I was thinking of going with Syria/Lebanon, but instead: Richard Mourdock probably went from about a 65% chance of winning to about a 20% chance of winning. That's a pretty big deal -- every Senate seat matters.
The final debate didn't seem to have any effect on the polls, so in that sense it appears not to have mattered.
That's what I'll kick it off with, but what do you have? What do you think mattered this week?
Frankenstorm is mattering pretty hard to folks who live in harm's way. Interesting scandal going on with Chinese leadership. Mixed economic news that generally pointed in the right direction.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of the Pres race, it seems like everyday that The Tie continues to show up in the polls and refuses to definitively move to either candidate "matters."
I'm not sure the 3rd debate didn't matter - if indeed A.) Obama halted the "Romentum" and B.) his odds of winning went up this week if you look at Silver and Sam Wang's models.
ReplyDeleteAgree that Mourdock is pretty big - and may alienate more women on the national level, thus impacting the presidential election.
As commenters mentioned on another post, if you look at the poll averages, Team Obama stopped Romney gaining in the polls ("Romentum") around the day of the VP debate. In reality this could be evidence of any number of factors but the funny joke was to call this "Joementum."
DeleteI'd say the last debate mattered in so far as it was the last big 'unknown known' (sorry to use a Rummyism) of the campaign season. While the result of the debate was negligible to ever so slightly helpful for Obama (and it could just as well be no more than further regression to the mean), it's past us now, and the election is largely baked.
DeleteGentlemen, time for closing arguments and to see how the turnout machines perform.
(Romney's misfiring attack on Jeep production might matter, I think there's a decent commercial that can be made out of the lie, even just to run it in Ohio.)
Going to go with Sandy becoming a very serious thing certainly matters (any plain bloggers out there who live between Norfolk and New York?) Also the models I've been following keep trending for Obama, I don't know if that "matters" but it certainly is interesting.
ReplyDeleteI'm going with Obama's interview in the Des Moines Register, saying if he wins it will be Latinos, and if he wins, Republicans will have to work with him on immigration reform if they want to win future elections.
ReplyDeleteSecond would be Mourdock's views on rape leading to another potential Democratic seat in the Senate.
Romney meets Meat Loaf.
ReplyDeleteActually, I guess it doesn't *really*matter, but it struck me as a perfect and hilarious symbol for what's going on in the GOP this year. It might not have been a Dukakis-in-a-tank level pander, but Mitt's palpable distress at rubbing elbows with a real life flesh and blood white-American knucklehead was awesome.
And to your list of Romney's funniest moments, his campaign photoshopped a Nevada event to make it look bigger:
Deletehttp://www.buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/romney-campaign-appears-to-exaggerate-size-of-neva
My local Reality-Based Community* is considering the possibility that the Hurricane Sandy "Frankenstorm" represents God's wrath at the Presidential campaigns for ignoring climate change:
ReplyDeletehttp://bluemassgroup.com/2012/10/its-just-so-tempting/
*Exactly when will this phrase begin to sound too Orwellian to bear?
That's pretty funny. But if God* is choosing to speak via hurricane, we're batting two; there was one disrupting the RNC, also. Cancelled day one, as I recall. So who's he taking aim at?
Delete*As a non-believer here; I'm of the mind that anyone who hears god talking is in need of a reality-based community. And if that offends, I do apologize. But I'm pretty offended with the way God seems to be shaping the GOP of late. But what can I say, I've got lady parts, descended from Eve. And I really like apples and make wonderful apple pie.
Zic, I’d also say that there seems to be a natural human tendency to interpret daily misfortunes as payback for our collective crimes -- be they some sort of immorality, carbon dioxide emissions, government overspending, corporate greed, or whatever happens to spring from our cultural framing or agenda.
DeleteToo Catholic for my tastes, Couves!
DeleteAnon -- Well yes, there does seem to be a kind of liberal equivalency to Catholic guilt. It's ironic that the Reality-Based Communities are so culturally indebted to Christianity.
DeleteWhat may turn out to matter this week is the increase in racism among Americans revealed in the AP study, with 80% of Republicans overtly racist, and the Romney campaign's increasingly bold appeal to racism. I hope I'm wrong.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny, because I've been thinking more and more how the traditional soft white-supremacy that's been a cultural reality for centuries is really starting to break down in a meaningful way. Honestly, I know that there's a lot of racist rhetoric flying around as the election approaches... but really it hasn't reached the same '08 level of "real Americans" and all that. And Republican strategists are already starting to talk openly about the reality that they're not going to win national elections on the strength of the white vote anymore.
DeleteIt'll be pretty intense if Obama takes Virginia and Colorado (and Florida, maybe) because he'll have done so because of non-white voters. I don't want to say that the reason Obama is tied (ahead slightly?) is because of the non-white vote and that Romney would be in a indisputable lead if the demographics of the country matched '92 (or maybe even '00) because if those demographics were the reality then Obama would have run a different campaign and I'm sure he would still have been competitve/winning (narrowly).
But he's the (slight) favorite to win next week because he was able to push up the non-white vote. And it looks like the changes his two candidacies have affected on the electorate are not going to be reversed (even if Obama loses). This election is a huge turning point for that reason.
That's not to say that racism is going to fade away. It seems more likely that Latinos and Asian-Americans are going to gradually become a part of the "majority" (will we still call that majority "white" if we're browner and less European-looking?), but there doesn't seem to be any major signs that African-Americans (especially low-income African-Americans) are going to see much change of cultural status. So maybe racism will still exist... it just will focus solely on low-income African-Americans rather than all non-whites. Progress?
DeleteCF: link to the AP story?
Delete@Anon 10:05: yes, "white" will still be the term in use. Forget that it's already been expanded multiple times -- to include Irish (?!), Mediterranean, and Slavic groups, as well as lots of Native Americans. Just look around now -- depending on the circles of course, but at least a lot of upper-middle-class 20- and 30-somethings in the Northeast don't seem to take "Hispanic/Latino" and "Asian" as incompatible with "white."
DeleteTo put it another way: The racial categories in America aren't really "white/non-white" -- they're "black/non-black." Any group of people that other people, when they see a group member they don't know, generally expect them to speak regionally standard American English is soon going to be called "white" if they aren't already. Except black people.
Anon @ 10am, there was no way, absolutely no way, that any black man could have been elected President in 1992. It would not have mattered if he walked across Lake Michigan to a debate on live TV.
DeleteWe had to bury my parents' generation first. I think my white supremacist father is still spinning in his grave.
Sorry I didn't check back to reply sooner. There's a Washington Post story on the AP poll athttp://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ap-poll-majority-of-americans-still-express-negative-view-of-blacks/2012/10/27/421d683a-2009-11e2-8817-41b9a7aaabc7_story.html?tid=pm_politics_pop
Delete(If there's a way to embed links in the comments I don't know how, sorry.]
It does say,by the way, that Obama loses 5 points because of racist attitudes against blacks, but gains 3 from non-whites, for a net loss of two points. This is actually close to but below another study's conclusion of what he lost in 2008 because of race.
That the AP poll finds 79% of Republicans are racist might also be considered in the Gallup poll figures that show Romney's rise fueled by an enormous uptick in the South, and Andrew Sullivan pointing out on Sunday that if Romney wins NC, VA and FLA, he'll have the entire Old Confederacy.
Actually I stated part of that wrong. Obama loses 5 points because of racist attitudes towards black, but gains 3 from pro-black attitudes, for a net loss of 2 points. It's not the race etc. of the source, it's the sentiment.
DeleteCaptain Future,
ReplyDeleteYour assumption was somewhat validated by Colin Powell's former chief of staff stating that his party (Republican), is full of racists. John Sununu displayed the behavior, claiming the only reason for Powell's endorsement was because Obama is black. What mattered here, is that it won't effect the outcome of the "race." What also mattered this week is that Condolezza Rice probably made her last appearance on Fox news by throwing cold water on the Benghazi non-story. What has mattered throughout this campaign has been the network and mainstream medias allowing the Romney campaign to continually distort (lie), on so many occasions without serious consistent push back. There has been some, but not as much as the story warrants. Just last evening on the PBS News Hour, they ran an audio clip of Romney repeating the Chrysler falsehood that the jobs were going to China. It should have been known by last evening that the story is false, and yet there was PBS advancing the falsehood in the public's mind.
For someone concerned about political lies, your view of "the Benghazi non-story" is surprising.
DeleteI read that more whites are turning on Obama because of his skin color. That we have become more racist. Sununu saying what he did about Powell pushed that view when he said people want someone of their own race in leadership. I can't believe it's how Americans feel as Obama hasn't governed as a black or white man. He's just governed with his philosophy but what it made me wonder is when he did win the second and third debates, sounded very good, strong, knowledgeable, was the reason it didn't help is it reminded racists of his color and they didn't like it? If so, it says more about who we are as a people than who Obama is. It's kind of scary to me.
ReplyDeleteI think that reporters are getting tired of writing, "It's a dead heat and we don't know who's going to win," so they're sending in more stories when they're drunk.
DeleteIf much of the opposition to Obama is race-based, then Secretary Clinton should have an easy time of it in 2016, right?
ReplyDeleteOnly if she advocates giving up control of her lady-parts to the church.
DeleteThere's barely 10% women in the Republican representation in the House; there's 0% black. Easier, sure, but not by much. I chose the House because the Senate just makes their numbers sound worse...
Delete@Crissa -- actually, one of the tiny silver linings of the 2010 cycle for liberals was the return of black elected officials to the national GOP. Allen West isn't even the only one! There's also Tim Scott in South Carolina (thanks, Wikipedia!) And of course there are no blacks in the Senate at all.
DeleteAs to Republican women -- yeah, I was pretty disappointed 2010 didn't make a difference in the House. But they did have several women who either were favored to win (the one who was supposed to win in NV) or did win Senate primaries (Fiorina, or was it Whitman, in CA, McMahon in CT, O'Donnell in DE, Angle in NV, and maybe more I'm forgetting), besides Kelly Ayotte who actually won her seat (NH). And it's been much more noticeable this year. The Republican Senate candidate is female in CA, CT, HI, NE, NM, and NY, and Steelman had been favored in the Missouri primaries. McMahon, Lingle, and Wilson have had reasonably close races (NM especially), Steelman probably would have won, and Fischer will win. So ... not enough to replace retiring Hutcheson and Snowe, but 6/33 is 18%, much better than one might have expected. And the Democrats are fielding 12 female Senate candidates, including non-incumbents in HI, MA, ME, ND, NV, and WI.
P.S. @Captain Future: you embed links by typing [a href="www.website.com"]hyperlink text[/a], except replacing the square brackets with <>.
"Easier, sure, but not by much."
DeleteBut don't women exclude themselves from politics by choice? You can't win if you don't run.
@Couves -- of course yoi're right that women are excluding themselves! That is why I am a big fan of projects like Kirsten Gillibrand's "Off the Sidelines" that encourage women to run and then help out if they do run. As to "by choice" ... that's a whole set of other issues ... about which we disagree ...
DeleteBtw: thanks for responding! (is this a weird thing to say? probably! but it's true:) After so long just appreciating your comments, I'm glad to be interacting with you at last.
@the classicist I thought we had interacted at least once before. It doesn't sound like we're really in disagreement. Of course, it would be good for a lot more women to get more involved in politics at the highest level. But I just think it's unlikely that we'll see it happen...
DeleteOur Founders set up a system that was designed to channel the energies of power-hungry men towards advancing the general welfare (as opposed to raising up armies of conquest). The fact that fewer women fit this description is perhaps a tribute to their sex, but doesn't change the problem that they're then largely excluded from power.
While the Founders' system has produced domestic tranquility, it's also been used to build up concentrations of power that now threaten the general welfare. What we most need right now is the fish swimming upstream -- the politician not interested in exercising power, but in returning it to the people.
@Couves -- where I would disagree with your description is in the generality of your claims. I agree that whatever we did now we would not be seeing more than 40-45% female representation. But that we fall THIS far short of it THIS consistently seems to me to be in large measure artificial and systemic rather than a healthy, natural result of individual choices.
Delete@the classicist: That's my very point -- it IS artificial and systemic precisely because our Founders designed a system that guaranteed that our leaders would be disproportionately aggressive, power-hungry people. In my experience, a far greater percentage of men fit this description than do women (how much of this is natural or due to social conditioning is a whole other matter).
DeleteIt would be possible to design a system that rewards a whole different set of personality traits -- a party list system, for example, puts a greater premium on dedication and working with a team rather than on raw personal ambition and risk-taking. Still, I'm not sure it's realistic to expect there to be as many women who want to be top dog as there are men.
@the classicist: One more thing -- I do agree that we could have closer to 40-45% women in Congress, simply by changing the design of our system.
Delete@Couves -- I meant that there are artificial and systemic reasons why women are much more hesitant to run in the first place -- the "whole other matter" you mentioned.
DeleteBtw: all of my suppositions on this are informed by my being a woman in a field with a male-female ratio somewhere between 2:1 and 4:1 (among senior, powerful, prominent people, often >4:1). Which is both anecdotal and not strictly parallel. So I am plenty open to the possibility that I'm misreading the politics through my particular lens; and more particularly to the possibility that the upper echelons of politics are so different from the lower in terms of burdens assumed and publicity imposed, that there will always be more men at the top. But right now I don't see much evidence. Right now the proportions of women in state legislatures seem roughly parallel to national proportions. (Which btw isn't the case in philosophy at all, in which the number of women drops very significantly at each stage of the process -- undergrad to grad, grad school to employment, any employment at all to having tenure, ..... If you're interested in how that happens, check out the feminist philosophers blog on wordpress, which people who are willing to ruin their days by checking depressing sites tell me is chock full of information.)
Haha, also -- it's okay if you're just done with this subject, I won't be surprised if you don't respond to this!
@the classicist -- Thank you for elaborating. Personally, I think there are very significant natural differences between the sexes… so it sounds like we may differ there. Of course, that doesn’t mean that 15% female participation in Congress is acceptable and the problem could always be addressed directly by establishing minimum quotas for female participation.
Delete