1. So you gotta read Jim’s explanation of why he votes the way he does in the thread. It’s presented in his own informal thready style, so I can’t link it or quote from it. We should think about his proposition that the difference between the two candidates domestically is wider than usual and is about affirming or rejecting what could be enduring change. That would make this election something like 1936. But the campaign is not playing out that way, of course. The election is not a referendum on ObamaCare. Nor is it a referendum on Obama as Progressive.
2. Unlike a “critical election,” this election will be very close and won’t give the winner much of a MANDATE. Obama the guy, as Pete reminds us, is rated higher than Obama the “cause,” and if he wins it will because of his personal advantages over Romney.
3. So Piers Morgan–who turns out to be pretty astute–claims that Romney might be most unprincipled and most personally upright candidate ever. His conclusion: He might be the kind of savvy manager who can save America. I think that explains Mitt’s recent surge pretty well.
4. Said surge is over. This morning’s polls give us a TIE. There’s no spin that puts Romney ahead. And I repeat that I have no reason not to believe that the average of a herd of polls isn’t pretty accurate.
5. Jim kind of admits in the thread that Foreign Policy slightly favors Obama, if only because we haven’t had some kind of disastrous TERRORIST event in our country under the president’s watch. Even the full exposure of the incompetence and mendacity of the administration on the Libya murders etc. won’t lead many people to conclude that Obama has made us less safe. Cutting the military budget and not taking the right kind of military modernization seriously does, in fact, do that. But Romney needs to make the case, and that would be mighty tough right now.
October 15th, 2012 | 8:27 am
“There’s no spin that puts Romney ahead.”
Um, sure there is. It’s the same spin that GOP partisans have been using for months. Also, that they used 4 years ago, it must be said.
October 15th, 2012 | 8:46 am
I’ll grant you that Obama has PERCEIVED personal advantages over Romney. But are these perceptions based on anything other than the gullible public’s succumbing to PR, fawning press coverage, and the whole “historic first black president” schtick? And, perhaps, the fact that Obama is physically attractive to many female voters (and so, by extension, to young men who want the company of young female voters)?
Viewed without rose-colored glasses, I submit that Obama comes across as cold, aloof, humorless, snide to opponents (even of his own party) and visibly narcisistic. He offers the same set of tired ideas as the late Ted Kennedy and John Kerry. His so-called “eloquence” is reminiscent of late Bruce Springsteen lyrics, i.e., bombastic, overwrought faux populism. While he has a good speaking voice, he does not make the best use of it, mostly alternating between monotonic droning (when he’s posing as an “intellectual) and Joe McCarthy-like bellowing (this style seems to be popular among political hacks of both parties).
Aren’t we at least allowed to say that his prominence is a product of mass hypnosis?
October 15th, 2012 | 10:19 am
Any analysis of this election must incorporate the potential of the Tea Party, which is not an organization, are ignored by the commie media, and are grounded on American first principles. If I am guessing correctly, they will do one more political tsunami, thus….Romney’s landslide. If America is saved from the sundry, derailed, foreign ideologies promoted by the progressiveLeft it will be as the result of the actions of these people. They are, pretty much, the children of those folks who supported ‘tail gunner, Joe’, and reacted to Roosevelt’s radical progssivism by landsliding Eisenhower.
I’m pretty sure few of them have been ‘polled.’
October 15th, 2012 | 10:44 am
By the way, I accidentally dropped a comment for this post on the previous post. If you can, and it suits you (it may well not) please transfer it to here when you moderate this.
October 15th, 2012 | 2:42 pm
@Joseph Marshall, your comment on foreign policy wasn’t bad. Of course a lot of those considerations are important to both democrats and republicans.
Part of the truth of “how critical is it”? is that the same general issues will be given some consideration no matter who is elected president.
October 15th, 2012 | 3:19 pm
We live on different planets. Akin is now ahead of McCaskill in Missouri. After 2 disastrous debates, I think that the Republican wavelet is fast becoming a tsunami. In 22 days we’ll know.
October 15th, 2012 | 6:14 pm
I strongly suspect that, if party identities were reversed, there would be no political oxygen in the “mainstream” (liberal-leaning-but-not-explicitly-liberal) media after coverage of the initial negligence, the attempt to shift the responsibility to a private individual rather than terrorists, the attempts to blame others (State and the intelligence community) for the administration lies and misdirections. It would be wall to wall. Compare the coverage of the much less important (nobody died) firing of the US attorneys during the second Bush administration if there is any doubt. On the other hand the commercial right-leaning media would probably be saying that the coverage of the administration’s Libya missteps were just a liberal distraction from taxes, debt, whatever. The difference is that the average, late deciding, nonideological voter is more likely to get their news from the mainstream media than FOX News or talk radio.
October 16th, 2012 | 8:53 am
I would say that the most critical things about an Obama victory would be four more significant years added to the Democratic leaning demographic shifts and four more years of implementing Obamacare.
The most crucial things to watch following this election are the vote totals of non-white and women voters, the ideological response of “social conservatives” to the election, and how much attention both parties pay to the issue of control of state legislatures.
At the moment, the Republican Party has, at the state level, gerrymandered a significant difference in the amount of popular vote advantage needed to control the House–which requires Democrats to gain about 1-2% more of the overall popular House vote to control the House than without the gerrymandering. The state level is also where most of the major attempts to suppress pro-Democratic voting is taking place.
It is only these two things that are pulling against the two demographic shifts, one toward the population of non-white voters, and one toward the “non-identification” with religious belief. Both of these trends heavily favor the Democratic Party in the long term.
What keeps Republicans in control of the Statehouses is the structure of political money donations. The ideology of “untax the rich for more prosperity” (of whom?) has created a larger financial reserve of a few upscale donors to pour money into states where they don’t vote. The escape from recall of the Republican governor of Wisconsin is the paradigm of this, and was probably the most important Republican victory nationwide over the last four years.
And the most important thing on the ballot of my state of Ohio, is Issue 2, a constitutional amendment to take direct redistricting out of the hands of the State Legislature.
The insofar as all of this will continue to exacerbate the ideological fracture of the Republican Party, that is also a Democratic advantage. I think it likely to.
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