P.M. Carpenter

Obama's Corleone strategy

Ezra Klein, on "Why Obama abandoned audacity":

There’s a reason they’re playing down the audacity of their first term and deemphasizing the policies that they think would do the most to help in a second. The American people, their research shows, are tired of audacity and skeptical of big ideas. They’re willing to believe Obama has done about the best job he could have been expected to do given the collapse of the global economy and the intransigence of the Republicans. But if they’re going to believe that, they’re also not willing to believe that he’s got all the answers now, or that his next big idea is the one that will really turn all this around.

One also nevers tampers with a lead. And one leaves emphatically untampered a lead against a self-contracting schmendrick like Romney, who always seems to find a way to further darken an already bleak situation. 

That's the politically practical approach, which, as far as it goes--and which, during the final days of a winning presidential campaign, is as far as it should go--is good enough. Conceptually, though, it reveals how successful the congressional, tea party nihilists have been.

As Klein notes, Obama's latest battleground-states campaign ad says nothing about the American Jobs Act or "protecting the Affordable Care Act until it begins insuring people in 2014." Why? We all know why. These two perfectly sensible, perfectly responsible, indeed perfectly essential government acts have been scandalized by right-wing extremists to the intimidated point of "the best is better left unsaid." (Here, Romney well knows how Obama feels.) All talk of societal "progress"--except the kind that can be measured in job creation and GDP--has become politically unfashionable. And that's an enormous electoral swing to crass materialistic conservatism.

And that's an Obama-worthy challenge of FDR-like audacity for a second term: to reinspire Americans to see beyond the kind of atomistic selfishness the right has glorified and to instead commit to a unified, national purpose. For now, though, Obama must be more Corleone-like: "I'm gonna wait, after the 'Baptism' ... And then I meet the Don McConnell and the Eric Cantors, all the heads of the familial, far-right fanatics."

Then ... kaboom.

Bogart to Romney: Have an affair

Politico is running the most peculiar headline: "Defining moment eludes Mitt Romney."

Isn't his problem precisely 47 percent too many defining moments, from $10,000 bets to empty chairs?

And isn't one month before the election a trifle late for candidate "definition," especially for a candidate who's been running twice as long as the current president has served?

Lectures a Republican strategist, "They’ve got the same people, doing the same thing they’ve been doing for eight years and there is no creativity." Says another, "Get rid of all that staging. Be real ... something dramatically real."

Reminds me of a story. During the '56 Stevenson-Eisenhower rematch a Democratic insider dropped by the California home of Humphrey Bogart, who was dying of esophageal cancer, to pay respects and shoot the political breeze, a conversational exercise that always lifted Bogart's spirits. Ominous news, mentioned the insider; it seemed there was a rumor floating about regarding Adlai's having once had an affair. The campaign was worried the story might get out. Worried? retorted Bogart. It's the best thing that could happen to Stevenson, he half-joked. It might prove to voters that he's human after all ... or as today's GOP strategists would put it, that he's "something dramatically real."

In this, if you any longer care, there's something of a paradox. Mitt Romney, more than any nominee in American political history, has campaigned for the White House as the "perfect" candidate--as the consummate businessman, the untarnished family man, the flawlessly nimble "fix it" guy and even as the impossibly, impeccably presidential-looking guy. And yet never has any candidate ever come across as something so flawed, so dramatically unreal--and undesirable.

Romney plans to deliver extemporaneous "debate zingers"

When did it begin? With Al Gore's sigh? With H.W.'s wristwatch-gazing? With "There you go again"? When did presidential debates begin shedding their cloak of broad, competitive competence and start wrapping themselves in the make-or-break "moment"? The NY Times:

Mr. Romney’s team has concluded that debates are about creating moments and has equipped him with a series of zingers that he has memorized and has been practicing on aides since August.

Pathetic. By Team Romney's standards, Henny Youngman would have made the perfect POTUS. (Well, at least we would have laughed our way to Armegeddon.)

There are, indisputably, certain "moments" to avoid, such as Gerald Ford's otherworldly declaration that there was "no Soviet domination" of the quite obviously, ruthlessly dominated. Others--sighs and wristwatches, for example--seemed harmless enough by comparison, but in reality they loomed just as damning. Why? I can only guess: They provided the media, I suppose, with a "hook"; something on which they could hang an analysis of an entire debate. The bastard sighed! Off with his head!

We left it to an aging actor, though, to begin "creating moments"--the perfect frame shot, the exquisitely well-rehearsed scene, the talk-of-the-town "zinger" of "There you go again" or "I won't exploit my opponent's youth and inexperience." That was it, I guess; the beginning of the end--the nascent span was rather brief--of the presidential debate, as a debate. Instead, it was showtime.

Comparing the Obama and Bush Derangement Syndromes

Michelle Goldberg's Daily Beast assessment of the on-screen pathologies of chronic Obama Derangement in Dinesh D’Souza's "2016: Obama's America" and Joel Gilbert's "Dreams From My Real Father" (which portrays the president's "mother [as] a whore") is eloquently tidy and sociopolitically spot on: "This is who [right wingers] are. There’s nothing left to be shocked about."

Any Obama-hating filth is no longer a kind of underground scuttlebutt; it's potentially a proud blockbuster.

This compels a comparison--one that the right, anyway, would wish to make: Well, for eight years you guys on the left were vocal practitioners of hysterical Bush Derangement; what we're doing is no different.

Let's look at that. Let's assume the opposing levels of sheer, unmitigated hatred--the left's against Bush, the right's against Obama--are roughly equal. But we must also look at the whys, without which the whats are merely stand-alone madness. 

All right, let's see. George W. Bush, for starters, wasn't legitimately elected to the White House in 2000, and that sort of thing tends to leave a rather bad taste in the mouths of the legitimately victorious opposition. But, wimps that we were, we accepted the verdict and, as advised, we "moved on," hoping for the best, even from the conspicuously witless W. And what did he --in his domestically compassionate conservatism and "humble" foreign policy--deliver? Unfunded, bankrupting tax cuts; a new, enormous, unfunded entitlement; warrantless wiretapping; an outrageoulsy concocted, ultimately $2-$4 trillion unprovoked war; thousands of American lives lost in vain ... oh, and internationally condemned, deeply, deeply unAmerican torture.  

So there's that. And President Obama? Let's see. Well, he pulled us from the brink of a Great Depression II; he's "created" about 5 million private-sector jobs, even in the catastrophic mess of an economy which W. left us; he's instituted a healthcare system in which nearly all Americans are guaranteed coverage; he's reversed the GDP upward by approximately 11 points; he got us out of that hellhole, Iraq, and is doing the same in Afghanistan; and he rescued the American automobile industry, perhaps the most fundamental of all American industries.

So yeah, it's sure easy to see why Obama deranges the right as much as Bush deranged the lucid.

The 47 percent's 10 percent effect

Nate Silver:

Mr. Obama’s probability of winning the Electoral College advanced to 83.9 percent in the Nov. 6 forecast, up from 81.9 percent on Wednesday.

Causation? The long answer, in Silver's words: "[A] secretly recorded videotape ... released on Sept. 17 showing Mitt Romney making unflattering comments about the '47 percent' of Americans who he said had become dependent on government benefits."

The short answer, in blunt reality: Mitt Romney.

Silver recalls that he issued a tweet advisory after the tape's release, warning that "Ninety percent of 'game-changing' gaffes are less important in retrospect than they seem in the moment." This Fizzle Effect is infuriatingly real for devout partisans who always hear in the opposition's latest blunder the explosive beginning of the dramatic end, only to watch the polls flatline.

Politics fans (as in fanatics) are much like the old Kremlinologists, examining every major player's gestures, words, syllables and inflections for decisive omens of shifting power relationships. Meanwhile the inattentively average citizen sighs, "Huh? Oh yeah that guy's running for some office, isn't he?"

Leave it to Mitt Romney to find a way around American apathy.

Ahmadinejad, yes, to Obama, they prefer

If you track back to Iran's news agency, Fars, which took seriously the Onion story, "Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad to Obama," all you get is this:

Error For Your Request . Not Exist This Story.

Who's writing Fars' material? Yoda?

How Romney could narrow the odds

Since the professional right is thrusting all manner of useless advice on their party's nominee, it is, at long last, time for Mitt Romney to hear something of actual utility--something that could, and I'd wager would, narrow the yawning electoral chasm that has opened between him and President Obama. In a speech, Romney should say:

"It's bullshit. OK? It's all bullshit. Everything I've been saying in the general and everything I said during the primaries is bullshit. Bullshit from beginning to end, except whenever I slipped up and and forgot who I was supposed to be and thus mistakenly uttered something sensible, such as 'if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that ... is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course.'

"That was intelligent. That was honest. OK? And therefore that's the very kind of thing I'm not supposed to say as the Republican Party's nominee, because the base is exceptionally heavy on morons.

"Well, screw 'em. They're taking this party down in flames, and I won't allow it. Not any more. Here's the deal. Listen up.

"Our entire economic theory is bullshit. Got it? Bullshit. Supply-side economics has proven itself an intellectual insult since the Gipper--crack economist that he was--shoved it down our gullible, unsuspecting throats 30 years ago. For Christ's sake, people, haven't you noticed its effects? Massive deficits, a steadily accumulating national debt, wealth inequality beyond a banana republican's dreams, fewer jobs and fewer benefits and less societal security since the goddam Haymarket riots? Some actor, recently, said it best: Wake the fuck up, people. Supply-side economics is a bullshitting scam which, duh, benefits only the scammers.

"Healthcare? You're goddam right I'm proud of what I did in Massachusetts. Yes, I meant it as a model for the nation, and that's exactly what it became. Good. End of that story.

"Social issues? Abortion? Women's rights? Gay rights and gay marriage? Anything along those lines? Look, I call myself a Republican and we Republicans have traditionally been small government and libertarian and that's what I stand for and if you want an opinion on abortion your milkman's would be as valid as mine. So why ask me? These things are none of my business: not as a Republican, not as a conservative, not as a politician, and not, potentially, as a government official. 

"As for foreign policy ... more bullshit. That's about all we've had to offer for years. This neoconservative crap? This notion that American firepower can grab everyone by the balls and thus their hearts and minds will simply follow? This idiotic idea that I as a president or we as a nation can dictate others' futures? That stern presidential lectures and national resolve and Marines with guns blazing can somehow extinguish global fanaticism and hate? Here, perhaps you need less to wake up than to fucking grow up. OK? The muscular garbage we've been spewing is just more routine bullshit.

"I could go on, but those are the essentials, folks. I've been sitting atop an immense, bullshitting fraud, which has been calling itself the Republican Party. It's not. It's no longer even the party of Ronald Reagan, let alone Teddy Roosevelt or Abe Lincoln. We've been bamboozling independents and playing to the morons for so long, even we at the top have deluded ourselves into believing that power is the only legitimate objective. Well, it's not. Power's a hoot, power's a lot of fun, power is great to have, but not at the expense of my very soul. So vote for me, or not. I'm going to lose anyway. And I really don't care. Hell I've got more money than a Saudi oil baron. Nothing can faze me. But I won't add to this fraudulent, Big Lie of a party any longer.

"Thank you, and good night."

He'd be right, of course. He'd still lose, just as he'll lose on his present course. But he'd probably lose by far less.

More like 0.9 tolerance?

Once Florida prosecutors "launched an investigation into possible fraud in voter registration forms" committed by RNC-hired Strategic Allied Consulting, the Republican National Committee sprang into conscientious action and "abruptly cut ties to [the] consulting firm."

Sean Spicer, spokesman for the RNC, said the party has "zero tolerance" for voter fraud.

And just what, to the RNC, does "zero tolerance" mean?

[Nathan] Sproul [Strategic Allied's owner] has operated other firms that have been accused in past elections of improprieties designed to help Republican candidates, including dumping registration forms filled out by Democrats.... He said he created Strategic Allied Consulting at the request of the Republican National Committee because of the bad publicity stemming from the past allegations.

The Grand Old Party. Integrity, always integrity.

No mercy: Krauthammer tortures Romney

Where's Ann Romney when Mitt needs her? Stop it! Charles. This is hard. With all your roughhousing, somebody's going to get hurt, and if you've nothing nice to say about Mitt, then just say nothing at all.

But, it seems that Charles has an advanced case of Peggy-envy. The thought of somebody else getting all the post-apocalypse credit for demanding a New New New Nixon Romney at just the right-wing right moment is unendurable to Krauthammer, so he's addressing to the Romney camp what has become the sine qua non of pseudoconservative claptrap: the Go Big! Go Bold! advisory column.

Krauthammer, you see, is fearless. We know this by his criticism of Romney's "unwillingness to go big, to go for the larger argument." Want to know how a plucky pundit would characterize such a wimpy unwillingness? As "simply astonishing," that's how. Because Krauthammer is fearless.

It gets better. Much better. Krauthammer hustles some nifty ideas. First there's his vague suggestion that Romney should more aggressively adopt as policy another, say, $4 trillion interventionist abomination in the Middle East--you know, because that's not only the really smartly strategic thing to do, it's precisely what a war-starved, bigger-deficit-hungry electorate wants to hear. Right? I sense, however, that even Charles senses a few pitfalls in this theory, so he scurries on, to:

[Romney's] only momentum came when he chose Paul Ryan and seemed ready to engage on the big stuff: Medicare, entitlements, tax reform, national solvency, a restructured welfare state. Yet he has since retreated to the small and safe.

I guess Krauthammer thinks "larger argument" is one word; that with Big and Bold and Large and Larger there just naturally connects a winsome Argument. In other words, by virtue of going big, one goes boffo. And for a limited time Krauthammer might be right. Voters often admire what they see as political grit in a pol's proposed changes to, as Krauthammer highlights, Medicare, entitlements, taxes, national solvency and the welfare state--until voters realize that those originally sensible-sounding changes are in reality radically insane. Per Mitt, QED.

Krauthammer also peddles the mind-bending, "What Mitt giveth, Mitt taketh away," unsupplied supply-side shell game: "He has proposed cutting tax rates, while pledging that the share of the tax burden paid by the rich remains unchanged.... But how many people know this?"

Among his base, as few as possible, I should think Mitt is hoping. Because it's a self-cancelling supply-side proposal. In cutting the rates while boosting the share one is left with a wash--no effective change, no amplified capital, no more cash at the top to perhaps, maybe piss down on the peasants. Once again, Mitt's debating only himself. And Charles wants more of this?

Unaccustomed as I am to defending Mitt Romney, I've just got to say, He's not the one in denial here; he's not the one who's somehow, foolishly overlooking all the big, bold, large opportunities to be had in argument here. In fact he tried those arguments--the very arguments that you wingnuts, Charles, ruthlessly shackled him with--and with them, he went bust. Big time.

Oh, by the way. Want to know how many times Krauthammer suggests "jobs" as a campaign theme? 0.

The GOP's hovering, ultimate nightmare

This week Mitt Romney is playing Mr. Nice Guy at rallies--"Look, I know the president cares about America and the people of this country. He just doesn't know how to help them. I do"--a few seemingly innocuous lines which, however, as BuzzFeed notes, have "profoundly confused his most ardent supporters."

This phenomenon is truly fascinating. We are witnessing the post-cultivation of mass psychosis in real time. Romney and Gingrich and Bachmann and other GOP primary dwarfs as well as Fox News and right-wing talk radio have invested four years in the filthy delusionization of their base. Now, just as opportunistically and unsentimentally, the last man standing--Mitt Romney--is watching it devour his chances of promotion, and so he's throwing and grinding every tactical gear in reverse.

But of course it can't be done. Just as they required months and even years to engender, such seething, mad hatreds don't evaporate on command. Observes BuzzFeed:

Every time he tried to assert that Obama cares about America, some members of the audience interrupted with boos and insistent shouts of "No!" By his last rally, he had apparently learned his lesson, rushing through the pro-Obama part of the line so the eventual applause would drown out the resistance.

The GOP's worst problem hasn't even yet kicked in. Losing this election will be a holiday picnic compared to the massive headache the party will suffer afterward: how to retain within its fold these millions of raging paranoids, as a recovering base, while proceeding to reorganize itself as a responsible player in American governance.

It may be that this proves impossible--that the paranoids will retain unshakable control, hence surviving moderates will be forced to establish a third-party outpost (I don't think they can take another of these monstrosities); or perhaps the moderates will seize control and banish the paranoids, but to roughly the same ill effect. That is, the paranoids would move to a third party, thus stripping the GOP of its deranged, but essential, base. 

Either way, the Republican Party has come as close to realizing Thomas Jefferson's nightmare of holding a wolf by the ears as any party since the 1850s.

Grrrrrrr Corn

I'm reasonably confident that David Corn has never heard of me. I want things to stay that way. I don't care to ever run the risk of upsetting him.

Yep, another excavated video:

Mother Jones has obtained a video from 1985 in which Romney, describing Bain's formation, showed how he viewed the firm's mission. He explained that its goal was to identify potential and hidden value in companies, buy significant stakes in these businesses, and then "harvest them at a significant profit" within five to eight years.

I know demented Chihuahuas less tenacious than Corn, and which do less damage to one's pant leg.

We've our own fucking super PACs, thank you very much

Resurrecting his Shakespearean talent in getting "these motherfucking snakes" off "this motherfucking plane," actor Samuel Jackson (who did, after all, once play Othello), has a political video out, through the super-PAC graces of--oh dear Lord--the Jewish Council for Education and Research. The script's wrapping iambic pentameter I shall quote:

We're all on our own if Romney has his way.
And he's against safety nets.
If you fall, tough luck,
So I strongly suggest that you wake the fuck up.

The passage may lack Shakespeare's lighthearted ribaldry, but its rhythmic directness does have a certain elegance.

Obama gets specific on Romney's behalf, poor thing

President Obama is up with a new, two-minute spot (I live in a stationary, not a swinging, state, so I hadn't seen it) that is more specific in just 23 words--"Governor Romney believes that with even bigger tax cuts for the wealthy, and fewer regulations on Wall Street, all of us will prosper"--than Romney has been in his entire strategic shift to pounding specificities (which, unoddly enough, you may have missed). 

Even Politico seems impressed:

Obama's spot is as good a summation as any of the Democratic theory of the case that 2012 is a choice election, and of the economic contrast message Obama took up over the summer.

In related "spot" news, the Washington Post this morning makes an interesting note of the vast difference between what Obama and a super PAC must spend in line with federal law's discounted ad rates for only the actual candidates:

In one Ohio ad buy slated to run just before the election, for example, Obama is paying $125 for a spot that is costing a conservative super PAC $900.

That's more than a 7:1 material advantage for Obama, which of course helps to compensate for the opposing lop-sidedness of Romney's PAC thugs.

Rush Limbaugh sorta gets something right

We cannot know the precise enumeration of "so many people," because we don't know how many were listening to Rush Limbaugh yesterday, but the answer to Rush's "why" comes with inherent ease: "Why do you think so many people in this country are stupid?"

Try this. According to Rush--and now, presumably, many "informed" people--the villainy behind all this left-wing polling (e.g. the latest New York Times/Quinnipiac/CBS News poll) showing Obama with substantial leads in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania is almost too conspicuous to note, and its preposterousness a cinch to disprove. How?

The problem out there is Rasmussen. Rasmussen has the race tied [nationally] at 46.

Come on, now. Don't laugh. Rush is trying to be serious and educational here. The statistical jokes of Rasmussen and Unskewed Polls (which he cites with admiration) and the unnoted, riotously dumb conflation of state and national polling are all Rush has got. So back off, man. He's a scientist.

And you know what? "[I]f you take every one of these [Romney-unfavorable] polls," says Rush, "and you exchange the sample"--you know, just exchange the sample, just, just, just exchange the goddamn inconvenient thing--"You find Romney up by anywhere from six to nine points, and, in some cases, ten points." Hurray!

I'm not making this up.

Rush prefers 2010's voter turnout as a methodological guide to 2012, the absurdity of which I was going to spend some time on, but I'm already sick of writing about this idiot and I wanted to get the next part in.

[Y]ou've got an attempt here to set up the idea that there has to have been some fraud because every poll had Obama winning by double digits or high single digits, and then Romney wins by five points, the left, you know these people. The first thing they're gonna think of is they had the election stolen from 'em and they're gonna start raising holy hell. The real vote will not matter to them if it's that drastically different from all these polls. Hillary Clinton told an ACORN audience that elections were stolen in Ohio in 2004. She told an ACORN audience that. They're not incapable of all this. They're totally capable of everything I have been and will be describing to you.

As always, in Rush's conspiratorially fevered brain the culprits of Hillary and ACORN stand immeasurably and wickedly tall. Yet Rush is accurately on to one thing--the "raising holy hell" thing.

Forget the polls, forget the statistical ups and downs and all the increasingly uniform forecasts of a total Romney meltdown. Consider, instead, only this: If, on the day that ultimately matters, Election Day, millions of minorities in thousands of towns are thwarted in dozens of already predicted ways by right-wing bureaucratic goons, then we will indeed see a lot of righteous and holy hell raised. It won't exactly be pretty, though. 

The GOP's payoff for years of hard, gruesome, careless toil

Earlier this evening I heard Chris Matthews remark on "Hardball" that President Obama is winning this race "in spite" of all the contemptible Republican tactics: charges of unAmericanism, a "food-stamp" presidency, come-and-get-it welfare dispensations, the president's through-and-through Otherness ... you are all too familiar with the filth.

My instant reaction to Matthews' observation was that the antithesis is likely true (or truer); that President Obama is winning this race because of Republican contemptibility, not in spite of it (none of which is to deny, it should go without saying, Obama's enormous political skills). If Republicans remain the undisputed champions of only one thing in this political universe, it is that they can always be counted on to blunderingly overreach, to patently overplay their hand, to make complete and absolute asses of themselves.

This attribute became strikingly clear under Gingrich's House regime--adolescent tantrums and government shutdowns, anyone?--and they've only become better at it. They have since disgracefully overplayed their hand in the ideological denial of climate change, in exploiting older religious conservatives at the cost of younger (and more conscientious) evangelicals, in "shrinking" government by brazenly bloating plutocratic wallets as well as deficits, in huckstering patriotic wars of vast national-security injury, in catering to ever-whiter and narrower slices of the nation's immensely diversifying demographics--in short, for the sake of that very next "win," they have played themselves straight into ethical bankruptcy.

They've nothing left. They squandered years of potentially competitive cooperation and thoughtful partisanship; they cornered themselves into wilder- and wilder-eyed extremism; they bet the farm on ... what? In heaven's name what?

So I put the rather loaded question to you: Are they now really losing in spite of all that?