I am beginning to become scared that Romney/Ryan will win. Can smart people please post here and say reassuring things to convince me that he won't?

romney is a total cypher but one thing that i think does emerge from the biographical fog is that he is v risk adverse

bush never struck me as practical or pragmatic

^^ what lag00n said

on the other hand i dont think he has much of a backbone and could totally be bullied by the gop into doing just abt anything

romney is a total cypher but one thing that i think does emerge from the biographical fog is that he is v risk adverse

that's true, and if you're adverse to pissing off your base, and your base is essentially the tea party now (witness Akin pulling an Akin and then everyone quietly going back to his corner once the fury died down a bit), then you're more likely to do the bidding of the far right, no?

i mean alienating his party is a risk too

He didn't look that way to me either but that's how he presented himself: all that compassionate conservative palaver and "humility" in foreign policy.

I can't think of a major policy point on which Romney has repudiated Bush.

as w bush it's not so much a question about the man as about his patrons; romney is clearly a technocrat with no discernible principles but as he also has no discernible spine i'm not partic comfortable w the idea of him being c-in-c while PALLING AROUND w the same kind of violently idealistic war nerds who got to institute their dream project in 2003

and "humility" in foreign policy.

not even in retrospect, but even at the time i think there was enough evidence to see this was pretty much a lie. the "humility" idea was put out there contra clinton's democratic-internationalism (yugoslavia, somalia). but if you read james mann "the vulcans" (which i dimly remember) bush's vaunted foreign policy wonder crew was all Team B hyperhawks from cheney on down.

romney pals around w/ the billionaires who steal peoples money not the billionaires who make bombs, it's just really hard to imagine him as a war president

he would probably outsource our military to mexican and chinese soldiers anyway

I policy I support ftr

http://t.imgbox.com/adz4svpC.jpg

Josef Stalin and his Merry Band of Bolsheviks! I want ideas from you people, that is what you're paid for.

well, that's my point, goole: I think it's a myth that Romney will govern as a moderate.

You want Team B people? John Goddamn Bolton is a senior policy advisor (and he was mentioned in Mann's book too).

a myth among who? 50% of our country thinks he'll be a noble right-winger and the other half thinks he'll be a psychopathic fascist. like 3 ppl believe he'll be a moderate.

He really seems like a guy who has taken very little interest in international politics over the course of his life. The question of the influence of guys like Bolton is a very serious concern.

oh absolutely

xp 2 alfred

romney's foreign policy team contains michael chertoff, various heads of various security consulting firms, and (specifically assigned to the middle east and north africa) a lady from rumsfeld's bullpen who published journal articles in 2000-2002 w titles like "iraq: time for a modified approach?" and "sanctions: a strategy in decline?"

where's Seward?

staring across the strait at russia

need you to make the "I can see Russia from my house" gif.

like 3 ppl believe he'll be a moderate.

Some of these so-called undecideds showing up in polls as for Romney now have bought the moderate bit he used in the debate

http://www.nationaljournal.com/2012-presidential-campaign/aide-mitt-romney-will-ask-obama-to-man-up-on-libya-20121016

Here's more on Romney foreign policy advisors. Man up!

yeah moderate pivot clearly working for them and clearly a focus - can you imagine a soup kitchen photo op during the primaries? interesting if 2012 actually makes vaguely true the myth of the 1980 debates - that scary conservative manages to seal election by presenting himself as acceptable, capable of governing alternative to failed, weak president.

http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/morgan-freeman-to-the-rescue

honestly i fully expect president romney to start another war w/o having the slightest notion or care about its human or geopolitical implications. he's got his head permanently anchored in the sand, and he's surrounded himself with hawks.

and frankly w/o the benefit of hindsight all presidents are ciphers,no?

in terms of daddy issues, romney is in the mold of gw bush trying to eclipse politically powerful fathers while obama is in the clinton absentee dad boat. al gore is in the powerful dad boat as well and it's interesting to see how his life changed (and seems more self-actualized) once the expectation of the presidency was off the table.

Wow--Romney's moved ahead on the RCP electoral college map:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/2012_elections_electoral_college_map.html

And he's almost pulled even on TPM's:

http://core.talkingpointsmemo.com/election/scoreboard

surprised he ever trailed on RCP

Something's going on, because that first debate can't be responsible for shifts like this.

sorry bam, america just isn't that into you

i'm guessing the latest polls don't take into account the second presidential debate.

but yeah, i'm not in panic mode but as usual i'm baffled, feel 0% connection to half the country

Chait and Silver have already speculated: Obama's bump (which always looked baffling to me) was inflated and coming down anyway, a move which coincided with the first debate.

"Something's going on, because that first debate can't be responsible for shifts like this."

I wonder if they are oversampling Republicans </conspiracy>. I think I'll start a website and adjust all the numbers back to Obama by oh let's say 7%.

shit is gonna bounce around, and probably revert to something like the pre-october mean, though probably a little closer than that.

i'm not an old political eye or anything but i don't think romney wants to peak in mid-october

Obama's bump

INSIDE: SEE whose bump's NOT showing!!!

Nate Silver ‏@fivethirtyeight
Gallup poll real bad for Obama. Marquette poll (WI) pretty bad for Obama. Other polls pretty good for Obama. Canceled out in forecast.

ok then

Why are you looking at colors on an RCP map? AFAICT all they signify is whether a particular candidate is more or less than 5% ahead of the other guy in a given state's polling average. The distinction between a "toss up" and a "lean" is an arbitrary cutoff. Pennsylvania slipped down exactly to +5 Obama, so it became a "toss up", and North Carolina went +5.6 Romney so it became "lean Romney". It's crazy to think Romney's going to win Pennsylvania, and it doesn't matter if he wins NC, so it's all moot. If you want to feel a little better, go to "create your own map" and click "no toss ups" to fill in the states where no candidate leads more than +5 in the polling averages.

shit is gonna bounce around

street poll

Starting to join Morbz in "annoyed with the horserace shit" zone.

(xpost) I just looked at the totals and was taken aback. Good point about Pennsylvania, though.

Okay, this looks good:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/158060/unadjusted-unemployment-mid-october.aspx

Very good, even, although hopefully the good won't be adjusted out of existence.

barry lost 3.2% today on intrade

http://www.intrade.com/v4/markets/contract/?contractId=743474

i was expecting (wrongly) that strong second debate performance would halt the slide

dudes it's been less than 48 hours

until a couple days ago we were STILL getting data about the first one. Let's watch "The Cosby Show" reruns instead.

intrade was all but convinced the health care act was going down by the supreme court. like 70-80%. they dont know shit.

" feel 0% connection to half the country"

ditto except raise that to 95% of the country

i can confirm 0% connection to half. i strongly suspect 0% with most others but am waiting for more data.

*BOOP BEEP BOOP B-B-B-BEEP BOOP B-B-BEEP BEEP*

intrade is interesting in certain circumstances. w/ a supreme court decision there are 9 people or really 2-3 people and you are just trying to predict what those people are gonna do. there's no reason to think that a betting market in something like that would do anything but put a numerical value on conventional wisdom. which is sorta interesting in its own right but not very fortune-telling.

I read a blog post this morning that talked about how closely intrade matches nate silver's model - maybe not because it's a good market so much as because people are just betting w/ one source of information, nate silver.

but there are other times when there might be some information out there that can be discovered by the market - like when paul ryan was rumored as the vp pick I looked @ intrade and the number was pretty much at 'sure thing' long before the media was. and in other cases it's just useful to have a benchmark for conventional wisdom.