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National Republicans
Gary Pearce posted on November 16, 2012 09:38
The decision about Obamacare highlights the tension that will mark North Carolina’s politics the next four years.
The tension stems from an election that saw the nation go in one direction (largely Democratic) and North Carolina in another (almost all Republican).
When political partisans win an election, they tend to believe that an era of enlightenment has dawned in which their ideas, their ideology and their party will always reign supreme.
That usually lasts until the next election.
It’s happening this time. Nationally, Democrats proclaim that demography is destiny and they are destined to rule as the Grand Old Party of Angry Old White Men declines into irrelevance. In North Carolina, Republicans proclaim that the state is headed in the same direction as South Carolina, Georgia, etc.
As Lee Corso would say: Not so fast.
This election was close nationally. And North Carolina is about the most closely divided state in the nation. It was Romney’s closest win – and Obama’s closest loss – in the country. The divide isn’t going away.
This presents a challenge to Governor-elect McCrory. So it was interesting that his response to Governor Perdue’s insurance-exchange decision was more muted than Senator Berger’s.
Berger runs a 70-30 Senate. McCrory will govern a 50-50 state. Republicans’ money and maps may protect their legislative majority for a while. But McCrory has to face the voters in four years.
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Carter Wrenn posted on November 13, 2012 17:46
The day after the election House Republican Leader John Boehner faced a tough question: Would he compromise with Obama or not? It was a Hobson’s Choice. Either way he was walking into a political minefield.
In the end Speaker Boehner threw what looked like a compromise on the table – in effect, saying to Obama, Okay, here it is: We’ll go along with raising revenues (meaning taxes) but you have to go along with tax reform and spending cuts – then the Speaker explained what he had in mind was like the 1986 tax reform compromise between Reagan and Tip O’Neal (that raised taxes).
In a way that did sound like a wind change – as if Boehner was saying to Obama, We Republicans can’t go along with outright repeal of the Bush tax cuts – which is what you want – but if we can dress tax increases up a bit and call it loophole closing then there’s an agreement to be had providing you offer us a big spending cut in return.
Of course, we can’t be sure that’s what Speaker Boehner had in mind at all. After all, this is politics and things are not always what they seem – it could be the cloud floating down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capital to the White House isn’t a compromise at all – it’s a political two-step, with John Boehner trying to put Obama in a corner so Obama’s the one to say, No deal.
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Carter Wrenn posted on November 13, 2012 11:17
Over on The Atlantic magazine’s website the liberal reporters were having a happy day after the election but not, as you’d expect, by celebrating Obama’s victory – instead, they were having a fine time ribbing conservative pundits from Ann Coulter to Karl Rove because they had said the polls that showed Obama leading Mitt Romney were dead-wrong.
For years, the reporters said, Conservatives have been calling the media biased but, in fact, this election when it came to reporting the facts wrong the most biased media wasn’t ABC or CBS – it was The Conservative Media.
The way the liberals see it, it’s a peculiar irony: People watching Fox News saw the election through the eyes of stars like Sean Hannity – they saw Hannity’s skewed version of the Presidential campaigns but never saw the election other people were seeing so, in the end, The Conservative Media did a better job misleading conservatives than the liberal media ever did.
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Gary Pearce posted on November 13, 2012 08:45
This election’s winners include not only data nerds like Nate Silver, but also the Obama campaign’s numbers-crunchers. Wasn’t data analysis supposed to be Romney’s strength at Bain and the Olympics?
The Obama staff – parodied as a bunch of soft-headed, socialist community organizers – were precise and efficient in their targeting and resource allocation. Romney, in contrast, spent precious time the last weekend chasing a chimera in Pennsylvania. Remarkably, Romney’s campaign, Republican pollsters and the Fox spin machine all were misled by their own data.
This part of a campaign, unlike ads and speeches, goes unnoticed. But attention must be paid. Because the Obama campaign has revolutionized politics.
Two small examples:
First, a friend who lives in Wilson County and volunteered for Obama said the campaign gave her precise instructions: go to Trailer Park X, knock on the door at Trailer Y and urge Voter Z to go vote. My friend said she was going to places she didn’t know existed – and finding voters the Obama campaign had identified.
Second, on Election Night, Obama volunteers in North Carolina got texts from the campaign: “Would you make a call to Betsy in Wisconsin at this number and urge her to go vote.”
This combination of high-tech and high personal touch is powerful. It’s the most important lesson of this election.
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Carter Wrenn posted on November 12, 2012 17:26
Last Tuesday, nationally, was a pretty fine day for Democrats: President Obama not only won, Democrats gained Senate seats, House seats, four states voted for gay marriage and two states voted for legalizing medical marijuana.
Since the morning after the election the TV and newspaper pundits have been gesticulating furiously over who’s to blame for the Republicans loss and everyone with an agenda had a say – one pundit roared the villain was ‘The Tea Party.’
Another snorted the culprit was ‘The Beltway GOP Establishment’ and added ‘No more Romneys. No more Bushes. No more McCains.’
Ann Coulter shot back, ‘Don’t blame Romney…Romney was the perfect candidate.’
Other pundits blamed ‘two idiots who came out against abortion in cases of rape,’ nominating ‘a millionaire big government establishment Republican’ and ‘the hurricane.’
Others declared, ‘Romney was too moderate,’ ‘Romney was too conservative,’ and ‘Obama aimed a billion dollar howitzer at a single target: Mitt Romney.’ A lot of pundits blamed demographics and one blamed magic saying, Obama pulled a rabbit out of the hat and magic-ed himself back into the White House.
But not one person mentioned silly rhetoric.
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Carter Wrenn posted on November 06, 2012 18:01
Albert, arguing, said, You’re wrong. Folks don’t care if politicians lie and steal – they expect them to do that. What’s more, they’ll vote for a crook who can fix the potholes in their street over a bungling saint every time.
I chalked that up to an otherwise garrulous man’s streak of skepticism but Eric the lawyer said, You took a couple hundred polls this year and your conclusion is we prefer crooks to saints – that’s discouraging. It looks like folks would at least be a little worried about what else the crook might steal.
Albert grinned. Shrugged. Said, They all steal.
Up in New York, the bluest of states, last week an Obama supporter published an editorial in the New York Times saying Mitt Romney is the most dishonest candidate ever to run for President. At the same time, across the country, a Romney supporter in red-state Indiana called Barack Obama spiteful, petty and second rate in Real Clear Politics.
During the summer Obama’s folks ran an ad saying a man’s wife died of cancer because Romney closed his mill, leaving him without health insurance – and Republicans ran an ad with Obama saying what sounded like, ‘If you own a business, you didn’t build it.’
There wasn’t a lot of truth in either ad but if you try telling that to either a Romney or Obama supporter – you’ll run head-on into a stone wall.
It’s hard to tell if politicians are more dishonest now than, say, a hundred years ago but it does seem clear this is one election where regular folks aren’t letting a little duplicity stand in their way – as long as the potholes get fixed.
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Carter Wrenn posted on November 06, 2012 17:29
I woke up yesterday feeling Romney would win but after a dozen calls from people asking about polls in Ohio (not one of which shows Romney leading) I went to bed thinking, Every single poll can’t be wrong.
This morning, at the crack of dawn, I got Dick Morris’ predictions saying all the polls were dead wrong and Romney will win ten swing states plus Pennsylvania and Minnesota and clobber Obama 325 to 213 in the Electoral College – and I thought, Dick wouldn’t say that unless he took his own poll. And he’s a good pollster.
Then, after I got to the office, I opened the newspaper and read about three new polls by NBC/Wall Street Journal, ABC/Washington Post and PEW Research – all showing Obama winning.
At lunch Mike, the twenty-something young Republican political consultant, who’d spent all morning furiously ‘tweeting,’ stopped punching buttons on his iPhone and blurted out, This uncertainly is driving me crazy.
Eric who’s Scottish and a lawyer and theologian to boot looked up from his plate.
Well, he said, You could look on it as a test of faith.
Mike plopped down his phone. The last thing I need is some kind of test – I just want to win and get it over with.
Then, Eric said, You might as well rely on the Redskins Rule.
The Washington Redskins final game before the election has predicted who would win the White House in every election since 1940 – except once.
If the Redskins win the incumbent wins. If they lose, the challenger wins.
This year they lost.
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Gary Pearce posted on November 06, 2012 13:12
The baffling question is how Mitt Romney lost. If ever this was a challenger’s race to win, this was it.
The economy is bad. Obama is an activist in an anti-government age. He has never done a good job of selling his record. He was not a great candidate this year. He bombed in the first debate. And, oh yes, he’s African-American.
All that makes me antsy about tonight. But the overwhelming evidence is that Obama will win.
Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight now puts that probability at over 90 percent. And it’s not just Superstorm Sandy, he says, but a slow, steady rebound for Obama over the last month.
Yes, I hear the Republican bluster about momentum and crowd excitement. But George McGovern and Michael Dukakis had big, enthusiastic crowds at the end, too.
Then there’s North Carolina. The Obama campaign wouldn’t have sent Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama to North Carolina the last weekend if it didn’t see a good chance to win here.
Perhaps the worst sign for Romney: Dick Morris predicts he’ll win a landslide. If Dick’s wrong, he’ll be screaming “fraud” by midnight. And raising money on it tomorrow.
If Romney loses, there are two explanations: the damage Obama’s ads did to his brand in the summer and the damage the Tea Party has done to the Republican brand in the last two years.
And if he loses, the Tea Party will be on the warpath to push the GOP even farther right – nationally and in North Carolina.
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Gary Pearce posted on November 05, 2012 10:27
Worst rationale for voting for Romney: maybe Democrats will cooperate with him, unlike Republicans who refused to work with Obama.
D.G. Martin asked about that argument when he interviewed Carter, Tom Drew and me on WCHL last week.
That rewards obstructionism. It rewards Washington Republicans who set out from the beginning of President Obama’s administration to destroy him, even if they destroyed the country in the process.
Four years ago, when President Bush and Henry Paulsen were begging Democrats to bail out their stimulus program, Democrats responded. But bipartisanship collapsed when the tables turned.
If Romney wins and Democrats act like Republicans, how long will it take for Republicans to whine over the loss of bipartisanship?
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Gary Pearce posted on November 02, 2012 10:32
Confused by the polling superstorm? Confounded by contradictory pundits? Then get a dose of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog. a deep, dense statistical analysis of the presidential race.
This week he plumbed the national and battleground-state polls. His conclusion: “Obama remains the favorite in the Electoral College.”
More:
“Mr. Obama is not a sure thing, by any means. It is a close race. His chances of holding onto his Electoral College lead and converting it into another term are equivalent to the chances of an N.F.L. team winning when it leads by a field goal with three minutes left to play in the fourth quarter. There are plenty of things that could go wrong, and sometimes they will.
“But it turns out that an NFL team that leads by a field goal with three minutes left to go winds up winning the game 79 percent of the time. Those were Mr. Obama’s chances in the FiveThirtyEight forecast as of Wednesday: 79 percent.”
Most political discussion is dominated by hunches, guesses and speculation. The best antidote is good data and good analysis of the data. Since I’m not paying a good pollster for that, I find Silver to be the next best thing.
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