Chrystia Freeland: There’s a great joke on Wall Street which is that the bet on Romney is Wall Street’s worst bet since the bet on subprime. But I found the hostility towards Obama astonishing. I found the commitment to getting him out astonishing. I found the absolute confidence that it would work astonishing. On that Tuesday, the big Romney backers I was talking to were sure he was going to win. They were all flying into Logan Airport for the victory party. There’s this stunned feeling of how could we be so wrong, and a feeling of alienation.The Romney comments to his donors, for which he was roundly pounced on by Republican politicians, I think they accurately reflected the view of a lot of these money guys. It’s the continuation of this 47 percent idea. They believe that Obama has been shoring up the entitlement society, and if you give enough entitlements to enough people, they’ll vote for you.
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
More scary Romney bubble
It turns out Romney wasn't the only one who was shocked, shocked that Obama won. According to Chrystia Freeland in conversation with Ezra Klein, many of his fellow plutocrats who supported him were equally shocked.
Lost week
Thanksgiving fell on the earliest date possible this year because Nov. 1 was a Thursday so the fourth Thursday was only three weeks into the month. Normally the holiday falls in the last week of November and the whole week is off limits for scheduling any meetings or conferences or interviews.
But this year, there was a full week in November after Thanksgiving week. My calendar, however, is blank, and I think it's because people never really put two and two together to realize they could schedule events without the holiday interfering. The week kind of got lost in the shuffle.
But this year, there was a full week in November after Thanksgiving week. My calendar, however, is blank, and I think it's because people never really put two and two together to realize they could schedule events without the holiday interfering. The week kind of got lost in the shuffle.
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Talking heads
I'm almost saturated with MSNBC for this campaign cycle and still watch it only for the long denouement. What bothered me yesterday was their willingness to equate talking heads like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly with Bobby Jindal and Marco Rubio as spokesmen for the Republican Party.
Limbaugh for sure, and I suspect O'Reilly as well, are simply entertainers -- cynical entertainers -- who spin their foul ideas simply to make money. They are equivalent to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who at least admit they're comedians, not to elected public officials. It may be true that politicians quiver in their shoes at the prospect of Limbaugh or O'Reilly banishing them from the circle of acceptable conservatism, but until someone with enough courage to call their bluff finally prevails, they will continue to have real power of censorship.
The most ridiculous statement of the week, though, obviously belongs to Marco Rubio, dodging a question about the earth's age by saying I'm not a scientist, man. This is a dispute for "theologians," a "mystery" we may never know the answer to. Patent nonsense. I was suspending judgment on Rubio, but no more. He is dishonest and hypocritical in this response and now I tend to believe he deliberately burnished the false history of his parents' flight from Cuba. Hopefully his lies will catch up with him before he becomes a serious candidate for president.
Limbaugh for sure, and I suspect O'Reilly as well, are simply entertainers -- cynical entertainers -- who spin their foul ideas simply to make money. They are equivalent to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who at least admit they're comedians, not to elected public officials. It may be true that politicians quiver in their shoes at the prospect of Limbaugh or O'Reilly banishing them from the circle of acceptable conservatism, but until someone with enough courage to call their bluff finally prevails, they will continue to have real power of censorship.
The most ridiculous statement of the week, though, obviously belongs to Marco Rubio, dodging a question about the earth's age by saying I'm not a scientist, man. This is a dispute for "theologians," a "mystery" we may never know the answer to. Patent nonsense. I was suspending judgment on Rubio, but no more. He is dishonest and hypocritical in this response and now I tend to believe he deliberately burnished the false history of his parents' flight from Cuba. Hopefully his lies will catch up with him before he becomes a serious candidate for president.
Monday, November 12, 2012
The Petraeus Affair
Robert Ludlum could hardly come up with a better title. It's no surprise that someone with Petraeus's drive and ego, separated from his wife for long periods, would have an affair. That Broadwell's subsequent biography, most commonly described as "fawning," would be a bestseller is just par for the course in our uncritical media and publishing world.
The most interesting factoid to emerge is that Petraeus's wife, Holly, was the daughter of the general who headed West Point when Petraeus was a cadet there. What better way to fast-track a military career, cynics might ask.
National security is not my bailiwick, but it seems clear there's more here than meets the eye. I've never been a fan of Petraeus, who seemed like a relentless self-promoter who was at times disloyal to his commander in chief. The only justification for Obama appointing this Republican general to a sensitive administration post is to keep your enemies nearer. At least this whole brouhaha distracts from the endless media dribble about the fiscal cliff.
The most interesting factoid to emerge is that Petraeus's wife, Holly, was the daughter of the general who headed West Point when Petraeus was a cadet there. What better way to fast-track a military career, cynics might ask.
National security is not my bailiwick, but it seems clear there's more here than meets the eye. I've never been a fan of Petraeus, who seemed like a relentless self-promoter who was at times disloyal to his commander in chief. The only justification for Obama appointing this Republican general to a sensitive administration post is to keep your enemies nearer. At least this whole brouhaha distracts from the endless media dribble about the fiscal cliff.
Friday, November 9, 2012
The scary Romney bubble
The post-election story about how Romney and Ryan were "shell-shocked" as returns came in showing an Obama victory is scary enough in itself and makes the overall fact that these men did as well as they did scarier than ever.
It shows that this rampant Republican sense of entitlement to their own facts, their denial of any truth that is inconvenient for their ideology, is not some harmless little quirk of character -- it is a menace to the body politic. The idea that anyone as out of touch with reality, as willing to consider only the sources of information that cater to his idea of the world could have had any significant power is frightening.
There was a lot of talk in the Romney campaign about finding a Republican Nate Silver, on the premise that Silver's models showing an Obama edge were deliberately skewed for partisan purposes. Silver promptly said that he might well be the Republican Nate Silver himself -- if the polls and his models ever showed an edge for that party.
Silver deals with reality. The Republicans apparently don't. The joke making the rounds before the election -- a caricature of George Washington saying "I cannot tell a lie," of Richard Nixon saying "I cannot tell the truth," and of Mitt Romney saying, "I cannot tell the difference" -- is not so funny in retrospect.
Romney and Ryan were not dissembling. They are not just pathological liars -- they are psychologically disconnected from reality. And they got 48% of the vote.
It shows that this rampant Republican sense of entitlement to their own facts, their denial of any truth that is inconvenient for their ideology, is not some harmless little quirk of character -- it is a menace to the body politic. The idea that anyone as out of touch with reality, as willing to consider only the sources of information that cater to his idea of the world could have had any significant power is frightening.
There was a lot of talk in the Romney campaign about finding a Republican Nate Silver, on the premise that Silver's models showing an Obama edge were deliberately skewed for partisan purposes. Silver promptly said that he might well be the Republican Nate Silver himself -- if the polls and his models ever showed an edge for that party.
Silver deals with reality. The Republicans apparently don't. The joke making the rounds before the election -- a caricature of George Washington saying "I cannot tell a lie," of Richard Nixon saying "I cannot tell the truth," and of Mitt Romney saying, "I cannot tell the difference" -- is not so funny in retrospect.
Romney and Ryan were not dissembling. They are not just pathological liars -- they are psychologically disconnected from reality. And they got 48% of the vote.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Adieu, Paul Ryan
I'm amazed that so many people seem to think Paul Ryan still has a future in politics. As the MSNBC commentators noted last night his contribution to the campaign was a big, fat zero, and since he couldn't even carry his home state Romney might have been better off with Rob Portman to help tip the scales in the all-important Ohio.
Ryan's serial mendacity on the campaign trail before his handlers enforced a virtual media blackout should have completely discredited his claims to be a serious expert on anything, even though Paul Krugman had long since unmasked him as a fraud.
Unsuccessful vice presidential candidates as a rule have not had great post-election careers in recent times. The only example I could find in the past century of a losing VP nominee coming back to win high political office was a guy named Franklin Roosevelt, who at 38 was the running mate with James Cox in an election that they lost to Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. This was before he was struck with the paralytic illness diagnosed as polio in 1921 and before his election as governor of New York in 1928.
But honestly I can't see Paul Ryan as a Franklin Roosevelt. If a much more formidable thinker and politician like Jack Kemp went nowhere after losing a national election, I don't see how Ryan will muster support for a new national campaign. The Republicans are going to have to tack more to the center represented by Chris Christie and the diversity represented by Marco Rubio.
I'm betting Ryan will even have trouble as Budget Committee chairman. He will be faced with the dilemma either of maintaining his reputation as a principled deficit hawk or heeding his baldfaced campaign lie that he is bipartisan. No prizes for guessing which way he will go, but it will definitively put the lie to any bipartisan pretensions.
In general, I expect a backlash in the Republican Party to a campaign based on lies. If the party has any hope for the future it will have to break the grip of the Roves and Norquists and find its way to the center with a good deal more integrity than it has shown in recent years. Again, for all the serious reservations I have about Christie, he seems well-positioned to lead the party in this direction.
Ryan's serial mendacity on the campaign trail before his handlers enforced a virtual media blackout should have completely discredited his claims to be a serious expert on anything, even though Paul Krugman had long since unmasked him as a fraud.
Unsuccessful vice presidential candidates as a rule have not had great post-election careers in recent times. The only example I could find in the past century of a losing VP nominee coming back to win high political office was a guy named Franklin Roosevelt, who at 38 was the running mate with James Cox in an election that they lost to Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. This was before he was struck with the paralytic illness diagnosed as polio in 1921 and before his election as governor of New York in 1928.
But honestly I can't see Paul Ryan as a Franklin Roosevelt. If a much more formidable thinker and politician like Jack Kemp went nowhere after losing a national election, I don't see how Ryan will muster support for a new national campaign. The Republicans are going to have to tack more to the center represented by Chris Christie and the diversity represented by Marco Rubio.
I'm betting Ryan will even have trouble as Budget Committee chairman. He will be faced with the dilemma either of maintaining his reputation as a principled deficit hawk or heeding his baldfaced campaign lie that he is bipartisan. No prizes for guessing which way he will go, but it will definitively put the lie to any bipartisan pretensions.
In general, I expect a backlash in the Republican Party to a campaign based on lies. If the party has any hope for the future it will have to break the grip of the Roves and Norquists and find its way to the center with a good deal more integrity than it has shown in recent years. Again, for all the serious reservations I have about Christie, he seems well-positioned to lead the party in this direction.
Nate Silver nails it
Election night held virtually no surprises for those of us following Nate Silver's 538 blog at the New York Times. The poll aggregator and analyst had for a long time tracked the probability of a decisive Obama victory among swing states and an equally decisive result for Democrats to retain control of the Senate.
So the Romney supporters who profess to be sincerely stunned by the 11:15 announcement calling the race for Obama, or Eugene Robinson's surprise at the extent of the Obama swing state sweep on Morning Joe, just means they weren't paying attention.
There was simply no reason not to believe that Silver's models were doing anything other than following sophisticated statistical techniques for weighing and analyzing poll data to predict the result. There was no reason not to accept the evidence he provided that state polls on the whole were going to be more accurate than national polls, or in any event, given the Electoral College, more significant.
So Silver had put the probability of an Obama victory at 87% before the first debate, then tracked the plunge after that debate down into the 60s, only to end up yesterday with a 90% probability of an Obama victory and a conservative estimate of 303 electoral votes. More venturesome poll analysts who predicted 332 votes are more likely to be right once problem child Florida gets around to the unbelievably complicated process of counting their votes and those 29 electoral votes go into the Obama column.
Anyway, a big thanks to Silver for providing evidence on a daily basis that this country was not going off the rails and falling for the deceptions of two of the most dishonest politicians ever to head a national ticket.
So the Romney supporters who profess to be sincerely stunned by the 11:15 announcement calling the race for Obama, or Eugene Robinson's surprise at the extent of the Obama swing state sweep on Morning Joe, just means they weren't paying attention.
There was simply no reason not to believe that Silver's models were doing anything other than following sophisticated statistical techniques for weighing and analyzing poll data to predict the result. There was no reason not to accept the evidence he provided that state polls on the whole were going to be more accurate than national polls, or in any event, given the Electoral College, more significant.
So Silver had put the probability of an Obama victory at 87% before the first debate, then tracked the plunge after that debate down into the 60s, only to end up yesterday with a 90% probability of an Obama victory and a conservative estimate of 303 electoral votes. More venturesome poll analysts who predicted 332 votes are more likely to be right once problem child Florida gets around to the unbelievably complicated process of counting their votes and those 29 electoral votes go into the Obama column.
Anyway, a big thanks to Silver for providing evidence on a daily basis that this country was not going off the rails and falling for the deceptions of two of the most dishonest politicians ever to head a national ticket.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
The Electoral College chimera
Every four years there's a slew of opinion pieces about finally getting rid of the anachronism of the Electoral College. I've played that game myself, but it's one you can never win. We will never get rid of the Electoral College. In fact, we will never again make any substantive change to the Constitution.
Getting rid of the Electoral College, as argued once again in this post by Ryan Cooper at Washington Monthly, is one of those desirable but chimerical goals in American politics, like DC statehood. It will simply never happen.
So get over it, live with it. The article in Sunday's Times about the "The Vanishing Battleground" pointed out that in 1960 Nixon and Kennedy campaigned in virtually every state, whereas now the candidates only visit a handful of swing states -- and fewer are swinging all the time. That's OK with me. I don't need to see my candidate to vote for him (maybe someday her). And I don't mind missing out on all the mendacious campaign ads.
At a Washington dinner party recently, the host raised the speculation du jour about whether a victory by Obama in the Electoral College even if he loses the popular vote -- an outcome suggested by some of the polling at the time -- would prompt both parties to demand an end to the indirect vote for president. I said I didn't think it would and I, personally, have no problem with that scenario. After all, we lived with Bush for eight years and all the havoc he wreaked, and it's doubtful that he even won a legitimate Electoral College victory, let alone a popular vote.
We're stuck with the Electoral College, a Supreme Court that has way too much power, and an increasingly sclerotic set of political institutions (think of the anti-democratic obstacle of the Senate, exacerbated by the abuse of filibuster!). European countries by and large are much more flexible in adapting their institutions -- look at how France easily and quickly shortened the term of the president and aligned it better with the parliamentary terms.
But change has become virtually impossible. It's a situation that future generations will have to deal with.
Getting rid of the Electoral College, as argued once again in this post by Ryan Cooper at Washington Monthly, is one of those desirable but chimerical goals in American politics, like DC statehood. It will simply never happen.
So get over it, live with it. The article in Sunday's Times about the "The Vanishing Battleground" pointed out that in 1960 Nixon and Kennedy campaigned in virtually every state, whereas now the candidates only visit a handful of swing states -- and fewer are swinging all the time. That's OK with me. I don't need to see my candidate to vote for him (maybe someday her). And I don't mind missing out on all the mendacious campaign ads.
At a Washington dinner party recently, the host raised the speculation du jour about whether a victory by Obama in the Electoral College even if he loses the popular vote -- an outcome suggested by some of the polling at the time -- would prompt both parties to demand an end to the indirect vote for president. I said I didn't think it would and I, personally, have no problem with that scenario. After all, we lived with Bush for eight years and all the havoc he wreaked, and it's doubtful that he even won a legitimate Electoral College victory, let alone a popular vote.
We're stuck with the Electoral College, a Supreme Court that has way too much power, and an increasingly sclerotic set of political institutions (think of the anti-democratic obstacle of the Senate, exacerbated by the abuse of filibuster!). European countries by and large are much more flexible in adapting their institutions -- look at how France easily and quickly shortened the term of the president and aligned it better with the parliamentary terms.
But change has become virtually impossible. It's a situation that future generations will have to deal with.
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