Marbury

batting for obama

 

It's hard to tell what's happening to the race right now, though as per my two previous posts, I suspect this enforced interruption is better for Obama than it is for Romney. To those observations, I'd add that Obama is lucky to have two heavy hitters on his side helping him out during this time.

One of them is literally weighty: Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, who can be seen above being rude to Fox News anchors before going to on to praise Obama's response to the crisis in the most glowing terms. It's a powerful moment, because Christie, one of the most prominent Republican governors in the country, has been a very active supporter of Mitt Romney, whose people must have been less than pleased to see this. This is an authoritative endorsement of Obama's performance at exactly the right moment.

Why was Christie so effusive? Well, first of all, it's probably what he felt. Christie is one of the few politicians to have the confidence to say what he feels at any particular time without worrying too much how it will go down. Second, his focus, politically speaking, is not on Romney or the national Republican Party, but on his electorate at home. He has a tough reelection fight coming up. So it's vital that he's seen to be 100% focused on the welfare of New Jersey, and part of that is being a guy who can work with a Democrat president.

The other big hitter, of course, is Big Dog. Bill Clinton stepped in to take Obama's place at a big campaign rally in Florida and will no doubt be doing more of the same. Nobody else can do this, because nobody else is enough of a draw. These rallies are very important to the Obama campaign, not just because of the coverage they generate, but because they fire up the troops, and provide an opportunity to collect data on potential voters. So they need as many people to come along as possible. Imagine, if you were planning to go to this rally and you found out Obama would be replaced by Clinton. You wouldn't be too disappointed. In fact you might be more excited about going than before. So, just as he did at the convention, Clinton is doing Obama a crucial favour.

Not that he needed to be asked. Stepping into the president's shoes will come naturally to Clinton, whom I suspect spends half his day assuming that he is president and the other half furious that he's not.

This raises a question: has any modern president played such a big and influential role in national politics after leaving office? I can't think of any. JFK, posthumously, perhaps. But that's about it.

romney's messaging problem in one picture

Picture: Jonathan Karl.

At the Romney "Storm Relief event", held today in Kettering, Ohio (the tins of food are for storm victims).

Meanwhile, one can only imagine how furious the Romney team is with New Jersey governor Chris Christie. Or "that fat bastard" as they now refer to him.

is sandy democrat or republican?

There it is, awesome and awful.

Marbury's best wishes go out to everyone in New York and down the Eastern Seaboard today. I hope you are all in your boltholes with tins of baked beans and back issues of the New Yorker.

Despite the gravity of the situation, the dirty work of political prognostication cannot cease. Thus today we ask, who benefits from this October surprise, Romney or Obama?

There is a reasonable case for either. Romney may benefit because, of the two campaigns, his would be happiest if the weather conditions prevent some voters from voting early. This year about a third of the votes in the presidential election will be cast before election day. Both campaigns are putting enormous efforts in banking these early votes, but the campaign to whom they matter most is Obama's, because a lot of his votes come from groups who for various reasons are less likely to get around to voting on election day: the poor, African-Americans, Hispanics, busy mums. In other words, if Obama loses these votes this week he will never get them back. The weather may stop people going and physically voting where that applies (as opposed to mailing in) but more importantly it prevents the Obama minions from getting out around the neighbourhood to mobilise its reluctant voters. Among the battlegrounds, this may affect the outcome in Virginia and New Hampshire.

On the other hand, the storm allows Obama to look like a president. Of course, there's nothing he can do about the storm itself (the 2008 Obama might have stood on the Jersey beach and simply commanded the storm to turn back; the 2012 version is more likely to send Joe Biden out to negotiate a reduction in its destructive force from 5.8 to 4.8) but he can look like he's charge of the federal government's response to the crisis, and he will be seen playing father to the nation, offering solace to Sandy's unfortunate victims.

I don't mean to suggest Obama would be doing anything differently if he didn't have an election coming up, or indeed that he will be the focus of the nation's attention this week. But the brutal truth is that he will be a player in the scenes that unfold over the next few days, and Mitt Romney will not. And this, ultimately, is why the storm is bad news for the Romney campaign.

In news terms, Sandy is likely to remove at least three of the eight campaigning days left. Every day Romney isn't closing the gap is a day he loses.

mittloaf

Meatloaf and Mitt sing "God Bless America" in Defiance, Ohio. Things don't get much more Republican than that.

And now, here is the weather forecast, in Meatloaf's stirring and syntactically idiosyncratic words:

"There has stormclouds come over the United States. There is thunderstorms in Europe. There are hailstorms, and I mean major hailstorms over the Middle East."

obama's stubborn lead

Reuters/Boston Globe

Both campaigns are good at projecting massive confidence in victory. But lately it's the Romneyites who have been doing so with real energy and bravado. Pumped up by their poll gains since Denver, a revitalised candidate, and their first run of really positive media coverage since the general election began, they're telling everyone who will listen that their candidate is bringing this one home. They've boasted about moving staff out of North Carolina, a battleground state, because they think it's in the bag.

The Romneyite cockiness is not thoughtless. Karl Rove orchestrated similar in 2000 when Bush was just behind or neck-and-neck with Gore. The aim is to create a sense of overwhelming momentum, shifting money, energy and ultimately votes to your candidate in the final weeks.

It's working, at least in part. You'll often hear commentators talk about this as as a neck-and-neck race, with Romney the coming man. Meanwhile, liberals are panicking. Liberals are expert handwringers.

That's why this Jonathan Chait piece is important, I think. He calls Romney on a well-executed bluff and reminds us of the underlying reality: Obama is marginally ahead in the national polls and has bigger leads in the battlegrounds. Chait concludes:

Obama’s lead is narrow — narrow enough that the polling might well be wrong and Romney could win. But he is leading, his lead is not declining, and the widespread perception that Romney is pulling ahead is Romney’s campaign suckering the press corps with a confidence game.

Or see this from (an Obama-supporting) statistical analyst:

The reality in the states – regardless of how close the national polls may make the election seem – is that Obama is in the lead. At the Huffington Post, Simon Jackman notes “Obama’s Electoral College count lies almost entirely to the right of 270.” Sam Wang of thePrinceton Election Consortium recently put the election odds “at about nine to one for Obama.” The DeSart and Holbrook election forecast, which also looks at the current polls, places Obama’s re-election probability at over 85%. Romney would need to move opinion by another 1%-2% to win – but voter preferences have been very stable for the past two weeks. And if 1%-2% doesn’t seem like much, consider that Romney’s huge surge following the first debate was 2%, at most.

That last point is particularly striking. Obama's lead may be small but it will be very hard to shift. Obama's post-convention bounce was just that - a bounce. What happened after the Denver debate was a regression to the mean. Obama is back to where he has been for most of the year: just slightly ahead. Just slightly ahead is still ahead.

This race is starting to remind me of the last months of the Obama-Clinton primary. Every week, every day brought a new earthquake - some event that was bound to shift the momentum decisively in the favour of one or the other candidates.

But in the end it started to become clear that "momentum" didn't matter as much as the press and commentariat liked to pretend it did. Each state voted according almost boringly predictable lines depending on its demographic make-up. The candidates had assembled and consolidated their coalitions already. One of them happened to deliver more delegates than the other. Everything else was sound and fury.

did somebody order some joe?

Joe Biden arrives at an Obama-Biden field office in Orlando, Florida.

ignorance is power

The most striking exchange from George Entwistle's evidence to the Select Committee yesterday came during questions about his response to being told by Helen Boaden that Newsnight was investigating Jimmy Savile's alleged crimes. Boaden suggested this might affect the Savile Christmas tribute for which he was ultimately responsible. Entwistle said, "Thanks for letting me know".

[Entwistle] was then asked by Whittingdale what he thought Newsnight was investigating. "I don't remember reflecting on it," Entwistle replied.

Whittingdale then said: "You didn't want to know?"

"It was a determination not to show an undue interest," Entwistle responded.

On the face of it, being determined not to be interested in your organisation when you're one of its most senior executives sounds insane. Especially when the issue is quite obviously an explosive one that will affect your work directly.

In the world of the BBC, Entwistle's phrase probably just about makes sense. It means, "I didn't want to risk being seen as interfering in the process". But the fact that we have translate it like this indicates the extent to which he is sunk into the parallel reality of the bureaucracy through which he has climbed. If something makes sense within the organisation but sounds mad outside it, then that's a good sign that something might be wrong with the culture.

The New York Times recently hired the Mark Thompson, Entwistle's predecessor, as its chief executive. Thompson was Director-General of the BBC when the Newsnight conversations happened. Questions are being asked, not least by the New York Times public editor, about whether he is tainted by this scandal. Thompson, in a statement, makes a not dissimilar defence to Entwistle:

Mr. Thompson said that in his conversation with the reporter and in his follow-up with BBC News officials, he was never told about the nature of the allegations, nor did he ask.

“I had no reason to believe that his conduct was a pressing concern,” he said. “Had I known about the nature of the allegations and the credible allegations that these horrific crimes had taken place during his time at the BBC and in the building at the BBC, I of course would have considered them very grave and would have acted very differently."

Nor did he ask. The bizarro-world BBC logic is even more apparent here. Had Thompson known about the nature of the allegations, everything would have been different, but he didn't know because he didn't want to know.

It's the James and Rupert Murdoch defence, though in some ways it's weaker, because Entwistle and Thompson are not claiming to not have been fully informed, rather that they deliberately turned a blind eye for the sake of bureaucratic protocol.

In sociology this approach to management is known as "strategic ignorance". To quote from the abstract of a recent study: "Knowledge is seen as a source of power, and ignorance as a barrier to consolidating authority in political and corporate arenas." But as it goes on to say, ignorance can be a source of power too. It can enable executives and politicians to deny liability and make the decisions they want without having to fully account for them.

Thompson and Entwistle presumably rose right to the top by regularly applying this kind of brake on their natural curiosity about what was going on around them. Within the BBC, an institution dedicated to the gathering and dissemination of knowledge, ignorance is clearly a very valuable asset. 

(More on "strategic ignorance" here and here).

horses and bayonets

 

Last night was a win for Obama and probably a bigger win than in the second debate, but it was of less import.

The debate was meant to be about foreign policy (though it strayed into economic policy, largely because that's where Romney wanted to take it). Obama did a successful job of presenting himself as the grown-up in the room. The president was sure-footed, authoritative, and aggressive in a controlled and effective way. There's no doubt that he's at his most comfortable in this area, and most confident that his opponent doesn't understand the issues in the way he does. His consistent line of attack was that Romney had no strategy ("all over the map") and constantly changed his positions on political whim. Obama combined this attack with some effective condescension, the most vivid example of which (see above) was in response to Romney's complaint that the navy has fewer battleships than it did. Obama replied, "We also have fewer horses and bayonets" (Note "fewer", because actually the U.S army still uses bayonets, fact fans).

Romney played a defensive game, as Obama did in the first debate (though Romney played it better). He often agreed with the president's positions, for example on Libya, Egypt and Syria, with qualifications. His biggest concern seemed to be calming the fears of voters (female voters in particular?) that he represents a return to the bellicosity of the Bush era. One of the first things he said was, "We can't kill out way out of this mess", as a critique of Obama's terrorism policy. How odd to hear to a Republican candidate accuse a Democrat of being too eager to kill America's enemies, and advocate soft power. He said he didn't want more wars, and sought "a peaceful planet". He wasn't at ease: he often gave meandering, fast-talking, confusing answers, and the contrast with his fluency on economic issues was striking. But he wasn't awful.

Overall, Romney's aim was to look competent, rather than knock the president out or blow voters away with his amazing ideas. Surprisingly, he made no mention of Benghazi, perhaps judging that the risk of another screw-up was too high given the detail involved. But then, his campaign is probably calculating that the daily news reports of fighting and chaos in Libya and Syria are already doing the job of undermining the president's credibility, and that all Romney has to do is be perceived as a safe pair of hands. Despite losing the debate on style and substance, his advisers may well feel he just about accomplished that job last night.

This election is not about foreign policy, so this debate was always likely to have the smallest impact of the three. Whether you think last night was good for Romney or good for Obama depends on where you judge the race to be. If the overall momentum is still with Romney then it was excellent: a narrow loss on foreign policy is as good as a draw is as good as a win. If the race has stabilised behind a narrow Obama lead (which is where I think it is, though it's hard to tell) then Romney may come to regret not taking more of a risk. The clock is running down.

(Full debate here).

hello pot, this is kettle

"Either lying or incompetent". Hmm, now where have I heard that before?

romnesia

It's a pretty good riff, and Obama is sounding more energised than he did before the last debate:

we're the kids in america

obama turns up

 

Last night was Romney's second debate and Obama's first. The president - or rather the candidate, the man who wants your vote - actually turned up, displaying the energy, conviction and zest for combat so conspicuously absent from the presidential podium two weeks back.

After a somewhat nervous first answer, Obama quickly got into his stride. He was the first to go directly on the attack against his opponent, turning to face him as he did so, and went on to throw punch after punch. He pointed out the suspicious vagueness of Romney's tax plan ("sketchy deal") got in a cheeky dig at Romney's wealth ("Your pension is bigger than mine") and detonated the 47% grenade in his final remarks. For most of the time he seemed more relaxed, friendly and in control of the debate than Romney. His answer on women's issues was excellent, and a hundred times better than Romney, who spluttered through it with a reference to how he used to let his chief of staff go home early so she could cook for her family.

I don't think this win was as decisive for Obama as Romney's was last time out, however, because Romney wasn't as weak. He was ragged at times, awkward at others ("binders full of women") and displayed a very Romney-esque obsession with the rules which led him to be quite rude to the moderator. But he showed passion and feistiness (too much at times) and gave his supporters some strong moments to cheer. His best answer involved a well-rehearsed and powerfully delivered litany of Obama's broken economic promises, concluding that while Obama was a nice guy and a good speaker, his policies weren't working.

Obama didn't quite drive his main arguments home. He seemed to have a theme during the first twenty minutes - that you can't believe a word this guy says ("What Governor Romney said just isn't true..."). But then he let it drop. And when a questioner asked about Bush - a gift of a question for the Democrats - he gave a rambling and confusing answer when he should have simply said Romney = Bush. And then said it again.

I also think that the exchange on Benghazi, while an embarrassment for Romney within the context of the debate itself, wasn't unambiguously good for the president in the context of the campaign. It puts the spotlight on a tricky issue for him. The fact is - forms of words notwithstanding - his administration did give the impression that the Benghazi attacks were the result of a riot in response to an anti-Islamic film. That later turned out not to be true, and they changed their story. They know they got it wrong, which is why Hillary took up the human shield position the day before the debate. The question is whether blame can be pinned on the president. That question wasn't bottomed-out last night because of Romney's screw-up. But it will be returned to in the final debate (which focuses on foreign policy) and you can bet Romney will have got his facts straight by then.

Nonetheless, Obama, who seemed half in love with easeful defeat two weeks ago, appears to have peered into the abyss and decided that he does, after all, want to win this thing. He largely pulled off the incredibly difficult trick of being aggressive towards his opponent while staying focused on the questioners, and remembering to charm. He looked like a happy warrior. If he loses now, he will at least have been in a fight.

And thus, the great panic of the liberals comes to an end, for now anyway. I don't know if this debate will move the polls, but I'd be surprised if it didn't stop Romney making more gains, and I wouldn't be surprised if Obama saw a small bounce. I suspect we will settle back to a one to two point lead for Obama - back where we were before the conventions. Importantly, though, Obama's own supporters will have had at least some of their confidence and enthusiasm restored.

The pity of it, for Democrats, is that if the Obama we saw last night had turned up in Denver, this contest would be over already.

how to be a presidential candidate

Romney and Obama may as well forget all the advice they've received in the last week from their advisers and consultants on how to talk to voters in tonight's town hall debate, and simply read from this script, helpfully prepared for them by Josh Freedman at McSweeney's, and entitled Allow Me To Evade That Specific Policy Question With Sweeping Generalizations About America:

What specific tax expenditures would I cut from the budget, since my proposals to make the budget “revenue neutral” are contingent on broadening the tax base as a result of reducing or eliminating tax expenditures? You know, that’s a great question. That’s the kind of question the American people have been asking. That’s the kind of question they need to be asking. And after all of that question-asking, Americans are ready for an answer.



Here’s the truth: America is the greatest country on Earth.



Continue reading here.

paul ryan's classmates

Here's another good quote, this one from Barney Frank, the waspish Democratic congressman. It can be found in an excellent New York Times profile of Paul Ryan:

Skeptics say Ryan owes his superwonk standing as much to comparisons with his colleagues than to any great knowledge or depth. In a recent profile of Ryan by Alec McGillis in The New Republic, Barney Frank dismissed his colleague’s brainy reputation as being relative to that of other House Republicans, some of whom had just been implicated in a late-night escapade during a Congressional trip to Israel last summer. “He is being graded on a curve,” Frank said of Ryan, “with a bunch of guys who jump into the Sea of Galilee because they want to be closer to God.”

obama's odd career choice

John Heilemann's account of the Obama-Clinton relationship for New York magazine is overlong and contains no significant new information but it does have some nice quotes, including a particularly striking one from Neera Tanden, who has been a senior policy advisor to both Hillary Clinton and Obama:

[Bill] Clinton, being Clinton, had plenty of advice in mind and was desperate to impart it. But for the first two years of Obama’s term, the phone calls Clinton kept expecting rarely came. “People say the reason Obama wouldn’t call Clinton is because he doesn’t like him,” observes Tanden. “The truth is, Obama doesn’t call anyone, and he’s not close to almost anyone. It’s stunning that he’s in politics, because he really doesn’t like people. My analogy is that it’s like becoming Bill Gates without liking computers."