The real final score: Obama 11, Romney 1

Nate Silver does have a way with data visualization. His analysis of the Democrats' current electoral college edge includes a electoral scorecard that lists the 50 states in order of the margin of victory, beginning with Obama's wins and moving on to Romney's. The close states in the middle reveal a striking fact: Romney won only one state by a margin of less than eight points. Obama won eleven.

Forget for a moment the demographic contest -- one candidate's large advantage among whites vs. the other's larger advantage among all ethnic minorities.  Forget, too, the strategic plusses and minuses of pursuing independents vs. turning out your base. Forget national popular vote margins. The simple fact is that Romney won only one state that any Republican would not have won.  A dozen states were competitive, and Obama won eleven of them -- by margins that were increasing rapidly at the end, and exceeded the final polls. He outperformed on every front --turnout, targeted advertising, and ultimately, the debates. He just kicked Romney's ass across the political field.

Update: it occurs to me that Silver comes to a very different conclusion: that even if Romney had won the national popular vote by two percentage points, Obama still would have won the electoral college. That is, Obama's advantage was structural, and would be shared by any Democrat at present. That assumes, I believe, a proportionality between Obama's margins in the swing states and the popular vote totals. But most of the direct competing was done in the swing states.  The tipping point, in Silver's reckoning, was Colorado: that is, Romney would have had to win Colorado and every other state that Obama won by a lesser margin than Colorado (Virginia, Ohio, Florida) to win the election.  And Obama won Colorado by 4.7 percentage points -- quite a large margin for Romney to have overcome. Does that mean that Obama's advantage was structural, i.e., that no competent Republican could have overcome it this year?  I don't know.  The margin there, and in all the truly competitive swing states, seemed much smaller just a few days before the election.

Romney Rules special edition: the meta-ethics of the post-truth campaign

Paul Krugman dubbed Mitt Romney's drive for the presidency the post-truth campaign. Steven Benen chronicles 20-50 verifiable instances of Mitt's mendacity every week (a record future generations will marvel at). I like to focus on the campaign's meta-ethics -- its explicit justifications for willfully misleading the public.  

That has happened on at least four occasions. Here they are*, in reverse chronological order:  

1) The most recent is the most egregious: the campaign is defending an ad, now running in Ohio, that gives the clear false impression that Chrysler is going to move its U.S.-based Jeep production to China, whereas the company has merely stated an intention to build Jeeps in China for the Chinese market. The ad follows on the heels of a false statement by Romney last week that Chrysler was moving U.S. Jeep manufactures to China.  Asked by Buzzfeed, to explain the ad, an unnamed Romney aide responded, ""What's in there that's false? Are they building Jeeps in China or not?" Context doesn't matter; artful omissions are okay; deliberately creating a false impression is okay.

A little distance on the post-truth campaign

I've been on vacation with my wife in the Finger Lakes and fell off the grid for reasons I won't bore you with -- off completely for one day, near-completely for three. When we get away, usually, I'm eager to dive back into the political/policy news when I can, but this time, my brief forays have felt like dropping into a coal mine.  A bit of distance defamiliarizes our degraded politics and brings home what a high-stakes, dangerous and disgusting contest it is.

Reconnecting for a bit last night, I caught up with this elevated argument from the Romney campaign:

Some wispy hints that Romney was not 100% hands-off at Bain, 1999-2002

Personally, I think that the charge that Romney as CEO and owner of Bain Capital "shipped jobs overseas" is meaningless, except insofar as it offsets Romney's hypocritical and bogus charge that Obama is substantially responsible for further loss of manufacturing jobs to China and elsewhere. Offshoring is inevitable: to cope, the U.S. must improve its education system and upgrade jobs currently considered low-end, which means strengthening workers' hands relative to management.

Further, Factcheck.org and other truth-squaders have a point in calling out the Obama campaign for claiming that Romney "shipped jobs overseas" when alluding to the activities of Bain portfolio companies that occurred after Romney took over the Winter Olympics in early 1999.  Today's Globe story documenting Romney's maintenance of formal or nominal control during his Olympic years really doesn't affect the argument between the Obama campaign and Factcheck, as Stephanie Cutter's letter to Factcheck, like the Globe article, alluded to numerous Bain SEC filings listing Romney as CEO, President, and owner of various Bain entities, including the parent company. Factcheck retorts that there is no positive evidence that Romney ever took an active role in any Bain decision or action during his Olympic gig. And Fortune's Dan Primack has been supplied with offering documents for funds that Bain started after Romney went to Utah that don't list Romney as a fund manager.