Obama, beware of Romnesia on foreign policy tomorrow night

Noting that vast majorities of Americans of all parties favor less U.S. involvement in Middle East leadership changes, not more, Daniel Larison warns Romney:

The Pew survey result matches findings from other surveys about what U.S. policy towards Syria should be, which show support for sanctions and not much else. The 23% that favors more U.S. involvement in the politics of the region are very likely the same people who think the U.S. should be directly arming the Syrian opposition and bombing Syrian air defenses. Their preferences are also wrong on the merits, but these results show that there is no real electoral price to be paid by ignoring what they want. That 23% is the audience to which Romney has been pandering for the last several months, and he probably has almost all of their votes locked up anyway. If most viewers correctly perceive that Romney is the more aggressive, activist candidate on Syria and on other international issues, he will lose the debate. Insofar as the last debate has an effect on the outcome of the election, he will be sabotaging himself in the final weeks.

Given Romney's recent renewed facility with the Etch-A-Sketch, I take this more as a warning for Obama than for Romney: expect Romney to shape-shift on this front as he did on taxes during (and indeed before) the first debate.

RIP, George McGovern: we're still a long way from home

Seasoned Democratic political operatives doubtless saw mainly chaos and certain defeat in the 1972 Democratic National Convention, in which an endless vice presidential nominating process pushed the presidential nominee's acceptance speech to 2 in the morning.  As a 13-year old thrilled by McGovern's insurgent capture of the nomination, I saw only promise and inspiration. 

I knew nothing about political process, but I don't think I was wrong about McGovern's integrity and force of character or core values.  Or about the tragedy of this country ignoring his warnings about three besetting sins: war of choice, government secrecy, and government controlled by corporate interests.  Here's some of what what he said to whoever was still awake at 2 a.m. (I think...) on July 14, 1972 (video here):

Poll-vaulting to debate glory

First we all watched the first debate and stood gaping as Obama's lead vanished in the aftermath. Then we learned that Obama's poll slide had in fact started about a week prior.

Next, we watched Obama win the second debate and held our breath for a bounce in the polls. Now, Jonathan Bernstein avers casually that the race is  "slightly trending towards Obama, perhaps beginning after the second debate or perhaps a bit before that."

A bit before...a new theory presents itself unbidden!  Whichever candidate is starting to rise in the polls outperforms in the debate.

The candidates personally are as much in the grip of campaign "fundamentals" as political scientists tell us the race itself is. The workings of their minds and bodies are pulled by electoral tides as surely as we are all subject to gravity. Or poll--arity.

Okay, maybe not. Sounds compelling, though, doesn't? I mean compolling.

Why does Obama let Romney get away with his "doubled the deficit" charge?

Obama did a lot of things right in the Hofstra debate. But one core Romney lie he let go unchallenged repeatedly. I go to my tweet tape:

@xpostfactoid1 

nailed him on everything but his own deficits

6:51 PM - 16 Oct 12 ·  Details

3x "he doubled the deficit" - time to pop that lie
6:56 PM - 16 Oct 12 · Details

he has cut the deficit - time to say so

6:57 PM - 16 Oct 12 · Details

unaswered: you doubled the deficit Lie
6:37 PM - 16 Oct 12 · Details

In fact, the deficit in FY 2009, compiled mainly on Bush's watch, was $1.4 trillion; this year it's just shy of $1.1 trillion. The only way Romney can get to Obama "doubling" it is to hold him responsible for 2009 -- as he's held him responsible for job losses that occurred prior to the stimulus taking effect (while holding himself harmless for job losses in the first year of his Massachusetts tenure -- see Romney Rule #2).

Chris Hayes on Romney Rules

I have for some months been compiling a set of Romney Rules for electoral competition, all of which boil down, essentially, to "rule x applies to my opponent, but not to me."

I am currently about one third through Chris Hayes', Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, which argues that the very nature of the meritocracy ethos to which almost all Americans subscribe leads inevitably to corruption: unmediated competition drives winners to game the system and cement their advantages. It's through that prism that Hayes, focusing on Romney's violation of the negotiated ground rules (e.g, by posing direct questions to Obama), viewed last night's debate -- and by extension, Romney himself. Kos diarist Iarxphd transcribes (I've fixed apparent typos):

The theme of the last 10 years of this country is that the people at the top don't think the rules apply to them.  And you send your people to sit down and negotiate a set of rules, and 20 minutes into it you throw it out the window. Everything we've seen, from the financial crisis to everything else that's happened to this country has been about the Oligarchs and the ruling class, and the people at the top, feeling like they are not a party to the social contract. So some stupid little contract that was negotiated by your people, you don't worry about it 20 minutes into it.

At the close, a ritual slaughter

Lord-a-mercy, Obama just killed Romney on the 47%. Was it genius, or luck that he saved it for the end, when there was no time for rebuttal?

The structure of that answer will be studied and go down in debate lore [update: text below]. The voter's question: what misconception does the public have about you that you would like to correct? (Good question, by the way.) Romney's answer: I care about 100% of the people. True in its way. Obama's...what's lovely is that a direct answer to the question was the perfect segue to the contrast. The misconception about me, he said,  is that I want government to do it all -- and he was eloquent in affirming his belief in private enterprise and in government as midwife, hand up.  Then, the pivot: Romney is a good man. But. In that private room, he said what he said...and Obama ticked off beautifully the groups who don't pay income taxes: seniors, students, soldiers.

Unlike in the last debate, that denouement cemented a theme he had hit all night: that Romney believes that helping the richest helps the economy.  I was thinking that that core point had been made but was a bit effaced, until that closer.

Whither Obama on taxes?

David Weigel notes that he tax stance that served Obama well in his town hall debate with McCain in 2008 will not serve four years later:

Obama had miraculous success in 2008 by promising to raise taxes on the wealthy as a way to be fair and close the deficit. It simply isn't working as well in 2012, when Obama owns four $1 trillion deficits. He can correct plenty of his staging problems in a town hall, compared to a back-and-forth podium debate. But he needs a bigger argument on taxes.

I'm not exactly sure why we should credit this, since Obama has not yet been able to put over his proposed restoration of Clinton era income tax rates on the top 2% and other modest tax increases for the wealthy, and the broad principle of "asking the wealthy to pay a little more" has broad popular support. But allowing that the tax proposals in Obama's proposed ten year deficit reduction plan are a bit lightweight, a few thoughts below about where we are and where we need to head:

Battleground state (of mind)

Well, dear reader(s), excuse my absence during a little anniversary getaway weekend, spent not looking at polling news and gnawing over the dread possibility of a Romney victory as we tromped through sculpture park and wood. Not the best anniversary weekend to be married to me. I'd have been better off canvassing, as I will next weekend. But who'd have thought a few weeks ago that things would look so desperate going into this weekend?

During the working day today I have peeked by degrees into the political news, and it seems that the situation has not further deteriorated (I am choosing not to get too worked up about the Gallup/USA Today poll, with its double-wide spread between likely and registered voters and questionable "battleground subsample" status. In fact, I'm not even going to tax myself with learning what's wrong w/ battleground subsamples). I am therefore free to hold my breath until tomorrow night, which I guess means continuing this unpleasant peek-at-the news-and-brood-about-disaster routine until showtime. Which means, frankly, that I have little to contribute to anyone's understanding of anything at the moment.

For what it's worth, my brooding keeps sending flashes of the mortal combat between Hamlet Sr. and Fortinbras Sr., staged (according to a play cooked up centuries later, in which it's not staged) to dispose of lands desired by both kingdoms.  Just as elections are better alternatives to succession wars, political debates are proxies for such mortal combat. And this one feels pretty mortal. Polls since 10/3 have blown through political scientists' skepticism about the effects of debates -- though some are now highlighting evidence that Obama's lead was shrinking prior to the debates, I don't think anyone is disputing the massive impact of the first round, or the stakes in the next one. I personally cannot even begin to imagine being Obama walking onto that stage.

In defense of the boomers, who don't exist

Going away for the weekend, freaked out by recent polls, holding my breath until Tuesday night...and so reposting one that got a little lost in the sauce, below.
 -------
In an article pinging across the internets just now, 34 year-old reporter Jim Tankersley calls his 63 year-old lawyer father to the bar to defend the boomer generation against a broad indictment:

This is the charge I’ve leveled against him on a summer day in our Pacific Northwest vision of paradise. I have asked my favorite attorney to represent a very troublesome client, the entire baby-boom generation, in what should be a slam-dunk trial—for me. On behalf of future generations, I am accusing him and all the other parasites his age of breaking the sacred bargain that every American generation will pass a better country on to its children than the one it inherited.

Dad makes some very good points in defense, but he accepts the general terms of the trial: that it makes sense to indict a so-called "generation" for the course of human events, national and global.  I reject that premise. Generalizations about generations always send me around the bend.  Being admittedly predisposed to dismiss the case on conceptual grounds, I believe that the particular charges don't stand up to scrutiny.

Maybe I shouldn't do debate assessment, cont.

If you'll forgive a bit of navel-gazing: I am nonplussed by my anomalous debate reactions.

For Democrats, the Biden-Ryan debate was plainly balm to the gaping wound in confidence ripped open by Obama's performance last week. My feelings, until I checked others' responses, were more in tune with this right-wing spin sampled on the Dish -- no doubt sincerely felt, since of course we partisans feel hostile to the opposition:

Maybe I shouldn't do debate assessment

I begin to think I'm not a good reader of debates. While not looking at commentary, I was afraid that Biden would be laughed off the national stage. He shouted nonstop until his voice gave out; he grimaced far too much and failed to look at Ryan when confronting him (though I may have been misled in that by the C-Span split screen; when I switched to PBS he seemed more natural in this regard), he interrupted incessantly, and I thought he was often incoherent on domestic policy (though generally effective on foreign), failing to answer Ryan's allegations systematically and jumbling a bunch of not-fully-articulated assertions together. Ryan, on the other hand, struck me as methodical, systematic, unruffled and precise -- never mind that his characterizations of Obama administration policies -- and Romney's -- were wildly misleading.

"The most important thing Joe Biden can do"

I'd like to offer a quick elaboration of a wise tweet by LOLGOP:

The most important thing Joe Biden can do tonight is describe the Ryan Budget in the clearest terms possible.

The essence of the Romney/Ryan campaign is to hide the ball. The task is to make concrete the scope and the impact of the cuts Ryan calls for.  The template was laid down too long ago by a certain Barack Obama:

Instead of moderating their views even slightly, the Republicans running Congress right now have doubled down and proposed a budget so far to the right it makes the Contract with America look like the New Deal. In fact, that renowned liberal, Newt Gingrich, first called the original version of the budget “radical” and said it would contribute to right wing social engineering. This is coming from Newt Gingrich. And yet this isn’t a budget supported by some small group in the Republican Party. This is now the party’s governing platform.

Done in by friendly fire? Dead-blogging the Obama-Romney debate

Kevin Drum has been hammering home two crucial insights about the Oct. 3 debate between Obama and Romney. First, that the spectacular flip-out of liberal commentators -- their fevered panning of Obama's performance -- in the debate's immediate aftermath drove the news coverage, which in turn drove the public's response. Second, that an obsession with the non-verbal aspects of debating has radically skewed the pundits' and hence the public's perceptions. I want to take up this challenge of Drum's:

what do I think liberal commenters should have done on Wednesday night? I'll tell you, but first let me lay some groundwork. Have you ever heard the old saw that the best way to judge a presidential debate is to watch it with the sound off? Well, I think that's just about the stupidest piece of folk wisdom I've ever heard. It's not just that this reduces debates to theater criticism. It's worse than that. It's not even good theater criticism. After all, would you watch a play or a movie with the sound removed and then write a review for your local newspaper? Of course not. You can't possibly judge a play without hearing the actual dialog.

Tankersley's case against the boomers: summarily dismissed

In an article pinging across the internets just now, 34 year-old reporter Jim Tankersley calls his 63 year-old lawyer father to the bar to defend the boomer generation against a broad indictment:

This is the charge I’ve leveled against him on a summer day in our Pacific Northwest vision of paradise. I have asked my favorite attorney to represent a very troublesome client, the entire baby-boom generation, in what should be a slam-dunk trial—for me. On behalf of future generations, I am accusing him and all the other parasites his age of breaking the sacred bargain that every American generation will pass a better country on to its children than the one it inherited.

Dad makes some very good points in defense, but he accepts the general terms of the trial: that it makes sense to indict a so-called "generation" for the course of human events, national and global.  I reject that premise. Generalizations about generations always send me around the bend.  Being admittedly predisposed to dismiss the case on conceptual grounds, I believe that the particular charges don't stand up to scrutiny.

xpostfactoid at 5

Today is xpostfactoid's fifth birthday as a continuous blog, after a couple of false starts.  Since the blog's heart, for better or wooly-headed worse, has always rested in close reads of Obama' rhetoric, may I commend you to yesterday's post,  The credo of a community organizer?

The credo of a community organizer

Frontline has put up a series of "artifacts" from the lives of Obama and Romney, including a letter, highlighted by Fallows, that Obama wrote to a friend in 1985 (at age 25) when he was a few months into his job as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side. One sentence leaped out at me, because it's echoed in Obama's rhetoric throughout his career in a strain that's often written off as mystical hooey -- including last month, in Charlotte. Not to be coy, I've highlighted it below.

I work in five different neighborhoods of differing economic conditions. In one neighborhood, I'll be meeting with a group or irate homeowners, working class folks, bus drivers and nurses and clerical administrators, whose section of town has been ignored by the Department of Streets and Sanitations since the whites moved out twenty years ago. In another, I'll be trying to bring together a group of welfare mothers, mothers at 15, grandmothers at 30, great-grandmothers at 45, trying to help them win better job training and day care facilities from the State. In either situation, I walk into a room and make promises I hope they can help me keep. They generally trust me, despite the fact that they've seen earnest young men pass through here before, expecting to change the world and eventually succumbing to the lure of a corporate office. And in a short time I've learned to care for them very much and want to do everything I can for them.

Generalizations about generations are generally fatuous

Generalizations about generations -- particularly boomer-whacking ones -- always drive me around the bend. I don't know whether I'll muster the energy to take on Jim Tankersley's extended mock-formal indictment of the boomers, but for the moment let me pull up the gist of a post taking a whack at Thomas Friedman at his Thomas Friedmanest.  And do read Hal Espen on boomer-bashing -- link in the footnotes.

...Friedman expands the attack to encompass a more familiar target -- the boomers:

We had a values breakdown — a national epidemic of get-rich-quickism and something-for-nothingism. Wall Street may have been dealing the dope, but our lawmakers encouraged it. And far too many of us were happy to buy the dot-com and subprime crack for quick prosperity highs.

Time to trot out my 16-month unemployment movement rule

In June 2011, when the Times' Binyamin Appelbaum warned that no president since Roosevelt has won reelection with the unemployment rate above 7.2%, I cobbled together a "16 month rule" for the zone in which the unemployment rate might more or less directly affect elections:

I have for some time been (nervously) tracking Obama's political fortunes against Reagan's, since it's often pointed out that both inherited a vicious recession; at Obama's low moments I've taken some comfort in the fact that Reagan's approval rating reached a nadir of 35% in January 1983, shortly after the unemployment rate peaked at 10.8%.  The impression I've soaked up is that the unemployment rate really matters in the 16-odd months before a president stands for re-election, when the electorate starts to tune in and measure him against the opposing party's candidates.  For Reagan, I've noted, a decisive turn came in July 1983, when the unemployment rate dipped to 9.4% from 10.1% the prior month. From there he had the wind at his back to October 1984, when the rate was 7.4%. Hence Reagan's landslide.  He asked us to stay the course, and the course started running downhill run when it counted.

Might it be postulated that the direction in which employment moves in the 16 months prior to an incumbent president's reelection bid is a fair predictor of his political fortunes?  The postulate works for six of the seven incumbents since Nixon, the earliest president for whom I have monthly unemployment numbers....

Romney is slippery when all wet

Obama continues to insist that Romney has proposed a $5 trillion tax cut -- he did it again today at a rally in Denver -- and liberal commentators such as Greg Sargent and Steve Benen make the same claim.  But that line of attack is too rigid. Romney can wriggle out from under it, as he did during the debate (as I forecast a half hour prior).

It remains true, deny though Romney will, that he cannot a) cut marginal rates by 20%, b) make that cut revenue neutral by reducing tax deductions, c) exclude investment income from the deduction reduction, and d) not raise taxes on Americans earning less than $200k per year.  It's also true that Romney has promised to do all of the above. Romney, therefore, is lying.

But it's not true that Romney has proposed a $5 trillion tax cut (over 10 years). He's proposed a $5 trillion marginal rate cut. That means he must either a) increase the structural deficit by up to $5 trillion by failing to reduce deductions enough to offset the rate cut (i.e., cut taxes by up to $5 trillion); b) raise taxes on the middle class; or c) not cut marginal rates by a full 20% across the board. Recently, he's intimated that he will break his package promise by going for option c).  You may argue, as Jonathan Bernstein and others have done, that the likeliest option is massive rate cuts with only token, or at least wildly inadequate, loophole closures. But that's an inference -- choosing one of three doors. You can also point out that in past debates Romney has referred to his "tax cut."  But he can plausibly claim to have misspoken -- from the beginning, he's included the not-credible "revenue neutral" claim.

It's hard to attack incompatible promises in a sound byte, especially four-part promises.  But insisting that Romney proposes to "cut taxes" by $5 trillion simply affords him deniability.

Romney's contortionist abilities should come as a surprise to no one. They were on full display throughout primary season, when he proved himself the best liar in the field and soothed appearances of inconsistency with a multi-verse lullaby.

Just a flesh wound?

Well, I don't know that this debate was quite as bad for Obama as the general consensus. He did get some core points across: that Romney's tax math doesn't add up, and that he's hiding the ball with regard to deductions; that a balanced approach, i.e. with new taxes, is a better approach to deficit reduction than cuts only; that Romneycare and Obamacare are structurally almost identical, and that Romney has no plan to cover the uninsured; that Romney proposes to voucherize Medicare.

But he didn't make the rebuttals concrete enough. He was too rigid in insisting that Romney wanted to cut taxes, instead of saying that his plan would either reduce revenue or raise taxes on the middle class or explode the deficit. In complaining that Romney had no real plan to cover the uninsured, he talked around the individual mandate, his real point being that when Romney was serious about expanding coverage, he pioneered the mandate. He didn't defend Medicare's Independent Payment Advisory Board effectively, or do any better job than the Republican presidential candidates did in exploding Romney's faux contrast between the healthcare plan he implemented in Massachusetts and the ACA. When Romney hit him for "ramming through" a plan with no Republican support, he didn't assert that the GOP sabotaged him, professed their desire to defeat him at every turn, demonized ideas that they'd pioneered (though he did say that the plan's main components were initially Republican proposals). He didn't defend his green energy investments at all, or rebut the Solyndra bullshit.

And of course, he didn't attack enough: didn't articulate how Romney's plans benefit the wealthy primarily, didn't drive home how revenue-free deficit reduction would gut domestic spending, didn't effectively rebut Romney's claim that he wouldn't cut Medicaid or other domestic spending drastically (he has to, if he proposes to balance the budget with no new revenues or with new tax cuts); he didn't mention the 47% comments or challenge the notion that the country is divided into makers and takers.   And he smiled too much, and looked down too much, and yielded to Lehrer much more than Romney did.

The media narrative that Romney dominated is almost unanimous, and John Sides et al tell us that that drives public opinion more than the debate itself (though the opposite seemed true in many Bill Clinton speeches; is reception of speeches different in that regard?).  So we'll see how much this moves the polls.

p.s. Fallows, of course, tried to warn Obama & co. of the debate dangers for incumbents; his quasi-forecast is infused in the post-debate commentary.  And I'm disappointed that Obama did not follow his own script and call out Romney's lies and the brutal cuts silently inscribed in his sketched-in policies. Apparently Obama hasn't been tracking Romney's repositionings as closely as, say, I have. He's a busy man