Victory has a thousand fathers, as John F. Kennedy observed, but defeat has two mommies. Every state that has cast a ballot on the question has voted against same-sex marriage, including three socially liberal ones (California, Maine and Oregon). North Carolina, which Obama carried in 2008, did so just this week by a vote of 61% to 39%…
The Democratic coalition depends on overwhelming support from blacks and strong support from Hispanics. Blacks and Hispanics alike are less apt than whites to support same-sex marriage. When California passed Proposition 8 in 2008, exit polls showed it had the support of 70% of blacks, 53% of Latinos and only 49% of whites…
Exit polls show that in 2004, blacks constituted 11% of the presidential electorate. In 2008 that figure rose to 13%. Blacks supported John Kerry over George W. Bush by 88% to 11% and Obama over John McCain by 95% to 4%.
That would mean Kerry got approximately 11.8 million black votes to Bush’s 1.5 million, while Obama got 16.2 million to McCain’s 0.6 million. Kerry’s margin among black voters was 10.3 million, Obama’s 15.6 million, an improvement of some 5.3 million, more than half his overall 9.5 million margin.
Extrapolating the California Prop 8 results nationally, around 11 million African Americans who voted for Obama in 2008 disagree with his position on gay marriage. Maybe that’s irrelevant to what happens in 2012, but that’s hard to believe.
“I always enjoyed his pranks,” said Stu White, a popular friend of Romney’s who went on to a career as a public school teacher and has long been bothered by the Lauber incident.
How the story appears now:
“I always enjoyed his pranks,” said Stu White, a popular friend of Romney’s who went on to a career as a public school teacher and said he has been “disturbed” by the Lauber incident since hearing about it several weeks ago
While the Post reports White as having “long been bothered” by the haircutting incident,” he told ABC News he was not present for the prank, in which Romney is said to have forcefully cut a student’s long hair and was not aware of it until this year when he was contacted by the Washington Post.
The Washington Post did not acknowledge a “correction” to the story. Freud said it best: “If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” They wanted to beef up the “hit” in their hit piece, and they couldn’t resist going too far.
We’re sure it’s merely a coincidence that this extensively researched piece about Mitt Romney in 1965 appeared the day after this. It’s Jsnuary 7 all over again.
You think that Democrats around the country are going to win — as I hear time and time again from people on the street. Democratic fundraisers, activists, supporters, and even politicians alike have somehow collectively lapsed into the sentiment that the president is going to be reelected and that we have a good shot to take the House back while holding the Senate. I am hearing the garbage that Democratic donors are telling Democratic fundraisers…”Obama has it in the bag”…
I know what you are going to say, “Look at Mitt Romney, look how pathetic he is…” Actually pathetic is a kind word for Romney and this campaign. Mitt Romney is to presidential campaigns as the Delta House grade point average was to Faber College — the worst in history. I mean, my God
We think the confidence that Carville describes comes from the fact that the Democrats he discusses have bought the various negative GOP narratives of the media hook, line and sinker. From the WOW to Zimmerman and all the rest. Republicans are just such awful people. Who’d ever vote for one of them?
The problem with that is the numbers. 2010 happened, and all the ignoring of that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. The President’s approval is in the low 40′s among likely voters. Undecideds aren’t really undecided, they’re anti-incumbent. The Jacksonian Democrats have gone. And finally there’s the enthusiasm factor, which seems to us to favor the GOP at this point.
None of this means events can’t change the course of the election. Our point is different: if there is a large Romney victory and a GOP rout that is shocking news to Carville’s Democrats above, it’s largely the media that are at fault. They have created a comfortable bubble that does not conform to reality. Maybe they’ll stop doing stupid things like polling “adults” and using sample bias to create results they like. Dream on. As they did in 2010, they’ll probably blame “public ignorance” and accuse voters of far worse motivations.
a study of the undecided voters in the past eight elections in which incumbents sought a second term as president reveals that only Bush-43 gained any of the undecided vote. Johnson in ’64, Nixon in ’72, Ford in ’76, Carter in ’80, Reagan in ’84, Bush in ’92 and Clinton in ’96 all failed to pick up a single undecided vote.
John Kerry came very close to taking Ohio and winning the election in 2004. Democrat turnout was up 7% over 2000; the problems was that GOP turnout was up 19% in that year. Hard to see a replay of that this year.
What the heck is going on with the latest curveball from the re-election team in Chicago? Distract, distort, motivate the base? A plan not particularly well executed, in our opinion, but they have to go with what they’ve got. Our guess is that this latest escapade is about the youth vote. At least he made it classy:
I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I talked to friends and family and neighbors, when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together; when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf
As for the youth vote angle, here’s a reference. (And there’s always the issue of money.) It’s as though the team in Chicago slices and dices polling data in order to serve little inducements to elements of the base — but in doing so, seems to ignore the second order effects of such action. They certainly seem to have been taken by surprise by the blowback.
and gave her campaign 40 whacks. Talk about karma. (BTW, there’s a recent video of the Chad Mitchell Trio singing the song in front of the couch where Lizzie offed papa.)
When a guy in jail in Texas gets over 40% of the Democrat vote for president in the West Virginia primary and carries 10 counties, you’ve got a problem. We said recently that the election doesn’t seem close at the moment, no matter what the polls say, and Tuesday’s results tend to confirm that. There’s an 800 pound gorilla in the room, and no amount of spinning and misdirection can make the people ignore him.
Bloomberg reports on statements by Greece’s Syriza party leader Alexis Tsipras, who is charged with forming a government:
“The bailout parties no longer have a majority in parliament to vote for measures that plunder the country,” Tsipras told reporters in Athens today after receiving the coalition-building mandate from President Karolos Papoulias. “There will be no 11 billion euros ($14 billion) of additional austerity measures; 150,000 jobs will not be cut.”
Political wrangling after the inconclusive May 6 election has reignited European concerns over Greece’s ability to hold to the terms of a second, 130 billion-euro rescue. Parliament is split down the middle on the two bailout deals negotiated since May 2010, as the country at the epicenter of the debt crisis again risks exit from the euro. Greek stocks sank to their lowest level in about two decades
Bloomberg characterized the elections as “inconclusive,” which seems to imply that after some harsh rhetoric, things will settle down and the bailouts and austerity will proceed. That seems incorrect to us. As we noted the other day, the two major political parties have gotten no less than 77-90% of the vote between them. Now it’s down to about a third. If that’s not a thorough repudiation of business-as-usual, we don’t know what is.
The elections were of course inconclusive in the sense that the pro-bailout parties failed to win a majority and so another election is scheduled probably for June 17. Tsipras also called for nationalizing Greek banks. Expect fireworks.
“Now we face a choice,” the president intoned. “For the last few years, the Republicans who run this Congress have insisted that we go right back to the policies that created this mess.” Wait! What? The Republicans lost control of Congress way back in November, 2006. They won control of the House in an historic electoral blowback against Obama ignoring the economy and his insistence on Obamacare. John Boehner became speaker 16 months ago. The GOP still doesn’t control the Senate.
An article claimed that solar power was cheaper than natural gas because the construction cost for the solar facility was much lower. Hogwash, via PL:
Assuming that the gas-fired plant managed an 85% capacity factor and a 30-yr plant lifetime, the initial capital expenditure would work out to $0.004/kWh…A bit less than half-a-cent per kilowatt-hour.
Assuming a 25% capacity factor and a 30-yr plant lifetime for the Cimarron Solar Facility, the initial capital expenditure works out to $0.127/kWh…Almost 13 cents per kilowatt-hour!
The average residential electricity rate in the US is currently around 12 cents per kWh. That’s the retail price. As a consumer of electricity, I know which plan I would pick. I’m currently paying about 9 cents per kWh. I sure as heck wouldn’t seek out a provider who would have to raise my current rate by about 50% just to cover their plant construction costs.
So solar is 25x more expensive when you amortize the capital costs over time. Such a waste. The Boulder City solar facility in Nevada cost $141 million, received over $50 million in direct government subsidies, and created 5 jobs. It was of course celebrated by the administration.
Four years after “Obamamania” swept college campuses and across the country, we will get a glimpse of what the phenomenon looks like the second time around. The Obama campaign expects overflow crowds at both OSU and VCU as part of carefully orchestrated optics. Aides want to portray the president as still highly popular among young people and still able to energize large crowds.
BG reports on what actually happened at the OSU event:
Obama drew a crowd of 35,000 at Ohio State when he campaigned for former Governor Ted Strickland in 2010…According to the Toledo Blade, the venue for Obama’s rally seats 20,000…The official Barack Obama Tumblr boasts a figure from ThinkProgress that 14,000 attended the event
“Carefully orchestrated optics?” This is an embarrassing level of ineptitude.
An exit poll made public just before 9 p.m. nearly two hours after the polls closed, indicated that center-right New Democracy party was in first place with 19 to 20.5 percent of the vote, much less than the 34 percent it won in 2009. But in a major shift, the Socialists, who dominated for decades, won 44 percent of the vote in 2009 and were in power when Greece asked for foreign aid in 2010, appeared to have 13 to 14 percent of the vote, putting them behind the Coalition of the Radical Left, called Syriza, which opposes Greece’s agreement with its foreign lenders. Syriza appeared to be drawing 15.5 to 17 percent of the vote…the far-right Golden Dawn party, whose symbol resembles the swastika and whose members perform Nazi salutes at rallies, attracting 5 to 8 percent of the vote, enough to enter Parliament for the first time…The parliamentary elections were the first time that Greece’s foreign loan agreement had been put to a democratic test, and the outcome appeared clear: a rejection of the terms of the bailout
Remember: “in Greece until now, support for the two major political parties “has never fallen below 77 percent, and it often exceeded 85 percent.” Now it’s about 35% and the most radical left and right wing parties have 20-25%. The odds of the dissolution of the eurozone or the EU itself appear to have gone up considerably.
The political outlook in the tossup states is far from clear. While they all voted for Mr. Obama in 2008, seven have elected Republican governors since then and all have added significant numbers of Republicans to their legislatures or Congressional delegations…Republicans are also making inroads in voter registration. While Democrats retain enrollment advantages in most of the tossup states that register voters by party, their advantage has shrunk in all of them, state elections data shows. Nevada, which had 100,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in 2008, now has only 35,000 more. The Democratic enrollment advantage has also been reduced in Florida and Pennsylvania. Iowa and New Hampshire, where Democrats held the edge in 2008, now both have more registered Republicans. And in Colorado, the only tossup state where registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats in 2008, the Republicans have widened their edge…
The changing makeup of the states offers opportunities for both Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama. The share of white working-class voters has increased in Ohio since 2008, which could benefit Republicans, according to an analysis of census data by William H. Frey of the Brookings Institution. Republicans could also benefit from an increase in the share of votes likely to be cast by older white residents in Colorado, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Other demographic trends are likely to benefit Democrats: minorities make up a greater portion of the electorate in Florida, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia than they did four years ago; and the portion of white college graduates has grown in Colorado, New Hampshire and Wisconsin. The number of voters ages 18 to 29, a group that helped fuel Mr. Obama’s victory four years ago, is rising in Colorado, Florida, Iowa and Nevada.
As we were just saying. It’s not just in places like West Virginia, a comfortably red state in the 2008 presidential election, but North Carolina which was blue in 2008, that Democrat politicians are fleeing the president. HT: GP
The 2008 election turned out to be relatively easy for the Democrats. Bush was unpopular, the media were worshipful, McCain stumbled badly when he suspended his campaign, and the winning message was mostly centrist (remember the Rorschach test?).
Since January 2009, we’ve learned that it hardly matters what the president says. Truth has no particular value to the administration. So they can say ad nauseam that the healthcare bill will cut costs, and you can keep your doctor and so forth. That this rhetoric was untrue, who cares? It helped the bill limp over the finish line. And so on from issue to issue. Words are for fools and the little people; meanwhile, mostly quietly, the administration has pursued a rigid, disciplined New New Left agenda. As a consequence, they have not dealt with the real-world problems of the economy and jobs as they should have done.
A sizeable majority of the American people understands this and is no mood to let it continue, which has been clear since the 2010 election. The administration’s re-election game plan has apparently been to divide and conquer using carefully selected narratives to energize parts of the base, in order to get the election close enough so that votes of dubious provenance in places like Philadelphia and St. Louis could make a difference. But the narratives have all backfired, from Zimmerman to doggiegate to the War on Women. They’ve been parodied, ridiculed, and countered, all at lightning speed.
We’ve been surprised at the ineptitude of the president’s team, but perhaps we shouldn’t be. After all, it’s an insular crew, headed by the 2008 veterans. They know what they know, and what they don’t know they’ve demonstrated that they’re not interested in learning. We could be surprised of course; the administration could tack to the center in a big and impressive way and gain a lot more voters than the ones they’d give up. But we fail to see how the administration is going to get re-elected with the current messaging strategy, no matter what the polls say at the moment.
