“The Wrong Right Move”: Terrible News For Mitt Romney
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney campaigns at D’Evelyn High School in Denver, Colorado over the weekend.
Once it became clear that President Obama received a significant bounce from the Democratic National Convention, the next question was whether this bounce would translate to an enduring advantage for his campaign.
On Friday, polls from National Journal and Reason magazine gave Obama a seven-point lead over Mitt Romney, 50–43 and 52–45, respectively. Saturday was a quiet day for national polling, but Sunday saw the release of two tracking polls by Rasmussen and Gallup. Rasmussen was unchanged from the last few days; Romney and Obama remain tied with 46 percent support, though Obama’s job approval has ticked down: 48 percent approve, 50 percent disapprove.
Obama began last week in a similar position with Gallup, but both his approval—and performance against Romney—improved in yesterday’s tracking poll. He now earns 48 percent support to Romney’s 46 percent, and has a job approval rating of 51 percent, with 43 percent disapproval. This morning, a set of national polls from Zogby and Politico/George Washington University show Obama with a decisive lead in the race. The Politico poll finds Obama leading Romney by 3 points among likely voters, 50 percent to 47 percent, while Zogby has Obama up 8, 49 percent to 41 percent.
These results should be considered with polls released last week—from NBC News and the Pew Research Center—that show Obama above 50 percent against Mitt Romney. Relative to his post-convention bounce, Obama’s position has declined, but overall, he’s unquestionably stronger than he was before the conventions. Here is a chart to illustrate the general change over the last three weeks.
As you can see, Obama’s position has sloped downwards since the beginning of last week, but Romney’s has also declined, leaving them in the same rough position.
If there’s an upside for Romney, it’s that Gallup and Rasmussen show a neck-and-neck race. But that’s the extent of the positive news for the former Massachusetts governor. Indeed, if we move our attention to state-level polling, the picture looks even worse for the Republican nominee. In the most critical state for Romney, Florida, his position has deteriorated. Public Policy Polling gives Obama a four-point lead in Florida, while Mason-Dixon puts him ahead by 1 percent. If you’re unwilling to put Florida in the “leans Obama” column—on account of Romney’s one-point lead in Friday’s Purple Strategies survey—then the most you can say is that Florida is a toss-up that tilts in Obama’s favor.
There’s no way in which this isn’t terrible news for Romney. Without Florida’s 29 electoral votes, there is no way for him to reach 270 without winning two states from the “leans Obama” column, like Wisconsin and Michigan. At most, he gets 256 electoral votes—and that’s if he wins every other swing state on the map.
Here’s where Romney stands: He consistently trails Obama, hasn’t held a lead in national polls, and is nearly five points way from the 50-percent mark in most polling averages. His support is collapsing among core demographics like older voters, and he has lost his advantage on the economy. Doubling-down on conservative positions might build enthusiasm among his base, but it won’t help him catch up with Obama; both sides are winning the vast majority of their respective partisans and partisan leaners.
In other words, unless Romney can win undecideds and convert Obama voters, he simply doesn’t have a path to the victory.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, September 24, 2012
“Competing Voices”: Did Rupert Murdoch Throw Fox News Under the Bus?
Rupert Murdoch veered off script this week with some tweets that ran completely counter to the Fox News spin this campaign season. In fact, they undercut the entire political premise at Fox, which is to attack Democrats without question, and to force Republican politicians to champion a truly right-wing agenda. Is there a rift brewing?
It’s true Murdoch has a history of taking stances on issues such as global warming and immigration that are diametrically opposed to the propaganda programming Fox airs. So perhaps this is another example of that.
And some observers might say Murdoch’s candid comments suggest competing voices are welcome within News Corp. I think that’s unlikely though, at least within Roger Ailes’ Fox world where you’re either on the team or off. Remember that in 2008, angry that Murdoch might use his New York Post to endorse Obama after Fox had tagged him a terrorist sympathizer, Ailes reportedly “threw a fit” and threatened to quit. (Murdoch’s Post endorsed McCain instead.)
Did Murdoch’s curious tweets cause similar consternation?
Note this one:
Election: To win Romney must open big tent to sympathetic families. Stop fearing far right which has nowhere else to go. Otherwise no hope.
Murdoch stresses Romney has “no hope” of winning in November if he keeps kowtowing (my word) to the “far right.” Instead, he has to embrace the “big tent.”
Where to begin in describing the lack of self-awareness in that statement? Or is it just shocking hypocrisy in play?
Murdoch owns Fox News, the epicenter of the “far right” in America, and Fox News has been relentlessly urging Republican candidates to wage right-wing battles against Obama. But seven weeks before Election Day, Murdoch now thinks Romney should stop trying to impress the “far right”? He should stop trying to appeal to the Fox News audience?
Urging a “big tent” appeal, Murdoch actually sounds like the Republican strategists who try to win elections for a living (instead of winning cable ratings races) who fretted that the vice presidential selection of Paul Ryan would doom the Romney campaign because of the “extremely unpopular” policies Ryan advocates.
The irony is Murdoch (and Fox News) was among those who all but demanded Ryan be the VP pick, and who then loudly cheered his selection. The pivotal Ryan pick was a perfect example of Romney catering to the “far right” in a way that Murdoch now says is counter productive to the candidate.
Also, it’s a bit baffling the way Murdoch dismissively refers to the “far right,” as if he’s not the most important broadcaster within the “far right,” and as if Fox isn’t the “far right” sun around which the conservative movement orbits every day. There’s a reason New York magazine labeled Ailes “the head of the Republican Party.” And there’s a reason a GOP source told the magazine “You can’t run for the Republican nomination without talking to Roger. Every single candidate has consulted with Roger.”
And note to Rupert: The Republican Party, at the urging of Fox News, eagerly folded its “big tent” years ago.
Here’s another Murdoch tweet from this week that likely produced bewildered looks inside the Fox News green room:
Retrospect; Conventions mixed but net big win for democrats. Michelle O and Clinton the big stars. Bill brilliant, Hillary away until 016.
The proclamation from the Fox News owner that the DNC was a hit last week, and that “big star” Bill Clinton was “brilliant,” must have come as a surprise to Fox talkers who spent last week denigrating the convention and bemoaning Clinton’s flat, “self-indulgent” speech.
In fact, Fox tried for days to deflate the convention by lying about its television ratings, misleading about what Obama said in his acceptance speech, and in general just endlessly bemoaning its very existence. (Fox was simply part of the larger right-wing media crackup over the convention.)
Turns out though, Murdoch thought the whole thing was a “big win for Democrats.”
I don’t know what Murdoch’s long-view strategy is, but in the short-term, by touting the success of the Democratic convention and downplaying the political importance of the “far right,” it sure looks like he’s throwing Fox News under the bus.
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters, September 13, 2012
“The Case Of The Missing Ex-Presidents”: GOP Repudiate’s It’s Past For Sins Against Republicanism
Tom Toles’s typically terrific editorial cartoon in today’s Post highlights a fundamental difference between today’s Democratic and Republican parties: The Democrats welcome their former presidents to their conventions; the Republicans don’t. The reason isn’t just that Bill Clinton is the best campaign speaker since World War II and George W. Bush is far less rhetorically compelling. It’s also that the Democrats are comfortable with their past while today’s Republicans repudiate theirs.
Clinton and Jimmy Carter have been fixtures at Democratic conventions since their presidencies ended, though Carter, whose presidency Democrats, like most Americans, don’t remember all that fondly, is usually trotted out nowhere near prime time. You have to go back all the way to Lyndon Johnson to find a Democratic ex-president who wasn’t included in convention proceedings: In 1972 (the only convention that occurred while Johnson was out of office and still alive), the debates over the Vietnam War, like the war itself, were still raging, and Johnson’s appearance would have proved hugely divisive at the convention that nominated George McGovern.
But what sins against Republicanism did today’s two Republican ex-presidents, George H.W. Bush and his son George W., commit? Both were mainstream Republicans of their times. Papa Bush presided over the death of Soviet Communism, and even if he wasn’t really responsible for its demise, you’d think that would be worth at least an appearance. But then, Papa Bush also raised taxes, which appears to have cast him into an ideological wasteland for today’s anti-tax Republicans.
As for the son, he promoted and signed into law massive tax cuts for the rich and did nothing to rein in the banks even as they did everything they could to magnify the risk they posed to themselves and everybody else. In other words, he followed Republican economic doctrine to the letter. He chose to wage a war of choice in Iraq, a war also sought by his party’s neo-conservatives. You might think that the fact that each of these policies ended in disaster would be reason enough for the Republicans not to invite W., but for the fact that these are still the policies that the party embraces (tax cuts for the rich, repeal of Dodd-Frank and attacking Obama for not doing more in Syria).
Bush’s banishing looks more like a case of ideological deviation than real-world catastrophe. He supported a path to legalization for illegal immigrants. He expanded Medicare to include a prescription drug benefit. (Obamacare, which the Republicans universally vow to repeal, provided more funding for that benefit.)
In other words, what’s wrong with the Bushes is the same thing that was wrong with Senators Richard Lugar and Robert Bennett, longtime party stalwarts whose routine bids for renomination were denied by Republican primary and caucus voters: they haven’t kept up with the party’s race to the right. The GOP base has banished the previous generation of Republican leaders for their lack of revolutionary zeal.
The tea partyization of the GOP has a lot in common with a sustained revolution, such as, to cite the paradigmatic example, that in France, where the Marats and Dantons, yesterday’s leaders, were cast aside for and by the even more zealous Robespierre and his ilk. The Republicans are Jacobins, and Jacobins don’t invite their old presidents back. When you’ve moved as far to the extremes as today’s GOP, even your own former leaders are the ancien regime.
By: Harold Meyerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 6, 2012
“The Advanced Class”: The Democrats’ Government Tutorial
Bill Clinton is typically described as the empathetic, feel-your-pain guy. But his greatest political skill may be as a formulator of arguments — the explainer in chief. And it’s no accident that the former president’s role in this year’s Democratic convention is very nearly as important as President Obama’s. What’s most striking about this conclave is that it bids to be a three-day tutorial session aimed at aggressively defending a view of government and the economy for which, over most of the past 40 years, Democrats have usually apologized.
It’s ironic that the 42nd president plays the co-professor with Obama in this advanced government class, for Clinton is associated with a determined effort to distance his party from its past. When Clinton pronounced in 1996 that “the era of big government is over,” it was taken as a concession to the new conservatism that swept to control of Congress just over a year earlier.
But Clinton’s rhetorical move was more tactical than fundamental. He never stopped believing in the power of government. And now that Republicans are putting forward the most emphatically pro-business, anti-government agenda on offer since the Gilded Age, he and his fellow Democrats now feel an urgency to assert the state’s positive role. The economic market, they insist, cannot deliver what the nation needs all by itself.
Thus, one of the most applauded lines of the convention’s first night came from Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick: “It’s time for Democrats to grow a backbone, and stand up for what we believe.” Rarely has a party so fully embraced a declaration that implied its own past spinelessness. Speaker after speaker answered Patrick’s call.
While Michelle Obama’s speech,the performance of her life, was apolitical on the surface, it regularly came back to arguing, subtly and implicitly, that hardworking Americans who start out on the social ladder’s lower rungs can be assisted in their struggles by the e
empowering hand of government.In his keynote address, San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro was explicit about this: “We know that you can’t be pro-business unless you’re pro-education,” he said. “We know that pre-K and student loans aren’t charity.”
Over and over, government was presented not as an officious intermeddler in people’s lives but as an ally of families determined to help their children to rise.And there lay the other stark contrast between the Tampa Republicans and the Charlotte Democrats. The Republicans built their whole convention around an out-of-context quotation from the president (“You didn’t build that”) and offered as their counter-theme, “We built it.”But so often, as a friend pointed out, the message of Tampa came off more as: “We own it.” Working people and the dignity of labor receded almost entirely at a gathering whose real stars were investors, entrepreneurs and business leaders on whom others are dependent for employment. Pride arose less from hard work than from the ability to deploy capital.
Democrats are no less committed to the American dream, but their dream is built on individual and family struggle. While Republicans cast themselves as the party of “family values,” Democrats here spoke far more about upward mobility as a family enterprise.
Thus Michelle Obama’s description of her father as a man whose “measure of his success in life” came from “being able to earn a decent living that allowed him to support his family.”
Thus Castro’s definition of the American dream as “not a sprint, or even a marathon, but a relay.” He explained that “each generation passes on to the next the fruits of their labor.”
Democrats know that even if they convince a majority that Barack Obama’s approach to government is closer than Romney’s to their own, they still carry the burden of high unemployment. That’s the value of Bill Clinton’s witness. Many wavering voters remember the Clinton years as an all-too-brief journey through the economic promised land and will pay close attention to his stamp of approval on Obama’s way forward.
But Democrats are also aware that victory depends on encouraging voters to see Romney’s policies as a throwback — not only to the George W. Bush years but also to the rough-and-tumble economics of the pre-New Deal Era, to a time when capital decisively held the upper hand over labor. Their three-day seminar was designed to show, as Lilly Ledbetter of Fair Pay Act fame suggested, that Obama understands why an extra 23 cents an hour in a paycheck matters more to most voters than does a capital gains tax cut.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 5, 2012
“Michelle For The Win”: A Common American Experience
Michelle Obama’s singular mission last night was to convince Americans that she and the president deeply understand the real challenges facing Americans today, and she aced it. With a relaxed grace that wowed the convention hall, she spoke in personal terms of a common American experience and voiced a deep belief that a shared connection allows her husband to fight for all of us, but especially the women. Against a backdrop of the GOP assault on women’s rights and an economic recession disproportionately affecting women, her words offered a handhold for the slipping hope that ran rampant just four years ago.
While she never mentioned either Romney by name, the obvious juxtaposition of the couples’ lives and core beliefs was woven silently into anecdotes and stated principles throughout the speech. The emotion in her voice was audible as Michelle recounted watching her father struggle to dress himself every morning for his physically demanding job at the water plant. The family needed the money despite his progressive multiple sclerosis. The painted image automatically conjured up a comparison with Ann Romney’s idyllic upbringing as the privileged daughter of a small town mayor.
When Michelle relayed the constant worry of her parents as they scraped and sacrified to afford the small portion of college tuition not covered by federal grants and loans, we were remided of Ann Romney’s description of how tough it was to live off of Mitt’s stock portfolio while they were newleyweds in college. Working moms around the country chuckled with camaraderie when Michelle said date night for her and Barack as parents was dinner or a movie because “as an exhausted mom, I couldn’t stay awake for both.” Ann Romney’s full-time mothering was no doubt exhausting, they must have been silently musing, but since she didn’t have to juggle a job as well, she might have gotten both dinner and a movie. And in a final blow, Michelle deftly but gently cut the heart out of of the GOP narrative and Mitt Romney’s top selling point when she said softly that for Barack “success isn’t about how much money you make, it’s about the difference you make in people’s lives.”
While Michelle was the main event, the entire evening was a veritable paean to the women voters this campaign needs to win. If the convention stage was the floor of the House, what are commonly referred to as “women’s issues” would be front and center in a Democratic offensive to rebuild the middle class and own the principles of equality and justice.
With female leaders of labor, government and health advocacy speaking all night long, the crowd was primed as the evening wore on. The men also paid homage to the women who got them to the stage, and pledged to fight for a better future for everyone’s daughters. Julian Castro, the young mayor from San Antonio, delivered a standout performance based largely on his life story of being raised by his mother and grandmother. It was a moving nod to the immigrant experience being made possible by strong women.
By the time Lilly Ledbetter took the stage, the crowd erupted in a frenzy something like teenage fans at a Jonas Brothers concert. The notorious blond grandmother from Alabama sued all the way to the Supreme Court after discovering male counterparts at her tire factory earned more than she did. Smart and sassy, Ledbetter summed up the real-life impact of a twenty-three cent pay gap: the ability to take the family to the occasional movie and still have pennies left over for the college savings account. Ledbetter scored one of the best responses of the night when she mused: “Maybe twenty-three cents doesn’t sound like much for someone with a Swiss Bank account….”
Women across the board say that economic concerns are top of list to get their vote, but nine out of ten say it is critical a candidate understand women. “Understanding women,” I heard consistently as I wandered the hall, means not making abortion and jobs separate issues. With two income households a necessity and reproductive health central to economic security, convention promises will remain just those until—in the words of one older male delegate from New Hampshire—“we stop talking about these as women’s issues. They are economic issues and family issues.”
The women at the convention are fiercely defensive of their president. One Virginia delegate told me with an evangelical zeal that “people forget the patient was bleeding. Our country was on the ER table and losing life fast. Now, the bleeding has stopped and the healing can begin.” Women effortlessly list Obama’s accomplishments on healthcare, on choice, on financial reform. They sing his praises as a father and a husband. And they organize like people with the threat of a Romney/Ryan presidency hanging over their heads.
But even on this night of homage to women, the wage gap wasn’t the only one on display. The women’s Congressional delegation lined up behind Nancy Peolsi as she spoke from the stage appeared appallingly sparse. Though not every member was meant to be accounted for, the image is a graphic reminder that women still only make up 17 percent of federal elected positions. Those numbers qualifies the United States for a spot at seventy-third place in the world for female representation in government, tied with Turkmenistan. A delegate from Colorado told me conspiratorially that there’s always a fight with local party leaders to get money to women candidates in enough time to make a difference in viability.
While the Ledbetter Act has become the president’s signature legislation with women, there is widespread frustration that the Paycheck Fairness Act still languishes in Congress, even if most of that rancor is reserved for the GOP. And one African-American delegate from Nevada fervently wished aloud that the president and Democrats would just speak up about the fact that the wage gap is far higher for women of color than white women. “Painting over the race part of inequality doesn’t help,” she said of her work to get other women of color involved in the campaign.
Kathleen Sebelius’s concise summation of the real time impact on women’s lives from Obamacare was impressive in content and delivery. But no speech provided a genuine analysis of why we are losing substantial ground on reproductive choice, most of them instead settling for the easy win against the GOP villain. Governor Deval Patrick’s rousing line about Democrats’ much-needed pivot to offense requiring more spine met with genuine, if surprised, appreciation. But with no stated solutions on how to stop the war on women other than to re-elect Obama, that offensive still looks daunting. Women haven’t forgotten that the Stupak amendment restricting federal funds from going towards abortion happened on the Democrats’ watch. “It’s not a matter of blame,” one woman from Illinois explained, “it’s a matter of strategy.”
But none of that was top of mind tonight as Michelle took the stage. She connected beautifully with almost every woman in the room while she spoke of her daughters, her concern for their future and her primary role as Mom-in-Chief. The distance yet to travel was most evident in what she didn’t say. Her own success as a lawyer, a dean at the University of Chicago and a hospital administrator was notable in its absence. Her impressive professional biography would have to wait another cycle for the political culture to catch up with reality. Meanwhile, she more than fulfilled her core job as first lady, which is to remind us of her husband’s humanity, his dedication and her abiding belief in his ability to continue to lead this country forward. And we believe her. Because while Ann Romney shouted out last week in Tampa, “I love you women,” Michelle Obama is one of us women.
By: Ilyse Hogue, The Nation, September 5, 2012
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