Category: 2012 Election

There are a handful of times when I wish my first thought about a campaign or candidate was not, “Hey I wonder how they feel about my rights?” I had one of those moments today.

A Supreme Court Justice candidate in Michigan is the sister of an actress from the West Wing. She managed to pull the key characters together to film a campaign video, and I hate to admit that it’s pretty funny – likely because it’s pretty light on politics and name dropping.

I loved the West Wing. I especially loved Ainsley Hayes who was a conservative alumna from an all women’s college in New England. It really was an enjoyable show, even given the obvious bias in the politics.

So, yes, I admit that with this video, it would kind of be tempting to be a low information voter. Fortunately, I don’t live in Michigan. I also can’t break myself of the habit of trying to find out more about actual candidate positions. (Hell, I even asked someone from Michigan if NRA usually grades in these races, but they said they didn’t think so. If you’re a Michigan voter, check the grades that should be posted soon to be sure!) Of course, I also doubt that if I was a low information voter that I would have watched West Wing at all or found any humor in the video.

Currently we are a nation divided. Everyone would love to think that people think the deficit is currently driving us off a cliff, but while many Americans will agree with that, when it comes to doing something about it, they want low taxes and big government. If we were not a divided nation, this election would not even be close. But it is close.

Ilya Somin notes that this is not a historically unprecedented election, and that Obama and Romney are not doing any better or worse than other elections with similar economic indicators. He also notes:

Some of the models also take account of foreign policy events. While one can certainly make a case against Obama’s foreign policy, he has not presided over a large and obvious failure that can clearly be laid at his door in a way that swing voters – most of whom have very low levels of political knowledge – can readily grasp.

This is why I don’t really get political with events like the fiasco that just happened in North Africa, which resulted in the death of several people including our Ambassador. I don’t think it’s a very useful political club. The voters we need to reach won’t likely pin that on Obama, largely because the media won’t pin that on Obama, and the low information voters don’t care enough to seek out better information. This is a highly partisan election. Those who follow politics are already set in their decision, and the result is still very close. We will be depending on these low-information voters to decide the outcome. Zombie, at PJ Media, calls them Honey Boo Boos:

Honey Boo Boos is a term I just made up for the last remaining undecided voters in America. As you may have read at the time, the infantile and atrocious reality TV show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo either surpassed or tied the viewership totals of both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. That means millions of people are so tuned out of politics and so uninterested in current affairs that they’d rather watch a family of obese rednecks abusing their young daughter than learn even the most basic facts about the next president of the United States. These Honey Boo Boo viewers are what pollsters like to call “low information voters,” but that descriptor is not complete: Honey Boo Boos are also low interest voters whose political ideology is either easily malleable or absent altogether.

As Professor Somin often points out, these aren’t stupid people — their decision not to pay careful attention to politics is rational, since the odds of their vote influencing the outcome of an election are vanishingly small. But they do still vote. Collectively, these are the people who will be deciding the 2012 election. Therefore rhetoric in this election will be more ridiculous than in an election where it wasn’t close, because much of the messaging will be aimed at low-information voters who aren’t persuaded by ideological or policy arguments. You see ads saying, “Obama is a nice guy, but hasn’t done a great job as President.” Those are aimed at those types of voters, who will tell pollsters that they are disappointed in Obama’s job performance, but they still personally think he’s a good man, and so are undecided.

Somewhere along the line we started telling people that voting was a civic duty. That was the wrong lesson. Being informed and educated about the workings of your Republic is the civic duty, and voting follows as a natural consequence of being informed and educated.

Ilya Somin links to a Cato Paper that says that the Tea Party movement is “functionally libertarian” Professor Somin notes:

How much of a libertarian impact the Tea Party will ultimately have remains to be seen. As I noted in my 2011 article, it’s possible the movement will peter out, get coopted by the socially conservative GOP establishment, or simply fail to gain enough political traction to influence policy any more than it already has. But Kirby and Ekins do make a strong case that the Tea Party has a strong libertarian element, and that it has pushed the GOP in a more libertarian direction over the last two years.

I’ve been reluctant to apply any labels to the Tea Party movement, because I think what they stand for varies quite a lot from group to group, and region to region. I went to a few rallies when this phenomena started, to see what it was about, and the best label I could apply to it is grassroots anger. We attended a forum hosted by one of the local groups, after it got a bit more organized, which previewed various contenders for the seat now held by Mike Fitzpatrick. The “Tea Party” candidate, who was younger than me by a few years, was pro-choice and favored drug legalization, which is probably why the county GOP did everything they could to ensure the Tea Party groups had no place at the table. I’ve never been quite sure what to make of the Tea Party movement, and haven’t been active in any groups, but I will admit they piss off and scare the right people, at least around here.

I want to thank reader Harold for pointing me to this article, outlining a scenario for why the Democratic Party is finished, and why the GOP will then move closer to the center and split, with the Tea Party folks forming a party that will eventually replace the Democrats. I like analysis like this, but I think it’s a lot of wishful thinking. People who follow politics closely often overestimate how much people really think about it. Party identification can be strong, and can take a long time to change. People who think of themselves as Democrats aren’t going to transform into Republicans, even if the Republicans move left. It would be like a Red Sox fan having to suddenly become a Yankee’s fan. Without some kind of calamity and major realignment, which I’ll give could happen, parties just don’t fail and get replaced — they adapt. So I would say rumors of either the death of the GOP or the Democrats is greatly exaggerated.

I think Barry owes Bill a beer, because there’s one thing I will definitely say it’s that the President didn’t build that. Here’s something interesting Jim Geraghty noted this morning’s Morning Jolt:

Either way, one of the fascinating facets of the polling during Obama’s presidency has been the fact that the monthly unemployment report has little if any discernible effect on Obama’s approval rating or head-to-head numbers against Romney in the tracking polls. This may meant that nearly half of Americans don’t blame Obama at all for the high level of unemployment for the past four years.

Are the American People suddenly getting educated on matters of economics, and realizing the President can’t do a whole hell of a lot about the economy? That’s quite encouraging if that’s actually the case. Maybe they believed Bill? Probably the most effective part of Clinton’s speech was that historically, we don’t just bounce right back from financial crises, which is true. What Barry rightly deserves condemnation for was ramming through a major new entitlement at a time of declined government revenues, and major deficits. He deserves condemnation for wasting our tax dollars pushing through a failed stimulus package. He definitely deserves condemnation for letting the regulatory agencies all run roughshod over the American economy. But I think even if you removed all that, the economy would still be rather anemic. Whoever won in 2008 was going to get to oversee a weak economy, pretty much no matter what.

I’m curious if anyone has identified the two men and one woman interviewed by the Daily Show who say that gun owners aren’t allowed in the Democratic Party – nor are business owners or white men. I’d be curious to know what state they each call home.

There were two things about the conventions that I think were definitely true. Both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama needs to make the sales pitch speech of their lives. Mitt Romney did, and Barack Obama droned on with the same crap I’ve been hearing for the past four years. He was definitely upstaged by Bill Clinton. Hell, he was upstaged by Joe Biden! Biden actually delivered a much better speech than I thought. Fortunately for the Democrats, when Biden is scripted, he’s good. It’s when he goes off script that all kinds of stupid crap come out of his mouth.

I can remember a co-worker of mine back in 2008, one who is not particularly conservative and did not come from this country, say “That guy is an empty suit, if I ever saw one.” I can remember back to the DNC in 2004, thinking he delivered a great speech to the convention, and wondering why the Democrats were running Kerry instead of this Obama guy. But Obama is an empty suit. His talent is delivering one speech well. Sure, there are variations on that speech, but once you hear a few of them, they all sound the same.

That Pennsylvania is a battleground state is a myth. I’ve heard this since 2004, and while 2004 was close, it hasn’t been close since. McCain spent a lot of time and effort on Pennsylvania, only to get clobbered. I doubt you’ll see Pennsylvania go red in a Presidential election again, at least for the foreseeable future. So it’s probably good to see Mitt not taking the bait and fighting for Pennsylvania. There are other states that will swing this election, and it’s not going to be us. Sorry Ohio, you’re going to get it twice as hard this year.

The trend I think is based on two factors. One, Clinton took a lot of the fiscal and economic issues that made the suburbs generally Republican off the table, and fought culture wars instead. George W. Bush just continued that trend. So the ring counties around Philadelphia are a lot more Democratic than they were in a decade ago. The rest of the state has portions which have a very long tradition of voting Democratic, even though their values don’t likely align with the far-left agenda of the Democratic Party. But voting habits are hard to change. With the suburbs shifting, if PA is to ever to go red again, the parts of the state that are not Philadelphia are going to have to vote more like Tennessee than West Virginia. There are signs that’s starting to happen, but while that’s happening, the Philadelphia area is growing while the rest of the state depopulates, and it is becoming more blue. The Republicans are going to have to figure out how to survive here, in the suburbs, if they want a shot at Pennsylvania again.

The non-prime-time part of the DNC, the part the major networks don’t air, was horrid. Any time your convention boos God, it’s time to think long and hard about the constituency you’re cultivating. No matter whether one is an atheist or a believer, any follower of politics knows that booing God is a losing proposition among the electorate. The Democrats made a highly damaging mistake of taking an internal squabble among their factions, and dragging it out into the public light for all to see. As ironic as it might be for a blog, who often highlights internal squabbles among People of Gun, I’ll still say it’s a losing strategy. The GOP, and more importantly their related PACs, now has the DNC booing God on camera. Way to go!

It was all pretty much horrid until Clinton came up, and showed why he’s still the person most fit to lead the Democratic Party. Hell, even I felt a little nostalgia. Those were good times. I was just starting out in my career, and since it was the dot com boom, companies were just throwing cash at anyone who could spell UNIX. Additionally, if it wasn’t for Bill Clinton, I might have never been outraged enough to buy a gun, and you might not be reading this blog right now. Since I met Bitter through this issue, you could say Bill Clinton brought us together.

But the nostalgia didn’t last as long as Clinton’s speech. Not nearly as long. He was clearly enjoying himself, stomping on the nighttime news broadcasts, so folks turning in for local news would see ol’ Bill, I can’t believe wasn’t intentional. The Republicans are probably lucky he overstayed his welcome, and laid it on a bit thick. People think of Clinton as the great moderate — the man who out republicaned the Republicans — but Clinton governed as a lefty for the first two terms of his Administration, and caused a backlash enough to lose Congress. It was the Clinton who got soundly beat in 1994 that we saw last night, and for far too long.

Last night a lot of GOP folks were lambasting the Dems for not being able to let go of the Kennedys, making fun of the Kennedy tribute video. I have two words for you: Ronald Reagan. It is best for those who live in glass houses not to throw stones. Though, to be fair, I’m pretty sure Reagan never drowned a woman in a drunk driving escapade. Some folks on Twitter, however, got the real problem here. This was my favorite comment, “The DNC cares about women, that can swim.”