Symmetry required it: 2012 american general election thread #2

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).

They got to knock down Carter to make Reagan look like more of a savior. It doesn't have anything to do with facts, it has to do with historical narrative.

Makes sense though if the voters they are most worried about winning over (or not losing outright) are literally the actual same people that Reagan won over in 1980. Seems like they'd be likely to vote Republican at this point regardless, but maybe the idea isn't so much that they can win the election by rallying them, but that they will lose really really horribly if they can't at least hold onto them. So trying to hit the theme of "this is just like 1980" makes....a kind of sense. At least, I get the motivation, not to say that I think it'll work, or that it means they have any understanding of the bigger picture.

yeah, what's funny is that the carter myth is every bit as fictional as the reagan myth -- try telling a republican today that carter increased military spending, that the left hated him, or that any president would have been stymied by the hostage crisis.

xpost to Bruneau - yeah that too! It's like alt-rock fans hammering away at hair metal even if they came along later and never actually heard much of it, etc.

but that they will lose really really horribly if they can't at least hold onto them

"And if the Republican Party cannot win in this environment, it has to get out of politics and find another business." That was George Will, on Sunday.

That same rightist friend I cited a few lines ago said, "You guys probably loath Carter as much as we do George H.W. Bush." I said that's not true! While the left does dismiss Carter, there's plenty of centrist Democratic Leadership Council types who revere Bush's tax position and conduct of foreign policy -- including our president.

I imagine "Carter" will remain a boogeyman for another five years -- much the same way "Hoover" did until the sixties.

and it's funny how similar in temperament those engineer-presidents Hoover and Carter were.

It's nice when some ultrarighty misrepresents or mischaracterizes and I can say "RONG, that's why your side is shitting the bed so bad, you can't get the basic facts right."

the few lines about Hoover's attitude at the start of the depression in The Path to Power made Hoover seem like a reactionary lunatic

if Hoover had been president in 1924 and served a term the twenties would've had a different feel. The guy was not a conservative: he was some kind of sui generis mix of crank, social engineer, and self-made man that only the early twentieth century would have rewarded.

I said last year in one of the other symmetry threads that it's impossible to watch Reagan's speech in the '76 convention and not take him seriously. Never mind his considerable political skills and the timing -- how can anyone not have thought he'd not triumph over the dour Carter?

basically Hoover had one shot to triumph as a president but 1928 was not the time.

despite his rhetoric, hoover was way more of a liberal interventionist and public works guy than ppl remember (the hoover dam, yo). i mentioned him to a libertarian friend in college and was treated to a vehement lecture about how ol' herb was just a big government statist scarcely any better than FDR.

The guy saved millions of people from starving in Europe! His Treasury people and FDR's collaborated closely on the first few crucial bits of Hundred Days legislation. Coolidge called him "Wonder Boy" and said "I've had more unsolicited advice from this man than I've ever wanted -- and all bad!" 'Nuff said.

haha, from wiki:

Franklin D. Roosevelt blasted the Republican incumbent for spending and taxing too much, increasing national debt, raising tariffs and blocking trade, as well as placing millions on the government dole. Roosevelt attacked Hoover for "reckless and extravagant" spending, of thinking "that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible." Roosevelt's running mate, John Nance Garner, accused the Republican of "leading the country down the path of socialism".

I was assigned to write a contrarian "what was good about Hoover" paper in high school history class, learned a lot. Gave me some respect for him and also totally made me understand why he was the wrong guy to deal with the Depression. He was cautious at a time when that was only going to make things worse.

If anything, Obama is kind of like a cross between Carter and Reagan.

Read a book like Rising Tide about how Hoover basically snapped his fingers and created an organization to rectify the damage caused by the Mississippi flooding in 1927, and you have to wonder how come he wasn't the one who was elected four times.

He comes across now as this tone-deaf bureaucrat who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but you gotta remind yourself that this was the guy that saved Mississippi and Belgium within a span of ten years.

I've been to both Hoover's and Carter's libraries and it's funny how both gloss over their terms as president with a few booths stood up within sight of the gift shop.

(Also, and maybe I was blind from being on the road all morning, but there is not one mention of the word "Reagan" inside Carter's library.)

haha remember: one of FDR's campaign promises was to reduce the deficit!

That new book The President's Club, a shallow but entertaining examination of post-presidential friendships and enmities, contains several excellent essays on Truman consulting a forever grateful Hoover on how to save postwar Europe from starving.

Thanking u sincerely all for diversifying my knowledge of Herbert Hoover

One of the things I've often thought about is if the postwar domestic political climate would have been at least a little less volatile if FDR had coddled Hoover a bit instead of saying shit like "I'm not Jesus Christ -- I will not resurrect Herbert Hoover." Hoover had great sway over Robert Taft and that isolationist wing of the GOP.

basically no two 20th century presidencies have more myths, shibboleths, and cliches stuck to them than Carter and Hoover.

Franklin D. Roosevelt blasted the Republican incumbent for spending and taxing too much, increasing national debt, raising tariffs and blocking trade, as well as placing millions on the government dole. Roosevelt attacked Hoover for "reckless and extravagant" spending, of thinking "that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible." Roosevelt's running mate, John Nance Garner, accused the Republican of "leading the country down the path of socialism".

yeah this is fucking hilarious.

wait - not even kennedy and reagan?

Obama has a head start on the 21st. (xxpost)

Most liberals I know are cool on Carter's presidency -- at least I don't hear much praise or defense of it -- but revere him for his post-presidential exploits and for being such a loveable kind-hearted old man.

Seriously the Romney campaign is just throwing stuff on the wall to see if anything sticks

Gonna be a cwazy fall

photo avails of romney rolling up his sleeves and pitching in at the Cigna boardroom in Hartford

He's kindhearted only when not uninvolved with politics, in which he's as obtuse, irascible, and ungrateful as usual.

I'm waiting for someone to produce a convincing fake Kenyan Obama birth cert