W(h)ither the Republicans?

Aron Nimzowitch, the greatest chess master of his era, once ungraciously berated himself: “That I should lose to this idiot!”

I’m guessing that’s how Republicans felt Wednesday morning. They’ve never respected Barack Obama, and many never admitted that he’s really president. To them, he’s a Kenyan usurper, a vacuous celebrity, the “affirmative action president” for whom whites voted just “to prove that they weren’t racists“, a puppet reading from a teleprompter, the “food stamp president“, a “racist” who “has a deep-seated hatred for white people”, and an “anti-American leftist” who needs to “learn how to be an American” because was mentored by Communists and had been “palling around with terrorists” most of his life.

As for Obama’s policies since usurping the presidency, conservatives were convinced (falsely) that the stimulus was an enormous waste of money. ObamaCare is a “government takeover” that will soon put “death panels” in charge of grandma’s treatment plan. Obama raised taxes and spent wildly, but slashed defense. He threw Israel under the bus, and let Iran get “four years closer to a bomb“. (Picture how imminent the Iranian bomb must be: Hawks like Michael Eisenstadt were telling us in 2005 that “within a few years at most, Iran will be a de facto nuclear weapons state”. Those “few years” had passed already when Obama took office. And now the Iranian bomb is even four years closer than that.)

Now Republicans are supposed to accept that the un-American socialist failure just kicked their butts. And you know who else did? Girls. Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin, Heidi Heitkamp, and Mazie Hirono didn’t just keep the Senate Democratic, they increased Harry Reid’s majority.

The bubble popped. The Right totally didn’t see it coming. All year and right up to the end, Dick Morris had been assuring them that a Romney landslide was brewing. The polls said otherwise, but pollsters belonged to the lamestream media that was in the bag for Obama, like that “effeminate” Nate Silver. If you used the internal data to “unskew” the Democratic sampling bias, then the polls also predicted a Romney landslide! With a week to go, Newt Gingrich foresaw more than 300 electoral votes for Romney, plus a Republican Senate. The Romney campaign claimed it could take Pennsylvania! George Will saw them capturing Minnesota!

Even Mitt Romney believed it.

I’m belaboring this point for a reason: Sure, we liberals had our own how-could-they-re-elect-that-guy moment in 2004. But most of us had been dreading that outcome for a long time. Even in 2008, when all the signs pointed in our favor, we kept looking up to see if the sky had started falling yet.

Conservatives aren’t like that. They believe (and constantly tell each other) that they are the majority. They are the People. They are the real Americans. In 2008, some kind of affirmative-action Hollywood smoke-and-mirrors made Obama president (if he really is president), but by 2012 America had seen the horrible consequences of his Marxist ideas, and they were ready for a real alpha male like Mitt Romney and his iron-pumping VP.

That fantasy world came crashing down Tuesday night in just a few hours. They lost the White House and the Senate. They lost congressional heroes like Alan West. Joe Walsh got whipped by a girl with no legs. (Check that: an Army helicopter pilot with no legs.) Michele Bachmann barely escaped. Gay marriage won in four states. Marijuana in two.

Not just a bad day. Worse, Republicans lost for an obvious reason that’s only going to get worse: demographics. Only 72% of the electorate was white this year — compared to 74% in 2008 and 77% in 2004. If you lose 93% of blacks, 72% of Hispanics, and 73% of Asians, even 59% of the white vote won’t save you any more.

Only 78% of voters are Protestant or Catholic, and that number is also going down. If you lose 70% of everybody else, that’s a big hill to climb.

If you depend so totally on white Christians, and if they’re less than 60% of the electorate, then you can’t afford to write off any subgroup of them, like single women (67% for Obama altogether — some of them had to be white Christians) or the young (60% of the under-30 vote) or low-to-middling-income workers (60% of those making under $50K).

Ruy Teixeira saw this coming ten years ago. Jon Chait said this was the watershed year in his February article “2012 or Never“:

The modern GOP—the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes—is staring down its own demographic extinction. Right-wing warnings of impending tyranny express, in hyperbolic form, well-grounded dread: that conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests.

Republican responses. Several people have observed the resemblance between Republican responses and the Kubler-Ross stages of grief. To me it has sounded more like stuff I remember from the playground.

They cheated. Thank God no major voice in the Republican Party is pushing this line, but it shows up often in comment threads: Nate Silver predicted the election so well because he must have figured in the Democratic vote fraud. There’s zero evidence for this, especially compared to the unmistakeable Republican voter-suppression effort, but no matter.

Fox News’ line has been similar, but less extreme: Obama was mean; he ran a negative campaign. (Ignore the fact that Romney’s campaign was more negative and lied constantly.)

Or the media cheated: The fact-checkers were biased when they correctly reported that Romney was lying about Jeep moving American jobs to China or Obama gutting the welfare work requirement. The “liberal” media wouldn’t help Republicans spin “you didn’t build that” into a gaffe, but they did cover Romney’s 47% tape as the disaster it very definitely was.

Yes, the mainstream media presented a different world than the conservative media. That’s because the conservative media was delusional, as Tuesday demonstrated.

It was luck. Both Haley Barbour and Karl Rove blamed Hurricane Sandy. A related theory is that Chris Christie pulled a dolchstoss, stabbing Romney in the back by embracing Obama after the storm.

But how did Sandy help Democrats win senate races in hurricane-free Montana and North Dakota? And what about the gay marriage initiatives? Seriously, did Maryland voters see Christie embrace Obama and think, “They should get married”? Is that what happened?

It doesn’t count. At least it doesn’t count against conservatism, because Romney wasn’t a true conservative.

Yeah, like Rick Santorum or Herman Cain would have done better. Exit polls say 35% of the electorate calls itself conservative, compared to 25% liberal. But moderates preferred Obama 56%-41%. How many moderates would have voted for Michele Bachmann?

On election night, conservatives argued that Romney’s moderation hurt their turnout, and claimed that Romney got 3 million fewer votes than McCain did in 2008. However, that argument is fading as the absentee ballots and other late reports get tabulated. As of this morning, the McCain-Romney gap was down to 1 million and will probably go away completely in the final totals.

Romney tacked to the center in October because he was losing as a conservative. True conservatives lost senate seats in red states like Missouri and Indiana, and got soundly thwacked in swing states like Ohio and Florida. Obama would have beaten a true conservative in a landslide, but Romney’s “tax cut? what tax cut?” act in the first debate made things competitive for a while.

It’s not fair. Non-whites shouldn’t have voted against Republicans, because Republicans have trophy non-whites. Listen to Rush Limbaugh:

Why doesn’t the Republican Party get credit for Condoleezza Rice? Why doesn’t the Republican Party get credit for Marco Rubio? Why doesn’t the Republican Party get credit for Suzanne Martinez? … The Allen Wests … Clarence Thomas. Herman Cain. None of it counts.

Even Republicans who notice the demographics still misdiagnose the problem as identity politics. But Marco Rubio won’t get them the Hispanic vote any more than Sarah Palin or Linda McMahon or Carly Fiorina captured the women’s vote. The problem is policy. As one Hispanic activist put it: “The face of who delivers bad news does not change bad news.”

Rush sort of gets this, but he doesn’t like it:

But what are we supposed to do now?  In order to get the Hispanic or Latino vote, does that mean open the borders and embrace the illegals? … If we’re not getting the female vote, do we become pro-choice?  Do we start passing out birth control pills? Is that what we have to do?

Here’s a start: The next Republican nominee needs to tell Rush to go to Hell when he calls Sandra Fluke a “slut” or says Cubans aren’t like other Hispanics because “they’re oriented toward work“. As long as the Party tolerates racism and sexism, it’s going to have trouble with non-whites and women, no matter who’s on the podium.

Your loss, America. Listen to Ann Coulter:

If Mitt Romney cannot win in this economy, then the tipping point has been reached. We have more takers than makers, and it’s over. … [America is] no longer interested in conservative ideas. It’s interested in handouts.

The “tipping point” — when lazy people who want government handouts become the majority — is something conservatives have been talking about for a long time. And how did we get there? Bill O’Reilly explained.

It’s a changing country, the demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore, and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama. … The white establishment is now the minority.

So: Democracy has failed in America because we’ve let in too many lazy brown people and let the lazy black people reproduce faster than the hard-working white people. Maybe that message will sound more inclusive when Marco Rubio or Bobby Jindal says it, but the Economist’s Lexington column thinks it’s a problem:

Put simply, it is hard for a party to win national elections in a country that it seems to dislike.

I’m going home now. Citizens of 15 states have posted online petitions calling for their states to secede.

You wanna fight me? I’ll fight you. Watch this video from Heritage Action.

I know, they appear to mean “We are in a war to save this nation” and “We will take the fight for freedom to the halls of Congress” and “This is the last stand on Earth” metaphorically. But not everybody in their audience will see it that way.

What’s a sensible response? When defeated, we all fantasize vindication and revenge. But you can’t let yourself carry out the ideas you generate just to make yourself feel better. Eventually you need to look objectively at why you lost and what you can do about it.

I agree with Charles Krauthammer and Rush Limbaugh this far: The problem is not conservatism per se. America needs a sound conservative party.

One of the major parties should be skeptical of government, and should look for market-based and private-sector ways to solve problems. Much of Obama’s “socialist” agenda originated with the kind of problem-solving conservatives used to do: Cap-and-trade was a conservative idea for controlling pollution through markets. ObamaCare came from RomneyCare, a conservative plan for achieving universal coverage without nationalizing the insurance companies. Whether you like those ideas or not, they (and more like them) should be part of the discussion.

But America doesn’t need an arrogant delusional conservative party.

When the new Tea Party congressmen took office in 2011, they had a mandate to push for spending cuts, but not to take the United States to the edge of bankruptcy, as they did in the debt-ceiling fiasco. Religious-right politicians may get a mandate to make abortion laws stricter, but not to humiliate abortion-seeking women, or force raped women to carry their rapists’ children.

Conservatives need to recognize that they are only about 1/3 of the country. To stay in office, they need to please someone other than themselves — to compromise, in other words. That requires a humility that at the moment seems alien to them. But if they force a series of absolutist us-against-them decisions on the voters, they will keep losing.

Conservatives need to grapple with the real problems of America, and stop shadow-boxing with imaginary problems. Fifty million Americans without health insurance is a real problem. Income inequality is a real problem. So are global warming, gun violence, and an election system where people have to wait five hours to vote. Feel free to start offering market-based, private-sector solutions at any time.

But voter fraud is not a real problem. Sharia law is not a real problem. Obama’s birth certificate is not a real problem. See the difference?

Come back to reality: Tax cuts do not increase revenue. Spending cuts don’t create jobs. Rape causes pregnancy. People die for lack of health insurance. Foreigners don’t want us to bomb or invade them. There’s no reasonable way to deport 12 million Hispanics.

Stop pretending otherwise.

Be as conservative as you want. But face reality, offer solutions, and give a little to get a little.

Don’t go back into the bubble. It may not feel like it now, but the American people did conservatives a favor last Tuesday.  For just a few hours the bubble popped, and it became painfully clear that the conservative media had been lying to its viewers and readers about the election.

What else have they been lying about?

Here’s my best, most honest advice to conservatives: Go cold turkey on propaganda. It kills the pain temporarily, but in the long run it makes your problems worse. Fox News, the Weekly Standard, talk radio, the Washington Times — they haven’t been serving you, they’ve been pandering to you and taking you for a ride.

America needs a conservative party. But it needs a conservative party that faces reality.

November 12, 2012 – 7:38 am Categories: Articles | Comments (13)

Tagged , |

The Monday Morning Teaser

No surprise, this week’s Sift focuses on the election aftermath, and in particular where the Republicans go now.

They’ve lost the popular vote in five out of six presidential election now, and seem to have alienated Hispanics as a voting bloc. (Asians too — which gets much less attention and points to a larger problem than just immigration policy.) White identity politics motivates the base, but the price may be too high. Evangelicals demand purity on gay rights and abortion, but those positions push away young voters.

So this week’s main article “W(h)ither the Republicans?” examines their reactions to a sweeping loss and gives my own suggestion: Keep a small-government, private-sector approach to problems, but come back to reality. Start proposing solutions to real problems like climate change, rather than imaginary ones like voter fraud or Sharia law. And recognize that conservatives are only 1/3 of the electorate, so you need to compromise.

The second article “Why Didn’t Money Talk?” discusses why the doomsday predictions many of us made after Citizens United didn’t pan out. The money showed up, but the results didn’t. Why not?

I’m trying to get both out before noon.

November 12, 2012 – 7:02 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Tomorrow Night

Everyone’s a libertarian until their state is under 10 feet of water.

— Top Conservative Cat

This week everyone was talking about the weather, but no one was doing anything about it

Maybe Hurricane Sandy will finally blow all the climate-change deniers to Crankland, and we can start talking seriously about what to do. In this election, Democrats found the courage to talk about abortion, but climate change has still been off the agenda.

It’s one of those focus-group feedback loops: If neither party pushes an issue, the public either loses interest in it or thinks that nothing can be done. Then focus groups don’t react to it, so candidates are afraid to mention it. But nobody knows whether the issue would catch fire if somebody fanned it.

This never happens to conservatives. There’s always one billionaire or corporation ready to push an issue even if the voters seem not to care.

Remember how the Republican Convention laughed when Mitt Romney reminded them that Obama wanted to do something about rising oceans? That’s just hilarious now if you’re from Atlantic City or Staten Island.

And we’ve all been fixated on tomorrow’s election

Up until now, I’ve been trying (sometimes unsuccessfully) to focus on issues and themes, and to avoid letting the pure horserace aspect of the election overwhelm its content. The mainstream media already offers way too much coverage like: “Scores of people are dead in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. How do you think this affects President Obama’s chances?”

But the election is tomorrow. You can’t ignore it any more than you can avert your eyes from the boxes under the tree on Christmas Eve. Are we going to get that cool RC helicopter, lumps of coal, or a very practical package of socks?

I did so well forecasting the 2008 election that I ought to quit while I’m ahead. I had three advantages then: I was one of the early people to realize how good Nate Silver is at analyzing polls, the message Nate divined from the polls was clear, and I discounted my fear that whites might make a voting-booth decision to screw the black guy. So when the Pacific-coast states put Obama over the top at precisely 11 p.m. eastern time, I looked like Nostradamus.

This year everybody reads Nate in the NYT and the message of the polls is far less clear. Last time, the states that teetered on the knife-edge were long-time red states like Indiana and North Carolina, which only affected the magnitude of the Obama landslide.

This year, the polls say Obama kinda-sorta. If Romney wins, well, stranger things have happened. Ditto for Congress: Probably Democrats keep the Senate and Republicans keep the House, but neither is a sure thing. As for when we can go to bed tomorrow night, who knows? I’m guessing it’s not going to cliff-hang on one too-close-to-call state, which probably means it’ll be decided by, say, midnight.

As in 2008, I’m splitting my election-night predictions into two parts: the result (for the Senate as well as the presidency), and how it’s going to play out hour-by-hour as the night rolls on.

… and you might also find this interesting

In addition to the races for office, there are also some important ballot initiatives. Same-sex marriage is on the ballot in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington. In Maryland and Washington, the legislature has already approved same-sex marriage, but the initiative would veto the law before it takes effect. A similar veto-initiative passed in Maine in 2009, and this vote would reverse that one. The Minnesota proposal would codify opposite-sex-only marriage in the constitution.

Polls are close, but generally favor same-sex marriage — which has never won at the ballot-box before. Recent polls have same-sex marriage proposals ahead 52%-42% in Washington, 57%-36% in Maine, and 52%-43% in Maryland. The Minnesota constitutional amendment is too close to call.

Ballot proposals in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington would legalize recreational marijuana use. That gives a whole new meaning to “high turnout”.

The amazing Rick Perlstein (of Nixonland fame) describes a little-explored region: The relationship between the content of conservative publications and the ads that sustain them. Liberals often refer to right-wing liars as “snake-oil salemen”. But the goldbugs and multi-level marketers and direct-mail advertisers that prey on the conservative rank-and-file are real snake-oil salesmen.

the con selling 23-cent miracle cures for heart disease inches inexorably into the one selling miniscule marginal tax rates as the miracle cure for the nation itself

Have trouble believing that tax cuts create jobs? Well, the Congressional Research Service doesn’t believe it either. So Republicans pressured them to withdraw their report.

Some parodies are so good that they ought to be true. Here, Brad Hicks explains that Atlas Shrugged is just the first volume in a trilogy that would have ended with Anthem, if Ayn had just gotten around to writing the middle volume.

If you vote for Obama, Mike Huckabee says you won’t get to spend eternity where he’s going. You know, I might agree with that.

There’s got to be a Romney: The Musical coming.

November 5, 2012 – 1:33 pm Categories: Short Notes, Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

Election Night Hour By Hour

Election night in a presidential year is the greatest show politics offers. Countless characters have been spinning their individual stories for months or even years, and now all their separate yarns meet here to end in victory or defeat.

Even if you think your candidate is going to win, you worry like a fan watching the football arc downfield towards a wide-open receiver in the end zone. Just yesterday, you overheard strangers having the most bizarre conversation about the election, full of misinformation and craziness. Your aunt thinks like that, but you believed she was the only one. What if people everywhere are changing their minds in some insane way, at the last minute, too late for the polls to pick up?

Information comes in little by little through the evening, as each state closes its polls and then the precincts report whenever they get done counting. I’ve already given you my best guesses about how the presidency and the Senate are going to go, and it makes no difference if you spend Tuesday night at the movies and then pull the bedcovers over your head until it’s all decided Wednesday morning. But that’s like skipping to the last page of a suspense novel. How is it going to play out?

Before the polls close. The most accurate polls are exit polls, put together by interviewing folks right after they vote. Exit pollsters don’t have to make guesses about who’s going to vote, there are no undecideds, and intensity no longer matters. They voted, and a vote is a vote.

Exit poll results start coming in around noon, but news organizations have pledged not to release them until poll-closing time. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t get some information out of them.

First, turnout. There’s no embargo against reporting turnout, and a big vote is good for the Democrats — especially big turnout of non-white voters, who often are more erratic in their voting habits. (That’s why Republicans have tried so hard to make voting difficult in swing states like Florida and Ohio.) The two big demographic questions in the election are whether blacks are as motivated to vote for Obama as they were in 2008, and whether the Hispanic vote is going to keep increasing.

All day, reporters will be saying whether turnout is light or heavy and maybe a little about who’s voting. Those are your first clues about what kind of night it will be.

Second, maybe the TV talking heads can’t tell you the exit poll results, but they’ve seen them, and they’re not obliged to make fools of themselves. So if conservative or liberal pundits start laying the groundwork for the what-went-wrong spin they’ll want to elaborate later, you can guess they know something.

7 p.m. The first real results come in, as polls close in Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, Vermont,  and Virginia. Obama is immediately projected as the winner in Vermont (3), and Romney quickly grabs Georgia (16), Indiana (11), Kentucky (8), and South Carolina (9).

But Virginia is the one to watch, because it’s Obama’s first chance at a knock-out punch. Romney can’t win without Virginia, and polling guru Nate Silver gives Obama a 73% chance of taking it. Mostly likely, Virginia won’t be called for a few hours, but if it is called for Romney quickly, that’s a very good sign for him.

Also watch for more detailed information about the turnout in these states and the race/gender composition of the electorate. Exit polls of Indiana in particular will assess what price Richard Mourdock paid for his outrageous statements about rape. That could signal whether the Democratic war-on-women message is working nationally.

Other than Indiana’s Donnelly/Mourdock Senate race, also watch Kaine/Allen in Virginia, which is supposed to be close, but Nate Silver expects Kaine to win. Sanders should win easily in Vermont.

Likely running total: Romney 44, Obama 3 with Virginia still out. This is a pattern that will continue for several hours: Obama is counting on west-coast states like California to put him over the top, so his electoral vote totals will run behind Romney’s most of the night even if he’s doing well. For example, Obama has essentially won already if Virginia gets called for him, but at this point he’d still be behind 44-16.

7:30. Polls close in North Carolina (15), Ohio (18), and West Virginia (5). Romney takes West Virginia. North Carolina is another possible Obama knock-out punch, but probably it’s a bridge too far. Ohio is the state everything hangs on, so I’d be amazed if it were called early.

The Senate races in Ohio and West Virginia should go to the Democrats, probably fairly quickly

Running total: Romney 49, Obama 3 with Virginia, North Carolina, and Ohio still out.

8:00. Major results start coming in. (You might even want to save yourself some aggravation by eating dinner peacefully and not turning on the TV until 8.) Alabama (9), Connecticut (7), Delaware (3), District of Columbia (3), Florida (29), Illinois (20), Maine (4), Maryland (10), Massachusetts (11), Mississippi (6), Missouri (10), New Hampshire (4), New Jersey (14), Oklahoma (7), Pennsylvania (20), Rhode Island (4), and Tennessee (11) start reporting results.

Easy wins for Romney in Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, and for Obama in Connecticut, Delaware, D.C., Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.

Pennsylvania is Romney’s first shot at a knock-out; it’s hard to see Obama winning without it. But probably Obama carries it in another hour. New Jersey might have some vote-counting delays due to the storm. New Hampshire and Florida are honest-to-God toss-ups that should take a while to call. Florida is another potential knock-out; Romney can’t win without it.

The first clear sign of a good night for the Democrats in the Senate will come when Warren beats Brown in Massachusetts. It will take a little longer for Murphy to beat McMahon in Connecticut, but that will happen too.

Running total: Romney 92, Obama 82 with Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania out.

8:30. Arkansas (6) goes to Romney. 98-79.

9:00. Another big moment. First results from Arizona (11), Colorado (9), Louisiana (8), Michigan (16), Minnesota (10), Nebraska (5), New Mexico (5), New York (29), South Dakota (3), Texas (38), Wisconsin (10), and Wyoming (3).

Romney quickly takes Arizona, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. Obama gets Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, and New York.

Also, Pennsylvania comes in for Obama and North Carolina for Romney. It might also be time to call Virginia or New Hampshire, probably for Obama, but I’m not counting on them.

The interesting Senate race is Baldwin/Thompson in Wisconsin. Democrats want to believe that Kerry in Nebraska and Carmona in Arizona have a chance, but they really don’t.

Running total: Romney 181, Obama 159. Ohio, Florida, Colorado, and Wisconsin out. New Hampshire and Virginia in, but unpredictable.

10:00. New results in Iowa (6), Kansas (6), Montana (3), Nevada (6), and Utah (6). Of all Romney’s home states, Utah is the only one that likes him. He also picks up Kansas and Montana.

Between 10 and 11 is when it will become clear that the Obama firewall is holding. Ohio will turn blue, and they’ll call Nevada and Wisconsin by the end of the hour. Florida might come in, but who knows?

The Montana Senate race is a real cliff-hanger.

Running total: Romney 196, Obama 193. Florida, Colorado, and Iowa out. New Hampshire and Virginia in, but unpredictable.

11:00. California (55), Hawaii (4), Idaho (4), North Dakota (3), Oregon (7), and Washington (12) are all called immediately. Obama takes all of them but Idaho and North Dakota. Iowa also comes in for Obama. Florida is definitely in, but I can’t predict for who.

Running total: Obama 277, Romney 203. New Hampshire, Virginia, Florida in but unpredictable. Colorado still out. Obama is over the top.

1:00. Alaska (3) goes for Romney and they call Colorado, but no one cares. Obama 277, Romney 206. Unpredictable: 55.

So Obama wins by midnight.

November 5, 2012 – 12:19 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (12)

Tagged |

Who Wins the Senate?

The presidential race isn’t the only thing happening tomorrow. We’re also electing 33 senators and the entire House of Representatives. Conventional wisdom says that the Democrats might gain a few seats in the House, but not enough to win a majority. I don’t have anything to add to that; 435 races are too many for me to get a handle on.

The Senate is another story. There are only 100 senators, and we only elect 1/3 of them at a time. This year 67 senators are not up for election — 30 Democrats and 37 Republicans.

Sure wins. Some of those 33 races aren’t very competitive. Nate Silver’s polling aggregation model gives a better than 95% chance of victory to 13 Democrats (Hirono in Hawaii, Cantwell in Washington, Feinstein in California, Klobuchar in Minnesota, Stabenow in Michigan, Brown in Ohio, Casey in Pennsylvania, Gillibrand in New York, Whitehouse in Rhode Island, Menendez in New Jersey, Cardin in Maryland, Carper in Delaware, and Nelson in Florida), 6 Republicans (Hatch in Utah, Barrasso in Wyoming, Fischer in Nebraska, Cruz in Texas, Wicker in Mississippi, and Corker in Tennessee), and 1 independent (Sanders in Vermont).

Sanders caucuses with the Democrats, so if all those races turn out as expected we’re up to 44 Democrats and 43 Republicans.

Now let’s do the same thing we did in the electoral college analysis and put the remaining 13 races in order, starting with the one that has the greatest likelihood of a Democratic win, and ending with the least likely Democratic win.

93.6% Warren/Brown in Massachusetts

93.0% Heinrich/Wilson in New Mexico

92.2% King/Dill/Summers (King is an independent expect to caucus with the Democrats)

92.2% Murphy/McMahon in Connecticut

89.7% Manchin/Raese in West Virginia

88.3% McCaskill/Akin in Missouri

85.0% Kaine/Allen in Virginia

77.2% Baldwin/Thompson in Wisconsin

67.7% Donnelly/Mourdock in Indiana

31% Tester/Rehberg in Montana

23.% Berkley/Heller in Nevada

19.6% Cremona/Flake in Arizona

10.5% Heitkamp/Berg in North Dakota

If you assume all the favorites win, that gives the Democrat a 53-47 advantage, the same as they have now. If President Obama is re-elected, the Democrats will need only 50 votes to control the Senate (because the vice president casts the tie-breaking vote). So they will hold the majority even if they only win the top six races on this list.

November 5, 2012 – 11:05 am Categories: Articles | Comments (2)

Tagged |

Obama or Romney: Who Wins Tomorrow?

Four years ago, the polls were clear, and the only question was whether a last gasp of racism would change voters’ minds in the booth. This year it’s all a lot less clear, but we can still see the general shape of how the election will play out.

Let’s start with the basics: The presidential election happens state-by-state. Each state has a certain number of electoral votes (equal to the number of its congressmen plus two for its senators). So in general, more populous states count for more, but the less populous states’ votes are still disproportionate to their population. Every state, no matter how small, gets at least 3 votes. The District of Columbia also gets 3 votes.

The total number of electoral votes is 538, which means a candidate needs 270 to get a majority (or two candidates could tie at 269-269). Almost every state awards its electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis, to the candidate who gets the most votes in that state. (Maine and Nebraska are exceptions, but probably that won’t come up this year and both states will end up giving all their votes to one candidate.)

The analysis I’m giving below is largely based on the work of NYT blogger Nate Silver, a polling geek who has a method for combining all the polls into a probability-of-victory percentage for each state. You don’t need to understand how the model works to recognize that Nate is good at this. In 2008, his predictions were uncanny. (The percentages below come from the early Monday morning run of Nate’s model.)

The fuhgeddabowdit states. In most states, the election won’t be close, and we might as well chalk them up now. Nate’s model gives at least a 99.5% chance that the following states will go to a particular candidate. Probably most of them will be called as soon as the polls close.

Obama: California (55), Connecticut (7), Delaware (3), D.C. (3), Hawaii (4), Illinois (20), Maine (3 out of 4), Maryland (10), Massachusetts (11), Minnesota (10), New Jersey (14), New York (29), Rhode Island (4), Vermont (3), Washington (12) — total 188

Romney: Alabama (9), Alaska (3), Arkansas (6), Georgia (16), Idaho (4), Indiana (11), Kansas (6), Kentucky (8), Louisiana (8), Mississippi (6), Missouri (10), Nebraska (4 of 5), North Dakota (3), Oklahoma (7), South Carolina (9), South Dakota (3), Tennessee (11), Texas (38), Utah (6), West Virginia (5), Wyoming (3) — total 176

Stranger-things-have-happened-but states. These are the 95% states. Occasionally somebody from the underdog’s camp will claim they’re going to pull an upset, and if you have too much money to spend you might even advertise (like Romney in Pennsylvania). But don’t hold your breath. The only way the underdog wins these states is with such a national landslide that the state won’t matter.

Obama: Michigan (16), New Mexico (5), Oregon (7), Pennsylvania (20) — subtotal 48; running total 236.

Romney: Arizona (11), Montana (3) — subtotal 14; running total 190.

Battleground Row. Now it starts to get interesting: Obama at 236 is approaching the magic 270. Romney at 190 has very little room for failure.

This is where Nate makes an astute observation: Each state may have its own independent election, but the state elections are not independent in a statistical sense. If, say, Obama takes North Carolina (where Nate gives him only a 22.8% chance), that probably means a national wave is building that will easily give him Wisconsin (94.5% chance). It would be a very strange world indeed if Obama took North Carolina and lost Wisconsin.

So it makes sense to line up all the states by their Obama-win-probability and see how far down the list he needs to go to get to 270.

Obama win probability state electoral votes Obama running total Romney running total
94.5% Wisconsin 10 246 292
90.7% Maine 1 of 4 247 291
90.0% Nevada 6 253 285
86.8% Ohio 18 271 269
81.2% Iowa 6 277 261
80.2% New Hampshire 4 281 257
72.6% Virginia 13 294 244
69.7% Colorado 9 303 235
44.5% Florida 29 332 206
22.8% North Carolina 15 347 191
12.3% Nebraska 1 of 5 348 190

So if you start at the top with Wisconsin (Obama’s most likely battleground state victory) and move towards the bottom, Obama crosses 270 at Ohio. Conversely, if we award Romney states from the bottom of the list up, he crosses 270 (reaching 285) if he wins Ohio. That makes Ohio the tipping point state, and explains why everybody is campaigning so hard there. So the minimal Obama-win map looks like this:

The minimal Obama-win map. (Not a prediction.)

And the minimal Romney-win map looks the same with Ohio red.

If Obama were to lose Ohio, he’d have to go three states further down his list (Iowa, New Hampshire, Virginia) to get to 270. If Romney loses Ohio, he’ll need either Nevada or Wisconsin to win. (In almost every reasonable scenario, Maine and Nebraska’s final votes don’t really matter.)

This is why you’ll hear Wisconsin, Nevada, Ohio, and sometimes Iowa described as “Obama’s firewall”. If he takes those states, he’s going to win even if he loses battleground states like Florida, Virginia, and Colorado.

What to Watch For. So Romney’s path to victory is narrow and depends heavily on the east-coast states Florida and Virginia. Those are the ones to watch early. If Romney loses either one, he’s done. If either one is too close to call hours after the polls close, probably that means the national trend is not enough in Romney’s favor to crack Obama’s firewall. An easy Obama win in New Hampshire, on the other hand, is only 4 votes, but it might be an early indication of an Obama victory nationally.

But if Florida and Virginia fall easily to Romney and New Hampshire is too close to call, we’re going to be studying specific Ohio counties far into the wee hours of the morning.

I’ll analyze Election Night hour-by-hour in a later post.

November 5, 2012 – 9:48 am Categories: Articles | Comments (11)

Tagged , , , |

The Monday Morning Teaser

What else is there to talk about? There’s an election tomorrow and people disagree about how it’s going to come out.

Until now, I’ve been trying not to cover the election as a horserace and instead focus on the real-world consequences of giving power to one party or the other. I figured you were already getting way too much horserace coverage on TV and in newspapers. But Election Day is like Christmas. You can denounce materialism 364 days a year, but on Christmas Eve you can’t help staring at the packages and wondering what Santa brought you.

Unfortunately, Election Santa likes to bring lumps of coal. (Or maybe we’ve just been naughtier as citizens than we’ve been in our personal lives.) We unwrapped a lot of coal in 2010. In my state of New Hampshire, we’re hoping to dispose of a lot of that coal tomorrow. (Gotta be careful with this metaphor. If I were a Republican talking about the coal the country got in 2008, that would be a racial dog whistle.)

Anyway, I’m going to go out on a limb once again and predict hour-by-hour how the election will unfold. My predictions did really well in 2008, but that was a very different election.

November 5, 2012 – 7:33 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Don’t Panic

It is said that despite its many glaring (and occasionally fatal) inaccuracies, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy itself has outsold the Encyclopedia Galactica because it is slightly cheaper, and because it has the words “DON’T PANIC” in large, friendly letters on the cover.

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

This week everybody was talking about looming disaster

It’s been a tough week to sift, because I’m inclined to get frantic and obsess over exactly the same things everybody else is: the home stretch of the election and Hurricane Sandy.

By this point, the candidates’ messages are about as fleshed out as they’re going to get. There’s not really any new insight to gain about Romney’s math-challenged tax plan or whether the economy is really in recovery or not. You probably made up your mind long ago, and if your state allows it, you may even have voted already.

(I have. Funny story about that: New Hampshire doesn’t have early voting, but I was headed back out to Illinois to deal with the aftermath of my father’s death and didn’t know if I’d be back by election day, so I voted absentee. As I got my ballot, the clerk informed me that if anybody sees me in New Hampshire on election day, my absentee ballot could be challenged. So I’m essentially in exile until November 7.)

So I’m done voting, and I’ve got stuff to do in a non-swing state (plus, I’m introverted enough to hate face-to-face electioneering). So my useful role in this election is more-or-less over, leaving me with no way to work out my pre-election tension other than to obsess over polls.

This puts me in a position I don’t like to be in: preaching what I’m not practicing.

Here’s the text of my sermon: Don’t obsess pointlessly. Figure out how much effort you’re going to put into this election and do it. Volunteer. Or babysit for your friends so they can volunteer. Or make one last pitch to the persuadable people in your life. Or decide not to do any of that. Then forget about it until it’s time to vote and watch the returns. I guarantee that when you look back on your life from a ripe old age, the time you spent fretting over whether Gallup’s likely-voter model is skewed will not seem well-spent.

Isn’t that good advice? You’re not going to follow it either, are you?

BTW, if you do plan to make one last pitch to the persuadable people you know, I wrote this article to help:

Convincing friends to vote for Obama.

Here’s why the campaigns are making me crazy

The final messages of the two campaigns are oddly complimentary. As they come down the stretch, it looks like both campaigns (no matter what they’re saying) believe that President Obama has a slight advantage. (Nate Silver’s model bears this out. He’s giving Obama around a 3/4 chance of winning — an advantage, but hardly prohibitive.) Which means: Romney is still looking for undecided voters, while Obama is focused on turning out the voters he already has.

And that leads to this perverse result: Romney wants the undecided voters to see him as a winner, so his campaign is exaggerating his chances of victory. Meanwhile, Obama is motivating his supporters to get out the vote by exaggerating Romney’s chances of victory. So the message I’m hearing from both sides is: Romney can win this.

Meanwhile, doom approaches from the sea

Other than NASCAR crashes, there are few things that our news media covers worse than a hurricanes. Every few years a truly disastrous storm hits, and once in a great while something like Katrina comes along. But every year, sometimes more than once in a year, there’s a storm that could be historically bad. Factors are converging, and they could all come together into the Perfect Storm.

There’s something pornographic about the coverage. Of course no reporter can root for the Big Disaster. But if it comes, careers will be made, and if it doesn’t, then they’re all just standing on windy beaches getting wet.

As with the election, make your plan and carry it out. But don’t keep looking at weather-service maps saying “Where is it now? Where is it now?”

And once the clean-up is well in hand, isn’t it time to start talking seriously about whether climate change has something to do with all this extreme weather? The insurance industry already is.

… but I wrote about abortion

Richard Mourdock’s comment that rape pregnancies are “something God intended” seemed to call for a stronger reaction than just “I disagree”. What bugs me isn’t just that he’s wrong, but that America isn’t supposed to work this way: Congressmen aren’t supposed to be interpreting the will of God for the rest of us. So I wrote:

Government Theology is Un-American.

Even if you don’t follow the link to that article, you should see the Clay Bennett cartoon I used to illustrate.

… and you might also find this interesting

When I heard that Joss Whedon had endorsed Romney, I thought “That can’t be serious.” But oh, yes. It’s as serious as a Zombie Apocalypse.

While we’re talking about endorsements, here’s Lena Dunham’s endorsement of Obama.

I can’t fathom why anyone found this “controversial” or even “astoundingly tasteless“. It’s a time-honored trick in advertising to make people think you’re talking about sex and then reveal that you’re really talking about something else. I thought it was done very cleverly this time.

I wonder what Dunham’s humorless critics thought of this Andy Borowitz satire.

With less than two weeks to go until Election Day, there is a deep divide among Republican leaders over whether to emphasize misogyny or racism as the campaign’s closing theme.

In Florida, the Republicans’ transparent efforts to suppress minority voters may have backfired.

New evidence that Romney’s private-insurance-with-a-Medicare-option plan will ultimately kill Medicare completely.

The Medicare Advantage program sort of does that already. And the private companies do exactly what health-insurance companies always do: compete to attract the people they don’t expect to get sick.

The study’s conclusion: healthy seniors tend to gravitate to private plans and sicker seniors gravitate to traditional Medicare. That’s because private insurers craft their plans to attract lower-cost patients and leave sicker, more expensive ones for traditional Medicare — a process known as favorable selection.

If that happened on a larger scale, Medicare would go into a death spiral: It would have to keep raising its premiums to cover an ever-sicker client base. And the death spiral would have nothing to do with the efficiency of the health-care it delivered.

October 29, 2012 – 3:12 pm Categories: Short Notes, Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

Government Theology is Un-American

If Congressman Mourdock wants to interpret the will of God to the People, he should move to a country where government officials do that, and leave my country alone.

This week, Indiana’s Richard Mourdock became the latest Republican candidate to make the political mistake of spelling out the consequences of his ideology: Not only would he make abortion illegal in all ordinary circumstances, but he sees no reason for a rape exception. He wants the government to force women to bear their rapists’ children.

Politics being what it is, a Rapist Procreation Act could never make it through Congress, even as an amendment to a larger Forced Motherhood Act. So euphemisms and rationalizations have to be employed.

Senate candidate Akin. Two months previously, Missouri senate candidate Todd Akin had made headlines by abusing science to support rapist procreation: Rape exceptions are unnecessary, he claimed, because rape pregnancies don’t happen. At least they don’t happen in cases of “legitimate rape”, i.e., the kind where the woman is penetrated by violence. “The female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,” he said.

Ignore the fact that no legitimate scientist believes this, so Akin had to search out a phony “expert” who is primarily another anti-abortion extremist. Even giving Akin’s words their most generous interpretation — that he meant to say “violent” rather than imply that the rape itself could be “legitimate” — they’re monstrous. In his view, for example, raped women who are drugged rather than beaten are not worth the law’s notice.

A friend of a friend once met a knife-wielding stranger on a stairwell. He said he wanted to kill her, but she negotiated him down to having sex instead. That also would not be a legitimate rape in Todd Akin’s view, so any possible pregnancy would be the woman’s responsibility, not the knifeman’s.

Or consider this account of an incest pregnancy. Sometimes her father raped her “legitimately” by violence. Sometimes threats were enough, and sometimes she submitted to save her younger sisters. What kind of rape got her pregnant? She doesn’t know.

Akin’s government would punish such men, presumably, but would also make sure that their reproductive strategy succeeds and their DNA is multiplied in the next generation.

Walsh. Illinois Republican Congressman Joe Walsh went a step further than Akin. Not only is a rape exception unnecessary, but a life-of-the-mother exception is unnecessary too — and for the same reason: It never happens. “With modern technology and science,” he said, “you can’t find one instance” of a medically necessary abortion.

Non-ideologues quickly came up with the example of ectopic pregnancy, which killed 876 American women between 1980 and 2007.

Mourdock. Having seen how much heat Akin took for abusing science, Mourdock decided to abuse theology instead. For Mourdock, the magic pregnancy-prevention intervention doesn’t come from the mysteries of female biology, it comes from God. If a woman gets pregnant through rape, that must be “something that God intended to happen.”

Again, let’s give Mourdock’s words their most generous interpretation, the one he begged for the next morning. (Consider the irony: We’re granting Mourdock a morning-after pill, so that his statement doesn’t bear any unwanted fruit.) He didn’t mean to say that God sends rapists to impregnate women. (“I don’t think God wants rape,” he said, in one of the strangest denials ever.) But once the sperm sights the ovum, it is up to God whether or not conception occurs.

This is the traditional God-of-the-gaps theology: Well-understood processes follow scientific cause-and-effect, but anything that happens mysteriously is God’s will. (Lightning strikes, for example, were God’s will until Ben Franklin thwarted God by understanding electricity and inventing the lightning rod.)

Personal vs. public. I find this view of God absurd, but that’s just me. If you want to interpret every unpredictable event as a message from your Creator, don’t let me stop you. If Mourdock’s family were to suffer a rape pregnancy (not that I’m wishing it on them), maybe they really would welcome the rapist’s baby as a “gift from God”. If they went on to raise that boy up to be a far better man than his father, I might even admire them for it.

But here’s where I get off the train: Mourdock the individual and the Mourdock Family should be free to believe what makes sense to them, and to organize their lives accordingly. But Congressman Mourdock and wannabee Senator Mourdock have no business telling the American people what God wants.

That’s not how America works. That is, in fact, what the Founders revolted against.

Old Europe vs. New America. In the old system of European monarchy, the King had a special relationship to God, and so his government stood between God and the People. In the same way that the bishops channeled God’s religious will, the King channeled God’s political will. The People may or may not understand why God wants them to go to war with Spain or pay a higher toll at the bridge, but no matter: The King and God had it all worked out, and it was the People’s duty to obey.

The American system of democracy reversed all that. In America, the People stand between God and the government.

In America, we believe that God pays no attention to rank; God speaks to everyone, and not just to high government officials.

In America, Congress is supposed to interpret the will of the People, not the will of God.

In America, it is up to the People to interpret the will of God for the government. It is not up to the government to interpret the will of God for the People.

Biology vs. Theology. One reason this anti-American tendency on the Right gets so little attention is that they have carefully framed their theological reasoning in biological terms: They claim to be talking about “when human life begins”, which sounds biological.

If you buy into that false framing, their favored answer “human life begins at conception” seems obvious: The fertilized ovum may be a one-celled organism that looks more like an amoeba than a baby, but it is alive and has human DNA, so it’s clearly “human life”.

But this is a strangely materialistic piece of logic that the Religious Right would not accept in any other case. Something makes killing a human being murder, but killing a pig dinner. Is that difference in the DNA somewhere? Can we hope that science will someday identify the “worth gene” that gives humans their incommensurable value?

Of course not. Imagine the outcry if someone claimed to pinpoint such a gene and showed that it was absent in certain birth defects.

Worth is not about DNA, it’s about soul. (If you don’t ordinarily use the word soul, you can take that as a functional definition: Whatever makes a human’s life more valuable than a pig’s is soul. Whether you think of it as a mystical whatever or as a socio-legal convention is, in practice, irrelevant.)

So the question of abortion is not when “human life” begins, it’s when the soul enters the body. (Or, for secularists, it’s when the law decides to take fetuses under its protection.)

All the biological evidence that is usually offered on the abortion question — when a fetus has a heartbeat or brainwaves or reacts in ways that resemble pain — is beside the point. A pig fetus at a similar stage would also have a heartbeat, brainwaves, and a cringing reflex. Paul Ryan might describe the “bean” that he saw on the ultrasound as a “baby”, but if a prankster had rigged the ultrasound to show Ryan the fetus of a pig or chimp, I doubt he’d have known the difference.

The difference between murder and dinner is not physical, it’s metaphysical. It’s a question for theologians, not biologists.

Government humility. And that means the government should stay out of it unless some compelling public interest is involved, which it isn’t. (In a post-apocalyptic world in need of repopulation, for example, the government would have such an interest.)

The ensoulment question has been debated as long as the Judeo-Christian tradition has existed, and the experts have often disagreed. (One frequently taken view was that ensoulment happened around 90 days — coincidentally corresponding to the first trimester when Roe v. Wade allows the fewest restrictions on abortion.) Other religious traditions have their own opinions on the matter. (Many, for example, would find the pig to be of comparable value to the human, and have a different notion of soul entirely. If they can build a majority somewhere, should the law reflect their theology? Or should they simply practice their beliefs without forcing vegetarianism on non-believers?)

In the American system, government takes a humble position in matters of theology: It recognizes that it has no special expertise, so it leaves such questions to the individual.

That’s what should happen here: Each sect should be free to put forward its own view of when a fetus acquires the incommensurable value of a human soul, and its practitioners should be free to practice that view.

That’s the American way.

October 29, 2012 – 2:12 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (5)

Tagged , , |

Convincing Friends to Vote for Obama

I don’t think anybody knows precisely how many voters make up their minds in the last week of a campaign, or how influenced they are by friends or relatives who steer them right. My guess is that the number is considerable. You might only influence one or two of them, but if a million people like you each influence one or two, that turns a close election into a landslide.

It’s worth trying, in other words.

These persuadable voters might be co-workers or classmates who are bored by politics, but feel vaguely guilty about not participating in democracy. Maybe they’re grandparents who have mostly lost interest in the larger world, or who only know what Bill O’Reilly chooses to tell them. Or they’re your grown children, who haven’t yet caught on to the idea that voting is part of their duty as an adult. Maybe they are friends who generally share your ideals, but aren’t in the habit of voting.

My two most important pieces of advice are:

  • Don’t waste your time arguing with committed Romney voters unless you enjoy it or you’re really performing for silent onlookers. Life is too short. If they pick an argument, you can put them off with a flip remark like “I’m not rich enough to vote for Romney.”
  • Don’t be a jerk. People who admire jerks are already voting for Romney, because Rush Limbaugh told them to. Liberalism is attractive because it is both serious and compassionate. Try to embody that; Obama does.

Some people don’t vote for really simple reasons that are easily dealt with.

  • I don’t know where to vote. The League of Women Voters knows. Go to their Vote411 web site and enter your address. It will locate your polling place and also tell you whether it’s still possible to register to vote in time for the election. (That’s worth checking. Some states allow at-the-polling-place registration.) The Obama campaign site gottavote.com is a good resource for early-voting info and for listing what you need to bring with you.
  • I can’t get to the polls. The best answer is “I’ll take you”, but that may not be practical if you’re talking to someone who retired to Florida. One of the things people can do at barackobama.com is identify themselves as Obama voters. If you do that, I guarantee someone will call you on election day to see if you need help getting to the polls. (I’ve been hanging out at the house of my recently deceased father, who was a 90-year-old registered Democrat. I’ve already gotten a call from the Obama campaign asking if he needed a ride.)

Closing arguments against Romney. The thing that makes you more effective than a TV commercial is that you know who you’re talking to and they know you. So some people will want to see why Romney’s budget numbers don’t add up and others will frost over immediately if you start making them do math. Some will be impressed by the depth of Romney’s duplicity, and others will shrug and say that all politicians lie. Still, seeing is believing.

One of the problems the Obama campaign uncovered early in its focus groups was that moderate voters simply refused to believe that Romney had taken the radical positions he ran on in the primaries, or that he lied as boldly as he did. But it’s true: He said he would cut taxes on “the top 1%” and later denied it. He said he would ban all abortions, without exceptions for rape or incest, and later denied it, at one point championing an exception for the “health of the mother” before denying that too. He said his health plan would cover pre-existing conditions, and later denied it. He says he loves teachers, but also wants to muzzle their unions and slash their retirement programs, and he opposes Obama’s plan to hire more of them in math and science.

Other than simple lying, Romney has taken advantage of vagueness. So he promises to balance the budget, but the only plans he has specified cut taxes and raise spending. (In Virginia, his ads cast him as the candidate who will create jobs by increasing spending, precisely what he denounces everywhere else in the country.) He says he can balance that out (plus the deficit we have now) with by cutting other spending and closing tax loopholes, but since he won’t specify those parts of his program, he can deny anything specific. So, is he planning to slash spending on education? On roads and bridges? On healthcare for the poor or food stamps for the hungry? Is he going to eliminate the mortgage interest deduction or deductions for contributions to charity? He has no plan to do that, he says. But he has to cut or tax somewhere to make his numbers work, and he won’t tell us where.

If the people you’re trying to convince say they’re leaning towards Romney or think he looked good at the debate or find him attractive in some other way, the right question to ask is: “Which Romney do you like?” Romney has literally had every position on every issue. But if he’s elected, which Mitt do you expect to take office in January? In order to support Romney, you need to believe that he was honest in what he promised you, but lying to all those other people.

If someone likes the “severely conservative” Romney of the primaries, there’s not much you can say. Whatever he does is likely to be more conservative than what Obama would do. But if they liked the “moderate Mitt” of the debates, probably they should be voting for Obama, who is the real moderate in the race. Jonathan Alter says it best:

Romney as president would be a man with a strange crick in the neck, constantly looking over his right shoulder to see which pickup truck full of movement conservatives was about to run him over.

Beyond the policy issues, there are character issues. Young Mitt was a bully, and his sons’ attempts to tell heart-warming stories about him only emphasize that he is still a bully. Women who came to him in his role as a Mormon bishop telling horrifying stories of his insensitivity. And of course there’s always the dog-on-the-roof story.

If you read between the lines in the stories of Romney’s friends, you see the larger pattern: He’s a great guy as long as he’s in control and you’re doing what he wants. James Lipton has him nailed:

He is that boss who tells lame jokes and waits for everyone else to laugh (or else), and keeps us forever off balance, uncertain and anxious.

Closing arguments for Obama. Two false charge against Obama are that he isn’t running on his record (or can’t because his record is terrible) or that his campaign is entirely negative. I’ve already devoted an article to Obama’s positive case, but it’s time to boil that down to a few paragraphs.

Here’s the best way to frame Obama’s economic record: Thanks to Obama (and his unfairly maligned stimulus), the next president won’t have to deal with anything like the multiple crises that Obama faced on Inauguration Day. The month Obama took office, the economy lost more than 800,000 jobs. Now it’s gaining at least 100,000 jobs a month. That’s not robust growth, but we are muddling ever upward. Those bad jobs numbers the Romney people throw around always include the massive job losses in the first few months of 2009, before Obama’s policies had taken effect.

When Obama became president, our banks were insolvent and the auto industry was about to collapse. We were fighting two expensive wars. Serious people were speculating about a Second Great Depression. It’s easy to brush that off now, but the fact that it didn’t happen is a major accomplishment.

Crises that deep take time to overcome. (In the First Great Depression, unemployment was still over 10% at the end of FDR’s second term.) Romney likes to compare the current recovery to the Reagan recovery of the early 80s, but that followed an ordinary interest-rate recession, not the popping of a bubble. Bubble recoveries are slower, because the previous peak wasn’t real.

There are a number of reasons to believe that the economy is about to accelerate. Consumer confidence is up. The jobless rate is finally below 8%. And people are starting to build houses again.

On foreign policy, Obama has been the steady hand we needed. He ended the Iraq War, wound down the Afghan War, attacked the people who really attacked us on 9-11 (including Bin Laden), and — best of all — didn’t get our troops involved in any new wars, despite numerous opportunities.

Myths. Many people — especially low-information voters — think they are against Obama because they’ve bought some crazy story about him: He’s Muslim, he’s Kenyan, he quadrupled the deficit, whatever. It’s impossible to list them all, but snopes.com is your best place to start debunking.

Greens are a special case. Some of the undecided are actually very well-informed liberal voters, but they can’t decide whether to vote idealistically for Green candidate Jill Stein or pragmatically for President Obama. If they live in a foregone-conclusion state like Texas or Vermont their Green vote isn’t going to affect the outcome anyway, so don’t bother trying to convince them. But in swing states people need to remember Bush/Gore in 2000. If the Nader voters in Florida or New Hampshire had voted for Gore, we wouldn’t have had an Iraq War.

I’ve made a longer pitch to Greens here, and Leftcandid has done it here.

In short. Across the board, Obama has done a good job in a bad situation. And on issue after issue, Romney has either offered no alternative or has offered every alternative, (when he wasn’t agreeing with what Obama has done). No matter what you think the country’s most important problem is — the economy, the deficit, women’s rights, war, terrorism, inequality, the environment, whatever — Obama is the best bet for progress.

October 29, 2012 – 11:55 am Categories: Articles | Comments (5)

Tagged , , |