Les Mittsérables

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Greg Sargent says this is the only ad Mittens will be running in the swing states, starting Friday.

Is it me, or is this ad pathetic?

According to Jed Lewison, Mittens held some sort of rally in Ohio to help him connect to blue-collar workers, and everyone on the stage with him were owners and other executives. He’s also gone back to bragging about Romneycare.

And Staples? One of the jewels in Mitt’s success story? It’s going down the tubes.

As Josh Marshall says, irony and karma want to kick mitt’s ass.

Stinky and the Bain

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Latest bobblehead chatter is that his association with Romney will doom Paul Ryan’s future political career. So Ryan is cutting himself loose from the Romney game plan and has unleashed (everybody’s favorite word these days) his inner wonk by … giving a Powerpoint presentation?

I’m with Dave Weigel — “wonk” is being defined down for Ryan’s benefit. Real wonks don’t do Powerpoint, and if they do, they don’t limit themselves to four bleeping slides.

Ryan also is reported to be saying snarky things about Romney within earshot of reporters on his campaign bus. I understand not everyone is buying that, though.

See Paul Krugman, “Delusions of Wonkhood” and “Death by Powerpoint, Continued.”

Arrested Development

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This is just inexplicable to me. First, Scott Brown is rolling the dice that Elizabeth Warren’s Native American heritage is her Achilles heel. He is running ads about it now.

Then, a couple of his staffers were caught on video taunting Warren supporters with war whoops and tomahawk chops.

David at Blue Mass Group says the idiots include “Brown’s Constituent Service Counsel Jack Richard (camoflage shirt) and — we believe — Massachusetts GOP operative Brad Garrett Garnett, front and center with tan baseball cap and gray hoodie, leading the whoops and chops.”

Local Boston television news says there’s a third staffer, a “GOP operative,” in there somewhere. Then they asked Scott Brown about it, and he said he didn’t know about the video and wouldn’t apologize, but Elizabeth Warren is lying about being part Native American and she should apologize.

If Scott were desperately behind in the polls and needed a “hail mary” pass to catch up, I could sorta kinda see him trying something like this. I doubt it would work, but the attempt wouldn’t surprise me. But the race in Massachusetts is very, very close, and by many accounts Brown is a smart and effective campaigner. Why is he doing this? Is Brown tired of being a senator?

Also, from the Chronicles of the Hopelessly Stupid — Althouse shows she couldn’t get a point if you stuck her with it.

Update: See Josh Marshall, “Really, Scott Brown?“

GOP Struggles with Math

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Yesterday Politico trotted out a polling analysis that says Romney is winning among middle-class families. They don’t define what they mean by “middle class,” but I notice the analysis makes a careful distinction between middle-class voters and middle-class families. Apparently Romney is losing with middle-class voters but winning with middle-class families; like the kids and dog count, I suppose. Or maybe they define “families” as “related white people who live together in the South somewhere.” The whole thing strikes me as an exercise in reassuring themselves they aren’t really losing.

Righties even have adopted what they are calling “unskewed” polling outcomes that show Romney winning handily. On the other hand, Sam Wang of Princeton Election Consortium is giving President Obama a 90 percent win probability. Nate Silver continues to give the President a comfortable lead in probable electoral votes.

Meanwhile, a small army of conservative number-crunchers are striving mightily to figure out a way to make Mitt Romney’s tax-and-deficit promises mathematically possible. So far, they haven’t been able to do it. See also “Checking Rove’s Math.”

Josh Marshall writes about why the GOP can’t, or won’t, adapt.

As recently as a couple weeks ago, the top generals in the Romney camp were stuck on the idea that Obama cannot win with unemployment this high. Can’t. And if evidence suggests otherwise, just give it time.

I’m reminded of this column which Byron York wrote on September 10th …

Mitt Romney and his top aides are running an essentially faith-based campaign. Whatever the polls say at the moment, whatever the pundits say, whatever some nervous Republicans say, Team Romney simply does not believe President Obama can win re-election in today’s terrible economy. The president may appear to be defying gravity now, but he can’t keep it up through Nov. 6.

Whether Romney could have done anything else if his team thought Plan A might not pan out I don’t know. But I think York was on to something here. Maybe not quite arrogance but a deep faith in an unproven hypothesis — enabled by a contemptuous disrespect for their opponent which blinded them to some of his assets as a candidate.

Perhaps they are blinded by his “blah”-ness.

Seriously, I’ve been saying for years that one symptom of whatever cognitive dysfunction is common to righties is a desperate need to believe that everyone but a small fringe of crazy liberals sees the world the way they do. You see something similar in white supremacists, who devoutly believe all other white people are white supremacists also but that a majority won’t admit it because it’s not “PC.” A rightie can no more admit that wingnuttery is not embraced by almost all Americans than the Pope could convert to Sikhism. That’s why, when they lose elections, the only possible (to them) reason must be voter fraud, or else voters were deceived by the Lamestream Media. So, it’s not surprising they simply cannot accept what is happening now in the campaigns.

The Right: You Latino People Are Too Emotional

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At the American Enterprise Institute blog and Daily Caller, they are struggling to explain why Latinos support Bush Obama over Romney, and the conclusion is that it’s all about emotions. “Hispanics have an emotional connection to Obama, and an emotional disconnect with the GOP,” said the AEI blogger.

According to these “analysts,” Latinos should be deserting Obama and turning to Romney because the economy remains sluggish and because he failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform and the DREAM Act. It’s like Latinos are not supposed to notice that the last two objectives were blocked by Republicans. They’re not supposed to notice that Romney has said he would veto the DREAM Act and expects millions of immigrants to “self-deport.”

No; if Latinos prefer Obama over Romney, they’re just being “emotional.”

Ideological Inbreeding

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Via Steve M, a fascinating analysis by Noah Millman at The American Conservative.

I have only become more convinced that what has changed the dynamics of this election has been a fundamental reevaluation not merely – or even primarily – of the two candidates, but of the two parties. This election is becoming nationalized, and it is becoming nationalized in the context of an across-the-board swing in the direction of the Democrats.

The reason, I think, is a simple one. The Republicans Party – not just the Romney campaign, but the party as a whole – is running on nothing. They are running on the presumption that the country has already rejected the Democrats, and that therefore it is their turn. They are behaving as if choosing Democratic governance was some kind of “experiment” that didn’t work out, and now the American people will, of course, come back to their natural home.

By contrast, the Democrats actually made a case for their party. They explained what their party has done, and why they should be able to set the national agenda. They defended their foreign policy, their economic policy, and their social policy in strong, unapologetic terms.

Millman points out that the polls haven’t just been moving in favor of Obama; in the swing states they’ve been moving in favor of Democrats in down ticket races as well. There’s still time for that to change before the election, of course, but I think that’s exactly what’s happening in the election campaigns right now.

Jonathan Bernstein wrote,

… GOP obsession with “vetting” Barack Obama, and with a variety of ill-fated attack lines, comes from two things: the divergence of incentives between the Romney campaign and what my brother calls the “movement conservative marketplace”; and, the closed information loop that makes it difficult for insiders to have any sense of how outsiders would see these attack lines.

Bernstein suggests the mighty media infrastructure may have turned into a liability for righties, because it’s too easy to gin up some phony controversy that explodes on Fox News and Politico and Buzzfeed, and which gets the rightie bloggers all fired up, but which is simply meaningless to the general electorate. The recent outrage that there’s a several-year-old video of Barack Obama using the word “redistribution” is an example. That was supposed to counter Romney’s “47 percent” remark? On what planet?

A lot of the current generation of Republican politicians suffer from ideological inbreeding, IMO. They have absolutely no idea what anyone outside the echo chamber thinks. And the only political skill many of these clowns possess is being a loyal echo. A lot of them don’t seem to understand what government is for, and I doubt they could write sensible policy legislation if you let them copy it off a blackboard.

Believe It, or Not

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Proof that the Republican Party has turned into a moveable freak show —

Mitt’s tax returns identify the United States as a foreign country. Well, from the perspective of his money, maybe it is.

Fresh from his anti-triumph at the AARP, Paul Ryan is now telling Florida seniors that “Obamacare” includes death panels.

Ryan is also telling people that Medicare has become a “piggybank” for Obamacare, and that President Obama is running a campaign of “division” and “distortion.”

However, there is no truth to the rumor that Congressman Ryan will be featured in an upcoming issue of The Journal of Psychological Projection. But that’s only because there is no such journal.

Sarah Pain is advising both GOP candidates to “go rogue.” If by that she means they should lose the election and then spend the next few years doing reality shows and Fox News commentaries, that works for me.

Ralph Reed has joined the Romney-Ryan campaign. Too many Rs.

And don’t miss “How Romney Packed the Univision Forum.”

Update: One more — the GOP is pushing Romney to promise he will keep troops in Afghanistan indefinitely. Hey, just tell him there’s a tax shelter in there somewhere.

Vanity Politics

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There’s a must-read post by Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money called “Ralph Nader and the Structure of Progressive Change.” It’s not actually about Ralph Nader, but rather, Ralph Nader here is emblematic of why progressives never seem to get a movement going.

What we might call “Goldwater” conservatives, he said, began organizing at a local level in the 1960s. Eventually they took over the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, progressives have responded to the country’s rightward shift by running vanity candidates like Ralph Nader for president every four years. In 2008, progressives changed strategies when Barack Obama seemed to capture their dreams and then were shocked when he turned out to be the centrist he always was. But even in 2008, it was still a simplistic analysis of progressive change offered by his supporters that hadn’t learned much in the previous 8 years.

I oversimplify, sure. But the trajectory of the conservative movement should be teaching us many lessons. Not that we should be crazy extremists. But that party structures are actually not that hard to take over if you really want to do it. Yet progressives seem to almost NEVER talk about localized politics. We complain about education reform but don’t organize to take over school boards. Conservatives outflank us in part because they seem to understand that the presidency is not all-powerful. Perhaps local offices like county clerk and elected judges are as or even more important than the presidency, at least from a long-term perspective. Too many progressives believe in Green Lantern presidencies. Elect Obama in ’08 and he can force through all the changes we want.

No. That’s not how it works.

What Loomis is calling “Green Lantern presidencies” I’ve called the “magic candidate,” which is the syndrome that makes people believe all we have to do to counteract 50 years of relentless wingnut organizing is elect the right guy to be president.

Right now, the Dems appear to have embraced progressive populism more than I’ve seen them do since the 1960s. I don’t think progressive activists can take much credit for this, though. And we won’t know if the Dems really mean it until we get a real majority in both houses, instead of a majority that includes a mess of Blue Dogs. Still, the fact that so many are running on progressive populist themes is heartening. A strong populist progressive movement would reinforce this, if we had one.

But this takes us back to Why Progressives Can’t Organize. I can think of several reasons.

First, we look bad in comparison to the Right because the Right has always had deep-pocket sponsors installing astroturf wherever the grass roots weren’t sprouting. The media-think tank infrastructure, now decades old, that supports movement conservatism is all funded by a relatively small number of family trusts, for the purpose of manipulating public opinion to support whatever will make more money for the trustees. What George Soros has contributed to the Left is not even a drop in the bucket in comparison; more like a drop in Lake Erie.

Second, in spite of the fact that we’re supposed to be the “collectivists” and conservatives the “individualists,” when it comes to organizing it’s the other way around. If you were to tell one hundred conservative citizen-activists to show up on Fifth and Main Street at 9 am Tuesday wearing red, white and blue T-shirts to rally for X, I’d bet you’d get about 8o percent compliance. Do the same thing with progressives, and maybe 20 people would actually follow directions. You’d get at least 30 other people showing up (early or late) with signs and fliers promoting an entirely unrelated cause. And Code Pink members would organize a separate rally two blocks away to grab all the attention.

My irritation with the Occupy “movement” that was never a movement stemmed from my long frustration with leftie vocational demonstrators. Occupy seemed to be the ultimate in vanity demonstrating; truly, rebels without a cause. It was people showing up to vent personal frustration at the system, but with no clue about how to fix the system. And, sorry, standing outside a police station with a megaphone, yelling “F— the police” over and over again, is not “activism.” It’s a tantrum.

On the other hand, I understand some of the Occupy groups that formed around the country last year have morphed into community activist groups focusing on local situations, such as foreclosures, which is great.

This takes us to a complaint about organizing locally. Conservatives get elected to school boards to block teaching evolution, for example, whereas progressives are more focused on national issues. Beginning with takeovers of local Republican party structures, wingnuts eventually owned the entire Party. However, I don’t know what would keep liberals from running for school boards to keep evolution in science class.

It may make a difference that we’ve been playing defense and they’ve been playing offense lo these many years. We’ve been working to preserve Roe v. Wade and other civil rights gains; they’ve been working to strike them down. We’ve been working to preserve the New Deal; they’ve been chipping away at it. But the Right has chipped away so much stuff that we’re going back on offense now. For example, they’ve chipped away at reproductive rights enough that women finally are getting riled up about it. Go, team.

Maybe because they are better at trusting leaders, rightie issues organizations all these years have been better at long games. Even after they don’t get everything they want — and they don’t always, even though it seems otherwise sometimes — they come back in the next election cycle supporting the same candidates and hoping to build on whatever they did get.

Too many progressives don’t do long games. No public option? Kill the bill! Dump Obama!

Finally, there’s been a vacuum in leadership. Too many of the icons of progressivism have been more about grandstanding for the glorious cause than about making realistic progress toward achieving that cause. Ralph Nader is one such person; so is Dennis Kucinich. Kucinich served nine terms in the House with no substantive legislative accomplishments, but he was good at sound bites and introduced a lot of no-chance resolutions to impeach Dick Cheney, and progressives swooned. Why are so many of us so easily distracted by shiny objects?

Who are the real national leaders of progressivism? The only name coming to mind is Barney Frank.

Well, that’ today’s rant. What am I missing?