November 2012
33 posts
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Hippies Wander Into the Lions' Den, Maul Lions →
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic: “The United States of America, whose media has long been held hostage by the vendors of hair-tonic and lead alchemy, saw those self-same vendors shamed, embarrassed, and reduced to self-mockery before the world. The United States of America, a country with the vending of black people barely out of living memory, with the systemic white supremacy very much in...
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Life after defeat for Mitt Romney: Public praise,... →
Philip Rucker, Washington Post: “But Romney’s top aides, who only a couple of days ago were openly speculating about who would fill which jobs in a Romney administration, woke up Wednesday to face brutal recriminations. Some top donors privately unloaded on Romney’s senior staff, describing it as a junior varsity operation that failed to adequately insulate and defend Romney through a summer...
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A GOP that's off-track →
Michael Gerson, The Washington Post: “First: Mitt Romney was not a particularly bad candidate. He was precisely the type of broadly acceptable, business-oriented figure with which the GOP is traditionally identified. But a generic Republican could not win the presidency, even in a relatively favorable year. Second: Every one of Romney’s opponents in the Republican primaries would have done...
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The American President →
Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Beast: “The president’s oration was almost a summation of his core belief: that against the odds, human beings can actually better ourselves, morally, ethically, materially, and we can do so more powerfully together than alone, and that nowhere exemplifies that endeavor more than America. It was Lincolnian in its cadences, and in some ways, was the final,...
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Why Mitt Lost →
Jacob Weisberg, Slate: “He ran a disastrous GOP convention. He never found a way to talk about himself or his agenda in a way that middle class voters could relate to. But even a clumsy candidate might have beaten Obama if not for a simple factor that could not be overcome: the GOP’s growing extremism. The Republican strategy of making the election a referendum on the president’s handling of...
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Hope and Change: Pt. 2 →
Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times: “No one can know for sure what complex emotional chemistry tipped this election Obama’s way, but here’s my guess: In the end, it came down to a majority of Americans believing that whatever his faults, Obama was trying his hardest to fix what ails the country and that he had to do it with a Republican Party that, in its gut, did not want to meet him...
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What About Today's Election Could Prove Me Wrong? →
John Sides, The American Prospect: “One interesting question is what today’s outcome will say about the role of “fundamentals,” such as the economy, in presidential elections. Such factors are not the sole determinant of election outcomes, but they do shape whether candidates enter the race, how they campaign, and who wins. On balance, I have argued that the sum total of economic...
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Single Women are the New White Men →
Hanna Rosin, Slate: “This election cycle we finally have a decent replacement for the working-class white man. The single woman voter—especially the one up for grabs, who is more likely to have children—is basically at exactly the economic and psychological place the married, white, working-class man was in the ’70s. She tends to be working-class, the main provider for her family, and not...
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The Likely Winner →
Joseph Lelyveld, New York Review of Books: “There’s a good chance that fewer than one half of one percent of the country’s voters will determine whether Barack Obama will be able to function effectively as president if his lease on the White House is renewed in the election now finally upon us. These are the ticket-splitters in swing districts, those who after voting for Obama will somehow...
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Nov. 5: Late Poll Gains for Obama Leave Romney... →
Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight/NewYorkTimes: “Mitt Romney has always had difficulty drawing a winning Electoral College hand. Even during his best period of polling, in the week or two after the first presidential debate in Denver, he never quite pulled ahead in the polling averages in Ohio and other states that would allow him to secure 270 electoral votes. But the most recent set of polls...
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Costly, Bitter Race Goes to the Voters →
Michael Cooper, New York Times: “From makeshift voting sites in East Coast communities devastated by Hurricane Sandy to the more typical voting booths set up in school gyms, libraries and town halls across the rest of the country, people began lining up before dawn to cast their ballots — collectively writing the ending to a bitter, expensive presidential campaign in which the candidates,...
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No Matter Who Wins Today, the Electoral College... →
Timothy Noah, The New Republic: “As the Bush-Gore debacle showed, sometimes the Electoral College does more than just exaggerate the margin of victory; sometimes it changes who the victor is. In our focus-group-and-computer-driven modern democracy, in which fierce competition between the two dominant parties efficiently divides the electorate into near-perfect halves, it seems likely that...
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FAQ: Attracting Female Voters →
River Clegg, McSweeney’s: “Q: You mentioned babies. How do I attract female voters who have children? A: Good question. Were there any single mothers in the last eight generations of your family? You’ll want to talk about them, a lot. You should also publicly acknowledge how difficult and important child-rearing is, particularly if you’re trying to make it financially impossible to do...
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It's Now Public: Editors Rejigger Polls →
John Podhoretz, Commentary: “With the poll-obsessed talk of the past six months, those who raise questions about problems with them are often subjected to scorn and derision on the grounds that they are simply objecting to surveys whose results they don’t like. The objection is beside the point; who else but someone who is unhappy with a poll’s result would bother to raise the hood and look...
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Buckeye Hate →
Walter Kirn, The New Republic: “That any one state should posses such outsize power over the country’s political destiny strikes me as outrageous on its face, but that this state should be my own birthplace, the very cradle of American mediocrity and overzealous lawn ornamentation, is positively terrifying.”
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Fear and Loathing in Ohio →
Robert Stacy McCain, The American Spectator: “The statistical wizard of the New York Times has gone so far out on a limb with his prediction of an Obama victory that Silver might as well pull a Joe Namath and guarantee it. Late Saturday, he peered into his vaunted “Forecasting Model” and raised the likelihood of the president’s election to 85.1 percent, the one-tenth of a...
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Dead heat between Obama and Romney →
CNN’s political unit on their latest poll: “It’s all tied up, according to a new national poll released two days before the presidential election. And the CNN/ORC International survey not only indicates a dead heat in the race for the White House, but also on almost every major indicator of President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney that was tested in the...
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Obama Gains Edge in Campaign's Final Days →
Pew Research Center: “Barack Obama has edged ahead of Mitt Romney in the final days of the presidential campaign. In the Pew Research Center’s election weekend survey, Obama holds a 48% to 45% lead over Romney among likely voters. The survey finds that Obama maintains his modest lead when the probable decisions of undecided voters are taken into account.”
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Don't Blame Mitt Romney →
Zeke Miller, BuzzFeed: “With just over 48 hours until polls close, many Republicans are concluding that they have done the best they could have done to win the 2012 presidential election. Mitt Romney has been, in the home stretch, the best Mitt Romney he could be, and as good a general election candidate as the party has fielded at least since George W. Bush’s first campaign.”
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Lessons learned from 2012 →
Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, Politico: “The 2012 election will be remembered by history for its smallness in a big, historic moment: The high drama of the first debate was a rare respite from months of petty rhetoric, egged on from start to finish by gobs of money from millionaires and billionaires. But for top leaders and strategists in both parties, the race has yielded immediate, tangible...
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Why Do White People Think Mitt Romney Should Be... →
Tom Scocca, Slate: “White people don’t like to believe that they practice identity politics. The defining part of being white in America is the assumption that, as a white person, you are a regular, individual human being. Other demographic groups set themselves apart, to pursue their distinctive identities and interests and agendas. Whiteness, to white people, is the American...
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Liberals Worry, "What if we win?" →
Timothy Noah, The New Republic: “In the final days of a presidential campaign that Barack Obama stands an excellent chance of winning, liberals are imagining all the terrible things that will happen if he does. “Liberals Fear Grand Bargain Betrayal If Obama Wins”; Carrie Budoff Brown writes in Politico. “GOP Already Working To De-Legitimize An Obama Win”; frets...
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Romney closes big: 'Love of Country' vs 'Revenge' →
Byron York, Washington Examiner: “Obama’s “revenge” remark was valuable to Romney not because it could be turned into an attack ad. “Revenge” was valuable because it underscored, a thousand times, Romney’s new emphasis on the bigness of his own campaign versus the smallness of Obama’s. Romney’s closing argument is filled with words and phrases that convey a largeness of vision: destiny,...
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Dispatch Poll: Ohio's a toss-up →
Darrel Rowland, The Columbus Dispatch: “The “Ohio firewall” precariously stands for President Barack Obama, but a strong Republican turnout could enable Mitt Romney to tear it down on Election Day. The final Dispatch Poll shows Obama leading 50 percent to 48 percent in the Buckeye State. However, that 2-point edge is within the survey’s margin of sampling error, plus or minus 2.2 percentage...
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America's Leftward Tilt? →
Drew Westen, New York Times: “The obvious story line of this election, whoever wins, is that Americans want pragmatic solutions to the relentless distress they have experienced for over a decade, whether that means a more active or a more passive government. They are looking for anyone who can provide a coherent vision of how to fix an economy that is not working for people who work for a...
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The likely winner -- gridlock →
Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times: “After a year of campaign sound and fury, we’re about to hold an election that will probably fail to usher in the one thing voters of all stripes would like to see: an end to the partisan gridlock in Congress. Neither President Obama nor Mitt Romney appears likely to win the kind of landslide victory that provides a mandate for big change. And whoever...
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Mitt Romney's election campaign insults voters →
The editorial board of the Washington Post: “How, other than an assumption that voters are too dim to remember what Mr. Romney has said across the years and months, to account for his breathtaking ideological shifts? He was a friend of immigrants, then a scourge of immigrants, then again a friend. He was a Kissingerian foreign policy realist, then a McCain-like hawk, then a purveyor of...
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For Romney to Win, State Polls Must Be... →
Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight/New York Times: “Although the fact that Mr. Obama held the lead in so many polls is partly coincidental — there weren’t any polls of North Carolina on Friday, for instance, which is Mr. Romney’s strongest battleground state — they nevertheless represent powerful evidence against the idea that the race is a “tossup.” A tossup race isn’t likely to produce 19 leads...
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Christie was Mitt's first choice for VP →
Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, Politico: “One of the most tantalizing subplots of the 2012 campaign has been the curious and sometimes controversial performances of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Now, campaign insiders tell POLITICO that Christie was Mitt Romney’s first choice for the Republican ticket, lending an intriguing new context to the continuing drama around the Garden State...
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Romney: Elect Me or House GOP Will Wreck The... →
Benjy Sarlin, TalkingPointsMemo: “In what his campaign billed as his “closing argument,” Mitt Romney warned Americans that a second term for President Obama would have apocalyptic consequences for the economy in part because his own party would force a debt ceiling disaster. “Unless we change course, we may well be looking at another recession,” Romney told a crowd in West Allis,...
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The choice →
Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post: “An Obama second term means that the movement toward European-style social democracy continues, in part by legislation, in part by executive decree. The American experiment — the more individualistic, energetic, innovative, risk-taking model of democratic governance — continues to recede, yielding to the supervised life of the entitlement state. If Obama...
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A Vote for a President to Lead on Climate Change →
Michael R. Bloomberg, BloombergView: “We need leadership from the White House — and over the past four years, President Barack Obama has taken major steps to reduce our carbon consumption, including setting higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks. His administration also has adopted tighter controls on mercury emissions, which will help to close the dirtiest coal power...
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The Case for Obama: Why He Is a Great President.... →
Jonathan Chait, New York: “I can understand why somebody who never shared Obama’s goals would vote against his reelection. If you think the tax code already punishes the rich too heavily, that it’s not government’s role to subsidize health insurance for those who can’t obtain it, that the military shouldn’t have to let gays serve openly, and so on, then Obama’s presidency has been a...
October 2012
68 posts
1 tag
Some things to watch in the final days →
Dan Balz, Washington Post: “It is easy to get confused in the final week of a presidential campaign, and we are at that point in Campaign 2012. There are conflicting polls in battleground states, unexpected moves by the campaigns into new states, widely varying assessments from the partisans in both parties and persistent spinning by the candidates’ advisers. There are also certain realities...
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Why I'm voting to re-elect President Obama →
Charles P. Peirce, Esquire: “It is not fear. It is simple, compelling logic. We have two major political parties. Until that great gettin’-up morning, when purists on both sides of the ideological ditch manage to create workable third parties that look like something more substantial than organized unicorn hunts — which won’t happen until we have proportional voting, and I wish...
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The Undecided Voter Revealed →
John Dickerson, Slate: “For these undecided voters, this election is a referendum on Romney. They’ve mostly already made up their mind about the incumbent. They don’t dislike President Obama, but they think he is either incapable of improving the economy or locked into a do-nothing phase with Congress. “I voted for Obama in 2008, much to the surprise of my family and some of my...
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So what does Romney do now? →
Steve Kornacki, Salon: “It will take days to catalog the full destruction from Hurricane Sandy and to calculate the clean-up cost, and the storm figures to dominate the news for the immediate future. Figuring out how this might impact the presidential race is a guessing game. There’s no precedent for a catastrophic weather event like this coming just days before such a close national...
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Gov. Christie praises Obama's response to... →
Meghashyam Mali, The Hill: “New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) praised President Obama’s work to help states battered by Hurricane Sandy as “outstanding” Tuesday, but cautioned that the recovery would be a prolonged effort. Christie, a prominent surrogate for GOP candidate Mitt Romney, said Obama had moved quickly to help designate his state a disaster area to better expedite federal...
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Sandy Teaches a Lesson →
Eugene Robinson, RealClearPolitics/Washington Post: “Back when he was being “severely conservative,” Mitt Romney suggested that responsibility for disaster relief should be taken from the big, bad federal government and given to the states, or perhaps even privatized. Hurricane Sandy would like to know if he’d care to reconsider. The absurd — and dangerous —...
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A Big Storm Requires Big Government →
The editors of the New York Times: “FEMA, created by President Jimmy Carter, was elevated to cabinet rank in the Bill Clinton administration, but was then demoted by President George W. Bush, who neglected it, subsumed it into the Department of Homeland Security, and placed it in the control of political hacks. The disaster of Hurricane Katrina was just waiting to happen. The agency was put...
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Obama Does It Better →
Sasha Issenberg, Slate: “All targeting carries the risk of missing the mark, and there are regularly voters whose actual attitudes defy the predictions of statistical models. But regular misfires by Republicans—which at best only waste resources and at worst mobilize Democrats who might not have voted otherwise, or provoke a backlash among those still persuadable—illustrate a gap between how...
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Nate Silver, Artist of Uncertainty →
Samuel Popkin, The American Prospect: “We’re heading into the last week of a tight presidential campaign, and polls are coming in too fast to count. Partisans everywhere are desperate for omens. But at moments like these, it’s people who care most intensely that the “right outcome” occur who run a high risk of getting it wrong—picking out positive polls for comfort, or panicking over an...
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Presidential Race Dead Even; Romney Maintains... →
The latest polling from the Pew Research Center: “As the presidential campaign enters its final week, Barack Obama has failed to regain much of the support he lost in the days following the first presidential debate and the race is now even among likely voters: 47% favor Obama while an identical percentage supports Mitt Romney.”
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How to Measure for a President →
John Dickerson, Slate: “So here’s a thought: What if we approached presidential campaigns the way a large corporation approaches its search for a new chief executive? The purpose of the campaign would be to test for the skills and attributes actually required for the job. Companies such as McDonald’s and Target do this even at the junior levels. Applicants are asked questions like...
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Obama's independent problem →
Chris Cillizza, Washington Post: “That’s a striking reversal from 2008, when Obama won independent voters, who made up 29 percent of the electorate, by eight points over Sen. John McCain of Arizona. And if Romney’s large margin among independents holds, it will be a break not just from 2008 but also from 2000 and 2004. In 2000, Texas Gov. George W. Bush won independents by 47 percent to 45...
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In Middle of a Messy Election, a Nightmare Makes... →
Peter Baker, New York Times: “Despite the meticulous planning, careful strategies, polling, advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts, the election could produce the sort of messy outcome that defies expectation and prognostication. Polls show such a tight race between President Obama and Mitt Romney heading into this final week that the two sides are playing out any number of wild...
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Obama's Blunder Was in Ceding Political Center to... →
Clive Crook, Bloomberg View: “In the last debate, focused mainly on foreign policy, [Romney] moved further toward moderation. He struck a conciliatory tone and found little in what Obama said to disagree with, making the encounter in one sense a nonevent. He was cautious to a fault, careful to avoid seeming recklessly hawkish, allaying concerns that under his leadership the U.S. might...
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The President's Ridiculous Pamphlet →
The editors, National Review Online: “Apparently, Obama’s second term is to be a more or less precise repeat of his first term. In fact, the sixth item on his seven-point list merely touts Obamacare, which, if memory serves, already has been passed. He also wants to add six-figure numbers to the headcounts of the public-sector unions that finance and staff his campaign. And build batteries....
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The Politics of the Middle Class →
Jean MacKenzie, GlobalPost: “The middle class designation is largely “self-described” and the vast majority of Americans place themselves firmly within its ranks, regardless of income. Few would accept being called “lower class,” and only the very rich are willing to label themselves as such. This is what makes the mythical middle class so attractive a target for political candidates,...
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America, finally home? →
George Will, Washington Post: “The death of George McGovern on the eve of the presidential candidates’ foreign policy debate underscored a momentous political reversal spanning four decades. McGovern’s nomination for president in 1972, a consequence of the Democratic Party’s recoil against the Vietnam War and the riotous convention four years earlier, made the country uneasy about his party...
