Velociworld

I have a few Mormon friends and relatives ... but still no warm cuddlies toward the Mormon Church. HOWEVER, this was a pleasure to read. At some point, Obama and Romney will have to go head-to-head - and I can't wait for the well earned ass kicking to commence.

We hope he takes Obama to the cleaners. Romney didn't really burn anybody up during the Republican debates, now did he?

I don't recall it was Romney's job in the debates to destroy anyone. The job was to win.

I'll take the Mormon over the Moron any fricking day...

The Obama camp can't touch the Mormon issue. Polygamy? Obama's pa was one. Crazy-ass racist religion? Harry Reid is one. Oh...and Jeremiah Wright. 'Nuff said.

What confidence. Although Obama has a first-rate affiablility hiding a shell, Romney has a quality of speaking that is amazingly off-putting to almost every class of people, and he is completely lost in reacting to a fluid argument or an audience. He is the definition of a stiff.

I think Obama will lose, perhaps in a landslide. But any conservative who thinks Rommey's debate performance will not put the fear back into him is kidding himself. The Marxist dialectic is about mangling truths so horribly that the oppostition becomes confused in outrage. Obama, or I should say Axlerod and Ayers, have been very effective at that, and Romney is easliy confused.

While Romney is running a better race than I had any reason to expect, Skippy actually doesn't know that Romney's going to win.

There are two reasons, I don't know that, which I've written about at some length at my place.

I looked a the past century of presidential elections where an incumbent was running. Five of them; Taft, Hoover, Ford, Carter and Bush 41 lost to challengers. Of the five, only Hoover didn't have a serious primary challenger, a third party candidate that siphoned his vote, or both. And Hoover had an unemployment rate nearly triple Obama's.

For Barry to lose, he would defy history in a spectacular and unprecedented way.

Second, the Electoral College map is more than a little daunting. Obama won so many states by such daunting margins four years ago, that he could lose some pretty big ones and still stay over 270.

Let's give all of the states that John Kerry won in '04 to Obama, which seems likely. If the president holds on to just Ohio or Florida, the election's over, even if he loses everything else he picked up in '08.

Could Romney do it? Possibly, sure. But I wouldn't put any money on it. Mitt would not only have to run a strategically and tactically perfect campaign, Obama would have to fuck up repeatedly and on a grand scale each time. And no one should count on such things.

Lookee, I get wanting Obama to lose, but a dispassionate analysis of the history and the map suggests that it ain't gonna happen.

But we'll certainly see, won't we?

"The Marxist dialectic is about mangling truths so horribly that the oppostition becomes confused in outrage."

Succinct. And dead-on.

Besides, Skippy is a Canadian.

Obama has already fucked up repeatedly and with vigor. He's done so often enough and vigorously enough for me to conclude that he's intentionally throwing the election.

Skippy's analysis does not include incumbents who did not run for re-election because they would have been beaten, i.e. LBJ and Truman. Certain losers bowing out before the election skews the stats.

Further, it is not at all certain that Obama will carry all of the states won by Kerry. There are always a couple surprises. The Democrats will try mightily to steal Ohio, and may succeed, but Obama's off-putting personality and general incompetence almost assure that he will manage to lose a couple states he should not lose. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Minnesota may all be in play.

Casca,

Yes, we covered that in the comments of the last post, but thanks anyway.

Now, how exactly does that make me wrong?

Randy,

And for every time that Obama says something stupid, Romney says something like "I like to fire people", making it essentially a wash.

By tactical and strategic fuck-ups, I mean - as one example - devoting time and resources in states - where he has no hope, like McCain did in Pennsylvania (where he couldn't win) while abandoning states like Michigan (which he could have and wound up losing Indiana.)

Look at the list of states that Romney has to pick up, and do so while actually being either an android or afflicted with Aspergers. That's not going to be easy, teenagers.

And sitting presidents tend only to lose when a very specific confluence of events takes place. I'm not making this up. The history is there for anyone too look up.

Your arguments do not convince.

O'Buzzkill is alienating vast(er) swathes of the electorate than I ever thought possible. Many of his acts are so blatantly idiotic that I have no choice but to conclude that for whatever reason he has decided not to be pResident again.

It'll be very interesting to see how much campaign cash he manages to squirrel away for personal use after his loss.

Jack,

I considered incumbents who chose not to run for re-election because, well, they didn't run for re-election. You could also argue that the deaths of McKinley, Harding, Roosevelt and Kennedy, along the with the Nixon resignation, could skew the stats, too. The only problem with your assertion is that history IS the stats.

But just for fun, let's look at '52 and '68.

No Democrat - including Harry Truman (who ran the most impressive campaign in American history in '48)- would have beaten Eisenhower. Even if you took Jesus his own self, sent Him to college, gave Him haircut and run Him as a Democrat, Ike would have kicked His ass across the country and back again.

'68 is a little different. A Nixon-Johnson race would have been the most thrilling ever, and I'm not convinced that LBJ would have lost. As it is, even Hubert Humphrey very nearly beat Richard Nixon. People tend to forget that.

It doesn't matter what I think. The bottom line is: We only have two choices. Can Romney win this game? Probably, as long as his team stays focused and don't let him step on his dick. I think we're way past the money now. This election will bring another meaning to fast and furious.

I think Obama and his mob are on the run, but what do I know?

You're right, he is playing to win. I like that, it's what playing any game is about.

What I'm seeing a lot, not just here, but across the partisan media, reminds me of 2004. Remember how liberals were convinced that George W. Bush could never, ever, EVER be re-elected?

Well, the liberals were almost right. Bush was re-elected by the thinnest margin of any incumbent in American history ... but he still won and the Left was heartbroken.

Liberals forgot that Bush, despite his horrible history of disasters, was a much better mechanical politician than he was given credit for. Karl Rove and Ed Gellespie created a GOTV and microtargeting operation that was without equal.

And the same is true of the Artist Formerly Known As Barry Soetoro. His ground game four years ago was unparalleled and Republicans would do well to remember that. If you didn't figure it out four years ago, Plouffe and Axelrod are dangerously good at what they do.

Never "misunderstimate" your opponent, especially when said opponent is a sitting president of the United States.

There's another dynamic here that feels familiar. The Left's visceral hatred of Bush actually fuelled the Right. The same thing might happen this year.

Skippy, Eisenhower wasn't even a candidate at the time Truman decided not to run again. And your thesis that Ike stormed across the political landscape is inaccurate: the Republican nomination wasn't even decided until convention.
Stop fabricating history to suit your needs.

Can we start a pool over whether anyone will even be allowed to vote?

Jack,

It was hardly a secret that Eisenhower was going to run in 1952. In '48 both parties begged him to run, and Truman offered to be his vice-president.

And I didn't say that Ike swept the nomination, I said that no Democrat would have beaten him. There is a difference, you know.

And, not for nothing, ALL presidential nominations were decided at the conventions back them. Humphrey didn't enter a single primary, but still got the nomination.

Primaries weren't determinative because there wasn't that many of them. State delegations were still mostly controlled by governors or other party bosses. Nor had the states made primary results binding on delegations, so deals could be (and often were cut in ye fabled "smoke filled rooms.) For those reasons, nominations were not often decided on the first ballot, as they are now.

Nice try, though.

Jack,

I meant to mention this much earlier, but Obama carried Ohio in '08. And he can afford to lose it if he holds Colorado, Iowa and New Hampshire, all of which have been trending Democratic.

Plus, there's Nevada in his column and Arizona is much closer than it should be. If Romney has to spend time and money defending Arizona, he's fucked.

This is something that I've been writing about at my place for years. The GOP has spent so long battling lost causes in places like Michigan and especially Pennsylvania that they've let the Southwest gradually slip away. As Hispanics grow as a percentage of the Texas electorate, you could very well see it become more competitive in the next four or five presidential cycles.

Fast and Furious, plus "It's the economy, stupid".

Skip,

Romney would be an idiot to get too far in the weeds with Fast and Furious, if only because most folks only know anything about it because of Obama's executive privilege claim.

Executive privilege has a long and complex history, and it would be almost impossible for him to explain why Obama was wrong - and, conversely, why Bush wasn't - in less than an hour. But if he just throws around bumper sticker slogans, he necessarily limits his own ability to use it in the event that he wins.

And I will say one thing about Mitt, he's very conservative in temperament, if not ideology. He has to know that the economy is his strongest case and anything that distracts from that hurts him more than it helps.

Skippy,
Nevada, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Colorado will ALL go for Romney in November. Harry Reid barely got re-elected; he can do nothing for Obama in Nevada. Not once but twice Obama deliberately insulted Las Vegas. Even Oscar Goodman won't vote for the cocksucker.

The blue-collar workers in Pennsylvania won't blow the Obama horn again. Colorado? Not as stupid, or quite as Californicated, as the conventional wisdom would have it.

Governor Susanna Martinez sort of skews your theory about the GOP ignoring the Southwest, doesn't she?

Let's look at Nevada and New Mexico, since those two states amuse me.

Two years of polling showed that practically any Republican could have beaten Reid directly into hell, so the fucking Tea Party gave the nomination to the only one that couldn't. Moreover, Reid did a little more than "barely get re-elected", he won by almost six points.

And please don't tell me that winning the New Mexico governor's office after Bill Richardson's reign of error and near-indictment was a triumphant example of the Will to Power, Jack. It only makes you look silly.

Although, I'll grant you that Martinez would be a smart VP pick. She's a woman who doesn't have Sarah Palin's baggage, and a Hispanic that doesn't have Marco Rubio's. She has executive experience and is liked by Republicans while being inoffensive to Independents. More importantly, she could put the Southwest in play.

And that's why Romney won't pick her. He seems to be married to the idea of giving it to a clone of himself, like Portman and Pawlenty.

Reid is Majority Leader. His narrow margin of victory bodes ill for Obama in that state.

And you can blame Richardson for Martinez all you want. Obama's election was all about Bush. And Romeny's sweeping of the states I have mentioned will be directly attributable to Obama's ineffectiveness. That's the way the political pendulum swings.

And Tom Daschle was Majority Leader in 2002. That didn't stop him from losing his seat outright when the GOP picked a sane candidate that wasn't constantly making dark allusions to "Second Amendment remedies." Bill Frist saw the writing on the wall and decided to retire first before he could be blamed for losing the majority.

In my opinion, '08 started out as being about Bush, but there was a period in September when McCain was leading and Team Obama was well and truly a-scared. The "Celebrity" ad was torching their asses in a big, bad way.

It was only McCain's disastrous response to the Lehman bankruptcy and the idiotic decision to pull out of Michigan that sunk him for good.

Moreover, you seem to be conflating wave elections - which tend to occur in off-years ('94, '02, '06, and, to a much lesser extent, '10) with presidential years. Before '08, the nearest close thing to a wave during a presidential was in 1980, when Republicans swept the Senate and the White House.

That doesn't usually happen, especially for Republicans. Even when they crush in presidential elections by giant margins (see '72, '84 and '88), Democrats have tended to pick up seats in Congress. But when Democrats win the presidency, regardless of the margin, they pick up congressional seats (with the exception of Clinton's two races.)

There's absolutely nothing in the polling thus far that suggests a wave. The GOP might lose half a dozen House seats, and the chances of a Senate takeover are slightly less than half with the Snowe retirement in Maine. And you're putting presidential states into play (such as New Mexico) that nobody else is.

Granted, I don't like Obama OR Romney very much. I'll always believe that the GOP would have done much better with either Huntsman or Mitch Daniels, who don't have broad areas of their records open to attack, play well with Independents, and put entire geographical regions into play.

On the other hand, I've been predicting in public for the last four years that Romney would get the nomination this time when everybody was telling me that I was crazy.

I like Mitch Daniels, but he has even less charisma than Romney. Voters are not as stupid as Democrats think, but we as Americans demand to be entertained at all times. Daniels and Huntsman are simply competent. As Miss America can tell you, it takes talent AND a swimsuit competition.

The early warning signs are there for a decisive Romney victory, if not a landslide. The conventional wisdom is always wrong. The media won't report trends favorable to a Republican, hoping instead that they can close their eyes, click their heels three times, and wake up in Marin County.

Even New Jersey could go Republican. People are tired of being condescended to by Barack Obama. What Obama picks up in hispanic votes this time, he will more than lose in independents and Democrats who choose to stay home.

Jack,

You're referencing "early warning signs", but not saying what they are. Also, you're throwing more and more implausible states to Romney every time you post. Shit son, why not tell me that he'll pick up California, too? It's way more likely than Jersey because it's one of Mitt's 33 home states.

Can you name anyone who won the presidency while losing his home state? Because Romney's absolutely going to lose Massachusetts and I'd say that it's better than even money that he'll lose Michigan, too.

Now, the polling is showing Oregon getting close, which I thought you'd trumpet. But so is Arizona. Romney's behind by 3 in Ohio and 4 in Colorado.But you're citing New Jersey, which Obama leads by 15 the last time I checked.

As far as Hunstman and Daniels go, both are far and away more conservative (and less whorish) than Romney, and neither would have had to explain away their entire lives prior to this year. Christ, Mitt endorsed the individual mandate in Wyden-Bennett as recently as 2009.

Nominating John Kerry was a bad idea for the Democrats. But it didn't stop the GOP from doing it this year.

But since you're looking at Republican governors as an indicator of presidential pick-ups, as you may have with New Mexico, then Romney's in even bigger trouble than I thought. Kasich in Ohio, Scott in Florida and Haley in South Carolina all have approval numbers closer to Jerry Sandusky's than Ronald Reagan's.

In the end, we'll both have this thread to look back on in November.

If you are a Democrat,
Wisconsin was a warning sign.

The downsizing of the Charlotte convention is a warning sign.

It is a warning sign that Obama isn't raising the money he wants, and is having to give wealthy liberals the LBJ treatment, i.e. grab them by the collar, glower over them, and kick them in the shins until they do what you want.

Ben Nelson isn't running for re-election, and no Democrat wants Obama coming to his state campaigning for him/her. (Remember, Nelson was booed when he went to a nice restaurant in Omaha to dine. Booed. In a restaurant). He can't help a single Democrat win re-election. Dems who are re-elected will be so in spite of Obama, not because of him. Obamacare is unpopular among people who work and pay taxes. Among the shiftless and lazy, it is popular. But sometimes they are too shiftless to get up and go vote.

It is a warning sign that the press is finally vetting Obama. The mainstream liberals pine for Hilary. Maraniss is no conservative, but he wrote an entire book calling out Obama's memoir as a fraud.

It is a warning sign that the European press is no longer enchanted. Where they blow, so blows the NYT. Where blows NYT, blows the rest of the American (ever-shrinking) mainstream media.

It is a warning sign that the Romney team is running a very different campaign than did McCain in '08. They are experienced (as is Romney).
Romney will lose Massachusetts, but he will win the presidency, turning political orthodoxy on its head. That isn't his home state any more then New York is Hilary's home state. When you boil it down, Romeny's real home state is Utah.

It is a warning sign that he can't get a bump in the polls no matter whom he panders to. The hispanics with immigration non-enforcement. The gays with his "personal" evolution of marriage.

Romney comes off as a sort of Howdy Doody buffoon, and he is remarkably conservative personally. But in the real world - the one on the other side of the front door of his home - he is an animal. He knows how to win. And, like Jefferson, he is smart enough to get others to do his real dirty work for him.

Except for the price of a barrel of crude coming down, pretty much everything that happens between now and the election will inure to Obama's detriment. Branch Rickey said "Luck is the residue of design", and Obama's luck is all going to be bad because he has not laid a foundation for true mass appeal. His presidency has been an ad hoc collection of gestures to individual grievance groups, and even those people don't all turn out to vote if they only got part of what they wanted.

It won't be a landslide, but it will be decisive, in Romney's favor. Michigan, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada will go Republican. Watch New Jersey. It won't be 15 points. Obama will end up spending money in places like New Jersey he didn't plan to spend.

I wouldn't read too much into Wisconsin, personally. Walker's victory was more an expression of distaste at the recall itself, and the exit polling reflects that. The governor's numbers were in the toilet before the recall and there's no reason to believe that they won't go back there now that the spectre of the recall is gone.

Besides, if Romney wins Wisconsin, there isn't much out there that he'll lose. It would be a 40-45 state sweep and maybe 60% of the popular vote. And nobody thinks that's going to happen.

Ben Nelson is practically retarded. Firstly, he bowed out at roughly the same point in the cycle that a lot of Democrats did in 1995. That didn't stop Bill Clinton from winning.

As much as I'd like to believe otherwise, it wasn't ObamaCare itself that killed Nelson, it was the sleazy Cornhusker Compromise that he stuffed into the committee bill, knowing that it would almost certainly be killed during reconciliation. So, not only was it was sleazy, it was ineffective.

I've found that voter enthusiasm only matters in elections where there's a credible third party.

Yes, liberals are disgusted with Obama, but where are they going to go? It isn't likely that they're going to stay home and give it to Romney without a fight. Mitt went through a primary where Tea Partiers became convinced that he's a Shining Path Republican, but they'll still vote for him. The electorate is too divided for either base to stay home, and there is no Ross Perot out there for everybody to run to.

As for money, Obama raised more of it that Romney last month. The difference is in the SuperPac funding, and I don't think that's going to make much of a difference. In an electorate like this, the ground game and GOTV are decisive, and we know that Team Barry is dumping a ton of his money there.

If there's one single thing that should be worrying both the White House and Chicago, it's the price of oil, which is going down too far, too fast. In the very short term (say the next three weeks), it's a plus. But in the longer term, lower oil prices in the summer are a leading indicator of another economic crash before November.

And if that happens, all of our predictions are meaningless. The only other thing that could kill Obams dead is an Israeli strike on Iran, which will almost definitely go badly.

All things being equal, the incumbent is doing better than he has any business doing. The way things have been going over the last two months, he should be down by six or seven nationally. Instead he's up by three, and most of the battleground state polls look reasonably good for him. Romney's isn't even decisively ahead in North Carolina, which is a bad, bad harbinger.

Off the top of my head, the last time an incumbent was ahead in July and wound up losing was in 1980. And Carter spent that summer both putting away Ted Kennedy and having his general election vote siphoned off by John Anderson. Meanwhile, Reagan was putting together a map and preparing for the debate.

I'm not saying that it's impossible for Mitt to win, but unless he picks up about six points nationally and starts pulling ahead in the battlegrounds - and does both of those things very soon - this is going to be even harder for him than it already is.

There is no reason for a majority of Americans to vote for Obama. And they won't.

Romney only recently secured the nomination. They are just now rolling out their real campaign. There is plenty of time. As you pointed out, McCain was ahead late and still lost. I say he blew it with his response to the financial crisis.

Obama hasn't gotten a bump from anything, and he won't even get a convention bump, but Romney will. Obama has no place to go but down. Anybody figured out why his unfavorables don't seem to match the rest of the polling data?

Dick Morris created an ad for Vicente Fox in which an old woman answers the door to pollsters from the government. She gives them false responses, and her husband remonstrates, "Why did you tell them that when you know you are voting for Fox?" And the old woman says "They've been screwing us for 75 years and now its our turn." I think that is what is happening with some of this year's polls.

All the economic data from here to November is going to be bad. Obama gonna sink like a rock starting mid August.

The good news is that Romney is going to win big. The bad news, for Republicans, conservatives, and right-wingers, is that Romney is going to be President.

Like Ronald Reagan, President Romney will be a far different political animal than was Governor Romney. In Massachusetts he had to suppress his conservative impulses. Nationally, he will not.

Since I never thought the Court would uphold the individual mandate either under the Commerce Clause or as a tax, I am wrong about everything. Obama will be re-elected.
Getting "free" health care is plenty reason for the poor, the lazy, and the communists to vote for him.

I don't like the individual mandate, and thought that it would be unconstitutional except for everything that's happened in the last century.

About a year ago, I wrote that the odds of it being upheld were actually pretty good, either under the Commerce Clause or the taxation power. And after Raisch, the Court would have looked retarded overturning it.

And because Republicans are often stupid, dishonest, or both, here's where shit gets outright hilarious.

Both the congressional GOP and the Romney campaign, have pledged to repeal the PPACA "on day one", which itself is insane because it's virtually certain that they won't have the seats in the Senate and everybody knows it.

But they're also on record as wanting to "replace" it. They understand that parts of ObamaCare (banning discrimination against pre-existing conditions, keeping kids on their parent's policies until they're 26, etc.) are exceptionally popular, and they have said they'll keep them.

The problem is that those provisions are titanically fucking pricey, which is the only reason that the individual mandate exists at all. Unless you broaden the risk pool to the maximum extent possible, everything else in the PPACA - most especially the parts that everyone has fallen in love with - bankrupts the insurance companies in about 35 seconds.

Anyone who passed third grade math knows tort reform doesn't come close to paying for it and makes the odds pretty good that Conrad Murray will be seeing you when you stub your toe. Buying across state lines causes other intractable problems. Since even the most basic of policies cost between seven and thirteen grand, you can't do it through tax credits. And block grants to the states would only have the states denying coverage instead of private companies. That's pretty much how welfare reform worked out.

That leaves you with the individual mandate, single payer or fantastic levels of deficit financing. Fourth options in a country like yours just ain't there.

The irrefutable fact about the Romney-GOP idea is that they have no plausible way of actually paying for it. Through his experience in Massachusetts, Romney knows this. So does Obama, and I don't reckon that he's going to be shy about pointing it out.

If this comes up in the debates - and it will - Mitt is going to have the mother of all deer-in-the-headlights looks, and it's all over. That nicely tees Obama up to accuse Romney of blatantly lying or accusing Republicans of wanting to kill the poor. Or both. And you know what? It'll work.

John Roberts may very well have just re-elected Barack Obama. Maybe he wants a Mulligan on administering the oath of office.

Finally, nothing - nothing - is more hilarious than every conservative on Twitter indignantly declaring that they're "moving to Canada" today. In less than twenty minutes, Republicans have become Alec Baldwin and Susan Sarandon.

By God, this thread is still going on. I'd moved on to purchasing a cadaver, flensing its skin, and mounting it on a unicycle in my rumpus room. I might publish this thread, and sell it for real gold from Roslyn Capital.

X4IRkm Very informative blog article.Really looking forward to read more. Really Cool.

Really appreciate you sharing this article post.Really thank you! Want more.