Final Predictions, Part Two

With the benefit of a couple of extra days of dust-settling (to say nothing of one last, momentous call for President Obama in the Sunshine State), the postmortem on the 2012 election has hit its stride, with some pretty interesting results: Republicans, for the most part, are in less of a de-legitimizing frame of mind than I might have predicted, and not independently the White House seems poised to flex a little bit of its post-electoral muscle. Both outcomes are worthy of a few thoughts here.
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Ohio, Ohio, ...Virginia?

I tried to stay away from blogging about this election and for a long time -- up until the Republican National Convention in Tampa -- I succeeded. But as Sherman once said to Grant, "You could never stay home when armies are moving." And so there came a point in the cycle where I just couldn't help myself. I hope those of you who've subscribed and read these columns have found them interesting, if not always particularly connected with reality. (This is what I hope my friends think about me generally, if it comes to that.)

First, some housekeeping: I will once again be live-blogging the election returns as they come in this evening, though I don't think I'll be using the map gadget to do so since it stalls out my ability to update in anything like real-time. There will be many maps from which to choose, and all being orderly and well this evening, they will all look approximately the same from one moment to the next. That out of the way, let's consider together where things stand one last time, with our focus on a state that hasn't been getting a lot of street cred in the battle for tipping-point status, at least so far.

No matter how one feels about the competing narratives about the state of the race, it isn't being argued by any reasonably non-partisan pundit out there that the President doesn't at least have the polling momentum on his side in these last few days of the campaign. And that, it turns out, has presented a comparatively new and daunting obstacle to the prospects of Mr. Romney.
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Final Predictions, Part One

In my most recent post I observed that the state-level polling data seems to be lagging the actual condition of the race on the ground, and yesterday's and today's polling data has done nothing to disabuse me of that intuition. Survey USA has the President up in Colorado (without which Romney can't win), Marist has him up in Florida (without which Romney can't win), and PPP has him up in Ohio (without which Romney cannot win). With these new polls emphasizing the short shelf-life of any supposed insights, and allowing that the lid isn't exactly 'on' between now and Tuesday, it seems to me that the time is right to make a few predictions.
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The Sandy Surprise

In a country as big and messy as this one, nothing is to be as consistently expected in Presidential elections, as the unexpected. In 2008 it was the Lehmann meltdown which cost McCain any chance of winning. In 2004 it was the final Osama Bin Laden tape which, together with the Ohio Secretary of State's office, probably cost John Kerry the election. In 2000 it was... well, we all know what it was in 2000, now, don't we.

This year's "October Surprise" is of course a massive storm which has slammed into the northeastern United States just a week before election day -- with consequences ranging from major flooding in New York City, to power outages in eastern Ohio, to all but comically deep accumulations of snow in the middle- and lower Appalachian mountains. This is nothing to wax idle-pundit about, either: People have lost their lives in this storm and will continue to do so for several days -- though the impression that is slowly forming in this commentator's mind is that the chances for a Katrina-sized death toll (or corresponding embarrassment for the White House) are already effectively nil.

Allowing that the situation transcends our usual partisan gamesmanship, it is unavoidable human nature to wonder in print just exactly what effect the storm will have on the trajectory of the Presidential horse race -- with outlets ranging from the sublime to the sublimely ridiculous having already weighed in. The broad consensus seems to be that the storm cannot possibly help the President, given the suppressive effect it is sure to have on the turnout of poor and minority voters in such crucial states as Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio. I hope you will therefore pardon me for taking a few paragraphs to weigh in with the contrary viewpoint that the storm can no longer harm the President's chances of reelection and will almost certainly help them instead, both directly and by hurting the candidacy of Mr. Romney.
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The Divergence, Explained

There's a story on Teagan Goddard's Political Wire today about the apparently bizarre disconnect between the current state of punditry on election 2012, and the current polling data.

As you know (you wouldn't be reading these words if you didn't), there is a droning mantra of paid political analysis out there right now, insisting in a way we haven't seen since 1980 that the challenger is closing hard and fast and has all the momentum on his side. The public has gotten to know him, gotten comfortable with him and, especially after the first debate, come to find him plausible as a potential President. Mitt Romney has passed the "living room test," and with the strong economic headwind facing the incumbent, all that is left for the challenger is to close the deal.

Meanwhile the state-level polling data has shown very little movement in Governor Romney's direction. Even the much-ballyhooed national tracking poll by Gallup (which shows Governor Romney with a substantial lead in the countrywide popular vote) suffers from the unfortunate credibility-inhibitor that it dramatically -- one might even say intentionally -- under-counts minorities. In other words, aside from a poll of angry southern white guys, none of the hard data about the race is consistent with the punditry. President Obama is up by small but structurally sound leads in Ohio, Nevada, Virginia, and Iowa; he is dead even in Colorado and Florida, and within the MOE or just outside of it in North Carolina and New Hampshire.

Even more perplexing is pundit-land's seeming lack of appreciation for just how daunting Mr. Romney's comeback would be from this starting point: Barack Obama, it happens, could lose *all* of Virginia, North Carolina, Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado and Florida, and with just Ohio and Nevada, where his leads are outside of the MOE, he would win with 272 electoral votes. We keep hearing that it's all about Ohio -- and for *one* of the two candidates it surely is -- but Mr. Romney's urgency to win Ohio is completely one-sided: If he wins it he can still lose. Indeed if the election were held today, and Ohio went to him (somehow), he almost certainly *would* still lose, because he would fail to carry Nevada, Iowa, and Virginia, and the Ohio victory would be meaningless. If Romney loses Florida, it's over; if he loses Ohio, it's over; if he loses Virginia, it's pretty close to over. If he loses Colorado it's basically over and if he loses Iowa and New Hampshire put together it's more-or-less over, and at the moment he is trailing or at best tied in ALL of these places. And still the pundits clamor on about Romney's camp feeling good about where they stand and looking forward to culminating their late turnaround on election day.

So what gives? 

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The Other Thing Late-Breaking Undecideds Do

I had an amazing encounter yesterday evening at my garbage can. And no, I'm not talking about an encounter with any of the half-dozen previously unknown life forms I might have found building complex civilizations on the inside lid, either. This was both an amazing encounter and, despite taking place at my garbage can, not totally disgusting.

It happens that my next-door neighbor on one side is a young graduate student in engineering, steadily working his way through the laborious process of completing his Ph.D. Let's call him Keith. He's a good kid insofar as he doesn't set couches on fire in his front yard, but his parents--a husband-and-wife team of contractor/landlord/developers in Melbourne--are two of the most unhinged Tea-Party-moron lunatics you are ever likely to encounter in your life. Keith's dad once told me that money is made from gold and that the shavings of gold are sometimes irradiated by the government to diminish our capacity to resist its efforts to control us*, while Keith's mom recently self-published a 360-page book in which she laid out a blueprint for fixing the public school system, of which the entire text seems to have consisted of the words "fire all the teachers and replace them with people I agree with" written over and over again**.

They are in other words the embodiment of precisely those attributes one imagines when one thinks of Tea Party / Constitution Party advocates who also happen to be wealthy enough to be landed contractor/developers: Loud, blinkered, counterfactual, selfish, scary, and, above all, wrong. I need not elaborate to the point of describing what they think of the current occupant of the White House. It isn't good. And no, the apple doesn't fall terribly far from the tree. But bear with me because there's more to this story than meets the eye.

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On the question of "building that"

Regular readers of Cinema Democratica will know that there hasn't been anything regular to read. I won't apologize here because, well, because that's been done. There is the matter of a new novel, which I began outlining on January 1st of this year and which--owing to a comedy of unforced errors--is scarcely any closer to completion than it was, then. Bringing the sort of attention to detail to that project that I very conspicuously failed to bring to any of its predecessors in my own bibliography, I've had little energy and even less enthusiasm to write anything else.

Quite aside from the issue of my time, though, there has also been the issue of my emotional investment. For any number of reasons, mostly to do with my disappointment with the President, I've felt almost none of the feverish daily investment in political affairs during this election cycle that I did four years ago. (When the guy to whom you gave three months of your persuasive-essaying life, four long weekends driving people to the polls, and a couple of thousand bucks, stands before a joint session of Congress for the last State of the Union Address of his first term and blames the high cost of college tuition on excessive faculty salaries, you may be forgiven for harboring a certain measure of ambivalence to the question of his continued incumbency. Especially if you teach college classes for a living.)

The thing is, there is only so much internet-free office space in the universe, and only so many ways to avoid viewing the aggregated political news of a person's daily facebook feed, before the whole thing becomes so unavoidable that fatalistic detachment starts competing inside one's head with fully-formed theses about what's going on. "You could never stay home when armies are moving," is how Sherman put it to Grant, after the latter had "retired" to Ohio in a snit in 1862. And if there are to be fully-formed ideas inside my head about what's going on, there seems little point in not inflicting them on the five of you, too.

The fully-formed idea inside my head this morning is that the Republicans have committed a grave and, as far as I can tell, un-commented miscalculation, with this whole business about "yes we did build that."
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What's the Matter, Can't You Take a Joke?

I don't enjoy writing about politics. During the run-up to the 2008 Presidential election I did rather a lot of it -- and a few people might have said that some of what I was producing wasn't all that bad -- but on very, very few of those occasions would I have described the activity as a labor of love. (Live-blogging the actual map on election night stands out as the exception that proves the rule, here, precisely because the topic about which I was writing was an exception that proves the rule: The good guys, on that night, were winning.)

Mostly the act of writing commentary about our present era from a perspective on the political left has felt less like a gleeful celebration of the promise of representative government being enjoined by an informed electorate -- and more like drawing the short-straw of trying to write a compelling narrative about a mismatched bowl game in which it is already understood that the entire coaching staff on the losing side will immediately be fired when the game is over. Except for the existence of high, occasionally life-and-death real-world stakes for the rest of us. Yes, that's more like it: A mis-matched football game, in which those of us seated in the stands have all wagered our lives' savings on the team everyone was predicting was going to lose before kickoff. We know how it's going to end, and it's going to end badly for almost everyone.

Indeed it is so not fun to write about politics from the left in this country that, on more than one occasion, it has actually given me chest-pains. I write about politics anyway because, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the idea of not writing about politics is often even more unbearable. January 9, 2011 is one of those times.

In case you've been living underwater since yesterday afternoon, one Gabrielle Giffords, along with twenty other people, was shot outside the entrance to a Tuscon-area supermarket. Ms. Giffords is the representative from the eighth congressional district of Arizona, and she was shot while meeting with constituents. Of the twenty other people shot, six were killed -- including a Federal judge and a nine year-old girl. Ms. Giffords herself was struck in the head and suffered a bullet wound that traveled all the way through her brain and exited the other side. Reports on her condition at this hour are still mixed: It appears likely that she will survive, though it is far less likely that she will ever truly recover. The alleged gunman is already in custody, after bystanders are reported to have tackled the individual as he attempted to re-load. The suspect's name is Jared Lee Loughner and he is twenty-two years old. After executing a search warrant into his home and automobile, law enforcement officials discovered an extensive collection of writings about the threat to freedom and democracy that is posed by excessive government control -- in language that could pass for the script of Glenn Beck's next radio broadcast.

Giffords has represented a Tuscon-area district that voted for McCain in 2008 and, after casting a vote in favor of the health insurance reform bill that past last year, won narrow reelection over a Tea-Party sponsored candidate in the 2010 midterms -- a juxtaposition that had not escaped the attention of highly placed and typically vitriolic opinion leaders on the black-hearted right. And here we come to the point of today's comment. It happens that Sarah Palin's political action committee, the SarahPalin PAC, recently published a map of the United States which targeted twenty congressmen and -women who fit the same political description as Ms. Giffords: Democrats who represented districts that had voted for McCain, and who subsequently voted in favor of health insurance reform. ...But when I say targeted, you see, I mean that the map in question actually placed gun sights over the areas of the country that these people represent. Let me just repeat that: Sarah Palin, folks, the woman who wants to be your next President, published a map that included gun sights drawn over the locations represented by nineteen other Democratic congresspeople, and Gabrielle Giffords.


As chilling as this is (and let no one attempt to suggest otherwise), it also serves as an excellent example of something else that too few people are talking about these days, it seems to me: the wave-of-the-hand dismissals that are being brought to such chains of causality by the right wing's rank and file. Having invested themselves in a world view that operates on an embrace of simplicity for the sake of itself, to an extent that a candidate for President can lose an election on the grounds of suggesting that he'd meet with people and have conversations before deciding, the Joe Everyman constituent on the political right does not now want to have that seductively vapid world view compromised by the obvious dot-connections between Sarah Palin's gun sights, and Gabrielle Giffords' gunshot wounds.

Forced to address the connection at all, they smirk their smug, bully-smirks, and ask you why you didn't realize that the Palin ad was intended to be taken as a joke. Far from serving as conclusive proof of the fulminating, pro-violence, anti-constructive agenda of the right, the linkage between Sarah's obviously (?) tongue-in-cheek map, and the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, is instead proof somehow of your thin skin.

It wasn't that long ago that I was asked semi-publicly by a husband-and-wife duo how it was that I'd become so unreasonable when it comes to politics. This, you understand, from a couple with whom I'd once enjoyed a close friendship but who, in adulthood, have like so many other people surrendered all semblance of basic reason to the right wing hate machine's siren-song cocktail of xenophobic religious bigotry, fear-mongering about excessive government interference, and laughable disinformation dressed up as open-minded impartiality. Two weeks before the wife of this couple asked me how it is that I could have changed into someone so unreasonable in the years since we'd known each other, the husband in this couple had referred to Glenn Beck -- the man who said on his nationwide broadcast, "You know, I'm seriously thinking about killing Barack Obama" -- as a journalist.

Of course, if we've learned anything over the past two years it is that the country gains nothing through the engagement of such people. Inviting their preferred politicians to participate in the writing of important legislation, and incorporating their suggestions, only threatens the facile diorama if it is reported that way by their mass-market spokespeople of hate, and so it doesn't even get mentioned. Instead it's "Obamacare," and the people who voted for it in pro-McCain districts get to wear gun sights -- if not on their persons, then on the places where they live.

Few people with whom I've discussed this want to admit it, but if the countless Republican ideas that were incorporated into the eventual health-insurance reform bill were to have no beneficial impact on the rhetorical tone of the extreme right -- if the bill ultimately passed could, as a result, end up being a virtual carbon-copy of the one proposed in 1994 by The Heritage Foundation, in response to the proposals being advanced at that time by the Clinton Administration -- then really, folks, the notion that constructively engaging a pair of foam-at-the-mouth religious nut-jobs about the A-to-B connection between Palin's poster and the Giffords shooting is a fool's errand. It's contrary to the best instincts of those of us on the left, but it's also true: Informed debate with these people is now pointless.

What then remains? What remains is a renewed commitment to Democratic ideals (sparing the pointless compromise for some other epoch in which both sides are once again prepared to negotiate in good-faith), coupled with a far more proactive commitment to messaging both the accomplishments those ideals have produced, and the ghastliness of the alternative, to the supposedly undecided but actually there-for-the-taking independent vote. It's the subject for another column at this point, obviously, but personally I am of the opinion that independents were largely ignored during the first two years of the Obama Administration, in two important senses: The ridiculousness of the right's characterizations of the President's agenda were never proactively countered with equally effective messaging about the truth (an old story with Democrats in high places, alas), and the compromises being offered to that agenda were targeted at mollifying the hardened right, instead of being offered so as to sound reasonable to the people in the low-information middle. In the case of health insurance reform, this produced a bill that carries less appeal to them, with no upside for people like Gabrielle Giffords.

As painful as it may be, as against-type as it may be, Democrats are going to have to cede the idea of speaking to Republicans as if there were any room left in this country for earnest, good-faith dialogue about the issues of the day, because there isn't. Painting gun-sights on the home towns of elected officials is the conclusive evidence of this -- the in-this-case-literal smoking gun. But more to the point, a decision to let go of the time-honored tradition of one-way good faith on the part of Democrats will free those officials, and the messaging resources that have been wasted in the effort, to point out far more effectively and far more comprehensively to the low-information voters in the middle that the threat represented by handing-back power to the gun-wielding religious nuts on the other side is larger now than it has ever been in our country's history. In other words, the next time one of those swaggering bully fascists from the Drudge Report smirks at us and asks us, "What's the matter, can't you take a joke," the answer we give in response -- thinking first of Ms. Giffords and the long and arduous rehab that probably awaits her -- should be a resounding, "No."

Dave O'Gorman
"The Key Grip"
Gainesville, Florida

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