The Day After

This is the thought that keeps running through my mind - if this incumbent, with this record, running this campaign, can beat this challenger, what is America in 2012?  And what hope is there for ever returning to a society of individual rights and strong economic growth?

It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces...

- Abraham Lincoln

But that seems to be what we've come to.  I keep thinking about the arguments of the slave-holders, that their system was in fact a kindness, more humane than the free labor system of the north, because their slaves had free food and housing and social security.

I went to bed last night, long before it was all called, because it started trending badly early, and I knew that I needed to get some sleep, and I wouldn't otherwise.  Slept until about four, woke to the depressing, but at that point not unexpected, news that we have four more years of Barack Obama to look forward to. I haven't read the returns, don't know what happened, or where, and frankly, don't much care.  I know that Scott Brown lost.  I know that rugged individualist "Live Free Or Die" New Hampshire has given up the ghost and become MA north politically.

Horrified by what's happened the last four years.  Terrified by what's to come in the next four.

One of the things that's coming soon, has probably already started, is the recriminations from those who didn't support Romney in the primary against those who did.  Let me just say this - the idea that another one of those candidates, be it Gingrich or Santorum or Perry or whoever, would have run a better campaign, or come closer to winning, strikes me as extremely far-fetched.

And this is not time for recriminations, because this is not a campaign failure or a candidate failure.  This is a system failure, and we need to figure out how to fix it.  Things are going to get worse before they get better, but if just letting them get worse until everyone sees how bad they are is the cure to the political problems, we're never going to get them fixed.

"Midnight in Manchester"

Great, great piece from Robert Costa on Romney's last campaign event before election day...

It’s past midnight in Manchester, and they’re hopeful. So is Romney. “The president was right when he said he can’t change Washington from the inside, only from the outside,” Romney says near the end. “Let’s give him that chance!”

As the crowd rises for the last time, Romney begins to slow his words. “This is much more than our moment; it’s America’s moment,” he says. “We’re almost home. One final push, and we’ll get there. We’ve known many long days and short nights and now we’re close. The door to a brighter future is there. It’s open. It’s waiting for us.”

Romney begins to hit his right hand on the podium, emphasizing every word. “Walk with me,” he pleads. “Walk together.” A second later, he backs away and waves. As he bends down and dips arms into the crowd, grasping shoulders and outstretched hands, “Born Free” plays for one final late-night spin.

Read it all...

"Data the Romney Campaign is Looking At"

Rich Lowry has a slew of tea leaves that the Romney camp are apparently reading, and they're all positive. Truth or spin? Probably some of each.

Offered anyway...

"An Admirable Candidate and Man"

Win or lose (and I still expect "win"), this is worth saying.

Victor Davis Hanson:

But whatever the verdict, conservatives can appreciate the way Romney conducted himself throughout the campaign. If one reviews the primaries, it is hard to imagine that the other rival candidates would have done as well as Romney has the last eight months. He ran against overwhelming odds that might have stymied others — a biased, sometimes vicious media, the Candy Crowley debacle, suspect polls that sought to create Obama momentum as much as sample voters, incumbency, and a $1 billion negative ad-based Obama campaign that sought to portray him as a near-felon and veritable killer of the innocent.

Through it all, he worked incredibly hard, blew the supposedly mellifluous Obama away in the first debate, and appeared far more presidential than the incumbent in the second and third.

I agree entirely...

Franchise exercised

Down to the polling place, this morning, waiting in line for the door to answer.  Eighteen year old daughter voting for the first time.  (So is the nineteen year old son, who is in the service and stationed out of state, so voted absentee two weeks ago.)  My wife fed the first ballots into the machine.

The first three votes cast in my precinct went to Mitt Romney for President, and for Scott Brown for the US Senate. 

I doubt that either will win that precinct, but there it is...

Election day

A couple of thoughts as we head to the polls...

• If the electorate is as Democratic as it was in 2008, Barack Obama will win a second term.  Many of the polls are suggesting that that will be the case.
• I can't believe it.
• Either way, I'm more than ready for it to be over.
• We really have two different electorates in this country, with very different assumptions and expectations.  Someone is going to be not only disappointed, but shocked tomorrow morning.  Certainly, there are many on the right who have looked at all of the data and really believe that Romney will win.  And I get the impression that many of Obama's supporters have not even considered that possibility.
• The polls cannot all be right.  Maybe none of them are.  But for the past month, or more, they've been telling two different stories.  With the topline results, they've been saying that it's a very tight race, with Romney possibly slightly ahead in the popular vote and Obama clearly ahead in the electoral college vote.  But the internals have suggested that Romney has a huge lead with independent voters.  Those two stories are only reconcilable if there is a massive majority of people voting who claim to be Democrats, a bigger Democrat majority than we actually saw in 2008.  Given what's happened since then, how likely is that?  Well, it's obviously preposterous.  
• And, as much as I hate - hate! - to be in the position of arguing that the polls are wrong (I'd much rather my candidate had a big lead than to be arguing that the polls are wrong, which feels like sophistry and rationalization [and the next time I engage in either of those won't be the first]), there's another part of it.  The response rate on political polls is actually down to 9%.  That is, for every 100 houses or phone numbers that a pollster chooses as part of its sample, it ends up with just 9 valid responses.  Even if they are doing a perfect job of choosing their initial dataset, there's just no way of knowing how representative of the actual electorate the final response set is.  They've got all kinds of techniques and data to weight the results, but all of the results rest on assumptions that may or may not be true.  Are there some kinds of voters who are more likely to be missed?  Are the 6% that the pollsters reach that won't answer the questions more likely to support one candidate than the other?
• There's a possibility that Obama's Sandy-related photo-ops actually changed the trajectory of this campaign.  In which case, his re-election would qualify as an act of God, because there's nothing he could have done to change it on his own.
• My emotional investment is more than adequate evidence for me that the Federal Government is far too big and obtrusive. If the Federal Government were kept within its Constitutional boundaries, the average citizen should have little to no contact with it from year to year.  Instead, it is a constant, overwhelming presence, influencing all that we see and do.

I've been hesitant to make a prediction.  Yes, I've been telling people for months that I expected Romney to win an election that ended up being not particularly close.  But I'm so emotionally invested that it's difficult for me to tell where the analysis ends and the wishful thinking begins. 

But here it is anyway...

Romney wins the popular vote 51-48.  And the electoral college vote 315-223.

Romney states that are likeliest to be lost if Obama wins:  OH, PA, WI, IA
Obama states that are likeliest to be won if there's a Romney landslide:  MI, MN, NV, OR

Predictable History, Unpredictable Past

This Associated Press story suggests that the campaign is Too Close To Call

As the 2012 presidential campaign moves to a close, national polls say the race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is too close to call.

Romney's big lead over Obama from last summer is gone as the hard-fought battle has tightened over the past three months, following the pattern of presidential contests in years gone by.

As more and more Americans focus on the decision of which level ro pull tomorrow, the polls also say Obama's hopes may be damaged because many of those who support him may not vote.

The original watershed mark for the final round of polls was the nationally televised debate between Romney and Obama last month. But late-breaking developments regarding the Americans killed in Libya, or the Americans without power and heat due to Hurricane Sandy could make recent poll results quickly obsolete.
...
While the polls seem to have different results, in fact, the differences are all smaller than the error margins to which all polls are subject. This means that the polls cannot be said to put either man in the solid position as the frontrunner.

In addition, the close race spotlights the unique system of picking a president - the election is decided by who wins the most electoral votes, which are awarded sate-by-state. It is possible in a close race that a candidate could win the most populate votes nationwide and still lose the electoral vote to his or her opponent.

Of course, every election is decided by who actually goes to vote. But the polls this year demonstrate that the issue of turnout is ever more critical than ever. For example, among registered voters, the Pew Research poll put the race at Obama 49% and Romney 42%. But when the results were weighted to reflect possible turnout, their results were Romney 47% and Obama 50%.

Ok, that's not exactly what it said. To see exactly what it said, you need to replace 2012 with 1980, Obama with Carter, and Romney with Reagan. It wasn't published today - it was published on the day before the 1980 election. The day before Ronald Reagan won 50.7% of the vote vs. Jimmy Carter's 41% (John Anderson took 10%). The day before Reagan won 489 electoral votes.

Too close to call...

"Obama unworthy commander-in-chief"

I think it's fair to say that the editors of the Las Vegas Review-Journal have left no room for misinterpretation in their endorsement of Mitt Romney. More specifically, in their passionate endorsement of the end of the Presidency of Barack Obama.

This administration is an embarrassment on foreign policy and incompetent at best on the economy - though a more careful analysis shows what can only be a perverse and willful attempt to destroy our prosperity. Back in January 2008, Barack Obama told the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle that under his cap-and-trade plan, "If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can. It's just that it will bankrupt them." He added, "Under my plan ... electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket." It was also in 2008 that Mr. Obama's future Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, famously said it would be necessary to "figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe" - $9 a gallon.

Yet the president now claims he's in favor of oil development and pipelines, taking credit for increased oil production on private lands where he's powerless to block it, after he halted the Keystone XL Pipeline and oversaw a 50 percent reduction in oil leases on public lands.

These behaviors go far beyond "spin." They amount to a pack of lies. To return to office a narcissistic amateur who seeks to ride this nation's economy and international esteem to oblivion, like Slim Pickens riding the nuclear bomb to its target at the end of the movie "Dr. Strangelove," would be disastrous.

Candidate Obama said if he couldn't fix the economy in four years, his would be a one-term presidency.

Mitt Romney is moral, capable and responsible man. Just this once, it's time to hold Barack Obama to his word. Maybe we can all do something about that, come Tuesday.

I can't honestly say that I've never seen anything like that, because that's not an uncommon level of vitriol for internet commentary. But it's quite something to see from a major newspaper.

I don't disagree with a word of it, of course...

Secretary Of Business

Another effective ad from Team Romney...

"Five Days" to go...

Five Days

"Here comes the landslide"

Dick Morris is even more optimistic than I am...

Voters have figured out that President Obama has no message, no agenda and not even much of an explanation for what he has done over the past four years. His campaign is based entirely on persuading people that Mitt Romney is a uniquely bad man, entirely dedicated to the rich, ignorant of the problems of the average person. As long as he could run his negative ads, the campaign at least kept voters away from the Romney bandwagon. But once we all met Mitt Romney for three 90-minute debates, we got to know him — and to like him. He was not the monster Obama depicted, but a reasonable person for whom we could vote.

As we stripped away Obama’s yearlong campaign of vilification, all the president offered us was more servings of negative ads — ads we had already dismissed as not credible. He kept doing the same thing even as it stopped working.

The result was that the presidential race reached a tipping point...

He addresses the Senate races and comes to the conclusion that the Republicans will take back the Senate. As I say, he's more optimistic than I am. But I said that Romney would win this election two years ago, and I've continued to say so...

It's Time To Vote

The Romney campaign has done some good videos this year. Here's another...

What, exactly, are the "major issues of the day," Mr. Brooks?

This is the kind of thing that NY Times token "conservative" David Brooks does that makes so many conservatives detest him. From a conversation - a lament about how much better conservatives used to be - with Judy Woodruff and Mark Shields on PBS’s “NewsHour:"

“I went back. I said, ‘Am I imagining the way old campaigns used to be?’” Brooks said. “I went back and looked at some of the 1980 speeches, or the debates, Jimmy Carter versus Ronald Reagan. They actually were talking about the major issues of the day, the Soviet Union, and inflation and stagflation. If you look at the major issues of the day, well, widening inequality — well, that has not really been talked about. Wage stagnation that has barely been talked about, global warming — you go down the list of the big issues of the day, and this campaign I think more even than real-life campaigns, it’s not imagining some campaign, even more than recent campaigns, has ignored a lot of those issues.”

If you want to make the case that President Birth Control-Big Bird-Binders-and-Bayonets has neglected the "major issues of the day," well, yeah. That's true. But if you want to make the case that global warming is one of the major issues of the day, I suspect that you'd find a lot of dissenters. As to anything economic in nature - including "widening inequality" and "wage stagnation," well, those are a function of the sad state of the American economy. They are completely inseparable from discussion of the unemployment rate, the deficit, the debt, the tax code, the looming entitlement crisis - you know, all of the things that Mitt Romney has been talking about every day for the past year.

Has one of the campaigns "ignored a lot of" the major issues of the day? Sure. But they haven't both ignored them. This is the kind of false equivalence that's infuriating. And it's the kind of thing that tells conservatives that David Brooks is not one of them...

Peggy Noonan - wrong again...

The October 3 debate in Denver, between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, was the seminal moment of this campaign. And Peggy Noonan, in her analysis, gets what happened there exactly backwards.

Why was the first debate so toxic for the president? Because the one thing he couldn't do if he was going to win the election is let all the pent-up resentment toward him erupt. Americans had gotten used to him as The President. Whatever his policy choices, whatever general direction he seemed to put in place he was The President, a man who had gotten there through natural gifts and what all politicians need, good fortune.

What he couldn't do was present himself, when everyone was looking, as smaller than you thought. Petulant, put upon, above it all, full of himself. He couldn't afford to make himself look less impressive than the challenger in terms of command, grasp of facts, size.

But that's what he did.

What happened in Denver had nothing to do with Barack Obama. It was never going to be - he's been the President for four years, with all of his speeches and actions, and their consequences. People's feelings about Obama and the job he's done are essentially set, not to be significantly changed by one more 90 minute television appearance. No, the debate was all about Mitt Romney.

The Obama campaign, recognizing that things are not going well, has spent the last year attempting to define Mitt Romney in such a way as to render him unacceptable to the majority of voters. The impact of Denver did not come from Obama's behavior, but from Romney's. In one night, he destroyed the caricature that the Obama campaign had spent a year building.

The threat to Obama's re-election was never the President's behavior. It was always the bad economy and an acceptable alternative. Mitt Romney's performance in Denver told the American people that there was not only an acceptable alternative, but one who knew how to deal with the bad economy. Obama's behavior - "petulant, put upon, above it all, full of himself" - didn't really show until the next two debates. And it's behavior that he's been demonstrating for his entire time on the public stage. The difference in Denver was that there was a contrast for everyone to see.

Some editor obviously screwed up...

It's trite and cliche to suggest that the press in this country favors the Democrats over the Republicans by a wide margin. Trite and cliche and true. And one of the ways in which that favoritism sometimes shows itself is through the art of juxtaposition - two superficially similar images side by side, with the Democrat beaming and the Republican scowling.

Years of that make this morning's edition of The Des Moines Register frankly shocking.

You can't buy that kind of publicity...

American Crossroads: "At Stake"

Clint's back, and there's nothing subtle - or amusing - about this one.

The Clear Path

Mitt Romney's close:



It works.

New Romney Ad - Apology Tour

Apology Tour



Yeah, that works...

The Final Debate

As I've been saying...

Yuval Levin:

It was absolutely clear that both candidates understood that this debate was entirely about Mitt Romney. Romney’s only goal was to seem presidential, and Obama’s only goal was to make Romney seem not presidential. By that measure, Romney clearly achieved his aim and Obama clearly did not. Romney did this by treating this debate very differently than the other two. He didn’t really try to score points, and he wasn’t afraid to express agreement with Obama, which he did remarkably often. His goal was to answer every question with a calm, responsible attitude and convey sobriety and level-headedness. The calculation must have been pretty simple: voters are not greatly concerned with foreign policy this year, but they wouldn’t elect someone they don’t trust on foreign policy. So having clearly conveyed his differences with Obama on domestic issues and his own domestic agenda, Romney merely needed to be a plausible commander in chief—to convey deep knowledge and the right attitude, to avoid getting rattled, to deny Obama the chance to label him a war monger or an amateur, and to waive off attacks on himself by returning to his core domestic message and reminding voters that the president is running on nothing.

Yup.

And Romney did not lose, so he won. Whether it was a tactical victory or not, it was clearly a strategic victory. The race is going Romney's way - has been since the first debate - and nothing that happened last night, or in the second debate, or in the VP debate, changed that.

Presidential Debate 3

My live twitter stream (with a few morning-after thoughts interspersed)...

I repeat what I said before 2nd debate - Romney can hurt himself, but Obama can't help himself.

The only question tonight - is Mitt Romney a credible President?

1980s-1950s-1920s line was good. Wrong, but good. Romney needs a response.

Russia is a geo-political foe. 100% correct.

Not going to give Mr. Putin "more flexibility after the election." Instead, more backbone. Good.

[Morning after - This was a great sequence for Mitt, and a great line. But how many people are aware of the "flexibility" quote? It may be one of those lines that should draw blood, but doesn't, because the target audience doesn't recognize the reference. That's not something the mainstream press played up - after all, Obama's not a Republican.]

Saying Assad has to go... And that's accomplished what, exactly? Right, exactly nothing...

Does Obama really want to go back to Libya? Is Romney going to let him get away with that?

[Morning after - And the answer is, "yes, Romney let him get away with that." Clearly, the strategy for the evening was not to get confrontational on Libya. Whether to avoid another dose of indignant protestations of virtue from the President or for some other reason, I do not know.]

"Our debt is is the biggest national security threat we face..."

"America is stronger now than when I came in to office." What the hell are you talking about?

Math teachers. One of the men on that stage needed math teachers at some point. Or better ones, at the very least...

Obama: "Hey, have you heard that Romney's proposing $5 trillion in tax cuts for the rich?"

Fewer ships...also fewer horse and bayonets... Really? The President of the US thinks that sarcastic snark is a legitimate argument?

[Morning after - some people liked that sequence from the President, thinking that it was a reasonable analogy, because technology has changed. I thought it was a dreadful (and clearly scripted) line and that it made him look very bad as he delivered it, but maybe not...] 

15 more minutes without a collapse, and Romney wins the election.

Romney's comments on the auto industry in 2008. Romney right, Obama wrong. Or lying. Or both...[Romney's 2008 NYT Editorial about the auto industry]

[Morning after - The President has made this accusation in two debates, and the VP made it in his debate, and it's a blatant lie. Not a misstatement, not a mis-representation, a blatant lie. And the four fact-checkers of the apocalypse are apparently too busy attempting to pin down Paul Ryan's marathon time to pay any attention to it.

You know, if we had taken your advice, Governor Romney, about our auto industry, we'd be buying cars from China instead of selling cars to China...You were very clear that you would not provide government assistance to the U.S. auto companies even if they went through bankruptcy.

- Barack Obama, last night

The American auto industry is vital to our national interest as an employer and as a hub for manufacturing. A managed bankruptcy may be the only path to the fundamental restructuring the industry needs. It would permit the companies to shed excess labor, pension and real estate costs. The federal government should provide guarantees for post-bankruptcy financing and assure car buyers that their warranties are not at risk.

- Mitt Romney, 2008

OK? The President is lying.]

The verdict? Good enough. Basically a draw on the evening, which is all that Romney (the next POTUS) needed...

Like Lehrer in the 1st, Schieffer let the candidates debate. That's a plus for the voters.

Obama's performance tonight didn't do anything at all to break Romney's increasing momentum.

romney looks/sounds like a president

RichLowry

Obama took more time than Romney. Again. Democrats get more time in each of the four debates...

Romney finished stronger than he started.

Chris Wallace fact-checks Obama on Iraqi status of forces agreement: Romney was right.

McCormackJohn

Romney demonstrated that he is Presidential in every way.

jack_welch

Krauthammer: I think it's unequivocal: Romney won, not just tactically but strategically.

McCormackJohn

Will media call Obama on lying - again - about Romney's position on the auto-industry bailout?

If Romney's tied or leading coming in, as seems likely, with the momentum, does tonight change that? No. Ergo Romney win.