By this definition it's notable that no one is claiming Romney sounded anything like Reagan a week ago and the polls now show he got no bounce. So even if Obama were Carter-which he isn't-Romney is certainly no Ronald Reagan.
Most commentators are now admitting that yesterdays tepid job numbers wont have much political impact and that they tell us little about where the economy is going either. Indeed, the market clearly didn't thin it mattered all that much. Yes part of it is that they think the Fed will do QE3.
However, at the end of the day what we saw was the market go through the roof Thursday on the very strong ADP private sector numbers and were unchanged based on the much lower BLS numbers.
Doesn't this suggest that the markets put more weight this time around in ADP? After all, they gave back none of the sharp gains from Thursday.
“There’s not a lot of undecided voters out there, and the impact of any given piece of economic news is going to be relatively small,” said John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University. “While it’s not good, it’s not a decisive shift.”
"Mr. Sides also noted that voters tended to focus on economic growth in the year before they headed to the polls."
"But other analysts said there seemed to be some evidence that the weak economic reports piling up might weigh on Mr. Obama and help Mr. Romney at the polls."
“I’m reminded of 1992, when, after the election, a story went around that G. H. W. Bush lost because there was a perception of the economy in recession even though the economy was already improving,” Andrew Gelman, the director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University, wrote in an e-mail.
Aha! So here's the other year that those who want a Romney victory seize on-1992. In many ways Romney's strategy seems to take 1992 to heart. He has tried hard to claim Clinton for his own-even after Clinton's sharp rebuff on Wednesday-and he is running the ultimate Its the economy, stupid! campaign.
Romney insists this election is only about the economy-and implicit is that if you're not happy with the economy, and who of us is, it's all the President's fault-and that any discussion about anything else is a "wedge issue" or an attempt to distract from what matters.
Yet this election has unfolded very differently than 1992. The polls have told a very different story. Clinton had a strong double digit lead after his record 16 point convention bounce that he never relinquished. Romney has trailed throughout the entire election.
And Romney's clueless patrician personal is actually the splitting image of George H.W. Bush himself. It's he who strongly resembles Bush not the President.
Indeed part of why they have tried to invoke 1980 is that the 1992 narrative has gotten no validation from the polls. But Romney is no Reagan. What's more the electorate is very different from 1980. Reagan won a landslide it's true, but this would require Romney to win places like Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, and California.
The post-Clinton Republican party has a very small path to victory that must mesh together perfectly-as they did for W in 2000 and 2004.
Consider what Pat Buchanan-yes that Pat Buchanan, the notorious one himself who recently got fired from MSNBC for his racist latest book about American decline-said just after the President's inauguration:
"In the National Journal, Ron Brownstein renders a grim prognosis of the party’s chances of recapturing the White House. Consider:
"In the five successive presidential elections, beginning with Clinton’s victory in 1992 and ending with Obama’s in 2008, 18 states and the District of Columbia, with 248 electoral votes among them, voted for the Democratic ticket all five times. John McCain did not come within 10 points of Obama in any of the 18, and he lost D.C. 92-8."
"The 18 cover all of New England, save New Hampshire; New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland; four of the major states in the Midwest — Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota; and the Pacific Coast states of California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii."
"Three other states — Iowa, New Hampshire and New Mexico — have gone Democratic in four of the past five presidential contests. And Virginia and Colorado have ceased to be reliably red."
"Not only are the 18 hostile terrain for any GOP presidential ticket, Republicans hold only three of their 36 Senate seats and fewer than 1 in 3 of their House seats. “Democrats also control two-thirds of these 18 governorships, every state House chamber, and all but two of the state Senates,” writes Brownstein.
In many of the 18, the GOP has ceased to be competitive. In the New England states, for example, there is not a single Republican congressman. In New York, there are only three."
“State by state, election by election,” says Brownstein, “Democrats since 1992 have constructed the party’s largest and most durable Electoral College base in more than half a century. Call it the blue wall.”
http://www.humanevents.com/2009/01/20/is-gop-still-a-national-party/
In 1980 we had an open map. Carter campaigned in California, and Reagan campaigned across the eastern seaboard. Clinton's win in 1992 really did rewrite the electoral map and it's the one we have now and will do for the foreseeable future.
What this election resembles in many ways is the 2004 election which is what the Romney team doesn't want to know about. We have the analogies of Swift Boat to Bain, Obama like Bush in 2004 was able to define the opposition early.
Then there's the conventions. The Democrats crushed the GOP there as Joe Scarborough acknowledges. Romney literally got the same convention bounce as Kerry in 2004-he lost a point. He joins Kerry as being only the second Presidential candidate since 1964 to lose actually lose ground postconvention.
Since 1964 there was one other candidate who got exactly a zero bounce-McGovern in 1972-another very poor comparison for Romney.
You can argue that it is these two years-2004 and 1972- that this election most resembles. While Bush's opponents and Nixon's opponents both hated the incumbent President, they were outwitted and never laid a glove. Similarly Romney has not laid a glove on Obama.
Overall, incumbent President's don't lose elections. Not since 1900 they don't. Not unless they are primaried.
In the Summer of 2011 during the debt ceiling fiasco that's all you heard about at Firedoglake-that Obama must be either primaried or third partied.
Eventually they came up with this website-the National Progressive Alliance-that was supposed to run a third party candidate to Obama. This effort was wholly abortive but history shows that they would have been better to pus for a primary opponent than a third party. Third party candidates have historically had little impact.
If Romney hopes to win this election after trailing in the polls for the entire election I don't know that there is any historical precedent for that. It's never happened as far as I know at least in modern times.
P.S. Buchanan is notable today for his unreconstructed racism-he's willing to talk about it in public. In many ways though he reads the tea leaves well. What I find interesting is his ability for Orwell's doublethink.
No one remains a more implacable critic of all things "affirmative action"-quotas, set asides, etc-so much so that you'd never know that he was the point man on Nixon's Philadelphia Plan. When he attacks it for the umpteenth time is there never any irony on his part?
Talk about being both priest and sin at the same time.It's as if a priest had to invent sin to put himself in business. I'm waiting for the next time he rails against affirmative action in an interview for someone to ask him why then did he create affirmative action.
Interestingly, this line about the priest who created sin is more or less exactly how Buchanan explained it at the time. Affirmative action was to be the wedge issue that would divide blacks from white union leaders.
No comments:
Post a Comment