Archive for the ‘2012 Tuesday’ Category

In Chicago yesterday, President Obama described the essence of his campaign against Mitt Romney. Asked during a press conference about his campaign ads criticizing Romney’s record at Bain Capital in the 1980s and ’90s, Obama disagreed with fellow Democrats’ advice to focus on other issues:

[T]his is not a distraction. This is what this campaign is going to be about — is what is a strategy for us to move this country forward in a way where everybody can succeed?

Well, now. That’s just completely different from every other presidential campaign in history…

Some commentary has focused on what Obama said just before that: his description of the job of president vs. the job of a private equity CEO. And with good reason. There is plenty to address: from his assertion that the president should be involved in helping individual communities plan their economic development, to the obvious conclusion that the job, as he’s described it, is not one he’s done particularly well given the …

Continue reading 2012 Tuesday: Obama wants the election to be about a topic he doesn’t understand »

Opinion polls have value — and limits. The value in the new CBS News/New York Times poll isn’t the headline result showing Mitt Romney leading Barack Obama 46-43. The top-line, national result in a poll conducted almost six months before Election Day is pretty worthless.

But there is value in some of the underlying data, and what they tell us about the direction the election may be taking. There’s some good and bad for each candidate.

First, a quick note about why these data mean anything. Because this poll is taken regularly, with consistency in the wording of questions over time, we can get a decent idea of trend lines. Even better, the people surveyed last Friday to Sunday (May 11-13) are the very same people surveyed last month, giving us an idea of how particular people’s opinions are shifting. However, not all of the people from the April poll chose to participate in May; again, there are limits.

Now to the data. We’ll start with the good for Obama because, frankly, it …

Continue reading 2012 Tuesday: Seeking trendlines for Obama and Romney »

For all the talk of how America is following in the footsteps of debt-riddled Greece, here is one way our politics is charting a very different course: We are not waiting to reach the very edge of the abyss before moving our parties away from the center.

One of the big stories from today’s primaries, which for the most part have been rendered less than front-page news outside the states holding them any given day, will be whether longtime Indiana Sen. Dick Lugar survives a challenge from tea-party favorite and State Treasurer Richard Mourdock. A recent poll (there haven’t been many of them) suggests Lugar’s time is up.

The headlines will be about the tea party throwing out a respected member of the D.C. establishment in a fit of ideologically pure pique. Yet, increasingly this kind of result is dog-bites-man news — for both parties.

Last month, Pennsylvania Democrats threw out a pair of “Blue Dog Democrats” from the U.S. House. The Blue Dogs, who tried to push laws such as …

Continue reading 2012 Tuesday: Should we worry about the primary losses of moderates? »

On Monday, the Obama-Biden 2012 campaign unveiled its slogan: “Forward.”

Yep, that’s it. As Washington Post humor-blogger Alexandra Petri observed, “If your slogan is just one or two notches above BCC, it might not be a great slogan.”

But never mind the lack of zip to the latest and greatest in Democratic bumper-sticker philosophy, or the fact that it won’t help the arguments that President Obama isn’t a Marxist. The most disqualifying thing about “Forward” as a slogan is that this is a president who keeps looking backward. Heck, even the video unveiling “Forward” as a slogan began with a retrospective on the 2008 financial crisis; the very first words of the video titled “Forward” are “January 2008.” I’m not sure that word means what the Obama team thinks it does.

In other forward-looking news, Democrats are using today’s anniversary of the Navy SEALs’ killing of Osama bin Laden last year to revisit some comments Mitt Romney made five years ago. (Forward! Forward!)

According …

Continue reading 2012 Tuesday: Team Obama moves ‘Forward’ by dredging up, distorting Romney’s words from 2007 »

The Republican primary resumes today, but it doesn’t matter. When Rick Santorum dropped out of the race a couple of weeks ago, any remaining suspense dissipated. The only question tonight will be Mitt Romney’s margins of victory. (Yes, I realize Newt Gingrich is playing up his chances of winning in Delaware. I also realize that, well, it’s Delaware.)

The conversation quickly moved on to the question of Romney’s running mate, which is a little bit silly. Four months remain before the Republican National Convention, and in my view it would be foolish to name a running mate this far out. If Romney continues to run neck-and-neck with President Obama in the polls or even opens up a sizable lead, he will want to play it safer with his choice than if, say, he falls behind significantly (think Sarah Palin in 2008). It’s too early.

I think the next couple of months will feature more scenes like the one we saw yesterday, with Romney campaigning alongside potential running mates. …

Continue reading 2012 Tuesday: The long GOP veepstakes begins »

A butterfly sows its oats — er, flaps its wings — in Cartagena, and an incumbent in Washington loses an election?

On it own, the story from Colombia about Secret Service agents hiring prostitutes in Colombia while on an advance trip preparing for President Obama’s recent visit there — a story that has broadened to include perhaps 20 people, including military personnel — is little more than a headache to a president. Quite obviously, he did not direct them to behave in such a way and does not approve of their actions.

But it may be a small example of the external, wholly unpredictable occurrences that cumulatively help to shape an election. As former British Prime Minister Harold McMillan is said to have responded when asked what worried him, it’s “Events, dear boy, events.”

I feel confident in predicting that one Secret Service scandal in Colombia, by itself, will not undermine Obama’s re-election chances. But consider that it comes at the same time as a controversy that does …

Continue reading 2012 Tuesday: Events, dear boy, events — and their ability to shape the race »

A lot of commentary about Barack Obama’s re-election campaign focuses on what’s different from 2008. But there’s one clear way in which it’s exactly the same.

In 2008, when ABC’s Charles Gibson asked Obama during a debate why he favored raising the capital-gains tax rate when the evidence suggests doing so would only reduce government revenues, Obama answered, “Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.” (Amazingly, except to those who have noticed Obama’s tendency to try to have things both ways, he went on to talk about the need to spend more money on health care and education — without disputing Gibson’s premise that raising capital-gains tax rates would instead lower revenues.)

Now, in discussing the so-called Buffett Rule, which would require Americans making at least $1 million in a year to pay at least 30 percent of their income in federal taxes, we’re back to the argument of fairness, economic and …

Continue reading 2012 Tuesday: With Buffett Rule, Obama ignores economics and leans on ‘fairness’ »

A GOP “war on women” concerning contraception. A bloody Republican primary that keeps dragging on. Improving jobs numbers. A sharp drop in President Obama’s approval ratings.

Wait, what?

The narrative of February and early March was that Obama baited Republicans into focusing on social wedge issues, even as the economy is foremost on voters’ minds, and then seized on good economic news to begin gaining ground on that top concern as well. The president had returned to the magic 50 percent mark in approval ratings in both the New York Times/CBS national poll and the Washington Post/ABC survey. It seemed that it didn’t matter who the Republicans nominated: His name would simply go down in history as another guy who lost to Obama.

Now, both polls show a significant reversal. The WaPo/ABC poll, released yesterday shows Obama falling from 50 percent approval/46 percent disapproval to the exact opposite: 46/50. Today, the NYT/CBS poll shows an even larger fall: from 50/43 to 41/47. …

Continue reading 2012 Tuesday: About that notion the economy, GOP ‘war on women’ have Obama cruising to re-election »

Voting day is finally here in Georgia. Besides the bottom-line totals for each candidate, how can we gauge success for them?

One key measure will be their performance by congressional district. First, it matters for the awarding of delegates: About half of Georgia’s delegates (42 of 76) will be granted based on their performance in Georgia’s new 14 congressional districts.

But it will also help us see whether Mitt Romney has gained or lost strength since 2008 — as well as giving us a very good head-to-head comparison between him and Newt Gingrich, who in Congress represented the very same areas where Romney was strongest four years ago. It’ll also help us see whether Rick Santorum fared better or worse than Mike Huckabee, who in 2008 was the social-conservative choice.

Here’s a graph based on the 2008 results, adjusted for the new congressional districts:

A few quick takeaways:

• Romney did best in districts 6 (now represented by Tom Price), 7 (Rob Woodall) and 11 (Phil …

Continue reading 2012 Tuesday: What to watch in Georgia »

Our unscientific poll last week found that, by about a 3-to-2 margin, readers believe Newt Gingrich would be hurt more by losing next week’s Georgia primary than Mitt Romney would by losing today’s primary in his native Michigan. Today, I’m going to suggest the person with the most riding on one of these states is neither Gingrich nor Romney, but Rick Santorum.

If one believes the “Mitt Romney vs. the Not-Romneys” narrative of this GOP primary, it follows that Santorum must buck the trend of all the other short-term front-runners if he wants to be a serious threat to topple Romney in the end. There is little reason to believe Santorum has risen to his current No. 1 spot by mere force of personality or policies: His personality and policies didn’t keep him out of fifth and even sixth place for much of the race, and they haven’t changed during the past two months when he became a top-tier candidate (or survivor, depending on how you view him). So, we need to see if he can buck …

Continue reading 2012 Tuesday: Michigan is the show-me state for Santorum »