We Dems have had our fun blasting away at Karl Rove’s ineffectual Super-Pac ad strategy. But, here and there one sees a dicey generalization extrapolated along the lines of, “See, ads don’t matter. It’s all about ground game.”
On one level, it seems true enough for this election. There is no doubt that the Obama’s campaign’s cutting edge, soup-to-nuts GOTV operation was an instrumental, perhaps the pivotal factor in securing the margin of victory. But it would be folly to ignore the importance of ads deployed by the Obama campaign early on in defining Romney, as an out-of-touch, flip-flopping, tax-dodging errand-boy for the super rich. The impact of those early ads in the Obama campaign has been noted in articles and on political talk shows, but rarely well as Michael Hirsch puts it in his National Journal article “Mitt Romney Had Every Chance to Win–But He Blew It“:

For all of the fretting about how $5 billion in campaign spending left the nation with something close to the status quo ante–a Democratic president and Senate, a GOP House–perhaps the most successful chunk of advertising money ever spent in modern American political history was the initial $50 million or so the Obama team devoted last spring to defining Romney as an exploitative, job-exporting Wall Street plutocrat.
In a dynamic that played out much like 2004, when Democratic challenger John Kerry failed to respond to the Republicans’ “Swift Boat” attacks, Romney never responded effectively to the fat-cat charges. And he never overcame that image, as a blanket of Obama ads kept up the attack through Nov. 6 in the battleground states. “I think they were very smart in defining him early. The early ads paid off,” says GOP strategist Rick Tyler, who helped Newt Gingrich defeat Romney in the South Carolina primary by portraying him similarly. “I don’t think he ever really recovered.”

In addition to the early ad campaign another Obama ad called “Stage” has been cited as a powerful attitude changer, most recently on MSNBC’s ‘Hardball’ program:

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Jane Mayer has an article about the ad in the current issue of the New Yorker (subscriber only link). But she had this to say about the low-budget ad on Chris Matthew’s Hardball show:

…They did some internal studies that showed that the trustworthiness of Romney was 11 points behind that of Obama in places where the ad was shown. In places where it didn’t show, he was just 5 points behind…It made people who watched it think he was profiting from laying people off and breaking promises to fund peoples’ pensions and health care plans…It was a killer ad.

Not surprisingly, one of the makers of the low-budget ad was an ardent fan of the late Frank Capra, who was a wizard at depicting stories of working people overcoming corporate greed. It is a powerful ad, and it may be that forcing the workers to build the stage for announcing their firings was especially galling in its unbridled, sadistic, in-your-face arrogance. Perhaps the take-away is that early ads that define the adversary’s character defects effectively do matter, and really great ads work anytime. The rest…maybe not so much.
It would be Capra-esque, karmic justice if Mike Earnest (yes, really), the worker who lost his job to the Romnoids in the ad, not only put an end to Romney’s political ambitions, but also saved America from a hideous right turn with his heartfelt account.

In every presidential election, many different causes are cited as tipping the scale in one direction or the other. There is certainly no shortage of reasons for President Obama’s re-election being bandied about.
One of the more interesting notions that has popped up in election post-mortems is that better-than-usual coverage of GOP-driven voter suppression was instrumental in energizing African and Latino Americans, and to some extent, even white moderates, as well as progressives. There are some interesting statistics to support the argument, although available data is not conclusive. For example, in “How the GOP’s War on Voting Backfired ,” The Nation’s Ari Berman explains,

Take a look at Ohio, where Ohio Republicans limited early voting hours as a way to decrease the African-American vote, which made up a majority of early voters in cities like Cleveland and Dayton. Early voting did fall relative to 2008 as a result of Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s cutbacks in early voting days and hours, but the overall share of the black electorate increased from 11 percent in 2008 to 15 percent in 2012. More than anything else, that explains why Barack Obama once again carried the state…According to CBS News: “More African-Americans voted in Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida than in 2008.”
The same thing happened with the Latino vote, which increased as a share of the electorate (from 9 percent in 2008 to 10 percent in 2012) and broke even stronger for Obama than in 2008 (from 67-31 in 2008 to 71-27 in 2012, according to CNN exit polling). The share of the Latino vote increased in swing states like Nevada (up 4 percent), Florida (up 3 percent) and Colorado (up 1 percent). Increased turnout and increased support for Obama among Latinos exceeded the margin of victory for the president in these three swing states.
We’re still waiting on the data to confirm this theory, but a backlash against voter suppression laws could help explain why minority voter turnout increased in 2012. “That’s an extremely reasonable theory to be operating from,” says Matt Barreto, co-founder of Latino Decisions, a Latino-focused polling and research firm. “There were huge organizing efforts in the black, Hispanic and Asian community, more than there would’ve been, as a direct result of the voter suppression efforts.” Groups like the NAACP, National Council of La Raza, National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, and the Asian-American Legal Defense Fund worked overtime to make sure their constituencies knew their voting rights.
…Racial minorities made up 28 percent of the electorate in 2012, up from 26 percent in 2008, and voted 80 percent for Obama. “Romney matched the best performance among white voters ever for a Republican challenger–and yet he lost decisively in the Electoral College,” wrote Ron Brownstein of National Journal. Minorities also accounted for 45 percent of Obama’s total vote. That means that in the not-so-distant-future, a Democrat will be able to win the presidency without needing a majority of white votes in his or her own coalition. In a country with growing diversity, if one party is committed to expanding the right to vote and the other party is committed to restricting the right to vote, it’s not hard to figure out which one will ultimately be more successful.

Of course the reason for the increase in the share of the electorate held by people of color could be that lots of white voters did not cast ballots on election day because they liked neither Romney or Obama. We will need the final white turnout as a percentage of the eligible white voter figures, and then compare them to ’08 to make a credible guestimate.
Joy-Anne Reid adds at The Griot:

Florida’s reduced early voting period actually galvanized black churches, who took full advantage of the one remaining Sunday to conduct a two-day “souls to the polls” marathon. And even as Election Day turned into a late Election Night, and with the race in Ohio, and thus for the 270 votes needed to win the presidency, called by 11 p.m., black voters remained in line in Miami-Dade and Broward, two heavily Democratic counties in Florida, where black voters broke turnout records even compared to 2008…
“Republicans thought that they could suppress the vote, but these efforts actually motivated people to get registered and cast a ballot,” Ohio State Sen. Nina Turner said. “It’s no surprise that the communities targeted by these policies came out to the polls in a big way–they saw this not just as an affront to their rights, but as a call to action.”
“From the tours we did in 22 states, it became clear to us that many blacks that were apathetic and indifferent became outraged and energized when they realized that [Republicans] were changing the rules in the middle of the game, in terms of voter ID laws, ending ‘souls to the polls,'” said Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network, who also hosts MSNBC’s Politics Nation. “So what was just another election, even though it dealt with the re-election of the first black president, took on a new dimension when they realized that they were implementing the disenfranchisement of black voters.”

Read more…

Nate Silver explains a much discussed topic, “Which Polls Fared Best (and Worst) in the 2012 Presidential Race”
At the Tampa Bay Times, Mary Ellen Klas addresses a question on the minds of many in FL and elsewhere, “Could Democrats tap Charlie Crist to unseat Gov. Rick Scott in 2014?” It’s not only Scott’s status as poster-boy for voter suppression and blame for long lines at Florida polls. It’s also “The decision to cancel the high speed rail: “$2.4 billion, tens of thousands of jobs in a struggling economy;” The governor’s failure to accept federal stimulus money: “we are a donor state; it was morally right to take that money;” The pending standoff over health care reform: “defies common sense.”
To get a sense of the importance of gerrymandering in the Republicans’ maintaining their House of Reps majority, note that Democratic House candidates got more popular votes than their Republican opponents, according to Aaron Blake at The Fix.
Also at The Fix, Chris Cillizza and Jon Cohen have some interesting stats about Obama and white voters: Obama’s 39 percent showing among white voters matched the percentage that Bill Clinton received in 1992 — albeit it in a competitive three-way race — and exceeded the percentage of the white vote earned by Walter Mondale in 1984, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George McGovern in 1972….In fact, the white vote as a percentage of the overall electorate has declined in every election since 1992.
Alan Fram has a good update at HuffPo on prospects for filibuster reform.
Despite the Republicans’ thinly-veiled meme that President Obama’s campaign dissed whites, WaPo columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. makes the point that Obama’s victory coalition was a model of diversity: “Yes, he won African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans overwhelmingly. But the exit poll also shows that 32 percent of Obama’s voters were white women and 24 percent of them were white men, while 23 percent were African-American men and women, and 14 percent were Latinos. This is a genuinely diverse alliance. ”
Much buzz about the epic failure of Romney’s ‘Project Orca’ voter monitoring and GOTV app.
Krugman makes a solid case for ignoring, no, booting the ‘deficit scolds.’ It’s like this: “…deficits are actually a good thing when the economy is deeply depressed, so deficit reduction should wait until the economy is stronger. As John Maynard Keynes said three-quarters of a century ago, “The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity…the deficit scolds, while posing as the nation’s noble fiscal defenders, have in practice shown themselves both hypocritical and incoherent. They don’t deserve to have a central role in policy discussion; they really don’t even deserve a seat at the table. And they certainly don’t deserve to have one of their own appointed as Treasury secretary. ”
As much as we enjoy watching Karl Rove hem, haw and squirm about the hundreds of millions of dollars squandered on Romney and failed senatorial candidates, Chris Kromm’s “Did Big Money really lose this election? Hardly” at Facing South makes the sobering point that big money was quite effective further down-ballot.
For a final schadenfreude wallow before you get to work building the future, check out Lauren Kelley’s Alternet post, “5 Very Bad Things That Happened to Karl Rove in Just 2 Days.”

We know you’re sick of politics and you would like to give it a rest for a while. But Michael Tomasky’s post, “The Obama Coalition in the Off Years” at The Daily Beast has one of the best ideas yet for the mid-term elections, and you should check it out before it fades off the political radar screen. Noting that 2012 voter turnout was near 60 percent, Tomasky explains:

Some rich liberals need to fund a public-education group that will work full-time to make sure the liberal blocs and constituencies come out and vote in off-year elections…And off-year turnout is down around 40 percent. The 20 percent who leave the system are almost entirely Democrats. This has been true all my life. It’s basically because old people always vote, and I guess old white people vote more than other old people, and old white people tend to be Republican. So even when white American isn’t enraged as it was in 2010, midterms often benefit Republicans.

Conceding the exceptions of ’98 and ’06, Tomasky continues,

As long as this is true, the country’s progressive coalition will spend forever taking one step forward in presidential years, and one step back in off years. But imagine if the Obama coalition had voted, even in decent numbers, in 2010. The Democrats might still well have the House.
If liberal blocs can be conditioned in a generation’s time to vote in every federal election, well, combine that with what we know to be the coming demographic changes, and the electoral pressure on Republicans would be constant and enormous. The Republican white voting pool has limits, so the GOP would have to compete even harder for brown and black votes, which would pull our politics even more to the left.
A long-term project along these lines would be $20 million (or whatever) very well spent for some rich liberal who cares about changing the country.

Tomasky’s idea has added appeal, considering that in 2014 an unusually high number of Democratic senators will be up for re-election in red and swing states (6 for each). As for the House, Cameron Joseph notes at The Hill:

On the House side, while Democrats will have some opportunities at districts they missed out on in California and elsewhere, heavily gerrymandered GOP maps in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin and North Carolina will continue to limit their opportunities.
Democrats tend to live in more urban areas, concentrating their votes into fewer congressional districts, and legally required “majority-minority” districts further pack Democrats into a few districts and make nearby districts more safely Republican.
According to a recent study by the Center for Voting and Democracy, Democrats start off with 166 safe districts while Republicans start off with 195. There are only 74 true swing districts where the presidential candidates won between 46 and 54 percent of the popular vote, down from 89 before redistricting.
That means the GOP needs to win less than one-third of competitive House seats to stay in control — something that shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish, barring a huge Democratic wave. In a politically neutral year Democrats are likely to have around 203 seats, a number that’s only slightly higher than the number they’ll have once the remaining 2012 races are called.

In addition, it’s just possible that some of the creative GOTV techniques Dems deployed so successfully this year could be transferable to the 2014 mid-terms. In any case, meeting the challenge of making the next mid-term electorate resemble this year’s general election demographics could help insure that progressive change replaces continued gridlock and stagnation.

Lots of buzz about Nate Silver accurately predicting the electoral vote allocation of all nine battleground states, as well as the other 41 states. At the moment he also is on target for the popular vote percentage spread, which may change a little when all of the votes are finally tallied.
Mark Blumenthal has a compelling wrap up explaining how the serious pollsters and poll analysts way outperformed the poll skeptics, including the confident but clueless Peggy Noonan, who wrote on Monday, “While everyone is looking at the polls and the storm, Romney’s slipping into the presidency. …I suspect both Romney and Obama have a sense of what’s coming, and it’s part of why Romney looks so peaceful and Obama so roiled.”
Noam N. Levey has an encouraging L.A. Times post explaining that “Obama’s win means his healthcare law will insure all Americans.” Levy says “Starting in 2014, millions of Americans should be able to get health insurance for the first time. Millions more who don’t get coverage through work should be able to buy a health plan that meets new basic standards. Critical GOP state leaders “must decide in days whether to implement it or have the federal government do it for them.”
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, on Tuesday Dems gained upcoming control of five state legislatures (CO, MN, NY, OR and ME), while the GOP gained control of three (AK, WI and AR), with NH not yet decided. Republicans will have control (both/all houses) of 23 state legislatures, while Dems will control both houses in 14 states, with 12 split. Reuters reports: “Heading into the election, Republicans filled almost 55 percent of all partisan legislative seats and controlled 59 legislative chambers, while Democrats controlled 36 chambers and three were tied.” Most of the governorships, lieutenant governorships, secretaries of state and half of the nation’s attorneys general are still held by Republicans.
It will be interesting to see what California Democrats can do with a supermajority (two-thirds) in the state senate, while nearing the two-thirds threshold in the state assembly. CA may once again become a model for progressive government, however tempered by formidable economic and immigration problems. As AP’s Don Thompson writes, “If Democrats win two-thirds majorities in both chambers, it would be the first time since 1933 that one party held simultaneous supermajorities.”
An AP/Edison Research exit poll in VA shows half of state voters favoring tax hikes on those earning $250K+ and two-thirds “favored keeping abortion legal in most or all cases.”
At PBS NewsHour, Judy Woodruff has a revealing interview about the presidential campaign strategy and tactics with WaPo’s Phillip Rucker, WSJ’s Carol Lee and Slate.com’s Sasha Issenberg, author of the much-buzzed “The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns.”
At the National Journal, Beth Reinhard’s post-mortem credits President Obama with doing an excellent job of making the election more about Romney’s character than Obama’s track record. “President Obama won his first term by being the right guy at the right time. He won his second term making Mitt Romney the wrong guy…Obama turned what could have been a stinging referendum on his economic stewardship into a pass-fail test on Romney’s character.” It was a potent meme, but Romney (and most of the pundits also underestimated the nation’s demographic transition since ’08.
Kyle Scott opines at the Houston Chronicle that “Obama won by saying yes to more Americans.” Says Scott: “President Barack Obama’s victory was secured by a politics of yes. Telling voters yes is essential to victory since most voters do not like to be told no. The key to political victory is figuring out how to tell the most people yes and the fewest people no. The president secured a second term by successfully employing this strategy.” It’s an appealing notion, but it doesn’t help to explain the collective outcome of the House races — unless Dems just didn’t have enough strong “yes” candidates.
The “Ya Think?” award for headline writing should probably go to the Washington Post for “Long voting lines suggest a need for reform.” It’s a good editorial, though.

Nate Silver forecasts that President Obama is on track to win 307 electoral votes in light of the latest polling data, cites 13 latest major polls, none of which show Romney ahead in the nation-wide popular vote. Only one shows a 1 point gain for Romney (Battleground Politico) to a tie in the popular vote nationwide (two others show a tie, Rasmussen and CNN).
At HuffPo Pollster Mark Blumenthal writes: “In all, HuffPost Pollster has entered over 120 new statewide polls into our database over the past week, most in the closely contested battlegrounds. This new data has done little to alter the overall polling snapshot, which continues to favor Obama in contested states like Wisconsin, Nevada, Iowa and Ohio by margins of 2 to 4 percentage points. The electoral votes from these four states, combined with those from other states where Obama leads Romney by wider margins, would give the President 277 electoral votes, just over the 270 need to win.”
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes has an illuminating interview with Slate.com’s Sasha Issenberg on the Obama campaign’s edge in the front porch campaign and high tech GOTV.
Silver explains “Romney’s Reason to Play for Pennsylvania.” Silver says “Given the number of unappealing options for Mr. Romney, however, it may be worth a try. Pennsylvania still ranks seventh on the FiveThirtyEight list of tipping-point states — and that is without considering the mechanics of early voting. Pennsylvania has little early voting, meaning that a larger share of the vote there is still in play.” But Democratic strategist Bob Shrum says Pennsylvania is always fool`s gold for the Republicans.”
National Journal’s Hotline on Call’s staff update sees it this way: “Depending who you ask, Romney’s decision to visit to Pennsylvania within 48 hours of Election Day speaks to one of two beliefs: That the state is seriously in play and must be contested, or that Ohio has slipped away and a last-minute map expansion is necessary to keep Romney’s electoral hopes alive. It may be a little of both…But the location of Romney’s rally is notable: In targeting the vote-rich suburbs of Philadelphia in eastern Pennsylvania — rather than the blue collar areas around Pittsburgh on the state’s west side…”
At Alternet, Lynn Stuart Parramore’s “Don’t Believe the Hype: The Gender Gap Still Favors Obama, Big-time” is a good rebuttal to Romney campaign spin about their momentum with women voters. Parramore cites recent polls showing Obama with a 17 percent edge with Virginia women and a 12 percent gender gap in Ohio.
Sahil Kapur reports at Talking Points Memo on the emerging Republican whine, “It’s Sandy’s fault.”
Politicians should note that the highest-turnout constituency, seniors, has definitely gone digital. According to a survey by the Pew Internet Project, in 2012 — for the first time — more than half of all those age 65 or older are online, and over a third are active in social networking. More than two-thirds of them now have cell phones, including 13 percent with smartphones.
Jamelle Bouie explains at The American Prospect why you shouldn’t worry so much about “the undecideds.”
In her Huffpo post “Don’t Be Fooled by a Moderate Mitt ,” Jane White has the relevant statistics which show which party is the sworn enemy of bipartisanship: “And when it comes to gridlock on Capitol Hill, the finger of blame points squarely at the GOP. While one of Romney’s ads blames Obama for not reaching out to work with congressional Republicans, it’s the Republicans Congress that has racked up the highest number of filibusters in American history. During Obama’s first term there were 246 cloture motions filed to end Republican filibusters compared to 133 during Dubya’s first term. Not even a handful of “sensible” Republicans had the guts to break ranks and vote with the Democrats.”
How much longer will Florida voters put up with Governor Scott’s disgusting restrictions on early voting? Here’s an update on the outrage in Florida, and the lawsuit to stop it.
At the Princeton Election Consortium, Sam Wang has a nifty “Election Night Scenario tracking Tool.”
Washington Post Outlook is running a Crystal Ball contest predicting the electoral vote outcome, with an eclectic group of 13 pundits. Some of the more interesting predictions: Chris Cillizza – Obama 277 EVs; Mad Money’s Jim Kramer – Obama 440 EVs; National Journal’s Hotline Editor Reid Wilson – Obama 294 EVs. A meteorologist, poker player and a Mclean, VA high school also weigh in. 11 of 13 pick Obama to win the electoral college vote.

UAW President Bob King weighs in with a USA Today op-ed, “Romney’s auto mess shows he is not ready.” Says King: “This is the real Romney, a man who objected to the rescue of the domestic auto industry, then made astronomical profits after his business partners threatened the survival of GM. A man who lies about Chrysler moving jobs to China, when his history at Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded, shows that he has invested in Chinese factories where workers are grossly exploited. Romney won’t even act to stop the Sensata factory in Illinois, in which he is an investor, from closing the doors and moving to China the day before the election…That is the picture of a me-first hedge-fund investor, not someone who has the judgment or character to be President of the United States.”
What the final skeds of the presidential candidates say about their closing strategies.
Jennifer Steinhauer of NYT’s ‘The Caucus’ flags “10 House Races to Watch,” noting “While there are more than 10 competitive races, some of them even closer than the ones we have listed list here, these House races are 10 worth watching.” They are: CA 15 and 36; CO 6; FL 18; IL 17; IA 3; GA 12; MA 6; NY 27; and UT 4.
At the Crystal Ball, Larry J. Sabato and Kyle Kondik are more confident that Dems will hold the senate than the white house.
But Robert Schlesinger reports at U.S. News that Nate Silver estimates at this point about 294+ electoral votes for Obama, while other forecasters also see an E.V. edge for Obama: “The Princeton Election Consortium, run by Professor Sam Wang, projects Obama pulling in 303 electoral votes, for example; Votamatic, which is run by Drew Linzer, a professor at Emory and Stanford, predicts 332 electoral votes for Obama; Real Clear Politics’s “No Toss Up States” map gives Obama 281 electoral votes. (Huffington Post’s Pollster.com gives Obama a base of 253 electoral votes and leads in five of toss-up states as compared with 206 electoral votes and a single toss-up state lead for Romney.) And the major online betting markets all give Obama pretty good odds of re-election (Intrade puts it at 63.3 percent chance, and Betfair says 68 percent).”
WaPo columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. explains why Democrats will remain the more pro-compromise party: “To hold their Senate majority, Democrats need to keep winning in smaller and rural states that lean Republican. Republicans almost everywhere — Brown is the exception — now live in fear of losing primaries to tea party candidates such as Mourdock…Thus is compromise on the ballot next week. But only one side seems genuinely interested in reaching it.”
But the latest Associated Press-GfK poll indicates “Almost half of likely voters, 47 percent, think the Republican challenger would be better at ending the logjam, compared with 37 percent for Obama.” Further, “about 1 out of 6 likely voters didn’t take a side on the gridlock issue: 6 percent weren’t sure who would do a better job at getting Washington moving and 10 percent didn’t trust either man to break the impasse among congressional partisans.”
Steve Bousquet of the Tampa Bay Times/Herald Tallahassee Bureau notes the rather sudden disappearance of FL Gov. Rick Scott from Romney campaign events and quotes Republican political scientist Darryl Paulson: “I think it is prudent to stay arm’s length from anyone in the party who might alienate the few undecided voters who are left.”
At The Daily Beast Michael Tomasky has some good tips for President Obama in the closing days of the election, including: “Florida? Let Joe Biden and Bill Clinton take care of south Florida. The alter kockers are more their crowd. Obama needs to hit the I-4 corridor, where the white swing voters and the Puerto Ricans (and plenty enough African Americans) live, with a huge weekend rally, probably in Tampa. He carried Tampa’s Hillsborough County 50-48 last time, and if he can replicate that, he has a shot at Florida, which would crush Romney.”
Andy Kroll reports at Mother Jones on MoveOn’s use of 12 million “voter report cards” in battleground states, grading voters on how often they have voted in the past — and comparing their grade with the average of their neighbors. The technique is credited with helping Democrat Michael Bennet win in the 2010 Senate race in Colorado.

Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog post, “Mitch McConnell and John Boehner’s strategy worked” finds a common denominator in recent endorsements of Romney:

…In endorsement after endorsement, the basic argument is that President Obama hasn’t been able to persuade House or Senate Republicans to work with him. If Obama is reelected, it’s a safe bet that they’ll continue to refuse to work with him. So vote Romney!
That’s not even a slight exaggeration. Take the Des Moines Register, Iowa’s largest and most influential paper. They endorsed Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, and Barack Obama in 2008. But this year, they endorsed Romney.
Why? In the end, they said, it came down to a simple test. “Which candidate could forge the compromises in Congress to achieve these goals? When the question is framed in those terms, Mitt Romney emerges the stronger candidate.”

Klein says that The Register argues that President Obama has abandoned bipartisanship, while crediting Romney with bipartisanship as Governor of Massachusetts — despite the fact that Obama “spent most of 2011 negotiating with John Boehner.” He notes a similar argument in the Orlando Sentinel endorsement of Romney and cites David Brooks’ Romney endorsement being based on a greater likelihood that the Republican would have a better chance of securing bipartisan cooperation.
Klein recalls Republican statements citing the defeat of President Obama as the mother of all GOP priorities but adds,

While it’s true that President Romney could expect more cooperation from congressional Republicans, in the long term, a vote against Obama on these grounds is a vote for more of this kind of gridlock. Politicians do what wins them elections. If this strategy wins Republicans the election, they’ll employ it next time they face a Democratic president, too, and congressional Democrats will use it against the next Republicans. Rewarding the minority for doing everything in their power to make the majority fail sets up disastrous incentives for the political system.

Klein is right that the strategy worked in securing some ill-considered endorsements for Romney. Yet, a vote for Romney is a vote to institutionalize political extortion as the new driving wheel of American politics. “We care less about enacting any policies that benefit the American people than defeating a Democratic president” is a pretty infantile approach to political deliberation.
Voters who want a return to some semblance of bipartisan cooperation would be far wiser not to reward the perpetrators of political extortion, the party of Gridlock, Obstruction and Paralysis. Giving them a sound thrashing up and down ballot would more likely accomplish that goal.

In his Washington Post article, “Hurricane Sandy highlights how Obama and Romney respond to disasters,” Ed O’Keefe describes the President’s course of action addressing frankenstorm Sandy:

…Obama has signed at least nine federal emergency disaster declarations in the past 24 hours at the request of state governors, directing FEMA to deploy more resources in anticipation of significant recovery efforts. He canceled campaign stops for Monday and Tuesday to return to the White House to oversee the federal government’s evolving storm response.
…Obama campaigned four years ago on a promise to revamp the federal government’s disaster-response functions and has embraced changes long sought by state governors and professional emergency managers. Since becoming president, he has led the federal response to multiple natural disasters, including tornadoes, flooding and major hurricanes, learning from government stumbles during the presidency of George W. Bush — most notably in the case of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Obama’s posture has been to order federal agencies to aggressively prepare for and respond to major storms and other disasters.

It’s a portrait of a president leaving no task unmet. O’Keefe sees “a moment of sharp contrast between President Obama and Mitt Romney and how their different ideas of governing apply to the federal response to large-scale disasters.” O’Keefe adds that “Obama has been aggressive about bolstering the federal government’s capability to respond to disasters, while his Republican challenger believes that states should be the primary responders in such situations and has suggested that disaster response could be privatized.” Further,

As governor of Massachusetts, Romney requested federal disaster assistance for storm cleanup, and he has toured storm-ravaged communities as a presidential candidate, but he has agreed with some who suggest that the Federal Emergency Management Agency could be dissolved as part of budget cuts.
When moderator John King suggested during a June 2011 CNN debate that federal disaster response could be curtailed to save federal dollars, Romney said: “Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.”

At the time, Romney didn’t have much to say about, ahem, how states should work together when a natural disaster overlaps state borders, as they most always do. But in the Romney campaign’s partial walkback statement, we get this:

“Governor Romney believes that states should be in charge of emergency management in responding to storms and other natural disasters in their jurisdictions,” said campaign spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg. “As the first responders, states are in the best position to aid affected individuals and communities and to direct resources and assistance to where they are needed most. This includes help from the federal government and FEMA.”

Which is pretty much how the system works, as O’Keefe points out. He adds that the Romney campaign is also collecting supplies for the storm’s victims, which FEMA says is not such a good idea in the earliest part of the relief effort, because cash and blood donations are more urgently needed and donated supplies can cause logistical bottlenecks too early on.
After President Bush botched the Hurricane Katrina relief effort the agency has undergone major restructuring and reorganization under the leadership of President Obama and FEMA administrator Carl Fugate, as O’Keefe explains:

Fugate and Obama have earned praise for restoring the agency’s reputation in the years since Katrina. Despite working for then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as head of the state’s emergency agency, Fugate said he rebuffed overtures from George W. Bush to lead FEMA after Katrina, saying that the GOP administration did not want to rebuild the agency in the fashion since embraced by Obama.

O’Keefe adds that “Fugate has batted away questions before about possible privatization of his agency: “I’m too busy working on other stuff. Ask that to somebody who would give you the time and day to answer that,” he said in a 2011 interview. O’Keefe notes that Obama’s FEMA reforms have “earned plaudits from then-Gov. Haley Barbour (R) of Mississippi and Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) of Louisiana — usually tough Obama critics — and professional emergency managers who had sought the changes for years.” O’Keefe concludes with a quote recalling Bush’s ‘Heckuvajob Brownie” mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina relief:

Obama’s changes at FEMA “have been night and day” compared with those under previous administrations, according to one veteran emergency manager who was not authorized to speak publicly for fear of jeopardizing federal disaster grant requests. “I don’t know who will be the next president, but they can’t put a political hack in the job of leading FEMA ever again.”

Some may protest that it’s unseemly to call attention to the differing approaches of the candidates in a time of national emergency, when Americans should be pulling together. But lives are at stake and it’s important that voters pay attention to the management philosophies and track records of the two candidates in addressing major disasters. This is a matter of national security as much as any foreign policy issue.
What voters are left with is an image of Romney posturing his ideologically-extravagant privatization schema and federal government-bashing, and a more grounded and experienced President Obama taking care of business. My hunch is that the clear distinction will not be lost on observant swing voters.

As the northeast braces for Frankenstorm Sandy, it’s worth flagging this Think Progress post, “Mitt Romney: Federal Disaster Relief For Tornado And Flood Victims Is ‘Immoral,’ ‘Makes No Sense At All‘ by Brad Johnson.
Might be a little surprise a-brewing in the Tar-Heel state, reports Jason Easely at PoliticusUSA.
Maddow busts MTP host’s defense of the GOP’s rape dodge.
CNN’s Tom Cohen reports on a couple of potential ‘spoilers’ who are making the Romney campaign a little nervous.
The Economist has an insightful update on the presidential campaign ‘air war,’ noting, “From late April, when Mr Romney clinched the Republican nomination, until October 21st, Mr Obama and his allies spent $275m on advertising to the Romney camp’s $319m, according to the Wesleyan Project…What is more, those figures understate Mr Obama’s presence on the airwaves, since his money went further. He and his allies aired 521,675 ads, according to the project’s tally, to 469,539 for Mr Romney. That is partly because the Obama campaign booked its ads earlier, locking in cheaper rates. What is more, campaigns themselves, as opposed to parties or other outsiders advertising on a candidate’s behalf, are entitled to cheaper rates by law. So the fact that roughly half of the spending in favour of Mr Romney comes from independent outfits such as American Crossroads and Restore Our Future is something of a handicap.”
Liz Kennedy reports at Demos on the overwhelming bipartisan majority opposed to corporate political spending and favoring reforms.
Please, Republicans, unleash Sununu some more — he provides a marvelous poster-boy for Republican values. Heck, maybe also show some re-runs of the Trump endorsement, inter-weaved with footage of his latest birther drivel. Very classy.
Why serious (non-clown) business leaders prefer President Obama.
In similar vein, 100 top CEO’s have called for (gasp!) tax hikes, reports Rick Newman at US News.
The Daily Beast Salutes “America’s Greenest Politicians” — and the 24 elected officials chosen include zero Republicans.