Month: September 2012
Convention Ginned Up Enthusiasm Among Obama Supporters
68%
Of Obama supporters say they are “extremely” or “very” enthusiastic about voting for President this year, a nine-point increase over last week. Obama supporters still lag behind Romney supporters in enthusiasm levels, however, finds the latest Economist/YouGov Poll.
The Romney Response Casts Further Doubt on His Foreign Policy Creds
This was news-cycle campaigning by the Romney campaign gone awry. Why didn’t the Romney campaign wait until it had all the facts? On his overseas trip in the summer, Romney was so careful not to criticize Obama while on foreign soil. But how much time do you give an administration to work through a diplomatic and international crisis before trying to score immediate political points? You’d expect the Sarah Palins of the world to quickly pounce on something like this, and she predictably did. But a presidential nominee running for the highest office in the land?
— NBC News’ First Read.
Who Said What When Regarding Libyan Attacks
Here is the the series of events concerning the attacks on Americans in the Middle East, in chronological order.
For the tea partiers out there, “chronological” is a big word that means in the order in which things happened, starting with the first thing and moving through time to the most recent thing.
For Republicans, it means that your version is a lie.
- Moronic publicity whore Pastor Terry Jones, not content to have caused the death of 12 people by threatening to hold a public Koran burning, promotes a new YouTube video further baiting Muslims. The film, made by Sam Bacile, a 52-year-old Israeli-American real-estate developer who lives in California, depicts the Prophet Muhammad as a pedophile and womanizer, and shows him having sex. It was posted online in July but was dubbed in Arabic on Sept. 4. Since then, a trailer for the film was heavily reported in Egypt.
Romney Off Deep End Over Embassy Killings Remarks
Unless the Romney campaign has gamed this crisis out in some manner completely invisible to the Gang of 500, his doubling down on criticism of the President for the statement coming out of Cairo is likely to be seen as one of the most craven and ill-advised tactical moves in this entire campaign.
— Mark Halperin, writing in TIME about Mitt Romney’s criticism of the Obama administration following the murder of three Americans at the U.S. embassy in Libya.
Religious Right Voters in N.C. and Virginia Are Uneasy about Romney’s Money and the Mormon Church
North Carolina and Virginia are both large swing states — the tenth and twelfth most populous states, respectively — where the political polarity between left and right could not be more extreme. Both states are home to millions of multiethnic white-collar liberals and moderates, most of whom live in the urban enclaves, as well as roughly the same numbers of rural, white evangelical voters who hold extreme, often fantastical right-wing views.
Thirty-five percent of voters overall, and the same proportion of lower- and middle-income white Bible Belt voters, say they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who is Mormon.
Pres. Obama won both states in 2008, but in the current campaign, it has become conventional wisdom that he will likely lose North Carolina and win Virginia — although these predictions are not supported in the most recent polls. A PPP survey released on Monday found the president up by 1 point — 49 percent to 48 percent — in North Carolina, while a local poll in Virgina found that Romney was up by 4 points there, 49 percent to 45 percent.
In most states where polling is close, the race will be decided by moderate swing voters, and while that is true for the most part in North Carolina and Virginia, the Romney campaign has an additional worry: an evangelical base with a generations-deep suspicion of outsiders, especially those of different faiths, including Jews and Muslims, of course, but also Catholics and Mormons.
Reuters has been in the field in Virginia talking with white Bible Belt voters and found that many of the say they are concerned about Mitt Romney’s wealth and his religion:
Paul Ryan’s Congressional Campaign Goes Up with Ads in His District Despite Claiming 25 Point Lead over Democratic Challenger Rob Zerban
The ad buy comes after the campaigns of both Ryan and his Democratic challenger Rob Zerban, a business owner and elected county official, released information on separate, private polls that produced widely different results:
[The Ryan campaign’s] survey of 400 likely voters showed a gap of 58 to 33 percent between the two candidates, with a 4.9 percent margin of error both ways. Libertarian challenger Keith Deschler trailed at 3 percent…
A 400-person poll conducted by the Zerban campaign found the race jumped to an 8-point difference when likely voters were informed about both candidates. The additional information told to those polled and the percentage difference without that information was not available Tuesday.
It is strange that Ryan’s congressional campaign rushed to produce ads after its own internal poll found that Ryan had a 25-point lead over Zerban.
This does not add up.
Deviling the Details
As a CEO, they say Mitt Romney’s terrific.
His and Paul Ryan’s budget plan is ultra-scientific.
But when it’s down to brass tacks,
Don’t even bother to ask,
Because he ain’t coming forth with specifics.
Obama Gets Three-Point Bump from Dem Convention
3
Percentage-point bump in voter support President Barack Obama received immediately after last week’s Democratic National Convention, rising to 50% from 47% before the convention, according to Gallup. He now leads Mitt Romney by six percentage points.
State, Local Governments’ ‘Secret Austerity’ Maintaining Recession
Ben Polak and Peter K. Schott make a compelling argument in the New York Times that this recession differs from the preceding two downturns because of under-employment by state and local governments:
Without this hidden austerity program, the economy would look very different. If state and local governments had followed the pattern of the previous two recessions, they would have added 1.4 million to 1.9 million jobs and overall unemployment would be 7.0 to 7.3 percent instead of 8.2 percent.
Why is this happening? One possibility is that we are witnessing a secular change in state and local politics, with voters no longer willing to pay for an ever-larger work force. An alternative explanation is that even though many state and local governments are constrained not to run deficits, they can muddle through a standard recession without cutting jobs. But when hit by a huge recession like that of 1981 or the latest one, the usual mix of creative accounting and shifting in capital expenditures cannot absorb the shock, and jobs have to go.
