Harold Titus's Blog, page 17
October 13, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2016 Election -- The Debates
The first presidential debate in late September was a final chance for Trump to change the game, the first time he would appear next to Clinton and have an opportunity to prove arguments about his erratic behavior and angry persona false.
Clinton was once again in the midst of deepened scrutiny. She left a 9/11 memorial event after feeling faint, leading to a wild surge of internet rumors about her health. She hadn’t given a proper press conference in months, leading to a barrage of press criticism (which was never matched when Trump began avoiding the press in the final two months of the campaign). Her campaign chairman, John Podesta, had his e-mail inbox hacked, and his messages leaked by Wikileaks, revealing embarrassing internal deliberations and casting more light on Clinton’s connections to wealthy individuals and corporations.
Trump, sensing his improving position, declined to prepare for his debate, beyond holding bull sessions with a coterie of disgraced politicians, generals, and even media executives, once ousted Fox News chief Roger Ailes briefly found his way into the camp. On his third set of campaign leaders, Trump became ringmaster of his own destiny.
The most important moment came at the close, when Clinton mentioned Trump’s treatment of women, citing a former pageant star named Alicia Machado, who Trump had mocked as fat. Trump’s blustery response was hardly elegant, and he spent the next several days attacking Machado in late-night tweets and falsely saying she had appeared in a sex tape.
That would come back to haunt him days later, when a video tape of Trump on Access Hollywood was published by the Washington Post. The tape featured Trump talking about his treatment of women, how he kisses them without asking and boasting he could do anything, even “grab them by the pussy.” At the next debate, pressed by CNN’s Anderson Cooper on whether he had ever done those things, Trump said no. Soon, more than a dozen women would come forward to allege that Trump had sexually assaulted them by kissing or fondling them without permission. One woman is currently suing Trump in a civil case, alleging that he raped her when she was 13 years old.
Through it all, there was no sign that Trump would change his approach to the contests. Each time he would start with a subdued mien, speaking in husky undertones, before rising to issue a soundbite—”Nasty woman!“—that would echo for days on social media. He doubled down on the alt-right influences in the campaign, now managed by CEO of Breitbart Media, Stephen Bannon. He paraded a line of women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment at the second debate, and promised that he would put Hillary Clinton in jail if he were president. In the third debate, he refused to say he would accept the results of the election if he lost.
His sheer intransigence frustrated elites in both parties, and left many women baffled at his ascent. But another segment of voters appear to see him hectored by these women and, by extension, a victim of Clinton’s political attacks. Some clearly saw hypocrisy in Clinton’s criticism of Trump given her own husband’s past behavior. As Trump gave voice to resentment against new social codes that denigrate casual sexism, Trump won the overwhelming support of male voters in the 2016 election. Clinton’s name on the ballot was a red flag that attracted a bull (Fernholz 8-12).
HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. — Hillary Clinton seemed to overpower Donald Trump in their first presidential debate Monday night as the Republican nominee stumbled over his words and found himself spending most of the night on his heels.
“I think Donald just criticized me for preparing for this debate,” Clinton said at one point. “And yes I did. And you know what else I prepared for is I prepared to be president.”
Moderator Lester Holt of NBC News led the candidates through many of the most explosive issues of this election and Trump found himself re-litigating many of his previous controversial comments. Here are six key moments:
1. Trump gets agitated out of the gate: Despite expectations that Trump would show a cooler, more presidential demeanor, he began repeatedly interrupting Clinton, raising his voice, and sniffing loudly during the very first section of the debate on jobs. It set the tone for the rest of the debate.
Tensions were so high that when Clinton asked the audience to visit her website, Trump admonished her posting her plan to defeat ISIS online, saying Gen. Douglas MacArthur would not approve of Clinton posting. “You're telling the enemy everything you want to do,” Trump said.
2. “A long record of engaging in racist behavior:” After multiple clashes on race, Clinton accused Trump of having “a long record of engaging in racist behavior” going back to a 1973 Department of Justice lawsuit accusing him of discrimination for not renting apartments to black people.
Trump dismissed the issue by saying the suit included lots of companies, and that he settled without admitting guilt. He also praised himself for opening a club in Palm Beach, Florida, that did not discriminate against anyone.
And Trump forcefully defended stop-and-frisk, the controversial policing policy that a court ruled unconstitutional when used in New York City. Trump called it “tremendous beyond belief” and said other cities needed to adopt it in order to implement “law and order.”
3. “I say nothing:” After his five-year crusade to raise questions about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, Trump expressed no contrition and gave no explanation for why he finally changed his mind last week when he admitted Obama was born in the United States.
Instead, Trump tried to blame Clinton for starting the rumor (fact checkers say that’s not true) and praised himself for forcing Obama to produce his birth certificate.
Pressed by Holt what he had to say to African-Americans who were offended by the claim, Trump responded, “I say nothing, because I was able to get it,” he said of the birth certificate. “I think I did a good job.”
4. Tax returns: Trump has refused to release his tax returns and didn’t budge when pressed during the debate, giving Clinton a wide opening. “You’ve got to ask yourself, why won’t he release tax returns?” she asked, speculating that he might not be as rich or charitable as he claims, or that he’s hiding business practices or debts.
Trump retorted by saying that tax returns don’t give the public much information, and that his financial disclosures tell you more, noting that his showed he made over $600 million last year. He also said he has relatively little debt.
Noting her father ran a drapery business, Clinton hit Trump for “stiffing” thousands of vendors, saying, “I’m relieved that my late father didn’t do business with you.”
Clinton also invoked an architect she brought to the debate whom she said Trump had failed to pay in full. “Maybe he didn’t do a good job and I was unsatisfied with his work,” Trump replied.
5. “Presidential look:” Holt asked Trump to turn to Clinton and tell her what he meant when he said she doesn’t have a “presidential look.” Trump said Clinton lacked the “stamina” necessary to be commander in chief.
Then, accusing Clinton’s campaign ads of being “not nice,” Trump ominously said he was refraining from saying something worse. “I was going to say something extremely rough to Hillary and her family,” he said, before adding that he decided against it.
Clinton responded by invoking a litany of comments Trump has made about women, and his former ownership of the Miss Universe pageant. “He loves beauty contests, hanging around them,” she said.
6. Iraq: Trump got bogged down in a lengthy and unconvincing defense of his claim that he opposed the Iraq War from the start, which fact checkers have repeatedly noted is not supported by the public record.
Trump responded with hostility when Holt noted this fact. While he acknowledged that Howard Stern in 2002 that he was in favor of the war, he said he said so “lightly” and argued that his private conversations with Fox News Anchor Sean Hannity — where he allegedly expressed opposition to the war — should be given more weight. Trump lashed out at Holt, accusing him of repeating a “mainstream media thing,” started by Clinton.
Clinton, who has been forced to bear the burden of her vote for the war for years, seemed to delight in Trump’s re-litigation of the issue, before doing some of her own. At a different point in the debate, she delivered a prepared zinger: “Well, Donald, I know you live in your own reality, but that is not the facts,” she said (Seitz-Wald 1-4).
ST. LOUIS — A presidential debate whose tone was expected to be shaped by Donald Trump's lewd and demeaning comments a decade ago fulfilled that billing in a testy back-and-forth Sunday night.
Hillary Clinton and Trump established the tenor from the outset, walking onto the stage for their introductions and, seemingly by mutual agreement, passing on the traditional handshake. Throughout the 90-minute exchange, which included questions posed by audience members in the town hall setting, they exchanged insults, defended themselves and even ventured into actual policy positions. After the opening salvos, the specifics of the tape faded into the background.
Here are five quick takeaways from Sunday's [second] debate:
1). The Elephant In the Room Topped the Show
Donald Trump had the worst weekend of his campaign, and perhaps the worst weekend of any presidential campaign ever. A flood of Republican members of Congress broke from the nominee saying that he should drop out or that they wouldn’t vote for him after video surfaced from 2005 of Trump making obscene comments about how he treated women.
Trump upped the tension just minutes prior to the debate by holding a brief press conference with several women who have in the past accused former President Bill Clinton of various forms of sexual assault — signaling his defense strategy.
And the tapes came up right out of the gate. Moderators Martha Raddatz of ABC News and Anderson Cooper of CNN asked Trump about the video and whether his words constituted sexual assault.
Trump first dismissed some of the video, saying he “didn’t say that all” and said he has “never done those things” and then went on to dismiss it as “locker room talk.”
Finally, he said, “I’m very embarrassed and I hate it,” and claimed "nobody has more respect for women than I do” — a claim he has repeated throughout his candidacy.
Then he turned toward the accusations against Clinton's husband.
“If you look at Bill Clinton. Mine were words and his were action,” Trump said. “There has never been anyone in the history of politics who has been so abusive to women.”
And he attempted to connect the former president’s faults to the current Democratic nominee, saying, “Hillary Clinton has attacked those same women and attacked them viciously.”
For her part, Clinton invoked First Lady Michelle Obama who has said more than once that when opponents go low, she and her husband go high.
And she said of Trump, "he never apologizes.”
2). Clinton Tries to Connect All the Dots.
Clinton also used the leaked video as further proof that Trump will only divide the country and is not fit to be president.
“It’s not only women and it’s not only this video that raises questions about his fitness to be president,” Clinton said, listing a litany of instances that Trump has denigrated others.
Clinton pointed to Trump’s mocking of a disabled reporter, his attacks against a Gold Star family, his smear of a former Miss Universe, his comments about women, and questioning the motives of a federal judge and his labeling of Muslims.
“This is not who we are” as Americans, Clinton said.
Trump responded, “It’s just words, folks. It’s just words.” It’s a response that meant that Clinton is all talk and no action, a theme through out the 90-minute debate. But it also could have been a defense for the demeaning things that he’s said to and about others.
3). Trump Takes Email Scandal to Another Level.
During the first debate, Trump got in no real effective attacks against Clinton. He learned his lesson.
Trump said he “probably shouldn’t say this,” but that if he were to win the presidency, he’s going to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate her.
“There has never been anything like it,” he said, referring to the deletion of 33,000 emails on her private server when she was Secretary of State.
Clinton responded, saying, her email server was a “mistake and I take responsibility.”
“I’m not making any excuses,” she said while adding that there is “no evidence” that her email was hacked. But instead of dropping it after those concise points, she spent more time trying to litigate the subject, which often makes her look like she's not being truthful or unconcerned.
And when Clinton tried to defend an excerpt of a paid speech that was leaked Friday afternoon where she said she speaks differently about Wall Street in public than in private by saying she was telling a story about former President Abraham Lincoln, Trump interjected in an effective way that made her justification seem absurd.
"She got caught in a total lie. And she lied," Trump said. "Now she’s blaming the lie on the late great Abraham Lincoln."
4). Trump Admits to Not Paying Federal Taxes.
Trump admitted that he took advantage of a loophole that allowed him not to pay federal income taxes.
When asked if he didn't pay federal income taxes, Trump said, “Of course.”
“A lot of my write off was depreciation,” Trump said, referring to a New York Times story indicated that Trump could have not paid taxes for up to 18 years since 1995 because of a $916 million loss.
“I absolutely used it,” Trump said.
5). Trump Breaks with His Own Running Mate on Syria.
In last week’s vice presidential debate, Trump’s vice presidential candidate Mike Pence broke with Trump on his Syria policy, taking a hard line on Russia and threatening American force if Russia and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad continues to bomb civilians.
But Sunday night, Trump said he doesn’t have the same position as his running mate.
“He and I haven’t spoken, and I disagree,” Trump said, which leads to Trump’s ongoing defense of Russia.
6). Trump Continued to Defend Russia.
Clinton said that Russia must be held accountable for atrocities in Syria and that she supports the investigation that Russia, along with Assad, are committing war crimes in Syria by the barrage of bombings in eastern Aleppo.
Trump, meanwhile, defended Russia, insisting that they are bombing ISIS, which the international community does not believe.
“I don’t like Assad at all but Assad is killing ISIS; Russia is killing ISIS,” Trump said.
Both candidates were asked their strategy for the war-torn nation. Clinton said she would continue what the U.S. is currently doing — special forces stationed on the ground, training rebels and counterintelligence missions — but would also enforce a no-fly zone.
Trump didn’t lay out a plan but after a rambling answer about Mosul, Iraq and several other tangents, he said the U.S. should implement a secret mission.
“Why can’t they do something secretly?” Trump asks (Caldwell “Second” 1-4).
LAS VEGAS — The days leading up to the third presidential debate were spent largely in the gutter, the latest chapter of this long and treacherous general election campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. But in this final showdown, hosted by Chris Wallace of Fox News, the two candidates fit in a little bit of policy alongside their attacks on each other's weaknesses and scandals.
At the University of Nevada, Trump, who has been badly trailing Clinton in polls, delivered a more focused performance than any of the previous debates. But an eye-popping comment he made questioning the legitimacy of the election will likely overshadow his other statements.
Here are our five major takeaways:
1. Trump Will Still Not Agree to Accept Election Results.
Trump refused to say he would accept the outcome of the election on Nov. 8, after traveling the country for days insisting the process is “rigged.”
“I will look at it at the time,” Trump told Wallace, eliciting a gasp from the audience in the debate hall and in the media filing center.
Clinton called Trump’s answer “horrifying” and said it was part of Trump’s pattern to play the victim and blame the system when he’s down.
She noted that after he called the outcome rigged after losing the Iowa GOP caucuses, and that when his television show didn’t win an Emmy, he blamed the system.
Trump didn’t deny but interjected that he should have won an Emmy.
2. Clinton Again Ties Trump to Russia.
When Wallace asked Clinton about a statement she made in a paid speech about wanting an open hemisphere of open borders and open trade, Clinton quickly pivoted to WikiLeaks and evidence the Russian government is hacking emails to influence the election. Clinton's speeches were part of a wide release this week by the organization believed to be connected to Russia and its leader Valdimir Putin.
She reminded voters that Trump has actively encouraged Russia to commit espionage and that he hasn’t since acknowledged that the U.S. intelligence committee believes Russia is the culprit.
“The most important question of this evening,” Clinton said, is if Trump “rejects Russian espionage against Americans.” She also asked Trump to admit that Russia was responsible for the hacks.
He refused, insisting as he has at previous debates, that he’s not sure if Russia is culpable.
Trump said that Putin “doesn’t respect” Clinton or President Obama and insisted anew that he doesn’t know Putin, which is counter to his previous claims. He noted again that Putin has “said nice things about me.”
Clinton said Putin would “rather have a puppet for president of the United States," prompting Trump to insist, "You're the puppet."
3. Trump Denies Allegations By Accusers.
Trump denied the claims of the nine women who have come out in the past week alleging unwanted groping and sexual advances, saying falsely the claims had been “debunked.”
“I didn’t even apologize to my wife,” Trump said, “because I didn’t do anything.” That contradicted comments from his wife, Melania, earlier in the week, when she told interviewers he had apologized for boorish comments on the Access Hollywood video.
“Nobody has more respect for women than I do,” Trump added.
Clinton used the topic to make a broader appeal to women, noting that Trump’s denial had extended to attacking his accusers at campaign rallies and saying they’re not attractive enough for him to grope.
“Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger,” Clinton said.
“This is pattern of divisiveness,” Clinton added, calling it “a very dark and dangerous vision for our country.”
Trump pivoted from the allegations to invoke a video released this week by conservative activist James O’Keefe that claims that Clinton supporters were paid to incite violence at his rallies. The video has not been substantiated by NBC News.
At a Chicago rally earlier this year where numerous fights broke out, Trump said they were “possibly or probably started by her or her sleazy campaign.”
4. Trump Says the Mosul Operation is Political.
Trump suggested that the new military operation to reclaim the Iraqi city of Mosul from ISIS was a political move by President Barack Obama to help Clinton.
Clinton, who says she supports the president’s decision, derided Trump’s claim.
“That’s how Donald thinks. He’s always looking … (for) conspiracy theories,” Clinton said.
She said that when she was watching the attack on Osama bin Laden, “he was hosting 'Celebrity Apprentice.'”
5. Clinton Suggested Trump Can’t be Trusted with Nuclear Weapons.
Trump flatly denied he had ever suggested that countries like Japan could arm themselves with nuclear weapons, even though he had done so in a Fox News interview with Wallace himself.
Clinton said Trump's contradictions on that issue proved anew that Trump couldn’t be trusted with that responsibility for the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
“The bottom line on nuclear weapons is that when the president gives the order it must be followed,” Clinton said.
Trump noted he has the support of more than 200 military leaders and criticized the U.S. for slashing its nuclear arsenal (Caldwell “Third” 1-4).
Works cited:
Caldwell, Leigh Ann, “Six Major Takeaways from the Second 2016 Presidential Debate.” NBC News. October 10, 2016. Web. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/201...
Caldwell, Leigh Ann, “Five Major Takeaways from the Third and Final 2016 Presidential Debate.” NBC News, October 20, 2016. Web. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/201...
Fernholz, Tim, “How Hillary Clinton Blew It.” Quartz, November 8, 2016. Web. https://qz.com/831141/2016-presidenti...
Seitz-Wald, Alex, “Six Keys Moments in the First 2016 Presidential Debate between Trump and Clinton.” NBC News, September 26, 2016. Web. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/201... 6
Clinton was once again in the midst of deepened scrutiny. She left a 9/11 memorial event after feeling faint, leading to a wild surge of internet rumors about her health. She hadn’t given a proper press conference in months, leading to a barrage of press criticism (which was never matched when Trump began avoiding the press in the final two months of the campaign). Her campaign chairman, John Podesta, had his e-mail inbox hacked, and his messages leaked by Wikileaks, revealing embarrassing internal deliberations and casting more light on Clinton’s connections to wealthy individuals and corporations.
Trump, sensing his improving position, declined to prepare for his debate, beyond holding bull sessions with a coterie of disgraced politicians, generals, and even media executives, once ousted Fox News chief Roger Ailes briefly found his way into the camp. On his third set of campaign leaders, Trump became ringmaster of his own destiny.
The most important moment came at the close, when Clinton mentioned Trump’s treatment of women, citing a former pageant star named Alicia Machado, who Trump had mocked as fat. Trump’s blustery response was hardly elegant, and he spent the next several days attacking Machado in late-night tweets and falsely saying she had appeared in a sex tape.
That would come back to haunt him days later, when a video tape of Trump on Access Hollywood was published by the Washington Post. The tape featured Trump talking about his treatment of women, how he kisses them without asking and boasting he could do anything, even “grab them by the pussy.” At the next debate, pressed by CNN’s Anderson Cooper on whether he had ever done those things, Trump said no. Soon, more than a dozen women would come forward to allege that Trump had sexually assaulted them by kissing or fondling them without permission. One woman is currently suing Trump in a civil case, alleging that he raped her when she was 13 years old.
Through it all, there was no sign that Trump would change his approach to the contests. Each time he would start with a subdued mien, speaking in husky undertones, before rising to issue a soundbite—”Nasty woman!“—that would echo for days on social media. He doubled down on the alt-right influences in the campaign, now managed by CEO of Breitbart Media, Stephen Bannon. He paraded a line of women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment at the second debate, and promised that he would put Hillary Clinton in jail if he were president. In the third debate, he refused to say he would accept the results of the election if he lost.
His sheer intransigence frustrated elites in both parties, and left many women baffled at his ascent. But another segment of voters appear to see him hectored by these women and, by extension, a victim of Clinton’s political attacks. Some clearly saw hypocrisy in Clinton’s criticism of Trump given her own husband’s past behavior. As Trump gave voice to resentment against new social codes that denigrate casual sexism, Trump won the overwhelming support of male voters in the 2016 election. Clinton’s name on the ballot was a red flag that attracted a bull (Fernholz 8-12).
HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. — Hillary Clinton seemed to overpower Donald Trump in their first presidential debate Monday night as the Republican nominee stumbled over his words and found himself spending most of the night on his heels.
“I think Donald just criticized me for preparing for this debate,” Clinton said at one point. “And yes I did. And you know what else I prepared for is I prepared to be president.”
Moderator Lester Holt of NBC News led the candidates through many of the most explosive issues of this election and Trump found himself re-litigating many of his previous controversial comments. Here are six key moments:
1. Trump gets agitated out of the gate: Despite expectations that Trump would show a cooler, more presidential demeanor, he began repeatedly interrupting Clinton, raising his voice, and sniffing loudly during the very first section of the debate on jobs. It set the tone for the rest of the debate.
Tensions were so high that when Clinton asked the audience to visit her website, Trump admonished her posting her plan to defeat ISIS online, saying Gen. Douglas MacArthur would not approve of Clinton posting. “You're telling the enemy everything you want to do,” Trump said.
2. “A long record of engaging in racist behavior:” After multiple clashes on race, Clinton accused Trump of having “a long record of engaging in racist behavior” going back to a 1973 Department of Justice lawsuit accusing him of discrimination for not renting apartments to black people.
Trump dismissed the issue by saying the suit included lots of companies, and that he settled without admitting guilt. He also praised himself for opening a club in Palm Beach, Florida, that did not discriminate against anyone.
And Trump forcefully defended stop-and-frisk, the controversial policing policy that a court ruled unconstitutional when used in New York City. Trump called it “tremendous beyond belief” and said other cities needed to adopt it in order to implement “law and order.”
3. “I say nothing:” After his five-year crusade to raise questions about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, Trump expressed no contrition and gave no explanation for why he finally changed his mind last week when he admitted Obama was born in the United States.
Instead, Trump tried to blame Clinton for starting the rumor (fact checkers say that’s not true) and praised himself for forcing Obama to produce his birth certificate.
Pressed by Holt what he had to say to African-Americans who were offended by the claim, Trump responded, “I say nothing, because I was able to get it,” he said of the birth certificate. “I think I did a good job.”
4. Tax returns: Trump has refused to release his tax returns and didn’t budge when pressed during the debate, giving Clinton a wide opening. “You’ve got to ask yourself, why won’t he release tax returns?” she asked, speculating that he might not be as rich or charitable as he claims, or that he’s hiding business practices or debts.
Trump retorted by saying that tax returns don’t give the public much information, and that his financial disclosures tell you more, noting that his showed he made over $600 million last year. He also said he has relatively little debt.
Noting her father ran a drapery business, Clinton hit Trump for “stiffing” thousands of vendors, saying, “I’m relieved that my late father didn’t do business with you.”
Clinton also invoked an architect she brought to the debate whom she said Trump had failed to pay in full. “Maybe he didn’t do a good job and I was unsatisfied with his work,” Trump replied.
5. “Presidential look:” Holt asked Trump to turn to Clinton and tell her what he meant when he said she doesn’t have a “presidential look.” Trump said Clinton lacked the “stamina” necessary to be commander in chief.
Then, accusing Clinton’s campaign ads of being “not nice,” Trump ominously said he was refraining from saying something worse. “I was going to say something extremely rough to Hillary and her family,” he said, before adding that he decided against it.
Clinton responded by invoking a litany of comments Trump has made about women, and his former ownership of the Miss Universe pageant. “He loves beauty contests, hanging around them,” she said.
6. Iraq: Trump got bogged down in a lengthy and unconvincing defense of his claim that he opposed the Iraq War from the start, which fact checkers have repeatedly noted is not supported by the public record.
Trump responded with hostility when Holt noted this fact. While he acknowledged that Howard Stern in 2002 that he was in favor of the war, he said he said so “lightly” and argued that his private conversations with Fox News Anchor Sean Hannity — where he allegedly expressed opposition to the war — should be given more weight. Trump lashed out at Holt, accusing him of repeating a “mainstream media thing,” started by Clinton.
Clinton, who has been forced to bear the burden of her vote for the war for years, seemed to delight in Trump’s re-litigation of the issue, before doing some of her own. At a different point in the debate, she delivered a prepared zinger: “Well, Donald, I know you live in your own reality, but that is not the facts,” she said (Seitz-Wald 1-4).
ST. LOUIS — A presidential debate whose tone was expected to be shaped by Donald Trump's lewd and demeaning comments a decade ago fulfilled that billing in a testy back-and-forth Sunday night.
Hillary Clinton and Trump established the tenor from the outset, walking onto the stage for their introductions and, seemingly by mutual agreement, passing on the traditional handshake. Throughout the 90-minute exchange, which included questions posed by audience members in the town hall setting, they exchanged insults, defended themselves and even ventured into actual policy positions. After the opening salvos, the specifics of the tape faded into the background.
Here are five quick takeaways from Sunday's [second] debate:
1). The Elephant In the Room Topped the Show
Donald Trump had the worst weekend of his campaign, and perhaps the worst weekend of any presidential campaign ever. A flood of Republican members of Congress broke from the nominee saying that he should drop out or that they wouldn’t vote for him after video surfaced from 2005 of Trump making obscene comments about how he treated women.
Trump upped the tension just minutes prior to the debate by holding a brief press conference with several women who have in the past accused former President Bill Clinton of various forms of sexual assault — signaling his defense strategy.
And the tapes came up right out of the gate. Moderators Martha Raddatz of ABC News and Anderson Cooper of CNN asked Trump about the video and whether his words constituted sexual assault.
Trump first dismissed some of the video, saying he “didn’t say that all” and said he has “never done those things” and then went on to dismiss it as “locker room talk.”
Finally, he said, “I’m very embarrassed and I hate it,” and claimed "nobody has more respect for women than I do” — a claim he has repeated throughout his candidacy.
Then he turned toward the accusations against Clinton's husband.
“If you look at Bill Clinton. Mine were words and his were action,” Trump said. “There has never been anyone in the history of politics who has been so abusive to women.”
And he attempted to connect the former president’s faults to the current Democratic nominee, saying, “Hillary Clinton has attacked those same women and attacked them viciously.”
For her part, Clinton invoked First Lady Michelle Obama who has said more than once that when opponents go low, she and her husband go high.
And she said of Trump, "he never apologizes.”
2). Clinton Tries to Connect All the Dots.
Clinton also used the leaked video as further proof that Trump will only divide the country and is not fit to be president.
“It’s not only women and it’s not only this video that raises questions about his fitness to be president,” Clinton said, listing a litany of instances that Trump has denigrated others.
Clinton pointed to Trump’s mocking of a disabled reporter, his attacks against a Gold Star family, his smear of a former Miss Universe, his comments about women, and questioning the motives of a federal judge and his labeling of Muslims.
“This is not who we are” as Americans, Clinton said.
Trump responded, “It’s just words, folks. It’s just words.” It’s a response that meant that Clinton is all talk and no action, a theme through out the 90-minute debate. But it also could have been a defense for the demeaning things that he’s said to and about others.
3). Trump Takes Email Scandal to Another Level.
During the first debate, Trump got in no real effective attacks against Clinton. He learned his lesson.
Trump said he “probably shouldn’t say this,” but that if he were to win the presidency, he’s going to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate her.
“There has never been anything like it,” he said, referring to the deletion of 33,000 emails on her private server when she was Secretary of State.
Clinton responded, saying, her email server was a “mistake and I take responsibility.”
“I’m not making any excuses,” she said while adding that there is “no evidence” that her email was hacked. But instead of dropping it after those concise points, she spent more time trying to litigate the subject, which often makes her look like she's not being truthful or unconcerned.
And when Clinton tried to defend an excerpt of a paid speech that was leaked Friday afternoon where she said she speaks differently about Wall Street in public than in private by saying she was telling a story about former President Abraham Lincoln, Trump interjected in an effective way that made her justification seem absurd.
"She got caught in a total lie. And she lied," Trump said. "Now she’s blaming the lie on the late great Abraham Lincoln."
4). Trump Admits to Not Paying Federal Taxes.
Trump admitted that he took advantage of a loophole that allowed him not to pay federal income taxes.
When asked if he didn't pay federal income taxes, Trump said, “Of course.”
“A lot of my write off was depreciation,” Trump said, referring to a New York Times story indicated that Trump could have not paid taxes for up to 18 years since 1995 because of a $916 million loss.
“I absolutely used it,” Trump said.
5). Trump Breaks with His Own Running Mate on Syria.
In last week’s vice presidential debate, Trump’s vice presidential candidate Mike Pence broke with Trump on his Syria policy, taking a hard line on Russia and threatening American force if Russia and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad continues to bomb civilians.
But Sunday night, Trump said he doesn’t have the same position as his running mate.
“He and I haven’t spoken, and I disagree,” Trump said, which leads to Trump’s ongoing defense of Russia.
6). Trump Continued to Defend Russia.
Clinton said that Russia must be held accountable for atrocities in Syria and that she supports the investigation that Russia, along with Assad, are committing war crimes in Syria by the barrage of bombings in eastern Aleppo.
Trump, meanwhile, defended Russia, insisting that they are bombing ISIS, which the international community does not believe.
“I don’t like Assad at all but Assad is killing ISIS; Russia is killing ISIS,” Trump said.
Both candidates were asked their strategy for the war-torn nation. Clinton said she would continue what the U.S. is currently doing — special forces stationed on the ground, training rebels and counterintelligence missions — but would also enforce a no-fly zone.
Trump didn’t lay out a plan but after a rambling answer about Mosul, Iraq and several other tangents, he said the U.S. should implement a secret mission.
“Why can’t they do something secretly?” Trump asks (Caldwell “Second” 1-4).
LAS VEGAS — The days leading up to the third presidential debate were spent largely in the gutter, the latest chapter of this long and treacherous general election campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. But in this final showdown, hosted by Chris Wallace of Fox News, the two candidates fit in a little bit of policy alongside their attacks on each other's weaknesses and scandals.
At the University of Nevada, Trump, who has been badly trailing Clinton in polls, delivered a more focused performance than any of the previous debates. But an eye-popping comment he made questioning the legitimacy of the election will likely overshadow his other statements.
Here are our five major takeaways:
1. Trump Will Still Not Agree to Accept Election Results.
Trump refused to say he would accept the outcome of the election on Nov. 8, after traveling the country for days insisting the process is “rigged.”
“I will look at it at the time,” Trump told Wallace, eliciting a gasp from the audience in the debate hall and in the media filing center.
Clinton called Trump’s answer “horrifying” and said it was part of Trump’s pattern to play the victim and blame the system when he’s down.
She noted that after he called the outcome rigged after losing the Iowa GOP caucuses, and that when his television show didn’t win an Emmy, he blamed the system.
Trump didn’t deny but interjected that he should have won an Emmy.
2. Clinton Again Ties Trump to Russia.
When Wallace asked Clinton about a statement she made in a paid speech about wanting an open hemisphere of open borders and open trade, Clinton quickly pivoted to WikiLeaks and evidence the Russian government is hacking emails to influence the election. Clinton's speeches were part of a wide release this week by the organization believed to be connected to Russia and its leader Valdimir Putin.
She reminded voters that Trump has actively encouraged Russia to commit espionage and that he hasn’t since acknowledged that the U.S. intelligence committee believes Russia is the culprit.
“The most important question of this evening,” Clinton said, is if Trump “rejects Russian espionage against Americans.” She also asked Trump to admit that Russia was responsible for the hacks.
He refused, insisting as he has at previous debates, that he’s not sure if Russia is culpable.
Trump said that Putin “doesn’t respect” Clinton or President Obama and insisted anew that he doesn’t know Putin, which is counter to his previous claims. He noted again that Putin has “said nice things about me.”
Clinton said Putin would “rather have a puppet for president of the United States," prompting Trump to insist, "You're the puppet."
3. Trump Denies Allegations By Accusers.
Trump denied the claims of the nine women who have come out in the past week alleging unwanted groping and sexual advances, saying falsely the claims had been “debunked.”
“I didn’t even apologize to my wife,” Trump said, “because I didn’t do anything.” That contradicted comments from his wife, Melania, earlier in the week, when she told interviewers he had apologized for boorish comments on the Access Hollywood video.
“Nobody has more respect for women than I do,” Trump added.
Clinton used the topic to make a broader appeal to women, noting that Trump’s denial had extended to attacking his accusers at campaign rallies and saying they’re not attractive enough for him to grope.
“Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger,” Clinton said.
“This is pattern of divisiveness,” Clinton added, calling it “a very dark and dangerous vision for our country.”
Trump pivoted from the allegations to invoke a video released this week by conservative activist James O’Keefe that claims that Clinton supporters were paid to incite violence at his rallies. The video has not been substantiated by NBC News.
At a Chicago rally earlier this year where numerous fights broke out, Trump said they were “possibly or probably started by her or her sleazy campaign.”
4. Trump Says the Mosul Operation is Political.
Trump suggested that the new military operation to reclaim the Iraqi city of Mosul from ISIS was a political move by President Barack Obama to help Clinton.
Clinton, who says she supports the president’s decision, derided Trump’s claim.
“That’s how Donald thinks. He’s always looking … (for) conspiracy theories,” Clinton said.
She said that when she was watching the attack on Osama bin Laden, “he was hosting 'Celebrity Apprentice.'”
5. Clinton Suggested Trump Can’t be Trusted with Nuclear Weapons.
Trump flatly denied he had ever suggested that countries like Japan could arm themselves with nuclear weapons, even though he had done so in a Fox News interview with Wallace himself.
Clinton said Trump's contradictions on that issue proved anew that Trump couldn’t be trusted with that responsibility for the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
“The bottom line on nuclear weapons is that when the president gives the order it must be followed,” Clinton said.
Trump noted he has the support of more than 200 military leaders and criticized the U.S. for slashing its nuclear arsenal (Caldwell “Third” 1-4).
Works cited:
Caldwell, Leigh Ann, “Six Major Takeaways from the Second 2016 Presidential Debate.” NBC News. October 10, 2016. Web. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/201...
Caldwell, Leigh Ann, “Five Major Takeaways from the Third and Final 2016 Presidential Debate.” NBC News, October 20, 2016. Web. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/201...
Fernholz, Tim, “How Hillary Clinton Blew It.” Quartz, November 8, 2016. Web. https://qz.com/831141/2016-presidenti...
Seitz-Wald, Alex, “Six Keys Moments in the First 2016 Presidential Debate between Trump and Clinton.” NBC News, September 26, 2016. Web. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/201... 6
October 11, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2016 Election -- Campaigns, Cheating
The top two voting issues for Americans, according to Pew Research Center, were the economy and terrorism, followed by foreign policy, health care, gun policy and immigration. During his campaign, Trump called for building a wall at the Mexican border, draining “the swamp” (meaning ending corruption in Washington, D.C.) and opposing free trade deals. Clinton’s campaign centered on health care, rights for women, minorities and LGBT and fair taxes.
But in a battle of slogans—"I'm With Her" vs. "Make America Great Again”—both campaigns were fraught with scandals and negative attacks.
Trump opponents were fueled by reports of sexual misconduct, including a leaked "Access Hollywood" recording of him bragging about groping women. Opponents also focused on Trump’s controversial comments and Tweets on immigrants, race and more, his attacks on the news media and violent protesters who lobbied for his election.
Clinton opponents, meanwhile, rallied around chants of "Lock her up," citing an ongoing FBI investigation into possible improper use of her personal email server during her time as secretary of state. The FBI concluded in July 2016 that no charges should be made in the case, but on October 28, then-FBI Director James Comey informed Congress the FBI was investigating more Clinton emails. On November 6, two days before the election, Comey reported to Congress that the additional emails did not change the agency’s prior report.
Going into election night, Clinton led in nearly all final polls. According to The New York Times and based on exit polls, Trump's win was attributed to his ability to not only consolidate the support of white voters (especially those without college degrees), but with minority and lower-income groups, as well (Editors 2-3).
A final dramatic interlude would give ulcers to her [Hillary’s] supporters. Twelve days before the election, the FBI’s Comey sent a letter to Congress saying that the investigation into the sexting habits of disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner led to the discovery of e-mails from Clinton’s server, likely sent or received by Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, Clinton’s closest personal aide.
The letter shocked the media and launched a breathless reassessment of her chances. Though the announcement contained no real content, and a week later, Comey would come forth to say that no new e-mails were found, the news provided traction to fears that Clinton’s continued political career would continue to be a never-ending parade of investigations and leaks. Republican-leaning independents and outright partisans came home to Trump, perhaps experiencing flash-backs to the 1990s and the media’s public obsession with Clinton scandals.
Indeed, Comey’s role in the campaign underscored how little attention traditional policy issues received compared to hyped-up scandals. Trump’s agenda promises little real help to those voters who backed him, but plenty of assistance to wealthy Americans. Yet there was a single issue in this race that dominated everything else, and it was this: Who is an American?
Trump’s flirtation with white supremacists, the anti-semitic nature of his campaign rhetoric, his constant bashing of immigrants generally and specifically Mexicans, his treatment of women and vision of their role in society, all made him a throwback to a time before the US debate over the virtues of social diversity.
In his criticisms of political correctness and depiction of an apocalyptic America, Trump found a constituency—of white voters in communities threatened by the all too real changes facing the United States—that Republicans had represented before but never with such alacrity. Their reaction to a changing America, catalyzed by Trump’s demagogic appeals, generated an electoral firestorm that few foresaw. Clinton’s more optimistic vision that emphasized the new picture of America clearly didn’t resonate with working class white voters who once reliably pulled the lever for her party’s previous nominees.
For all the demographic changes the United States has seen in recent years, white voters remain the largest single constituency and now, in the words of one electoral analyst, they are voting like a minority group. Trump’s ability to drive them out echoes the leverage of enthusiasm used by Obama to deliver his majorities in 2008 and 2012. The question that will haunt Democrats, at least into 2020, will be whether a different candidate—one without Clinton’s unique and overbearing history—could have held the center (Fernholz 13-14).
When Donald Trump claimed, "the election's going to be rigged," he wasn't entirely wrong. But the threat was not, as Trump warned, from Americans committing the crime of "voting many, many times." What's far more likely to undermine democracy in November is the culmination of a decade-long Republican effort to disenfranchise voters under the guise of battling voter fraud. The latest tool: Election officials in more than two dozen states have compiled lists of citizens whom they allege could be registered in more than one state – thus potentially able to cast multiple ballots – and eligible to be purged from the voter rolls.
The data is processed through a system called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which is being promoted by a powerful Republican operative, and its lists of potential duplicate voters are kept confidential. But Rolling Stone obtained a portion of the list and the names of 1 million targeted voters. According to our analysis, the Crosscheck list disproportionately threatens solid Democratic constituencies: young, black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters – with some of the biggest possible purges underway in Ohio and North Carolina, two crucial swing states with tight Senate races.
Like all weapons of vote suppression, Crosscheck is a response to the imaginary menace of mass voter fraud. In the mid-2000s, after the Florida-recount debacle, the Bush administration launched a five-year investigation into the allegedly rampant crime but found scant evidence of wrongdoing. Still, the GOP has perpetuated the myth in every national election since. Recently, North Carolina Board of Elections chief Kim Strach testified to her legislature that 35,750 voters are "registered in North Carolina and another state and voted in both in the 2012 general election." … Yet despite hiring an ex-FBI agent to lead the hunt, the state has charged exactly zero double voters from the Crosscheck list. Nevertheless, tens of thousands face the loss of their ability to vote – all for the sake of preventing a crime that rarely happens. So far, Crosscheck has tagged an astonishing 7.2 million suspects, yet we found no more than four perpetrators who have been charged with double voting or deliberate double registration.
On its surface, Crosscheck seems quite reasonable. Twenty-eight participating states share their voter lists and, in the name of dispassionate, race-blind Big Data, seek to ensure the rolls are up to date. To make sure the system finds suspect voters, Crosscheck supposedly matches first, middle and last name, plus birth date, and provides the last four digits of a Social Security number for additional verification.
In reality, however, there have been signs that the program doesn't operate as advertised. Some states have dropped out of Crosscheck, citing problems with its methodology, as Oregon's secretary of state recently explained: "We left [Crosscheck] because the data we received was unreliable."
In our effort to report on the program, we contacted every state for their Crosscheck list. But because voting twice is a felony, state after state told us their lists of suspects were part of a criminal investigation and, as such, confidential. Then we got a break. A clerk in Virginia sent us its Crosscheck list of suspects, which a letter from the state later said was done "in error."
The Virginia list was a revelation. In all, 342,556 names were listed as apparently registered to vote in both Virginia and another state as of January 2014. Thirteen percent of the people on the Crosscheck list, already flagged as inactive voters, were almost immediately removed, meaning a stunning 41,637 names were "canceled" from voter rolls, most of them just before Election Day.
We were able to obtain more lists – Georgia and Washington state, the total number of voters adding up to more than 1 million matches – and Crosscheck's results seemed at best deeply flawed. We found that one-fourth of the names on the list actually lacked a middle-name match. The system can also mistakenly identify fathers and sons as the same voter, ignoring designations of Jr. and Sr. A whole lot of people named "James Brown" are suspected of voting or registering twice, 357 of them in Georgia alone. But according to Crosscheck, James Willie Brown is supposed to be the same voter as James Arthur Brown. James Clifford Brown is allegedly the same voter as James Lynn Brown.
And those promised birth dates and Social Security numbers? The Crosscheck instruction manual says that "Social Security numbers are included for verification; the numbers might or might not match" – which leaves a crucial step in the identification process up to the states. Social Security numbers weren't even included in the state lists we obtained.
We had Mark Swedlund, a database expert whose clients include eBay and American Express, look at the data from Georgia and Virginia, and he was shocked by Crosscheck's "childish methodology." He added, "God forbid your name is Garcia, of which there are 858,000 in the U.S., and your first name is Joseph or Jose. You're probably suspected of voting in 27 states."
Swedlund's statistical analysis found that African-American, Latino and Asian names predominate, a simple result of the Crosscheck matching process, which spews out little more than a bunch of common names. No surprise: The U.S. Census data shows that minorities are overrepresented in 85 of 100 of the most common last names. If your name is Washington, there's an 89 percent chance you're African-American. If your last name is Hernandez, there's a 94 percent chance you're Hispanic. If your name is Kim, there's a 95 percent chance you're Asian.
…
Every voter that the state marks as a legitimate match receives a postcard that is colorless and covered with minuscule text. The voter must verify his or her address and mail it back to their secretary of state. Fail to return the postcard and the process of taking your name off the voter rolls begins.
This postcard game amplifies Crosscheck's built-in racial bias. According to the Census Bureau, white voters are 21 percent more likely than blacks or Hispanics to respond to their official requests; homeowners are 32 percent more likely to respond than renters; and the young are 74 percent less likely than the old to respond. Those on the move – students and the poor, who often shift apartments while hunting for work – will likely not get the mail in the first place.
…
In January 2013, [Kris] Kobach [Kansas Secretary of State] addressed a gathering of the National Association of State Election Directors about combating an epidemic of ballot-stuffing across the country. He announced that Crosscheck had already uncovered 697,537 "potential duplicate voters" in 15 states, and that the state of Kansas was prepared to cover the cost of compiling a nationwide list. That was enough to persuade 13 more states to hand over their voter files to Kobach's office.
In battleground-state Ohio, Republican Secretary of State John Husted's Crosscheck has flagged close to half a million voters. In Dayton, we tracked down several of the suspects on our lists. Hot spots of "potential duplicate" voters, we couldn't help but notice, were in neighborhoods where the streets are pocked with rundown houses and boarded storefronts. On Otterbein Avenue, I met Donald Webster, who, like most in his neighborhood, is African-American.
Crosscheck lists him registered in Ohio as Donald Alexander Webster Jr., while registered a second time as Donald Eugene Webster (no "Jr.") in Charlottesville, Virginia. Webster says he's never been a "Eugene" and has never been to Charlottesville. I explained that both he and his Virginia doppelgänger were subject to losing their ability to vote.
… Robert Fitrakis, a voting-rights attorney, … examined our Crosscheck data. I showed him Donald Webster's listing – and page after page of Ohio voters. Fitrakis says that the Ohio secretary of state's enthusiasm for Crosscheck fits a pattern: "He doesn't want to match middle names, because he doesn't want real matches. They're targeting people with clearly defined ethnic names that typically vote for the Democratic Party. He wants to win Ohio the only way he knows how – by taking away the rights of citizens to vote."
…
Kobach's Crosscheck purge machinery was in operation well before Trump arrived on the political scene – and will continue for elections to come. Low voter turnout of any kind traditionally favors the GOP, and this is the party's long game to keep the rolls free of young people, minorities and the poor. … (Palast “GOP’s” 1-3).
We should not be blind to the fact that Republican-controlled states have continued to use old and improved upon disenfranchisement tactics. The League of Women Voters recently outed thirteen guilty states.
This year, and for several years, there has been a concerted effort in many states to stop some voters from voting, or to make it much harder for them to participate. Since the Supreme Court rolled back key provisions of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, elected officials have purged existing voters from the rolls, made cuts to early voting, reduced polling places, put in place strict voter photo ID laws and levied onerous voter registration restrictions.
…
Tight margins in some key elections show that suppression may play a role.
In Wisconsin, President-elect Trump beat Secretary Clinton by roughly 27,000 votes, however according to federal court, 300,000 registered voters lacked the proper photo ID.
…
In 2016, the League [of Women Voters] worked to make sure voters impacted by new laws were aware of these restrictions. In Ohio, the League made thousands of phone calls to inform voters about that state’s purge. In Virginia, the League conducted outreach so voters knew about the new ID law. In Kansas, the League worked to register voters and provide them information. Across the country League members volunteered as non-partisan poll observers.
What states rigged their elections? Here’s the list of 13 states with new voting restrictions in effect in the 2016 election:
1. Alabama saw a new restrictive photo ID requirement in 2016. There is ongoing litigation that could require voters to provide more burdensome documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote.
2. Arizona for the first time had limitations on mail-in ballot collection. This law made it a felony to turn in another voter’s completed ballot. This practice is popular for rural and Native American communities that do not have access to reliable transportation or postal offices.
3. Indiana now permits election officers to demand voters provide proof of identification. This law subjects voters to an additional and duplicative voter identification requirement that did not exist before the law was enacted.
4. Kansas continued attempts to require documentary proof of citizenship in order to register to vote by mail and at the DMV. Courts overturned these requirements but many voters who tried to register were put on a suspense list.
5. Mississippi passed a restrictive photo ID requirement that was allowed to go into effect after the U.S Supreme Court gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in 2013.
6. New Hampshire enacted a new photo ID law, requiring voters without acceptable ID to be photographed at the polls, and the photograph to be affixed to an affidavit.
7. Ohio made cuts to early voting and changed absentee and provisional ballot rules. The Buckeye State also eliminated the period known as “Golden Week”, when voters can register and cast a ballot on the same day. The Secretary of State also purged more than 1 million Ohio voters from the registration rolls.
8. Rhode Island voters needed to provide a valid photo ID to vote this year. Voters without ID could only cast provisional ballots.
9. South Carolina for the first time required voters who have photo IDs to produce them in order to vote in this presidential election. Voters without ID needed to sign an affidavit at the polls and could only cast a provisional ballot.
10. Tennessee lawmakers made the photo ID law already in place more restrictive by limiting acceptable IDs to only those issued by the state or federal government. The state conducted an illegal purge of voters who hadn’t recently voted.
11. Texas instituted one of the most restrictive photo ID laws in the nation, but was blocked in the courts. The state then required voters with ID to produce it, and individuals lacking the official ID could vote only after showing a different form of identification and signing a declaration.
12. Virginia limited voter registration by civic organizations and required restrictive photo ID for the first time.
13. Wisconsin reduced early voting hours on weekdays and eliminated them entirely on weekends. Voters also were required to show photo IDs for the first time (Courtney 1-2).
Then there is this revelation that Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary for Bill Clinton, revealed on Facebook September 28, 2020.
A news outlet in the United Kingdom has obtained the massive database used by the Trump campaign’s digital operation in 2016. Their investigation found that 3.5 million Black voters were sorted into a “Deterrence” category — voters the campaign wanted to stay home on Election Day.
The campaign used an algorithm to sort nearly 200 million voters into one of eight categories, which it then targeted with tailored Facebook ads. Black voters overwhelmingly made up the “Deterrence” category: in Georgia, for instance, Black people make up 32 percent of the population but comprised 61 percent of the Trump campaign’s “Deterrence” category. It was the same story across multiple swing states: the Trump campaign used its vast database to disproportionately target Black voters on Facebook and other social media with negative ads designed to discourage them from voting.
Make no mistake: this is digital voter suppression. And thanks to Facebook’s practically nonexistent rules on political advertising at the time, no complete public record exists to examine the ads used by the Trump campaign or the audience lists it used to target voters. That means we have no way of knowing how much money Facebook raked in through the Trump campaign’s attempts to suppress the votes of Black Americans. Time and again, Mark Zuckerberg has shown he cares more about profits than protecting our democracy. Even now, multiple scandals later, his new rules for political advertising and misinformation are woefully insufficient and arbitrarily enforced. He hasn’t changed one bit (Reich 1).
Reich’s post is based on this article: https://www.channel4.com/news/reveale...
Works cited:
Courtney, Sarah, “The 2016 Presidential Election Was Rigged.” League of Woman Voters, November 23, 2016. Web. https://www.lwv.org/newsroom/press-re...
Editors of History.com, “The 2016 US Presidential Election.” History, August 5, 2019. Web. https://www.history.com/topics/us-pre...
Fernholz, Tim, “How Hillary Clinton Blew It.” Quartz, November 8, 2016. Web. https://qz.com/831141/2016-presidenti...
Palast, Greg, “The GOP’s Stealth War against Voters.” Rolling Stone, August 24, 2016. Web.https://www.rollingstone.com/politics...
Reich, Robert, Facebook entry, September 28, 2020.
But in a battle of slogans—"I'm With Her" vs. "Make America Great Again”—both campaigns were fraught with scandals and negative attacks.
Trump opponents were fueled by reports of sexual misconduct, including a leaked "Access Hollywood" recording of him bragging about groping women. Opponents also focused on Trump’s controversial comments and Tweets on immigrants, race and more, his attacks on the news media and violent protesters who lobbied for his election.
Clinton opponents, meanwhile, rallied around chants of "Lock her up," citing an ongoing FBI investigation into possible improper use of her personal email server during her time as secretary of state. The FBI concluded in July 2016 that no charges should be made in the case, but on October 28, then-FBI Director James Comey informed Congress the FBI was investigating more Clinton emails. On November 6, two days before the election, Comey reported to Congress that the additional emails did not change the agency’s prior report.
Going into election night, Clinton led in nearly all final polls. According to The New York Times and based on exit polls, Trump's win was attributed to his ability to not only consolidate the support of white voters (especially those without college degrees), but with minority and lower-income groups, as well (Editors 2-3).
A final dramatic interlude would give ulcers to her [Hillary’s] supporters. Twelve days before the election, the FBI’s Comey sent a letter to Congress saying that the investigation into the sexting habits of disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner led to the discovery of e-mails from Clinton’s server, likely sent or received by Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, Clinton’s closest personal aide.
The letter shocked the media and launched a breathless reassessment of her chances. Though the announcement contained no real content, and a week later, Comey would come forth to say that no new e-mails were found, the news provided traction to fears that Clinton’s continued political career would continue to be a never-ending parade of investigations and leaks. Republican-leaning independents and outright partisans came home to Trump, perhaps experiencing flash-backs to the 1990s and the media’s public obsession with Clinton scandals.
Indeed, Comey’s role in the campaign underscored how little attention traditional policy issues received compared to hyped-up scandals. Trump’s agenda promises little real help to those voters who backed him, but plenty of assistance to wealthy Americans. Yet there was a single issue in this race that dominated everything else, and it was this: Who is an American?
Trump’s flirtation with white supremacists, the anti-semitic nature of his campaign rhetoric, his constant bashing of immigrants generally and specifically Mexicans, his treatment of women and vision of their role in society, all made him a throwback to a time before the US debate over the virtues of social diversity.
In his criticisms of political correctness and depiction of an apocalyptic America, Trump found a constituency—of white voters in communities threatened by the all too real changes facing the United States—that Republicans had represented before but never with such alacrity. Their reaction to a changing America, catalyzed by Trump’s demagogic appeals, generated an electoral firestorm that few foresaw. Clinton’s more optimistic vision that emphasized the new picture of America clearly didn’t resonate with working class white voters who once reliably pulled the lever for her party’s previous nominees.
For all the demographic changes the United States has seen in recent years, white voters remain the largest single constituency and now, in the words of one electoral analyst, they are voting like a minority group. Trump’s ability to drive them out echoes the leverage of enthusiasm used by Obama to deliver his majorities in 2008 and 2012. The question that will haunt Democrats, at least into 2020, will be whether a different candidate—one without Clinton’s unique and overbearing history—could have held the center (Fernholz 13-14).
When Donald Trump claimed, "the election's going to be rigged," he wasn't entirely wrong. But the threat was not, as Trump warned, from Americans committing the crime of "voting many, many times." What's far more likely to undermine democracy in November is the culmination of a decade-long Republican effort to disenfranchise voters under the guise of battling voter fraud. The latest tool: Election officials in more than two dozen states have compiled lists of citizens whom they allege could be registered in more than one state – thus potentially able to cast multiple ballots – and eligible to be purged from the voter rolls.
The data is processed through a system called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which is being promoted by a powerful Republican operative, and its lists of potential duplicate voters are kept confidential. But Rolling Stone obtained a portion of the list and the names of 1 million targeted voters. According to our analysis, the Crosscheck list disproportionately threatens solid Democratic constituencies: young, black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters – with some of the biggest possible purges underway in Ohio and North Carolina, two crucial swing states with tight Senate races.
Like all weapons of vote suppression, Crosscheck is a response to the imaginary menace of mass voter fraud. In the mid-2000s, after the Florida-recount debacle, the Bush administration launched a five-year investigation into the allegedly rampant crime but found scant evidence of wrongdoing. Still, the GOP has perpetuated the myth in every national election since. Recently, North Carolina Board of Elections chief Kim Strach testified to her legislature that 35,750 voters are "registered in North Carolina and another state and voted in both in the 2012 general election." … Yet despite hiring an ex-FBI agent to lead the hunt, the state has charged exactly zero double voters from the Crosscheck list. Nevertheless, tens of thousands face the loss of their ability to vote – all for the sake of preventing a crime that rarely happens. So far, Crosscheck has tagged an astonishing 7.2 million suspects, yet we found no more than four perpetrators who have been charged with double voting or deliberate double registration.
On its surface, Crosscheck seems quite reasonable. Twenty-eight participating states share their voter lists and, in the name of dispassionate, race-blind Big Data, seek to ensure the rolls are up to date. To make sure the system finds suspect voters, Crosscheck supposedly matches first, middle and last name, plus birth date, and provides the last four digits of a Social Security number for additional verification.
In reality, however, there have been signs that the program doesn't operate as advertised. Some states have dropped out of Crosscheck, citing problems with its methodology, as Oregon's secretary of state recently explained: "We left [Crosscheck] because the data we received was unreliable."
In our effort to report on the program, we contacted every state for their Crosscheck list. But because voting twice is a felony, state after state told us their lists of suspects were part of a criminal investigation and, as such, confidential. Then we got a break. A clerk in Virginia sent us its Crosscheck list of suspects, which a letter from the state later said was done "in error."
The Virginia list was a revelation. In all, 342,556 names were listed as apparently registered to vote in both Virginia and another state as of January 2014. Thirteen percent of the people on the Crosscheck list, already flagged as inactive voters, were almost immediately removed, meaning a stunning 41,637 names were "canceled" from voter rolls, most of them just before Election Day.
We were able to obtain more lists – Georgia and Washington state, the total number of voters adding up to more than 1 million matches – and Crosscheck's results seemed at best deeply flawed. We found that one-fourth of the names on the list actually lacked a middle-name match. The system can also mistakenly identify fathers and sons as the same voter, ignoring designations of Jr. and Sr. A whole lot of people named "James Brown" are suspected of voting or registering twice, 357 of them in Georgia alone. But according to Crosscheck, James Willie Brown is supposed to be the same voter as James Arthur Brown. James Clifford Brown is allegedly the same voter as James Lynn Brown.
And those promised birth dates and Social Security numbers? The Crosscheck instruction manual says that "Social Security numbers are included for verification; the numbers might or might not match" – which leaves a crucial step in the identification process up to the states. Social Security numbers weren't even included in the state lists we obtained.
We had Mark Swedlund, a database expert whose clients include eBay and American Express, look at the data from Georgia and Virginia, and he was shocked by Crosscheck's "childish methodology." He added, "God forbid your name is Garcia, of which there are 858,000 in the U.S., and your first name is Joseph or Jose. You're probably suspected of voting in 27 states."
Swedlund's statistical analysis found that African-American, Latino and Asian names predominate, a simple result of the Crosscheck matching process, which spews out little more than a bunch of common names. No surprise: The U.S. Census data shows that minorities are overrepresented in 85 of 100 of the most common last names. If your name is Washington, there's an 89 percent chance you're African-American. If your last name is Hernandez, there's a 94 percent chance you're Hispanic. If your name is Kim, there's a 95 percent chance you're Asian.
…
Every voter that the state marks as a legitimate match receives a postcard that is colorless and covered with minuscule text. The voter must verify his or her address and mail it back to their secretary of state. Fail to return the postcard and the process of taking your name off the voter rolls begins.
This postcard game amplifies Crosscheck's built-in racial bias. According to the Census Bureau, white voters are 21 percent more likely than blacks or Hispanics to respond to their official requests; homeowners are 32 percent more likely to respond than renters; and the young are 74 percent less likely than the old to respond. Those on the move – students and the poor, who often shift apartments while hunting for work – will likely not get the mail in the first place.
…
In January 2013, [Kris] Kobach [Kansas Secretary of State] addressed a gathering of the National Association of State Election Directors about combating an epidemic of ballot-stuffing across the country. He announced that Crosscheck had already uncovered 697,537 "potential duplicate voters" in 15 states, and that the state of Kansas was prepared to cover the cost of compiling a nationwide list. That was enough to persuade 13 more states to hand over their voter files to Kobach's office.
In battleground-state Ohio, Republican Secretary of State John Husted's Crosscheck has flagged close to half a million voters. In Dayton, we tracked down several of the suspects on our lists. Hot spots of "potential duplicate" voters, we couldn't help but notice, were in neighborhoods where the streets are pocked with rundown houses and boarded storefronts. On Otterbein Avenue, I met Donald Webster, who, like most in his neighborhood, is African-American.
Crosscheck lists him registered in Ohio as Donald Alexander Webster Jr., while registered a second time as Donald Eugene Webster (no "Jr.") in Charlottesville, Virginia. Webster says he's never been a "Eugene" and has never been to Charlottesville. I explained that both he and his Virginia doppelgänger were subject to losing their ability to vote.
… Robert Fitrakis, a voting-rights attorney, … examined our Crosscheck data. I showed him Donald Webster's listing – and page after page of Ohio voters. Fitrakis says that the Ohio secretary of state's enthusiasm for Crosscheck fits a pattern: "He doesn't want to match middle names, because he doesn't want real matches. They're targeting people with clearly defined ethnic names that typically vote for the Democratic Party. He wants to win Ohio the only way he knows how – by taking away the rights of citizens to vote."
…
Kobach's Crosscheck purge machinery was in operation well before Trump arrived on the political scene – and will continue for elections to come. Low voter turnout of any kind traditionally favors the GOP, and this is the party's long game to keep the rolls free of young people, minorities and the poor. … (Palast “GOP’s” 1-3).
We should not be blind to the fact that Republican-controlled states have continued to use old and improved upon disenfranchisement tactics. The League of Women Voters recently outed thirteen guilty states.
This year, and for several years, there has been a concerted effort in many states to stop some voters from voting, or to make it much harder for them to participate. Since the Supreme Court rolled back key provisions of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, elected officials have purged existing voters from the rolls, made cuts to early voting, reduced polling places, put in place strict voter photo ID laws and levied onerous voter registration restrictions.
…
Tight margins in some key elections show that suppression may play a role.
In Wisconsin, President-elect Trump beat Secretary Clinton by roughly 27,000 votes, however according to federal court, 300,000 registered voters lacked the proper photo ID.
…
In 2016, the League [of Women Voters] worked to make sure voters impacted by new laws were aware of these restrictions. In Ohio, the League made thousands of phone calls to inform voters about that state’s purge. In Virginia, the League conducted outreach so voters knew about the new ID law. In Kansas, the League worked to register voters and provide them information. Across the country League members volunteered as non-partisan poll observers.
What states rigged their elections? Here’s the list of 13 states with new voting restrictions in effect in the 2016 election:
1. Alabama saw a new restrictive photo ID requirement in 2016. There is ongoing litigation that could require voters to provide more burdensome documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote.
2. Arizona for the first time had limitations on mail-in ballot collection. This law made it a felony to turn in another voter’s completed ballot. This practice is popular for rural and Native American communities that do not have access to reliable transportation or postal offices.
3. Indiana now permits election officers to demand voters provide proof of identification. This law subjects voters to an additional and duplicative voter identification requirement that did not exist before the law was enacted.
4. Kansas continued attempts to require documentary proof of citizenship in order to register to vote by mail and at the DMV. Courts overturned these requirements but many voters who tried to register were put on a suspense list.
5. Mississippi passed a restrictive photo ID requirement that was allowed to go into effect after the U.S Supreme Court gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in 2013.
6. New Hampshire enacted a new photo ID law, requiring voters without acceptable ID to be photographed at the polls, and the photograph to be affixed to an affidavit.
7. Ohio made cuts to early voting and changed absentee and provisional ballot rules. The Buckeye State also eliminated the period known as “Golden Week”, when voters can register and cast a ballot on the same day. The Secretary of State also purged more than 1 million Ohio voters from the registration rolls.
8. Rhode Island voters needed to provide a valid photo ID to vote this year. Voters without ID could only cast provisional ballots.
9. South Carolina for the first time required voters who have photo IDs to produce them in order to vote in this presidential election. Voters without ID needed to sign an affidavit at the polls and could only cast a provisional ballot.
10. Tennessee lawmakers made the photo ID law already in place more restrictive by limiting acceptable IDs to only those issued by the state or federal government. The state conducted an illegal purge of voters who hadn’t recently voted.
11. Texas instituted one of the most restrictive photo ID laws in the nation, but was blocked in the courts. The state then required voters with ID to produce it, and individuals lacking the official ID could vote only after showing a different form of identification and signing a declaration.
12. Virginia limited voter registration by civic organizations and required restrictive photo ID for the first time.
13. Wisconsin reduced early voting hours on weekdays and eliminated them entirely on weekends. Voters also were required to show photo IDs for the first time (Courtney 1-2).
Then there is this revelation that Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary for Bill Clinton, revealed on Facebook September 28, 2020.
A news outlet in the United Kingdom has obtained the massive database used by the Trump campaign’s digital operation in 2016. Their investigation found that 3.5 million Black voters were sorted into a “Deterrence” category — voters the campaign wanted to stay home on Election Day.
The campaign used an algorithm to sort nearly 200 million voters into one of eight categories, which it then targeted with tailored Facebook ads. Black voters overwhelmingly made up the “Deterrence” category: in Georgia, for instance, Black people make up 32 percent of the population but comprised 61 percent of the Trump campaign’s “Deterrence” category. It was the same story across multiple swing states: the Trump campaign used its vast database to disproportionately target Black voters on Facebook and other social media with negative ads designed to discourage them from voting.
Make no mistake: this is digital voter suppression. And thanks to Facebook’s practically nonexistent rules on political advertising at the time, no complete public record exists to examine the ads used by the Trump campaign or the audience lists it used to target voters. That means we have no way of knowing how much money Facebook raked in through the Trump campaign’s attempts to suppress the votes of Black Americans. Time and again, Mark Zuckerberg has shown he cares more about profits than protecting our democracy. Even now, multiple scandals later, his new rules for political advertising and misinformation are woefully insufficient and arbitrarily enforced. He hasn’t changed one bit (Reich 1).
Reich’s post is based on this article: https://www.channel4.com/news/reveale...
Works cited:
Courtney, Sarah, “The 2016 Presidential Election Was Rigged.” League of Woman Voters, November 23, 2016. Web. https://www.lwv.org/newsroom/press-re...
Editors of History.com, “The 2016 US Presidential Election.” History, August 5, 2019. Web. https://www.history.com/topics/us-pre...
Fernholz, Tim, “How Hillary Clinton Blew It.” Quartz, November 8, 2016. Web. https://qz.com/831141/2016-presidenti...
Palast, Greg, “The GOP’s Stealth War against Voters.” Rolling Stone, August 24, 2016. Web.https://www.rollingstone.com/politics...
Reich, Robert, Facebook entry, September 28, 2020.
October 8, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2016 Election -- Liar, Liar
Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!
… The Guardian has catalogued more than 100 falsehoods made by the Republican nominee over the last 150 days, and sorted them according to theme.
Degrade and Destroy
For decades, Trump has described America and its leaders in apocalyptic terms. He thought Ronald Reagan weak and “a disaster”, he lambasted George HW Bush and Bill Clinton’s policies, and after supporting George W Bush’s Iraq invasion, quickly dismissed that war as “a mess”.
In Trump’s world, crime is always rising (the national rate fell for decades), and African Americans are “living in hell” (they are not). Migrants are flooding in (more Mexicans are leaving than arriving), and they bring violence (there is no evidence that they do). Civilian and military leaders are always clueless (Trump received five deferments from Vietnam), except when they love him. We have no idea who refugees or undocumented migrants are, and they take our jobs (we know very well who they are; they include his wife).
Trump’s vision of the US has been, for decades, one of dystopia – he even described the 1990s as a crisis worse than the Great Depression. But amid all this desolation Trump gains three things. He fuels doubt and fear, leaving people vulnerable; he denigrates his opposition en masse, blaming the world on them; and he raises himself up above the nonexistent wreckage.
Embiggen Big League
Like a man who once took a joke about the size of his hands too hard, Trump spends a lot of time trying to look as large as possible, from his never-proven $10bn worth (Forbes estimates $3.7bn) to crowds at his rallies and his success in meaningless internet polls.
This self-inflation is pierced throughout by paperwork. In March, the Guardian found that Trump valued a New York golf course at $50m in one document and at $1.4m in a court filing (he sued to pay lower taxes). On Thursday, the New York Times reported similarly huge discrepancies in his reported income. The Washington Post has shown repeatedly that Trump’s boasts of charitable giving have virtually nothing behind them.
He has also falsely bragged of endorsements from federal agencies and claimed “many environmental awards”, and tried the ploy in reverse: he has called the millions his father gave him as “a small loan” and portrayed his $916m loss in 1995 as an example of “smart” tax avoidance.
…
Shout at the Messenger
Whenever in doubt, Trump attacks what he calls “the dishonest media”, accusing reporters (without evidence) of bias, inaccuracy and a failure to show the size of his rallies. He ignores that reporters quote him extensively, call his campaign for comment, interview his supporters, his rival’s campaign and independent voters and experts. He often cites news stories about Clinton, and even praised fact-checkers in a presidential debate for catching her in a falsehood.
At every rally, Trump says the cameras refuse to show his audience, even though his campaign forces cameras to stay within a small pen, where they pan to show the crowd – as anyone at his rallies or watching online can see. Only one camera at each event stays fixed on Trump: the shared “pool” camera, whose footage networks share and which stays on Trump so as not to miss his speech.
Last week, NBC’s Katy Tur, a target for criticism from the podium, noted that Trump “has joked in private with reporters about how he understands how the pool camera works”.
“This is a shtick that he does to rile up his base,” she said, “to give them an excuse for polls that might not be in his favor, to give them an excuse to berate someone that’s not Donald Trump.”
Trump’s scorched earth insults, like his attacks on other institutions, try to delegitimize authority and leave only himself in its place. But while most Americans still respect other institutions that Trump has demeaned, the press was vulnerable. Decades of cable news punditry had already diminished opinion of the press, and the internet has sapped major newspapers of their powers to compete with openly partisan sites, fake news and social media networks. Trump tried to fill the vacuum.
Conspiracy Smoke, Fire Not Required
Trump’s most famous false conspiracy, about Barack Obama’s birthplace and who started birtherism, is only one of many.
There was Ted Cruz’s father and JFK’s assassin, drawn from a tabloid with ties to Trump; the climate change “hoax” that was “invented by the Chinese”; the Muslims who cheered September 11; the vaccines that cause autism; the Miss Universe “sex tape”; the political correctness of San Bernardino; the secret Muslim president and his secret terror agenda; and the antisemitism-tinged plot of bankers and the media.
…
Trump himself seems to get lost in the intrigue, and sometimes slips into a Dadaist jumble of anti-Clinton allusions – Whitewater, cattle futures, Benghazi, uranium, Blumenthal, “bleaching” 33,000 emails – that sound sinister when put together. This is apparently the desired effect: a haze of noxious sentiment, even if no one has found fire for all that smoke.
For more than 20 years, journalists and congressional Republicans have tried. The latter have spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars investigating the Clintons’ associations and careless email practices but have yet to find criminal conduct.
Arguably Trump’s worst conspiracy is his insistence that voter fraud has “rigged” the election, which merges his fringe claims with his attack on institutions. No evidence supports the claim of widespread fraud and the decentralized electoral college makes such a conspiracy functionally impossible – but the claim gives Trump something to blame failure on besides himself. Like his other conspiracies, it sows doubt and distrust, diminishing the nation so that Trump can portray himself as an authority.
Trump’s favorite escape from this maze is the phrase “there’s something going on”, which lets Trump suggest malevolence, claim ignorance and say nothing of substance at all.
Deny Everything
When cornered by his own quotes or something he doesn’t know, Trump often lies with blunt denials – “wrong!” – or variations of the phrases “that’s very important” or “we’ll look into it”.
He also tries to wriggle out of uncomfortable situations with this tactic, most notably when he claimed ignorance of David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader who has professed approval for his policies, and white supremacists. Trump had disavowed Duke a few days earlier and denounced him in 2000, but in February he refused to condemn like-minded supporters, saying: “I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists.”
On the edge of pointless self-inflation and denial is Trump’s fixation with Vladimir Putin, whom he has claimed to know “very well”, to have spoken with “indirectly and directly”, and to have never met and “know nothing” about. Trump also falsely insists that Putin called him “a genius” (Putin called him “flamboyant”).
Distortions
Not all Trump’s falsehoods are exotic. Like Clinton and many career politicians, he sprinkles misleading statistics into speeches, including on the murder rate, African American unemployment, poverty among Hispanic Americans, the deficit and taxes.
Trump also takes the tactic a step further, condensing whole arguments into outrageous soundbites. This is how a conservative argument about military presence in Iraq transformed into the claim that Obama “founded” Isis and how Clinton’s support for immigration reform became “open borders” (Yuhas 1-5).
In their personalities and their politics, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump might not have much in common, but in the public eye they share one glaring characteristic: A lot of people don’t believe what they say. In a July New York Times/CBS poll, less than one-third of respondents said Clinton is honest and trustworthy. Trump’s scores were about the same.
Trump’s campaign-trail falsehoods are so legion that cataloguing them has become a journalistic pastime. With a cocky disdain for anything as boring as evidence, the presumptive GOP nominee confidently repeats baseless assertions: He purports to have watched American Muslims celebrate the Twin Towers’ fall; he overstates the sizes of the crowds at his rallies, he understates America’s GDP growth rate, and no reputable business publication agrees with his claims of a personal net worth of $10 billion. In March, when three Politico reporters fact-checked Trump’s statements for a week, they found he had uttered “roughly one misstatement every five minutes.” Collectively, his falsehoods won PolitiFact’s 2015 “Lie of the Year” award. Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks has judged Trump “perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes.”
Clinton isn’t an egregious fabricator like Trump, but she’s been dogged her whole career by a sense of inauthenticity—the perception that she’s selling herself as something she isn’t, whether that’s a feminist, a liberal, a moderate or a fighter for the working class. Detractors, especially on the right, have deemed her dishonest about the facts as well. In 1996, New York Times columnist William Safire called her a “congenital liar,” and decried as utterly implausible Clinton’s statements about commodities trading, the firing of White House travel staff and the investigation of Vince Foster’s suicide. Although unfounded, his charges stuck. Feeding the image of a prevaricator, Clinton has also waffled on or modified her policy positions over the years on issues ranging from free trade to gay marriage. And that doesn’t even include the ongoing investigation of the private email server she used during her tenure as secretary of state, and her highly disputed statements about whether and how it conflicted with government rules.
…
On the whole, Clinton’s misstatements are those of a typical politician. She has changed her position on a number of issues, and some of these reversals—like her newfound opposition to the Pacific trade deal she championed as secretary of state—rise to the level of flip-flops or, perhaps, insincere electioneering designed to obscure what she really thinks. In defending her use of a private email server, Clinton has clearly stretched the truth, though whether she grasps the fallaciousness of her statements or believes herself to be giving straight answers is impossible to know. Her biggest problem is how she responds to questions about her veracity. She invariably defaults to a lawyerly persona—a guarded, defensive and hedging style that inhibits her from explaining herself in the relaxed, “authentic” manner voters like to see. That hyper-defensiveness, the lack of apparent forthrightness, is what gave rise to charges like Safire’s two decades ago and what perpetuates the impression that she doesn’t level with the public.
Trump is much more shameless as a trafficker in untruth. He seems willing to say whatever he deems necessary to win support at the moment, and he tries to get people to accept his statements through the sheer vehemence of his rhetoric. When he says, falsely, that “there’s no real assimilation” among “second- and third-generation” Muslims in the United States, it clearly doesn’t matter to Trump whether he’s right; what matters is that he wants us to believe he’s right. Many of his misstatements, taken individually, may be fairly innocent or at least commonplace, but the brazenness and frequency of the falsehoods, and their evident expedience, are what set Trump apart. Moreover, his typical response to being called out is to double down on a falsehood—like denying that he backed the 2003 Iraq invasion and the 2011 Libya intervention—or to pretend he never uttered it, showing an egregious unconcern or contempt for truth that taxes even the generous standards of political discourse.
…
Telling the truth matters, even in politics. But we should remember that today, as at other points in our past, charges of lying often arise not out of sober concern for the sanctity of our public discourse, but as a way to score quick and wounding points in the partisan joust that is American democracy (Greenberg 1-5).
Everything about “balance” and “objectivity” as news standards rests on a benefit-of-the-doubt assumption about public figures, and about the public audience. For the public figures, the assumption is that they’re at least trying not to lie, and that they’d rather not get caught. For the public audience, the assumption is that they’ll care about an ongoing record of honesty or deception. But those assumptions do not match the reality of Trump.
…
Unlike other public figures we’ve encountered, Donald Trump appears not even to register the difference between truth and lies. He lies when it’s not “necessary” or even useful. He lies when disproof is immediately at hand. He shows no flicker in the eye, or “tell” of any kind, when he is caught in a flat-out lie. Richard Nixon looked tense and sweaty when saying “I am not a crook.” Bill Clinton went into his tortured “it depends what the meaning of is is” answer precisely because he was trying to avoid a direct lie.
Trump doesn’t care. Watching his face for discomfort or “tells” is like looking at an alligator for signs of remorse.
Thus the media have to start out with the assumption that anything Trump says is at least as likely to be false as true. He has forfeited any right to an “accurate until proven to be inaccurate” presumption of honesty (Fellows 1).
… there’s new evidence [that] backfiring [doubling down on one’s false opinion when confronted with facts] is rarer than originally thought — and that fact-checks can make an impression on even the most ardent of Trump supporters.
But there’s still a big problem: Trump supporters know their candidate lies, but that doesn’t change how they feel about him. Which prompts a scary thought: Is this just a Trump phenomenon? Or can any charismatic politician get away with being called out on lies?
…
At least it’s nice to know that facts do make an impression, right? On the other hand, we tend to avoid confronting facts that run hostile to our political allegiances. Getting partisans to confront facts might be easy in the context of an online experiment. It’s much harder to do in the real world (Resnick 2, 4).
Finally, we must not forget the relentless lying foisted upon us by Republican Party officials, operatives, and media mouthpieces during Barack Obama’s eight years as President. Here is a letter that I wrote to the editor of my hometown newspaper after I had heard once too often Mitch McConnell railing about the “Obama economy.”
We have been hearing a lot recently about politicians lying. One lie dwarfs all.
“It’s Obama’s economy,” we hear Republican flaks repeat. “He’s botched it. We will create jobs, grow the economy!” They count on our lack of attention to or memory of important political/economic events of the past decade.
How many of you actually recall the major 2008 GOP-induced economic meltdown and, afterward, how the GOP obstructed the President’s and the Democratic House and Senate’s attempts to stimulate the economy?
During the first two years of Obama’s presidency Mitch McConnell repeatedly used the Senate rule that a minimum of 60 votes were required to defeat the filibuster of any bill brought to the Senate floor for a vote. During most of those two years the Senate consisted of 58 Democrats, 40 Republicans, and two independents. Several of those 58 Democratic senators voted consistently with the Republicans. To reach the 60 vote threshold, Democrats had to gain the support of the two independents (one of them Democrat turncoat Joe Lieberman) and at least two or three “moderate” Republicans. The Affordable Care Act (“Obama Care”), the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “stimulus package”), and the Wall Street Reform Act (which included the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) managed to slip through after Democrats made bill-weakening concessions. Virtually everything else passed by the Democratic Party-controlled House was successfully filibustered. By the end of 2014, the GOP Senate had used the filibuster rule over 500 times.
Here are a few of the bills – all of which would have benefited working class Americans -- that McConnell’s minions stopped. Infrastructure building; equal pay for women; an increased minimum wage; stoppage of corporate tax breaks for moving jobs and production facilities out of the country; a rehiring of 400,000 teachers, firefighters, paramedics and police officers; student loan reform; an extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed; legislation to help working people join labor unions; the requirement that millionaires pay a comparable tax rate to middle-class Americans, the repeal of Big Oil tax subsidies.
When the Republicans won control of the House in 2010, President Obama’s hopes for improving the lot of ordinary Americans were dashed. Everything the GOP-controlled House thereafter passed was designed either to profit large corporations and the super wealthy or weaken the support system for destitute Americans. Additionally, GOP House and Senate leaders sought to acquire what they wanted by shutting down once and later threatening to shut down the operations of the government.
For seven and a half years the Republican Party has sabotaged the national economy all the while presuming that it could win national elections by pinning the blame for stunted recovery on Congressional Democrats and our President. Liars (Titus 1-2).
Works cited:
Fellows, James, "A More Detailed Guide to Dealing with Trump’s Lies.” The Atlantic, November 28, 2016. Web. https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/201...
Greenberg, David, “Are Clinton and Trump the Biggest Liars Ever to Run for President?” Politico, July/August 2016. Web. https://www.politico.com/magazine/sto...
Resnick, Brian, “Trump Supporters Know Trump Lies. They Just Don’t Care.” Vox, July 10, 2017. Web. https://www.vox.com/2017/7/10/1592843...
Titus, Harold. Letter to the Editor of the Siuslaw News, September 10, 2016. Print.
Yuhas, Alan, “How Does Donald Trump Lie? A Fact Checker's Final Guide.” The Guardian. November 7, 2016. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...
… The Guardian has catalogued more than 100 falsehoods made by the Republican nominee over the last 150 days, and sorted them according to theme.
Degrade and Destroy
For decades, Trump has described America and its leaders in apocalyptic terms. He thought Ronald Reagan weak and “a disaster”, he lambasted George HW Bush and Bill Clinton’s policies, and after supporting George W Bush’s Iraq invasion, quickly dismissed that war as “a mess”.
In Trump’s world, crime is always rising (the national rate fell for decades), and African Americans are “living in hell” (they are not). Migrants are flooding in (more Mexicans are leaving than arriving), and they bring violence (there is no evidence that they do). Civilian and military leaders are always clueless (Trump received five deferments from Vietnam), except when they love him. We have no idea who refugees or undocumented migrants are, and they take our jobs (we know very well who they are; they include his wife).
Trump’s vision of the US has been, for decades, one of dystopia – he even described the 1990s as a crisis worse than the Great Depression. But amid all this desolation Trump gains three things. He fuels doubt and fear, leaving people vulnerable; he denigrates his opposition en masse, blaming the world on them; and he raises himself up above the nonexistent wreckage.
Embiggen Big League
Like a man who once took a joke about the size of his hands too hard, Trump spends a lot of time trying to look as large as possible, from his never-proven $10bn worth (Forbes estimates $3.7bn) to crowds at his rallies and his success in meaningless internet polls.
This self-inflation is pierced throughout by paperwork. In March, the Guardian found that Trump valued a New York golf course at $50m in one document and at $1.4m in a court filing (he sued to pay lower taxes). On Thursday, the New York Times reported similarly huge discrepancies in his reported income. The Washington Post has shown repeatedly that Trump’s boasts of charitable giving have virtually nothing behind them.
He has also falsely bragged of endorsements from federal agencies and claimed “many environmental awards”, and tried the ploy in reverse: he has called the millions his father gave him as “a small loan” and portrayed his $916m loss in 1995 as an example of “smart” tax avoidance.
…
Shout at the Messenger
Whenever in doubt, Trump attacks what he calls “the dishonest media”, accusing reporters (without evidence) of bias, inaccuracy and a failure to show the size of his rallies. He ignores that reporters quote him extensively, call his campaign for comment, interview his supporters, his rival’s campaign and independent voters and experts. He often cites news stories about Clinton, and even praised fact-checkers in a presidential debate for catching her in a falsehood.
At every rally, Trump says the cameras refuse to show his audience, even though his campaign forces cameras to stay within a small pen, where they pan to show the crowd – as anyone at his rallies or watching online can see. Only one camera at each event stays fixed on Trump: the shared “pool” camera, whose footage networks share and which stays on Trump so as not to miss his speech.
Last week, NBC’s Katy Tur, a target for criticism from the podium, noted that Trump “has joked in private with reporters about how he understands how the pool camera works”.
“This is a shtick that he does to rile up his base,” she said, “to give them an excuse for polls that might not be in his favor, to give them an excuse to berate someone that’s not Donald Trump.”
Trump’s scorched earth insults, like his attacks on other institutions, try to delegitimize authority and leave only himself in its place. But while most Americans still respect other institutions that Trump has demeaned, the press was vulnerable. Decades of cable news punditry had already diminished opinion of the press, and the internet has sapped major newspapers of their powers to compete with openly partisan sites, fake news and social media networks. Trump tried to fill the vacuum.
Conspiracy Smoke, Fire Not Required
Trump’s most famous false conspiracy, about Barack Obama’s birthplace and who started birtherism, is only one of many.
There was Ted Cruz’s father and JFK’s assassin, drawn from a tabloid with ties to Trump; the climate change “hoax” that was “invented by the Chinese”; the Muslims who cheered September 11; the vaccines that cause autism; the Miss Universe “sex tape”; the political correctness of San Bernardino; the secret Muslim president and his secret terror agenda; and the antisemitism-tinged plot of bankers and the media.
…
Trump himself seems to get lost in the intrigue, and sometimes slips into a Dadaist jumble of anti-Clinton allusions – Whitewater, cattle futures, Benghazi, uranium, Blumenthal, “bleaching” 33,000 emails – that sound sinister when put together. This is apparently the desired effect: a haze of noxious sentiment, even if no one has found fire for all that smoke.
For more than 20 years, journalists and congressional Republicans have tried. The latter have spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars investigating the Clintons’ associations and careless email practices but have yet to find criminal conduct.
Arguably Trump’s worst conspiracy is his insistence that voter fraud has “rigged” the election, which merges his fringe claims with his attack on institutions. No evidence supports the claim of widespread fraud and the decentralized electoral college makes such a conspiracy functionally impossible – but the claim gives Trump something to blame failure on besides himself. Like his other conspiracies, it sows doubt and distrust, diminishing the nation so that Trump can portray himself as an authority.
Trump’s favorite escape from this maze is the phrase “there’s something going on”, which lets Trump suggest malevolence, claim ignorance and say nothing of substance at all.
Deny Everything
When cornered by his own quotes or something he doesn’t know, Trump often lies with blunt denials – “wrong!” – or variations of the phrases “that’s very important” or “we’ll look into it”.
He also tries to wriggle out of uncomfortable situations with this tactic, most notably when he claimed ignorance of David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader who has professed approval for his policies, and white supremacists. Trump had disavowed Duke a few days earlier and denounced him in 2000, but in February he refused to condemn like-minded supporters, saying: “I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists.”
On the edge of pointless self-inflation and denial is Trump’s fixation with Vladimir Putin, whom he has claimed to know “very well”, to have spoken with “indirectly and directly”, and to have never met and “know nothing” about. Trump also falsely insists that Putin called him “a genius” (Putin called him “flamboyant”).
Distortions
Not all Trump’s falsehoods are exotic. Like Clinton and many career politicians, he sprinkles misleading statistics into speeches, including on the murder rate, African American unemployment, poverty among Hispanic Americans, the deficit and taxes.
Trump also takes the tactic a step further, condensing whole arguments into outrageous soundbites. This is how a conservative argument about military presence in Iraq transformed into the claim that Obama “founded” Isis and how Clinton’s support for immigration reform became “open borders” (Yuhas 1-5).
In their personalities and their politics, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump might not have much in common, but in the public eye they share one glaring characteristic: A lot of people don’t believe what they say. In a July New York Times/CBS poll, less than one-third of respondents said Clinton is honest and trustworthy. Trump’s scores were about the same.
Trump’s campaign-trail falsehoods are so legion that cataloguing them has become a journalistic pastime. With a cocky disdain for anything as boring as evidence, the presumptive GOP nominee confidently repeats baseless assertions: He purports to have watched American Muslims celebrate the Twin Towers’ fall; he overstates the sizes of the crowds at his rallies, he understates America’s GDP growth rate, and no reputable business publication agrees with his claims of a personal net worth of $10 billion. In March, when three Politico reporters fact-checked Trump’s statements for a week, they found he had uttered “roughly one misstatement every five minutes.” Collectively, his falsehoods won PolitiFact’s 2015 “Lie of the Year” award. Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks has judged Trump “perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes.”
Clinton isn’t an egregious fabricator like Trump, but she’s been dogged her whole career by a sense of inauthenticity—the perception that she’s selling herself as something she isn’t, whether that’s a feminist, a liberal, a moderate or a fighter for the working class. Detractors, especially on the right, have deemed her dishonest about the facts as well. In 1996, New York Times columnist William Safire called her a “congenital liar,” and decried as utterly implausible Clinton’s statements about commodities trading, the firing of White House travel staff and the investigation of Vince Foster’s suicide. Although unfounded, his charges stuck. Feeding the image of a prevaricator, Clinton has also waffled on or modified her policy positions over the years on issues ranging from free trade to gay marriage. And that doesn’t even include the ongoing investigation of the private email server she used during her tenure as secretary of state, and her highly disputed statements about whether and how it conflicted with government rules.
…
On the whole, Clinton’s misstatements are those of a typical politician. She has changed her position on a number of issues, and some of these reversals—like her newfound opposition to the Pacific trade deal she championed as secretary of state—rise to the level of flip-flops or, perhaps, insincere electioneering designed to obscure what she really thinks. In defending her use of a private email server, Clinton has clearly stretched the truth, though whether she grasps the fallaciousness of her statements or believes herself to be giving straight answers is impossible to know. Her biggest problem is how she responds to questions about her veracity. She invariably defaults to a lawyerly persona—a guarded, defensive and hedging style that inhibits her from explaining herself in the relaxed, “authentic” manner voters like to see. That hyper-defensiveness, the lack of apparent forthrightness, is what gave rise to charges like Safire’s two decades ago and what perpetuates the impression that she doesn’t level with the public.
Trump is much more shameless as a trafficker in untruth. He seems willing to say whatever he deems necessary to win support at the moment, and he tries to get people to accept his statements through the sheer vehemence of his rhetoric. When he says, falsely, that “there’s no real assimilation” among “second- and third-generation” Muslims in the United States, it clearly doesn’t matter to Trump whether he’s right; what matters is that he wants us to believe he’s right. Many of his misstatements, taken individually, may be fairly innocent or at least commonplace, but the brazenness and frequency of the falsehoods, and their evident expedience, are what set Trump apart. Moreover, his typical response to being called out is to double down on a falsehood—like denying that he backed the 2003 Iraq invasion and the 2011 Libya intervention—or to pretend he never uttered it, showing an egregious unconcern or contempt for truth that taxes even the generous standards of political discourse.
…
Telling the truth matters, even in politics. But we should remember that today, as at other points in our past, charges of lying often arise not out of sober concern for the sanctity of our public discourse, but as a way to score quick and wounding points in the partisan joust that is American democracy (Greenberg 1-5).
Everything about “balance” and “objectivity” as news standards rests on a benefit-of-the-doubt assumption about public figures, and about the public audience. For the public figures, the assumption is that they’re at least trying not to lie, and that they’d rather not get caught. For the public audience, the assumption is that they’ll care about an ongoing record of honesty or deception. But those assumptions do not match the reality of Trump.
…
Unlike other public figures we’ve encountered, Donald Trump appears not even to register the difference between truth and lies. He lies when it’s not “necessary” or even useful. He lies when disproof is immediately at hand. He shows no flicker in the eye, or “tell” of any kind, when he is caught in a flat-out lie. Richard Nixon looked tense and sweaty when saying “I am not a crook.” Bill Clinton went into his tortured “it depends what the meaning of is is” answer precisely because he was trying to avoid a direct lie.
Trump doesn’t care. Watching his face for discomfort or “tells” is like looking at an alligator for signs of remorse.
Thus the media have to start out with the assumption that anything Trump says is at least as likely to be false as true. He has forfeited any right to an “accurate until proven to be inaccurate” presumption of honesty (Fellows 1).
… there’s new evidence [that] backfiring [doubling down on one’s false opinion when confronted with facts] is rarer than originally thought — and that fact-checks can make an impression on even the most ardent of Trump supporters.
But there’s still a big problem: Trump supporters know their candidate lies, but that doesn’t change how they feel about him. Which prompts a scary thought: Is this just a Trump phenomenon? Or can any charismatic politician get away with being called out on lies?
…
At least it’s nice to know that facts do make an impression, right? On the other hand, we tend to avoid confronting facts that run hostile to our political allegiances. Getting partisans to confront facts might be easy in the context of an online experiment. It’s much harder to do in the real world (Resnick 2, 4).
Finally, we must not forget the relentless lying foisted upon us by Republican Party officials, operatives, and media mouthpieces during Barack Obama’s eight years as President. Here is a letter that I wrote to the editor of my hometown newspaper after I had heard once too often Mitch McConnell railing about the “Obama economy.”
We have been hearing a lot recently about politicians lying. One lie dwarfs all.
“It’s Obama’s economy,” we hear Republican flaks repeat. “He’s botched it. We will create jobs, grow the economy!” They count on our lack of attention to or memory of important political/economic events of the past decade.
How many of you actually recall the major 2008 GOP-induced economic meltdown and, afterward, how the GOP obstructed the President’s and the Democratic House and Senate’s attempts to stimulate the economy?
During the first two years of Obama’s presidency Mitch McConnell repeatedly used the Senate rule that a minimum of 60 votes were required to defeat the filibuster of any bill brought to the Senate floor for a vote. During most of those two years the Senate consisted of 58 Democrats, 40 Republicans, and two independents. Several of those 58 Democratic senators voted consistently with the Republicans. To reach the 60 vote threshold, Democrats had to gain the support of the two independents (one of them Democrat turncoat Joe Lieberman) and at least two or three “moderate” Republicans. The Affordable Care Act (“Obama Care”), the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “stimulus package”), and the Wall Street Reform Act (which included the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) managed to slip through after Democrats made bill-weakening concessions. Virtually everything else passed by the Democratic Party-controlled House was successfully filibustered. By the end of 2014, the GOP Senate had used the filibuster rule over 500 times.
Here are a few of the bills – all of which would have benefited working class Americans -- that McConnell’s minions stopped. Infrastructure building; equal pay for women; an increased minimum wage; stoppage of corporate tax breaks for moving jobs and production facilities out of the country; a rehiring of 400,000 teachers, firefighters, paramedics and police officers; student loan reform; an extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed; legislation to help working people join labor unions; the requirement that millionaires pay a comparable tax rate to middle-class Americans, the repeal of Big Oil tax subsidies.
When the Republicans won control of the House in 2010, President Obama’s hopes for improving the lot of ordinary Americans were dashed. Everything the GOP-controlled House thereafter passed was designed either to profit large corporations and the super wealthy or weaken the support system for destitute Americans. Additionally, GOP House and Senate leaders sought to acquire what they wanted by shutting down once and later threatening to shut down the operations of the government.
For seven and a half years the Republican Party has sabotaged the national economy all the while presuming that it could win national elections by pinning the blame for stunted recovery on Congressional Democrats and our President. Liars (Titus 1-2).
Works cited:
Fellows, James, "A More Detailed Guide to Dealing with Trump’s Lies.” The Atlantic, November 28, 2016. Web. https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/201...
Greenberg, David, “Are Clinton and Trump the Biggest Liars Ever to Run for President?” Politico, July/August 2016. Web. https://www.politico.com/magazine/sto...
Resnick, Brian, “Trump Supporters Know Trump Lies. They Just Don’t Care.” Vox, July 10, 2017. Web. https://www.vox.com/2017/7/10/1592843...
Titus, Harold. Letter to the Editor of the Siuslaw News, September 10, 2016. Print.
Yuhas, Alan, “How Does Donald Trump Lie? A Fact Checker's Final Guide.” The Guardian. November 7, 2016. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...
October 6, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2016 Election -- Trump Voter Characteristics
No one factor describes Trump’s supporters. But an array of factors – many of them reflecting five major social psychological phenomena can help to account for this extraordinary political event: authoritarianism, social dominance orientation [SDO], prejudice, relative deprivation, and lack of intergroup contact.
…
Though found among left-wingers ..., authoritarianism is more numerous among right-wingers throughout the world. Trump’s speeches, studded with such absolutist terms as “losers” and “complete disasters,” are classic authoritarian statements. His clear distinction between groups on the top of society (Whites) and those “losers” and “bad hombres” on the bottom (immigrants, Blacks and Latinos) are classic social dominance statements.
In the United States, Republicans began averaging higher on authoritarianism than Democrats before the rise of Trump. And the party began to learn how to appeal to this segment of the American electorate in various ways. The Republican Party’s opposition to virtually everything proposed by the African-American President Obama helped. But it remained for Trump to break the unwritten rules of American politics and appeal directly and openly to authoritarians and those who score high on SDO [Social Dominance Orientation].
…
SDO is closely related to authoritarianism but clearly separable. It features an individual's preference for the societal hierarchy of groups and domination over lower-status groups. It represents a predisposition toward anti-egalitarianism within and between groups. Individuals who score high in SDO are typically dominant, driven, tough-minded, disagreeable, and relatively uncaring seekers of power. They believe in a “dog-eat-dog” world, and they report being motivated by self-interest and self-indulgence.
Many outgroup prejudices characterize dedicated Trump’s followers, not just anti-immigrants, but anti-outgroups in general. Since Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” the Republican Party has employed strategies that appeal to bigotry with “dog whistles” – somewhat subtle code words for race and other minorities designed to be heard by racists but not by non-racists. Nixon opposed racial school desegregation by claiming to be against the “bussing” needed to achieve interracial schools. Ronald Reagan began his campaign in 1980 by giving a “states’ rights” speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi quite near where three civil rights workers had been lynched earlier. George H. W. Bush in 1988 ran a campaign ad of an African-American murderer that his opponent had released from jail – an ad for which his campaign manager later apologized.
The 2008 presidential campaign witnessed recurrent Republican slips that betrayed traditional racist thinking. One Republican club issued false ten dollar bills with Obama’s picture accompanied by stereotyped African-American food - a watermelon, ribs and a bucket of fried chicken. The McCain campaign ran an advertisement claiming that Obama had been “disrespectful” to Governor Palin – the old Southern term recalling sanctions against Black men interacting with White women. Republican Representative Lynn Westmoreland described Obama and his wife as “uppity.” And Republican Representative Geoff Davis called the then-47-year-old Obama, “Boy.”
Trump is less subtle. He has repeatedly made unconcealed use of prejudice against outgroups ranging from “dangerous” Muslims to Mexican “rapists.” His dedicated followers loved it; breaking with so-called “political correctness,” he blared openly what they had been saying privately.
…
… pre-election publicity that minorities were planning to vote in large numbers for Clinton undoubtedly stirred Republicans to turn out too. In fact, the African-American turnout fell below that of 2008 and 2012 – a key factor in Clinton’s narrow losses in North Carolina, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
A major means of reducing intergroup prejudice is through optimal intergroup contact. So it is noteworthy that there is growing evidence that Trump’s White supporters have experienced far less contact with minorities than other Americans. For instance, Rothwell and Diego-Rosell (2016, p. 14) found that “...the racial and ethnic isolation of Whites at the zip-code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.” This finding remains true for both non-Hispanic Whites in general and for the smaller subset of White Republicans. And this lack of intergroup contact result emerges while controlling for dozens of other variables.
Consistent with this finding, these researchers also found that Trump support increased as an area’s distance from the Mexican border increased. Throughout the world, intergroup contact has been shown typically to diminish prejudice by reducing intergroup fear and inducing empathy. Its extreme absence for most Trump fans is an important factor that has been virtually ignored in the post-election analyses.
The principal media explanation for explaining Trump’s followers involves economics. Trump loyalists were assumed to have lost their jobs to Mexico and China and to be understandably angry. Little mention was made of the major reason for massive job losses – the accelerating pace of automation.
Mass media writers, reading each other and non-randomly interviewing a few unemployed workers, latched on to this too-simple theory as the primary explanation for the Trump victory. Single-factor theories are always dubious. The claim was that economically-deprived and often unemployed, angry working-class voters in basic manufacturing areas switched political parties and voted for “change.” This argument ignored the fact that the greatly depleted power of labor unions (by 2016, down to only 10.7% of wage and salary workers) to help turn out the Democratic vote was a significant factor – especially in key industrial states.
Undoubtedly, this media caricature fits some followers, especially in the swing states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. But this contention does not provide the major explanation for Trump’s support. The argument lost much of its credence when estimated that the median annual income of Trump supporters was a solid $72,000. The most impressive and extensive study of voting intentions later provided an estimate of $81,898 for Trump backers’ mean household income. Instead of being far poorer than Clinton voters, this figure was slightly above the $77,046 for those who had an unfavorable view of Trump.
Rothwell and Diego-Rosell (2016) analyzed in detail the individual and geographic data of 125,000 American adults who had answered Gallup survey phone calls during the long election period. Many of their results challenge the widespread view of Trump supporters. Trump followers were less likely than others to be looking for work, unemployed or part-time employed. And those voters living in districts with more manufacturing were actually less favorable to Trump. Nor were his followers largely living and working in postal areas where employment in manufacturing had declined since 1990. Underlying these results is the fact that blue-collar Trump supporters tend to work in occupations that are largely shielded from Chinese and Mexican competition – transportation, repair, and construction.
To be sure, social mobility has been declining in the United States. Contrary to the popular too-simple theory, however, people who live in areas with greater mobility voted more Republican. This was even true in the crucial “swing states,” and it is a trend that can be detected in other recent elections.
But these findings do not mean that social class and economics played no role whatsoever in this tight election. Instead of absolute deprivation, social psychologists stress the importance of relative deprivation. Disappointing comparisons to relevant referents is often more significant than factual changes. What voters think is true is more important in elections than the actual truth.
Trump adherents feel deprived relative to what they expected to possess at this point in their lives and relative to what they erroneously perceive other “less deserving” groups have acquired. Rapidly rising costs of housing and prescription drugs have aggravated their financial concerns. Their savings may not allow the type of ideal retirements they had long envisioned. And hopes for their children advancing beyond their status and going to college are being dashed by rising tuitions.
Building on the research of Chetty and Hendren (2016), Rothwell and Diego-Rosel (2016) found that Trump actually did better in some low mobility areas (e.g., Raleigh, Indianapolis and rural areas generally) where children are having difficulty just reaching the status of their parents. Working-class families had previously depended on low-tuition state institutions of higher learning for educational and employment mobility. But largely Republican state legislatures throughout the country have sharply reduced funding to these schools, forcing rising tuitions. Thus, Trump adherents are typically not personally economically destitute; but they are, as Thomas Edsall (2016) phrased it, “falling behind the Joneses.” In short, they were often feeling deprived relative to their hopes and expectations.
Trump exploited this sense of relative deprivation brilliantly. He articulated issues snugly within the authoritarian worldview of his admirers. His words and claims appalled many Americans, but he knew his target audience well. In their insightful analysis, Reicher and Haslam (2016) describe Trump’s carefully staged rallies in detail. Calling them “identity festivals” that embodied a politics of hope, they note how they were choreographed to bind the attendees into a populist movement with the media (forced to sit in a cordoned-off back section), immigrants, and the so-called “elite” as enemies. Criticism of Trump by the media and other sources (such as Clinton calling some of his followers “deplorables”) only enhanced the movement and served to confirm Trump’s assertions against their common “enemies.”
Trump’s oft-repeated slogan, “Make America great again,” augmented the movement’s thrust. It represented a brash reactionary call to return to an earlier time when America’s position in the world was unchallenged, when American presidents and Supreme Court judges were all White males, when immigration was restricted and widespread racial segregation persisted, and when the government’s affirmative action programs largely helped White males (e.g., the G.I. Bill of Rights, Federal housing loans). And his cabinet heads suggest that Trump plans to return to that long-ago scene as much as possible.
All five of these tightly interconnected phenomena – authoritarianism, social dominance, prejudice, lack of intergroup contact and relative deprivation – make people vulnerable to an intense sense of threat. Authoritarian leaders have long understood that they can attract followers by enhancing the perception of dangerous threats to the society and offering simple solutions. Sometimes the threats are real (Hitler with massive Weimar inflation), but often they are imagined (Trump with patently false claims of a declining economy, massive voter fraud, enormously increased crime, and unvetted immigration). With a background of genuine terrorist threats, Mideast conflict, and a recent great recession, even imagined threats seem plausible – especially to citizens who are already easily threatened and who have witnessed rapid change in their localities.
… London and other major English cities had had long experience with immigrants, and had increased their diversity relatively gradually. Time had reduced the sense of threat and enhanced positive intergroup contact. But for small towns and rural districts with a sudden and rapid entry of immigrants, perceived threat prevailed and optimal contact was as yet minimal.
A quite similar process occurred in small Midwestern towns with rapid increases in Latino immigration. … areas whose diversity index rose by 150% witnessed a 67% vote for Trump. Consider Arcadia, Wisconsin, that had job growth – not restricted jobs. Arcadia’s plentiful jobs attracted rapid in-migration from below the Mexican border – roughly 1,500 miles away. The resulting perceived threat, unalleviated by a period of intergroup contact, made many rural and small-town White Midwesterners respond positively to Trump’s harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric. …
No one factor describes Trump’s supporters. But an array of factors – many of them reflecting five major social psychological phenomena that form the tinder and the spark -- can help to account for this extraordinary political event.
These social psychological factors are not unique to the United States. We have seen throughout the paper that many studies of Europe’s far-right-wing voters show results strikingly similar to these data on the 2016 American election. Authoritarianism and social dominance attitudes have been routinely found to correlate significantly with far-right voting in nations throughout Europe. These voters share with Trump supporters similar views of women, minorities, immigrants, and free-market economics. … (Pettigrew (1-8).
I have included below the viewpoint of a letter writer printed in my local newspaper, the Siuslaw News, July 11. 2020. The author is clearly a devoted Fox News viewer. All the themes that Sean Hannity and company are currently, relentlessly pushing leap out at you from the text. Fear, fear, fear is the unifying message. Change and those who advocate it are the enemy.
As I sat with friends and family watching our safe and sane fireworks and celebrating the birth of our nation, I couldn’t help but wonder if this would be the last time we would ever be able to celebrate this holiday.
We the people of the United States of America are living in a time of much civil unrest. Our nation is at a tipping point, being torn apart by those who hate our country and its history.
There are people who want — in no uncertain terms — to tear it apart and divide us. It is no longer about what political party you belong to; it is about what the future of our nation will be and its ultimate survival as a free country.
Do you really want Marxist groups like BLM, terrorist groups like Antifa and far left Socialists in the government like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to completely defund and dismantle the police and leaving millions of vulnerable people unprotected?
Do you really want our country to be a Socialist country?
Socialism has already been tried and failed in 52 other countries, What makes anyone think it would actually work here?
Do we want them telling us what we should say, what we should believe and what is right and wrong? Do we honestly believe that defunding, demonizing and vilifying law enforcement is the answer?
Make no mistake about it, these groups are no longer asking; they are saying that, if we do not meet their demands and give them what they want, they will burn our country down.
They do not believe in individual sovereignty but, instead, want collective subjugation which, by definition is the action of bringing someone or something under domination or control.
They have hijacked the peaceful protesters and taken over with their own agenda. Those of us who love our country didn’t ask for this. I do not believe that this is what the majority of us want for our family’s future.
It is time to open our eyes, draw a line in the sand and decide if we are going to stand with the Marxists, the mob, anarchy, political correctness, socialism, cancel culture radicals and the “progressives” who hate America.
We are the greatest nation ever created and a gift from God that gives us liberty, freedom and the pursuit of happiness for everyone.
It comes down to what your principles and values are and what you believe in. Either you support liberty, all of the founding documents and all that this country has been through for over 200 years, or you want to see our nation fall and be ruled by Socialism.
It is up to each of us to make our own decision of how we want our future to look. I stand with America as it stands, even with all of its faults. At least for now we will still have the right to work on making things better for everyone of every race, color and creed (Worley 5).
Woks cited:
Pettigrew, Thomas F., “Social Psychological Perspectives on Trump Supporters.” Journal of Social and Political Psychology, Vol 5, No 1 (2017). Web. https://jspp.psychopen.eu/article/vie...
Worley, Lois, “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.” Siuslaw News, July 11, 2020. Web. https://thesiuslawnews.com/article/un...
…
Though found among left-wingers ..., authoritarianism is more numerous among right-wingers throughout the world. Trump’s speeches, studded with such absolutist terms as “losers” and “complete disasters,” are classic authoritarian statements. His clear distinction between groups on the top of society (Whites) and those “losers” and “bad hombres” on the bottom (immigrants, Blacks and Latinos) are classic social dominance statements.
In the United States, Republicans began averaging higher on authoritarianism than Democrats before the rise of Trump. And the party began to learn how to appeal to this segment of the American electorate in various ways. The Republican Party’s opposition to virtually everything proposed by the African-American President Obama helped. But it remained for Trump to break the unwritten rules of American politics and appeal directly and openly to authoritarians and those who score high on SDO [Social Dominance Orientation].
…
SDO is closely related to authoritarianism but clearly separable. It features an individual's preference for the societal hierarchy of groups and domination over lower-status groups. It represents a predisposition toward anti-egalitarianism within and between groups. Individuals who score high in SDO are typically dominant, driven, tough-minded, disagreeable, and relatively uncaring seekers of power. They believe in a “dog-eat-dog” world, and they report being motivated by self-interest and self-indulgence.
Many outgroup prejudices characterize dedicated Trump’s followers, not just anti-immigrants, but anti-outgroups in general. Since Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” the Republican Party has employed strategies that appeal to bigotry with “dog whistles” – somewhat subtle code words for race and other minorities designed to be heard by racists but not by non-racists. Nixon opposed racial school desegregation by claiming to be against the “bussing” needed to achieve interracial schools. Ronald Reagan began his campaign in 1980 by giving a “states’ rights” speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi quite near where three civil rights workers had been lynched earlier. George H. W. Bush in 1988 ran a campaign ad of an African-American murderer that his opponent had released from jail – an ad for which his campaign manager later apologized.
The 2008 presidential campaign witnessed recurrent Republican slips that betrayed traditional racist thinking. One Republican club issued false ten dollar bills with Obama’s picture accompanied by stereotyped African-American food - a watermelon, ribs and a bucket of fried chicken. The McCain campaign ran an advertisement claiming that Obama had been “disrespectful” to Governor Palin – the old Southern term recalling sanctions against Black men interacting with White women. Republican Representative Lynn Westmoreland described Obama and his wife as “uppity.” And Republican Representative Geoff Davis called the then-47-year-old Obama, “Boy.”
Trump is less subtle. He has repeatedly made unconcealed use of prejudice against outgroups ranging from “dangerous” Muslims to Mexican “rapists.” His dedicated followers loved it; breaking with so-called “political correctness,” he blared openly what they had been saying privately.
…
… pre-election publicity that minorities were planning to vote in large numbers for Clinton undoubtedly stirred Republicans to turn out too. In fact, the African-American turnout fell below that of 2008 and 2012 – a key factor in Clinton’s narrow losses in North Carolina, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
A major means of reducing intergroup prejudice is through optimal intergroup contact. So it is noteworthy that there is growing evidence that Trump’s White supporters have experienced far less contact with minorities than other Americans. For instance, Rothwell and Diego-Rosell (2016, p. 14) found that “...the racial and ethnic isolation of Whites at the zip-code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.” This finding remains true for both non-Hispanic Whites in general and for the smaller subset of White Republicans. And this lack of intergroup contact result emerges while controlling for dozens of other variables.
Consistent with this finding, these researchers also found that Trump support increased as an area’s distance from the Mexican border increased. Throughout the world, intergroup contact has been shown typically to diminish prejudice by reducing intergroup fear and inducing empathy. Its extreme absence for most Trump fans is an important factor that has been virtually ignored in the post-election analyses.
The principal media explanation for explaining Trump’s followers involves economics. Trump loyalists were assumed to have lost their jobs to Mexico and China and to be understandably angry. Little mention was made of the major reason for massive job losses – the accelerating pace of automation.
Mass media writers, reading each other and non-randomly interviewing a few unemployed workers, latched on to this too-simple theory as the primary explanation for the Trump victory. Single-factor theories are always dubious. The claim was that economically-deprived and often unemployed, angry working-class voters in basic manufacturing areas switched political parties and voted for “change.” This argument ignored the fact that the greatly depleted power of labor unions (by 2016, down to only 10.7% of wage and salary workers) to help turn out the Democratic vote was a significant factor – especially in key industrial states.
Undoubtedly, this media caricature fits some followers, especially in the swing states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. But this contention does not provide the major explanation for Trump’s support. The argument lost much of its credence when estimated that the median annual income of Trump supporters was a solid $72,000. The most impressive and extensive study of voting intentions later provided an estimate of $81,898 for Trump backers’ mean household income. Instead of being far poorer than Clinton voters, this figure was slightly above the $77,046 for those who had an unfavorable view of Trump.
Rothwell and Diego-Rosell (2016) analyzed in detail the individual and geographic data of 125,000 American adults who had answered Gallup survey phone calls during the long election period. Many of their results challenge the widespread view of Trump supporters. Trump followers were less likely than others to be looking for work, unemployed or part-time employed. And those voters living in districts with more manufacturing were actually less favorable to Trump. Nor were his followers largely living and working in postal areas where employment in manufacturing had declined since 1990. Underlying these results is the fact that blue-collar Trump supporters tend to work in occupations that are largely shielded from Chinese and Mexican competition – transportation, repair, and construction.
To be sure, social mobility has been declining in the United States. Contrary to the popular too-simple theory, however, people who live in areas with greater mobility voted more Republican. This was even true in the crucial “swing states,” and it is a trend that can be detected in other recent elections.
But these findings do not mean that social class and economics played no role whatsoever in this tight election. Instead of absolute deprivation, social psychologists stress the importance of relative deprivation. Disappointing comparisons to relevant referents is often more significant than factual changes. What voters think is true is more important in elections than the actual truth.
Trump adherents feel deprived relative to what they expected to possess at this point in their lives and relative to what they erroneously perceive other “less deserving” groups have acquired. Rapidly rising costs of housing and prescription drugs have aggravated their financial concerns. Their savings may not allow the type of ideal retirements they had long envisioned. And hopes for their children advancing beyond their status and going to college are being dashed by rising tuitions.
Building on the research of Chetty and Hendren (2016), Rothwell and Diego-Rosel (2016) found that Trump actually did better in some low mobility areas (e.g., Raleigh, Indianapolis and rural areas generally) where children are having difficulty just reaching the status of their parents. Working-class families had previously depended on low-tuition state institutions of higher learning for educational and employment mobility. But largely Republican state legislatures throughout the country have sharply reduced funding to these schools, forcing rising tuitions. Thus, Trump adherents are typically not personally economically destitute; but they are, as Thomas Edsall (2016) phrased it, “falling behind the Joneses.” In short, they were often feeling deprived relative to their hopes and expectations.
Trump exploited this sense of relative deprivation brilliantly. He articulated issues snugly within the authoritarian worldview of his admirers. His words and claims appalled many Americans, but he knew his target audience well. In their insightful analysis, Reicher and Haslam (2016) describe Trump’s carefully staged rallies in detail. Calling them “identity festivals” that embodied a politics of hope, they note how they were choreographed to bind the attendees into a populist movement with the media (forced to sit in a cordoned-off back section), immigrants, and the so-called “elite” as enemies. Criticism of Trump by the media and other sources (such as Clinton calling some of his followers “deplorables”) only enhanced the movement and served to confirm Trump’s assertions against their common “enemies.”
Trump’s oft-repeated slogan, “Make America great again,” augmented the movement’s thrust. It represented a brash reactionary call to return to an earlier time when America’s position in the world was unchallenged, when American presidents and Supreme Court judges were all White males, when immigration was restricted and widespread racial segregation persisted, and when the government’s affirmative action programs largely helped White males (e.g., the G.I. Bill of Rights, Federal housing loans). And his cabinet heads suggest that Trump plans to return to that long-ago scene as much as possible.
All five of these tightly interconnected phenomena – authoritarianism, social dominance, prejudice, lack of intergroup contact and relative deprivation – make people vulnerable to an intense sense of threat. Authoritarian leaders have long understood that they can attract followers by enhancing the perception of dangerous threats to the society and offering simple solutions. Sometimes the threats are real (Hitler with massive Weimar inflation), but often they are imagined (Trump with patently false claims of a declining economy, massive voter fraud, enormously increased crime, and unvetted immigration). With a background of genuine terrorist threats, Mideast conflict, and a recent great recession, even imagined threats seem plausible – especially to citizens who are already easily threatened and who have witnessed rapid change in their localities.
… London and other major English cities had had long experience with immigrants, and had increased their diversity relatively gradually. Time had reduced the sense of threat and enhanced positive intergroup contact. But for small towns and rural districts with a sudden and rapid entry of immigrants, perceived threat prevailed and optimal contact was as yet minimal.
A quite similar process occurred in small Midwestern towns with rapid increases in Latino immigration. … areas whose diversity index rose by 150% witnessed a 67% vote for Trump. Consider Arcadia, Wisconsin, that had job growth – not restricted jobs. Arcadia’s plentiful jobs attracted rapid in-migration from below the Mexican border – roughly 1,500 miles away. The resulting perceived threat, unalleviated by a period of intergroup contact, made many rural and small-town White Midwesterners respond positively to Trump’s harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric. …
No one factor describes Trump’s supporters. But an array of factors – many of them reflecting five major social psychological phenomena that form the tinder and the spark -- can help to account for this extraordinary political event.
These social psychological factors are not unique to the United States. We have seen throughout the paper that many studies of Europe’s far-right-wing voters show results strikingly similar to these data on the 2016 American election. Authoritarianism and social dominance attitudes have been routinely found to correlate significantly with far-right voting in nations throughout Europe. These voters share with Trump supporters similar views of women, minorities, immigrants, and free-market economics. … (Pettigrew (1-8).
I have included below the viewpoint of a letter writer printed in my local newspaper, the Siuslaw News, July 11. 2020. The author is clearly a devoted Fox News viewer. All the themes that Sean Hannity and company are currently, relentlessly pushing leap out at you from the text. Fear, fear, fear is the unifying message. Change and those who advocate it are the enemy.
As I sat with friends and family watching our safe and sane fireworks and celebrating the birth of our nation, I couldn’t help but wonder if this would be the last time we would ever be able to celebrate this holiday.
We the people of the United States of America are living in a time of much civil unrest. Our nation is at a tipping point, being torn apart by those who hate our country and its history.
There are people who want — in no uncertain terms — to tear it apart and divide us. It is no longer about what political party you belong to; it is about what the future of our nation will be and its ultimate survival as a free country.
Do you really want Marxist groups like BLM, terrorist groups like Antifa and far left Socialists in the government like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to completely defund and dismantle the police and leaving millions of vulnerable people unprotected?
Do you really want our country to be a Socialist country?
Socialism has already been tried and failed in 52 other countries, What makes anyone think it would actually work here?
Do we want them telling us what we should say, what we should believe and what is right and wrong? Do we honestly believe that defunding, demonizing and vilifying law enforcement is the answer?
Make no mistake about it, these groups are no longer asking; they are saying that, if we do not meet their demands and give them what they want, they will burn our country down.
They do not believe in individual sovereignty but, instead, want collective subjugation which, by definition is the action of bringing someone or something under domination or control.
They have hijacked the peaceful protesters and taken over with their own agenda. Those of us who love our country didn’t ask for this. I do not believe that this is what the majority of us want for our family’s future.
It is time to open our eyes, draw a line in the sand and decide if we are going to stand with the Marxists, the mob, anarchy, political correctness, socialism, cancel culture radicals and the “progressives” who hate America.
We are the greatest nation ever created and a gift from God that gives us liberty, freedom and the pursuit of happiness for everyone.
It comes down to what your principles and values are and what you believe in. Either you support liberty, all of the founding documents and all that this country has been through for over 200 years, or you want to see our nation fall and be ruled by Socialism.
It is up to each of us to make our own decision of how we want our future to look. I stand with America as it stands, even with all of its faults. At least for now we will still have the right to work on making things better for everyone of every race, color and creed (Worley 5).
Woks cited:
Pettigrew, Thomas F., “Social Psychological Perspectives on Trump Supporters.” Journal of Social and Political Psychology, Vol 5, No 1 (2017). Web. https://jspp.psychopen.eu/article/vie...
Worley, Lois, “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.” Siuslaw News, July 11, 2020. Web. https://thesiuslawnews.com/article/un...
October 4, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2016 Election -- Results
Candidate
Party
Electoral Votes
Popular Votes
✓
Donald J. Trump
Republican
304
62,980,160
Hillary R. Clinton
Democratic
227
65,845,063
Gary Johnson
Libertarian
0
4,488,931
Jill Stein
Green
0
1,457,050
Evan McMullin
Independent
0
728,830
The United States presidential election of 2016 was the 58th quadrennial American presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. The Republican ticket of businessman Donald Trump and Indiana Governor Mike Pence defeated the Democratic ticket of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. Senator from Virginia Tim Kaine.
While Clinton received about 2.9 million more votes nationwide, a margin of 2.1% of the total cast, Trump won a victory in the Electoral College, winning 30 states with 306 pledged electors out of 538, and overturned the perennial swing states of Florida, Iowa and Ohio, as well as the "blue wall" of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which had been Democratic strongholds in presidential elections since the 1990s. Leading up to the election, a Trump victory was projected unlikely by most media forecasts.
2016 Election Facts
• Issues of the Day: Health care costs, Economic inequality, Terrorism, Foreign policy (Russia, Iran, Syria, Brexit), Gun control, Treatment of minorities, Immigration policy, Shifting media landscape
• One of only 5 elections (1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, 2016) where the popular vote winner was defeated
• Hillary Clinton first female presidential nominee of a major political party
• Clinton won Maine but Trump earned an electoral vote by winning the popular vote in the 2nd Congressional District. This marked the first time that Maine has split its electoral vote since it moved away from the winner-take-all method in 1972.
• Independent Evan McMullin received 21.5% of the vote in Utah; best '3rd party' performance in any single state since Ross Perot in 1992
• Libertarian Gary Johnson received over 3% of the nationwide vote; best 3rd party performance nationwide since Ross Perot in 1996
• There were seven faithless presidential electors. Aside from 1872 - death of Horace Greeley - it is the greatest number since electors began casting one vote each for president and vice president (12th Amendment, 1804). Three additional faithless votes, one each in Colorado, Maine and Minnesota, were disallowed.
• Clinton won Washington; however three electors cast votes for Colin Powell, one for Faith Spotted Eagle
• Trump won Texas; however one elector cast a vote for Ron Paul, another for John Kasich
• Clinton won Hawaii; however one elector cast a vote for Bernie Sanders
(2016 1)
Overall, whites with a four-year college degree or more education made up 30% of all validated voters. Among these voters, far more (55%) said they voted for Clinton than for Trump (38%). Among the much larger group of white voters who had not completed college (44% of all voters), Trump won by more than two-to-one (64% to 28%).
There also were large differences in voter preferences by gender, age and marital status. Women were 13 percentage points more likely than men to have voted for Clinton (54% among women, 41% among men). The gender gap was particularly large among validated voters younger than 50. In this group, 63% of women said they voted for Clinton, compared with just 43% of men. Among voters ages 50 and older, the gender gap in support for Clinton was much narrower (48% vs. 40%).
About half (52%) of validated voters were married; among them, Trump had a 55% to 39% majority. Among unmarried voters, Clinton led by a similar margin (58% to 34%).
Just 13% of validated voters in 2016 were younger than 30. Voters in this age group reported voting for Clinton over Trump by a margin of 58% to 28%, with 14% supporting one of the third-party candidates. Among voters ages 30 to 49, 51% supported Clinton and 40% favored Trump. Trump had an advantage among 50- to 64-year-old voters (51% to 45%) and those 65 and older (53% to 44%).
Voter choice and party affiliation were nearly synonymous. Republican validated voters reported choosing Trump by a margin of 92% to 4%, while Democrats supported Clinton by 94% to 5%. The roughly one-third (34%) of the electorate who identified as independent or with another party divided their votes about evenly (43% Trump, 42% Clinton).
…
Virtually all validated voters with consistently liberal values voted for Clinton over Trump (95% to 2%), while nearly all those with consistently conservative values went for Trump (98% to less than 1% for Clinton). Those who held conservative views on most political values (“mostly conservative”) favored Trump by 87% to 7%, while Clinton received the support of somewhat fewer among those who were “mostly liberal” (78%-13%). Among the nearly one-third of voters whose ideological profile was mixed, the vote was divided (48% Trump, 42% Clinton).
As in previous elections, voters in 2016 were sharply divided along religious lines. Protestants constituted about half of the electorate and reported voting for Trump over Clinton by a 56% to 39% margin. Catholics were more evenly divided; 52% reported voting for Trump, while 44% said they backed Clinton. Conversely, a solid majority of the religiously unaffiliated – atheists, agnostics and those who said their religion was “nothing in particular” – said they voted for Clinton (65%) over Trump (24%).
Within the Protestant tradition, voters were divided by race and evangelicalism. White evangelical Protestants, who constituted one out of every five voters, consistently have been among the strongest supporters of Republican candidates and supported Trump by a 77% to 16% margin.
This is nearly identical to the 78% to 16% advantage that Mitt Romney held over Barack Obama among white evangelicals in Pew Research Center polling on the eve of the 2012 presidential election.
Among white mainline Protestants (15% of voters overall) 57% said they voted for Trump and 37% reported voting for Clinton. Clinton won overwhelmingly among black Protestants (96% vs. 3% for Trump).
White non-Hispanic Catholics supported Trump by a ratio of about two-to-one (64% to 31%), while Hispanic Catholics favored Clinton by an even larger 78% to 19% margin.
Among all voters, those who reported attending services at least weekly favored Trump by a margin of 58% to 36%; the margin was similar among those who said they attended once or twice a month (60% to 38%). Those who reported attending services a few times a year or seldom were divided; 51% supported Clinton and 42% supported Trump. Among the nearly one-quarter of voters (23%) who said they never attend religious services, Clinton led Trump by 61% to 3o%.
…
In 2016, a 61% majority of those who said they voted for Clinton were women, while Trump voters were more evenly divided between men and women. Whites constituted nearly nine-in-ten (88%) of Trump’s supporters, compared with a smaller majority (60%) who voted for Clinton. Clinton’s voters also were younger than Trump’s on average (48% were younger than 50, compared with 35% for Trump).
Among Clinton voters, 43% were college graduates, compared with 29% of Trump voters. And while non-college whites made up a majority of Trump’s voters (63%), they constituted only about a quarter of Clinton’s (26%).
About a third of Clinton voters (32%) lived in urban areas, versus just 12% among Trump voters. By contrast, 35% of Trump voters said they were from a rural area; among Clinton voters, 19% lived in a rural community.
The religious profile of the two candidates’ voters also differed considerably. About a third of Clinton voters (35%) were religiously unaffiliated, as were just 14% of Trump voters. White evangelical voters made up a much greater share of Trump’s voters (34%) than Clinton’s (7%). One-in-five Trump voters (20%) were white non-Hispanic Catholics, compared with just 9% of Clinton voters. And black Protestants were 14% of Clintons supporters, while almost no black Protestants in the survey reported voting for Trump (Examination 2-5).
The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.
There are, inevitably, miseries to come: an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court; an emboldened right-wing Congress; a President whose disdain for women and minorities, civil liberties and scientific fact, to say nothing of simple decency, has been repeatedly demonstrated. Trump is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader who will not only set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted. The African-American Other. The Hispanic Other. The female Other. The Jewish and Muslim Other. The most hopeful way to look at this grievous event—and it’s a stretch—is that this election and the years to follow will be a test of the strength, or the fragility, of American institutions. It will be a test of our seriousness and resolve.
All along, Trump seemed like a twisted caricature of every rotten reflex of the radical right. That he has prevailed, that he has won this election, is a crushing blow to the spirit; it is an event that will likely cast the country into a period of economic, political, and social uncertainty that we cannot yet imagine. That the electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness, his disdain for democratic norms, is a fact that will lead, inevitably, to all manner of national decline and suffering (Remnick 1, 2).
Works cited:
2016 Presidential Election.” 270 to Win. Web. https://www.270towin.com/2016_Election/
An Examination of the 2016 electorate, Based on Validated Voters.” The Pew Research Center, August 9, 2018. Web. https://www.people-press.org/2018/08/...
Remnick, David, “An American Tragedy.” The New Yorker, November 9, 2016. Web. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-d...
Party
Electoral Votes
Popular Votes
✓
Donald J. Trump
Republican
304
62,980,160
Hillary R. Clinton
Democratic
227
65,845,063
Gary Johnson
Libertarian
0
4,488,931
Jill Stein
Green
0
1,457,050
Evan McMullin
Independent
0
728,830
The United States presidential election of 2016 was the 58th quadrennial American presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. The Republican ticket of businessman Donald Trump and Indiana Governor Mike Pence defeated the Democratic ticket of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. Senator from Virginia Tim Kaine.
While Clinton received about 2.9 million more votes nationwide, a margin of 2.1% of the total cast, Trump won a victory in the Electoral College, winning 30 states with 306 pledged electors out of 538, and overturned the perennial swing states of Florida, Iowa and Ohio, as well as the "blue wall" of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which had been Democratic strongholds in presidential elections since the 1990s. Leading up to the election, a Trump victory was projected unlikely by most media forecasts.
2016 Election Facts
• Issues of the Day: Health care costs, Economic inequality, Terrorism, Foreign policy (Russia, Iran, Syria, Brexit), Gun control, Treatment of minorities, Immigration policy, Shifting media landscape
• One of only 5 elections (1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, 2016) where the popular vote winner was defeated
• Hillary Clinton first female presidential nominee of a major political party
• Clinton won Maine but Trump earned an electoral vote by winning the popular vote in the 2nd Congressional District. This marked the first time that Maine has split its electoral vote since it moved away from the winner-take-all method in 1972.
• Independent Evan McMullin received 21.5% of the vote in Utah; best '3rd party' performance in any single state since Ross Perot in 1992
• Libertarian Gary Johnson received over 3% of the nationwide vote; best 3rd party performance nationwide since Ross Perot in 1996
• There were seven faithless presidential electors. Aside from 1872 - death of Horace Greeley - it is the greatest number since electors began casting one vote each for president and vice president (12th Amendment, 1804). Three additional faithless votes, one each in Colorado, Maine and Minnesota, were disallowed.
• Clinton won Washington; however three electors cast votes for Colin Powell, one for Faith Spotted Eagle
• Trump won Texas; however one elector cast a vote for Ron Paul, another for John Kasich
• Clinton won Hawaii; however one elector cast a vote for Bernie Sanders
(2016 1)
Overall, whites with a four-year college degree or more education made up 30% of all validated voters. Among these voters, far more (55%) said they voted for Clinton than for Trump (38%). Among the much larger group of white voters who had not completed college (44% of all voters), Trump won by more than two-to-one (64% to 28%).
There also were large differences in voter preferences by gender, age and marital status. Women were 13 percentage points more likely than men to have voted for Clinton (54% among women, 41% among men). The gender gap was particularly large among validated voters younger than 50. In this group, 63% of women said they voted for Clinton, compared with just 43% of men. Among voters ages 50 and older, the gender gap in support for Clinton was much narrower (48% vs. 40%).
About half (52%) of validated voters were married; among them, Trump had a 55% to 39% majority. Among unmarried voters, Clinton led by a similar margin (58% to 34%).
Just 13% of validated voters in 2016 were younger than 30. Voters in this age group reported voting for Clinton over Trump by a margin of 58% to 28%, with 14% supporting one of the third-party candidates. Among voters ages 30 to 49, 51% supported Clinton and 40% favored Trump. Trump had an advantage among 50- to 64-year-old voters (51% to 45%) and those 65 and older (53% to 44%).
Voter choice and party affiliation were nearly synonymous. Republican validated voters reported choosing Trump by a margin of 92% to 4%, while Democrats supported Clinton by 94% to 5%. The roughly one-third (34%) of the electorate who identified as independent or with another party divided their votes about evenly (43% Trump, 42% Clinton).
…
Virtually all validated voters with consistently liberal values voted for Clinton over Trump (95% to 2%), while nearly all those with consistently conservative values went for Trump (98% to less than 1% for Clinton). Those who held conservative views on most political values (“mostly conservative”) favored Trump by 87% to 7%, while Clinton received the support of somewhat fewer among those who were “mostly liberal” (78%-13%). Among the nearly one-third of voters whose ideological profile was mixed, the vote was divided (48% Trump, 42% Clinton).
As in previous elections, voters in 2016 were sharply divided along religious lines. Protestants constituted about half of the electorate and reported voting for Trump over Clinton by a 56% to 39% margin. Catholics were more evenly divided; 52% reported voting for Trump, while 44% said they backed Clinton. Conversely, a solid majority of the religiously unaffiliated – atheists, agnostics and those who said their religion was “nothing in particular” – said they voted for Clinton (65%) over Trump (24%).
Within the Protestant tradition, voters were divided by race and evangelicalism. White evangelical Protestants, who constituted one out of every five voters, consistently have been among the strongest supporters of Republican candidates and supported Trump by a 77% to 16% margin.
This is nearly identical to the 78% to 16% advantage that Mitt Romney held over Barack Obama among white evangelicals in Pew Research Center polling on the eve of the 2012 presidential election.
Among white mainline Protestants (15% of voters overall) 57% said they voted for Trump and 37% reported voting for Clinton. Clinton won overwhelmingly among black Protestants (96% vs. 3% for Trump).
White non-Hispanic Catholics supported Trump by a ratio of about two-to-one (64% to 31%), while Hispanic Catholics favored Clinton by an even larger 78% to 19% margin.
Among all voters, those who reported attending services at least weekly favored Trump by a margin of 58% to 36%; the margin was similar among those who said they attended once or twice a month (60% to 38%). Those who reported attending services a few times a year or seldom were divided; 51% supported Clinton and 42% supported Trump. Among the nearly one-quarter of voters (23%) who said they never attend religious services, Clinton led Trump by 61% to 3o%.
…
In 2016, a 61% majority of those who said they voted for Clinton were women, while Trump voters were more evenly divided between men and women. Whites constituted nearly nine-in-ten (88%) of Trump’s supporters, compared with a smaller majority (60%) who voted for Clinton. Clinton’s voters also were younger than Trump’s on average (48% were younger than 50, compared with 35% for Trump).
Among Clinton voters, 43% were college graduates, compared with 29% of Trump voters. And while non-college whites made up a majority of Trump’s voters (63%), they constituted only about a quarter of Clinton’s (26%).
About a third of Clinton voters (32%) lived in urban areas, versus just 12% among Trump voters. By contrast, 35% of Trump voters said they were from a rural area; among Clinton voters, 19% lived in a rural community.
The religious profile of the two candidates’ voters also differed considerably. About a third of Clinton voters (35%) were religiously unaffiliated, as were just 14% of Trump voters. White evangelical voters made up a much greater share of Trump’s voters (34%) than Clinton’s (7%). One-in-five Trump voters (20%) were white non-Hispanic Catholics, compared with just 9% of Clinton voters. And black Protestants were 14% of Clintons supporters, while almost no black Protestants in the survey reported voting for Trump (Examination 2-5).
The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.
There are, inevitably, miseries to come: an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court; an emboldened right-wing Congress; a President whose disdain for women and minorities, civil liberties and scientific fact, to say nothing of simple decency, has been repeatedly demonstrated. Trump is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader who will not only set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted. The African-American Other. The Hispanic Other. The female Other. The Jewish and Muslim Other. The most hopeful way to look at this grievous event—and it’s a stretch—is that this election and the years to follow will be a test of the strength, or the fragility, of American institutions. It will be a test of our seriousness and resolve.
All along, Trump seemed like a twisted caricature of every rotten reflex of the radical right. That he has prevailed, that he has won this election, is a crushing blow to the spirit; it is an event that will likely cast the country into a period of economic, political, and social uncertainty that we cannot yet imagine. That the electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness, his disdain for democratic norms, is a fact that will lead, inevitably, to all manner of national decline and suffering (Remnick 1, 2).
Works cited:
2016 Presidential Election.” 270 to Win. Web. https://www.270towin.com/2016_Election/
An Examination of the 2016 electorate, Based on Validated Voters.” The Pew Research Center, August 9, 2018. Web. https://www.people-press.org/2018/08/...
Remnick, David, “An American Tragedy.” The New Yorker, November 9, 2016. Web. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-d...
October 2, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2012 Election -- Attempted rigging?
On Election Night 2012, Democrats had more than the reelection of President Obama to celebrate. Karl Rove, the mastermind Republican strategist hated and feared by Democrats, had a meltdown live on Fox News.
…
Rove's famous hissy-fit took place when the network called the state of Ohio for Obama, putting the president over the 270 electoral votes needed to win reelection. Rove argued that Fox's analysts had acted prematurely.
To resolve the awkward, on-air stand-off, host Megyn Kelly asked the analysts at the Fox "decision desk" how sure they were Obama really would win Ohio and the election (Levy 1).
Rove explained that when Fox called Ohio, only 74% of the vote was in showing President Obama with a lead of roughly 30,000 votes. But, as Rove contended, with 77% reporting according to the Ohio Secretary of State office, the President’s lead had been slashed to just 991 votes.
“We gotta be careful about calling the thing,” Rove said, “I’d be very cautious about intruding in on this process.”
Rove was supremely confident that the numbers coming in from Ohio throughout the night that favored President Obama weren’t indicative of who would win Ohio when all the votes were ultimately tabulated by the state’s computers. With a quarter of the vote still out there, Rove was anticipating a shift to the Right just after 11 pm, which, coincidentally, is exactly what happened in 2004.
That year, John Kerry and the entire nation were watching Ohio just after the 11pm hour. Florida had just been called for George W. Bush and according to the Electoral College math whoever won Ohio would win the election. And considering that exit polls from the state showed John Kerry with a substantial lead, there were a lot of tense moments for Karl Rove and the Republicans that night.
Then the clock struck 11:14pm, and the servers counting the votes in Ohio crashed. Election officials had planned for this sort of thing to happen and already contracted with a company in Chattanooga, Tennessee called SMARTech to be the fail safe should the servers in Ohio go down.
As journalist Craig Unger lays bare in his book, Boss Rove, SMARTech was drenched in Republican politics. One of the early founders of the company was Mercer Reynolds who used to be the finance chairman of the Republican Party. SMARTech’s top client was none other than the Bush-Cheney campaign itself and SMARTech also did work for Jeb Bush and the Republican National Committee. And it was Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell, who ensured that SMARTech received the contract to count votes on election night should the servers go down, which they did at exactly 11:14pm.
Sixty long seconds later the servers came back up in Ohio, but now with vote rerouted through SMARTech in Chattanooga. And, coincidentally, Bush’s prospects for re-election were suddenly a lot brighter. The vote totals that poured into the system from SmartTECH’s computer in Chattanooga were flipping the exit polls on their head. The lead Kerry had in the exit polls had magically reversed by more than 6%, something unheard of in any other nation in the developed world, giving Bush the win in Ohio and the presidency for another four years.
Unger further explains in his book that the only independent analysis of what happened in Ohio was done by Richard Hayes Phillips and published in the book, Witness to a Crime. Phillips and his team analyzed more than 120,000 ballots, 127 polls books, and 141 signature books from Ohio’s 2004 election.
Phillips found zero irregularities in vote totals from all the counties that reported results before the servers crashed at 11:14pm. But of the fourteen counties that came in after the crash connected Ohio’s election computers to SmartTECH’s computers in Chattanooga, every single one of them showed voter irregularities – that all favored George W. Bush.
For example, consider Cleveland’s Fourth Ward. In 2000, Al Gore won 95% of that ward’s vote. But in 2004, the county reported its results after the 11:14 pm crash, and it showed that Kerry had only won 59% of the vote – a 35% drop without any explanation. There were several other abnormalities across Ohio’s post-server crash that delivered the state to Bush.
John Kerry never protested the election and to this day, these 2004 voter abnormalities have never been addressed.
So the question is: on election night this year, when Karl Rove was protesting the call his network had just made in Ohio, was Rove anticipating a wave of unpredicted vote totals to swing the election back to Mitt Romney after a statewide server crash, just as had happened in 2004?
Perhaps. He did make the point that the race was about to drastically narrow according to the Secretary of State’s office. And as The Free Press reports, a number of odd similarities with 2004 began occurring in Ohio this year just after the 11pm hour once again.
“Curiously, the Ohio Secretary of State’s vote tabulation website went down at 11:13pm, as reported by Free Press election protection website monitors, and mentioned by Rove on the news. This was one minute earlier than the time on election night 2004 — when Ohio votes were outsourced to Chattanooga, Tennessee — and then the vote flipped for Bush…
This time, the Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) vote tabulation site went down as on election night as well. In his rant on Fox, Rove argued that Fox News should not confirm Ohio for Obama until votes came in from the southwest Ohio GOP strongholds of Delaware, Butler and Warren counties and suburban Cincinnati. It was after the crash of the secretary of state’s site in 2004 that improbable vote totals came in from Republican counties in southwest Ohio – particularly Butler, Clermont, and Warren counties. These three counties provided more than Bush’s entire Ohio victory margin of 119,000.”
Only this time, when the servers came back up, the votes never flipped. President Obama’s lead held and he went on to win, while Karl Rove – and Mitt Romney – watched in slack-jawed amazement.
We know there was a parade of Conservative talking heads in the days before the election predicting a landslide victory for Mitt Romney. Is it because they lived in a bubble, lacking pollster Nate Silver’s facts and arithmetic that actually showed the President winning in a landslide? Could it be that Rove’s election night freak-out was just a result of this same Election Day ignorance held by all Republicans? Or was Rove genuinely shocked by what he was seeing because he knew the fix was in, just like in 2004, and there was no way President Obama was going to win re-election?
And if that’s the case, why did the plan to steal the election not work?
Here’s where the story gets really interesting.
Just a few weeks before Election Day, the hacktivist group Anonymous issued a video statement against Karl Rove. Anonymous is notorious for numerous cyber actions against the Justice Department, the Pentagon, the Recording Industry of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, and even the Church of Scientology.
In the video released prior to Election Day, Anonymous warns Karl Rove that he’s being watched. “We know that you will attempt to rig the election of Mitt Romney to your favor,” a black-robed figure in a Guy Fawkes mask says in the video. “We will watch as your merry band of conspirators try to achieve this overthrow of the United States government.”
The figure then warns Rove that Anonymous is “watching and monitoring all your servers,” and goes on to say, “We want you to know that we are watching you, waiting for you to make this mistake of thinking you can rig this election to your favor…If we catch you we will turn over all of this data to the appropriate officials in the hopes that you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Then, just two days after Election Day, as the Republican Party was in full-blown despair and Karl Rove was trying to figure out what went wrong, Anonymous released a press statement claiming it did indeed prevent an attempt by Rove to steal the election for Mitt Romney.
The statement reads, “We began following the digital traffic of one Karl Rove…After a rather short time, we identified the digital structure of Karl’s operation and even that of his ORCA. This was an easy task in that barn doors were left open and the wind swept us inside.”The “ORCA” that Anonymous is referring to in the press release is a massive, high-tech get-out-the-vote system created by the Romney campaign this year that will keep tabs on potential voters and coordinate with operatives to target who has and hasn’t voted yet on Election Day.
Romney’s Communications Director Gail Gitcho bragged about how sophisticated ORCA is saying, “At 5 o’clock when the exit polls come out, we won’t pay attention to that. We will have had much more scientific information based on the political operation we have set up.” In other words, ORCA will know who won Ohio better than any exit polls.
But, according to Anonymous, ORCA had nothing to do with getting out the vote and everything to do with rigging the vote.
“We coded and created, what we call The Great Oz. A targeted password protected firewall that we tested and refined over the past weeks. We placed this code on more than one of the digital tunnels and their destination that Karl’s not so smart worker bees planned to use on election night.”
Anonymous alleges these “digital tunnels” were leading to servers in three different states. The release goes on to detail what happened on election night as Rove’s operatives attempted to access these tunnerls. “We watched as Karl’s weak computers repeatedly tried to penetrate The Great Oz. These children of his were at a loss-how many times and how many passwords did they try-exactly 105.”
“Karl’s speared ORCA whale was breached, rotting with a strong stench across his playground, unable to be resuscitated,” claims Anonymous.
So might this have really been the reason for Karl Rove’s shock on election night? Under the guise of sophisticated get out the vote operation, had Rove and the Republican Party actually built up a massive system to steal the Ohio election, just like in 2004, only to have it thwarted at the last minute by a group of computer hackers?
If this is true, then the implications are enormous and could take down the entire Republican Party and finally wake Americans up to the fact that our privatized vote system is shockingly flawed and insecure.
In their press release, Anonymous concludes, “We have a warning for Karl – sail again at your own peril. We may just put all the evidence into a tidy little package and give it to a painfully bored nemesis hanging out in a certain embassy in London.”
In an era of internet [falsehoods] and digital false flags, we must demand proof for these sort of claims made by Anonymous. But given Karl Rove’s history with elections in Ohio and the known vulnerabilities with our corporate owned electronic voting machines, there may be both smoke and fire with these election night allegations.
That’s why it’s vitally important for Anonymous to release any information or evidence it has about this plot to not just Julian Assange, but to law enforcement authorities as well. Otherwise, the alleged democracy-saving actions of the hacktivist group will instead be regarded as useless internet antics, relegated to the dustbins of history (Sacks and Hartmann 1-10).
Here is another writer’s interpretation.
So why didn’t Rove’s guy Romney win Ohio as Bush did in ’04? All the voter suppression tactics and usual dirty tricks seemed to be in place. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted was the new Blackwell and Romney the new Bush, but Rove proved to be the same old Rove –- operating from his 2004 election theft playbook.
This time, after Columbus Free Press articles appeared about voting machines tied to Romney and scurrilous software patches installed on Ohio tabulators, 60,000 people emailed the U.S. Department of Justice with a change.org petition requesting an investigation of Ohio. Justice Department personnel as well as FBI agents were on the ground on Election Day in Ohio looking not only for voter suppression but also for electronic election tampering.
Election protection activists blanketed the state with a visible Video the Vote project that was based out of Columbus and also included Cleveland and Cincinnati.
Although the judges in the software patch cases denied the temporary restraining orders, the cases are still open. However, the story of the Free Press lawsuit was announced the day before Election Day, was picked up by the Associated Press, and appeared in more than 500 newspapers. Just prior to Election Day, the best reporting in Ohio was ironically coming from Channel 19 -- Fox News in Cincinnati. Also, at 12:23am on Election Day morning, Forbes.com posted one of the greatest anti-vote tampering deterrent articles in U.S. history. Essentially, they outlined the shaky electronic voting technology and how it might be used to tamper with votes in the United States’ foremost swing state. …
Under the glare of intense light activated from law enforcement, media and election protection activists, no one seemed willing to tamper this time with Ohio’s vote totals – despite the unrelenting magical numerology of Rove. This time, reality and fact-based numbers prevailed Fitrakis 2-4).
Works cited:
Fitrakis, Bob, “Why Rove Failed to Deliver Ohio on Election Day: What Happened in Ohio This Time Around.” Truthout, November 16, 2012. Web. https://truthout.org/articles/why-rov...
Levy, Pema, “The Real Reason Why Rove Went into Denial on Election Night.” Newsweek, January 12, 2014. Web. https://www.newsweek.com/why-rove-wen...
Sacks, Sam, and Hartmann, Thom, “Anonymous, Karl Rove and 2012 Election Fix?” Truthout, November 19, 2012. Web. https://truthout.org/articles/anonymo...
…
Rove's famous hissy-fit took place when the network called the state of Ohio for Obama, putting the president over the 270 electoral votes needed to win reelection. Rove argued that Fox's analysts had acted prematurely.
To resolve the awkward, on-air stand-off, host Megyn Kelly asked the analysts at the Fox "decision desk" how sure they were Obama really would win Ohio and the election (Levy 1).
Rove explained that when Fox called Ohio, only 74% of the vote was in showing President Obama with a lead of roughly 30,000 votes. But, as Rove contended, with 77% reporting according to the Ohio Secretary of State office, the President’s lead had been slashed to just 991 votes.
“We gotta be careful about calling the thing,” Rove said, “I’d be very cautious about intruding in on this process.”
Rove was supremely confident that the numbers coming in from Ohio throughout the night that favored President Obama weren’t indicative of who would win Ohio when all the votes were ultimately tabulated by the state’s computers. With a quarter of the vote still out there, Rove was anticipating a shift to the Right just after 11 pm, which, coincidentally, is exactly what happened in 2004.
That year, John Kerry and the entire nation were watching Ohio just after the 11pm hour. Florida had just been called for George W. Bush and according to the Electoral College math whoever won Ohio would win the election. And considering that exit polls from the state showed John Kerry with a substantial lead, there were a lot of tense moments for Karl Rove and the Republicans that night.
Then the clock struck 11:14pm, and the servers counting the votes in Ohio crashed. Election officials had planned for this sort of thing to happen and already contracted with a company in Chattanooga, Tennessee called SMARTech to be the fail safe should the servers in Ohio go down.
As journalist Craig Unger lays bare in his book, Boss Rove, SMARTech was drenched in Republican politics. One of the early founders of the company was Mercer Reynolds who used to be the finance chairman of the Republican Party. SMARTech’s top client was none other than the Bush-Cheney campaign itself and SMARTech also did work for Jeb Bush and the Republican National Committee. And it was Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell, who ensured that SMARTech received the contract to count votes on election night should the servers go down, which they did at exactly 11:14pm.
Sixty long seconds later the servers came back up in Ohio, but now with vote rerouted through SMARTech in Chattanooga. And, coincidentally, Bush’s prospects for re-election were suddenly a lot brighter. The vote totals that poured into the system from SmartTECH’s computer in Chattanooga were flipping the exit polls on their head. The lead Kerry had in the exit polls had magically reversed by more than 6%, something unheard of in any other nation in the developed world, giving Bush the win in Ohio and the presidency for another four years.
Unger further explains in his book that the only independent analysis of what happened in Ohio was done by Richard Hayes Phillips and published in the book, Witness to a Crime. Phillips and his team analyzed more than 120,000 ballots, 127 polls books, and 141 signature books from Ohio’s 2004 election.
Phillips found zero irregularities in vote totals from all the counties that reported results before the servers crashed at 11:14pm. But of the fourteen counties that came in after the crash connected Ohio’s election computers to SmartTECH’s computers in Chattanooga, every single one of them showed voter irregularities – that all favored George W. Bush.
For example, consider Cleveland’s Fourth Ward. In 2000, Al Gore won 95% of that ward’s vote. But in 2004, the county reported its results after the 11:14 pm crash, and it showed that Kerry had only won 59% of the vote – a 35% drop without any explanation. There were several other abnormalities across Ohio’s post-server crash that delivered the state to Bush.
John Kerry never protested the election and to this day, these 2004 voter abnormalities have never been addressed.
So the question is: on election night this year, when Karl Rove was protesting the call his network had just made in Ohio, was Rove anticipating a wave of unpredicted vote totals to swing the election back to Mitt Romney after a statewide server crash, just as had happened in 2004?
Perhaps. He did make the point that the race was about to drastically narrow according to the Secretary of State’s office. And as The Free Press reports, a number of odd similarities with 2004 began occurring in Ohio this year just after the 11pm hour once again.
“Curiously, the Ohio Secretary of State’s vote tabulation website went down at 11:13pm, as reported by Free Press election protection website monitors, and mentioned by Rove on the news. This was one minute earlier than the time on election night 2004 — when Ohio votes were outsourced to Chattanooga, Tennessee — and then the vote flipped for Bush…
This time, the Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) vote tabulation site went down as on election night as well. In his rant on Fox, Rove argued that Fox News should not confirm Ohio for Obama until votes came in from the southwest Ohio GOP strongholds of Delaware, Butler and Warren counties and suburban Cincinnati. It was after the crash of the secretary of state’s site in 2004 that improbable vote totals came in from Republican counties in southwest Ohio – particularly Butler, Clermont, and Warren counties. These three counties provided more than Bush’s entire Ohio victory margin of 119,000.”
Only this time, when the servers came back up, the votes never flipped. President Obama’s lead held and he went on to win, while Karl Rove – and Mitt Romney – watched in slack-jawed amazement.
We know there was a parade of Conservative talking heads in the days before the election predicting a landslide victory for Mitt Romney. Is it because they lived in a bubble, lacking pollster Nate Silver’s facts and arithmetic that actually showed the President winning in a landslide? Could it be that Rove’s election night freak-out was just a result of this same Election Day ignorance held by all Republicans? Or was Rove genuinely shocked by what he was seeing because he knew the fix was in, just like in 2004, and there was no way President Obama was going to win re-election?
And if that’s the case, why did the plan to steal the election not work?
Here’s where the story gets really interesting.
Just a few weeks before Election Day, the hacktivist group Anonymous issued a video statement against Karl Rove. Anonymous is notorious for numerous cyber actions against the Justice Department, the Pentagon, the Recording Industry of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, and even the Church of Scientology.
In the video released prior to Election Day, Anonymous warns Karl Rove that he’s being watched. “We know that you will attempt to rig the election of Mitt Romney to your favor,” a black-robed figure in a Guy Fawkes mask says in the video. “We will watch as your merry band of conspirators try to achieve this overthrow of the United States government.”
The figure then warns Rove that Anonymous is “watching and monitoring all your servers,” and goes on to say, “We want you to know that we are watching you, waiting for you to make this mistake of thinking you can rig this election to your favor…If we catch you we will turn over all of this data to the appropriate officials in the hopes that you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Then, just two days after Election Day, as the Republican Party was in full-blown despair and Karl Rove was trying to figure out what went wrong, Anonymous released a press statement claiming it did indeed prevent an attempt by Rove to steal the election for Mitt Romney.
The statement reads, “We began following the digital traffic of one Karl Rove…After a rather short time, we identified the digital structure of Karl’s operation and even that of his ORCA. This was an easy task in that barn doors were left open and the wind swept us inside.”The “ORCA” that Anonymous is referring to in the press release is a massive, high-tech get-out-the-vote system created by the Romney campaign this year that will keep tabs on potential voters and coordinate with operatives to target who has and hasn’t voted yet on Election Day.
Romney’s Communications Director Gail Gitcho bragged about how sophisticated ORCA is saying, “At 5 o’clock when the exit polls come out, we won’t pay attention to that. We will have had much more scientific information based on the political operation we have set up.” In other words, ORCA will know who won Ohio better than any exit polls.
But, according to Anonymous, ORCA had nothing to do with getting out the vote and everything to do with rigging the vote.
“We coded and created, what we call The Great Oz. A targeted password protected firewall that we tested and refined over the past weeks. We placed this code on more than one of the digital tunnels and their destination that Karl’s not so smart worker bees planned to use on election night.”
Anonymous alleges these “digital tunnels” were leading to servers in three different states. The release goes on to detail what happened on election night as Rove’s operatives attempted to access these tunnerls. “We watched as Karl’s weak computers repeatedly tried to penetrate The Great Oz. These children of his were at a loss-how many times and how many passwords did they try-exactly 105.”
“Karl’s speared ORCA whale was breached, rotting with a strong stench across his playground, unable to be resuscitated,” claims Anonymous.
So might this have really been the reason for Karl Rove’s shock on election night? Under the guise of sophisticated get out the vote operation, had Rove and the Republican Party actually built up a massive system to steal the Ohio election, just like in 2004, only to have it thwarted at the last minute by a group of computer hackers?
If this is true, then the implications are enormous and could take down the entire Republican Party and finally wake Americans up to the fact that our privatized vote system is shockingly flawed and insecure.
In their press release, Anonymous concludes, “We have a warning for Karl – sail again at your own peril. We may just put all the evidence into a tidy little package and give it to a painfully bored nemesis hanging out in a certain embassy in London.”
In an era of internet [falsehoods] and digital false flags, we must demand proof for these sort of claims made by Anonymous. But given Karl Rove’s history with elections in Ohio and the known vulnerabilities with our corporate owned electronic voting machines, there may be both smoke and fire with these election night allegations.
That’s why it’s vitally important for Anonymous to release any information or evidence it has about this plot to not just Julian Assange, but to law enforcement authorities as well. Otherwise, the alleged democracy-saving actions of the hacktivist group will instead be regarded as useless internet antics, relegated to the dustbins of history (Sacks and Hartmann 1-10).
Here is another writer’s interpretation.
So why didn’t Rove’s guy Romney win Ohio as Bush did in ’04? All the voter suppression tactics and usual dirty tricks seemed to be in place. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted was the new Blackwell and Romney the new Bush, but Rove proved to be the same old Rove –- operating from his 2004 election theft playbook.
This time, after Columbus Free Press articles appeared about voting machines tied to Romney and scurrilous software patches installed on Ohio tabulators, 60,000 people emailed the U.S. Department of Justice with a change.org petition requesting an investigation of Ohio. Justice Department personnel as well as FBI agents were on the ground on Election Day in Ohio looking not only for voter suppression but also for electronic election tampering.
Election protection activists blanketed the state with a visible Video the Vote project that was based out of Columbus and also included Cleveland and Cincinnati.
Although the judges in the software patch cases denied the temporary restraining orders, the cases are still open. However, the story of the Free Press lawsuit was announced the day before Election Day, was picked up by the Associated Press, and appeared in more than 500 newspapers. Just prior to Election Day, the best reporting in Ohio was ironically coming from Channel 19 -- Fox News in Cincinnati. Also, at 12:23am on Election Day morning, Forbes.com posted one of the greatest anti-vote tampering deterrent articles in U.S. history. Essentially, they outlined the shaky electronic voting technology and how it might be used to tamper with votes in the United States’ foremost swing state. …
Under the glare of intense light activated from law enforcement, media and election protection activists, no one seemed willing to tamper this time with Ohio’s vote totals – despite the unrelenting magical numerology of Rove. This time, reality and fact-based numbers prevailed Fitrakis 2-4).
Works cited:
Fitrakis, Bob, “Why Rove Failed to Deliver Ohio on Election Day: What Happened in Ohio This Time Around.” Truthout, November 16, 2012. Web. https://truthout.org/articles/why-rov...
Levy, Pema, “The Real Reason Why Rove Went into Denial on Election Night.” Newsweek, January 12, 2014. Web. https://www.newsweek.com/why-rove-wen...
Sacks, Sam, and Hartmann, Thom, “Anonymous, Karl Rove and 2012 Election Fix?” Truthout, November 19, 2012. Web. https://truthout.org/articles/anonymo...
September 29, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2012 Election -- Why Obama Won
The Republican base saw the president as weak and beatable, but Mitt Romney’s high command struggled to find a winning message.
“The bottom line is that the Obama campaign [had] a candidate that was very hard to lay a glove on because he was somebody that the American people, by and large, had decided that they just liked,” said Romney’s deputy campaign manager Katie Packer Gage.
...
“It was one of the most frustrating things in our campaign,” Gage added. “In focus group after focus group, when you would sit down with this sort of narrow slice of voters — undecided female voters who had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 — they weren’t ready to vote for Barack Obama yet, but when we would test message point after message point after message point, there was almost nothing that would stick to this guy because they just liked him personally” (Hohmann 1).
On paper, Democrats' turnout efforts this year dwarfed those of their GOP counterparts. The 125 million voter contacts the Obama team claimed were more than twice the Republican total. The hundreds of Democratic field offices outnumbered GOP outposts by greater than 2-1 or 3-1 in key swing states.
But the Obama campaign insisted it wasn't just about the numbers.
"Many field campaigns have historically favored quantity over quality. We do not," Obama national field director Jeremy Bird told reporters just before Election Day. "These are not phone calls made from a call center. They are done at the local level by our neighborhood team leaders, members and volunteers, who are talking to people in their communities."
And in an election cycle where billions of dollars were spent on attack ads -- far more than ever before -- that kind of old-school retail politicking may have made the difference.
In the home stretch, the Romney campaign pointed to a big jump in voter contacts this year over John McCain's 2008 effort. But a significant percentage of the voter contacts they pointed to included indirect contact -- like door hangers -- that didn't give voters the all-important sense of personal connection.
Meanwhile, the Obama campaign's turnout effort flooded the zone. While Republicans were still battling for the nomination in the spring, the number of Obama field offices in key primary season states likely to play significant roles in the fall -- states like Ohio, New Hampshire and Florida -- already outnumbered those of all his potential GOP challengers combined, even though the president wasn't facing any primary season challengers.
…
Record-breaking numbers of voters cast their ballots before Election Day this year -- half the voting population or higher in some states -- and the Obama campaign was able to bank huge leads weeks ahead of the race's final day.
…
… these Obama outposts, no matter how small, weren't just window dressing; they filled a couple of key functions. Since each was staffed with at least one Obama for America staffer, they served as an initial point of contact with the campaign, and a recruitment center for local volunteers. They provided a central location for campaign events, for phone banking and for data collection. And their permanence allowed the campaign to develop vital local insight: to build detailed voter files on potential supporters, field test the best ways to motivate them, and push them to cast their votes weeks before Election Day.
Republicans said those early voting efforts by the president's campaign were just tapping out their support from voters who would have shown up for him in the end anyway -- and that the edge fueled by early voting would evaporate when Republican voters headed to the polls on Election Day. They weren't entirely wrong; a good chunk of those early Democratic votes came from banking ballots from the president's strongest supporters, base voters who would have shown up no matter what.
But that early vote cushion wasn't just cosmetic. It helped create an aura of inevitability on the ground in key swing states. It provided an insurance policy against potential vote loss to Election Day lines and snafus. And instead of devoting valuable home stretch resources to bringing guaranteed votes to the polls on Election Day, the campaign could instead focus on using those hard-core supporters as Election Day foot soldiers, employing the most personal and effective form of voter persuasion to bring less enthusiastic backers to the polls (Sinderbrand 1-3).
The Democrats’ position on … domestic issues and the improving economy convinced independent voters—better than one-third of the electorate—that President Obama deserved re-election. Mitt Romney’s gaffes during the campaign, particularly his “private” remark writing off 47 percent of the electorate as dependent on government programs, enabled Democrats to frame Republicans as out of touch with ordinary Americans.
Romney simply did not resonate well with the majority of voters. Polls indicated that Americans “liked” Obama, even though some disagreed with his policies. Personality and perceptions play a significant role in campaigns. But it is important to understand that a candidate’s stance on the issues help to create positive or negative images. So elections are not simply about personalities, but also reflect the effectiveness of getting across a positive message to voters (Goldfields 14).
… a reconstruction by the [Boston] Globe of how the campaign unfolded shows that Romney’s problems went deeper than is widely understood. His campaign made a series of costly financial, strategic, and political mistakes that, in retrospect, all but assured the candidate’s defeat, given the revolutionary turnout tactics and tactical smarts of President Obama’s operation.
One of the gravest errors, many say, was the Romney team’s failure, until too late in the campaign, to sell voters on the candidate’s personal qualities and leadership gifts. The effect was to open the way for Obama to define Romney through an early blitz of negative advertising. Election Day polls showed that the vast majority of voters concluded that Romney did not really care about average people.
…
Rich Beeson, the Romney political director …, said that only after the election did he realize what Obama was doing with so much manpower on the ground. Obama had more than 3,000 paid workers nationwide, compared with 500 for Romney, and hundreds of thousands of volunteers.
“Now I know what they were doing with all the staffs and offices,’’ Beeson said. “They were literally creating a one-to-one contact with voters,’’ something that Romney did not have the staff to match.
Republicans, as it happened, had lost track of their own winning formula.
Democrats said they followed the trail blazed in 2004 by the Bush campaign which used an array of databases to “microtarget’’ voters and a sophisticated field organization to turn them out. Obama won in part by updating the GOP’s innovation.
Romney’s inner circle of family and friends understood the candidate’s weakness all too well: He was a deeply private person, with an aversion to revealing too much of himself to the public. They worried that unless the candidate opened up, he would too easily be reduced to caricature, as a calculating man of astounding wealth, a man unable to relate to average folks, a man whose Mormon faith put him outside the mainstream.
Romney’s eldest son, Tagg, drew up a list of 12 people whose lives had been helped by his father in ways that were publicly unknown but had been deeply personal and significant, such as assisting a dying teenager in writing a will or quietly helping families in financial need. Such compelling vignettes would have been welcome material in almost any other campaign. But Romney’s strategists worried that stressing his personal side would backfire, and a rift opened between some in Romney’s circle and his strategists that lasted until the convention. More than being reticent, Romney was at first far from sold on a second presidential run. Haunted by his 2008 loss, he initially told his family he would not do it. While candidates often try to portray themselves as reluctant, Tagg insisted his father’s stance was genuine.
“He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to ... run,’’ said Tagg, who worked with his mother, Ann, to persuade his father to seek the presidency. “If he could have found someone else to take his place ... he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention.’’
…
Family members kept pushing for a film or series of advertisements that would show how Romney had helped average people in personal ways, based on Tagg’s list of 12 people, along with clips about how Romney raised his family. The film project was to be overseen by documentary filmmaker Greg Whiteley, a longtime family friend who had been allowed to film portions of Romney’s 2008 campaign. But the plan was rejected, leading some in the family to blame [Stuart] Stevens, [Romney’s chief strategist].
Stevens said he did not kill the documentary. But he said he did have a strategic vision that went another way, one he grounded in four questions he put to voters in focus groups.
“There [were] different areas that you could go into,’’ Stevens said. “Talk about Mitt’s business record, Mitt‘s personal story, what Mitt would do as president ... and why Barack Obama is bad. We tested all four equally. We were open to doing any combination, and the one that tested far and away the best, people wanted to know what Mitt Romney would do as president.’’
President Obama’s strategy had very different roots.
His national field director, Jeremy Bird, … was confident that Obama would commit massive resources to building an organization that zeroed in on individual voters.
…
… Bird and his colleagues drew up plans to expand the electorate into one that could reelect Obama. In Ohio, for example, a “barber shop and beauty salon’’ strategy was designed to get likely Obama supporters, particularly African-Americans, to register to vote when they went for a haircut. “Faith captains’’ were assigned to churches to encourage parishioners to turn out for Obama. “Condo captains’’ were told to know every potential Obama voter in their building. The goal was like nothing seen in presidential politics: Each Obama worker would be responsible for about 50 voters in key precincts over the course of the campaign. By Election Day, that worker would know much about the lives of those 50 voters, including whether they had made it to the polls. Romney’s team talked about a ratio of thousands of voters per worker. It would prove to be a crucial difference.
A first-class ground operation in 2012 required leading-edge technology, and here also an early gap opened between Obama and Romney.
The goal was to create the political equivalent of a Facebook or Twitter, a platform that would change the way presidential campaigns are run. And Obama’s team found just the man for the job: a 34-year-old programming whiz named Harper Reed, who got his start as an 11-year-old pecking on an Apple II and had never held a top job in a political campaign. With his wildly flowing black hair, big earrings, and bigger glasses, he was not long on humility — his website proclaimed that “I am pretty awesome’’ — but his talents were real.
As Reed assembled his team, he insisted on being given leeway to hire some of the best techies in the country, from Facebook, Craigslist, Twitter. Moreover, he insisted the team be largely internal, rather than have the enterprise be divided up among outside consultants.
The group was haunted by the failure of a similar venture in Obama’s 2008 campaign, when a get-out-the-vote computer program called Houdini crashed and could have cost the election if the race had been closer. This time, Reed and his team created a successor that they named Gordon, after the person who punched Houdini in the stomach shortly before the magician died.
Separately, the Obama team created a system called Narwahl, named after an Arctic whale, which linked disparate computer programs together. Narwahl and Gordon would be tested repeatedly in exercises that Obama’s team called “game day.’’ Every imaginable failure would be thrown at the systems — hacker attacks, database meltdowns, Internet failures — and the team would be challenged to write up a manual for how to deal with each disaster. It was, they said, more fun than the fantasy war game Dungeons & Dragons.
Zac Moffatt, Romney’s digital director, did not have the luxury of Reed’s time or resources. Moffatt came from the world of politics, had worked at the Republican National Committee and had long believed Romney would be the best GOP candidate for president.
Moffatt played catch-up from the start. He had 14 people working for him in the primaries and then, around May 1, he submitted a general election plan that required at least 110 people and would eventually have 160. Obama was far ahead. Moffatt recalled his assignment in daunting terms: “Can we do 80 percent of what the Obama campaign is doing, in 20 percent of the time, at 10 percent of the cost?’’
Moffatt’s team nonetheless managed to create big projects on short notice. For example, one of the highest priorities was a Facebook app that would enable the Romney campaign to locate voters who otherwise could not be found by telephone. By some estimates, half of younger voters do not have a landline or cannot be reached by cellphone. Three weeks before Election Day, the app was unveiled by the campaign and downloaded by 40,000 Romney supporters.
There was only one problem. Months earlier, Obama’s campaign had developed a similar app, which had been downloaded by 1 million people.
“I questioned why they didn’t spend more time and energy early defining Romney in a fuller way so people could identify with him,’’ [David] Axelrod [Obama’s senior strategist] said in a post-election interview.
“One of my conclusions is so much of his life was kind of walled off from use. His faith is important to him, but they didn’t want to talk about that. His business was important, but they didn’t want to talk about that much. His governorship was important to him, but his signature achievement [health care] was unhelpful to them in the Republican primary. My feeling is you have to build a candidacy on the foundation of biography. That is what authenticates your message. I was always waiting for that to happen.’’
Axelrod jumped at the opening. In a major gamble, the Obama campaign moved $65 million in advertising money that had been budgeted for September and October into June, enabling the president to unleash a series of attacks that would define Romney at a time when the Republican would have little money to respond.
From Axelrod’s viewpoint, the timing was perfect. Romney had been weakened by assaults from fellow GOP candidates during the primaries. Romney alienated many Hispanics by suggesting that illegal immigrant families should “self- deport,’’ and he said he had been a “severely conservative’’ governor, hurting his strategy to move to the middle for the general election.
...
… Obama’s campaign had far more people on the ground, for longer periods, and backed by better data. In Florida, for example, the Romney campaign said it had fewer than 200 staff members on the ground, a huge commitment of its total of 500 nationwide. But the Obama campaign had 770 staff in Florida out of 3,000 or so nationwide.
“They had more staff in Florida than we had in the country, and for longer,’’ said Romney adviser Ron Kaufman.
Indeed, in swing state after swing state, the Obama field team was much bigger than the Romney troops. Obama had 123 offices in Ohio, compared with Romney’s 40. Obama had 59 offices in Colorado, compared with Romney’s 15, according to statistics compiled by the Obama campaign.
Romney’s confidence remained strong as Election Day approached. While public polls showed Obama in control, some of Romney’s internal polls showed him winning.
But Obama’s field organization was too strong. In Florida, 266,000 more Hispanics voted than four years earlier. “They altered the face of the election by driving up the Latino turnout,’’ Romney political director Rich Beeson said. “They told us they would do it. I didn’t think they would do it, and they did.’’
Ohio was the greatest surprise of all. Romney pollster Neil Newhouse calculated that 209,000 more African-Americans voted this year than in 2008 in Ohio, while 329,000 fewer whites had voted.
“I don’t know how that’s possible,’’ Newhouse said. “If that is what the Obama campaign achieved, hats off to them.’’
A key difference was the depth of voter contact. Romney took comfort in polls that showed voters had been contacted equally by both campaigns. But the polls were misleading, perhaps equating a recorded robocall on the phone with a house call by a worker.
…
As dawn broke on Election Day, 800 Romney volunteers filled the floor of TD Garden in Boston. This was the centerpiece of the campaign’s turnout operation, code named ORCA, that was supposed to swallow Obama’s Narwhal program. But the Romney team was so determined to keep ORCA secret that it had never run a test at TD Garden; it had only gone through some lesser runs in a different building.
The ORCA workers were supposed to be in contact with more than 30,000 volunteers stationed at polling places across the country. Those volunteers were told to bring a smartphone and go to a secure Web page on which they could report the names of everyone who voted. In this way, the Romney campaign could determine if supporters had failed to show up and urge them to vote.
But as volunteers on Election Day began tapping in the names of voters, it became clear something was wrong.
The system was so overloaded with incoming data from volunteers that it exceeded capacity and crashed.
The Obama campaign, which had suffered a similar meltdown in 2008 and had been zealous about testing its systems this time around, had no glitches. Tens of thousands of Obama volunteers across the country sent real-time data from polling places, enabling workers at Chicago headquarters to ensure that expected vote totals were on track. More importantly, the field organization put in place by Jeremy Bird hit its goals, turning out the needed number of voters to reelect the president.
Exit polls told a stunning story. The majority of voters preferred Romney’s visions, values, and leadership. But he had clearly failed to address the problem that Romney’s own family worried about from the start. Obama beat Romney by an astonishing 81 to 18 percent margin on the question of which candidate “cares about people like me.’’
That finding still frustrates those closest to Romney. His former lieutenant governor, Kerry Healey, who believed the campaign wasted an opportunity to highlight Romney’s life at the convention, said, “even at the end of the campaign, I never felt that the American people understood Mitt Romney’s genuine character and that is a terrible shame.’’
Romney, who did not respond to an interview request, was ultimately responsible for his campaign’s failings. Republicans variously blamed factors such as a candidate who was too moderate or not moderate enough, a lower-than-expected turnout of white voters for Romney coupled with a heavy minority vote for Obama, and the president’s leadership during the Sandy storm.
Inevitably, much of the blame has been directed at Stevens, and he hasn’t ducked it. “If there’s blame to be thrown, throw it my way,’’ he said. But he said it should be noted that Obama had no primary opponents, giving him an enormous advantage (Kranish 1-25).
Works cited:
Goldfields, David, “What We Can Learn about America from the 2012 Presidential Election.” American Studies Journal, 58 (2014). Web. June 9, 2020. http://www.asjournal.org/58-2014/what...
Hohmann, James, “Campaign Officials Dissect Election.” Politico, December 8, 2012. Web.
https://www.politico.com/story/2012/1...
Kranish, Michael, “The Story behind Mitt Romney’s Loss in the Presidential Campaign to President Obama.” Boston.com, December 22, 2012. Web. https://www.boston.com/uncategorized/...
Sinderbrand, Rebecca, “Analysis: Obama Won with a Better Ground Game.” CNN. November 7, 2012. Web. https://www.cnn.com/2012/11/07/politi...
“The bottom line is that the Obama campaign [had] a candidate that was very hard to lay a glove on because he was somebody that the American people, by and large, had decided that they just liked,” said Romney’s deputy campaign manager Katie Packer Gage.
...
“It was one of the most frustrating things in our campaign,” Gage added. “In focus group after focus group, when you would sit down with this sort of narrow slice of voters — undecided female voters who had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 — they weren’t ready to vote for Barack Obama yet, but when we would test message point after message point after message point, there was almost nothing that would stick to this guy because they just liked him personally” (Hohmann 1).
On paper, Democrats' turnout efforts this year dwarfed those of their GOP counterparts. The 125 million voter contacts the Obama team claimed were more than twice the Republican total. The hundreds of Democratic field offices outnumbered GOP outposts by greater than 2-1 or 3-1 in key swing states.
But the Obama campaign insisted it wasn't just about the numbers.
"Many field campaigns have historically favored quantity over quality. We do not," Obama national field director Jeremy Bird told reporters just before Election Day. "These are not phone calls made from a call center. They are done at the local level by our neighborhood team leaders, members and volunteers, who are talking to people in their communities."
And in an election cycle where billions of dollars were spent on attack ads -- far more than ever before -- that kind of old-school retail politicking may have made the difference.
In the home stretch, the Romney campaign pointed to a big jump in voter contacts this year over John McCain's 2008 effort. But a significant percentage of the voter contacts they pointed to included indirect contact -- like door hangers -- that didn't give voters the all-important sense of personal connection.
Meanwhile, the Obama campaign's turnout effort flooded the zone. While Republicans were still battling for the nomination in the spring, the number of Obama field offices in key primary season states likely to play significant roles in the fall -- states like Ohio, New Hampshire and Florida -- already outnumbered those of all his potential GOP challengers combined, even though the president wasn't facing any primary season challengers.
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Record-breaking numbers of voters cast their ballots before Election Day this year -- half the voting population or higher in some states -- and the Obama campaign was able to bank huge leads weeks ahead of the race's final day.
…
… these Obama outposts, no matter how small, weren't just window dressing; they filled a couple of key functions. Since each was staffed with at least one Obama for America staffer, they served as an initial point of contact with the campaign, and a recruitment center for local volunteers. They provided a central location for campaign events, for phone banking and for data collection. And their permanence allowed the campaign to develop vital local insight: to build detailed voter files on potential supporters, field test the best ways to motivate them, and push them to cast their votes weeks before Election Day.
Republicans said those early voting efforts by the president's campaign were just tapping out their support from voters who would have shown up for him in the end anyway -- and that the edge fueled by early voting would evaporate when Republican voters headed to the polls on Election Day. They weren't entirely wrong; a good chunk of those early Democratic votes came from banking ballots from the president's strongest supporters, base voters who would have shown up no matter what.
But that early vote cushion wasn't just cosmetic. It helped create an aura of inevitability on the ground in key swing states. It provided an insurance policy against potential vote loss to Election Day lines and snafus. And instead of devoting valuable home stretch resources to bringing guaranteed votes to the polls on Election Day, the campaign could instead focus on using those hard-core supporters as Election Day foot soldiers, employing the most personal and effective form of voter persuasion to bring less enthusiastic backers to the polls (Sinderbrand 1-3).
The Democrats’ position on … domestic issues and the improving economy convinced independent voters—better than one-third of the electorate—that President Obama deserved re-election. Mitt Romney’s gaffes during the campaign, particularly his “private” remark writing off 47 percent of the electorate as dependent on government programs, enabled Democrats to frame Republicans as out of touch with ordinary Americans.
Romney simply did not resonate well with the majority of voters. Polls indicated that Americans “liked” Obama, even though some disagreed with his policies. Personality and perceptions play a significant role in campaigns. But it is important to understand that a candidate’s stance on the issues help to create positive or negative images. So elections are not simply about personalities, but also reflect the effectiveness of getting across a positive message to voters (Goldfields 14).
… a reconstruction by the [Boston] Globe of how the campaign unfolded shows that Romney’s problems went deeper than is widely understood. His campaign made a series of costly financial, strategic, and political mistakes that, in retrospect, all but assured the candidate’s defeat, given the revolutionary turnout tactics and tactical smarts of President Obama’s operation.
One of the gravest errors, many say, was the Romney team’s failure, until too late in the campaign, to sell voters on the candidate’s personal qualities and leadership gifts. The effect was to open the way for Obama to define Romney through an early blitz of negative advertising. Election Day polls showed that the vast majority of voters concluded that Romney did not really care about average people.
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Rich Beeson, the Romney political director …, said that only after the election did he realize what Obama was doing with so much manpower on the ground. Obama had more than 3,000 paid workers nationwide, compared with 500 for Romney, and hundreds of thousands of volunteers.
“Now I know what they were doing with all the staffs and offices,’’ Beeson said. “They were literally creating a one-to-one contact with voters,’’ something that Romney did not have the staff to match.
Republicans, as it happened, had lost track of their own winning formula.
Democrats said they followed the trail blazed in 2004 by the Bush campaign which used an array of databases to “microtarget’’ voters and a sophisticated field organization to turn them out. Obama won in part by updating the GOP’s innovation.
Romney’s inner circle of family and friends understood the candidate’s weakness all too well: He was a deeply private person, with an aversion to revealing too much of himself to the public. They worried that unless the candidate opened up, he would too easily be reduced to caricature, as a calculating man of astounding wealth, a man unable to relate to average folks, a man whose Mormon faith put him outside the mainstream.
Romney’s eldest son, Tagg, drew up a list of 12 people whose lives had been helped by his father in ways that were publicly unknown but had been deeply personal and significant, such as assisting a dying teenager in writing a will or quietly helping families in financial need. Such compelling vignettes would have been welcome material in almost any other campaign. But Romney’s strategists worried that stressing his personal side would backfire, and a rift opened between some in Romney’s circle and his strategists that lasted until the convention. More than being reticent, Romney was at first far from sold on a second presidential run. Haunted by his 2008 loss, he initially told his family he would not do it. While candidates often try to portray themselves as reluctant, Tagg insisted his father’s stance was genuine.
“He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to ... run,’’ said Tagg, who worked with his mother, Ann, to persuade his father to seek the presidency. “If he could have found someone else to take his place ... he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention.’’
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Family members kept pushing for a film or series of advertisements that would show how Romney had helped average people in personal ways, based on Tagg’s list of 12 people, along with clips about how Romney raised his family. The film project was to be overseen by documentary filmmaker Greg Whiteley, a longtime family friend who had been allowed to film portions of Romney’s 2008 campaign. But the plan was rejected, leading some in the family to blame [Stuart] Stevens, [Romney’s chief strategist].
Stevens said he did not kill the documentary. But he said he did have a strategic vision that went another way, one he grounded in four questions he put to voters in focus groups.
“There [were] different areas that you could go into,’’ Stevens said. “Talk about Mitt’s business record, Mitt‘s personal story, what Mitt would do as president ... and why Barack Obama is bad. We tested all four equally. We were open to doing any combination, and the one that tested far and away the best, people wanted to know what Mitt Romney would do as president.’’
President Obama’s strategy had very different roots.
His national field director, Jeremy Bird, … was confident that Obama would commit massive resources to building an organization that zeroed in on individual voters.
…
… Bird and his colleagues drew up plans to expand the electorate into one that could reelect Obama. In Ohio, for example, a “barber shop and beauty salon’’ strategy was designed to get likely Obama supporters, particularly African-Americans, to register to vote when they went for a haircut. “Faith captains’’ were assigned to churches to encourage parishioners to turn out for Obama. “Condo captains’’ were told to know every potential Obama voter in their building. The goal was like nothing seen in presidential politics: Each Obama worker would be responsible for about 50 voters in key precincts over the course of the campaign. By Election Day, that worker would know much about the lives of those 50 voters, including whether they had made it to the polls. Romney’s team talked about a ratio of thousands of voters per worker. It would prove to be a crucial difference.
A first-class ground operation in 2012 required leading-edge technology, and here also an early gap opened between Obama and Romney.
The goal was to create the political equivalent of a Facebook or Twitter, a platform that would change the way presidential campaigns are run. And Obama’s team found just the man for the job: a 34-year-old programming whiz named Harper Reed, who got his start as an 11-year-old pecking on an Apple II and had never held a top job in a political campaign. With his wildly flowing black hair, big earrings, and bigger glasses, he was not long on humility — his website proclaimed that “I am pretty awesome’’ — but his talents were real.
As Reed assembled his team, he insisted on being given leeway to hire some of the best techies in the country, from Facebook, Craigslist, Twitter. Moreover, he insisted the team be largely internal, rather than have the enterprise be divided up among outside consultants.
The group was haunted by the failure of a similar venture in Obama’s 2008 campaign, when a get-out-the-vote computer program called Houdini crashed and could have cost the election if the race had been closer. This time, Reed and his team created a successor that they named Gordon, after the person who punched Houdini in the stomach shortly before the magician died.
Separately, the Obama team created a system called Narwahl, named after an Arctic whale, which linked disparate computer programs together. Narwahl and Gordon would be tested repeatedly in exercises that Obama’s team called “game day.’’ Every imaginable failure would be thrown at the systems — hacker attacks, database meltdowns, Internet failures — and the team would be challenged to write up a manual for how to deal with each disaster. It was, they said, more fun than the fantasy war game Dungeons & Dragons.
Zac Moffatt, Romney’s digital director, did not have the luxury of Reed’s time or resources. Moffatt came from the world of politics, had worked at the Republican National Committee and had long believed Romney would be the best GOP candidate for president.
Moffatt played catch-up from the start. He had 14 people working for him in the primaries and then, around May 1, he submitted a general election plan that required at least 110 people and would eventually have 160. Obama was far ahead. Moffatt recalled his assignment in daunting terms: “Can we do 80 percent of what the Obama campaign is doing, in 20 percent of the time, at 10 percent of the cost?’’
Moffatt’s team nonetheless managed to create big projects on short notice. For example, one of the highest priorities was a Facebook app that would enable the Romney campaign to locate voters who otherwise could not be found by telephone. By some estimates, half of younger voters do not have a landline or cannot be reached by cellphone. Three weeks before Election Day, the app was unveiled by the campaign and downloaded by 40,000 Romney supporters.
There was only one problem. Months earlier, Obama’s campaign had developed a similar app, which had been downloaded by 1 million people.
“I questioned why they didn’t spend more time and energy early defining Romney in a fuller way so people could identify with him,’’ [David] Axelrod [Obama’s senior strategist] said in a post-election interview.
“One of my conclusions is so much of his life was kind of walled off from use. His faith is important to him, but they didn’t want to talk about that. His business was important, but they didn’t want to talk about that much. His governorship was important to him, but his signature achievement [health care] was unhelpful to them in the Republican primary. My feeling is you have to build a candidacy on the foundation of biography. That is what authenticates your message. I was always waiting for that to happen.’’
Axelrod jumped at the opening. In a major gamble, the Obama campaign moved $65 million in advertising money that had been budgeted for September and October into June, enabling the president to unleash a series of attacks that would define Romney at a time when the Republican would have little money to respond.
From Axelrod’s viewpoint, the timing was perfect. Romney had been weakened by assaults from fellow GOP candidates during the primaries. Romney alienated many Hispanics by suggesting that illegal immigrant families should “self- deport,’’ and he said he had been a “severely conservative’’ governor, hurting his strategy to move to the middle for the general election.
...
… Obama’s campaign had far more people on the ground, for longer periods, and backed by better data. In Florida, for example, the Romney campaign said it had fewer than 200 staff members on the ground, a huge commitment of its total of 500 nationwide. But the Obama campaign had 770 staff in Florida out of 3,000 or so nationwide.
“They had more staff in Florida than we had in the country, and for longer,’’ said Romney adviser Ron Kaufman.
Indeed, in swing state after swing state, the Obama field team was much bigger than the Romney troops. Obama had 123 offices in Ohio, compared with Romney’s 40. Obama had 59 offices in Colorado, compared with Romney’s 15, according to statistics compiled by the Obama campaign.
Romney’s confidence remained strong as Election Day approached. While public polls showed Obama in control, some of Romney’s internal polls showed him winning.
But Obama’s field organization was too strong. In Florida, 266,000 more Hispanics voted than four years earlier. “They altered the face of the election by driving up the Latino turnout,’’ Romney political director Rich Beeson said. “They told us they would do it. I didn’t think they would do it, and they did.’’
Ohio was the greatest surprise of all. Romney pollster Neil Newhouse calculated that 209,000 more African-Americans voted this year than in 2008 in Ohio, while 329,000 fewer whites had voted.
“I don’t know how that’s possible,’’ Newhouse said. “If that is what the Obama campaign achieved, hats off to them.’’
A key difference was the depth of voter contact. Romney took comfort in polls that showed voters had been contacted equally by both campaigns. But the polls were misleading, perhaps equating a recorded robocall on the phone with a house call by a worker.
…
As dawn broke on Election Day, 800 Romney volunteers filled the floor of TD Garden in Boston. This was the centerpiece of the campaign’s turnout operation, code named ORCA, that was supposed to swallow Obama’s Narwhal program. But the Romney team was so determined to keep ORCA secret that it had never run a test at TD Garden; it had only gone through some lesser runs in a different building.
The ORCA workers were supposed to be in contact with more than 30,000 volunteers stationed at polling places across the country. Those volunteers were told to bring a smartphone and go to a secure Web page on which they could report the names of everyone who voted. In this way, the Romney campaign could determine if supporters had failed to show up and urge them to vote.
But as volunteers on Election Day began tapping in the names of voters, it became clear something was wrong.
The system was so overloaded with incoming data from volunteers that it exceeded capacity and crashed.
The Obama campaign, which had suffered a similar meltdown in 2008 and had been zealous about testing its systems this time around, had no glitches. Tens of thousands of Obama volunteers across the country sent real-time data from polling places, enabling workers at Chicago headquarters to ensure that expected vote totals were on track. More importantly, the field organization put in place by Jeremy Bird hit its goals, turning out the needed number of voters to reelect the president.
Exit polls told a stunning story. The majority of voters preferred Romney’s visions, values, and leadership. But he had clearly failed to address the problem that Romney’s own family worried about from the start. Obama beat Romney by an astonishing 81 to 18 percent margin on the question of which candidate “cares about people like me.’’
That finding still frustrates those closest to Romney. His former lieutenant governor, Kerry Healey, who believed the campaign wasted an opportunity to highlight Romney’s life at the convention, said, “even at the end of the campaign, I never felt that the American people understood Mitt Romney’s genuine character and that is a terrible shame.’’
Romney, who did not respond to an interview request, was ultimately responsible for his campaign’s failings. Republicans variously blamed factors such as a candidate who was too moderate or not moderate enough, a lower-than-expected turnout of white voters for Romney coupled with a heavy minority vote for Obama, and the president’s leadership during the Sandy storm.
Inevitably, much of the blame has been directed at Stevens, and he hasn’t ducked it. “If there’s blame to be thrown, throw it my way,’’ he said. But he said it should be noted that Obama had no primary opponents, giving him an enormous advantage (Kranish 1-25).
Works cited:
Goldfields, David, “What We Can Learn about America from the 2012 Presidential Election.” American Studies Journal, 58 (2014). Web. June 9, 2020. http://www.asjournal.org/58-2014/what...
Hohmann, James, “Campaign Officials Dissect Election.” Politico, December 8, 2012. Web.
https://www.politico.com/story/2012/1...
Kranish, Michael, “The Story behind Mitt Romney’s Loss in the Presidential Campaign to President Obama.” Boston.com, December 22, 2012. Web. https://www.boston.com/uncategorized/...
Sinderbrand, Rebecca, “Analysis: Obama Won with a Better Ground Game.” CNN. November 7, 2012. Web. https://www.cnn.com/2012/11/07/politi...
September 27, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2012 Election -- The Debates
… Romney proposed months of intense preparation, with 16 mock debates. (Obama did 11.) Then, just as Romney seemed ready, the campaign received news that a video had been leaked in which the candidate characterized 47 percent of Americans as “victims’’ who wanted government benefits and would never vote for him. That left the impression that Romney was referring not just to people on welfare but also to recipients of Social Security and veterans benefits. It seemed to confirm the worst view of Romney, that he didn’t care about average people. His poll numbers plummeted
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… After some lethargic rehearsals, in which Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts played the Romney role, Obama never mentioned the 47 percent controversy during the first debate. The president skipped at least two practice sessions at which he was going to review material. Obama seemed as unready as Romney was ready. “This was an exposure of Mitt Romney that people hadn’t seen before,’’ said [Neil] Newhouse [Romney’s election pollster]. “He had been a caricature who’d outsourced jobs, offshored jobs. The Mitt Romney they saw in debates was articulate, thoughtful, and had a plan.’’ Romney’s rating went up by 9 points in some key states, … (Kranish 15).
… Obama’s team pressured their distracted boss to take Mitt Romney more seriously and bear down during debate practice — and he shot back, accusing them of sending him into battle with a mushy, ill-defined plan of attack. “This is all great,” he told the team during one of 11 prep sessions he attended, most of them at Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington. “But what am I actually supposed to do when I get onto the stage? You are telling me what not to do. I feel like I’m getting a lot of contradictory advice, guys” (Thrush and Martin 1).
Obama was frustrated with the contradictory advice he was getting from top aides before the Denver debate. In August, Obama’s debate prep team drafted a detailed strategy memo for the initial faceoff that called for Obama to take the fight to Romney, according to campaign officials. “He’s going to come out and do that Massachusetts moderate routine,” senior strategist David Axelrod told a colleague at the time. “And we’ve got to call bullshit on him.” But after Romney’s “47 percent’ debacle, advisors’ urged Obama to pull back a bit, to seem more presidential and less caustic. Obama and his team flew west on September 30, still not quite sure of how to handle Romney.
The Obama high command was deeply worried about their candidate’s preparedness as Denver drew closer. As he prepped outside of Las Vegas before the first debate, the small circle of aides who saw the raw video of one of the practice sessions could see how bad things were. The optics were chillingly Nixon 1960. Obama was grim and hardly making eye contact with Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, his debate partner.
He particularly hated the post-prep session where the team sat together and reviewed the video. During one, as the team was critiquing his performance, Obama got up, said, “Enough!” and walked out.
Obama adviser [Valerie] Jarrett – a close friend of the First Family but an unpopular figure with much of the president’s staff – was irritated with the debate team after the Denver debacle.
Another adviser said she made it clear “the team, and not just the president, made a strategic miscalculation” and needed to “adjust their antennae.” She hadn’t been part of the debate team and demanded to know why Obama’s other aides hadn’t gotten a heads-up that he was about to bomb. Her intervention made the situation more fraught than it needed to be, and they took steps to calm the situation (Thrush and Martin 6-7).
[This man] with unshakeable confidence was deeply shaken by his own failure in Denver — far more than anyone on the outside could have known at the time. Intuitively, Obama and his top advisers quietly waged a campaign-within-a-campaign to buck up their bummed-out candidate and, even more quietly, to purge distractions and negativity from his midst (Thrush and Martin 2).
Second Debate
He waited all of 45 seconds to make clear he came not just ready for a fight but ready to pick one.
President Obama, who concluded that he was “too polite” in his first debate with Mitt Romney, made sure no one would say that after their second. He interrupted, he scolded, he filibustered, he shook his head.
He tried to talk right over Mr. Romney, who tried to talk over him back. The president who waited patiently for his turn last time around forced his way into Mr. Romney’s time this time. At one point, he squared off with Mr. Romney face to face, almost chest to chest, in the middle of the stage, as if they were roosters in a ring.
The strategy for Tuesday night was clear: undercut Mr. Romney’s character and credibility by portraying him as lying about his true positions on issues like taxes and abortion. Time and again, Mr. Obama questioned whether the man on stage with him was the same “severely conservative” candidate who tacked right in the Republican primaries.
He painted Mr. Romney as a tool of big oil who is soft on China, hard on immigrants, politically crass on Libya and two-faced on guns and energy. He deployed many of the attack lines that went unused in Denver, going after Mr. Romney’s business record, his personal income taxes and, in the debate’s final minutes, his comments about the 47 percent of Americans he once deemed too dependent on government.
“Governor Romney doesn’t have a five-point plan,” Mr. Obama charged. “He has a one-point plan,” which is to help the rich, he said.
He mocked Mr. Romney by noting that he once closed a coal plant as the governor of Massachusetts. “Now suddenly you’re a big champion of coal,” he said.
As for trade, he said, “Governor, you’re the last person who’s going to get tough on China.”
And he pressed Mr. Romney for not disclosing how he would pay for his tax and deficit reduction goals. “We haven’t heard from the governor any specifics beyond Big Bird and eliminating funding for Planned Parenthood,” he said.
Mr. Romney held his own and gave as good as he got, presenting Mr. Obama as a failed president who has piled on trillions of dollars of debt, left millions of Americans without work, bungled security for American personnel in Libya, done nothing to reform entitlement programs and deserted a middle class “crushed under the policies of a president who has not understood what it takes to get the economy working again.”
But it was Mr. Obama who was the central story line of the night, his performance coming across as a striking contrast to that of his first face-off with Mr. Romney. For days leading up to Tuesday night’s encounter, Mr. Obama huddled in a Virginia resort with advisers to practice a more aggressive approach without appearing somehow inauthentic or crossing over a line of presidential dignity. It was a line he would stride up to repeatedly over the course of more than 90 minutes, and some will argue that he slipped over it at times.
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His aggressive approach came as no surprise to Mr. Romney’s camp. It was clear from the start when Mr. Obama made sure to use the first question — from a college student worried about finding a job — to jab Mr. Romney for opposing the way the president went about the auto industry bailout of 2009.
With each question that followed came another attack. When it was not his turn, Mr. Obama sat on a stool and looked at Mr. Romney as he talked, rather than staring down and taking notes as he did in Denver. There was little smirking, though he did project at times an air of tolerant dismissal (Baker 1-3).
When an undecided young woman voter asked Obama and Romney how they plan to rectify wage inequality in the workplace, Romney thought he could go in for the kill and show women he cared.
He explained that he was surprised to find men occupying cabinet positions and asked his staff if they could find women who were equally qualified for them. “I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks?’ And they brought us whole binders full of women,” Romney said to prove he had taken a “concerted effort” to find qualified women.
Within minutes of his speech, a Tumblr parody was created, #bindersfullofwomen became a trending Twitter hashtag and the phrase was the second-highest Google search term during the debate.
Romney sparred with Obama over unfair trading practices in China, and admitted to having invested in Chinese firms. But he then confronted Obama and asked him repeatedly if he had looked at his own pension.
“You know, I don’t look at my pension. It’s not as big as yours so it doesn’t take as long. I don’t check it that often,” Obama responded to Romney’s line of questioning.
While Romney thought he got a leg up by accusing Obama of having investments in China and the Cayman Islands, the real winner online was the president. His response was the top searched Google query during the debate, particularly in Virginia, New Jersey, Ohio and Illinois (Shanker 1).
Evidently intent on redeeming himself by getting in all the points he failed to get in last time, Mr. Obama pushed right past time limits and at one point even refused to yield when the moderator, Candy Crowley of CNN, tried to rein him in (Baker 3).
In the town hall-style forum at Hofstra University on Long Island, the candidates roamed the stage, circling, interrupting and at times heckling one another as they took questions from an audience of 80 undecided voters.
The moderator, CNN's Candy Crowley, often had to intervene to keep order.
The 11 questions from the voters present ranged from gun control to Libya to immigration, but the main focus was on the economy.
The most dramatic clash came over foreign policy, and the attack last month [September 11] on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which left the US ambassador and three other Americans dead.
Mr Romney sought to portray the attack as evidence of the Obama administration's failing foreign policy and he suggested Mr Obama had dithered over admitting a terrorist attack had occurred.
Mr Obama shot back that he had said so the day after the attack, in an appearance at the White House.
The Republican challenged this, saying: "It took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror."
When Ms Crowley confirmed that Mr Obama had indeed called the attack an "act of terror" the day after the attack, the president told the moderator: "Say that a little louder, Candy."
The president also accused Mr Romney of using the Libyan events for political purposes. "While we were still dealing with our diplomats being threatened, Governor Romney put out a press release, trying to make political points, and that's not how a commander-in-chief operates," he said.
Mr Obama accused Mr Romney of inconsistency, and contrasted his own bailout of the US car industry with the Republican's position that car-makers should have been allowed to go bankrupt.
In turn, Mr Romney blamed the president for unemployment of 20 million and bloated federal deficits.
America, he insisted, could not afford another four years with Mr Obama at the helm, warning that Mr Obama's policies would ultimately prove as disastrous as the euro debt crisis.
"We've gone from $10tn of national debt to $16tn of national debt," he said.
"If the president were re-elected, we'd go to almost $20tn of national debt. This puts us on a road to Greece."
Mr Obama said voters had heard no specifics on Mr Romney's "sketchy" economic plan apart from eliminating Sesame Street's Big Bird and cutting funding for Planned Parenthood, a family planning organisation Republicans say promotes abortion (Mardell 1-3).
Third Debate
Barack Obama went on the offensive over foreign policy in the third and final presidential debate, repeatedly accusing Mitt Romney of flip-flopping on major international issues but failing to deliver a killer blow to his opponent's resurgent campaign.
While the president emerged as the narrow winner on the night, the encounter, which was cordial and largely uneventful compared with the previous two debates, is unlikely to have much impact on the outcome of the election.
Going into the debate at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida, Obama had an inbuilt advantage on foreign policy and security. As president, with access to daily briefings by intelligence analysts, diplomats and generals, he is better briefed and it showed as he dominated Romney in the first half of the debate.
The Republican candidate appeared unsure at times and occasionally stumbled over his lines as if struggling to remember his briefing notes. He began sweating as Obama, aggressive from the start, got the better of him during exchanges on Iran, Iraq and Russia as well as on US military spending.
…
"What we need to do with respect to the Middle East is strong, steady leadership, not wrong and reckless leadership that is all over the map," said Obama. "And unfortunately that's the kind of opinions that you've offered throughout this campaign, and it is not a recipe for American strength, or keeping America safe over the long haul."
But with a growing sense in the Republican camp that the White House might just be within reach after all, Romney appeared happy to settle for a safe, gaffe-free performance in which his main goal was to reassure the US public that he was not a warmonger.
…
One of the most telling moments came when Obama, in a flash of normally suppressed arrogance, lectured Romney on military developments as if he was a child. Responding to a pledge by Romney to increase military spending and a complaint that the navy had fewer ships, Obama resorted to heavy sarcasm.
"You mentioned the navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1917. Well, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines," Obama said.
But Romney did not crumple and recovered in the second half ...
On the Middle East he said an attack on Iran would be a last resort and that he was against direct US military involvement in Syria. He sought to neutralise the advantage Obama enjoys thanks to the killing of Osama bin Laden by insisting that his own policy was about more than "going after the bad guys". "We can't just kill our way out of this mess," Romney said.
Romney managed to get in some hits on Obama too, accusing him of having conducted "an apology tour" of the Middle East at the start of his presidency and this was perceived by America's enemies as a sign of weakness. "Mr President, America has not dictated to other nations. We have freed other nations from dictators," he said.
The idea that Obama is an apologist for American values resonates strongly among conservatives.
…
Surprisingly there was almost nothing on the Benghazi consulate attack. Having twice botched the issue Romney opted against returning to it in depth (MacAskill “Obama” 1-3).
Works cited:
Baker, Peter, “For the President, Punch, Punch, Another Punch.” The New York Times, October 17, 2012. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/17/us...
Kranish, Michael, “The Story behind Mitt Romney’s Loss in the Presidential Campaign to President Obama.” Boston.com, December 22, 2012. Web. https://www.boston.com/uncategorized/...
MacAskill, Ewan, “Obama and Romney Clash over Foreign Policy in Final Presidential Debate.” The Guardian, October 23, 2012. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/201...
Mardell, Mark, editor, “Obama Hits Back in Fiery Second Debate with Romney.” BBC News, October 17, 2012. Web. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-can...
Shanker, Dakshayani, “Five Best Moments from Obama and Romney’s 2012 Second Debate.” NBC News, Oct. 9, 2016. Web. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/201...
Thrush, Glenn and Martin, Jonathan, “Plenty of 2012 Pitfalls for Obama and Romney.” Politico, December 17, 2012. Web. https://www.politico.com/story/2012/1...
…
… After some lethargic rehearsals, in which Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts played the Romney role, Obama never mentioned the 47 percent controversy during the first debate. The president skipped at least two practice sessions at which he was going to review material. Obama seemed as unready as Romney was ready. “This was an exposure of Mitt Romney that people hadn’t seen before,’’ said [Neil] Newhouse [Romney’s election pollster]. “He had been a caricature who’d outsourced jobs, offshored jobs. The Mitt Romney they saw in debates was articulate, thoughtful, and had a plan.’’ Romney’s rating went up by 9 points in some key states, … (Kranish 15).
… Obama’s team pressured their distracted boss to take Mitt Romney more seriously and bear down during debate practice — and he shot back, accusing them of sending him into battle with a mushy, ill-defined plan of attack. “This is all great,” he told the team during one of 11 prep sessions he attended, most of them at Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington. “But what am I actually supposed to do when I get onto the stage? You are telling me what not to do. I feel like I’m getting a lot of contradictory advice, guys” (Thrush and Martin 1).
Obama was frustrated with the contradictory advice he was getting from top aides before the Denver debate. In August, Obama’s debate prep team drafted a detailed strategy memo for the initial faceoff that called for Obama to take the fight to Romney, according to campaign officials. “He’s going to come out and do that Massachusetts moderate routine,” senior strategist David Axelrod told a colleague at the time. “And we’ve got to call bullshit on him.” But after Romney’s “47 percent’ debacle, advisors’ urged Obama to pull back a bit, to seem more presidential and less caustic. Obama and his team flew west on September 30, still not quite sure of how to handle Romney.
The Obama high command was deeply worried about their candidate’s preparedness as Denver drew closer. As he prepped outside of Las Vegas before the first debate, the small circle of aides who saw the raw video of one of the practice sessions could see how bad things were. The optics were chillingly Nixon 1960. Obama was grim and hardly making eye contact with Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, his debate partner.
He particularly hated the post-prep session where the team sat together and reviewed the video. During one, as the team was critiquing his performance, Obama got up, said, “Enough!” and walked out.
Obama adviser [Valerie] Jarrett – a close friend of the First Family but an unpopular figure with much of the president’s staff – was irritated with the debate team after the Denver debacle.
Another adviser said she made it clear “the team, and not just the president, made a strategic miscalculation” and needed to “adjust their antennae.” She hadn’t been part of the debate team and demanded to know why Obama’s other aides hadn’t gotten a heads-up that he was about to bomb. Her intervention made the situation more fraught than it needed to be, and they took steps to calm the situation (Thrush and Martin 6-7).
[This man] with unshakeable confidence was deeply shaken by his own failure in Denver — far more than anyone on the outside could have known at the time. Intuitively, Obama and his top advisers quietly waged a campaign-within-a-campaign to buck up their bummed-out candidate and, even more quietly, to purge distractions and negativity from his midst (Thrush and Martin 2).
Second Debate
He waited all of 45 seconds to make clear he came not just ready for a fight but ready to pick one.
President Obama, who concluded that he was “too polite” in his first debate with Mitt Romney, made sure no one would say that after their second. He interrupted, he scolded, he filibustered, he shook his head.
He tried to talk right over Mr. Romney, who tried to talk over him back. The president who waited patiently for his turn last time around forced his way into Mr. Romney’s time this time. At one point, he squared off with Mr. Romney face to face, almost chest to chest, in the middle of the stage, as if they were roosters in a ring.
The strategy for Tuesday night was clear: undercut Mr. Romney’s character and credibility by portraying him as lying about his true positions on issues like taxes and abortion. Time and again, Mr. Obama questioned whether the man on stage with him was the same “severely conservative” candidate who tacked right in the Republican primaries.
He painted Mr. Romney as a tool of big oil who is soft on China, hard on immigrants, politically crass on Libya and two-faced on guns and energy. He deployed many of the attack lines that went unused in Denver, going after Mr. Romney’s business record, his personal income taxes and, in the debate’s final minutes, his comments about the 47 percent of Americans he once deemed too dependent on government.
“Governor Romney doesn’t have a five-point plan,” Mr. Obama charged. “He has a one-point plan,” which is to help the rich, he said.
He mocked Mr. Romney by noting that he once closed a coal plant as the governor of Massachusetts. “Now suddenly you’re a big champion of coal,” he said.
As for trade, he said, “Governor, you’re the last person who’s going to get tough on China.”
And he pressed Mr. Romney for not disclosing how he would pay for his tax and deficit reduction goals. “We haven’t heard from the governor any specifics beyond Big Bird and eliminating funding for Planned Parenthood,” he said.
Mr. Romney held his own and gave as good as he got, presenting Mr. Obama as a failed president who has piled on trillions of dollars of debt, left millions of Americans without work, bungled security for American personnel in Libya, done nothing to reform entitlement programs and deserted a middle class “crushed under the policies of a president who has not understood what it takes to get the economy working again.”
But it was Mr. Obama who was the central story line of the night, his performance coming across as a striking contrast to that of his first face-off with Mr. Romney. For days leading up to Tuesday night’s encounter, Mr. Obama huddled in a Virginia resort with advisers to practice a more aggressive approach without appearing somehow inauthentic or crossing over a line of presidential dignity. It was a line he would stride up to repeatedly over the course of more than 90 minutes, and some will argue that he slipped over it at times.
…
His aggressive approach came as no surprise to Mr. Romney’s camp. It was clear from the start when Mr. Obama made sure to use the first question — from a college student worried about finding a job — to jab Mr. Romney for opposing the way the president went about the auto industry bailout of 2009.
With each question that followed came another attack. When it was not his turn, Mr. Obama sat on a stool and looked at Mr. Romney as he talked, rather than staring down and taking notes as he did in Denver. There was little smirking, though he did project at times an air of tolerant dismissal (Baker 1-3).
When an undecided young woman voter asked Obama and Romney how they plan to rectify wage inequality in the workplace, Romney thought he could go in for the kill and show women he cared.
He explained that he was surprised to find men occupying cabinet positions and asked his staff if they could find women who were equally qualified for them. “I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks?’ And they brought us whole binders full of women,” Romney said to prove he had taken a “concerted effort” to find qualified women.
Within minutes of his speech, a Tumblr parody was created, #bindersfullofwomen became a trending Twitter hashtag and the phrase was the second-highest Google search term during the debate.
Romney sparred with Obama over unfair trading practices in China, and admitted to having invested in Chinese firms. But he then confronted Obama and asked him repeatedly if he had looked at his own pension.
“You know, I don’t look at my pension. It’s not as big as yours so it doesn’t take as long. I don’t check it that often,” Obama responded to Romney’s line of questioning.
While Romney thought he got a leg up by accusing Obama of having investments in China and the Cayman Islands, the real winner online was the president. His response was the top searched Google query during the debate, particularly in Virginia, New Jersey, Ohio and Illinois (Shanker 1).
Evidently intent on redeeming himself by getting in all the points he failed to get in last time, Mr. Obama pushed right past time limits and at one point even refused to yield when the moderator, Candy Crowley of CNN, tried to rein him in (Baker 3).
In the town hall-style forum at Hofstra University on Long Island, the candidates roamed the stage, circling, interrupting and at times heckling one another as they took questions from an audience of 80 undecided voters.
The moderator, CNN's Candy Crowley, often had to intervene to keep order.
The 11 questions from the voters present ranged from gun control to Libya to immigration, but the main focus was on the economy.
The most dramatic clash came over foreign policy, and the attack last month [September 11] on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which left the US ambassador and three other Americans dead.
Mr Romney sought to portray the attack as evidence of the Obama administration's failing foreign policy and he suggested Mr Obama had dithered over admitting a terrorist attack had occurred.
Mr Obama shot back that he had said so the day after the attack, in an appearance at the White House.
The Republican challenged this, saying: "It took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror."
When Ms Crowley confirmed that Mr Obama had indeed called the attack an "act of terror" the day after the attack, the president told the moderator: "Say that a little louder, Candy."
The president also accused Mr Romney of using the Libyan events for political purposes. "While we were still dealing with our diplomats being threatened, Governor Romney put out a press release, trying to make political points, and that's not how a commander-in-chief operates," he said.
Mr Obama accused Mr Romney of inconsistency, and contrasted his own bailout of the US car industry with the Republican's position that car-makers should have been allowed to go bankrupt.
In turn, Mr Romney blamed the president for unemployment of 20 million and bloated federal deficits.
America, he insisted, could not afford another four years with Mr Obama at the helm, warning that Mr Obama's policies would ultimately prove as disastrous as the euro debt crisis.
"We've gone from $10tn of national debt to $16tn of national debt," he said.
"If the president were re-elected, we'd go to almost $20tn of national debt. This puts us on a road to Greece."
Mr Obama said voters had heard no specifics on Mr Romney's "sketchy" economic plan apart from eliminating Sesame Street's Big Bird and cutting funding for Planned Parenthood, a family planning organisation Republicans say promotes abortion (Mardell 1-3).
Third Debate
Barack Obama went on the offensive over foreign policy in the third and final presidential debate, repeatedly accusing Mitt Romney of flip-flopping on major international issues but failing to deliver a killer blow to his opponent's resurgent campaign.
While the president emerged as the narrow winner on the night, the encounter, which was cordial and largely uneventful compared with the previous two debates, is unlikely to have much impact on the outcome of the election.
Going into the debate at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida, Obama had an inbuilt advantage on foreign policy and security. As president, with access to daily briefings by intelligence analysts, diplomats and generals, he is better briefed and it showed as he dominated Romney in the first half of the debate.
The Republican candidate appeared unsure at times and occasionally stumbled over his lines as if struggling to remember his briefing notes. He began sweating as Obama, aggressive from the start, got the better of him during exchanges on Iran, Iraq and Russia as well as on US military spending.
…
"What we need to do with respect to the Middle East is strong, steady leadership, not wrong and reckless leadership that is all over the map," said Obama. "And unfortunately that's the kind of opinions that you've offered throughout this campaign, and it is not a recipe for American strength, or keeping America safe over the long haul."
But with a growing sense in the Republican camp that the White House might just be within reach after all, Romney appeared happy to settle for a safe, gaffe-free performance in which his main goal was to reassure the US public that he was not a warmonger.
…
One of the most telling moments came when Obama, in a flash of normally suppressed arrogance, lectured Romney on military developments as if he was a child. Responding to a pledge by Romney to increase military spending and a complaint that the navy had fewer ships, Obama resorted to heavy sarcasm.
"You mentioned the navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1917. Well, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines," Obama said.
But Romney did not crumple and recovered in the second half ...
On the Middle East he said an attack on Iran would be a last resort and that he was against direct US military involvement in Syria. He sought to neutralise the advantage Obama enjoys thanks to the killing of Osama bin Laden by insisting that his own policy was about more than "going after the bad guys". "We can't just kill our way out of this mess," Romney said.
Romney managed to get in some hits on Obama too, accusing him of having conducted "an apology tour" of the Middle East at the start of his presidency and this was perceived by America's enemies as a sign of weakness. "Mr President, America has not dictated to other nations. We have freed other nations from dictators," he said.
The idea that Obama is an apologist for American values resonates strongly among conservatives.
…
Surprisingly there was almost nothing on the Benghazi consulate attack. Having twice botched the issue Romney opted against returning to it in depth (MacAskill “Obama” 1-3).
Works cited:
Baker, Peter, “For the President, Punch, Punch, Another Punch.” The New York Times, October 17, 2012. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/17/us...
Kranish, Michael, “The Story behind Mitt Romney’s Loss in the Presidential Campaign to President Obama.” Boston.com, December 22, 2012. Web. https://www.boston.com/uncategorized/...
MacAskill, Ewan, “Obama and Romney Clash over Foreign Policy in Final Presidential Debate.” The Guardian, October 23, 2012. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/201...
Mardell, Mark, editor, “Obama Hits Back in Fiery Second Debate with Romney.” BBC News, October 17, 2012. Web. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-can...
Shanker, Dakshayani, “Five Best Moments from Obama and Romney’s 2012 Second Debate.” NBC News, Oct. 9, 2016. Web. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/201...
Thrush, Glenn and Martin, Jonathan, “Plenty of 2012 Pitfalls for Obama and Romney.” Politico, December 17, 2012. Web. https://www.politico.com/story/2012/1...
September 24, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2012 Election -- Obama's First Term: Accomplishments, Campaigns Begin
A ... “we shall see” factor looms over what is arguably Obama’s crowning achievement: the Affordable Care Act. In passing a bill that provides near-universal health care to the American people, Obama succeeded where five previous presidents over the course of a century had failed. He did so against the advice of some of his closest aides and the fervent, united opposition of Republicans. The law manages not only to extend coverage to 32 million uninsured Americans but also to cut the deficit and put in place dozens of new policies and programs aimed at reducing health care costs, the single greatest driver of America’s long-term fiscal problems.
Yet the measure’s major effects are yet to be felt, and its ultimate fate is highly uncertain. Most of the law’s benefits, including subsidies for the uninsured, do not kick in until 2014. Little wonder, then, that voters have a hard time getting excited about the ACA. And the bill’s various experimental policy measures to control health care costs are just that— experiments that might or might not work. Moreover, the law might not survive a legal challenge that the Supreme Court is currently considering, and will almost certainly be killed or gutted if the Republicans are victorious in November.
You can understand, then, why Obama was afraid to make more than a glancing mention of the ACA in the State of the Union. But the lukewarm-to-hostile attitudes people have about the law now are likely to fade if he manages to get reelected. With four more years to oversee the implementation of the law and protect it against whatever the courts and congressional Republicans hurl at it, Obama can ensure that it will be politically and programmatically secure. The benefits will have started flowing, and businesses and the medical industry will have begun to adapt to it. Over time it will likely become as much a permanent fixture of American life as Social Security (Glastris 9-10).
In 2009, when the health care law was still being written, Sarah Palin coined the phrase "death panel" in a widely shared Facebook post. …
… that Aug. 7, 2009, social media post from the former Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential candidate included a dire warning:
"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society.' "
Conservative op-ed pages were on board. Talk radio, too. On his syndicated national radio program, Rush Limbaugh said of Palin, "She's dead right."
The specter of "death panels" became an instant rallying cry for the still-new Tea Party movement, whose supporters crowded into town hall meetings that summer and shouted down Democratic lawmakers considering support for the Affordable Care Act.
Republican members of Congress tapped into that anger. U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley told a crowd back home in Iowa, "We should not have a government program that determines you're gonna pull the plug on Grandma."
As the summer of 2009 wore on, the president stayed above the fray. Anita Dunn, who was the White House communications director at the time, told NPR in a recent interview that the team didn't take the attacks seriously at first, "simply because they did seem so crazy."
But the president himself would need to directly respond. He went on the road, first to a mid-August town hall in Portsmouth, N.H., where he said that this is how politics works sometimes, "that people who want to keep things the way they are will try to scare the heck out of folks, and they'll create boogeymen out there that just aren't real."
Days later, in Grand Junction, Colo., Obama kept at it.
"The notion that somehow I ran for public office or members of Congress are in this so that they can go around pulling the plug on Grandma? I mean when you start making arguments like that, that's simply dishonest," the president said.
Ultimately, the Affordable Care Act was approved by the then-Democratic-controlled Congress. The president signed it in the spring of 2010. Meanwhile, the allegations regarding "death panels" would be "Lie of the Year" by the fact-checking organization PolitiFact.
[Anita] Dunn, currently a managing director at the D.C. firm SKDKnickerbocker, says that the early disinformation campaign had a lasting negative effect nonetheless.
"One of the hallmarks of the Affordable Care Act is that people don't know what is in the bill, or realize the benefits they've gotten," Dunn says, adding, "a huge part of that is how it was defined early by the opposition" (Gonyea 1-2).
… Republicans used the court system and the states to weaken Obamacare. For instance, a June 2012 Supreme Court decision made it possible for many Republican-controlled states to refuse to participate in the expansion of Medicaid so central to Obamacare, a move that deprived millions of low-income Americans of coverage. At the same time, an even greater number of states refused to implement their own health-insurance exchanges — regulated marketplaces where uninsured people buy coverage — which forced the federal government to step in, something that it had not anticipated and that created new policy challenges. As a consequence of these Supreme Court and state decisions, and in the context of Republican and Tea Party mobilizations against President Obama and “his” health care reform, the implementation of the reform proved highly contentious and uneven across the country (Beland, Rocco. and Wadden 1).
… When he came into office, Detroit was in free fall. Without additional government help (the Bush administration had provided $13.4 billion in bridge loans), Chrysler and possibly GM could have been liquidated, putting at risk the entire network of domestic auto suppliers on which Ford and other carmakers depend. The Obama administration injected an additional $62 billion into GM and Chrysler in return for equity stakes and agreements for massive restructuring— eliminating brands, closing dealerships, renegotiating pay and benefit agreements, and, in Chrysler’s case, facilitating a merger with Fiat.
The federal takeover was deeply unpopular with the public and condemned by conservatives as socialism. But it is hard to argue with the results. Since bottoming out in 2009, the auto industry has added upward of 100,000 jobs. The Big Three are all profitable again, and last year they each gained market share, the first time that’s happened in two decades. Most of the $80 billion in bailout funds have been paid back; Washington is likely to lose only about $16 billion, less if the price of its GM stock rises. Even on its face, the policy has been one of the most successful short-term government economic interventions in decades.
But Obama’s restructuring of Detroit goes even deeper. A big part of the reason U.S. automakers were in such bad shape on the eve of the recession was a spike in gas prices that had left them with lots full of SUVs and light trucks they couldn’t sell. Unlike their foreign-owned competitors, who could shift from, say, Tundras to Corollas and weather the storm, Detroit simply didn’t know how to make money producing small cars, though they were belatedly trying to learn. So, as a condition of the bailout, Obama’s White House secured commitments from GM and Chrysler to put even more emphasis on building more fuel-efficient cars in the United States. Meanwhile, with money from the stimulus, the administration invested in companies that manufacture advanced batteries of the kind needed to make electric cars. And, while the automakers were feeling beholden, the administration convinced them to agree to a doubling of auto fuel efficiency requirements over the next thirteen years.
Or consider higher education. Obama has pushed through two major reforms in this area. First, working with Democrats in Congress, he ended the wasteful, decades-old practice of subsidizing banks to provide college loans. Starting in the summer of 2010, all students began getting their loans directly from the federal government. The move saves the Treasury $67 billion over ten years, $36 billion of which will go to expanding Pell Grants, the most significant form of aid to lower- and lower-middle-income students.
Second, the administration has issued so-called “gainful employment” rules for career-focused colleges, especially for-profits. Those schools whose students don’t earn enough to pay off their loans—because they never graduate, or don’t learn marketable skills—will be cut off from the federal student loan program, effectively putting them out of business.
While these are big moves, they might also turn out to be first steps. As the think tank Education Sector has written, by kicking the banks out of the student loan program, Obama has effectively eliminated the biggest lobbying force standing in the way of an über-reform of student aid: turning the confusing plethora of loan programs into one simple federal loan payable as a percentage of a person’s income over a working lifetime. Such a single “income-contingent” loan would make it possible for virtually every American to afford a post-secondary education without risk of going bankrupt. ...
If it’s too early to know what history will think of Barack Obama, it is possible to ask today’s historians what they think. Two polls have been conducted since Obama took office that ask experts to rate America’s presidents based on measures of character, leadership, and accomplishments. A 2010 Siena Research Institute survey of 238 presidential scholars ranked Obama the fifteenth-best president overall. Last year, the United States Presidency Centre at the University of London surveyed forty-seven UK specialists on American history and politics. That survey placed Obama at number eight, just below Harry Truman.
…
… With Republicans unified in opposition and willing to abuse the filibuster such that to pass any legislation has required sixty Senate votes that Obama has seldom had, it is unrealistic to think he or anyone could have done a whole lot better.
…
The view that Barack Obama is overly cautious must also take into account the many times in his presidency when he took extraordinary risks. He did so when he turned down Detroit’s first bailout request, demanding more concessions, including government ownership and the resignation of GM’s CEO, before saying yes. He did so when, after passing the stimulus, he made health care reform his number one legislative priority, against the advice of some of his top political advisers; and when, after Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate race, he chose to jam the health care bill through reconciliation despite cries of outrage from the GOP. And he did so, most famously, when he chose to send special forces into Pakistan to go after Osama bin Laden, without certainty that the terrorist leader was even there, with his senior national security advisers waffling, and with the clear understanding that if the mission went wrong, as a similar one did under Jimmy Carter, it could ruin his presidency.
It should be clear by now that I don’t believe that Obama’s record has been crippled by an excess of caution. Indeed, his last-minute decision to order extra helicopters into the bin Laden raid illustrates that daring and caution are compatible virtues, and he has a winning mix of both. It should also be clear that, on the strength of his record so far, I think he’s likely to be considered a great or near- great president.
That’s not to say that his instincts and decisions have always been right. I cannot, for instance, find a good reason why he should not have at least threatened to use Fourteenth Amendment powers to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling to break the hostage standoff with the GOP last year. Time and again, he has allowed himself to be played too long by Republicans pretending to be interested in bipartisanship.
… A president has to remind the public every day of what he’s already done, why he’s done it, and how those achievements fit into a broader plan that will help them in the future.
With his State of the Union and some subsequent speeches, he has only begun this task. And while it’s very late in the day, the election is still eight months away. The irony is that, while Barack Obama has achieved a tremendous amount in his first term, the only way to secure that record of achievement in the eyes of history is to win a second. And to do that, he first has to convince the American voters that he in fact has a record of achievement (Glastris 11-20).
For Republicans, the only thing harder than losing to Barack Obama might be explaining it.
By any reasonable standard, Obama is a seriously vulnerable incumbent: a president overseeing a limping economy, whose party got thumped in the 2010 midterm elections and whose signature accomplishment of health care reform is highly controversial. Whatever his strengths on national security and personal likability, Obama probably began the 2012 campaign as the most beatable sitting president in 20 years (Burns and Haberman 1).
The Democrats’ stance on the economy: in favor of modest stimulus, increased tax rates on the wealthiest citizens, health care, cultural issues such as abortion and gay rights, immigration reform that emphasizes a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and environmental legislation to address global warming ….
Republican positions on the economy: paring down the national debt, opposing tax increases, and cutting government spending, health care (opposed to Obamacare), support for traditional marriage and school prayer, and against abortion, favoring immigration reform that focuses on border control, and skeptical about global warming and the need and economic advisability of environmental regulations ….
… The Republicans called for stronger measures against China’s economic imperialism and evinced unambiguous support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightist government (a popular position among the party’s evangelical Protestant base) than the Democrats’ position ….
… After years of eluding American detection, Osama bin Laden was killed on orders of President Obama. The removal of the architect of 9/11 neutralized a potential campaign issue for Republicans who had claimed that the Democrats were “soft” on terrorism. Also, President Obama’s [avowed] … “pivot” away from the Middle East and Europe and toward Asia ….(Goldfields 11-13).
Romney’s campaign, scrambling to catch up after a protracted GOP primary, was not only outclassed by the incumbent, but held too long to the mistaken assumption that the election amounted to a referendum on Obama’s economic policies. By the time the candidate and his top adviser, Stuart Stevens, realized a message of “Obama isn’t working” was insufficient, it was after Labor Day and too late. By then — never having made his own case in a sustained and effective way and giving Obama fodder at a crucial moment — Romney had been defined as a cartoonishly out-of-touch fat cat.
The former Massachusetts governor kept open a line of communication with his former strategist, Mike Murphy, and brought former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie and Ohio Sen. Rob Portman into his confidence. But the ever-loyal Romney stuck with Stevens until the end and never seriously doubted his pollster Neil Newhouse, who produced a steady stream of fatally over-optimistic poll data rooted in a skewed model of the electorate that vastly underestimated Obama’s support.
Yet it all came down to Romney himself, a resilient and cool-headed executive who could never quite stop trying to apply his idiosyncratic boardroom method of operation to the vastly different task of modern campaigning.
Obama was saved, in the end, by a game plan that focused on “nine governor’s races” in key battleground states and an audacious decision to raid his campaign’s end-of-the-line budget to spend more than $100 million in an early summer negative ad blitz that caught Romney flat-footed.
...
Obama – who privately joked Romney wasn’t quite “human enough” to get elected as the campaign hit the homestretch – bounced back after the first debate and roared back to life in the final three weeks (Thrush and Martin 2-3).
The Obama campaign representatives … believed they would lose the election if it was a referendum on the president. His team felt they needed to launch an expensive ad campaign attacking Romney immediately after he wrapped up the GOP nomination because the president was already a known commodity.
“We knew we had to make it a choice,” said Jeremy Bird, national field director for the Obama campaign.
Romney national political director Rich Beeson marveled at the customization of the Obama campaign. They tailored advertisements in key media markets to key constituencies, sometimes airing nine different spots on one day.
“We were going after it with a meat cleaver, and they were going after it with a scalpel,” he said.
The Obama campaign believed they needed to add more voters to the rolls.
That required beefing up a massive, costly field operation in 2011. “We had time, and that was very beneficial to us,” said Marlon Marshall, the Obama campaign’s deputy national field director. “We were able to figure out early on in a state like Florida we have to change the electorate in order to be successful. We spent a year, almost a year-and-a-half, registering voters … in order to keep Florida on the map.”
The Obama team believes that the selection of Paul Ryan cost Romney Florida, eating into his support among Cubans because of his past opposition to the embargo, galvanizing Sunshine State volunteers for Obama and raising doubts among seniors over what his budget plan might do to Medicare.
“We needed to make this a state-by-state race, and we needed to take a state like Florida and turn it into a battle over each precinct,” Bird said.
He added that the Obama team felt “we were just barely up in Florida” going into Election Day, even though the Romney camp thought they had the state in the bag.
Romney over-performed John McCain’s 2008 vote total in every targeted state except Ohio, but he got smoked in every swing state but North Carolina.
The Obama campaign was deeply attuned to focus groups.
With swing voters giving Romney high marks for bipartisanship as governor of Massachusetts, Chicago decided to send Bay State Democrats to swing states to criticize Romney’s record. Romney saved the bulk of his bipartisanship messaging for late October, but by then, the Obama campaign felt they’d mitigated a potential big asset for the opposition.
Internally, they saw an appetite from focus-group voters for more specifics from each candidate. ...(Hohmann 1-2).
Obama sought to replay Clinton’s 1996 strategy of winning the race early. He framed the race in the Summer as a choice between fairness versus tax cuts for the rich. Using attacks on Romney’s finance background at Bain Capital and failure to disclose tax returns, and GOP proposals to cut income taxes by 20 percent, Democrats characterized Romney as a rich and out-of-touch businessman who had little understanding of the economic plight of ordinary Americans. By the fall, many voters believed Romney would protect the rich while Obama would help the middle class.
Romney paid significantly more than Obama for his advertisements and therefore got less bang for the dollar. During October, according to Kantar/CMAG data, Obama ran 160,000 commercials costing $400 million versus 140,000 for Romney costing $500 million. The Republican strategy of waiting until late to place its commercials created great inefficiencies in ad expenditures. In some states such as Iowa, Ohio, and Wisconsin, Republicans outspent Democrats by three-to-two, but reached fewer people. And in places such as Florida, Obama’s ads reached 20 percent more viewers. Based on the Wesleyan Media Project, Obama spent $265 million on 503,255 ads in 63 markets with an average cost of $528 per spot. Romney devoted $105 million on 190,784 commercials in 78 markets at a cost of $552 per advertisement, or about 5 percent more on average.
Obama spent about 10 percent of his advertising budget on digital outreach through Facebook, Google, and Bing, which was considerably higher than Romney. This allowed the campaign to engage in highly targeted outreach and reach people beyond the traditional electorate. This expanded the Democratic base and gave the President an advantage in certain states.
…
Obama’s organization built a large, in-house operation that was well-integrated into its overall strategy. It brought experts aboard who specialized in online outreach, social media mobilization, and data mining. The campaign also developed a website dashboard that allowed field organizers to enter data based on phone calls, home visits, and event attendance. Through Twitter and Facebook, it created a comprehensive data base with detailed voter profiles, which it could use to turnout people for events or from whom they could raise money. In contrast, the Romney organization did not have a lot of time to build its own digital campaign. After a bruising primary campaign that went well through the Spring, the GOP nominee out-sourced its data management and social media outreach activities using outside vendors. This is an expensive approach to communications and provides limited control over messaging (West 1-3).
SEPTEMBER, 47 PERCENT VIDEO — A video from a May fund-raiser in Florida showed Romney characterizing nearly half of Americans as “victims’’ who want government aid. It seemed to confirm the worst views of critics (Kranish 25).
The video, showing Romney at a closed-doors fundraising event, captures him dismissing 47% of the nation as government-dependent. "My job is not to worry about those people," he says.
He adds: "I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."
The release of the video, on the liberal Mother Jones website, came at an awkward moment for the Romney campaign amid reports of internal strife and bickering among his campaign managers.
The Republican presidential candidate is also running behind Barack Obama in the polls, albeit only by 3%, after a lacklustre Republican convention in August.
"All right, there are 47% who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you-name-it," he [Romney] said.
He added: "These are people who pay no income tax."
Apart from offending a large part of the population, the comment is also inaccurate. The 47% are not people who pay no income tax and encompasses sections of the population who have earned their entitlements (MacAskill 1-3).
The bartender did it.
Scott Prouty came forward to say he secretly taped the video last year in which GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney told donors that 47% of Americans are "dependent on the government" and "believe they are victims."
Prouty was revealed Wednesday night during an MSNBC interview with Ed Schultz. The Huffington Post also interviewed Prouty, a Florida man, several times and agreed not to disclose his name until after the TV appearance.
The secretly taped video was posted online by Mother Jones magazine in the fall, several months after the fundraiser in May in Boca Raton where Romney spoke. The video created a national uproar as President Obama and his Democratic allies used Romney's words to illustrate how the Republican was out of touch.
…
Prouty, who worked for a catering company hired for the fundraising event, told MSNBC he wanted people to hear the candidate and make their own judgments about his motivation.
"The guy was running for the presidency, and these were his core beliefs. And I think everybody can judge whether that's appropriate or not or whether they believe the same way he does," he told MSNBC. "I felt an obligation to expose the things he was saying."
Prouty described himself as a "regular guy," who is middle class and hard working. He said he agonized for weeks about what to do, fearful that the video could be traced back to him because of where he positioned the camera at the fundraising event.
In his first post-election interview, Romney told Fox News last week that his videotaped comments were "unfortunate" and "very harmful."
"What I said is not what I believe," Romney said. "My whole life has been devoted to helping people, all of the people. ... But that hurt. There's no question that hurt and did real damage to my campaign" (Camia 1-2).
Works cited:
Beland, Daniel, Rocco, Philip, and Waddan, Alex, “Eight Years of Attacks and Obamacare Still Stands.” Policy Options, May 15, 2018. Web. https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazi...
Burns, Alexander and Haberman, Maggie, “If Romney loses…” Politico, November 5, 2012. Web. https://www.politico.com/story/2012/1...
Camia, Catalina, “Man Who Taped Romney's 47% Comments Speaks Out.” USA Today, March 13, 2013. Web. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...
Glastris, Paul, “The Incomplete Greatness of Barack Obama.” Washington Monthly, March/April 2012. Web. https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazin...
Goldfields, David, “What We Can Learn about America from the 2012 Presidential Election.” American Studies Journal, 58 (2014). Web. June 9, 2020. http://www.asjournal.org/58-2014/what...
Gonyea, Dan, “From the Start, Obama Struggled with Fallout from a Kind of Fake News.” NPR, January 10, 2017. Web. https://www.npr.org/2017/01/10/509164...
Hohmann, James, “Campaign Officials Dissect Election.” Politico, December 8, 2012. Web.
https://www.politico.com/story/2012/1...
Kranish, Michael, “The Story behind Mitt Romney’s Loss in the Presidential Campaign to President Obama.” Boston.com, December 22, 2012. Web. https://www.boston.com/uncategorized/...
MacAskill, Ewen, “Mitt Romney under Fire after Comments Caught on Video.” The Guardian, September 17, 2012. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/201...
Thrush, Glenn and Martin, Jonathan, “Plenty of 2012 pitfalls for Obama and Romney.” Politico, December 17, 2012. Web. https://www.politico.com/story/2012/1...
West, Darrell M., “Communications Lessons from the 2012 Presidential Election.” Brookings, November 6, 2012. Web. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-fro...
Yet the measure’s major effects are yet to be felt, and its ultimate fate is highly uncertain. Most of the law’s benefits, including subsidies for the uninsured, do not kick in until 2014. Little wonder, then, that voters have a hard time getting excited about the ACA. And the bill’s various experimental policy measures to control health care costs are just that— experiments that might or might not work. Moreover, the law might not survive a legal challenge that the Supreme Court is currently considering, and will almost certainly be killed or gutted if the Republicans are victorious in November.
You can understand, then, why Obama was afraid to make more than a glancing mention of the ACA in the State of the Union. But the lukewarm-to-hostile attitudes people have about the law now are likely to fade if he manages to get reelected. With four more years to oversee the implementation of the law and protect it against whatever the courts and congressional Republicans hurl at it, Obama can ensure that it will be politically and programmatically secure. The benefits will have started flowing, and businesses and the medical industry will have begun to adapt to it. Over time it will likely become as much a permanent fixture of American life as Social Security (Glastris 9-10).
In 2009, when the health care law was still being written, Sarah Palin coined the phrase "death panel" in a widely shared Facebook post. …
… that Aug. 7, 2009, social media post from the former Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential candidate included a dire warning:
"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society.' "
Conservative op-ed pages were on board. Talk radio, too. On his syndicated national radio program, Rush Limbaugh said of Palin, "She's dead right."
The specter of "death panels" became an instant rallying cry for the still-new Tea Party movement, whose supporters crowded into town hall meetings that summer and shouted down Democratic lawmakers considering support for the Affordable Care Act.
Republican members of Congress tapped into that anger. U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley told a crowd back home in Iowa, "We should not have a government program that determines you're gonna pull the plug on Grandma."
As the summer of 2009 wore on, the president stayed above the fray. Anita Dunn, who was the White House communications director at the time, told NPR in a recent interview that the team didn't take the attacks seriously at first, "simply because they did seem so crazy."
But the president himself would need to directly respond. He went on the road, first to a mid-August town hall in Portsmouth, N.H., where he said that this is how politics works sometimes, "that people who want to keep things the way they are will try to scare the heck out of folks, and they'll create boogeymen out there that just aren't real."
Days later, in Grand Junction, Colo., Obama kept at it.
"The notion that somehow I ran for public office or members of Congress are in this so that they can go around pulling the plug on Grandma? I mean when you start making arguments like that, that's simply dishonest," the president said.
Ultimately, the Affordable Care Act was approved by the then-Democratic-controlled Congress. The president signed it in the spring of 2010. Meanwhile, the allegations regarding "death panels" would be "Lie of the Year" by the fact-checking organization PolitiFact.
[Anita] Dunn, currently a managing director at the D.C. firm SKDKnickerbocker, says that the early disinformation campaign had a lasting negative effect nonetheless.
"One of the hallmarks of the Affordable Care Act is that people don't know what is in the bill, or realize the benefits they've gotten," Dunn says, adding, "a huge part of that is how it was defined early by the opposition" (Gonyea 1-2).
… Republicans used the court system and the states to weaken Obamacare. For instance, a June 2012 Supreme Court decision made it possible for many Republican-controlled states to refuse to participate in the expansion of Medicaid so central to Obamacare, a move that deprived millions of low-income Americans of coverage. At the same time, an even greater number of states refused to implement their own health-insurance exchanges — regulated marketplaces where uninsured people buy coverage — which forced the federal government to step in, something that it had not anticipated and that created new policy challenges. As a consequence of these Supreme Court and state decisions, and in the context of Republican and Tea Party mobilizations against President Obama and “his” health care reform, the implementation of the reform proved highly contentious and uneven across the country (Beland, Rocco. and Wadden 1).
… When he came into office, Detroit was in free fall. Without additional government help (the Bush administration had provided $13.4 billion in bridge loans), Chrysler and possibly GM could have been liquidated, putting at risk the entire network of domestic auto suppliers on which Ford and other carmakers depend. The Obama administration injected an additional $62 billion into GM and Chrysler in return for equity stakes and agreements for massive restructuring— eliminating brands, closing dealerships, renegotiating pay and benefit agreements, and, in Chrysler’s case, facilitating a merger with Fiat.
The federal takeover was deeply unpopular with the public and condemned by conservatives as socialism. But it is hard to argue with the results. Since bottoming out in 2009, the auto industry has added upward of 100,000 jobs. The Big Three are all profitable again, and last year they each gained market share, the first time that’s happened in two decades. Most of the $80 billion in bailout funds have been paid back; Washington is likely to lose only about $16 billion, less if the price of its GM stock rises. Even on its face, the policy has been one of the most successful short-term government economic interventions in decades.
But Obama’s restructuring of Detroit goes even deeper. A big part of the reason U.S. automakers were in such bad shape on the eve of the recession was a spike in gas prices that had left them with lots full of SUVs and light trucks they couldn’t sell. Unlike their foreign-owned competitors, who could shift from, say, Tundras to Corollas and weather the storm, Detroit simply didn’t know how to make money producing small cars, though they were belatedly trying to learn. So, as a condition of the bailout, Obama’s White House secured commitments from GM and Chrysler to put even more emphasis on building more fuel-efficient cars in the United States. Meanwhile, with money from the stimulus, the administration invested in companies that manufacture advanced batteries of the kind needed to make electric cars. And, while the automakers were feeling beholden, the administration convinced them to agree to a doubling of auto fuel efficiency requirements over the next thirteen years.
Or consider higher education. Obama has pushed through two major reforms in this area. First, working with Democrats in Congress, he ended the wasteful, decades-old practice of subsidizing banks to provide college loans. Starting in the summer of 2010, all students began getting their loans directly from the federal government. The move saves the Treasury $67 billion over ten years, $36 billion of which will go to expanding Pell Grants, the most significant form of aid to lower- and lower-middle-income students.
Second, the administration has issued so-called “gainful employment” rules for career-focused colleges, especially for-profits. Those schools whose students don’t earn enough to pay off their loans—because they never graduate, or don’t learn marketable skills—will be cut off from the federal student loan program, effectively putting them out of business.
While these are big moves, they might also turn out to be first steps. As the think tank Education Sector has written, by kicking the banks out of the student loan program, Obama has effectively eliminated the biggest lobbying force standing in the way of an über-reform of student aid: turning the confusing plethora of loan programs into one simple federal loan payable as a percentage of a person’s income over a working lifetime. Such a single “income-contingent” loan would make it possible for virtually every American to afford a post-secondary education without risk of going bankrupt. ...
If it’s too early to know what history will think of Barack Obama, it is possible to ask today’s historians what they think. Two polls have been conducted since Obama took office that ask experts to rate America’s presidents based on measures of character, leadership, and accomplishments. A 2010 Siena Research Institute survey of 238 presidential scholars ranked Obama the fifteenth-best president overall. Last year, the United States Presidency Centre at the University of London surveyed forty-seven UK specialists on American history and politics. That survey placed Obama at number eight, just below Harry Truman.
…
… With Republicans unified in opposition and willing to abuse the filibuster such that to pass any legislation has required sixty Senate votes that Obama has seldom had, it is unrealistic to think he or anyone could have done a whole lot better.
…
The view that Barack Obama is overly cautious must also take into account the many times in his presidency when he took extraordinary risks. He did so when he turned down Detroit’s first bailout request, demanding more concessions, including government ownership and the resignation of GM’s CEO, before saying yes. He did so when, after passing the stimulus, he made health care reform his number one legislative priority, against the advice of some of his top political advisers; and when, after Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate race, he chose to jam the health care bill through reconciliation despite cries of outrage from the GOP. And he did so, most famously, when he chose to send special forces into Pakistan to go after Osama bin Laden, without certainty that the terrorist leader was even there, with his senior national security advisers waffling, and with the clear understanding that if the mission went wrong, as a similar one did under Jimmy Carter, it could ruin his presidency.
It should be clear by now that I don’t believe that Obama’s record has been crippled by an excess of caution. Indeed, his last-minute decision to order extra helicopters into the bin Laden raid illustrates that daring and caution are compatible virtues, and he has a winning mix of both. It should also be clear that, on the strength of his record so far, I think he’s likely to be considered a great or near- great president.
That’s not to say that his instincts and decisions have always been right. I cannot, for instance, find a good reason why he should not have at least threatened to use Fourteenth Amendment powers to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling to break the hostage standoff with the GOP last year. Time and again, he has allowed himself to be played too long by Republicans pretending to be interested in bipartisanship.
… A president has to remind the public every day of what he’s already done, why he’s done it, and how those achievements fit into a broader plan that will help them in the future.
With his State of the Union and some subsequent speeches, he has only begun this task. And while it’s very late in the day, the election is still eight months away. The irony is that, while Barack Obama has achieved a tremendous amount in his first term, the only way to secure that record of achievement in the eyes of history is to win a second. And to do that, he first has to convince the American voters that he in fact has a record of achievement (Glastris 11-20).
For Republicans, the only thing harder than losing to Barack Obama might be explaining it.
By any reasonable standard, Obama is a seriously vulnerable incumbent: a president overseeing a limping economy, whose party got thumped in the 2010 midterm elections and whose signature accomplishment of health care reform is highly controversial. Whatever his strengths on national security and personal likability, Obama probably began the 2012 campaign as the most beatable sitting president in 20 years (Burns and Haberman 1).
The Democrats’ stance on the economy: in favor of modest stimulus, increased tax rates on the wealthiest citizens, health care, cultural issues such as abortion and gay rights, immigration reform that emphasizes a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and environmental legislation to address global warming ….
Republican positions on the economy: paring down the national debt, opposing tax increases, and cutting government spending, health care (opposed to Obamacare), support for traditional marriage and school prayer, and against abortion, favoring immigration reform that focuses on border control, and skeptical about global warming and the need and economic advisability of environmental regulations ….
… The Republicans called for stronger measures against China’s economic imperialism and evinced unambiguous support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightist government (a popular position among the party’s evangelical Protestant base) than the Democrats’ position ….
… After years of eluding American detection, Osama bin Laden was killed on orders of President Obama. The removal of the architect of 9/11 neutralized a potential campaign issue for Republicans who had claimed that the Democrats were “soft” on terrorism. Also, President Obama’s [avowed] … “pivot” away from the Middle East and Europe and toward Asia ….(Goldfields 11-13).
Romney’s campaign, scrambling to catch up after a protracted GOP primary, was not only outclassed by the incumbent, but held too long to the mistaken assumption that the election amounted to a referendum on Obama’s economic policies. By the time the candidate and his top adviser, Stuart Stevens, realized a message of “Obama isn’t working” was insufficient, it was after Labor Day and too late. By then — never having made his own case in a sustained and effective way and giving Obama fodder at a crucial moment — Romney had been defined as a cartoonishly out-of-touch fat cat.
The former Massachusetts governor kept open a line of communication with his former strategist, Mike Murphy, and brought former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie and Ohio Sen. Rob Portman into his confidence. But the ever-loyal Romney stuck with Stevens until the end and never seriously doubted his pollster Neil Newhouse, who produced a steady stream of fatally over-optimistic poll data rooted in a skewed model of the electorate that vastly underestimated Obama’s support.
Yet it all came down to Romney himself, a resilient and cool-headed executive who could never quite stop trying to apply his idiosyncratic boardroom method of operation to the vastly different task of modern campaigning.
Obama was saved, in the end, by a game plan that focused on “nine governor’s races” in key battleground states and an audacious decision to raid his campaign’s end-of-the-line budget to spend more than $100 million in an early summer negative ad blitz that caught Romney flat-footed.
...
Obama – who privately joked Romney wasn’t quite “human enough” to get elected as the campaign hit the homestretch – bounced back after the first debate and roared back to life in the final three weeks (Thrush and Martin 2-3).
The Obama campaign representatives … believed they would lose the election if it was a referendum on the president. His team felt they needed to launch an expensive ad campaign attacking Romney immediately after he wrapped up the GOP nomination because the president was already a known commodity.
“We knew we had to make it a choice,” said Jeremy Bird, national field director for the Obama campaign.
Romney national political director Rich Beeson marveled at the customization of the Obama campaign. They tailored advertisements in key media markets to key constituencies, sometimes airing nine different spots on one day.
“We were going after it with a meat cleaver, and they were going after it with a scalpel,” he said.
The Obama campaign believed they needed to add more voters to the rolls.
That required beefing up a massive, costly field operation in 2011. “We had time, and that was very beneficial to us,” said Marlon Marshall, the Obama campaign’s deputy national field director. “We were able to figure out early on in a state like Florida we have to change the electorate in order to be successful. We spent a year, almost a year-and-a-half, registering voters … in order to keep Florida on the map.”
The Obama team believes that the selection of Paul Ryan cost Romney Florida, eating into his support among Cubans because of his past opposition to the embargo, galvanizing Sunshine State volunteers for Obama and raising doubts among seniors over what his budget plan might do to Medicare.
“We needed to make this a state-by-state race, and we needed to take a state like Florida and turn it into a battle over each precinct,” Bird said.
He added that the Obama team felt “we were just barely up in Florida” going into Election Day, even though the Romney camp thought they had the state in the bag.
Romney over-performed John McCain’s 2008 vote total in every targeted state except Ohio, but he got smoked in every swing state but North Carolina.
The Obama campaign was deeply attuned to focus groups.
With swing voters giving Romney high marks for bipartisanship as governor of Massachusetts, Chicago decided to send Bay State Democrats to swing states to criticize Romney’s record. Romney saved the bulk of his bipartisanship messaging for late October, but by then, the Obama campaign felt they’d mitigated a potential big asset for the opposition.
Internally, they saw an appetite from focus-group voters for more specifics from each candidate. ...(Hohmann 1-2).
Obama sought to replay Clinton’s 1996 strategy of winning the race early. He framed the race in the Summer as a choice between fairness versus tax cuts for the rich. Using attacks on Romney’s finance background at Bain Capital and failure to disclose tax returns, and GOP proposals to cut income taxes by 20 percent, Democrats characterized Romney as a rich and out-of-touch businessman who had little understanding of the economic plight of ordinary Americans. By the fall, many voters believed Romney would protect the rich while Obama would help the middle class.
Romney paid significantly more than Obama for his advertisements and therefore got less bang for the dollar. During October, according to Kantar/CMAG data, Obama ran 160,000 commercials costing $400 million versus 140,000 for Romney costing $500 million. The Republican strategy of waiting until late to place its commercials created great inefficiencies in ad expenditures. In some states such as Iowa, Ohio, and Wisconsin, Republicans outspent Democrats by three-to-two, but reached fewer people. And in places such as Florida, Obama’s ads reached 20 percent more viewers. Based on the Wesleyan Media Project, Obama spent $265 million on 503,255 ads in 63 markets with an average cost of $528 per spot. Romney devoted $105 million on 190,784 commercials in 78 markets at a cost of $552 per advertisement, or about 5 percent more on average.
Obama spent about 10 percent of his advertising budget on digital outreach through Facebook, Google, and Bing, which was considerably higher than Romney. This allowed the campaign to engage in highly targeted outreach and reach people beyond the traditional electorate. This expanded the Democratic base and gave the President an advantage in certain states.
…
Obama’s organization built a large, in-house operation that was well-integrated into its overall strategy. It brought experts aboard who specialized in online outreach, social media mobilization, and data mining. The campaign also developed a website dashboard that allowed field organizers to enter data based on phone calls, home visits, and event attendance. Through Twitter and Facebook, it created a comprehensive data base with detailed voter profiles, which it could use to turnout people for events or from whom they could raise money. In contrast, the Romney organization did not have a lot of time to build its own digital campaign. After a bruising primary campaign that went well through the Spring, the GOP nominee out-sourced its data management and social media outreach activities using outside vendors. This is an expensive approach to communications and provides limited control over messaging (West 1-3).
SEPTEMBER, 47 PERCENT VIDEO — A video from a May fund-raiser in Florida showed Romney characterizing nearly half of Americans as “victims’’ who want government aid. It seemed to confirm the worst views of critics (Kranish 25).
The video, showing Romney at a closed-doors fundraising event, captures him dismissing 47% of the nation as government-dependent. "My job is not to worry about those people," he says.
He adds: "I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."
The release of the video, on the liberal Mother Jones website, came at an awkward moment for the Romney campaign amid reports of internal strife and bickering among his campaign managers.
The Republican presidential candidate is also running behind Barack Obama in the polls, albeit only by 3%, after a lacklustre Republican convention in August.
"All right, there are 47% who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you-name-it," he [Romney] said.
He added: "These are people who pay no income tax."
Apart from offending a large part of the population, the comment is also inaccurate. The 47% are not people who pay no income tax and encompasses sections of the population who have earned their entitlements (MacAskill 1-3).
The bartender did it.
Scott Prouty came forward to say he secretly taped the video last year in which GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney told donors that 47% of Americans are "dependent on the government" and "believe they are victims."
Prouty was revealed Wednesday night during an MSNBC interview with Ed Schultz. The Huffington Post also interviewed Prouty, a Florida man, several times and agreed not to disclose his name until after the TV appearance.
The secretly taped video was posted online by Mother Jones magazine in the fall, several months after the fundraiser in May in Boca Raton where Romney spoke. The video created a national uproar as President Obama and his Democratic allies used Romney's words to illustrate how the Republican was out of touch.
…
Prouty, who worked for a catering company hired for the fundraising event, told MSNBC he wanted people to hear the candidate and make their own judgments about his motivation.
"The guy was running for the presidency, and these were his core beliefs. And I think everybody can judge whether that's appropriate or not or whether they believe the same way he does," he told MSNBC. "I felt an obligation to expose the things he was saying."
Prouty described himself as a "regular guy," who is middle class and hard working. He said he agonized for weeks about what to do, fearful that the video could be traced back to him because of where he positioned the camera at the fundraising event.
In his first post-election interview, Romney told Fox News last week that his videotaped comments were "unfortunate" and "very harmful."
"What I said is not what I believe," Romney said. "My whole life has been devoted to helping people, all of the people. ... But that hurt. There's no question that hurt and did real damage to my campaign" (Camia 1-2).
Works cited:
Beland, Daniel, Rocco, Philip, and Waddan, Alex, “Eight Years of Attacks and Obamacare Still Stands.” Policy Options, May 15, 2018. Web. https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazi...
Burns, Alexander and Haberman, Maggie, “If Romney loses…” Politico, November 5, 2012. Web. https://www.politico.com/story/2012/1...
Camia, Catalina, “Man Who Taped Romney's 47% Comments Speaks Out.” USA Today, March 13, 2013. Web. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...
Glastris, Paul, “The Incomplete Greatness of Barack Obama.” Washington Monthly, March/April 2012. Web. https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazin...
Goldfields, David, “What We Can Learn about America from the 2012 Presidential Election.” American Studies Journal, 58 (2014). Web. June 9, 2020. http://www.asjournal.org/58-2014/what...
Gonyea, Dan, “From the Start, Obama Struggled with Fallout from a Kind of Fake News.” NPR, January 10, 2017. Web. https://www.npr.org/2017/01/10/509164...
Hohmann, James, “Campaign Officials Dissect Election.” Politico, December 8, 2012. Web.
https://www.politico.com/story/2012/1...
Kranish, Michael, “The Story behind Mitt Romney’s Loss in the Presidential Campaign to President Obama.” Boston.com, December 22, 2012. Web. https://www.boston.com/uncategorized/...
MacAskill, Ewen, “Mitt Romney under Fire after Comments Caught on Video.” The Guardian, September 17, 2012. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/201...
Thrush, Glenn and Martin, Jonathan, “Plenty of 2012 pitfalls for Obama and Romney.” Politico, December 17, 2012. Web. https://www.politico.com/story/2012/1...
West, Darrell M., “Communications Lessons from the 2012 Presidential Election.” Brookings, November 6, 2012. Web. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-fro...
September 22, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2012 Election -- Obama's First Term -- Obstruction, Accomplishments
Party of “No” Stymies Democratic Party Legislation
On January 29, 2009, the whittled-down and beaten-up Republican minority in the House of Representatives gathered for a strange celebration of defeat. The Democrats had just drubbed them at the polls, seizing the White House and a 79-seat advantage in the House. The House had then capped President Barack Obama’s first week in office by passing his $800 billion Recovery Act, a landmark emergency stimulus bill that doubled as a massive down payment on Obama’s agenda. Even though the economy was in free fall, not one House Republican had voted for the effort to revive it, prompting a wave of punditry about a failed party refusing to help clean up its own mess and dooming itself to irrelevance.
But at the House GOP retreat the next day at a posh resort in the Virginia mountains, there was no woe-is-us vibe. …
…
The Republicans were pumped because they saw a path out of the political wilderness. They were convinced that even if Obama kept winning policy battles, they could win the broader messaging war simply by remaining unified and fighting him on everything. Their conference chairman, a then-obscure Indiana conservative named Mike Pence, underscored the point with a clip from Patton, showing the general rallying his troops for war against their Nazi enemy: “We’re going to kick the hell out of him all the time! We’re going to go through him like crap through a goose!”
…
… What has distinguished the opposition to Obama is not just the intensity—a GOP congressman shouting “You lie!” during a presidential address, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s admission that his top priority was limiting Obama to one term—but the consistency. … on just about every issue, from Obamacare to climate to education reforms that conservatives supported until Obama embraced them, Republicans have embraced that strategy.
Unified vitriol against Obama’s legislative agenda, coming from Republican office holders and media bomb-throwers had an immediate destructive effect.
Polls showed a 14-point plunge in public support for the Recovery Act in the week after the House vote. Most economists now believe the stimulus helped avert a depression and jump-start a recovery, but a year after passage, the percentage of Americans who believed it had created any jobs was lower than the percentage who believed Elvis was alive.
… Not one House or Senate Republican backed Obama’s health reforms, even though they looked a lot like Mitt Romney’s reforms in Massachusetts. And the unified GOP opposition forced the White House to cut all kinds of deals to keep all 60 Senate Democrats on board to overcome a filibuster …
… they [the Republicans] also filibustered and voted in lockstep against previously uncontroversial Obama priorities, like extended unemployment benefits, expanded infrastructure spending and small-business tax cuts. Senate Republicans even turned routine judicial nominations into legislative ordeals, filibustering 20 of his district court judges—17 more than had been filibustered under all of his predecessors.
Republican leaders simply did not want their fingerprints on the Obama agenda; as McConnell explained, if Americans thought D.C. politicians were working together, they would credit the president, and if they thought D.C. seemed as ugly and messy as always, they would blame the president. …
The Republican outside game, like the Republican inside game, was all about standing up to Obama. He was blistered every day on Capitol Hill as well as talk radio as a dangerous leftist who wanted to turn the United States into Europe. While Republican congressmen didn’t post photos of the president in Muslim garb on Facebook, or forward racist emails from their uncles about him, or openly question whether he was an American citizen, they didn’t really try to set their base straight, either. And that base was fired up. The Tea Party movement that began to mobilize a few weeks into the Obama era was billed as an anti-tax crusade—even though Obama had just passed $300 billion worth of tax cuts in his stimulus—but the rallies felt a lot like anti-Obama rallies, with angry speeches about tyranny in the White House and crude portraits of the president as the Joker.
The relentless attacks on Obama helped sink his approval rating from the high 60s down to the 40s, where they would remain for most of his presidency. He had run as a “post-partisan” candidate, promising to fix the nastiness and pettiness of Washington, and it was a promise he couldn’t keep. In his first two years in office, he and his Democratic majorities did a lot—the stimulus, Obamacare, sweeping Wall Street reforms, bringing troops home from Iraq—but he failed to convince the public to like what he did. In the 2010 midterms, Americans voted to change his change, giving the Republicans the House in a landslide that Obama described as “a shellacking.” …
Many Republicans believe their just-say-no approach reflected principled resistance to liberal overreach, not cynical partisan nonparticipation, but whatever you call it, it helped restore the GOP House majority much faster than the pundits thought possible. And divided government meant the doom of Obama’s legislative agenda, including a jobs bill, gun control measures and immigration reform. …
… Many of the Tea Party Republicans elected in the midterm wave had campaigned on rolling back the stimulus, repealing Obamacare, and dismantling Wall Street reform—and they expected their leaders to make it happen, even though they didn’t control the White House or the Senate. …
“The second we got the majority back, people started making unrealistic demands,” [Oklahoma Rep. Tom] Cole says. “They thought: Oh, if we just fight harder, if we just shut down the government, if we just use more extreme tactics, the other side will cave.” …
The most prominent example was the 2011 showdown over the debt ceiling, when Republican leaders threatened to let the government default on its obligations if Obama didn’t accept major spending cuts. The idea was to use the full faith and credit of the nation as a hostage to force Obama to pay a policy ransom—possibly even a “Grand Bargain” including entitlement reforms. But some House Republicans truly wanted to shoot the hostage and force Obama into default to make a point about the debt, even though that would have created global chaos. Others refused to vote to raise the debt ceiling—which merely lets the Treasury pay for spending Congress has already authorized—unless Obama agreed to repeal Obamacare. And while Speaker John Boehner tried negotiating with Obama, many of his members had little appetite for any bargain that would make Obama look like a bipartisan statesman. There’s not much incentive to compromise with an adversary after telling your constituents he’s a socialist tyrant intent on destroying America.
The result was a near-catastrophe that helped produce a downgrade of the U.S. government’s credit rating. And while the crisis was averted by a last-minute deal for across-the-board spending cuts known as “the sequester,” the GOP purity caucus was unwilling to claim victory because Obama had won some concessions. … (Grunwald 1-6).
Accomplishments
In mid-January, pollsters for the Washington Post and ABC News asked a representative sampling of Americans the following question: “Obama has been president for about three years. Would you say he has accomplished a great deal during that time, a good amount, not very much, or little or nothing?”
When the poll’s results were released on January 18, even the most seasoned White House staffers, who know the president faces a tough battle for reelection, must have spit up their coffee: more than half the respondents—52 percent—said the president has accomplished “not very much” or “little or nothing.”
… there is an empirically right answer—one chosen by only 12 percent of the poll’s respondents. The answer is that Obama has accomplished “a great deal.”
Measured in sheer legislative tonnage, what Obama got done in his first two years is stunning. Health care reform. The takeover and turnaround of the auto industry. The biggest economic stimulus in history. Sweeping new regulations of Wall Street. A tough new set of consumer protections on the credit card industry. A vast expansion of national service. Net neutrality. The greatest increase in wilderness protection in fifteen years. A revolutionary reform to student aid. Signing the New START treaty with Russia. The ending of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Even over the past year, when he was bogged down in budget fights with the Tea Party-controlled GOP House, Obama still managed to squeeze out a few domestic policy victories, including a $1.2 trillion deficit reduction deal and the most sweeping overhaul of food safety laws in more than seventy years. More impressively, on the foreign policy front he ended the war in Iraq, began the drawdown in Afghanistan, helped to oust Gaddafi in Libya and usher out Mubarak in Egypt, orchestrated new military and commercial alliances as a hedge against China, and tightened sanctions against Iran over its nukes.
Oh, and he shifted counterterrorism strategies to target Osama bin Laden and then ordered the risky raid that killed him.
That Obama has done all this while also steering the country out of what might have been a second Great Depression would seem to have made him already, just three years into his first term, a serious candidate for greatness.
And yet a solid majority of Americans nevertheless thinks the president has not accomplished much. Why? There are plenty of possible explanations. The most obvious is the economy. People are measuring Obama’s actions against the actual conditions of their lives and livelihoods, which, over the past three years, have not gotten materially better. He failed miserably at his grandiose promise to change the culture of Washington .... His highest-profile legislative accomplishments were object lessons in the ugly side of compromise. In negotiations, he came off to Democrats as naïvely trusting, and to Republicans as obstinately partisan, leaving the impression that he could have achieved more if only he had been less conciliatory—or more so, depending on your point of view. And for such an obviously gifted orator, he has been surprisingly inept at explaining to average Americans what he’s fighting for or trumpeting what he’s achieved.
In short, when judging Obama’s record so far, conservatives measure him against their fears, liberals against their hopes, and the rest of us against our pocketbooks. But if you measure Obama against other presidents—arguably the more relevant yardstick—a couple of things come to light. Speaking again in terms of sheer tonnage, Obama has gotten more done than any president since LBJ. But the effects of some of those achievements have yet to be felt by most Americans, often by design. Here, too, Obama is in good historical company.
… a number of Obama’s biggest accomplishments function, like FDR’s, with a built-in delay. Some are structured to have modest effects now but major ones later. Others emerged in a crimped and compromised form that, if history is a guide, may well be filled out and strengthened down the road. Still others are quite impressive now but create potential for even greater change in the future. ...
…
Let’s begin with the policies that have prompted the most disappointment from the left and anger from the right: Obama’s big moves on the economy. The most visible aspect of Obama’s agenda in this arena was the American Recovery Act, better known as the stimulus. Almost no one has a good word to say about it these days. Voters have soured on it. Obama made no mention of it in his State of the Union address. Liberals complain that it was too heavily weighted with not-very-stimulatory tax cuts meant to lure GOP votes (which it didn’t), that it should have been even bigger (true, though it was bigger than the one the Democratic-controlled House proposed), and that a significantly bigger one could have passed Congress (dubious). Conservatives claim it didn’t increase jobs or help the economy at all.
But most reputable economists say it did. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus added anywhere from 500,000 to 3.3 million jobs and boosted GDP by between 1 and 4.5 percent. Indeed, within weeks of the stimulus going into effect, unemployment claims began to subside. Twelve months later, the private sector began producing more jobs than it was losing, and it has continued to do so for twenty-three straight months, creating a total of 3.7 million private-sector jobs. On the first key test—whether it helped the economy when the economy needed it most— the stimulus passed. And if the current recovery continues to pick up steam, then the stimulus will be remembered as having helped lead America out of the Great Recession.
But the potential significance of the stimulus may go even beyond that. First off, thanks to innovative management, the administration has been able to spend $787 billion with minimal fraud. (By comparison, FDR’s early New Deal spending was so fraught with waste and abuse that the term “boondoggle” arose to describe it.) Not only that, but the way the administration has chosen which projects to fund has itself been revolutionary. Instead of spending all the money in the usual manner—by formula, with each state and congressional district getting its “fair share”—the administration used a sizeable portion of the stimulus to create a dozen or more giant competitive grant programs. Potential recipients, be they state and local governments, nonprofits, or corporations, had to vie for the money by proposing their own entrepreneurial strategies for meeting federal goals, as well as procedures to measure the results of their efforts.
The best known of these is Race to the Top, the much praised $4.35 billion Education Department grant program. It is one of the few policies of this administration praised by left and right—and yet almost no one mentions that it was part of the stimulus bill. …
Another major (and much-reviled) aspect of Obama’s economic legacy is how his team handled the meltdown of the financial sector. This is another achievement he made no mention of in his State of the Union address—and no wonder, because it’s complex, still unfolding, and involves the rescue of bankers. But it’s worth slowing down here to remember the crisis as Obama inherited it. As you will recall, the actual bank “bailout” took place in the fall of 2008, when the Bush administration created the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. By injecting more than $300 billion into hundreds of banks, and especially the nation’s biggest, TARP bought the economy some breathing room and gave the incoming administration some resources— another $350 billion in unspent TARP funds—to work with. But with consumers increasingly unable to make their mortgage and credit card payments—the economy was shedding upward of 800,000 jobs the month Obama was inaugurated—losses at the big banks were mounting faster than Washington could force-feed dollars into them, and no one really knew what they were carrying on their balance sheets. Any number of institutions looked like they could collapse, and that extra $350 billion was not enough to stabilize the system and pay for other crucial emergency programs, like mitigating foreclosures.
The advice the administration was getting from economists like Joseph Stiglitz, who had seen the crisis coming years before, was to use the moment to completely reshape the financial sector: nationalize the biggest, most troubled banks; toss out their management; break them up into smaller banks; have the government strip out and sell off the “toxic” assets on their books; downsize executive salaries and bonuses; and, in general, shrink the size of Wall Street, the better to limit its baleful influence on the rest of the economy.
… Timothy Geithner’s Treasury Department crafted a much more targeted intervention, aimed at stabilizing the financial markets and getting the economy back on track at the lowest possible cost to government. Rather than have the taxpayers assume the risky and expensive burden of taking over the banks—an expense that Congress, having already approved TARP and the stimulus, was in no mood to authorize—Geithner’s plan was to convince investors to come in and recapitalize them. His plan had three main parts. First, the Treasury, working with the Fed and other agencies, ran “stress tests” of the banks to determine the fragility of their books and how much more capital they’d need to be able to survive and lend in an even more dire economic scenario than was expected at the time. Second, it gave banks six months to raise that amount of capital from private investors, and said that, if they failed, Treasury would use taxpayer dollars to buy ownership shares of the banks at a preset price, effectively establishing a floor for private investors. Third, it created a fund, with both public and private dollars, to buy the toxic assets on the banks’ books, thereby giving some assurance that there would be a market for those assets.
The politics of the plan were dreadful. It looked like more mollycoddling of Wall Street. But, as Joshua Green noted in the Atlantic, it had the desired effect. Private money, $140 billion of it, flooded into the nineteen biggest banks; the lending markets unfroze; and, with the help of low interest rates from the Fed, the banks paid back the TARP funds, with interest. In 2008, the International Monetary Fund studied past financial crises in forty-two countries and found that their governments spent, on average, 13.3 percent of GDP to resolve them. By that measure, it would have cost the U.S. government $1.9 trillion. The Obama plan got the banks back on their feet at essentially zero cost to the government, and in historically near-record time. Let that sink in.
In addition to resolving the immediate crisis, the administration tried to insure against a repeat of it by issuing a plan to expand federal regulation of the financial markets, a plan that ultimately became the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, otherwise known as Dodd-Frank. The new law, which passed with almost no GOP votes, has been scathingly criticized since it first appeared in the House— by conservatives for being a big-government power grab and by liberals and various academic experts for being too weak.
But as Michael Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute explains, the new law parallels and expands upon the great achievements of New Deal financial regulation. Much as the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 mandated transparency in the securities markets and created the SEC to punish fraud, Dodd-Frank creates a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to do the same for everything from mortgages to credit cards. The Securities Exchange Act forced stock trading onto exchanges and mandated that traders have sufficient collateral. Similarly, Dodd-Frank pushes financial derivatives into clearinghouses and exchanges. The 1933 Glass-Steagall Act forced the separation of commercial banks from the more speculative activities of investment banks. The new so-called Volcker Rule in Dodd-Frank limits the ability of banks to trade securities for the firm’s own profit. Glass-Steagall also created the FDIC to monitor commercial banks and take them over if they get into financial trouble. Dodd-Frank gives the FDIC “resolution authority” over the “too big to fail” financial behemoths so that they too can be monitored and taken over if necessary.
At each stage as Dodd-Frank has moved through the legislative process, from House to Senate and now to the agency level for implementation, liberals have sounded the alarm that the insufficiently stringent law was liable to get progressively weaker as industry lobbyists jam it full of caveats and exemptions. Yet while the law does now include its fair share of loopholes (especially in the Volcker Rule), what’s surprising is that the measure has in general gotten tougher, not weaker, over time—often at the behest of lawmakers who wanted stronger measures than did Geithner. …
Washington narratives tend to get set early and resist new anomalous facts. So it is with the financial crisis. The initial take was that Dodd-Frank is weak tea and Obama caved to Wall Street. This view has persisted despite accumulating evidence to the contrary. …
… The main danger to the economy was interconnection, not raw size.” With the capital requirements of the Collins amendment, the Volcker Rule, and the forcing of derivatives into clearinghouses, Dodd-Frank goes a long way toward dealing with the “interconnection” problem. The law’s “resolution authority” also gives regulators the ability to spot overly risky behavior by big banks early and to shut them down if they get into trouble. And the behemoths now have higher capital requirements than do smaller banks, another hedge against risk and an incentive for business to move from the former to the latter.
...
… But if we get through the next decade or two without another financial meltdown, and Wall Street’s unhealthy influence over the economy abates, then Obama will be credited with not only having gotten us out of the financial crisis in the short run but also having crafted an effective new set of rules to reduce the chances of it happening again (Glastris 11-20).
Works cited:
Glastris, Paul, “The Incomplete Greatness of Barack Obama.” Washington Monthly, March/April 2012. Web. https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazin...
Grunwald, Michael, “The Victory of ‘No.’” Politico. December 4, 2016. Web. https://www.politico.com/magazine/sto...
On January 29, 2009, the whittled-down and beaten-up Republican minority in the House of Representatives gathered for a strange celebration of defeat. The Democrats had just drubbed them at the polls, seizing the White House and a 79-seat advantage in the House. The House had then capped President Barack Obama’s first week in office by passing his $800 billion Recovery Act, a landmark emergency stimulus bill that doubled as a massive down payment on Obama’s agenda. Even though the economy was in free fall, not one House Republican had voted for the effort to revive it, prompting a wave of punditry about a failed party refusing to help clean up its own mess and dooming itself to irrelevance.
But at the House GOP retreat the next day at a posh resort in the Virginia mountains, there was no woe-is-us vibe. …
…
The Republicans were pumped because they saw a path out of the political wilderness. They were convinced that even if Obama kept winning policy battles, they could win the broader messaging war simply by remaining unified and fighting him on everything. Their conference chairman, a then-obscure Indiana conservative named Mike Pence, underscored the point with a clip from Patton, showing the general rallying his troops for war against their Nazi enemy: “We’re going to kick the hell out of him all the time! We’re going to go through him like crap through a goose!”
…
… What has distinguished the opposition to Obama is not just the intensity—a GOP congressman shouting “You lie!” during a presidential address, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s admission that his top priority was limiting Obama to one term—but the consistency. … on just about every issue, from Obamacare to climate to education reforms that conservatives supported until Obama embraced them, Republicans have embraced that strategy.
Unified vitriol against Obama’s legislative agenda, coming from Republican office holders and media bomb-throwers had an immediate destructive effect.
Polls showed a 14-point plunge in public support for the Recovery Act in the week after the House vote. Most economists now believe the stimulus helped avert a depression and jump-start a recovery, but a year after passage, the percentage of Americans who believed it had created any jobs was lower than the percentage who believed Elvis was alive.
… Not one House or Senate Republican backed Obama’s health reforms, even though they looked a lot like Mitt Romney’s reforms in Massachusetts. And the unified GOP opposition forced the White House to cut all kinds of deals to keep all 60 Senate Democrats on board to overcome a filibuster …
… they [the Republicans] also filibustered and voted in lockstep against previously uncontroversial Obama priorities, like extended unemployment benefits, expanded infrastructure spending and small-business tax cuts. Senate Republicans even turned routine judicial nominations into legislative ordeals, filibustering 20 of his district court judges—17 more than had been filibustered under all of his predecessors.
Republican leaders simply did not want their fingerprints on the Obama agenda; as McConnell explained, if Americans thought D.C. politicians were working together, they would credit the president, and if they thought D.C. seemed as ugly and messy as always, they would blame the president. …
The Republican outside game, like the Republican inside game, was all about standing up to Obama. He was blistered every day on Capitol Hill as well as talk radio as a dangerous leftist who wanted to turn the United States into Europe. While Republican congressmen didn’t post photos of the president in Muslim garb on Facebook, or forward racist emails from their uncles about him, or openly question whether he was an American citizen, they didn’t really try to set their base straight, either. And that base was fired up. The Tea Party movement that began to mobilize a few weeks into the Obama era was billed as an anti-tax crusade—even though Obama had just passed $300 billion worth of tax cuts in his stimulus—but the rallies felt a lot like anti-Obama rallies, with angry speeches about tyranny in the White House and crude portraits of the president as the Joker.
The relentless attacks on Obama helped sink his approval rating from the high 60s down to the 40s, where they would remain for most of his presidency. He had run as a “post-partisan” candidate, promising to fix the nastiness and pettiness of Washington, and it was a promise he couldn’t keep. In his first two years in office, he and his Democratic majorities did a lot—the stimulus, Obamacare, sweeping Wall Street reforms, bringing troops home from Iraq—but he failed to convince the public to like what he did. In the 2010 midterms, Americans voted to change his change, giving the Republicans the House in a landslide that Obama described as “a shellacking.” …
Many Republicans believe their just-say-no approach reflected principled resistance to liberal overreach, not cynical partisan nonparticipation, but whatever you call it, it helped restore the GOP House majority much faster than the pundits thought possible. And divided government meant the doom of Obama’s legislative agenda, including a jobs bill, gun control measures and immigration reform. …
… Many of the Tea Party Republicans elected in the midterm wave had campaigned on rolling back the stimulus, repealing Obamacare, and dismantling Wall Street reform—and they expected their leaders to make it happen, even though they didn’t control the White House or the Senate. …
“The second we got the majority back, people started making unrealistic demands,” [Oklahoma Rep. Tom] Cole says. “They thought: Oh, if we just fight harder, if we just shut down the government, if we just use more extreme tactics, the other side will cave.” …
The most prominent example was the 2011 showdown over the debt ceiling, when Republican leaders threatened to let the government default on its obligations if Obama didn’t accept major spending cuts. The idea was to use the full faith and credit of the nation as a hostage to force Obama to pay a policy ransom—possibly even a “Grand Bargain” including entitlement reforms. But some House Republicans truly wanted to shoot the hostage and force Obama into default to make a point about the debt, even though that would have created global chaos. Others refused to vote to raise the debt ceiling—which merely lets the Treasury pay for spending Congress has already authorized—unless Obama agreed to repeal Obamacare. And while Speaker John Boehner tried negotiating with Obama, many of his members had little appetite for any bargain that would make Obama look like a bipartisan statesman. There’s not much incentive to compromise with an adversary after telling your constituents he’s a socialist tyrant intent on destroying America.
The result was a near-catastrophe that helped produce a downgrade of the U.S. government’s credit rating. And while the crisis was averted by a last-minute deal for across-the-board spending cuts known as “the sequester,” the GOP purity caucus was unwilling to claim victory because Obama had won some concessions. … (Grunwald 1-6).
Accomplishments
In mid-January, pollsters for the Washington Post and ABC News asked a representative sampling of Americans the following question: “Obama has been president for about three years. Would you say he has accomplished a great deal during that time, a good amount, not very much, or little or nothing?”
When the poll’s results were released on January 18, even the most seasoned White House staffers, who know the president faces a tough battle for reelection, must have spit up their coffee: more than half the respondents—52 percent—said the president has accomplished “not very much” or “little or nothing.”
… there is an empirically right answer—one chosen by only 12 percent of the poll’s respondents. The answer is that Obama has accomplished “a great deal.”
Measured in sheer legislative tonnage, what Obama got done in his first two years is stunning. Health care reform. The takeover and turnaround of the auto industry. The biggest economic stimulus in history. Sweeping new regulations of Wall Street. A tough new set of consumer protections on the credit card industry. A vast expansion of national service. Net neutrality. The greatest increase in wilderness protection in fifteen years. A revolutionary reform to student aid. Signing the New START treaty with Russia. The ending of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Even over the past year, when he was bogged down in budget fights with the Tea Party-controlled GOP House, Obama still managed to squeeze out a few domestic policy victories, including a $1.2 trillion deficit reduction deal and the most sweeping overhaul of food safety laws in more than seventy years. More impressively, on the foreign policy front he ended the war in Iraq, began the drawdown in Afghanistan, helped to oust Gaddafi in Libya and usher out Mubarak in Egypt, orchestrated new military and commercial alliances as a hedge against China, and tightened sanctions against Iran over its nukes.
Oh, and he shifted counterterrorism strategies to target Osama bin Laden and then ordered the risky raid that killed him.
That Obama has done all this while also steering the country out of what might have been a second Great Depression would seem to have made him already, just three years into his first term, a serious candidate for greatness.
And yet a solid majority of Americans nevertheless thinks the president has not accomplished much. Why? There are plenty of possible explanations. The most obvious is the economy. People are measuring Obama’s actions against the actual conditions of their lives and livelihoods, which, over the past three years, have not gotten materially better. He failed miserably at his grandiose promise to change the culture of Washington .... His highest-profile legislative accomplishments were object lessons in the ugly side of compromise. In negotiations, he came off to Democrats as naïvely trusting, and to Republicans as obstinately partisan, leaving the impression that he could have achieved more if only he had been less conciliatory—or more so, depending on your point of view. And for such an obviously gifted orator, he has been surprisingly inept at explaining to average Americans what he’s fighting for or trumpeting what he’s achieved.
In short, when judging Obama’s record so far, conservatives measure him against their fears, liberals against their hopes, and the rest of us against our pocketbooks. But if you measure Obama against other presidents—arguably the more relevant yardstick—a couple of things come to light. Speaking again in terms of sheer tonnage, Obama has gotten more done than any president since LBJ. But the effects of some of those achievements have yet to be felt by most Americans, often by design. Here, too, Obama is in good historical company.
… a number of Obama’s biggest accomplishments function, like FDR’s, with a built-in delay. Some are structured to have modest effects now but major ones later. Others emerged in a crimped and compromised form that, if history is a guide, may well be filled out and strengthened down the road. Still others are quite impressive now but create potential for even greater change in the future. ...
…
Let’s begin with the policies that have prompted the most disappointment from the left and anger from the right: Obama’s big moves on the economy. The most visible aspect of Obama’s agenda in this arena was the American Recovery Act, better known as the stimulus. Almost no one has a good word to say about it these days. Voters have soured on it. Obama made no mention of it in his State of the Union address. Liberals complain that it was too heavily weighted with not-very-stimulatory tax cuts meant to lure GOP votes (which it didn’t), that it should have been even bigger (true, though it was bigger than the one the Democratic-controlled House proposed), and that a significantly bigger one could have passed Congress (dubious). Conservatives claim it didn’t increase jobs or help the economy at all.
But most reputable economists say it did. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus added anywhere from 500,000 to 3.3 million jobs and boosted GDP by between 1 and 4.5 percent. Indeed, within weeks of the stimulus going into effect, unemployment claims began to subside. Twelve months later, the private sector began producing more jobs than it was losing, and it has continued to do so for twenty-three straight months, creating a total of 3.7 million private-sector jobs. On the first key test—whether it helped the economy when the economy needed it most— the stimulus passed. And if the current recovery continues to pick up steam, then the stimulus will be remembered as having helped lead America out of the Great Recession.
But the potential significance of the stimulus may go even beyond that. First off, thanks to innovative management, the administration has been able to spend $787 billion with minimal fraud. (By comparison, FDR’s early New Deal spending was so fraught with waste and abuse that the term “boondoggle” arose to describe it.) Not only that, but the way the administration has chosen which projects to fund has itself been revolutionary. Instead of spending all the money in the usual manner—by formula, with each state and congressional district getting its “fair share”—the administration used a sizeable portion of the stimulus to create a dozen or more giant competitive grant programs. Potential recipients, be they state and local governments, nonprofits, or corporations, had to vie for the money by proposing their own entrepreneurial strategies for meeting federal goals, as well as procedures to measure the results of their efforts.
The best known of these is Race to the Top, the much praised $4.35 billion Education Department grant program. It is one of the few policies of this administration praised by left and right—and yet almost no one mentions that it was part of the stimulus bill. …
Another major (and much-reviled) aspect of Obama’s economic legacy is how his team handled the meltdown of the financial sector. This is another achievement he made no mention of in his State of the Union address—and no wonder, because it’s complex, still unfolding, and involves the rescue of bankers. But it’s worth slowing down here to remember the crisis as Obama inherited it. As you will recall, the actual bank “bailout” took place in the fall of 2008, when the Bush administration created the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. By injecting more than $300 billion into hundreds of banks, and especially the nation’s biggest, TARP bought the economy some breathing room and gave the incoming administration some resources— another $350 billion in unspent TARP funds—to work with. But with consumers increasingly unable to make their mortgage and credit card payments—the economy was shedding upward of 800,000 jobs the month Obama was inaugurated—losses at the big banks were mounting faster than Washington could force-feed dollars into them, and no one really knew what they were carrying on their balance sheets. Any number of institutions looked like they could collapse, and that extra $350 billion was not enough to stabilize the system and pay for other crucial emergency programs, like mitigating foreclosures.
The advice the administration was getting from economists like Joseph Stiglitz, who had seen the crisis coming years before, was to use the moment to completely reshape the financial sector: nationalize the biggest, most troubled banks; toss out their management; break them up into smaller banks; have the government strip out and sell off the “toxic” assets on their books; downsize executive salaries and bonuses; and, in general, shrink the size of Wall Street, the better to limit its baleful influence on the rest of the economy.
… Timothy Geithner’s Treasury Department crafted a much more targeted intervention, aimed at stabilizing the financial markets and getting the economy back on track at the lowest possible cost to government. Rather than have the taxpayers assume the risky and expensive burden of taking over the banks—an expense that Congress, having already approved TARP and the stimulus, was in no mood to authorize—Geithner’s plan was to convince investors to come in and recapitalize them. His plan had three main parts. First, the Treasury, working with the Fed and other agencies, ran “stress tests” of the banks to determine the fragility of their books and how much more capital they’d need to be able to survive and lend in an even more dire economic scenario than was expected at the time. Second, it gave banks six months to raise that amount of capital from private investors, and said that, if they failed, Treasury would use taxpayer dollars to buy ownership shares of the banks at a preset price, effectively establishing a floor for private investors. Third, it created a fund, with both public and private dollars, to buy the toxic assets on the banks’ books, thereby giving some assurance that there would be a market for those assets.
The politics of the plan were dreadful. It looked like more mollycoddling of Wall Street. But, as Joshua Green noted in the Atlantic, it had the desired effect. Private money, $140 billion of it, flooded into the nineteen biggest banks; the lending markets unfroze; and, with the help of low interest rates from the Fed, the banks paid back the TARP funds, with interest. In 2008, the International Monetary Fund studied past financial crises in forty-two countries and found that their governments spent, on average, 13.3 percent of GDP to resolve them. By that measure, it would have cost the U.S. government $1.9 trillion. The Obama plan got the banks back on their feet at essentially zero cost to the government, and in historically near-record time. Let that sink in.
In addition to resolving the immediate crisis, the administration tried to insure against a repeat of it by issuing a plan to expand federal regulation of the financial markets, a plan that ultimately became the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, otherwise known as Dodd-Frank. The new law, which passed with almost no GOP votes, has been scathingly criticized since it first appeared in the House— by conservatives for being a big-government power grab and by liberals and various academic experts for being too weak.
But as Michael Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute explains, the new law parallels and expands upon the great achievements of New Deal financial regulation. Much as the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 mandated transparency in the securities markets and created the SEC to punish fraud, Dodd-Frank creates a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to do the same for everything from mortgages to credit cards. The Securities Exchange Act forced stock trading onto exchanges and mandated that traders have sufficient collateral. Similarly, Dodd-Frank pushes financial derivatives into clearinghouses and exchanges. The 1933 Glass-Steagall Act forced the separation of commercial banks from the more speculative activities of investment banks. The new so-called Volcker Rule in Dodd-Frank limits the ability of banks to trade securities for the firm’s own profit. Glass-Steagall also created the FDIC to monitor commercial banks and take them over if they get into financial trouble. Dodd-Frank gives the FDIC “resolution authority” over the “too big to fail” financial behemoths so that they too can be monitored and taken over if necessary.
At each stage as Dodd-Frank has moved through the legislative process, from House to Senate and now to the agency level for implementation, liberals have sounded the alarm that the insufficiently stringent law was liable to get progressively weaker as industry lobbyists jam it full of caveats and exemptions. Yet while the law does now include its fair share of loopholes (especially in the Volcker Rule), what’s surprising is that the measure has in general gotten tougher, not weaker, over time—often at the behest of lawmakers who wanted stronger measures than did Geithner. …
Washington narratives tend to get set early and resist new anomalous facts. So it is with the financial crisis. The initial take was that Dodd-Frank is weak tea and Obama caved to Wall Street. This view has persisted despite accumulating evidence to the contrary. …
… The main danger to the economy was interconnection, not raw size.” With the capital requirements of the Collins amendment, the Volcker Rule, and the forcing of derivatives into clearinghouses, Dodd-Frank goes a long way toward dealing with the “interconnection” problem. The law’s “resolution authority” also gives regulators the ability to spot overly risky behavior by big banks early and to shut them down if they get into trouble. And the behemoths now have higher capital requirements than do smaller banks, another hedge against risk and an incentive for business to move from the former to the latter.
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… But if we get through the next decade or two without another financial meltdown, and Wall Street’s unhealthy influence over the economy abates, then Obama will be credited with not only having gotten us out of the financial crisis in the short run but also having crafted an effective new set of rules to reduce the chances of it happening again (Glastris 11-20).
Works cited:
Glastris, Paul, “The Incomplete Greatness of Barack Obama.” Washington Monthly, March/April 2012. Web. https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazin...
Grunwald, Michael, “The Victory of ‘No.’” Politico. December 4, 2016. Web. https://www.politico.com/magazine/sto...
