Tag: barack obama

• What Obama’s Bad National Numbers Definitely Don’t Tell Us

   A “Blue Wall.”

  A new poll today has some grim numbers for the president. Though it shows him besting Perry and Romney in head-to-head match-ups, it’s well within the margin of error, and his numbers for job approval, whether the country is on the right track, and in a head-to-head against a generic Republican are rather discouraging.

  That said, his general election percentages are causing a bit of exaggerated analysis. At NBC news, for example, Mark Murray is quoted as saying that Obama is “no longer the favorite” to win in 2012. Keep in mind, this is a national poll, which is essence a snapshot of the feelings of the entire general electorate; in other words, the popular vote. Guess what has nothing to do with who is elected president? That’s right.

  The data that would actually tell us Obama’s current reelection prospects would be state-by-state match-ups within the traditional swing states, as well as within red states that Obama turned (temporarily?) blue in 2008. Remember, Bush “won” (or was installed) in 2000 even though he lost the popular vote by half a million votes. In 2004, if a few more liberals had turned out in Ohio, John Kerry would have won the presidency with a popular vote deficit of about 3 million votes. It are the electoral votes that matter, as unfortunate and aberrant as that is.

  Now think about what states, then, Obama would need to carry. The latest census changes somewhat the number of electoral votes each state has, and the new numbers favor the Republicans, but on the whole the math isn’t terribly different. To win, Obama will of course need to carry the traditional blue states — there will be no room to lose anything that, say, Gore or Kerry had previously won. After that, it’s only a handful of more electoral votes that Obama would need to win the day. At an event at Brookings in 2009 that I reported on for one of my previous employers, National Journal’s Ron Brownstein called the block of safely blue states the “Blue Wall.” I wrote at the time:

  … the event left no doubt in anyone’s mind that Democrats’ growing appeal to suburban and younger white working-class voters, and the dwindling of the country’s rural population, the growing numbers of minority voters and other emergent groups — what Ron Brownstein called “the coalition of the ascendant” — meant that Democrats would have a national electoral advantage for the foreseeable future.

  Things are looking much tougher than expected, doubtless, as Brownstein himself has recently written:

  … Obama’s approval rating exceeds his disapproval rating in states with 301 Electoral College votes — well down from his 365 total in 2008 but still enough to win. That total, however, includes North Carolina, where Obama’s approval and disapproval ratings are virtually even, and Georgia, where Republicans remain skeptical that he can seriously compete, despite signals from his reelection campaign that it intends to. If those two are removed from the list, the states in which Obama’s approval number exceeds his disapproval rating provide exactly 270 Electoral College votes, the bare majority needed to win.

  So while Obama’s job ahead is tougher than most pundits (including me) had predicted, the notion that he’s in dire straits is not quite accurate. Things could certainly get worse, but it isn’t as though he’ll be facing the most appealing opposition, regardless of who gets the GOP nod. Romney, with a genuine centrist record despite his right-appeasing campaigning, still presents the clearest threat, though as I’ve noted Perry has potential appeal that may transcend his ideological distance from the electorate as a whole.

  But again, that’s irrelevant right now. If, for example, Perry’s national numbers are strong against Obama, that could be because he’s running enormous margins in states that he’d win anyway like Texas. Obama doesn’t need to win the electoral-vote-rich states like Ohio by big margins. He just needs to win them by a single vote to take their electoral votes. So let’s wait and see whether Perry and Romney are faring this well because they’re genuinely popular across the spectrum, or whether they’re just being bolstered by those states that already loathe their illegitimate, communist, Muslim, Kenyan-born president.

  September 6, 2011

  2012 presidential election, barack obama, politics

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• Obama in the Fog

  I know, it’s easy to continue to beat the I’m-disappointed-in-Obama drum from the comfort of my MacBook. But there’s a couple of new news items that are adding fuel to my sickly fire.

  Let’s begin with the older item, one reiterated by Maureen Dowd a few days ago.

  In Cannon Falls, Minn., the president compared negotiating with House Republicans to negotiating with his wife. That’s right. I sincerely hope Obama doesn’t really think this analogy is anywhere close to apt:

  “In my house,” Obama noted, “if I said, ‘You know, Michelle, honey, we got to cut back, so we’re going to have you stop shopping completely. You can’t buy shoes; you can’t buy dresses; but I’m keeping my golf clubs.’ You know, that wouldn’t go over so well.”

  In Decorah, he said: “Everybody cannot get 100 percent of what they want. Now, for those of you who are married, there is an analogy here. I basically let Michelle have 90 percent of what she wants. But, at a certain point, I have to draw the line and say, ‘Give me my little 10 percent.’ ”

  Let’s unpack this, shall we? First of all, in a marriage, as we understand the concept in this century, the two partners have chosen to be together, they love each other. In politics, the two parties actually put all their efforts into preventing the other party from participating. Because that’s what they’re supposed to do.

  Yes, in theory, the two parties simply have competing visions about reaching the same goal: the betterment of American society. But since what each party considers “betterment” is also incompatible, the marriage analogy is still widely off the mark.

  And what’s with the “my wife buys a lot of shoes” cliché? I know Obama wants to appear “traditional,” but does that mean he has to trade in archaic stereotypes?

  This smacks of cluelessness, as though he and his advisors are in some sort of fog. They can’t tell what decade they’re in, and they can’t suss out how to translate a desperate, ugly, combative situation (their relationship to the hostage-taking Republicans) into a framework that the general voting public understands. If they think they’ll get the message across with this absurd and wrongheaded matrimony analogy, I despair at how they will make their case for reelection as the months go by in this horrid economic climate.

  Speaking of being in the fog, the Times reports today:

  President Obama will call on Thursday for the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, to step down, and will issue a new executive order providing for additional sanctions, an official said. It will be the first time the United States has explicitly called for Mr. Assad’s departure from power.

  Well thank goodness the administration is so on top of this situation. The attacks on Syrian civilians have been going on since March. I wonder at what point the administration determined that, like Qaddafi, Assad has lost the “legitimacy” to lead.

  Look, I understand that foreign policy is deeply complicated and terrifyingly sensitive business. So I realize that the seemingly glacial time scale it took for the Obama administration to determine that, hey, yeah, this Assad guy is maybe not an acceptable head of state, had myriad incomprehensible factors weighing on it. But if that’s so, help us understand that. If Qaddafi’s illegitimacy was so obvious moments after he began to attack his own people (and he’s been remarkably resilient considering that pronounced illegitimacy), why was the Assad situation so different? Again, I grant that there may be a lot of good reasons why it is different, but the president has not made those reasons clear, or even attempted to make up a reason.

  So again, it is as though he is in a fog. If not in reality, in perception; something clearly unacceptable is happening in the midst of a peaceful revolution in line with American values, and it’s taken months for the administration to call out Assad so specifically (as opposed to earlier sanctions). Why was it not a priority to help Americans understand why the administration was doing what it was doing (or not doing)? And if the Syrian situation itself was not on their radar, why not?

  Perhaps this is all part of Obama’s fabled expertise at “the long game.” If so, I don’t even remember what the game is anymore. To me, the president seems lost in the fog: billows from the metaphorical wreckage of our economy and political institutions, and the real human wreckage around the world.

  August 18, 2011

  barack obama, politics

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• Shows What I Know

  I was on tour with the American Shakespeare Center in 2004, and we were performing in a suburb of Chicago. During our stay in the area, we were hosted at a party by someone associated with the college at which we were performing. In their foyer was a local alternative weekly that trumpeted on its cover the would-be political star that was then-State Senator Barack Obama. I don’t remember for sure, but I suspect it was when he was merely a contender for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate. In the picture, he was smiling his trademark toothy ear-to-ear grin, being chummy with some other local pol. The headline, which I also forget, implied there was some momentum behind this up-and-comer who sought to become the next Senator from Illinois.

  I had no idea, really, who Obama was, though I think I had heard his name once or twice before. At that moment, however, I remember very clearly thinking, There’s no way this guy goes anywhere beyond local politics. Why? Because his last name was one letter away from “Osama.” Dealbreaker. Maybe in another decade, Barack.

  Now that guy, Obama, is president and is responsible for killing that other guy, Osama. Shows what I know.

  May 4, 2011

  barack obama, politics, terrorism

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• Coulda Been a SOTU

  Last month, John Kerry gave an excellent speech to the Center for American Progress which almost word for word ought to have been what the president gave as the State of the Union. In fact, he even used “Sputnik moment” as a theme, which makes me assume that someone at the White House was listening, even if no one else was. A key passage, emphasis mine:

  For the last months we’ve watched the news and read the campaign literature and heard a lot the soundbites. We’ve heard politicians say they won’t become a part of Washington. That say they’re for small government, lower taxes, and more freedom. But what do they really mean?

  Do they want a government too limited to have invented the Internet, now a vital part of our commerce and communications? A government too small to give America’s auto industry and all its workers a second chance to fight for their survival? Taxes too low to invest in the research that creates jobs and industries and fills the Treasury with the revenue that educates our children, cures disease, and defends our country? We have to get past slogans and soundbites, reason together, and talk in real terms about how America can do its best.

  If we are going to balance the budget and create jobs, we can’t pretend that we can do it by just eliminating earmarks and government waste. We have to look at the plain facts of how we did it before, and by the way, you don’t have to look far. In the early 1990’s, our economy was faltering because deficits and debt were freezing capital. We had to send a signal to the market that we were capable of being fiscally responsible. We did just that …

  How we got off track is a story that doesn’t require retelling. But the truth of how we generated the 1990’s economic boom does need to be told. We didn’t just cut our way to a balanced budget; we grew our way there.

  I love that imagery, of growing one’s way toward economic equilibrium rather than just slashing things away to get below some arbitrary line.

  I happened to read a Boston Globe piece on Kerry’s ambitions regarding the position of Secretary of State, which mentioned Ezra Klein’s recommendation of the speech in question, and only then did it cross my attention. I hope it gets around without too many more degrees of separation.

  And like I said, this could have been the State of the Union. 

  February 5, 2011

  barack obama, john kerry, politics

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• John Kerry and Barack Obama as Leaders

  Ryan Lizza’s recent New Yorker piece on the aborted climate change legislation of John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsay Graham is dispiritingly illuminating. Like previous long-form pieces we’ve seen of late (George Packer’s New Yorker article on the Senate, Todd Purdham’s morbid look at Washington in Vanity Fair) it is heavily discouraging in its recounting the mangling of a well-intentioned bill, as well as the juvenile and often pathetic relationship between official Washington and wealthy lobbying groups.

  Perhaps inadvertently, the Lizza piece presented a contrast that to me was inescapable; that of the presidency that is, and that which could have been. Two clips from the article will help illustrate my point. First is a scene in which, if Lizza’s account is correct, the Obama White House commits horrendous political malpractice on the climate change issue, bumbling so badly that it makes one’s head spin.

  In February, the President’s budget proposal included $54.5 billion in new nuclear loan guarantees. Graham was also trying to use the promise of more loan guarantees to lure Republicans to the bill, but now the White House had simply handed the money over. Later that month, a group of eight moderate Democrats sent the E.P.A. a letter asking the agency to slow down its plans to regulate carbon, and the agency promised to delay any implementation until 2011. Again, that was a promise Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman wanted to negotiate with their colleagues. Obama had served the dessert before the children even promised to eat their spinach. Graham was the only Republican negotiating on the climate bill, and now he had virtually nothing left to take to his Republican colleagues.

  If the reportage is accurate, this is tragic foolery, and bodes extremely ill for whatever hopes we liberals may have for our shining ray of presidential hope.

  Later in the article, we are treated to this scene.

  … Kerry and some aides were in his office discussing the progress of their bill. Someone mentioned T. Boone Pickens, the author of the so-called Pickens Plan, an energy-independence proposal centered on enormous government subsidies for natural gas, which is abundant, cleaner-burning than other fossil fuels, and sold by a Pickens-controlled corporation at some two hundred natural-gas fuelling stations across North America. Back in 2004, Pickens had helped to fund the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group that ran a sleazy—and inaccurate—ad campaign proclaiming, among other things, that Kerry had lied about the circumstances that led to his Bronze Star and Purple Hearts.

  Kerry had an inspiration. “I’m going to call T. Boone,” he said. Frangione was surprised. “You really want to call that guy?” she asked. Kerry told an aide to get Pickens on the phone. Minutes later, Kerry was inviting Pickens to Washington to talk. Rosengarten, who watched Kerry make the call, thought it was “a show of extraordinary leadership.” The following week, Pickens and Kerry sat in two upholstered chairs in the Senator’s office. Between them loomed a giant model of Kerry’s Vietnam swift boat. Kerry walked Pickens through the components of the bill that he and his colleagues were writing, but Pickens seemed uninterested. He had just one request: include in the climate legislation parts of a bill that Pickens had written, called the Natural Gas Act, a series of tax incentives to encourage the use of natural-gas vehicles and the installation of natural-gas fuelling stations. In exchange, Pickens would publicly endorse the bill. At the end of the meeting, the Senator shook hands with the man who had probably cost him the Presidency.

  Think about this. T. Boone Pickens is given a lot of credit these days for being some kind of happy prophet of reasonably-attained clean energy, but let none of us forget the grossly shameful character assassination of John Kerry for which he was responsible, paving the way to the second, perhaps more disastrous half of the George W. Bush presidency.

  And here is John Kerry, swallowing his pride to get something done that he knows is right and necessary.

  When the words “cost him the Presidency” crossed my view, I could not help but think: What if the Swift Boat liars had failed, and President Kerry had been able to score a second term in 2008. How far along would climate change legislation be now? Passed? What about the rest of the progressive agenda?

  Where Obama is professorial, John Kerry is often mocked for being ultra-professorial — pedantic and dull. But from my admittedly-poor vantage point, it seems to me that it’s the more boring of the two men who seems to have had the guts to actually lead, to get his hands dirty with the Senate’s intractably egomaniacal blowhards and solve some problems.

  October 7, 2010

  barack obama, john kerry, politics

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• Dreams from the Father?

  

  I recently read Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, and it took a couple of weeks before something about it dawned on me. While Obama gained a lot of early national political credibility when he began to strongly advocate for more engagement with and embrace of faith in the Democratic Party, and often espoused his own religiousness and Christian-ness during the campaign, these themes seemed wholly absent from Dreams.

  When Obama does deal with religion in the book’s narrative, it is almost exclusively raw pragmatism, figuring out how to harness existing religious institutions in Chicago and learning how to navigate their politics. To the best of my memory, at no point does Obama claim a “come-to-Jesus” moment in which he sees the proverbial light and converts from idealistic wanderer to committed Christian.

  Perhaps this is more apparent in The Audacity of Hope, which, I have to admit, I have no inclination to read whatsoever. For while our president is obviously a very skilled and fluid writer, I am not inclined to use up my time on what from what I understand is essentially a campaign book, primarily published as an excuse for a by Rev. You-Know-God-Damn-America-Who, and I take it that it elaborates on his position on religious engagement Obama takes in his semi-famous 2006 Call to Renewal speech.

  But it strikes me as interesting that his since-super-hyped Christianity is not apparent in Dreams. I suppose he could have had his Francis-Collins-meets-a-waterfall moment after having written the book, but somehow, I can’t help but think that Dreams serves as a truer foundation for where Obama is spiritually. The mysteries of the cosmos are too vast to be dealt with by mere mortals (“above his pay grade,” as it were), but only a stupid politician or community organizer would overlook the potential force behind an already-unified and malleable contingent of believers, and in the quest to do some good, not think to oneself, “I need to get them on my side.”

  I’m not jumping on the Obama-as-closet-atheist bandwagon, because I see no evidence for it. But Dreams makes me suspect that if Obama is a Christian, it is more in the philosophical sense than in the theological. But, I stress, it is just a guess.

  March 6, 2010

  barack obama, religion

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