This surprises me — Romney and the GOP SuperPACs are pulling ads from Michigan and Pennsylvania, meaning they don’t think they have a prayer. And the Los Angeles Times reports that in the past few days most Romney television ads have disappeared in Ohio and some other battleground states.
We know this can’t be because the Romney campaign and the SuperPACs are short of dough. They’re rolling in it. I also can’t believe the RRs are giving up on battleground states. So what’s up?
My guess is that they decided the old ads weren’t working and pulled them before they have new ads in the can and ready to go. But how long does it take to crank out a campaign ad? Even a so-so ad would be better than no ad at all, considering the Obama campaign is still running ads full tilt.
Of course, maybe they’re all just too incompetent to run an effective campaign.
Republicans were predicting that Romney would follow in Clinton’s footsteps (rather than, say, Dole’s). Wait until the convention, they argued. Wait until all the Santorumites and Newtheads rally around Mitt in Tampa. Wait until the country sees him speak. Romney’s underwater ratings will evaporate shortly thereafter, and he’ll never look back. …
… And so, given that least one former nominee had used a convention to dig himself out of a big favorability hole, I figured that now, five days after Tampa, was the right time to check back in and see if Romney’s own popularity problem had finally cleared itself up.
Unfortunately for the GOP, it hasn’t.
Romney has issued a few ineffectual bleats this week about the Dem convention being a “celebration of failure” and the platform being “extreme,” but that’s not going to resonate with anyone but wingnuts and baggers. I suspect Romney and his aides are having one meeting after another right now about the direction of the campaign, and by next week we may see an entirely retooled Romney effort. But what could they possibly try that they haven’t tried already?
First off, if you missed The Speech (or just want to watch it again), you can watch it at Political Carnival. The Washington Post also has the speech, plus a sort of tweet-annotated transcript. There’s another transcript-as-delivered here. Don’t bother with speech-as-prepared-for-delivery transcripts, since Big Bill spoke off the cuff so much I understand the teleprompter operator gave up before the speech was over.
Watching Bill Clinton take the stage at the Democratic National Convention and take over the room with his first few, simple words – “We are here to nominate a President and I’ve got one in mind†— was like watching a great violinist follow a group of gifted amateurs.
It occurs to me that the Obama campaign can fire their advertising people and just run clips of Bill Clinton’s speech for the rest of the campaign. Even if they don’t do that, I have no doubt we will be seeing a barrage of Big Bill videos over the next few hours.
So that was actually three things. Anyway, what struck me most was how much Arkansas we’re-heah-to-nominate-a-president-I-got-one-in-mahnd he let into his voice. As Chuck Berry once put it, the man was campaign-shoutin’ like a Southern diplomat. (How much you want to bet that the man once owned a coffee-colored Cadillac, and that he knows at least five women named Nadine?) G’s were dropped all over the stage. The ad-libs were all tossed off in that wonderful character we’ve come to know as the smartest little boy around the cracker barrel. Willard Romney was out there somewhere and he was being utterly eviscerated by Floyd The Barber. And the only people who look more ridiculous than he does the morning after are all those media brainiacs who were saying how smart the Republicans were being in “driving a wedge” between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. There is a reason you should be careful what you wish for.
You might have missed this, but about a month ago Dick Morris confidently predicted that Bill Clinton would vote for Mitt Romney. In a kind of good Democrat-bad Democrat routine, Romney has been insinuating that he is President Clinton’s heir, and more like Clinton than President Obama is like Clinton.
“My guess is we will get a great rendition of how good things were in the 1990s, but we’re not going to hear much about how things have been the last four years,†Ryan told the crowd outside the Dallas County Courthouse. “And, by the way, under President Clinton, we got welfare reform. Chuck Grassley, everybody else in Congress — we got welfare reform, which moved people from welfare to work to get people out of poverty. President Obama is rolling back welfare reform.â€
Oh, the video possibilities are endless. It will be interesting to see if the Romney-Ryan “welfare” ads stay on the air; all the Dems have to do to kill that snake is to run ads of Big Bill rebutting it.
An interesting thing about the speech: At the beginning, over Twitter, we were fed the usual diet of snarky conservative comments. That’s fine. We liberals tossed off some snarky tweets last week during the Tampa convention. That’s how it goes, and some of them are funny even when you disagree with them.
But the funny thing was, over the course of the speech, those tweets became fewer in number. Then they disappeared. That’s when you can tell the other side is worried. Clinton reached people. He revved up the base, but he did a lot more than that.
Today the Right is in full sour grapes mode, callng the speech “long” and even “a swing and a miss.”
Sometime last night, Ari Melber tweeted “RNC gave us Eastwooding, DNC offers Clintoning, a fact-driven, policy argument presented to voters like they are thinking adults.” And Matt Latimer wrote at Daily Beast,
Here’s why I think Clinton’s speech was successful: He did what almost no one at the Republican convention tried to do, what few conventions bother to do anymore. He treated the American people like thinking human beings.
The only downside I see for President Obama is that it’s doubtful he can match the excitement created by Big Bill. But I could be wrong.
Lots of good stuff to read on the Web today. First, Best Headline award to Paul Krugman — “Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Make Bipartisan.” He was referring to pundits who had fallen for Paul Ryan’s packaging as a courageous, honest, serious, and even wonky intellectual. Apparently some scales have fallen from some eyes.
Speaking of bipartisanship, here’s more proof that the practice of “fact checking” is dying on a bipartisan vine. Last night Mayor Castro said that 4.5 million jobs had been created on President Obama’s watch. (I am pretty certain he said “private sector jobs,” although that’s not in the official transcript. Maybe someone could check that.) Well, the fact-checkers at CNN confirmed that this number is correct — 4.5 million private sector jobs have been added to the economy since January 2010, when the recession hit bottom — but they downgrade the statement anyway. Why? Because (a) the economy lost a million public sector jobs; and (b) you have to subtract the number of jobs lost from January 2009 to January 2010, when the economy was still in free-fall.
So, CNN says, the Obama Administration has seen a net gain of only 300,000 private sector jobs, and when you add in the public sector jobs lost — many of which were lost because Republican governors were “balancing budgets” to make room for tax cuts — you end up with a negative number.
And I cordially invite CNN to fact check my ass. If anything, CNN’s argument makes the Democrats’ point, that the Bush economic crisis was so terrible it took a whole year just to stop the hemorrhage. And we wouldn’t have lost so many public sector jobs had Republicans not cut aid to states out of the stimulus, and see above about the Republican governors. How many jobs did Scott Walker alone lose?
Eastwood’s speech reveals a lot about today’s Republican Party. First, the fact that he was up on that podium in the first place raises questions about the professionalism and judgment of the operatives and strategists who planned the convention. Apparently, none of the people charged with making sure the convention presented the party and the candidate in the best light possible thought it was worth it to vet Eastwood’s speech or to find out whether the octogenarian actor was up to the task of giving a speech at the convention. This is the kind of mistake that serious presidential campaign teams do not make, but today’s Republican Party is rapidly losing its claim to being a serious or professional operation.
(In Eastwood’s defense, sorta kinda, I have to say that he is first and foremost an entertainer, and he was giving the audience in front of him exactly what they wanted.)
Likewise, much of the reaction from the Right to last night’s Dem convention was just weird. I see little attempt at substantive criticism; they are mostly picking out things like taking “God” out of the platform (thank you, Dems). They also went ballistic over a line from a video shown in Charlotte, “Government Is The Only Thing We All Belong To.” See Steve M for details.
It struck me that the GOP convention featured speaker after speaker talking about the hardships their grandparents had overcome. Last night we heard speaker after speaker talk about the hardships they had overcome themselves.
To be fair, several Dem speakers spoke of parents and grandparents also. But the hardship stories were different in another way — the Dems connected the hardship stories to real policies in a way that the GOP did not. John Dickerson noticed this, too.
If the speech is effective beyond the power of well delivered rhetoric, it will be because the first lady took this description of Obama’s core self and linked it to policy. This is what Ann Romney and Mitt Romney never did. The message of the GOP convention was “Trust Mitt.†That was Michelle Obama’s message too: Her husband could be trusted because he came from a background and has lived a middle class life. But then she started connecting the biography to the policy. This was always Bill Clinton’s great gift. If this connection is successfully made, then that’s what will make this pitch more politically [word missing?] than just a pretty speech by a loving wife who thinks her husband deserves an A for effort.
“We were so young, so in love, and so in debt,” she joked about their early student loan debt, which was higher than their mortgage. “That’s why Barack has fought so hard to increase student aid.” She made the same connection between Obama’s grandmother and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to help women get equal pay for equal work. Tax cuts, the auto bailout, and every other policy, she argued, grew out of his biography.
You got that from most of the Dem speakers; a personal connection, a story of how their own experiences shaped their views and inspired them to enter public life. With Republicans there’s a huge disconnect; their experiences of real hardship are second and third hand. We ended up listening to Ann Romney — who is having an elevator installed in the garage of one of her homes to manage her several cars — pretend to care about the price of gasoline.
Another difference between GOP and Dem “hardship” narratives is that Republicans like to tell these stories to show how Grandpa succeeded without anyone’s help, whereas Dems talk about coming together to achieve success. Mayor Julian Castro, for example, talked about “investing in opportunity.” I liked this part of his speech —
Of all the fictions we heard last week in Tampa, the one I find most troubling is this: If we all just go our own way, our nation will be stronger for it. Because if we sever the threads that connect us, the only people who will go far are those who are already ahead. We all understand that freedom isn’t free. What Romney and Ryan don’t understand is that neither is opportunity. We have to invest in it.
Another thing that struck me is that the Dems talked a lot about veterans, a group absent from last week’s GOP rhetoric. And when Iraq veteran Tammy Duckworth said,
President Obama pushed for fairness in the military, listening to commanders as we ended “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and on how to allow women to officially serve in more combat jobs—because America’s daughters are just as capable of defending liberty as her sons.
— I saw a roaring ovation from the women in the hall. (Duckworth also reinforced the “working together” theme by talking about how her Blackhawk helicopter crew didn’t abandon her after a rocket-propelled grenade tore her legs off.)
In Tampa, the GOP seemed to have entirely dropped its long-standing conceit of being the pro-military and pro-national security party. Maybe somebody said this, but I didn’t hear them talking about supporting the troops or getting tough on terrorists. It was like they forgot. Why was that?
The larger point is that, while the death of bin Laden might not be a front-burner issue in 2012, it certainly has changed the trajectory of U.S. politics in President Obama’s favor.
Some commenters argued that the polling bump the President got from bin Laden’s death would be short-lived, and I didn’t disagree, but my point was that the killing of bin Laden would force the GOP to make narrative adjustments it didn’t want to make. And I think the lack of talk about security and terrorists in Tampa was the result of that adjustment.
Righties still can, and do, reassure each other that Obama is soft on terrorists. They still like to compare President Obama to President Carter, who in rightie mythology plays the role of the Specter of Wimpiness. But it must have sunk in to at least some of them that they can no longer credibly claim to be the party of Tough Guys Who Will Protect You From Scary Things versus the wimpy Dems. That part of their sales pitch was kneecapped when Bin Laden was killed.
And given the rolling embarrassment that was Mitt’s “world tour,” I suspect Mitt himself may have banned talk of foreign policy from the convention.
I’m going to do a little live blogging. Is it me, or are the Dems a lot more fired up than the Republicans were?
Deval Patrick — Wow. Great speech. It’s a shame he was on before 10 o’clock eastern when the networks begin broadcasting. I’ll have to post a video as soon as there is one. I’m sorry I missed Ted Strickland. I’ll find a video of that, too.
Wait — here it is —
Update: Mayor Julian Castro is doing pretty well, I think.
Update: Michelle Obama’s speech was, as always, very real.
Beside the chair, one of the more remarkable things about last week’s GOP convention was a lack of specificity. Speakers ran down Obama and promised President Romney would make “tough choices” — Republicans like the word “tough” — but so far Mittens has managed to run a nearly content-free general election campaign, and the convention didn’t change that. His acceptance speech told us next to nothing about what specific policies he might pursue.
A couple of day’s ago Greg Sargent provided a glimpse into the Romney campaign strategy. Apparently the Romney folks assume that many people who currently plan to vote for Obama are just being emotional — they like Obama and are attached to the symbolism of the first black president. These are the voters Romney thinks he can win over.
Romney’s argument is that the Obama Administration has been a dismal failure, and it’s time to put someone in charge who knows how to Get Stuff Done. Unable to convincingly pivot (or shake the etch-a-sketch) from the extreme right-wing positions he endorsed during the primaries, Romney now is offering himself to the general electorate as a generic alternative candidate. He is deliberately making himself the blankest possible slate. His people think that if the electorate sees Romney has a responsible, successful businessman and not the vampire squid that he is, voters will be won over and won’t ask questions.
As I remember it, in 2000 George W. Bush pretty much got away with a similar sort of campaign. He made some promises about cutting taxes and using the budget surplus (that he eliminated with the tax cuts) to save Social Security, but other than that he mostly just packaged himself as a successful businessman and governor and moderate Republican while painting Al Gore as, well, weird. In 2000, enough of a complacent public bought that to enable the Bushies to get their boy “selected.”
Greg Sargent argues that public opinion about President Obama is more complex and nuanced than Romney thinks.
Despite the Romney campaign’s assumptions, these voters may be proving unexpectedly resistant to the conclusion that the Obama presidency amounts to an “extraordinary record of failure,†as Romney put it recently. It’s true that majorities disapprove of Obama’s handling of the economy. But disapproval can mean different things. A disapproving voter may be disappointed in the slow pace of the recovery, but may also have decided that the crisis was so severe — and the resulting problems run so deep — that Obama could not have done much to make the country recover faster.
This came up again and again in interviews with swing voters done by Ron Brownstein and yours truly. And it would explain why more Americans consistently hold Bush responsible for the current economy.
In other words, a lot of voters may be disappointed about sluggish economic growth without necessarily wanting to kick the President out of office, especially if Romney can’t explain precisely what he would do differently to turn things around. An extraordinarily charming politician might pull it off, but Romney ain’t that, especially when he behaves just like your SOB boss when he has to mingle with employees at the company Christmas party.
I also wonder how Romney is going to remain Mr. Blank Etch-a-Sketch during the debates. You know President Obama is going to hammer him on specifics, and I don’t think Romney’s “vote for me ’cause I’m the white guy” act is going to score him points. This is not 2000; people are not complacent. They want to see the fine print. Maybe they have been underwhelmed by Mr. Obama, but they aren’t going to hand the White House keys over to someone they suspect might make things worse.
Barring some unforeseen disaster that might be blamed on Obama, between now and November, I think Mr. Romney is going to have to stop just saying he is a successful businessman and start acting like one to appeal to the majority of voters. And to me, that means providing a more credible business model than what he’s coughed up so far.
Update: One more thing — Republicans don’t know how to be cool.
Something really odd going on this morning about an alleged new poll that allegedly shows Romney roaring ahead of President Obama among independent voters. National Reviewposted this four days ago:
According to a new poll conducted by Democracy Corps (the James Carville/Stan Greenberg-founded firm), Mitt Romney is leading by 16 points among independents, 54 percent to Barack Obama’s 38 percent. Twenty-six percent of independents think the country is going in the right direction; 68 percent think it is going on the wrong track. Forty percent of independents approve of Obama, while 56 percent disapprove.
The overall poll isn’t a terrific win for Romney — he’s at 47 percent to Obama’s 49 percent — but if he’s opened up a gap anywhere near this large among independent voters, that’s certainly a hopeful trend for him.
This morning, in a delayed reaction, a number of rightie blogs are reporting this information and predicting a growing tidal wave of support for Romney that will sweep him into the White House, and Dems are panicked.
Now, these numbers about independents might be true, but I can’t confirm them. Some of the rightie blogs provide links that allegedly go to the source data, but if you follow the links you either get to a “page not found” or “404” page or to the home page of Carville and Greenburg’s Democracy Corp, with a note near the bottom saying that the page you are looking for can’t be found, but maybe you’d like to look at something else?
I haven’t been able to find any national polls that break out independent voters separately, just state polls, and those are all over the map. However, Nate Silver’s trend lines for November 6 show Obama pulling further ahead of Romney.
There really was such a poll, but Carville & Greenberg yanked it off the Web.
A hacker planted fake polling data on the Democracy Corps page and then alerted National Review.
The Right is hallucinating.
All three of the above bulleted items are equally plausible, IMO. If someone does find the source data somewhere, do let me know. I’d like to see it.
Elsewhere — there are several commentaries out today on the theme that Democrats are really, really worried, and possibly panicked, about their convention, for one reason or another. One such story is that they are worried that Bill Clinton will end up sandbagging the President to help his wife win in 2016. Steve M. takes that one apart pretty deftly. And, seriously, it doesn’t even make sense. President Obama isn’t running in 2016; how would it help Hillary Clinton politically to undermine him now? That’s just weird.
Nate Silver says Mittens may have gotten a teenie little bounce of maybe two or three percentage points — more of a bouncette — out of the GOP convention. He really needed better than that to change momentum in his favor.
“In 1968, France was a dangerous place to be for a 21-year-old American, but Mitt Romney was right in the middle of it.â€
I immediately envisioned a comic book cover showing Young Mitten (“La Mitaine Jeune”) running through the streets of Paris, dodging a barrage of stale croissants and irate taunts, armed with nothing but the Book of Mormon. I so wish I could draw. This would be perfect for Mad Magazine.
The quote comes from Tommy Christopher at Mediaite, and you should just read the whole thing. La Mitaine Jeune was in France avoiding military service the same year 16,592 Americans died in Vietnam. La Mitaine got four deferments, no doubt made possible by money and family connections.
