2012 Presidential Election - The Ups and Downs

[JAD_333]

Romney sure has rubbed elbows with a lot of foreign dignitaries as of late. Shouldn't he win the presidency first or is this customary for those simply running for the office?

It's not uncommon for presidential candidates to travel abroad. McCain and Obama did it.

[dalem]

Romney sure has rubbed elbows with a lot of foreign dignitaries as of late. Shouldn't he win the presidency first or is this customary for those simply running for the office?

Is this your first Presidential election?

-dale

[astralis]

It's not uncommon for presidential candidates to travel abroad. McCain and Obama did it.

not sure what romney gets out of it, though. very few people care about foreign policy even during good times, let alone now.

i suspect romney saw the challenge of obama being rated as a better CIC than he and wanted to show that he could go mano a mano on this area. if so, this trip really backfired on him.

[astralis]

a good piece by brooks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/op...aign-ever.html

[JAD_333]

not sure what romney gets out of it, though. very few people care about foreign policy even during good times, let alone now.

i suspect romney saw the challenge of obama being rated as a better CIC than he and wanted to show that he could go mano a mano on this area. if so, this trip really backfired on him.

I don't think so. One would expect that to be the buzz in DC and liberal circles, but put yourself in his the shoes of the conservative base (as long as you can stand it). London was a blip, Israel was a triumph. Poland? Solidarity criticism? Poland is tired of being pushed around by Obama. Romney's praise plays well. He does, however, need to have a chat with his press people...:)

[dalem]

a good piece by brooks.

I don't think it's a dull campaign at all. Brooks laments a lack of a slow, simple, and deep core message from either campaign but seems to ignore the tremendous advantage that today's instant access to information gives the electorate. Repub candidate A says Dem candidate B voted to raise taxes 87 times so he's a poopyhead - but within 10 minutes of that anyone can check the facts and see that Dem candidate B actually voted 87 times to save America from Nazi zombie robots and Repub opponents tacked on tax increases to each bill to be dicks.

That's a pretty powerful tool for the electorate.

And for a campaign to win these days they have to focus on the undecideds. Brooks seems surprised by this, not just regretful. I do agree with him that it would be nice to get more policy and less "neener neener", but I think that'll come after the conventions.

-dale

[astralis]

dale,

That's a pretty powerful tool for the electorate.

sure is, and frankly it's just an acceleration of the trends of the last century. from newspapers to radio to cable TV to this.

i'm not as surprised as brooks re: the constant tactical sniping, but i do agree with him that it's worrisome if the sniping starts replacing actual substance. i hope you're right that there's less neener neener after the conventions.

And for a campaign to win these days they have to focus on the undecideds.

there was an article recently talking about how the # of undecideds have shrunk to a record low this year. as a result both campaigns are rooting for their respective bases to come out. of the TV commercial bombardment i've seen this year, i've actually only seen one that tried to play for independents (coming from the RNC, not directly from romney's campaign; the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger 'he tried, you tried, it's okay to pick someone new' spot).

[TopHatter]

Add it up: The prediction models look dismal for Obama. Can he still win? (OP-ED)
By Jeff Greenfield

I got into writing and thinking about politics because I was told there would be no math.

Boy, was I misled. It’s not just the torrent of polls that we have to deal with, but the numbers that supposedly forecast Presidential elections with uncanny accuracy. Depending on whom you turn to, the key lies in second quarter real GDP growth, the optimism or pessimism of the electorate, individual or family real income growth or a dizzying mix of these and other measurements.

They’re usually economic, although one prognosticator—Allan Lichtman, history professor at American University—uses broader measurements, asking whether the incumbent or challenger is charismatic or whether the incumbent party has presided over a major change in social policy. (This is considered a positive, although I don’t know if we’ve ever had a case like the Affordable Care Act, which—unlike every other major social change—passed without bipartisan backing and remains broadly unpopular.)

I’m a skeptic about the predictive power of these numbers for many reasons. For one thing, the “sample size,” which totals about twenty or so Presidential elections since most of these measurements were first made, is too small. For another, they work—unless they don’t. In 1968, strong economic figures were trumped by a divisive war and by social unrest. In 2000, every economic forecasting model predicted that Al Gore would win a comfortable or landslide plurality. They were “right” in the sense that he got half a million more votes than Bush; they were “wrong” in the fundamental outcome they offered.

So it’s with that skepticism in mind that I offer, not a prediction, but a flat pre-election assessment: If President Barack Obama is to win, he is going to have to overcome a set of numbers that no incumbent President, or incumbent party, has ever managed to surmount.

The jobless rate has been stuck at just above 8 per cent for months; you have to go back to 1936 to find a President re-elected with a higher unemployment rate. And in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s case, it was a far better number than he had inherited. Plus, growth was booming.

Today, real growth is at 1.5 per cent. In the economic forecasting models, this portends what even the liberal arts majors have been predicting: a very close election.

The core question for many voters—“Are you generally satisfied with the country’s direction, or has the U.S. gone off on the wrong track”—gets a 32.7-60.7 negative answer, according to the RealClearPolitics average. Generally, an incumbent party needs to have at least a 35% positive response to this question to win the election, says the Gallup Organization.

The consumer confidence level is now about 60 per cent. No incumbent party has ever kept the White House with a number anything like that. (It was slightly higher, at 65 per cent, in 1980 when Carter lost in a landslide.)

Now, try this as a thought exercise. Forget who is running, what the latest gaffe of the day is, who is outraged and what latest insult to what group has been perpetrated by the candidate or his staff. Ignore whom you’re rooting for, and just look at those numbers with the ice-cold heart of a bean counter.

What you would conclude, I think, is that there is no way an incumbent President could get re-elected given these current numbers.

In this sense, the 2012 election is going to test just how predictive many of these “fundamental” models are, and whether the assertion of some forecasters—that the outcome can be known irrespective of candidates and campaigns—is valid.

Why? Because, to put it bluntly: The Republicans have nominated a bad candidate.

Some (very) brief history and a hypothesis. Six years ago, Mitt Romney and his team realized that he could never win the Republican nomination as the pragmatic, moderate-conservative with moderate-to-liberal views on everything from abortion to gun control to the environment to health care. (The mandate was a conservative position back then, but put that aside.) When Team Romney saw Sen. George Allen, the likely 2008 social conservative hero, lose his re-election bid in 2006, they found an opening, and decided to reach, or lunge, for that slot.

And so, throughout the 2008 campaign and throughout this one, Romney has been running as if to claim that his four years in higher office was a case of mistaken identity. I think it has forced him to campaign in mortal fear of every word he utters, to pander to local pride and political constituencies in a manner that seems a parody of the clumsy politician.

At root, Romney is a candidate in the grip of performance anxiety. And whether on the tennis court or in more intimate settings performance anxiety is a near-guarantee of poor performance.

It’s often said that a re-election campaign is always about the incumbent; like many political observations, that’s partly, but not wholly, true. Even when the electorate is disposed to replace the President, it has to be satisfied that the challenger is up to the job. Mitt Romney has yet to meet that test.

The Obama campaign, however, can take very limited comfort from Romney’s discomfit. If the “fundamental” numbers continue to be as grim as they now are, the desire to change course will deepen. And the more that longing intensifies, the lower the bar Mitt Romney will have to clear.

Link

I've been saying this for months: The Republicans will be the reason that Obama is reelected, not Obama's abysmal job performance.
Against every historic metric and political indicator, Obama will be reelected...thanks to none other than the GOP.

[antimony]

I've been saying this for months: The Republicans will be the reason that Obama is reelected, not Obama's abysmal job performance.
Against every historic metric and political indicator, Obama will be reelected...thanks to none other than the GOP.

Unfortunately for the Republican Party and America as a whole, if Obama does win, there will be even more of a right shift among conservatives. So whoever comes in to bat for the Republican party in 2016 will be forced to adopt an even more conservative stance than what Romney is showing up now and in general may not be acceptable to the folks in the middle.

More polarization :(

[RollingWave]

I've been saying this for months: The Republicans will be the reason that Obama is reelected, not Obama's abysmal job performance.
Against every historic metric and political indicator, Obama will be reelected...thanks to none other than the GOP.

Election Forecasts - FiveThirtyEight Blog - NYTimes.com

I have a bit of faith in Nate Silver's model in general especially having followed him through most of this his baseball writing days, if it's any indication Obama's chances of winning according to his model is quite high, as it has consistently stayed in the upper 60% range since the start . and really hasn't moved much. it takes into account a pretty wide variety of stuff, from weighted polls to economic figures etc.

At the end of the day, this looks a lot like a rerun of 2004 only with the parties reversed, and hell Mitt Romney has quiet a lot in similairty to John Kerry anyway. both being essentially New England blue bloods. and also similar in the sense that the challengers' odds are precieved to be better (espeically by their own supporters) than they really are.

[JAD_333]

a good piece by brooks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/op...aign-ever.html

Asty:

Did Brooks say anything important? What did I miss? He draws parallels to previous campaigns and finds that today's campaign comes up short on intellectual horsepower and long on the same old same old.

... I’ve come up with a number of reasons for why it is so dull. First, intellectual stagnation. This race is the latest iteration of the same debate we’ve been having since 1964. Mitt Romney is calling President Obama a big-government liberal who wants to crush business. Obama is calling Romney a corporate tool who wants to take away grandma’s health care.

Obviously Obama and Romney did not get the memo; the columnists are bored; time to step up your game.

It's an interesting column in that it says more about Brooks than anything else. I agree with Dale. This election is anything but boring.

[dalem]

At least neither of these guys has to run against George Washington.

Incredibly NSFW, btw. Unless you work in a total &^$!#@! factory.

"12 stories tall and made of radiation" indeed.

-dale

[JAD_333]

At least neither of these guys has to run against George Washington.

George run? He would have hung out at the plantation and waited to be named the winner.

[JAD_333]

I've been saying this for months: The Republicans will be the reason that Obama is reelected, not Obama's abysmal job performance.
Against every historic metric and political indicator, Obama will be reelected...thanks to none other than the GOP.

Top:

You're no fun. You're supposed to have a tinge of doubt about which way the election will go.:)

Jeff Greenfield's op ed disappoints me. He cites all the metrics that point to an Obama loss, and at that point he abruptly ends his analysis and goes into denial, (an affliction that seems to have hit many liberal columnists these days). But not to worry; Obama will win anyway, he says, because "...The Republicans have nominated a bad candidate." What makes Romney a bad candidate? "At root, Romney is a candidate in the grip of performance anxiety. And whether on the tennis court or in more intimate settings performance anxiety is a near-guarantee of poor performance. Really?

This is good analysis: Gerson, Shields explore Romney campaign’s weaknesses, polarization | The Chautauquan Daily

During the 1980 election season, Governor Ronald Reagan was unelectable and the polls confirmed that. But during the debates, he was able to disprove citizens’ thoughts about him. He presented himself as a reassuring and likable figure, Shields said.

What Romney doesn’t understand, Shields said, is that even Reagan had to reassure voters of who he was, what he stood for and where he intended to take the country.

“The vote for president is the most personal vote that any of us cast as a citizen,” Shields said.

The presidential elections come with a sense of intimacy because people learn so much about a candidate, Shields said. But Romney is a private individual who has not accepted he has no privacy, he said.

Romney is not viewed as authentic or with a human touch, Gerson said, and a convention speech could help show the public otherwise.

Gerson said candidates need to take a problem and turn it around during convention speeches. He said it will be a challenge to humanize Romney.

[RollingWave]

George run? He would have hung out at the plantation and waited to be named the winner.

Of course, Hamilton probably would have suggested the two candidate to simply grab a pistol and head down to Weehawken :P ... that would certainly be.... entertaining?