1561

I don’t know if I’d go that far but I think that the Occupy movement was an indication that the nation’s collective sub-conscience has reached a tipping point. Republicans are really good at controlling the narrative and using populist rhetoric to cloak oligarchical policies but there comes a point where reality trumps propaganda and we have reached that point. (Starting, I think, with the debt ceiling “crisis” last summer.)

I can think of other worm turning moments in recent history. There was one back when Gingrich was selling his whole contract on America and I think Katrina was a big one. Katrina was the moment where the nation’s collective sub-conscious said, “Fuck these guys – They aren’t interested in governing shit, they’re just gaming the system.”

Sadly, the nation’s collective sub-conscious has a short memory.

1562

Romney is this year’s John Kerry. No one is enthusiastic about him. No one will be voting for him (other than the absurdly rich); they’ll be voting against Obama.

Basically, this is Obama’s race to lose. Only a colossal mistake on his part will prevent him from easily walking into a second term.

1563

I’ve been saying from the get go that it’s worse than Kerry. Kerry had no charisma but Romney has anti-charisma.

1564

The problem for ROmney is, his brain is so odd…okay, wait, let’s pause a second.

Presidential campaigns are so long, and so stressful, they really do reveal things about people. Can we all agree, Democrat or Republican, that this campaign has revealed that whatever goes on in Romney’s brain, some of it is just fucking odd? Okay, digression over.

So, yeah, Romney is being told to stay on message. But his brain is so damned odd, he can’t avoid stuff like the airplane window comment. Politically, it’s completely meaningless. But…it’s just so damned odd.

And it loses him a day or two of narrative, just making a weird, laughable offhand comment in the perfectly reasonable course of expressing concern about a close call his wife had.

1565

Poll porn:

Washington Post has Obama +8 in Ohio (52-44) and +4 in Florida (51-47).

That’s not a lot of undecided voters.

In fact, one other thing the pollsters won’t tell you unless you ask: at this stage, “undecided” voters end up being “not voting” voters about 50% of the time.

1566

He doesn’t know how to talk to normal people, that’s all. Go watch the clip of him chatting about his dressage horse with Hannity, he’s at ease and lucid in the clip because it’s something he cares about and he thought he wasn’t on camera. The Lucille Bluth meme is spot on.

1567

Odd fact - Kerry is great in person. Like Bush (II) he has a powerful presence when you take away the cameras and the stagecraft.

He suddenly makes sense when your standing next to him and feeling just a little dwarfed by his presence.

Now Romney, that I can’t explain. Good hair and lots of money?

1568

I’ve tried to explain a similar dynamic with Joe Biden. On camera, he makes verbal blunders aplenty. One-on-one, he’s usually the smartest guy in the room wherever he goes. Some people were just never meant for screen time, looks and experience notwithstanding. It could be nerves, it could be something else.

I don’t doubt that Romney is very sharp, but I doubt his ability to convey it in a manner that provides effective leadership of a media-filled nation.

1569

I’d say Joe is a bit saltier in real life than he can be on television, I get the impression that he’s holding it back and it makes him come off a bit false. Romney strikes me as someone who is visiting the burn ward, though. He knows he has to be there and talk to the monsters, and he’s trying to keep a smile on his face, but he’d rather be somewhere else.

1570

Agreed. He’s high on my list of the government types I’d actually be interested in having a beer with, if you’ll forgive the trope. I get the impression he’d be willing to engage in a real discussion.

1571

Even the old folks are starting to abandon Romney. The Reuters poll has support among 60 and older “crumbling” from a 20pt lead to a 4pt lead in the two weeks following the Democratic convention.

Something tells me Medicare might be a problem for him and his running mate.

Man, I can’t wait for the debates. I am going to pop a big bowl of popcorn.

1572

Oh, and Romney really knows how to work a crowd.

1573

Sadly the first debate is on the same evening as the Supernatural season premiere. I’ll have to make the choice to watch some evil son of a bitch get their ass kicked from here to purgatory for being stupid enough to mess with the forces of good, or watch Supernatural. ;)

1574

Jennifer Granholm has a good article on this on Politico.

Logistically, the bubble life is probably not much different for the uber-wealthy. They hire people to take care of their lives — their laundry and lawns, their cars and bills. They don’t worry about the meals or the rent or how to pay for their health care. They have drivers and schedulers — an army of people at their beck and call. And they have private planes so they don’t have to mess with public airports at all.

What they don’t have, unless they really try, is contact with the messiness of life. They don’t eat unplanned meals at the local ribs joint near the factory, they don’t kneel in a church in the inner city. They don’t know the moral agony of filing for unemployment, or what it’s like to choose between paying for a child’s field trip or reducing the balance on their 21 percent a month credit card.

In one notorious incident in 1994, when he was running for Senate, Mitt Romney visited a Boston homeless shelter for veterans. When the director told him that the shelter’s biggest problem was obtaining milk for the vets, Romney joked, “Well, maybe you can teach the vets to milk cows!” Reporters overheard this weird and insensitive joke, and when the story hit the papers Romney made amends by generously personally donating milk to the shelter. But if he hadn’t seen the problem (and been caught making a gaffe about it), he would not have been aware of the need, nor acted to solve it.

I think that Romney’s lifetime privilege is working seriously against him in three ways:

  1. It clearly puts him in the “bubble” Granholm describes; he has no in-the-bones experience of making hard choices, and he has no idea how ignorant and out-of-touch that makes him look.

  2. He has never had to work this hard or stay this focused in his life. Ann Romney was quoted a couple of days ago telling the media to lay off because “this is hard.” Specifically, it’s much harder than running a consultancy or hobnobbing with bigwigs. Romney has been able to live a life of relatively comfortable bullshitting because he’s always been one of the big dogs in the room; it didn’t much matter whether he was right or not as long as he made money. Now people are actually listening to the shit he says, and the results are not pretty.

  3. I strongly suspect that Romney doesn’t actually care that much whether he wins. He wants to win this one for his resume. He doesn’t have any actual burning drive to make anyone’s life better. He doesn’t see this as his chance to serve the country. That’s where his “I’m not here to care about 47% of the US” comment came from. He’s literally in it for himself. And the only people he cares about are the ones who will vote for him. That’s why he flip-flops all over the place; he literally doesn’t have any solid intellectual or ethical core, because he’s never really needed or wanted one. Romney doesn’t serve, Romney is served.

Fortunately the American people generally don’t like presidential candidates who act like entitled royalty. That, I think, is the single biggest factor sinking Romney.

I also agree that the GOP has succeeded all too well – ever since Reagan, the GOP strategy of pushing the country to the right has actually gone very well for them at a national level, at least in terms of economics if not cultural values. But that pendulum has reached its limit, and the continued rightward push has lost its interest for most of the country. The Tea Party will never stop pushing, but they have already marginalized themselves by doing so, and taken the GOP with them – again, facilitated by Romney’s literally thoughtless self-interest, which gives him no means nor incentive to push back against their excesses. They are, after all, going to vote for him.

1575

The fact that he’s kind of a pathological liar tends to make him come off a bit false too.

1576

I think this is spot on.

That article also explains a lot. The reason Romney comes off as so strange and frankly alien is that he almost literally comes from another world.

1577

Richard Cohen woodsheds the GOP on exactly the kind of stuff we’ve been talking about here:

grafs:

In 1980 Ronald Reagan won the Republican nomination. He beat a future president, George H.W. Bush; two future Senate majority leaders, Howard Baker and Bob Dole; and two lesser-known congressmen. This year Mitt Romney won the GOP nomination. He beat a radio host, a disgraced former House speaker, a defeated Senate candidate, a former appointee of the Obama administration, a tongue-tied Texas governor, a prevaricating religious zealot who happens to serve in the House of Representatives and a cranky libertarian doctor. Where did all the talent go?

Open the window and listen. You will hear the moans and groans of Republican officials and their trained pundits. But where were these people when their field of oddballs was being assembled? Why were they so silent when Hispanics and women were being told to shove it and the long-dead Darwin was being debated?

1578

Supposedly the GOP has a pretty deep bench (Rubio, Christie, Jindal, etc), it’s kind of interesting that none of them threw their hat in. It also makes me wonder if the public perception of said bench isn’t based on a curve; from what I’ve seen of Chris Christie he’s actually not all that great a politician. His angry bully thing gets him some points, but it’s almost literally all he has going.

1579

Good point, would you care to back it up? I’m pretty much the reasonable right wing around here because I’m socially liberal but personally libertarian/gunish, so I’ll entertain any reasonable dissection of the candidates. Based on experience though, I’m guessing you’re doing the drive-by slander thing and you’ll come up with a couple of talking points, then fade into the background. For example, let me give you a hurdle:

  1. Romney passed a universal healthcare bill
  2. That bill covered abortions
  3. Romney passed an extension of a gun control bill
  4. Romney called the ER mandate socialism, and is now touting is as a solution

First, please, tell me how you internalize all that. It will be illuminating.

H.

1580

Matt Taibbi says fuck both of these motherfuckers, rather convincingly actually.

With 300 million possible entrants in the race, how did we end up with two guys who would both refuse to bring a single case against a Wall Street bank during a period of epic corruption? How did we end up with two guys who refuse to repeal the carried-interest tax break? How did we end with two guys who supported a vast program of bailouts with virtually no conditions attached to them? Citigroup has had so many people running policy in the Obama White House, they should open a branch in the Roosevelt Room. It’s not as bad as it would be in a Romney presidency, but it comes close.

If this race had even one guy running in it who didn’t take money from all the usual quarters and actually represented the economic interests of ordinary people, it wouldn’t be close. It shouldn’t be close. If one percent of the country controls forty percent of the country’s wealth – and that trend is moving rapidly in the direction of more inequality with each successive year – what kind of split should we have, given that at least one of the candidates enthusiastically and unapologetically represents the interests of that one percent?

To me the biggest reason the split isn’t bigger is the news media, which wants a close race mainly for selfish commercial reasons – it’s better theater and sells more ads. Most people in the news business have been conditioned to believe that national elections should be close.

This conditioning leads to all sorts of problems and journalistic mischief, like a tendency of pundits to give equal weight to opposing views in situations where one of those views is actually completely moronic and illegitimate, a similar tendency to overlook or downplay glaring flaws in a candidate just because one of the two major parties has blessed him or her with its support (Sarah Palin is a classic example), and the more subtly dangerous tendency to describe races as “hotly contested” or “neck and neck” in nearly all situations regardless of reality, which not only has the effect of legitimizing both candidates but leaves people with the mistaken impression that the candidates are fierce ideological opposites, when in fact they aren’t, or at least aren’t always. This last media habit is the biggest reason that we don’t hear about the areas where candidates like Romney and Obama agree, which come mostly in the hardcore economic issues.