I'm doing a bit more over at Greg's place this week while he's on vacation (but only a bit more, because the great Jamelle Bouie is guest-blogging; I'm thrilled to be sharing the space with him). So I may wind up with a bit less than usual around here all week. That was certainly the case today, but I'm going to try to keep to normal around here, or at least close. Although I expect that the morning links posts will be shorter than usual, since I'm doing the Roundup over there (and I try not to repeat things, although I'm not really sure that makes any sense). Anyway, if you want lots and lots of links, just head over to Plum Line.
To the business at hand. At Plum Line, I did a post on the Ninth Circuit nominee who was confirmed this afternoon. As I said in the update over there, this one had a curious resolution; after scheduling a cloture vote today, it turned out that Republicans dropped their filibuster and allowed just one regular old-fashioned confirmation vote, which turned out to be a 61-34 easy win. I'm looking forward to some reporting on it: did they just drop it because they had counted the votes? Or was it a deal, and if so in exchange for what?
My other Plum Line piece was a quick one about jobs numbers and Romney campaign claims.
And over at Post Partisan, one I liked, although I think it would have been better divided into three posts: a reminder that most of what's happening in the presidential campaigns now doesn't matter; why everyone acts as if it does matter; and a quick history of spring campaigns, in which I pointed out that the 1996 cycle was actually the first one in which the nominations were decided this early and at least one campaign had plenty of money to spend.
One comment on those Romney jobs claims: Fehrnstrom wasn't very specific about how many jobs have been lost under Obama, but I've seen a lot of reporters total up the Obama job-creation record as if it included January 2009, even though Obama didn't even take office till two-thirds of the way through the month. This is important because that month was one of the worst months for job losses in American history, with about 600,000 lost jobs.
ReplyDeleteIf you credit Obama for that month, he could well be in negative territory for his presidency through most of the summer. If you disregard January (which you obviously should), Obama is about a month away from achieving positive job creation. And if you tote things up starting after March 2009, when the stimulus started to take effect, he's already in positive territory.
Are you counting early by the number of weeks with voting, the number of states that had voted, the number of people who had voted... Or just the date?
ReplyDeleteThe date. 20th century pre-reform nominations weren't settled until the convention, even for the incumbent generally. In the 1970s and 1980s, generally the nominee didn't have lots of extra money thanks to the campaign finance regime of the time.
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