Mitt Romney

Obama The Inevitable – Continued

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

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Just as I was starting to think that everyone had bought into the myth that the upcoming US presidential election is going to be anything other than a landslide for Barack Obama, Jamelle Bouie from The American Prospect brings a healthy dose of perspective to the matter:

I don’t mean to single out partisans; actual Beltway pundits are also too concerned with gaffes and faux controversies. Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei’s assessment of the last month—which has the top spot at POLITICO—describes the Obama campaign as “stumbling out of the gate” and “struggling” with message discipline. It’s everything you would expect from a micro-focus on the election

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How much of this is remarkable, and how much of this is the usual sturm und drang of a presidential election? Campaigns always see blowback on their messaging, on account of the fact that political parties aren’t monolithic entities. Obama may have had a huge fundraising advantage in 2008, but in a polarized country where Democrats have taken steps to regulate Wall Street and raise taxes on rich people, it’s no surprise that Republicans have suddenly emerged with a fundraising advantage, and the support of interested billionaires. It would be unusual if that weren’t the case.

Hear, hear. Finally, some level-headedness on the start of Obama’s campaign.

The Republicans chose Mitt Romney as their nominee. Mitt Romney. And so unless Barack Obama is caught on camera having an extramarital affair, sneaking gold ingots from Fort Knox or peeing on the American flag while whistling jaunty showtunes, he is going to be re-elected president in November. And no-drama Obama ain’t going to be doing any of those things.

Obama The Inevitable

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

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Well, stop blogging for a month or so and when you come back, the world has turned a little bit. The ratcheting up of the Euro crisis, the effective end to the Republican presidential nomination process, the sudden and complete inability of David Cameron’s Conservative Party to do anything right, in terms of either action or image… Guess I learned something there. Anyway, picking up where I left off in April…

So much handwringing in the media at the moment about President Obama’s political fortunes and reelection prospects!

From Politico:

Nothing inspires Democrats like the Barack Obama swagger – the supreme self-confidence on stage, the self-certainty in private.

So nothing inspires more angst than when that same Obama stumbles, as he has leaving the gate in 2012.

That’s the unmistakable reality for Democrats since Obama officially launched his reelection campaign three weeks ago. Obama, not Mitt Romney, is the one with the muddled message — and the one who often comes across as baldly political. Obama, not Romney, is the one facing blowback from his own party on the central issue of the campaign so far — Romney’s history with Bain Capital. And most remarkably, Obama, not Romney, is the one falling behind in fundraising.

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National polls, which had shown Obama with a slight but steady lead over Romney through April, moved into a virtual tie this month — despite Romney’s clumsy conclusion to the GOP race.

And from The Daily Beast:

The dirty little secret of campaigns is that there are usually just two messages. Either: Stay the Course or It’s Time for a Change. When Barack Obama won 53 percent of the popular vote and carried 28 states, just 14 percent of Americans thought we were moving in the right direction. So it was obviously a Time for a Change election. When Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton coasted to easy reelections, the country’s mood was undeniably Stay the Course. The election coming up in November is stuck in between. Americans don’t know whether to forge ahead or swing back.

And watching from across the pond, The Daily Telegraph:

There are storm clouds on the horizon for Barack Obama’s re-election.

Democrats indulged in over-confidence during the Republican primaries. It was an understandable reaction to the chaos that came with all the pandering to the far-Right and the rise of frankly laughable candidates like Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain in the search for an alternative to Mitt Romney.

After that debacle, the Romney campaign manager’s promise of an “etch-a-sketch” moment to re-shake and re-shape public perception about their candidate seemed a dose too hopeful.

But only a month after the Republican primaries all but officially ended, we have a real horserace on our hands.

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According to a new Washington Post/ABC poll, 30 percent of Americans say they are worse off than when President Obama took office in the depths of the fiscal crisis. This is comparable to the numbers President George HW Bush faced when he lost re-election to Bill Clinton in 1992.

And right now Obama and Romney are essentially tied when registered voters are asked who would be better at creating jobs and handling the economy.

Why do we do this to ourselves?  Why spend so much time speculating about an event the outcome of which is almost a foregone conclusion?

I understand the motives of the professional media. People will not tune in to The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer or Hardball with Chris Matthews in significant numbers to get their daily dose of the campaign ups and downs if they think that the result is already assured. That would mean less advertising revenues for the networks, and a huge army of unemployed cable news talking heads who would suddenly flood the market and push unemployment back up above 9%. So the word must continue to go out that the uninspirational, unpersonable technocrat who is unable to motivate his base and who campaigns like an electioneering android with a gaffe bug actually poses a serious threat to Obama’s reelection chances.

With regard to the professional media, I think there is also the bias factor. And by that I don’t mean the fact that all news outlets are biased in one direction or another, but actually the fact that all of the television and most print sources (even Fox News to some extent) strive to appear “balanced” when reporting the news, to tell both sides of the story (even if, in Fox’s case, the tone of voice, facial expressions and screen captions help to “guide” the viewer as to which side is correct).

At some point – and not being a student of journalism and media I don’t know when – good television reporting stopped meaning uncovering and reporting the truth, but rather reporting and giving equal weight to both sides of a story. So if Sam says the world is round but Bob says that it is a perfect cube, today’s headline will read “Sam and Bob spar in congress over shape of the world” rather than “Bob effectively ends his career with insane statement”.

But why do we ordinary people do it to ourselves? Are we just led by the media, or is there something else at work too?

I suppose that I will be doing the blogging walk of shame come November this year if the unthinkable occurs and Romney does become president-elect. But seriously. Are we all really so bored and in need of intrigue that we are going to kid ourselves that this one is even going to be close?

On Young Voters And The GOP

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Republicans - GOP - Young Voters

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At least some people in the Republican Party seem to have woken up to the demographic timebomb ticking away under their feet, and have started to lament, if not yet analyse, the fact that the vast majority of young people in America today would sooner give up their loud music and Pac-Man video games (or whatever it is that young people do for fun these days) than vote for a GOP candidate in a presidential election.

There is an article worth reading on this topic by Jeff Jacoby in today’s Boston Globe, entitled “As Dems rack up debt, youth should flock to GOP”.

Mitt Romney is apparently the latest Republican to develop a sense of outrage that no one outside of the grey haired brigade would be seen dead voting for him:

‘I don’t mean to be flip with this,’’ said Mitt Romney during a Q&A with students at the University of Chicago last week. “But I don’t see how a young American can vote for a Democrat.’’ He cheerfully apologized to anyone who might find such a comment “offensive,’’ but went on to explain why he was in earnest.

The Democratic Party “is focused on providing more and more benefits to my generation, mounting trillion-dollar annual deficits my generation will never pay for,’’ Romney said. While Democrats are perpetrating “the greatest inter-generational transfer of wealth in the history of humankind,’’ Republicans are “consumed with the idea of getting federal spending down and creating economic growth and opportunity so we can balance our budget and stop putting these debts on you.’’

At which point the needle on my “Are You For Real?” machine jolted as far toward the “You Must Be Kidding” end of the spectrum as it could go before the whole machine exploded in a shower of sparks.

The author himself does a good job of pouring cold water on any Republican claims to the mantle of fiscal restraint:

But that debt wasn’t piled up without plenty of Republican help. During George W. Bush’s presidency, annual federal spending skyrocketed from $1.8 trillion to $3.4 trillion, and $4.9 trillion was added to the national debt. Bush left the White House, in fact, as the biggest spender since LBJ . Granted, the profligacy of Barack Obama has outstripped even Bush’s bacchanal: CBS reports that Obama has added more to the national debt in just three years and two months than Bush did in his entire eight years. Still, younger voters can hardly be blamed if they haven’t noticed that Republicans are “consumed with the idea of getting federal spending down.’’

Therefore I do not intend to say anything more about the glaring, shameless hypocrisy of the Republicans – the party that gifted America two unfunded wars, large tax breaks not balanced by spending cuts and the joke that is Medicare Part D – laying any claim whatsoever to competency in handling the nation’s finances. Except that I will say that much of the “profligacy of Barack Obama” mentioned by the author was the result of a fiscal stimulus implemented (despite its imperfections) at a time when the US economy was in freefall, and without which the tepid recovery currently being experienced would likely be nothing but a sweet dream.

Mitt Romney and those others in the Republican Party who scratch their heads wondering why young people don’t like them miss the point entirely when they sulk that young people should embrace their economic policies. Though their fiscal policies may perhaps benefit young people in certain ways (and even this is arguable), there is no evidence based on past behaviour that they will actually have the political courage to implement them if voted into office. Old people (the beneficiaries of the “wealth transfers” that Romney claims to lament) actually vote in large numbers. Younger people don’t. The policy priorities of our political candidates duly reflect this fact.

Besides, it is not the GOP’s economic policies that are the main problem. The problem is the fact that in a bad economy, the opposition party is spending more time talking about abortion, contraception, mass deportations of illegal immigrants, repealing ObamaCare, questioning the president’s eligibility to hold office, and reinstating “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and a host of other socially regressive policy positions which are anathema to a majority of young people today than they are about how to reduce unemployment and help a population ill-equipped to perform the more highly-skilled, non-manufacturing jobs of tomorrow.

Rick Santorum in particular often complains that the media focuses on his socially conservative policy positions and not his economic plan, but he can hardly expect young voters to thrust him into office on the back of his inspired ideas on the economy (spoiler – they are not that great) when they are more worried that he will cut off their unemployment insurance, or close down the Planned Parenthood centre where they go for medical care, or start a war with Iran.

It is no coincidence that the one Republican presidential candidate who actually walks the fiscal conservatism walk and who doesn’t continually bleat on about social issues and the culture wars – Ron Paul – vastly outperforms his rivals with young voters, in primary after primary.

Newsflash to Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich:

Even if you had a cogent economic policy (which, by the way, none of you do) you will never appeal to young people by just tweaking your fiscal message a little bit. You had a choice when you started your presidential campaigns, and in your desperation to secure the party base you chose to fearmonger and rant about “taking back America”, and fret about turning into a socialist state, and speak about the importance of individal freedom in one breath while promising to impose your religious values on the whole country in the next.

Many young people would like an alternative to President Barack Obama, but you offer them nothing by way of a contrasting, conservative vision for the country that they could ever find acceptable. You offer them nothing. You offer racial minorities nothing. You offer women nothing. You offer the working poor and the unemployed nothing. And all of these constituencies will dutifully line up to vote for Barack Obama, and you will lose the presidential election on November 6th.

It could be otherwise, if only you offered the American people a genuine acceptable choice when they cast their votes.

How British Conservatives Miss Their American Mark

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Fraser Nelson takes to his Daily Telegraph column today to extol the virtues of Mitt Romney, in a puff piece entitled “David Cameron need take no lessons from Barack Obama, but he might listen to Mitt Romney”. But by fundamentally misunderstanding today’s Republican Party, he fails to make a convincing case.

You might expect Nelson to perhaps talk about some of the reasons why David Cameron should pay heed to Mitt Romney rather than President Obama on his upcoming trip to the United States. But all we really get is this solitary paragraph:

“In the Republican primary contest, meanwhile, the candidates have been very precise about debt. American conservatism is now defined by plans to tackle it, and the candidates compete on which taxes they’d cut to kick-start the economy, increase employment and balance the books. Romney’s 59-point plan for growth is easily the most moderate, yet is still more radical and holistic than anything produced in Britain. He has ruled out tax rises, and pledged to cut state spending by 5 per cent on day one. Cameron, by contrast, is aiming for a 3.3 per cent cut over five years.”

Would that this were true.

mittromneyrolemodel

American conservatism, defined by plans to tackle the debt? If there is one thing – and there are a lot at the moment – which distinguishes British and American conservatives, it is the fact that British conservatives (perhaps with the exception of the ultra-hardcore Eurosceptic fringe) live predominantly in the real world, while American conservatives have decamped en masse to cloud-cuckoo land, where huge swathes of the federal budget can be eliminated at a stroke without causing any undue suffering to those who have been coaxed and encouraged over the years to depend on various government programmes, and with no political repercussions.

Romney’s plan may well be more radical and holistic than anything produced in Britain, but that doesn’t really matter because nothing remotely resembling it is ever going to be implemented. The British Tories, on the other hand, are willing to risk alienating public opinion and their petulant Liberal Democrat coalition partners to actually implement a programme of needed budget cuts. So who should get the praise, the man who gives tough speeches about slashing trillions from the federal budget with no earthly chance of ever actually doing it, or the man who treads more carefully and holds together a precarious coalition to deliver more modest budget cuts that are actually attainable?

That’s not to say that the British conservatives are in the right with regard to the slower pace at which they have chosen to tackle budget deficits and spur economic growth while in government. Many people, myself included, are frustrated at the glacial pace at which much needed supply-side reforms are being implemented in the UK (often thwarted by EU regulations and/or the Liberal Democrats). A little more ambitious, far-reaching zeal would not be a bad thing at all, though how possible this is as long as the Liberal Democrats are partners in government remains in doubt. And so at first glance, once can understand why some British political pundits look at the fiery rhetoric emanating from the Republican primaries on the economy and find the British conservatives lacking. But to look closer, and to remember the different respective points that Britain and America occupy on the left-right political spectrum, is to realise firstly that the British conservatives have very little political scope to move further to the right, and secondly that the policy positions that the Conservative Party occupies do not differ greatly from the Democratic party in many cases.

And this is the crux of the matter. Even as the Republican Party in America continues to lurch further and further to the right and stake out ever more extreme positions on all manner of issues, the British Tories and their supporters in the British press as yet are unable to sever the psychological link which tells them that they should cheer the Republicans and boo the Democrats. This mindset may have worked in the past, when there was a greater degree of comity and moderation in American politics and the two parties were not so greatly divided, but it does not work today.

It seems to be of entirely no matter to the Republican cheerleaders in the British press that the majority of Democratic party policies are equivalent to or to the right of many current Tory principles (even the long-cherished and now-abandoned public health insurance option is significantly to the right of having a single-payer National Health Service), or that many members of the new Republican tea party congressional intake would (if they actually possessed a working knowledge of the world beyond their own borders) look at Britain with disdain, regarding us as some type of socialist dystopia.

Sadly, the time has come for the British Tories and their allies to acknowledge that they no longer have a serious, thinking partner on the other side of the Atlantic. This is probably just a temporary blip, as all such overcorrections to the right or the left tend to be countered by a return to more moderate positions (as will either happen in 2012 when Obama beats Romney/Santorum, or in 2016 when Obama’s heir runs against a chastened GOP desperate to win back the votes of the women and minorities that it is currently shedding so carelessly). But for the time being, British conservatives have nothing to gain by cosying up to the Republican Party of John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum.

The Conservative Party’s American role models may have embraced tea as their emblem, but their economic policy prescriptions are not based in reality, and are going a long way toward making the Republicans look callous, backward and foolish. There is no need for the Tories to damage their still-fragile brand by standing next to them, wearing a T-shirt that proclaims “I’m with Stupid”.

Meet Mitt Romney, Normal Bloke

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Well, colour me surprised!

Willard “Mitt” Romney, when a sufficient distance away from a television camera and campaign appearance, is a normal-looking (though still clearly super wealthy) guy!

Check out this post on Buzzfeed, showing a montage of Mitt Romney shots taken by his daughter-in-law for her blog:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/25-photos-of-mitt-romney-looking-normal

Waiting for a free table at Applebee's, just like you.

Now, I’m not saying that Mitt Romney’s entire campaign team should be fired. I’m just saying that they should be politely invited to enter the barrel of a giant cannon and then smoothly launched at high velocity from their recumbent positions on a swift journey to an alternative, watery location, many miles from dry land.

The talking heads always tell us that image is everything. So why have none of these images surfaced until now? Why, when anyone utters the name “Romney”, do we picture without fail the stiff, patrician, ill-at-ease baby boomer that we all know and love, standing stiffly in a pair of dark blue jeans that he would clearly never wear off the campaign trail, a vote-winning automaton programmed to say (approximately) the right thing and squeak by with the narrowest of margins?

I’m not saying that I could single-handedly do a better job than everyone on the Romney 2012 campaign payroll. Actually, yes, yes I am. I am saying that I could single-handedly do a better job than everyone on the Romney 2012 campaign’s current payroll. And so could my wife’s cat.