Symmetry required it: 2012 american general election thread #2

Yeah I feel like the debates are always built up by both sides into these "Now we'll see..." moments, and they're mostly usually not very interesting.

Plus, how much does it matter anyway? Kerry gave Bush at least one real solid ass-kicking, and I don't think it had any particular effect.

sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.

every time romney offers a position, obama should remind folks of the 18 other positions he's held on the same topic over the past few months. this is already a "thing" w/ romney and i don't think it would be a bad idea to make it the central fact about him.

I love how Bush's expression after Kerry starts writing things down while Bush talks ("Shit. I better try that too.")

in the nyer article about bubba and obama, there's a bit where clinton suggests that it's better to paint romney as a psycho right winger than to portray him as a 'flip-flopper' (hate that phrase) because undecided voters might think that romney could return to his moderate roots once he was in office.

ah, i see.

this is why i'm not bill clinton (among other reasons).

expectations on the debates for romney will be very high, it will be a boring draw, race won't change

conservative belief is that obama is pretty dumb and an empty suit; if you get someone to just stick it to him live he'll collapse, mitt romney somehow won't do that, blame and recrimination all around.

republicans going back to the jeremiah wright well

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=n-ELYhHdQw4

debates sealed the deal for reagan in 80, tight race before that, landslide after. gore performance (and snl mocking of same) in 00 hurt him though i'm not sure it impacted polls (still i remember that dui revelation hurt bush in closing week so i'm guessing he got a little bump from debate performance?). debates helped kerry down the stretch, though not enough obv. also carter in 76 and kennedy in 60 obv.

That's why they wanted Newt to debate him, in the misguided belief that Gingrich is a mega-intellect whose debating skills would blow Obama out of the water. xxp

I would have loved to see an Obama/Newt debate tbh

I'd like to bet Mitt Romney $10,000 he won't put on this blue suit:

http://msnbcmedia2.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/040727/040727_kerry_hmed_4p.grid-6x2.jpg

http://cdn.static.ovimg.com/episode/223647.jpg

http://images2.fanpop.com/images/photos/6400000/The-Cowardly-Lion-the-wizard-of-oz-6449515-496-475.jpg

^^^ Newt Gingrich. "C'mon, put 'em up! I'll debate 'cha wit one paw tied behind my back!"

debates sealed the deal for reagan in 80, tight race before that, landslide after.

― balls, Monday, September 10, 2012 3:39 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

some other stuff happened after the debates too, as always its hard to tease out cause and effect, interesting post http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/08/09/what-really-happened-in-the-1980-presidential-campaign

gore performance (and snl mocking of same) in 00 hurt him though i'm not sure it impacted polls (still i remember that dui revelation hurt bush in closing week so i'm guessing he got a little bump from debate performance?).

― balls, Monday, 10 September 2012 19:39 (8 minutes ago) Permalink

IIRC, most polling had Gore winning the debates

my conception of the 1980 race is that people wanted to vote for Reagan and it took them until the end of the election to go "ok, he's not an idiot, I can vote for this guy without shame." No such revelation in the works for Mittbot.

and.... that link completely obliterates what I thought lol

ya its weird u always hear abt reagan storming from behind to win it

crazy that carter had that huge a 'lead' at the start of the year - residue from ppl rallying around the president in the aftermath of iran crisis? also wow that race was not nearly as tight as i'd been led to believe, competitive for a stretch near the end but...not really. would love to see jack anderson numbers, also curious what happens if 1) kennedy doesn't challenge carter or 2) kennedy wins nomination somehow. totally curious about the book mentioned there.

Meantime

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/09/birtherpalooza_canceled.php?ref=fpa

One theory could be found on the Facebook page of Linda Bentley, an Arizona tea party activist who had been promoting the event. A visitor to her page wrote that it had been doomed because Arpaio was unwilling to take his probe even further and investigate the president for murder.

“The REASON the EVENT by Sheriff Joe & his Cold Case POSSE was CANCELLED is because the Sheriff & others are TOO DUMB to SEE the MURDERS Barack Obama had his Security Adviser John Brennan commit on Obama’s Gay Lovers in Chicago,” the visitor wrote.

that is one hell of an intimidation tactic, hunting down someone and killing people on top of them

chicago style politics

I was skimming through J. Hoberman's The Dream Life yesterday (for a signing that never happened), and he mentioned somewhere that the Labor Day Gallup Poll in '68 was Nixon 43, Humphrey 31, and Wallace 19. The final result was Nixon 43.4, Humphrey 42.7, and Wallace 13.5. Obviously a unique election, with no direct bearing on this year at all. But it does show there can be significant movement after Labor Day.

Guessing Humphrey didn't get much of a bounce from the '68 convention...

its just one poll tho

(xposts) to be fair, having your Gay Lovers murdered is considered a good conservative alternative to marrying them

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OXTGFskDxls/UE48nCtOB4I/AAAAAAAAGkk/OCYW2Ic3ucE/s400/3c00b414fb7111e1ab4c22000a1d0350_7.jpg

gangster

re lag∞n's link: I haven't read much evidence refuting Gary Sick's (and the early Hitchens) case for an October Surprise re the Iranians.

From reading Elizabeth Drew's book on the '84 race I see evidence that Mondale's making Reagan look like querulous and doddering in the first debate chipped slightly at RR's lead -- two points. He still lead by almost double digits.

Other than that I can't remember a debate after 1980 that didn't cement impressions about the loser (Dukakis: coldfish; Dole: lol old; Gore: prick).

Really? 2004 didn't, unless I guess the impression being cemented was Kerry is not the dundering idiot the guy who actually won was.

idiot no dundering yes

you forgot Poland

you could easily frame the dubya debates as events that cemented poor impressions about him, it's just that they weren't enough. (or were enough in gore's case, again, half a million more people votes for him)

general polarization makes the debates (and the conventions) less and less important as time goes on. Kerry 'won the debates' it just didn't affect much.

xp

people voted*

gore won the people votes, lost the Scotus votes

they musta thought he was a prick in the debates

he won fans of lipstick and sighs

CNN went through their own post-debate polling tonight, and it wasn't good for Romney. They even had Obama up 48-47 among men.

Greg Sargent with more on that stupid-ass Carter/Obama analogy.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/for-the-romney-campaign-its-forever-1980/2012/09/10/d9e02e86-fb57-11e1-8adc-499661afe377_blog.html

it's weird just how huge a figure carter is in republican thinking. maybe it's his role in the reagan myth or maybe they just love optimism and earnestness flamed out in weakness and failure and a one term presidency but it's a weird consequence of their bubble that they expect the electorate to get over and forget dubya but snap to attn at the spectre of carter.

One of my Republican friends started in with the Carter comparisons as soon as the inauguration was over. (He voted for Obama, but has been rooting for him to fail ever since.) Maybe because Carter is the only sitting Democrat that Republicans have beaten since ... hell, Cleveland?

Carter is the only one-term Democratic president in living memory that they can hang "FAILURE" around

xp

I keep reminding GOP friends that Carter's last defense budget was generous enough for any Reaganite to appreciate (a fact that Weinberger, Baker, et al have since cited).

This is a subset of a larger, unsubstantiated pop-culture theory of mine, but I'd also say Carter and Reagan occupy slightly special places in the Zeitgeist because they were in the age of total newspaper + broadcast television dominance, when there was a lot more of a shared political/cultural experience generally. You can count on people of a certain age knowing most of the same things about Carter and maybe sharing a lot of the same feelings about his presidency, in a way that I'm not sure will be true in twenty years about the Obama years. If that makes any sense at all.

Basically, I don't think they're entirely crazy to keep leaning on Carter - - - I mean, he's a president who had incredibly high negatives at the time, a time which many voters still remember. They can't use Clinton in this way because he's really popular, they can't bang on about "Ted Kennedy style government" right now because he's dead and everything that's been said about him in the last few years lionized his health care quest, so all the "sleazy personal life stuff" that defined him for years and years is basically information adrift. So who else can the boogeyman be? The last Democratic president before Carter was Lyndon Johnson and I'm not sure he has a well-formed narrative in the minds of average voters, many of whom weren't even born when he was President.

but it's a weird consequence of their bubble that they expect the electorate to get over and forget dubya but snap to attn at the spectre of carter

I'd never really thought about it like that, but yeah. Anyone 18-24 was not born while Reagan was in office; you could push that to maybe 28 in terms of actually remembering him in office. Anyone up to the age of 32 was not born while Carter was in office; push it up to 36 for a working memory. Everyone voting, no matter how young, remembers W. Yet they go on and on about Reagan (understandable) and Carter (much less so).