If you’re a Democratic candidate or campaign worker, please read Bill Cotterell’s “Early voting: It’s not just rides to the polls any more” at The Florida Current for useful tips and insights about GOTV under today’s electoral parameters.
Joshua Holland has an interesting Alternet interview with Atlantic columnist and former Carter speechwriter James Fallows on the topic of false equivalency enabling in the MSM, the so-called ‘fact-checkers” and the now-routine abuse of the filibuster. Fallows observes “You have stories in responsible papers saying the measure lost 51-47, when the 51 were for it. You see offhand references that it takes 60 votes to pass the bill. So it’s the biggest recent amendment to the Constitution that’s happened just de-facto. We act as if it requires a super-majority to do anything…When this is described in the newspaper as being a “dysfunctional Senate,” it leads to the sense that there’s a coming-from-nowhere failure of government — as opposed to an actual strategy by one side to hamstring the other, and slow down the process of government.”
At The Nation Eric Alterman cuts through the fog in his post, “Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans AND the Media Are the Problem.” and his punch line resonates: “If you want the truth about today’s Republican Party, I suggest you watch HBO’s The Newsroom. You won’t find it on the news.”
Nate Cohn’s TNR blog “Why Romney’s Numbers Aren’t Dropping” provides some reassurance that Romney’s high “floor” in the 45 percent ballpark in most recent opinion polls is not worth worrying about — unless he starts showing numbers a few points higher on a consistent basis.
In his New York Times column, Charles M.Blow makes a cogent argument that “This year, we may have to take the polls with an even larger grain of salt than usual,” as a result of widespread voter suppression of “poll respondents who think that they will able to vote for President Obama in November, but may not be allowed to do so.”
Howell Raines wonders at CNN.com “When did the GOP become the whiners?” It’s been that way for a while, but it does seem to have gotten worse in the last year or two. Says Raines: “For the rest of this election season, if Democrats are smart, they’ll keep reaching into the Lee Atwater bad-boy trick bag and let the season’s reigning choir of complaint blend its many voices: the charismatic duo of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, the tea party, the anchors and panelists of Fox News and now the hapless Rich Gorka.”
Please Romney, do this. Visit lots of Staples stores. That’ll shore up your ‘regular guy’ cred and lock up the middle class vote, big time.
It’s just a snapshot, but it’s a good one. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight forecasting model gives Obama a 2.1 percent bump up, thanks to improved personal income growth.
You go, Dubya. Americans are eagerly awaiting your economic advice. As Democratic consultant Paul Begala says of the new ‘Bush Institute’ book being peddled by Dubya, “The book is titled The Four Percent Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs. You gotta hand it to Bush. Either he was born without the moral compass that engenders humility or he has one sick sense of humor. To start with, let the record show that George W. Bush was in fact president of the United States for eight years. And for those eight years economic growth averaged not four percent, but 2.04 percent. For Bush to attach his name to a book claiming to be a recipe for economic growth is what we Texans call chutzpah.”