According to Krauthammer: “The problem for Romney is that there were only four events [that] could change the course [of the race]: the three debates and the conventions, and he apparently squandered the first.”
Charles focuses on the tactical error that was Clinton Eastwood. What Clinton really meant etc. occupied conservatives. It’s an understatement to say his performance didn’t impress swing voters. In so many ways, as Pete has shown, squandered is the right word.
Obama, as Charles adds, made it clear that he really cares. And so he recovered the love of his party. Caring is not as good as succeeding, but maybe good enough. Especially if it’s not clear the other guy even cares.
The truth is Romney is clearly behind. Given the small number of undecided voters, it’ll be tough for him to make up lost ground. He’s behind, if only a bit many cases, in virtually all the battleground states. Ohio looks pretty bad.
So there are the debates. The single debate in 1980 was a pretty decisive win for Reagan. What chance is there that Romney will do as well as Reagan–or Obama as badly as Carter did–over a series of three debates in a very hostile media environment? Maybe, as in the case of Reagan, Romney’s bar is the fairly low credible and caring alternative to the incumbent. But the economy is not really as bad as it was in 1980, and there’s no hostage crisis to make the incumbent look weak and otherwise inept in foreign policy.
The situation isn’t hopeless, of course. I think Romney is now, once again, as low as he can go.
September 11th, 2012 | 2:41 pm
Professor, you say the economy is “not really as bad as it was in 1980,” but I don’t think there was 8% unemployment in 1980, as there is now (really, it’s worse than that). It is true that inflation was a big problem in 1980, which it is not now (for the time being, anyway).
However the economy today compares with 1980, I agree with you that Romney’s in terrible shape. And I think the problem is that -contrary to Romney’s stubbornly held belief – the state of the economy is not terribly salient to the election, past American history notwithstanding. Obama can win the election with people who vote out of tribal/ideological motives impervioius to economic circumstances (including most highly educated voters) and uninformed, highly suggestible people who can be persuaded (with the help of the media) that the bad economy is not Obama’s fault but that of Bush and the Republicans.
Romney – notwithstanding that he was far superior to anyone else running for the GOP nomination – is turning out to be the dud we all feared he would be. It looks like the choice of Ryan for VP was just a sop to conservative intellectuals and the Tea Party. Sigh.
September 11th, 2012 | 2:42 pm
The bottom line is that Mitt is a terrible, terrible, terrible candidate. Always has been. And, sigh, apparently always will be.
Why does 95% of the public not know that the US deficit for the year just passed the $1 Trillion mark yet again? Conservatives like to (rightly) scream about the MSM bias against anything that will reflect badly on O and the Dems if they can get away with it, but allegedly Mitt’s got a massive warchest right now, and what exactly is he doing with it?
Why has there been zero pushback against the ludicrous claim by the Dems that Mitt wants to increase taxes on the middle class by $2000 per year? If folks actually believe that, then Mitt’s toast, and the Dems keep saying it, and no one’s calling them on it.
What the heck is Mitt’s plan anyway?
September 11th, 2012 | 4:36 pm
I disagree is some ways, but there is a lot of truth to what djf hs to say.. I do think that if the economic situation was less unambiguously bad (1980 saw both a recession and double digit inflation) and the situation could not be plausibly blamed on the other party, Romney would be doing better. But, at the presidential level, the Democratic coalition seems to have a higher floor now than in 1980.
September 11th, 2012 | 5:28 pm
Pete, I think the point I’m making is pretty much the same one you’ve been making – the bad economy, combined with Romney’s saccharine efforts to “humanize” himself, are not going to put him over the top. As you’ve been saying, to have any chance of peeling off enough swing voters to win, he has to rebut the Democratic narrative about our domestic problems and offer some sort of outline of what he plans to do about them and how it will help middle class voters. Apparently, Romney simply doesn’t want to do this. He thinks he can win by running a platitude-filled “why not the best” campaign like Jimmy Carter’s in 1976. Incredible.
“But, at the presidential level, the Democratic coalition seems to have a higher floor now than in 1980.” — No kidding. Apparently, something fundamental was changing in the country, at the grass roots, during the decades when Republicans and conservatives were obsessing over marginal tax rates, the defense budget, Supreme Court appointments (which we mostly got wrong, anyway), Saddam Hussein, North Korea, Red China, terrorism, school vouchers, and dozens of other things. Not that those things aren’t important (most of them, at any rate). But they had nothing to do with the transformation of the US into a country capable of electing a leftist ideologue (albeit one smart enough to accept occasional compromises when necessary and to camouflage his true intentions) to the presidency.
September 11th, 2012 | 5:39 pm
djf, but where I think you are right is that Obama would be losing this election in 1980 America.
I do agree that conservatives have not done a good job of talking to people (especially younger people) who aren’t already socialized into the conservative narrative and/or like to consume right-leaning media. Lots of reasons for that of course, and I don’t have a handle on all of them. I get what you’re saying, but we wouldn’t be any better off if Bush 43 had picked Arlen Specter rather than John Roberts (even with the Obamacare ruling) – to pick one example. There was time to worry about the defense budget and talk more about health care policy, but that time was wasted (and in some ways still is.)
September 11th, 2012 | 6:00 pm
Pete, when I said we got Supreme Court appointments mostly wrong, I had in mind O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter. I certainly agree that Bush 43 could have done far, far worse than Roberts (who seemed perfect when he was nominated).
Again, I don’t mean to deprecate everything conservatives have accomplished, or everything they have fought for, since Reagan was elected. I do mean that none of our victories -as important as some of them were – have forestalled whatever underlying processes were underway changing us into a society receptive to the sort of ideologues who now constitute the Democratic Party (Obama is just the most prominent of them). Yes, I agree – a guy like Obama could not have won in 1980. But precisely that kind of guy looks like he’s on his way to being reelected in 2012. Something fundamental has changed on the ground while conservatives have been focusing their attention on the sky. Maybe there was nothing we could have done to prevent it – but we never really tried.
September 11th, 2012 | 7:11 pm
djf, I agree with all of that. I think some of these processes were fairly obvious, and others less so. For instance, it is, in many ways tougher (on an emotional level) for the average conservative to have some idea of how little of the center-right message is getting out to large portions of the population. The availability of center-right broadcasting makes the playing field look more level than it really is. That’s just one thing of course There are also changing family structure, demographic changes, changing issue mixes and no doubt plenty I can’t think of right now and have never thought of.
September 11th, 2012 | 8:14 pm
The economy is worse now than it was in 1980. Technically the economy is better now, but this is only thru operation of true progressivism (i.e., Patent) the only wealth that has really trickled down, and the only trickle down that actually makes sense+ involves technological change with a trickle down mechanism, i.e. a patent entereing the public domain. So more folks have fridges and microwaves, there is an internet (that Al Gore helped develop, before he took his progressivism to Apple.) Toss in video games, computing power/speed and Iphones and the economy is way better, measured in quality of graphics/content per dollar spent. Of course you have to shift your consumption pattern and behavior to capture the improvement.
But since we are out of presidential candidates who can win the popular vote, loose the electoral college and go on to improve the economy (via Apple). We are sort of screwed.
A primary selling point is that the military has and helps drive technological innovation. Certainly it also works wonders as a sort of discipline/quasi-middle class building engine. So economically speaking the wasteful wars were not all that wasteful.
Factoring in the trickle down economics of true progressivism, and the economy is better off now than it has ever been. Of course we no longer really live in a time when know how also trickles down. The middle class simply gets the bennefit of lower prices for high tech goods. That is still a valid trickle down but it isn’t quite as robust as it used to be. In addition this tech really increases labor productivity, which means fewer jobs for the same or greater levels of production. But since there really is an industrial reserve army of labor (man-power, addecco, employment-plus, spherion…) workers cannot really bargain for increased wages…in addition a lot of the patent has moved to trade secret, and a good chunk of it is in this manufacturing technology, the processes that break down labor into repeateable steps, capable of being infinitely repeated by quasi-low skill, but technologically sophisticated IRAL (part of the bennefit to the employer of all this consumer spending in wealth that has trickled down (technology).
Everyone in Ohio who wants to work can work for around $10 an hour, doing things which basically require skills that carry over pretty well from smart phones and video games. Of course back in 1980 similar labor was also around $10 a hour (and it was less productive, and everyone was more picky, and there wasn’t such a deep labor pool, and all the parents swore that the kids would go to college).
President Obama’s manufacturing commerical about saving Ohio jobs and showing the 80 of 88 counties involved in the auto-industry (with substantial ammounts working non-union derivatives/Honda), is spot on. Not that very many folks in Ohio even like or aspire to factory/warehouse work. So there is no real “Hope” or awesome feeling towards Obama. But Obama did try to do some stimulus, and probably would have done more if not for the republicans.
In any case the economy is bad in terms of “hope” or job/satisfaction/security, the only progressivism anyone believes in is technological change. Deficit spending is just to boost aggregate demand.
Mitt Romney will end up raising taxes on the middle class by at least 2k, maybe 3k (depending on how charitable you want to be, and assuming the budget wasn’t just cobbled together rhetoric/copyright(who believes in this form of property with a modicum of creativity anyways)?
The bottom line is, if you can’t find work you are lazy, but if you are working you probably can’t find much hope other than the newest gadget or phone anways, and you are unlikely to “believe” in it. At some point you might as well complete the Marxist circle and adopt Mormonism as a self-consciously rediculous opiate of the people. Mormonism isn’t really making any push…but for some odd reason Heroin is. Along with the idea of giving roses to familly, it isn’t a concept that should be so lightly mocked and quickly dismissed ( Some may disagree but the Aristotelian remedy of seeking to emulate the wise “Romney”, (of course this requires a certain level of Hope/ambition) is probably preferable to heroin).
Of course the Heroin problem is a symptom of the Obama Malaise, the “Hope” was just copyright(speech with a modicum of originality), and like words faded quickly, but the supply of oxycotin from Canada via the internet took a major dump when via patent engineers and regulators changed the delivery mechanism to a liquid capsule that could not be snorted (thanks in part to a Bill also signed by Kasich). Unfortunately Mexican gangs stepped into the void with huge amounts of Heroin.
I wasn’t aware in the 1980′s but manufacturing jobs paid more/relatively speaking (If you have a Union job you want to keep it, if you are IRAL, then you pick up an opiate?) and there wasn’t a Heroin problem in rural Ohio.
So…the political economy due in part to income inequality (and other broad measure thinking) is in my opinion just plain worse.
September 12th, 2012 | 11:31 am
any ideas out there on why David Brooks seems to be imploding these days? His columns lately run the gamut from attack ads on Romney to disappointment or disenchantment with Obama to general obliviousness to the election altogether. Did I miss something?
September 12th, 2012 | 3:06 pm
Ramsey, for what it’s worth, I think centrists like Brooks (who really hasn’t been any kind of conservative for years) gave up on the Republicans in the late Bush years, and genuinely hoped that the Democrats would take advantage of the GOP implosion by moving back toward the relative centrism (I stress relative, of course) of the middle years of the Clinton administration. Of course, the Democrats did just the opposite, moving even further to the left than they already had. Nonetheless, the Brooks types were so deluded by their own wishful thinking that they took Obama for some sort of moderate who would “bring people together” (don’t ask me how otherwise intelligent and informed people could convince themselves of this). Now that it is clear that Obama is as much of a moderate or centrist as the late Bella Abzug, Brooks types find themselves politically homeless, and they are having a sort of nervous breakdown as a result.
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