This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
Republicans have been the first to assert, without shame, the parallels between their own “Swift-boating” of John Kerry in 2004 and the Obama campaign’s alleged “Swiss-boating” of Mitt Romney over Bain Capital’s business practices. But they have been less inclined to explore a deeper parallel that’s more about political strategy than ethics: How the Romney campaign, like the Kerry campaign before it, has set itself up for this adversity by placing undue weight on a sunny and largely unchallenged representation of the candidate’s biography.
When John Kerry began running for president in 2003, Democratic elites were acutely aware of the impact of 9/11 on swing voters in 2002–an atypical midterm victory for the party in power–and of the Bush White House’s skillful exploitation of old stereotypes about Democratic weakness on national security. Many supported Kerry–particularly against the frankly anti-war Howard Dean–for that reason alone, holding up his war record like a charm against the Rovian evil eye. By the time the general election campaign began, however, John Kerry, War Hero was by design the main voter impression of the nominee (as opposed to John Kerry, U.S. Senator or John Kerry, wealthy liberal). This backfired, in part, because the campaign had not anticipated and neutralized a massive airing of old grudges against Kerry as the public face of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and in part because so little else positive remained of the candidate’s public persona. Inside and beyond the Kerry campaign, and from the very beginning, many Democrats believed a broader message of “new American patriotism” or “common national purpose,” linked to but transcending the candidate’s biography would have been far more powerful and less vulnerable. But they were brushed aside.
In Romney’s case, the emphasis on biography had a different genesis but was equally powerful. His record as governor of Massachusetts was a minefield of problems in securing conservative votes in the primaries and conservative loyalties in the general election. His own policy agenda as a presidential candidate had few distinctive features, and mostly looked like a series of forced accommodations to conservative demands. Just as importantly, an agenda mainly composed of the Ryan Budget, the economic ideology of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and the social-issues ideology of the Christian Right did not look like an electoral winner. What was left to campaign on? Romney’s “character,” competence and private-sector bona fides (a tangible advantage in the primaries in comparisons with career pols like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum). Just as John Kerry’s Vietnam War-and-anti-War record was never tested in the Democratic nominating contest in 2004–his main problem was that he had voted for the Iraq War in the Senate–the underside of Romney’s Bain experience wasn’t seriously tested in the 2008 Republican nominating contest. When his rivals (most notably Newt Gingrich) tried to “go there,” they were shouted down by Republican elites as anti-capitalist.
If Romney is seriously “Swiss-boated,” there are two significant differences between his situation and that of Kerry during the stretch run in 2004. The first, to Romney’s great benefit, is that he may have a lower credibility threshold for the simple reason that the economy is so much worse than it was (or at least appeared to be) when Bush was running for a second term. But the second is that Kerry, once forced to abandon biography as the heart of his message, was able to fall back on a broad Democratic message and policy agenda that was competitive with Bush’s, with the support of a united party. Romney is caught between the realization that his own party’s agenda is not so popular, and the immense pressure he will face from the dominant conservatives of the GOP to prove himself by making his message as ideologically sharp and specific as possible the moment he abandons the biographical approach. Once Kerry won the nomination in 2004, the primaries were over for him. Once Mitt Romney is forced to articulate a broad message and a specific policy agenda, the primaries will begin all over again, and his party won’t let him avoid their demands unless he’s in deep trouble in the polls. And then it could be too late, and what would Romney do then anyway? Campaign strictly on his Winter Olympics record?
John Kerry may have had an exotic wife, a pricy education, and decidedly elite hobbies like wind-surfing. But when push came to shove among the blue-collar voters of Ohio, he could and did hoist a beer and get down and dirty with the Democratic base whose agenda he generally and demonstrably shared. And he did not have to deal with the equivalent of those Olympics videos where the 2012 Republican nominee cheerfully says: “Bonjour, je m’appelle Mitt Romney!”

Some Democrats are excited about the most recent controversies over Mitt Romney’s background at Bain Capital because they think it could represent a “silver bullet” in a difficult campaign year, or at least make a significant dent in Romney’s levels of support among “persuadable” non-college educated white voters in the midwest. Personally, I think it’s a bit early to assume it has had any impact so far, or will be particularly well internalized by swing voters between now and Election Day. Maybe that will happen, but we haven’t seen much empirical evidence of it just yet.
But what we do know is that the potential toxification of Romney’s business background represents an extraordinary strategic challenge for a Republican nominee that has chosen–or more accurately, been forced–to rely on that background to an extraordinary degree. This is a topic I’ve been writing about extensively over at the Washington Monthly, particularly in a post yesterday that sought to sum up how Romney got into this position:

First, there was the fateful decision to make Romney’s success (the money he made plus the jobs the firm supposedly helped create) at Bain the centerpiece of his own campaign. This decision appears to have been the product of several calculations: it reinforced the simplistic economic monomania of their chosen campaign message; it avoided the kind of detailed policy-based message that might be dangerous for any Republican; they didn’t want to campaign on his Massachusetts record because of RomneyCare and other major flip-flops; and they figured an atmosphere of unprecedented hostility to government and politics was the best possible time to campaign as a technocratic businessman….

‘

[I]t’s important to understand that if anyone manufactured the furor over Bain, and largely directed the development of the “story,” it was the Romney campaign, from the very beginning. It remains to be seen if they knew what they were doing, have outsmarted themselves, or simply had no better options.

In a Daily Beast post this morning on Romney’s very limited options in choosing a running-mate or shaping a convention, Mike Tomasky makes a strong case that Romney’s where he is for reasons largely outside his control:

Who, in this context, is Mitt Romney? An ex-governor who can’t discuss his record, and an ex-capitalist who … is getting close to the point where he can’t discuss his record. And who has been afraid for two years, or more, lest he offend Rush Limbaugh and Fox. This is not his Republican Party. It’s theirs. And Romney has given us no reason to think that will change.

It is more likely than ever that Romney’s main hopes for victory lie in keeping the focus on Obama (with the help of his Super PAC friends, if he can keep them more or less in harness) and making the election as strict a referendum on the status quo as is humanly possible. If he can do that without any positive message or even any clear personal identity, that will be quite an accomplishment. The “Bain moment” indicates that may well be how he has to proceed.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
President Obama’s team perhaps once hoped to reenact Ronald Reagan’s triumphant 1984 march to reelection. But it’s now clear that they’re condemned to repeat George W. Bush’s much less inspiring campaign in 2004.
The playbook is clear: A barrage of negative advertising to define your opponent before he can define himself; a stream of issues and events to mobilize your base; and a meticulous ground game to squeeze every last vote out of the base come November. As for the small number of voters who haven’t made up their minds already, you don’t try to argue that they’ve never had it better, but rather that the other guy is unacceptable. In the end, you win a narrow victory by default. Sure, you haven’t really confronted the country’s deepest problems. But there’ll be plenty of time to deal with them next year.
The only justification for such a campaign is necessity, and the only vindication is victory. So how is it going so far? Three recent national surveys offer some clues.
First the toplines. ABC/Washington Post puts the candidates in a dead heat, 47-47; Quinnipiac gives Obama a narrow 46-43 edge, within the margin of error; Pew shows Obama with a 7-point lead, 50-43. ABC/WP places Obama’s job approval at 47 percent; for Quinnipiac, it’s 45 According to the latter, 47 percent of the people believe that Obama deserves reelection, while 49 don’t.
Some other ABC/WP findings help explain the electorate’s reservations about the president. Only 44 percent approve of his handling of the economy, by far the most important issue in this year’s election, versus 54 percent who don’t. When asked which candidate they trusted to do a better job handling the economy, 49 percent said Romney, while only 44 chose Obama. Quinnipiac had it a bit closer–Romney 46, Obama 45. Pew offers this oddity: while its survey finds Obama leading 48-42 on “improving economic conditions,” Romney leads 46-42 on “improving the job situation.” When asked a forward-looking question–what they thought of the president’s plans for the economy, only 44 percent of the Quinnipac sample expressed a favorable view, compared to 50 percent unfavorable. In the ABC/WP survey, only 36 percent thought that Obama’s handling of the economy was a major reason to support him, versus 43 percent who thought it was a major reason to oppose him.
Is Romney in great shape on the economy? Anything but. Only 40 percent of the WBC/WP respondents had a favorable view of his economic plans, versus 46 percent unfavorable. And by 43 to 38 percent, they thought that Obama had presented a clearer plan for the economy than had Romney. (In late October of 2008, Obama led McCain by 50 to 32 on that same measure. Romney’s doing much better than his Republican predecessor, while Obama is doing much worse than he did four years ago.)
For reasons I don’t understand, the Pew surveys have pretty consistently yielded better results for Obama–larger edges and higher shares of the electorate–than have those from most other organizations over the past few months. For our purposes, however, the most important finding from their latest survey is this: “there is no clear trend in either candidate’s support since Romney wrapped up the GOP nomination … The presidential campaign’s dynamics have changed little in recent months.” Quinnipiac finds exactly the same thing, while ABC/WP shows that the boost Obama got from the unsightly Republican nominating contest was at best temporary.
Given the strategic decisions the Obama campaign has made, two questions emerge as decisive. First, what are the prospects for a 2004-style mobilization of its base coalition? By all accounts, Obama’s team has a substantial head-start in the organizational nuts and bolts needed for a successful get-out-the-vote effort. But compared to 2008, it may be an uphill fight. In his first presidential campaign, Obama enjoyed a huge edge among young adults and did worst among older voters. But new numbers from Gallup indicate that by an astonishing 20 percentage points, fewer voters aged 18 to 29 say that they will definitely vote than they did four years ago, and their voting intentions fall short of this year’s average among all registered voters by the same margin. By contrast, relative to the electorate as a whole, more older voters are committed to voting. The same Gallup survey shows diminished enthusiasm among Hispanic voters. In 2008, members of this pivotal group were a modest 8 points below the national average for definite voters. This year, it’s 14 percent.
To be sure, there’s time to gin these numbers up, and history suggests that the intentions of groups who are more weakly attached to the electoral process can change more than those of groups for whom voting is an established habit. Still, Obama’s 2008 mobilization effort had the wind in its sails, while this year’s effort faces some significant headwinds–perhaps enough to negate the much-discussed demographic shift in his favor over the past four years.
The second key question for Obama’s strategy is whether his campaign’s attack on Mitt Romney is succeeding in defining him as an unacceptable alternative. Based on the evidence, it’s too early to say.
On the one hand, the last round of Bain attacks has clearly rattled the Romney campaign, and a smattering of survey evidence suggests that the sustained ad campaign in swing states has scored some points. On the other hand, the Pew survey found no shift since May in swing-state voter preference.
But it’s not too early to say that Obama’s vital signs look dicey. Over the past 33 months, his job approval has been lower than George W. Bush’s at a comparable time in his presidency for all but one week. Bush averaged above 50 percent in the quarter before his successful reelection campaign, while Obama has been stuck in the 46-48 percent range for months. And the famous “wrong track” measure now stands at 63 percent, versus 55 percent in the days preceding the vote in 2004. If these two numbers don’t improve for Obama, his presidency will be in jeopardy. And they probably won’t–unless the economy perks up noticeably.

As Election Day 2012 draws near it will become more and more apparent that the white working class is a pivotal group whose electoral choice will largely determine the outcome. If the percentage of white working class support for Obama remains where it is today, in the low to mid 30’s, an Obama victory will be almost impossible. If Obama’s level of support rises reasonably close the percentage he received in 2008, Obama’s victory becomes almost certain. As a result, in the weeks between now and November 2nd there will be a huge outpouring of analyses seeking to explain the opinions and likely electoral choices of white working class voters.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of these analyses will be fundamentally wrong.
The reason is simple. The conventional way of examining the opinions of white working class voters – a group that is generally defined as those with just a high school diploma or those who have less than a four year college education — is to note their views on a variety of subjects and then compare those opinions with the opinions of white voters who have graduated college or gone on to post-graduate educations.
The results are predictable. Aside from certain “pockets” of populist views on subjects like corporations, Wall Street and profits, across a wide range of issues white working class voters’ opinions consistently appear to be more conservative than the more educated. On this basis, analysts and commentators invariably proceed to create a composite stereotype – a “typical” white worker who is significantly more conservative than his more educated counterparts across a wide range of issues. Based on this political composite columnists and pundits then quickly conclude that winning the support of this typical white working class voter requires “moving to the right” and appealing to his or her basically conservative views.
This cliché of “the typical white worker as a conservative” has a long history in political thinking. In its modern form it first appeared in 1970 in Scammon and Wattenberg’s book, The Real Majority in which a fictional 40 year old machinist from Ohio took his place alongside similar clichés about “conservative Hard Hats” and the TV character of Archie Bunker. Since that time it has survived largely unchanged as “the Joe Six-Pack vote,” “The Bubba vote”, “the NASCAR vote” and “gun-rack on the pick-up truck vote.”
But on the most basic level, this is simply the wrong way to think about white working class people.
For one thing, very often the differences between more and less educated white voters on specific issues are not large – often as little as 10 or 15%. This kind of difference is simply not enough to justify maintaining a stereotype of one group as being fundamentally more conservative than another. When comparing the views of two different groups of 30 individuals on a particular topic, for example, a 10% difference between the two groups will only represent a difference in the views of three of the 30 individuals. This is hardly enough to reasonably characterize one group as basically “conservative” and the other as “liberal” or “progressive”
Three Kinds of Workers
Far more important, however, is the fact that the stereotype of the “average conservative white worker” fails to capture the most important fact about these voters – that most are not “average.” On the contrary White working class Americans are profoundly split into three distinct groups.
To read the memo, click here

Democratic hopes for winning back control of the House of Reps are nearly shot, owing in large part to diminished prospects in CA, where Dems had hopes to pick up as many as 8 House seats, but now 1 or 2 seems more realistic as a result of the new independent redistricting system and/or Democrats’ failure to front strong enough candidates, reports Dan Walters in the Modesto Bee.
Aaron Blake and Rachel Weiner suggest a similar outcome in their post at The Fix, “The Terminal Ten: The most vulnerable House seats in the country,” Six of the ten are currently held by Democrats.
At The American Prospect, Jamelle Bouie takes a look at the big picture surrounding all of the fuss about presidential campaign war chests and spending and sees only a “marginal” benefit in the presidential race, but adds “If you want to know where money will have its greatest effect, look to congressional elections. A few million dollars in a few states can–and likely will–mean the difference between the status quo, or an ability to direct the nation’s agenda..”
Caroline Winter has a long — and revealing — Bloomberg Businessweek piece on “How the Mormons Make Money,” which sheds some light the church’s vast holdings and Romney’s business ethics and values.
Drew Westen,author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation,” presents a strong case for enacting the Fair Elections Bill in his NYT Op-Ed, “How to Get Our Citizens Actually United,” and he suggests a messaging strategy: “Voters aren’t interested in “process” issues. They want to know about outcomes. Voters from right to left will tell you, for example, that they overwhelming reject the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision to allow unlimited, anonymous money to flood our political system. But getting them worked up about election laws isn’t easy. You have to connect the dots to something that matters to them — like the fact that once-middle-class workers have seen their incomes drop by nearly 8 percent in three years and their wealth disappear by a staggering 40 percent. And you have to make sure they believe that the problem is not, as the right would have it, the extravagant pensions of teachers like my 82-year-old mother (who taught for over 30 years before retiring from the Atlanta city schools), but the actions of bankers and C.E.O.’s who’ve engineered a system that is decimating the middle class.”
If this new Gallup poll is right, Dems have some work to do in convincing voters who have health insurance that their health security won’t be damaged by the Affordable Care Act.
Paul Begala crunches some numbers about ‘swing voters’ at The Daily Beast,’ and concludes: “…The whole shootin’ match comes down to around 4 percent of the voters in six states….Four percent of the presidential vote in Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico, and Colorado is 916,643 people. That’s it…Who are these people, these few, these proud? Well, pollsters tell us swing voters are mostly women. They are younger–which blows away the myth that the president has the youth vote locked up. Older voters, like older consumers, are just more set in their ways. Young people are more persuadable about nearly everything. Many swing voters have a high-school diploma but no college degree. And a chunk of them are Hispanic.”
A new poll by The Hill indicates that President Obama’s tax proposal has the support of a plurality of voters. As Sheldon Alberts reports at The Hill, “The Hill’s poll found likely voters support Obama’s $250,000-a-year threshold, although by a relatively narrow margin…Forty-seven percent said existing tax rates should be extended only for families earning less than $250,000, while 41 percent believe they should be extended for everyone.” Maybe increasing the cut-off to $400k would win him more support.
I don’t know why we never see or hear about political ads that focus on the difference between political parties, instead of individuals. In their recent book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism,” Ornstein and Mann have a paragraph that should make it an easy sell to sentient swing voters: “One of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier –ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the center of American politics, it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country’s most pressing challenges.”
Nate Silver does the math at his FiveThirtyEight NYT blog and concludes of new voter i.d. laws, “I do think these laws will have some detrimental effect on Democratic turnout.” But he adds, “Pennsylvania, for instance, went from having no voter ID laws to a strict photo ID requirement. Based on the academic studies, I estimate that this will reduce turnout by about 2.4 percent as a share of registered voters. And based on my formula to convert changes in turnout to changes in the popular vote, I estimate that this would reduce President Obama’s margin against Mitt Romney by a net of 1.2 percentage points.”

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Mitt Romney’s refusal to take responsibility for the actions of Bain Capital from 1999 to 2002 says a lot about the kind of president he would be.
Friday night, Romney persisted in denying that he was responsible for the behavior of Bain during the period, even though he was listed on SEC documents as the firm’s CEO, Chairman, President and sole stockholder. Romney claims he “left” Bain Capital to run the Olympics back in 1999 and is not in the least responsible for the actions it took over the next three years, notwithstanding the fact that he was CEO, Chairman, President and sole stockholder until 2002.
There is mounting evidence of specific decisions and actions that undercut Romney’s case that he was no longer involved in the day-to-day decisions of Bain Capital after 1999.
But the central, indisputable fact is that the CEO, Chairman, President and sole stockholder of a company is responsible for whatever the company does — by definition. For normal people, any argument to the contrary simply defies common sense
Romney can dance around the issue, parse words, argue he gave up “management control” until he is blue in the face. But however he structured the decision making process at Bain Capital while he was also running the Olympics, he was ultimately in charge — and he was ultimately responsible for — and benefited mightily from its actions. In every business the buck stops with the CEO, Chairman, President and sole stockholder — it’s that simple.
Romney’s refusal to be held responsible for the actions of the company he owned — and for which he remained CEO, Chairman and President — says a lot about the kind of President he would be — and a lot more about his character.
Romney was happy to make millions of dollars from the company he owned. He was happy to take credit for the “jobs he created.” But he refuses to take responsibility for the lives his company destroyed, or the fact that in some cases he loaded up companies with debt and bled them dry to pay his own fees before he put them into bankruptcy and fired their employees.
Romney cashed Bain’s checks — and sometimes he apparently deposited them in Swiss Bank accounts — or accounts in Bermuda or the Cayman Islands. But he refuses to take responsibility for the fact that the firm was — as the Washington Post called it — a “pioneer of outsourcing.”
This is a guy who plays by a different set of rules than ordinary mortals. And the last thing he wants to do is allow those ordinary mortals to see first hand how he did what he did by disclosing his income tax returns from the years he was active at Bain.
Some of the companies he acquired at Bain did well. Others went under. But win or lose, Romney always made money. Workers may have lost their livelihoods and pensions. Small businesses that served as suppliers to his companies may have gone under. But Romney always came out ahead.
Mitt Romney is the kind of guy who is always happy to bask in the glow of success, but is never willing to take responsibility for failure.
This entire episode is reminiscing of Romney’s reaction to the revelation that as an 18-year-old student at the Cranbrook Prep School, he was involved in bullying John Lauber, a fellow student who he didn’t believe “fit in.” The Washington Post reported that a fellow student named Mathew Freidman, and three other former students, reported that Romney had marched:
The Post wrote:

“It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” said Thomas Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said. “What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.”

Romney could have accepted responsibility for what he did as a young man — and acknowledged that it must have been a horrific experience for the bullied student. Instead, when confronted with the charges, he said he didn’t “remember” the episode that fellow students referred to as a “vicious attack.” Then he gave a non-apology-apology. He told a radio talk show host that, “Back in high school, I did some dumb things and if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize for that…” In the military there is a tradition that when there is a problem — when a soldier is called on the carpet — the correct response is “no excuse sir.” Not Mitt Romney. Romney is the past master at ducking responsibility and making excuses.
Romney may believe that the President of Bain Capital didn’t have responsibility for the company’s actions — but someone should explain to him that the President of United States is absolutely responsible for the work of every Executive Department, whether or not he is directly involved in every decision. The President of the United States is responsible for the success or failure of every military mission. He is responsible for preventing recession — for saving the auto industry even when it is unpopular — for making the tough decisions and living with their consequences. When you’re President of the United States, you can’t say, “Oh I had no responsibility because I left the day-to-day decisions of the Defense Department to others.” Do we really want a President that refuses to take responsibility for the actions of a company for which he was CEO, President, Chairman and sole stockholder?
But it doesn’t stop with personal responsibility. Romney Economics refuses to take responsibility for the future of the next generation. In fact the whole body of radical right wing economic philosophy that Romney has embraced is an absolute abrogation of the concept that we have a responsibility to each other. The core element of that philosophy is the notion that millionaires and billionaires have only one moral obligation — to look out for themselves. They rationalize this unbridled selfishness with elaborate theories about how their bounty will ultimately trickle down to everyone else — how they have to make more money because they are — after all — the “job creators.” In fact, of course, the real job creators are ordinary middle class consumers, whose demand causes businesses of all sorts to hire people to produce products and services. Companies don’t create jobs because they have more money in their bank accounts or out of the goodness of their hearts. They create jobs because someone has the money in their pockets to buy the things that they sell.
But “trickle down” economics is really nothing more than an elaborate justification for millionaire selfishness — for the refusal of the wealthiest Americans to take responsibility for the welfare of the entire community and for the next generation. The advocates of Romney Economics claim to be hugely concerned that we do not leave our children a massive federal debt. But their concern does not carry far enough to allow them to agree to a meager increase in their own tax rates to levels that persisted during the 1990’s when our economy added 23 million new jobs and created quite a number of new millionaires. They’re responsibility to the next generation does not go far enough to prevent them from despoiling the planet in order to pad their Swiss Bank accounts. It does not prevent them from denying the scientific fact of global climate change in order to prevent oil company profits from declining.
In fact, the irresponsibility of the one percent crowd is little different than that of a group of thoughtless teenagers that throw beer bottles onto the highway out of the windows of their cars, not caring that someone else will inevitably have to clean up their mess. Like the irresponsible teenagers, it’s all about them. And many of them are so out of touch that they don’t have a clue about their own selfishness.
Ask some of the folks who attended the Romney fundraisers in the Hampton’s last weekend:

A woman in a blue chiffon dress poked her head out of a black Range Rover here on Sunday afternoon and yelled to an aide to Mitt Romney, “Is there a V.I.P. entrance. We are V.I.P.” [New York Times, 7/8/12] “We’ve got the message,” [A New York City donor from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits] added. “But my college kid, the babysitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.”[LA Times, 7/8/12] “A few cars back, Ted Conklin, the owner of the American Hotel in Sag Habor, N.Y., long a favorite of the well-off and well-known in the Hamptons, could barely contain his displeasure with Mr. Obama. “He is a socialist. His idea is find a problem that doesn’t exist and get government to intervene,” Mr. Conklin said from inside a gold-colored Mercedes as his wife, Carol Simmons, nodded in agreement. Ms. Simmons paused to highlight what she said was her husband’s generous spirit: “Tell them who’s on your yacht this weekend! Tell him!” Over Mr. Conklin’s objections, Ms. Simmons disclosed that a major executive from Miramax, the movie company, was on the 75-foot yacht, because, she said, there were no rooms left at the hotel.” [New York Times, 7/8/12]

Let’s be honest, Mitt Romney — and many of his supporters — were born on third base and think they hit a triple.
The last thing that we need in a president is a man who refuses to take personal responsibility for his own actions and that of his company. The last thing we need is a president whose economic philosophy is an elaborate justification for the unwillingness of many of our wealthiest citizens to take any responsibility whatsoever for the welfare of our entire society.

Michael McLaughlin has a HuffPo update on the price of felon disenfranchisement laws across the U.S. Would you believe 5.85 million voters disenfranchised —600K more than in 2004? More than 4 million of them are no longer in prison. “A majority of felons and ex-cons blocked from voting reside in a core of six Southern states — Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee and Virginia — where more than 3 million people are banned from the rolls….7 percent of blacks are disenfranchised compared to 1.8 percent of the rest of the country…In Virginia, 20 percent of blacks can’t vote. In Florida, that number is 23 percent…”
If that wasn’t disturbing enough, see Steven Rosenfeld’s Alternet post, “Not Again! How Our Voting System Is Ripe For Theft and Meltdown in 2012.”
I side with those who believe that Dems need to exercise a little more party discipline, not so much with occasional renegade/mavericks, but with chronic DINOs and the worst offenders, like the five Dems who voted to repeal Obamacare and who also joined 17 other Dems in voting to hold Attorney-General Holder in contempt of Congress. Perhaps a point system that adversely affects their committee assignments.
Speaking of DINOs, sad that the once-promising and now retiring Sen. James Webb joins Joe Lieberman in opposing the President’s tax plan and taking a stand in favor of the 2 percent who earn more than $250K.
At his FiveThirtyEight blog, Nate Silver deploys a regression analysis to determine “Why Obama May Be Stronger Than His Approval Ratings,” but also notes that “the small set of voters who take a favorable view of Mr. Obama but do not approve of his job performance are very much worth fighting over for the campaigns.”
I suppose bipartisan congratulations are in order for Republican Senator Susan Collins on casting 5,000 consecutive votes, although a great many of them in recent years were in groveling service to the fattest of cats at the expense of working people. Collins’ achievement reminds me of the scene in “About Schmidt,” in which the proud mom played by Kathy Bates shows Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) her grown son’s framed certificate for good attendance in an electronics course.
In The Economist, “What’s Eating Appalachia?” probes the underlying reasons for Democrats’ failure to get traction in the region.
I like Timothy Egan’s ‘tribal analysis’ of constituencies favoring Obama and Romney in the NYT ‘Opinionator.’ I think he also hit on a particularly useful insight for ad-makers: “The two images — rich guy on a Jet Ski, skinny kid with Grandma at the Howard Johnson’s pool — tell you why Obama continues to hold a narrow lead in most of the swing states, despite the terrible economy. People don’t mind rich politicians; 75 percent of voters in a Gallup poll this week said Romney’s wealth would not be a factor…But a significant number are bothered by people who fetishize their wealth or use tricks (like offshore tax havens) to avoid the burdens of normal citizens. In that Gallup poll, one in five independents, a crucial block, said Romney’s wealth made them less likely to vote for him…The pictures of Romney and his fellow suits at Bain Capital ravenously stuffing bills in their mouths and pockets is repulsive for the same reason that almost two-thirds of Americans have an unfavorable view of the Romney surrogate Donald Trump…This is the tribe that Obama has to connect with if he expects to win a second term. They fill their beer coolers with motel ice, because it saves a couple of bucks, and are looking for a president who has their back.”
Class warfare seems to be raging all across the Times op-ed page, where, Krugman takes on the 0.01 percent and their tax-avoidance heritage and even David Brooks gives the aristocracy a proper thrashing in his column, “Why Our Elites Stink.”