Armenian-American, conservative and quite vocal in my complaints against affirmative action and those who doubted the wisdom of welfare reform.

The larger issue raised by Anna Stoddard in Oh, For Goodness Sake is my relationship with Obama. In truth, I only met Obama a handful of times. What is missing, however, is that Obama and I were part of an intense cultural sub-group due to our connections at Occidental College. My knowledge of him was built, in part, through my prior knowledge of Mohammed Hasan Chandoo, Caroline Boss, and others  - the young people who were active in campus politics driven by the Democrat Socialist Alliance at Occidental College. I took my status as a Marxist revolutionary thinker very seriously...and so did he. It not a small deal to live your life anticipating the Marxist revolution was coming down the road. The intensitiy of Obama's commitment to Marxism is why my girlfriend could refer to him as "one of us."

As she writes in Oh, For Goodness Sake, Stoddard also misses that I knew the Marxist professors Obama talks about in Dreams of My Father and I was dating the various structural feminists too. I knew the same foreign students and anti-apartheid activists.

By all accounts, my wife and I are taking grave risks because of my willingness to discuss Obama's early Marxist socialist ideology. If Anna Stoddard and her "Oh, For Goodness Sake" blog is the best that liberal Democrats can do to discredit my story, then I think I can stand up to anything thrown at me by http://www.attackwatch.com/  Seriously, we are okay. We have seen no threats against us. Why?  I think most Republicans already believed Obama was a Marxist and most Democrats do not think it is a bad thing in the first place.

Nevertheless, I'm still frustrated and puzzled by why I could not get this story into the media sooner. If it were not for Newsmax, Breitbart TV and talk radio, then I'm not sure it ever would have gotten to the general public.  Nevertheless, I learned in politics that it is important to respond immediately when you are under attack by an untruthful, error-prone person like Anna Stoddard writing in Oh, For Goodness Sake.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Catching Up with Mistake Prone "Oh, For Goodness Sake" Blogger: Dr. Drew Defends Himself, Again

I see that Anna Stoddard at "Oh, For Goodness Sake" has published a third article attacking my eye witness report on young Barack Obama's commitment to Marxist-Leninist ideology. See, http://ohforgoodnesssake.com/?p=16905 The good news is that I have moved up the scale from "...yet another bull-jiver" in February 17, 2010.

For the full story of my meeting with young Marxist Obama, see http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/02/meeting_young_obama.html

In response to the OFGS blogger, I feel a responsibility to report that I also remember I bumped into him in The Cooler on campus, I visited the apartment he shared with Chandoo and I saw him around the campus mail boxes. As I recall, on this last encounter, Obama and his roommate - Hasan Chandoo - asked me if I would be attending a graduation party with them. I think this minor increase in my reported contacts, from two to maybe five, is largely consistent with my earlier statements, particularly my statement that my insight into young Obama's true ideology depended on my role in the same "intense cultural sub-group" and not on the amount of time we spent together.

Aside from this admitted error, the Anna Stoddard relies heavily on quotes from David Remnick's book, The Bridge to attack my credibility. This is curious to me because Remnick's book came out on April 6, 2010. This was after my report on young Obama's Marxist-Leninist perspective was first published by Ronald Kessler at http://www.newsmax.com/RonaldKessler/obama-college-marxism-occidental/2010/02/08/id/349329 on February 8, 2010.

Ironically, Remnick - a liberal Democrat - confirms my take on the young Obama's ideology, relies on the same people I report hanging out with, and verifies the same social connections - including Obama's ties to Ms. Grauman-Boss and Mr. Mohammed Hasan Chandoo. Remnick's book added to my credibility because he verified the gist of my story. This is probably how I moved up Stoddard's credibility scale from "bull-jiver" to exaggerator. I suspect that the correspondence between my report and the testimony in The Bridge is the major reason my story on meeting young Obama later appeared in books by Michael Savage, Stanley Kurtz, Paul Kengor and Jack Cashill.

Strangely, Stoddard has never corrected the absurd suggestion that Ann Coulter was teaching at Cornell and that I was employed as her teaching assistant. I'm shocked Ms. Stoddard never corrected this error. I think a contentious reporter would have figured out that Coulter was a student in my discussion section, a discussion section where I was a TA for Prof. Lowi.

Stoddard suggests that I tweeted that I "attended college" with young Obama. This, of course, is not true. I think it is obvious to any one familiar with Twitter that the tweet in question did not come from me. It came from another person who was asserting that I attended college with young Obama. (Democrats, however, may not fully understand how Twitter works in the wake of the Rep. Weiner scandal.)

There is considerable irony in the fact that Margot Mifflin, Chandoo's college-era girlfriend, is quoted on page 107 of Remnick's book confirming my take on the upper class look of young Obama. She reports that some students at Occidental College did not care for young Obama because he was "too GQ." Since Anna Stoddard's quotes from Remnick's book, I should have gotten more credit for the fact that my take on Obama appearance was later verified by Mifflin's comments in The Bridge.

Stoddard also reports Obama drove a “a funky red car, a Fiat” and suggests that I missed that fact. The reality of the situation is that I report in the American Thinker article that the owner of the luxury car was Obama's friend Chandoo. Stoddard's silliness is apparent in her own words:
In a recent article on American Thinker, makes a huge deal over Obama riding in a friend’s BMW, while Obama’s friend, Paul Carpenter recalls Obama drove “a funky red car, a Fiat.” Drew probably wouldn’t have known that small detail, because Drew was not a friend of Obama’s at Occidental, as he claims.
I will also stand by the report I have made that young Obama was not particularly close to the African-American community while he was at Occidental College. Stoddard cites the statements of Eric B. Moore. However, Moore did not stay in touch with young Obama after his transfer to Columbia University. Moore did not attend Obama's wedding. Chandoo, however, was there.

Meanwhile, Remnick's own book indicates that young Obama moved in with a white male friend when he transferred to Columbia University. Obama's book, Dreams from My Father, reports that he maintained ties with Hasan Chandoo. After leaving Occidental College, however, Obama does not mention continuing ties with even one of the African-American friends he supposedly made at Occidental College.

As an eye witness to the facts surrounding young Obama's ideology, I'm not surprised that the best the left can do to challenge my story is to launch inaccurate attacks on my credibility.  These attacks are easy to refute simply by referring to the research done by one of their own - David Remnick in The Bridge.  I'm thinking that this information will be helpful on the day that I become a target of Obama's new http://www.attackwatch.com/ website.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Even Republicans Rejected Info About Obama's Past

Young Obama in 1981 during
his first year at Columbia University.
What would you do if you knew the top Democrat running for president was lying about his past?

That is the question I was faced with in 2008. I had met the young Barack Obama while he was a sophomore at Occidental College, and I knew that his commitment to socialism was deep, genuine and long-standing.

I had been a leader of the Marxist students at Occidental College myself starting in 1976 when I founded the precursor of the Democrat Socialist Alliance on campus. The young Obama I knew was a Marxist socialist who would have been quite comfortable with Communist party members like his Hawaii mentor Frank Marshall Davis, retired domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers, or active socialist politicians like Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer.

The Obama I knew was nothing like the life-long, pragmatic centrist that he was pretending to be in the 2008 presidential campaign. When I talked politics with the young Obama, he expressed a profound commitment to bringing about a socialist economic system in the U.S. – completely divorced from the profit motive – which would occur, in his lifetime, through a potentially violent, Communist-style revolution. In this context, I saw my report on young Obama as a key piece of evidence suggesting a profound continuity in his belief system.

Although I was surprised by Barack Obama’s insistence on his mainstream ideological credentials, I was shocked that my attempts to spread the news about young Obama’s Marxism failed to gain any media traction during the 2008 presidential campaign with reporters, activists, or campaign staffs.

Once I saw the significance of my face-to-face observations on the young Obama, I went out of my way to get my story on record with the Orange County Register. I tried to contact, among others, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, the folks behind the Swift Boat ads, and the McCain campaign.

I thought I would get a phone call back from Fox News - someone, somewhere – and I still do not understand why no one seemed to catch on to the urgency of the situation. I understand I did not have audio tape of young Obama. I did not have any photos or home movies. Nevertheless, I was extremely active in the leftist politics and counter cultural milieu of Occidental College in the 1970s.

As a younger man, I had earned a Ph.D. in political science from Cornell which, I would think, gave me some credibility in measuring young Obama’s ideological convictions. I quickly saw other people who had known the young Obama were featured in various news articles. It seemed to me I should have been just another interview for any journalist, producer or campaign consultant interested in checking out my story and testing it against the facts.

In frustration, I was also posting what I knew on The Caucus Blog site at the New York Times. My expectation was someone from the Times would call me and follow-up on the leads I was sending out. Here is a sample of what I was doing in October 2008 to get the word out about Obama’s Marxist ideology.
I even thought of scheduling my own press conference on the campus of Occidental College through their campus Republican club. Internally, I was conflicted by the urgency of what I knew and the sense it was best for the story to break out in a manner supportive of the McCain campaign.

What shocked me about my experience in the summer of 2008 is that I thought my background as a Williams College political science professor, as a small business owner, and as a visible presence in the Orange County community would allow my message to immediately go to the very top of the McCain campaign. I thought my story would be welcomed by Fox News.

Since then, things have slowly gotten better. My story on the young Marxist Obama has appeared in Michael Savage’s Trickle-Up Poverty, Paul Kengor’s Dupes, Stanley Kurtz’s Radical-In-Chief and Jack Cashill’s Deconstructing Obama.

Nevertheless, I think there is something broken in our media and campaign system. I do not think most independents or conservatives understand, or fully appreciate, the tremendous advantages the left derives from having the mainstream media serve as the fully paid, completely sympathetic, Dan Rather-level opposition research team of the Democrat party. It is a system that methodically ignores damaging information about flawed candidates like Sen. John Edwards and Rep. Anthony Weiner while routinely elevating minor errors among Republicans to the status of Watergate investigations.

If Republicans are going to win in 2012, I think they need to make some changes so that they are friendlier to the whistle-blowers bringing them bad news about the Obama administration. Personally, I would like to see Republicans create new ways to collect negative news stories on liberals by 1) including web pages requesting opposition research from leakers, 2) establishing guidelines for leakers that help them give campaign decision makers the confidence to pursue appropriate leads, and 3) instituting feedback mechanisms so leakers have some minimal assurance that they have been heard by top campaign managers and that their information has been discarded for technical or strategic reasons and not simply because it was overlooked by a careless staff member.

I think recognition of this problem should be the first step in taking systematic action to prevent flawed Democrat candidates from winning office. In the meantime, I predict we will see more examples of media failure as the left dominates the muckraking journalism profession while the right seems too dependent on a small handful of seemingly obscure, over-worked journalists and – as my case illustrates – unconnected and often baffled citizen activists.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Seeing Rick Perry Live in Orange County, CA

I got a chance to see Gov. Rick Perry of Texas in action this morning. The Orange County Republican Central Committee (OCGOP) held a special rally for him at one of my favorite spots, Rogers Gardens in Newport Beach. As I understand the conventional wisdom, Gov. Perry is not supposed to be really strong as a debater -- something I noticed watching on television last night -- and yet he is supposed to be gifted at making a difference through these personal appearances.

As a political scientist, I am asking myself the question what is it that Gov. Perry does in person that scores points for him.

First, I think one of the most important things that comes across about his is that he is very conscientious. For example, he goes out of his way to sign campaign posters.

One of my political friends showed me a cowboy hat signed by both Gov. Perry and his wife on opposite ends of the brim near the crown of the hat. The signatures were perfect - carefully balanced and carefully written out. My friend believes that 40 years from now this hat will be a sought after item on eBay. I think he is right. It looks like Perry chalked up another supporter in the local Orange County Republican Party, in part, through his kindness and timely attention to detail.

At the event, Perry also went out of his way to recognize, Tom Fuentes, the prior O.C. Republican Central Committee chairman, who is terminally ill from cancer.  Perry did not simply recognize Fuentes once, he weaved comments on Fuentes, into the overall speech he gave that morning to the partisan crowd.

While I managed to shake Gov. Perry hand, I did not do a good job of informing him about Barack Obama's long-standing ties to Marxist socialist thought.  I'm expecting he and his staff have read my posts here and elsewhere and that eventually the truth about Obama's commitment to Marxism and socialism will inform the 2012 campaign in a way that it did not in the 2008 campaign.  I took home a Gov. Perry sign.  I will put up in the window of my office, in large measure, to disturb my Democratic Party neighbors - the one who probably think it is too soon to be focused on national politics.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Romney Rises to Occasion in First Debate with Perry


The most important thing I noticed is that Romney is looking better than ever based on what I saw at the latest MSNBC Republican Primary debate with Brian Williams and some dorky guy from Politico - John F. Harris, Editor-in-Chief. (Really, it is not fair to put Harris on the same stages as Brian Williams. It's like watching a high school ballerina perform next to someone from American Ballet Theatre.)

The debate started off with a quick round of back and forth between Gov. Romney and Gov. Perry and Romney clearly demonstrated that years of experience in national debates pays off. Romney had clearly anticipated Perry's answers and responses and created a level-headed, common-sense image that made Perry look awkward and overpowered. Romney also looked more rested. Perry looked as if he had been up all night fighting those fires in TX himself.

As a reporter, I would say that the key exchange took place after Gov. Perry attacked Gov. Romney's record of job creation in Massachusetts. In a Reaganesque moment, Romney to interjected "listen, wait a second" as the moderators tried to move on, Here, Romney played his cards well by getting a break for himself early in the debate. Moreover, his comments had a grain of truth.

"States are different," Romney said. "Texas is a great state. Texas has zero income tax. Texas has a right to work state, a Republican legislature, a Republican Supreme Court. Texas has a lot of oil and gas in the ground. Those are wonderful things, but Governor Perry doesn't believe that he created those things. If he tried to say that, well, it would be like Al Gore saying he invented the Internet."

What got my attention is how natural, trustworthy and earnest Romney looked as he delivered those lines. In contrast, Perry looked overly aggressive and wooden as he released the line that "Michael Dukakis created jobs three times faster than you did, Mitt."


Romney took the punch and then shot back: "Well, as a matter of fact, George Bush and his predecessor created jobs at a faster rate than you did, Governor."


"That's not correct," said Perry.


"Yes, that is correct," said Romney.


In all this rapid fire exchange, the inexperienced John F. Harris of Politico looked overwhelmed. Meanwhile, the experienced MSNBC moderator Brian Williams, drew on his vast television comfort level to quip: "Nice to see everybody came prepared for tonight's conversation."

As far as I could tell, the above exchange highlighted the considerable value of previous experience with presidential primary level debating. It is not a natural talent. It is an acquired skill that gets better with practice. Accordingly, my prediction is that Perry stumbled a little tonight, because of his inexperience in debates, and that Romney probably made himself some new friends and supporters. Perry is a steep challenge to Romney and Romney rose to the challege. In reaction to this debate, I'm expecting Perry to stall a little and to Romney to flip up quite a bit.

All in all, however, I'm still supporting Gov. Perry. Nevertheless, I think Romney had a good answer for how his investment career created net jobs for Americans. I know this was an issue with Carly Fiorina in the last CA Senate campaign whose business expertise came off as almost hostile to the needs of workers. I'm also sensitive to the fact that polls show Romney clearly beating Obama. I like that Perry is okay suggesting Obama is a "liar." He is. I also appreciated Romney's new strength and decisiveness. Since I last paid attention to Romney, it appears he is getting a better message that makes sense by suggesting Obama is a nice guy, "who doesn't have a clue" about how to turn around the economy. I think Romney's comments about Obama being a pay phone guy in a smart phone world are quite compelling and remind us that Obama is not that smart and hasn't produced results the American people expect. If anything, Obama is the rigid unchanging ideologue who doesn't seem normal, while Romney looks like the sort of flexible guy who can learn from mistakes and produce positive results.

As a political scientist, I'm reminded of how much appearances matter in presidential debates. In the future, Gov. Perry should work harder at the debates. He needs to be more rested and relaxed ahead of time - no matter what is happening with his workload as an active TX governor. I'm also reminded at the extent to which success in debates is simply a matter of practice, rehearsal, and experience.

Finally, as someone who knew the young Marxist Obama, I was gratified to see Speaker Newt Gingrich come straightout and criticize bureaucratic socialism. I'm going a rally for Gov. Perry in Newport Beach tomorrow a.m. If I get a chance to say hello to Gov. Perry face-to-face, I'll share the same news I shared with Speaker Gingrich: the Obama I knew was a radical revolutionary looking to overthrow the U.S. capitalist system. In this context, however, I was proud to see Gingrich lash out at the mainstream media for seeking to divide Republicans and distract attention from Obama's dangerous weaknesses and failed economic policies. The mainstream media ignored my warnings about Obama's commitment and ties to Marxist socialist thought in 2008. They do not deserve any protection from the Republican candidates given the misery they inflicted on the U.S. by not fully vetting Obama in early 2008 or fully researching him in the summer of 2008. I expect that anti-Obama activists will also benefit - as has Gov. Romney - from increased experience at the national level.

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

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