No Romney Binders Needed for Women Veterans!

Joined Vote Vets sometime ago not knowing what to expect after learning about them from a good friend who is retired Air Force.  Discovered some really good former military candidates who are running in this election starting with the former Surgeon General under President Bush Richard Carmona who is running against the hard right Jeff Flake.  

Because of years around the military, it makes a difference to me if they are a veteran especially today because of how the Republican Party is treating veteran candidates with lies ridicule, and deceit.  There are times that I cannot fathom Republicans today with their attacks which are just mean spirited on our men and women who are veterans who dare run against a Republican.  It is disgraceful and understandable that younger people who are getting out of the service are starting to become more Democrat because of the actions of today's Romney Republican Party.  

This former Chief of the Medical Services at Ramstein AFB, GE speaks for me.  It is a huge hospital and unlike the world of the wealthy business people like Romney, the Air Force believes in promoting qualified women to positions of trust and responsibility based on their qualifications.  

Romney made a total jerk of himself with his arrogant 'I am better than you attitude' as rules don't apply to Romney as he tried to bully not only the President but the Moderator Candy Crowley during the debate this week.

Why is the Romney camp who refused to acknowledge our troops in Afghanistan at the GOP Convention being propped up by phony stories like this one below by Politico which should receive pants on fire for truthfulness.  Glad to see Vote Vets tell the truth about Politico which spun and lied with the story that veterans were retreating from Obama moving to Romney:

So, Politico's story just isn't true. It's coming up with a thesis, and jamming a bunch of unreliable numbers in there to back it up, while completely ignoring contradicting numbers. I would be extremely interested to see polling done only of veterans and military families, with a responsible sample size. That would lead to a reliable thesis and more responsible reporting.

After seeing the headline from Politico several weeks ago that Vets were retreating from Obama, I sent out in an email asking veterans I know if they had switched to Romney.  In keeping with the decorum of this site, I won't repost some of what they said.  Suffice it to say they did not agree with the article.  You can now add Politico to those shilling for Romney with a reporter willing to stretch the truth by a lot:.  Once again we get the facts from Vote Vets unlike the media site for Politico:

Vets Retreating From Obama? Not So Fast
By Jon Soltz | Huffington Post | View story in the original contextPUBLISHED: September 25, 2012 

It's a provocative headline from Politico: "Veterans Retreating from President Obama."
Provocative, but not exactly true. 

First, in the spirit of disclosure, I talked with the reporter who wrote the piece for 45 minutes, and walked him through the many reasons that veterans (especially younger veterans) are supporting President Obama, and how their voice can sway key voters that progressives usually have trouble reaching. And believe me, from expanding funding for veterans care, to constructing new vets centers under the stimulus, to passing legislation to get veterans hired, to doing more to help vets with PTSD and traumatic brain injuries, to getting us out of Iraq, to killing Osama bin Laden, there's a lot that veterans like about the President. 

I also explained that where older veterans tend to be white males and more conservative, the newer generation of veterans contains more Latinos, African Americans, and women -- demographics that heavily tilts towards President Obama. That likely means that we're in the midst of a real paradigm shift, as far as the veterans' community goes, and the political leanings of its members. I do not know why I wasn't quoted in the story, nor why none of the facts or stats or poll numbers I passed on were used. 

Now on to the facts. 

The writer says, "Back in May, Obama had the lead among Afghanistan and Iraq veterans. But a Reuters/Ipsos poll from September says that's evaporated, with Romney now up 48 percent to 34 percent." 

What doesn't he say? That a Zogby poll from Sept 21-22 shows that President Obama leads Mitt Romney among veterans and military families, 54%-40%, and that lead expands to 56%-32%, when you include third party candidates, among all voters. 

That May Reuters-Ipsos poll referenced above found a 44-37 lead for the President. 

Considering that nearly every single poll has the President expanding his lead since then, it'd be reasonable to expect that the President's May 44-37 lead among veterans has expanded with the rest of the country, or at least remained about the same. Yet Reuters now says Mitt Romney has had an amazing 11 point bounce and the President has crashed by 10 points in a few months. Is it more likely that has happened, or veterans are more or less trending more towards the President with the rest of the polls, which would put him in line for that 54-40 lead among vets and military families that Zogby shows today? 

Of course, this isn't the first time that there have been different poll findings regarding veterans. In May, when Reuters-Ipsos found that 44-37 lead among veterans for the President, here was Politico's headline: 

"Mitt Romney has huge lead with vets, poll says"

Yep, that's right. Politico ran with a Gallup poll, which showed Mitt Romney with a lead among veterans. 

Polling today also shows President Obama is pummeling Mitt Romney on questions of who is a stronger leader and better on foreign policy and terrorism issues. In some polling among all voters, the gap between the President and Mitt Romney is as wide as 15 percent. But I'll do something that I rarely ever do. Quote a FOX News poll. It found:

• Who is better on Foreign policy: Obama 54 / Romney 39

• Who can better protect the US from terrorist attacks: Obama 49 / Romney 41

• Who would be a stronger negotiator with foreign leaders: Obama 49 / Romney 43

These are issues that military troops, veterans, and their families care deeply about. While those numbers don't break down veterans, I find it extremely hard to believe that the veterans community is so wildly out of line with the American public, at large, that they're flooding over to Mitt Romney, as the Politico article would have you believe. 

Here's my point. The "polling" of veterans is incredibly inconsistent and unreliable. It's impossible to use any existing polls to show definitive veteran support for President Obama or Mitt Romney. The best we can do is guess where President Obama started with veterans, and presume veterans' opinions don't move in complete and utter contrast to the rest of the population. But guessing isn't good enough to write a story on. 

Worse, when you start to pull veterans out of a larger pool of polling subjects, you're going to get wildly varying results. Because a small fraction of the population has served in war (and less than 1 percent in Iraq and Afghanistan), your poll sample will likely reflect that. Simply put, you're not polling strictly veterans as the full respondent sample, you're polling Americans and then yanking the veterans out, for a very tiny and unrepresentative sampling with incredibly unreliable results. And, if you're pulling just Iraq and Afghanistan veterans from that, the sample size will be even smaller and even more unreliable.  

Excerpt:  Read More at Vote Vets.org

What happens to polling as a whole when you put in a 3rd party candidate like former NM Governor Gary Johnson who is running on the Libertarian ticket?  Would be willing to bet a steak dinner that Obama's lead increases considerably.  Then there is Virgil Goode in Virginia running as a Constitution Party candidate who is a former Representative from SW Virginia.  Bet that same steak that he will pull big numbers away from Romney in VA.  I bet a steak dinner because that is for only blue collar according to Perino at  Fox Tabloid News when it was reported that Obama had steak for dinner before the debate.

• Obama Eating Steak And Potatoes Is "Pandering To The Blue-Collar Worker

Can only guess at what TX/CO/OK ranchers are saying about that comment from Fox's Perino.  Kind of what I found from veterans I know would be my guess.