Wednesday Open Thread

   

Sorry for blog neglect.  Day long meetings, family visiting, end of month billing, and house cleaning are all cutting into my all important internet time. 

I am just trying to catch up with the day's news.

- I enjoyed the Bloomberg endorsement of Obama -- not because I think it will translate into votes, but because Bloomberg is the beau ideal of a certain class of pundit.  I am looking forward to the Morning Joe crowd chewing on this.

- The sanctimonious cluelessness of the dinosaur media is a spectacle to behold.  The advent of the "public editor" has really proved to be one of the most amazing wastes of time ever.  How can every last one of them have the same stick up the ass mentality?

- The Romney campaign pretends that wishful thinking translates into votes.  It's been tried before.  And will have the same effect. 

- I have to brag about getting a perfect score on this Slate test of presidential electoral maps since 1860.

I will do my election predictions this weekend and invite you all to do the same.

In the meantime, tell me what's happening.

 

Comments

[kathy a.]

TNC on either i win or you cheated -- and please do click through to fallows, with all the dirt on polls vs. false expectations of victory.

i'm heading out at o-dark-thirty to leaflet for my favorite proposition. YES on 34, my fellow californians!

and this weekend is my first door-to-door campaigning since 1960, at which point i was a hapless little tyke whose mom believed in nixon. so, you might say that i'm atoning for the political sins of the previous generation. although, they are the ones who told me about the importance of the constitution, and the duties of citizens, and to think for myself -- it probably didn't occur to them that i'd take all that seriously. ;)

[Don K]

I'm afraid I matched your electoral nerdishness by also getting a perfect score on the electoral map quiz.

[kathy a.]

and wow. look at this, about NYC, subways, global climate change, and the big breakdown. or something like that.

[paula]

Great, kathy!

[karl]

I didn't get a perfect score on the quiz, so goddam you all to hell!

[low-tech cyclist]

October Employment and Unemployment Numbers:

Unemployment at 7.9%, statistically unchanged from September.

Employment: best numbers we've seen in awhile.

October: +171,000.
September: Revised upward from +114,000 to +148,000.
August: Revised upward from +142,000 to
+192,000.

Altogether, that's +255,000. Good news indeed.

[oddjob]

The Congressional Research Service released a report demonstrating there's no correlation between top tax rates and economic growth, and the Republicans in the Senate screeched about it so much the CRS then withdrew it.

Nothing like having a nonpartisan agency analyze the heart and soul of your agenda only to find the emperor wears no clothes...

Hat tip, Sully.

[low-tech cyclist]

Predictions: Obama wins the popular vote by 2-3%, wins all the swing states except North Carolina and perhaps Florida, and we pick up 1-2 Senate seats, net. We wind up with 200-210 House seats, but still no gavel for Nancy, alas.

[oddjob]

The facts of history show that Democratic administrations are better for the US economy than Republican ones.

[low-tech cyclist]

No question about it, oddjob. But most plutocrats are apparently willing to sacrifice a bit of wealth for greater control. They kinda like high unemployment because it means that their workers can't just up and leave if they treat them like shit. And that apparently means more to them than the likelihood that they (the plutocrats, that is) will themselves be wealthier if the economy is doing well enough that we have full employment.

[kathy a.]

great news from california: support for Prop. 34 -- to replace the death penalty with life without possibility of parole -- has jumped! our friend janinsanfran is the field director for this measure, and doing a great job.

for more info, see the YES on 34 website. tell your friends!

[kathy a.]

oh, and catch this -- WaPo's editorial board knocks romney upside the head for insulting voters.

[Eric Wilde]

I'm pleased most by Bloomberg's endorsement via climate change. To see Mother Nature so forcefully raise this neglected topic in the election raises my hopes that we'll actually attend to it more in the near future.

[low-tech cyclist]

kathy - wow, they really did, didn't they? And with only the most negligible touch of 'both sides do it.' They really jumped on Mitt with both feet. Who knew they had it in them?

In other good election-related news, even the Rasmussen tracker is showing Obama and Romney tied nationally. Other than the Rasmussen and (currently in abeyance) Gallup trackers, no poll in over a week has shown a Romney lead nationally.

Nate Silver's been talking lately about the tension between the national and state polls, and giving his reasons for coming down on the side of the states. Well, it looks like the states are winning, because the national polls are moving their way.

[kathy a.]

steve benen started chronicling romney's lies in january. this is the 41st edition, containing 33 whoppers from the last week.

[nancy]

If I were a marathoner, I would not dream of showing up to run this weekend. I don't get this at all. Smacks of 'let them eat cake' under the circumstances. Update: Cancelled. 21 mins ago. Whew.

Just saw that Prup checked in a while ago. That's good.

Wow -- For today WaPo is forgiven. That is exactly what's needed saying. That conversation has surely been going on around a good many kitchen tables and not just in Dem households. My sense though is Mitt's Mormonism has played an important role in his intelligence-insulting behavior. Things mean what he says they mean. Because he said so. As an authority.

Sullivan has a link up to a story at Slate which people would do well to read in order to better understand how the LDS church authority operates. Asking unwanted [unseemly] questions, even as a devout Mormon historian, is not permitted. Not only was this man threatened and excommunicated, he was blackballed, his career smashed. How Mitt's Mormonism might play out in an administration hasn't gotten near the attention it should have in a Presidential race imho.

[kathy a.]

good news that the marathon is off. what were they thinking??

i'm still concerned about people affected by the storm being able to vote. sounds like a lot of power out; people are dealing with a lot of problems; displaced people may not even be near their polling places.

that slate piece is not exactly light...

[oddjob]

Romney: Elect Me Or House GOP Will Wreck The Economy

[kathy a.]

oddjob -- that isn't even an onion piece! (sounds an awful lot like extortion, though....)

[oddjob]

Doesn't it though?

[oddjob]

Nate Cohn points out that there's a good chance the vote count on Election Night will make Romney look like he's won more of the popular vote than he actually has.

Hat tip, The Plum Line.

[kathy a.]

cut that out, oddjob! well, ok. it's ok, now that i see the point is that the west coast tabulation will only run things up in the popular vote.

so many times, the election is "called" by networks before the polls even close out here in the west. that sucks. it is part of why i voted by mail, just to get my part done early. but i hadn't thought of the noise, if it looks remotely close when obama is called!

so, i'll pass along this good news: the GOP has fallen under 30% of registered voters in CA. (i know this is how other states think of us, but we sent you nixon and reagan. also, darrel issa. please do not make me say more.)

[low-tech cyclist]

I'll try to remember to front-page this sometime Tuesday, but here's a list of poll closing times of states worth watching (all times EST):

Presidential swing states:

7pm: Virginia
7:30pm: Ohio, North Carolina
8pm: Florida*, New Hampshire
9pm: Wisconsin, Colorado
10pm: Iowa, Nevada

*FL polls close at 7pm local time. But a few counties are in the Central time zone.

States with close Senate races:

7pm: Virginia, Indiana
8pm: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Missouri
9pm: Wisconsin, Arizona, Nebraska
10pm: Montana, Nevada
11pm: North Dakota

[low-tech cyclist]

Latest odds: Nate Silver gives Romney a 1-in-6 chance; Sam Wang gives him a 1-in-500 chance. I hope Sam's right!

And Chris Cillizza of the WaPo, in another demonstration of the total uselessness of the MSM, moves Ohio from 'lean Obama' to 'tossup' for no better reason than that Romney needs to win Ohio.

[Sir Charles]

The interesting thing is that for all of the talk of it being a long night, I think the outcome for the presidency could conceivably be known very early. With Virginia closing at 7:00, I think we may well have a sense of where it stands relatively early in the evening. If Obama wins it, I think the odds are that he has won the election. Look for the results from Prince William and Loudon counties. If Obama carries those I think he carries the state which I think means he wins.

Ohio at 7:30 is the election. If there is enough distance between the candidates, we could all know by 9:00 or 10:00 or so the outcome of the race.

With Florida, I guess we watch Hillsborough County's results and see if Obama replicates his victory there in 2008. If he does, I think that too would indicate a likely win.

The senate races could definitely keep you up all night.

[low-tech cyclist]

Hell, in 2008, the Senate races weren't all resolved until the following summer. Even if we set Franken aside as a special case, my recollection is that Alaska's and Oregon's Senate races both took several days to resolve, and Georgia's required a runoff.

So if the Senate gets complicated, I'm going to bed.

I still remember telling my wife on election night of 2000, as she went to bed, that I was staying up until it was settled. Needless to say...

[low-tech cyclist]

But you're right, SC, that we should have a pretty good idea of how the Presidential race is turning out quite early, between Virginia and Ohio.

The county-by-county results from Webb's win over Allen in 2006 are still online here, available for downloading as an Excel spreadsheet, and would be a pretty good benchmark to judge how Obama and Kaine are doing in VA if it takes awhile for anyone to project a winner. Since Webb won extremely narrowly, they've got to do at least as well as he did to win Virginia.

[paula]

Excellent piece:
The Confederate bugle, blown one more time. http://slate.me/RDMYSd

[Prup (aka Jim Benton)]

I'll throw another factor into the mix. The Weather Channel of all places has not just a link to the state-by state forecasts in the swing states, but also a list of the key counties in each swing state. (They list Hillsborough, but also Piniellas, Flagler and Osceola in FL, and 9 in Virginia.

One thing they don't have -- but I could research -- is how each of these was impacted by Sandy. the "Sandy Factor" is going to be very unpredictable, and even in retrspect will probably need to be studied on almost a precinct by precinct level. Some people are physically unable to vote -- and some of these states have no early or by mail balloting for people in general. Some have more pressing things on their mind than voting -- and just as important, than GOTVing. (This will hurt Democrats, whose volunteers are also the sort who would see direct humanitarian effort as more necessary.) And how has this experience worked on people's enthusiasm, are they fierce or depressed?

But the differences are likely to be imense. My feel, for example, is that Michael Grimm will lose a race he might have won, because my feel is the Republican parts of the district were hit harder -- but overall Obama and Gillibrand will lose a few (sparable) percentage points in the state as a whole. On the other hand, my feeling is -- and I'd love to take the time to look closely -- that in Jersey the impact is about equal, but that if anything is more on Republicans -- and the Christie factor complicates everything with his presence, but his praise of Obama and repeated back-stabbing of Romney.

What thinks you? More later, maybe, though no guarantees, I'm still shaky here personally.

[Joe S]

I think Barak Obama is going to be president-elect on November 6, 2012 at 9:30 p.m. Central Time, but that Prup is going to owe me 500 books pursuant to our bet that Mitt Romney would not get more than 100 electoral votes. I hope you have a good selection of anthropology, sociology, and philosophy, Prup.

[Prup (aka Jim Benton)]

The bppks are yours, Joe, if you will come and pick them up -- but my collection is mostly fiction, mysteries and SF, and a good collection of History and some religion. Some of that is reserved, mostly the religion, some between-the-Wars history and some of my Silver Age Mysteries. The rest is yours to pick from. Unfortunately, the three categories you list probably don't total a dozen books unless you include the religion under philosophy, which brings it to about three or four dozen.

If you do not want to get here and arrange pick-up and shipping, I'll donate 250 books plus one book for every electoral vote Mitt gets over 125 (which should have been my bet amount, given Texas) to the Sarah Shulman Institute, a local residential facility that gets my overflow in general. And this won't be just 'culls' I already did that, and will be much appreciated by the patients. But if you can get here -- I can't put the whole list on e-mails without spending most of my free time for 2013 -- the original bet is good. (And, of course, there are still a couple of days left for Romney to do something incredibly dumb, but the early voting is already in.)

[low-tech cyclist]

Wow, talk about grasping at straws:

Mitt Romney’s campaign is reorganizing itself around a new last-second message, accusing President Obama of urging his supporters to vote out of “revenge.”

The new line of attack stems from an Obama rally in Springfield, Ohio on Friday in which he briefly interrupted his speech after the audience booed House Republicans and Romney.

“No, no, no — don’t boo, vote,” Obama said. “Vote. Voting is the best revenge.”

This didn’t sit well with Romney, who incorporated it into a speech the same night, also in Ohio.

“Vote for revenge?” Romney said. “Let me tell you what I’d like to tell you: Vote for love of country.”

His running mate Paul Ryan referenced Obama’s “revenge” in a speech on Saturday morning in Ohio as well.

“We don’t believe in revenge, we believe in change, in hope. We actually do!” he said.

In addition to targeting the quote in speeches, the campaign released a new television ad entitled “Revenge Or Love Of Country” on Saturday featuring clips of Obama’s “revenge” moment and Romney’s response.

"Offensensitivity" is what Berke Breathed once called this sort of thing.

FWIW, Obama's unscripted remark seems to be an obvious play off of George Herbert's oft-quoted aphorism, "living well is the best revenge." Anybody who draws that connection will instantly realize how ridiculously off-base this faux offense-taking is.

Man, they're getting desperate. It doesn't really tie into any coherent Romney campaign theme. At best (tactically speaking), it connects to the 'angry black Kenyan anti-colonialist' wingnut theme, and of course it expands by implication on Romney's '47%' theme, suggesting that Obama's legion of moochers and takers hate the rest of us for our success, or something.

But this one is just such a clearly desperate reach that I expect it's more likely to lose him votes than win him any.

I think it connects well with the excellent piece Paula recommended here a few hours ago, that Romney's campaign, like (to varying extents) all GOP campaigns since Nixon, is based on a 'white identity' appeal. How many people can he get to vote for him because they're whites who don't like all those dark-skinned people, and are convinced that they're almost all loafers and moochers, living off of the tax dollars that the rest of us pay?

But as the article suggests, Romney's taking this appeal to the extreme, because he (for good strategic reasons) isn't willing to take the risk of defining himself and his agenda beyond buzzwords.

The article also suggests that the GOP will move away from this appeal when it is no longer demographically tenable, but I'm not seeing that. Bush and Rove were smart enough to see the end of the line coming up for this play, and did their best to bring Hispanics into the fold, but the base wasn't having it.

The GOP's been playing this card since 1968, after all, and the party's aging-white-male base has absorbed it all the way down to their DNA. At its core, this is the "we don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee" party, the party that defines itself by not liking anyone different from them - blacks, Hispanics, hippies, gays and lesbians, bureaucrats, atheists, Muslims, furriners, people who live in San Francisco or NYC, you name it.

And since their use of and dependence on this play has jumped in intensity over the past four years, they can't exactly back off of it at a moment's notice anyway. They are who they are, and will have a tough time becoming something different. They may just be stuck with being the White Resentment Party until most of the people they've indoctrinated over the past nearly half a century die off.

[oddjob]

i know this is how other states think of us, but we sent you nixon and reagan. also, darrel issa. please do not make me say more.

Not to mention Richard Pombo, "B-1 Bob" Dorner, S. I. Hayakawa, and any number of other way out there "conservatives".

[kathy a.]

you don't have to rub it in, oddjob. ;)

[joel hanes]

cathy, oddjob :

to oddjob's list, I'd add Dana Rohrabacher, Buck McKeon, Duke Cunningham ...

But California needn't send so many wingnuts; and some of the blame lies at the feet of the national Democratic Party establishment.

For some reason, the DCCC's Steve "Blue Dog" Israel is unwilling to fund progressive Dem challenges to prominent corrupt Republicans who have strong corporate backing, while corrupt Blue Dog Dems do get DCCC funding.

In CA, Buck McKeon is vulnerable and mired in corruption scandals, but his opponent gets no love from the national Dems. In IL, Tammy Duckworth will have to take out the excrable Joe Walsh without much help from the DCCC. In WI, it's Rob Zerban who's storming the castle of Paul expletive deleted Ryan. For other examples, see Howie Klein's "Down With Tyranny" blog, which has been beating this drum for a year now.

If we want a better Democratic Party, this behavior must change. Write Nancy Pelosi (who chose Steve Israel, and his predecessor Van Hollen) and let her know that you'd like to see the national party help progressive candidates depose the princes of right-wing Republican corruption.

[oddjob]

I've always thought it interesting that while California's famous for its political liberals (& they're most defnitely prominent) when you survey the Republicans the state's elected during the last 30+ years they're often at least as out there on the right as the "out there" California liberals are on the left.

[nancy]

From the 'Meatloaf' ^-^ rally. This man-on-the-ground set of Ohio voter interviews is appalling and so depressing. I only made it about halfway though before I had to 'make it stop'. Try to get to the lady with the silver hair though. She's unforgettable.

[Prup (aka Jim Benton)]

How could anybody forget the Bono Boners and the unfunny Jerry Lewis, not to mention the oldies James Utt and John Schmitz -- the father of Mary Kay LaTourneau, btw -- but I'll have to question Hayakawa, who was much more complex than that -- and a true casualty of the Vietnam Conflict at home. I could go on for a long time, just let me say that a person who, as a Japanese-American wrote a column on jazz for a Chicago Black newspaper, and whose philosophy was based on the error of 'category thinking' etc. was much more complex than his later career indicated. He should have remained a great teacher, instead of becoming an Administrator and politician, two jobs he was totally unsuited for. But his pre-Vietnam work was important and helped keep Republicans away from power for a few extra years -- his textbook was used by the Kennedy Generation in High School.

[Prup (aka Jim Benton)]

That column was during WWII, btw. That's what made it so exceptional -- but Prup's brain farts continue.

[nancy]

Lordy. Bill is riffing at a campaign rally in VA as only he can do. Vocal cords nearing fail.
MSNBC. Hope there is warm water, honey and lemon waiting off-podium.