I would not want to be a member of one of those Republican “elite” circles right now, responsible for getting my party out of its presidential quandry.
The Herman Cain implosion is now impossible to deny or ignore. With one of the original sexual harassment accusers going public (and looking highly credible), a new accuser coming forward, and the candidate himself holding a highly self-destructive press conference, the Cain Train’s forward momentum now seems to be depending entirely on blind conservative hatred of the media (and perhaps of those feminazis who think sexual harassment is a serious issue). But even that line of defense may be crumbling. RedState’s Erick Erickson pretty much gave up on Cain when he tried to blame the Perry campaign for his troubles, calling the Cain campaign “stuck on stupid.” The Iowa Republican‘s Craig Robinson has gone into full-fledged attack mode, calling Cain’s conservative defenders part of a “cult of personality.” And those signs of abandonment occurred before today’s rolling fiasco.
So will Cain’s impending collapse finally convince Republicans to unite behind Mitt Romney? Doesn’t look like it. Mitt seems stuck in the polls nearly everywhere other than in New Hampshire. Will it feed a comeback by Rick Perry? Not much sign of that, either.
Indeed, the candidate who seems to be benefiting from the chaos right now is none other than Newt Gingrich, left for dead months ago and still running a limited campaign that’s in the red financially. Brand new PPP polls in Ohio and Mississippi (and also in the state senate district in Iowa that’s holding a special election today) show Gingrich running not only well ahead of Perry, but also ahead of Romney. Jonathan Chait is so stunned by what he calls “The Newtening” (sorta kinda told you so, Jon) that he’s foresworn making any more predictions about this GOP nomination contest.
What’s next? A Santorum surge? (Matter of fact, there are some who see signs of Santorum momentum in Iowa). A Bachmann revival? A Ron Paul breakthrough?
Hard to say, but the one thing that does still make sense, as Ron Brownstein explained week before last, is that there are two separate GOP nominating contests underway, one for each half of the party that is composed of Tea Party supporters and non-Tea Party supporters. Romney is winning the latter handily, but has made little headway among the former, who are obviously struggling to settle on a champion. There is no one in sight who can bridge the gap between the two factions, which means that unless Romney can just wrap it all up early with a surgical strike in Iowa, a collision is inevitable between Mitt and, well, somebody.

A good place to begin your Tuesday reading would be John Nichols article in The Nation, “Occupy the Polls: Tuesday’s Critical Tests of Political Power” which spotlights a ten-pack of elections being held around the country today to watch for clues. Number one is the Ohio referendum to restore labor rights, which progressives are expected to win.
Dems should also keep an eye on swing state Virginia, where top Democrats are rallying to prevent Republicans from controlling the state senate, the last Democratic bulwark in the Old Dominion. The Washington Times’ David Sherfinski has a report here.
Seizing on a newly-released Florida poll indicating that a near-majority of respondents believe the Republicans are sabotaging the economy at the same time as the President’s approval rating is 41 percent in the sunshine state, Jonathan Chait makes the case that Obama’s low approval ratings are being overemphasized by the pundits. Chait notes that Bush’s mid-forties approval numbers improved significantly in ’04 as many voters decided they couldn’t cast ballots for Kerry. Says Chait: “…incumbent approval rating isn’t something that’s independent of the opposing candidate. Voters may shape their view of the incumbent by making a comparison…We have to be a little cautious about interpreting the importance of Obama’s mediocre approval ratings in the face of a polarized electorate and a still-discredited opposition party.”
Mounting opinion poll data indicates that the public believes the GOP is intentionally stalling the economy to hurt the President’s re-election prospects, according to Brian Beutler’s post “Three’s A Trend: Polls Show Voters Believe GOP Intentionally Stalling Economic Recovery” in Talking Points Memo. Salon’s Steve Kornacki has more to say about it here.
Ed Pilkington reports in The Guardian on “Koch brothers: secretive billionaires to launch vast database with 2012 in mind.” For those who were unaware of the extent of the brothers’ grandiose ambitions, Pilkington notes “The voter file was set up by the Kochs 18 months ago with $2.5m of their seed money…It has been given the name Themis, after the Greek goddess who imposes divine order on human affairs.”
Martha C. White has a Time Moneyland report “Bank Transfer Day, The Day After.” Although aggregate numerical data is not yet in, some anecdotal reports are impressive. Noting that the facebook-generated campaign had 86K supporters, White adds: “The Denver Post says more than 1,000 protesters marched from bank to bank and urged customers there to close their accounts, while the Colorado Independent says local credit unions have acquired $100 million in new deposits within the past month… In Sacramento, Golden1 Credit Union opened for extended hours, and Vice President of Marketing, Scott Ingram said “It’s a busy day for us. We were anticipating we’d see a lot of new members and that’s what’s happening at every branch,” reported
reported Leigh Paynter of News10 KXTV. Elsewhere, Suzanne Kapner of the Wall St. Journal reports “On Saturday, the Boeing Employees’ Credit Union in Seattle signed up a one-day record 659 new members. At the grand opening of a Randolph-Brooks Federal Credit Union branch in Pflugerville, Texas, the parking lot was so full that customers had to leave their cars across the street.” You want video? Anna Almendrala of HuffPo has some Youtube footage here.
Most of the action was in the west, but not all of it. Looking to the east, Rashid Mian of the Long Island Press reports in his “Bank Transfer Day: Hundreds Switch to LI Credit Unions” that “Bethpage Federal Credit Union reported that more than 1,200 new accounts were opened on Saturday alone, far more than the usual 300 accounts the credit union opens on average per week.” “We’ve been so busy I’ve been handling customers that are overflow,” says David Glaser, vice president of the National Capital Bank of Washington, in Washington, D.C. The two-branch bank has one location open on weekends, and Glaser says it added six new customers on Saturday. Ordinarily, he says a Saturday might yield just a single new customer or none at all,” according to White’s report in Time, cited above.
Dems need not be intimidated by GOP bluster and cherry-picked polls arguing for a return to “market-based” healthcare,’ because some polls show show quite the opposite, As Sarah Kliff of Ezra Klein’s wonkblog reveals in her “Unexpected chart of the day: Americans want more government in health care.”
Elizabeth DiNovella has a penetrating report in The Progressive on “The Group Behind the Republican Takeover,” the Republican State Leadership Committee, which “played a decisive role in the 2010 elections, and helped flip twenty state legislative chambers from Democrat to Republican. Republicans now control more state legislatures than at any time since 1928.” DiNovella notes that, “Able to raise unlimited funds, the Republican State Leadership Committee is a stalking horse for corporate America. Top contributors to the group include Altria (formerly Philip Morris), Anheuser-Busch, Citigroup, Comcast Cable, Exxon Mobil, Home Depot, Monsanto, PhRMA, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Verizon, and WellPoint.” Just thought you oughtta know.
Anyone who has any doubts that ‘felon disenfranchisement’ laws being strengthened by Republicans across the country are racially-motivated, should check out “Who Gets to Vote?,” a revealing NYT op-ed by New York law School professor Erika L. Wood.
Ronald Brownstein discusses “The Two Worlds of Whites” revealed in the Pew Research study last week in his National Journal column. Says Brownstein: “On the day after Barack Obama’s sweeping victory in 2008, veteran Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg described the modern Democratic coalition as diverse America and the whites who are comfortable with diverse America…That appears to be even more true today. The line between whites who are comfortable with the racial and ethnic change transforming America into a “world nation” and those uneasy about it increasingly looks like one of the most important boundaries of the 2012 campaign.”

A number of recent national polls have shown remarkable levels of public support for the Occupy Wall Street protests. In two recent surveys, solid majorities have said that they either “agree” with the protestors or “view them favorably.” Perhaps even more striking are the results for groups who would ordinarily be expected to react with hostility. As Greg Sargent has noted, a majority of the non-college educated, working class whites in these surveys expressed clear support for the Wall Street protests. Adding icing to the cake, these same polls show that Occupy Wall Street is substantially more popular than the Tea Party
Looking at these results, progressives can be forgiven for feeling almost giddy. It is no longer unreasonable to seriously ask the questions: “Has the long night of conservative ideological hegemony finally reached its end? Has the long-sought populist holy grail been discovered at last?”
As with all polling data, however, one must be cautious about jumping too quickly to conclusions. When the question was posed simply as “is your opinion of the Occupy Wall Street movement favorable, unfavorable or haven’t you heard enough about it” in a recent Quinnipiac survey the results were less encouraging. Only 30% of the respondents were favorable, 39% were unfavorable and 30% had not heard enough. Even when the questions include enough information for most people to formulate opinions, the questions end up probing general attitudes about Wall Street and the banking and financial industries rather than gauging the level of support for any specific agenda or strategy of the protests. The Time survey question, for example describes the protestors as opposing policies that “favor the rich, the government bank bailouts and the influence of money in our political system.” For many years now – well before the 2008 meltdown – surveys have shown that there is a very broad current of “populist” distrust and antagonism toward these same economic actors, policies and institutions. The problem has always been that this cluster of attitudes never found any meaningful outlet for practical social or political expression.
A more important reason for caution in interpreting the recent polls, however, becomes apparent when one looks more closely at those surveys that use a variety of different question wordings — wordings that more closely track the actual contours of today’s ideological and partisan debate between progressives and conservatives and that use the actual language employed by the two sides.
The most recent opinion survey by Democracy Corps asked a number of questions with these key characteristics. At first glance, the results seem solidly encouraging. Here are three statements that received strong majority support in the D-Corps survey:

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Thomas B. Edsall argues in his “The Politics of Austerity” in the New York Times Opinion pages that Republicans may be “playing with fire” for themselves, as well as for the nation. First, observes Edsall:

As the national debt grew from $10.6 trillion when Obama took office to $13.7 trillion on Election Day 2010, the stage was set for a conservative revival. Conservatives successfully shifted the focus of American politics to the twin themes of debt and austerity — with a specific attack on means-tested entitlement programs.
The Republican Party, after winning back control of the House in 2010, has reverted to the penny-pinching of an earlier era, the green eyeshade Grand Old Party of Herbert Hoover and Robert Taft, advocating a “root canal” approach to governance evident in the first budget passed by the Republican-controlled House — the Paul Ryan “path to prosperity” budget with $4 trillion in cuts — and the subsequent Aug. 2 debt ceiling agreement.

Edsall argues that “The new embattled partisan environment allows conservatives to pit …those dependent on safety-net programs against those who see such programs as eating away at their personal income and assets.” Edall notes further, how “The conservative agenda, in a climate of scarcity, racializes policy making, calling for deep cuts in programs for the poor.

…The beneficiaries of these programs are disproportionately black and Hispanic. In 2009, according to census data, 50.9 percent of black households, 53.3 percent of Hispanic households and 20.5 percent of white households received some form of means-tested government assistance, including food stamps, Medicaid and public housing.
Less obviously, but just as racially charged, is the assault on public employees. “We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots,” declared Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin.
For black Americans, government employment is a crucial means of upward mobility. The federal work force is 18.6 percent African-American, compared with 10.9 percent in the private sector. The percentages of African-Americans are highest in just those agencies that are most actively targeted for cuts by Republicans: the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 38.3 percent; the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 42.4 percent; and the Education Department, 36.6 percent.

Edsall succinctly defines the salient principle of ‘austerity politics’: “Once austerity dominates the agenda, the only question is where the ax falls.” But he also sees Dems having leverage in conservative overconfidence:

Still, conservatives have a tendency to overestimate public support for their agenda and consequently to overreach: recall the two government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996; the 1998 Clinton impeachment; and the Ryan budget, which gave Democrats a recent victory in upstate New York.
…Republicans are playing with fire, though, when they threaten American standing in the world, as they did in provoking Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the United States’ credit rating to AA+ from AAA in August. Confidence in Congressional Republicans fell 36 points after the debt ceiling debacle, compared with a 22-point drop for Mr. Obama.

In Edsall’s view, however, Dems can be faulted for weak messaging, which allows the tax and spend meme to stick to their party, alienating a good many swing voters. Edsall stops short of offering solutions in his post. But his post helps clarify what Dems should emphasize more sharply in their attack messaging, as well as in shoring up their defenses.

In The New York Times Sunday Review TDS Co-Editor William Galston makes the case for mandatory voting. Noting that 31 nations have some form of mandatory voting, with half of them also providing an enforcement mechanism, Galston highlights the example of Australia, which has some cultural characteristics similar to the U.S. and over 85 years experience with the requirement.:

…Alarmed by a decline in voter turnout to less than 60 percent in 1922, Australia adopted mandatory voting in 1924, backed by small fines (roughly the size of traffic tickets) for nonvoting, rising with repeated acts of nonparticipation. The law established permissible reasons for not voting, like illness and foreign travel, and allows citizens who faced fines for not voting to defend themselves.
The results were remarkable. In the 1925 election, the first held under the new law, turnout soared to 91 percent. In recent elections, it has hovered around 95 percent. The law also changed civic norms. Australians are more likely than before to see voting as an obligation. The negative side effects many feared did not materialize. For example, the percentage of ballots intentionally spoiled or completed randomly as acts of resistance remained on the order of 2 to 3 percent.

Galston fleshes out three basic arguments for mandatory voting in the U.S.: the need for more citizen responsibility, the need for broader participation of demographic groups and that it would reduce polarization. He adds that it would improve our dismally-low turnout rates in non-presidential years and it could lead to a more serious discussion of the issues during campaigns, among other benefits. He concludes with a challenge to the states:

The United States Constitution gives the states enormous power over voting procedures. Mandating voting nationwide would go counter to our traditions (and perhaps our Constitution) and would encounter strong state opposition. Instead, a half-dozen states from parts of the country with different civic traditions should experiment with the practice, and observers — journalists, social scientists, citizens’ groups and elected officials — would monitor the consequences.

An interesting idea. Perhaps one of those states could experiment with a tax credit for voters, in effect a penalty for nonvoters. Galston doesn’t discuss the difficulty of enacting such legislation, with Republicans across the country more interested in ‘reforms’ to suppress voting. More likely, states where Dems hold the governorship and majorities in the state legislature will be the first to experiment with it.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Even as the political world awaits the further unfolding of Herman Cain’s handling of sexual harassment allegations, one of his rivals is on the brink of making a strategic decision that could have an even greater impact on the Republican presidential nominating contest, and on the general election as well. Will Mitt Romney go for a “quick kill” by focusing his vast resources on a serious bid to win the Iowa Caucuses just two months from now? Or will he stick to his original plan of beginning his campaign with an almost certain win in New Hampshire, at the risk of allowing someone–likely Cain or Rick Perry–to begin consolidating conservative anti-Romney sentiment with an Iowa victory?
The consequences of Romney’s decision, it turns out, go beyond the strategic question of how best to win the GOP nomination. It could also determine whether the nominating contest will turn into an extended ideological slugfest that poorly positions Romney to face off against Barack Obama next year. Indeed, the real possibility that a drawn-out contest will drag Romney even further to the right should be a considerable factor in his decision-making process–one that, if he is wise, should prompt him to take a serious look at rolling the dice yet again in Iowa.
As New York‘s John Heilemann recently explained, Team Romney has carefully handled Iowa in a way that makes it possible for the candidate to go either way, but he’s now reached the failsafe point:

These mixed signals are neither incidental nor accidental. They’re reflective of a deep ambivalence in Romneyworld about its approach to the Hawkeye State. All year long, the campaign has debated internally whether and how hard to compete in the caucuses. Every option carries both significant upsides and substantial risks. But now, with the voting in Iowa just two months away, decision time is here.

The argument against a Romney commitment to Iowa can be summed up in one word: 2008. At this point in that cycle four years ago, a Romney win in the caucuses, giving him momentum to beat Rudy Giuliani and John McCain in New Hampshire, seemed all but certain. A University of Iowa poll on October 29, 2007 showed him with 36 percent of likely Iowa caucus-goers, with Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, and Fred Thompson all bunched in the low teens. He had vast money (eventually spending $10 million in Iowa) and organization (he had won the Ames Straw Poll in the summer), and moreover, was positioned as the “movement conservative” in the field at a time when ideologues had big doubts about the other candidates. Within a month, however, his lead was gone, and his loss to the low-budget, high-energy Huckabee campaign derailed his path to the nomination.
In every respect other than the disarray of the current field, Romney is in a less enviable position in Iowa today, with polling support in the 20s, a skeleton organization, very little time spent on the ground by the candidate, and most importantly, a reputation as a flip-flopping moderate in a cycle when the GOP base has turned sharply to the right and feels no particular reason to settle for an impure nominee. But then again, who, exactly, is going to beat Romney this time? Rick Perry has lost two-thirds of his support, in Iowa and nationally, since September, and the man who took most of that support, Herman Cain, has less organization in Iowa than Romney, and has been making serious mistakes on almost a daily basis since surging in the polls.
It’s an exquisite dilemma for Romney, who certainly has the resources to make an eight-week blitz in Iowa. But for all the risks involved in the “quick-kill” strategy, what should ultimately sway him to make the plunge is the big advantage a short primary season would give him in preparing for the general election.
By advantages, I don’t mean it would save Romney a lot of money, though it would, or that it would give him more time to mobilize unhappy conservatives in a holy crusade to beat Obama, though it would do that as well. More important than both of these factors, the “quick kill” would enable him to escape the intense ideological pressures of a nominating contest where Romney, in particular, will be required to prove his conservative bona fides constantly, at the expense of his general election appeal.
The gap between the outlook of the GOP’s conservative base and the general electorate is large this year and the nominating contest is widening it still further each day. At GOP candidate debates, it is taken for granted that the very idea of universal health care is an abomination, deflationary monetary and fiscal policy is a great idea during a recession, Social Security and Medicare need to be drastically overhauled, paying attention to income inequality is “class warfare,” and every instrument of government should be bent to the task of further engorging the wealth of “job creators.” Just in the last two weeks, Cain and Perry have been competing for the “most conservative” mantle by trumpeting deeply regressive tax overhaul plans and swearing their fealty to the most extreme anti-abortion sentiments. Perry has already made it plain that his main weapon against Romney will be the constant assertion that his rival is secretly and not-so secretly a liberal, sure to push “Obama Lite” policies. Right-wing litmus-test titans like Jim DeMint of South Carolina will exact as high a price as possible for their weighty endorsements.
This is a very dangerous environment for the ultimate nominee, and particularly for Romney, who has virtually no stored capital of trust with the very voters who will determine his fate. Up until now, he has only made two big concessions to the pressure to turn hard-right: his support for the Cut, Cap and Balance deficit reduction proposal (an explicit condition for DeMint’s support) and his strategic decision to cynically blast Rick Perry for sympathy towards illegal immigrants. If he does not essentially win the nomination before the contest gets into the southern states, how many more ideological gestures of this sort will he have to make?
More generally, a long primary season is a very bad thing for the Republican Party. At this point, Barack Obama’s best, and perhaps only, strategy for re-election is to make this a “two futures” choice, in which the extremism of the GOP gets as much attention as the current state of the economy. Nothing will play into this strategy quite like months of Republican candidates barnstorming through Tea Party-dominated state primaries accusing each other of being reasonable instead of right.
The “quick-kill” scenario may be the only way out of this trap, and only Mitt Romney can trigger it by hunkering down for an intense holiday-season drive through the right-to-life fundraising banquets and local-supporter potluck dinners of Iowa. We’ll soon know whether he has the stomach for it.

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After the doomsayers and Pollyanna’s of both parties have all had their say, Ron Brownstein can be counted on for a sound analysis of the political moment in presidential politics. His current National Journal post, “Back to Basics: Can Barack Obama’s amplified populism galvanize the modern Democratic coalition?” provides a carefully-calibrated weighing of the challenges facing the Obama campaign. Brownstein explains:

Regardless of the Republican nominee, those on the Obama team recognize that their biggest obstacle is voter disappointment with his performance, particularly on the economy. They believe one of their biggest opportunities is that voters generally prefer the president’s ideas for dealing with jobs and the deficit over Republican alternatives. They understand that their biggest challenge is to improve the retrospective judgment about his performance while simultaneously encouraging voters to focus more on the prospective comparison with the GOP.
In most national surveys, Obama’s approval rating is running around 45 percent. (Some top Democrats worry that the actual number among likely voters is lower.) Even more ominous, more than two-thirds of Americans surveyed routinely say the country is on the wrong track, the highest level in decades. On both fronts, those numbers more resemble the profile of presidential losers than of winners.

As long as there is an electoral college, U.S. presidents will be elected by 50 different elections, which makes for a complicated calculus. As Brownstein says, “…Even senior Obama strategists acknowledge that they feel more confident about states where his approval rating reaches 47 percent or above.” Brownstein adds that the 47 percent approval figure is “the same number transfixing many Republicans.”
It’s always possible that the economy will pick up during the next year, but Brownstein notes that “…The glum conclusion inside the White House is that the economy isn’t likely to provide him much of a tailwind before Election Day.” Brownstein believes “The smaller-scale administrative initiatives he’s now consistently announcing may help only at the margin.”
But Brownstein does not dismiss the Obama campaign strategy, which he describes:

…Obama’s team is most optimistic about improving his ratings through the comparison with the eventual Republican nominee. That debate, they hope, will remind people of first-term accomplishments like the auto-industry rescue and shift attention toward ideas such as reducing the deficit through a mix of spending cuts and upper-income tax increases, which consistently outpolls the GOP’s cuts-only approach. Put another way, they hope that clarifying the choice will help them win the referendum…Obama strategists say that no matter whom the GOP nominates, the president will deliver the same core message: A Republican president would rubber-stamp the agenda of the GOP Congress and return to policies that caused the crash, favor the wealthy, and squeeze the middle class….

Brownstein recounts the weaknesses of the GOP presidential candidates, most notably Romney, whose “boardroom background” could alienate the largest swing constituency — blue collar whites — which is how Ted Kennedy whipped Romney in the ’94 Bay State Senate race. But Brownstein also cites political strategist Mark Penn’s argument that an over-emphasized “class warrior” message might alienate white collar workers who have been trending Democratic in recent elections.
Brownstein acknowledges that Republicans will “remind voters about the aspects of Obama’s term they like least–such as his stimulus failing to dent high unemployment.” But he leaves the door open for a possible Obama victory, concluding “Obama’s sharpening populism reaches back to his party’s traditions. Whether it can galvanize his party’s modern electoral coalition remains to be proven.”
I would only underscore that, despite historic precedents concerning approval ratings and unemployment rates, there are some major unprecedented factors bearing on the 2012 presidential election, which could be game-changers.
First, The entire GOP field is riddled with well-publicized vulnerabilities, personal and political. Secondly, we have never before seen a Republican party so hell-bent on legislative obstruction at all costs, and there are indications that this is not playing well with the middle class. Third, today’s GOP is more shamelessly devoted to protecting the wealth of multimillionaires from even modest tax increases than ever, contrary to overwhelming public support. Lastly, the public is well-aware that the Republican party is focused on destroying a sitting president as its openly-stated raison d’etre — even if it means voting against putting hundreds of thousands of unemployed Americans to work fixing our dangerously decaying infrastructure.
it will take some skillful politicking to exploit these new factors effectively. But if Dems listen to the right strategists, these assets ought to be worth a few points in a close election.

So in the extended game of hot potato that the Republican presidential nominating contest has become, here’s the score:
* Newt Gingrich imploded in May and June, and has clawed his way back to being only a quarter of a million or so in debt, and rehiring a small staff in three states.
* Tim Pawlenty ran out of gas in August, and got out.
* Michele Bachmann got elbowed to the curb in September by the meteoric rise of Rick Perry.
* Perry bombed extensively in late September and most of October, losing about two-thirds of his support nationally and in the early states, with most of it going directly to Herman Cain.
* Herman Cain seems to be in the process of imploding right now, with his only consolation being that not much of anybody is talking about the floundering he was doing a couple weeks ago on abortion and foreign policy.
* Ron Paul ain’t going anywhere, and Rick Santorum looks to be in the position of trying to convince people to consider him formidable if he finishes third or fourth in Iowa, where he is campaigning monomaniacally.
Though it all, Mitt Romney drifts along in the mid-twenties in national and most state polls (except for his top states like NH and NV), even as it becomes apparent that the Tea Party wing of the party still opposes him violently, no matter how many times they are told his nomination is “inevitable.” Unless he pursues the risky strategy (the very one that blew him up four years ago) of entering Iowa with both feet in order to execute a “quick kill” on the entire field, he will probably have to endure an extended primary season in which he will be daily described as a crypto-liberal, forcing him in turn to say crazy, flip-floppy things to fit in.
Nate Silver published an extended piece over the weekend analyzing the odds on the general election outcome from the perspective of three variables: the president’s approval ratings; 2012 GDP growth figures; and the relative extremism of the Republican nominee. Obama’s doing not so great on the first two measurements, but number three is lookin’ good.