Jonathan V. Last's Blog, page 63
November 6, 2012
Coffee is for closers, Mitt.
I’ll have detailed thoughts later in the week, but some first blush thoughts:
* There will be fighting about ideology and demographics in the coming days, but I don’t buy it. For several reasons. The first being, no one actually knows what ideology Romney ran on. If you believe Romney’s ideology mattered, then what were voters rejecting? Romney’s hard-line on not giving in-state tuition to the children of illegal immigrants? Or the constant sly tips that he wouldn’t repeal Obamacare whole? Or the openness to raising effective tax payments by cutting personal income tax deductions in unspecified ways?
For the most part, Romney was an ideological Rohrschach test for voters onto which they could project whatever views they wanted. As such, you can’t really say that they were uniformly rejecting some particular brand of ideology.
But of course, that’s not what these fights are about. One of the things you’ll see the coming GOP ideology wars is the very neat alignment between what a given analyst says Republicans must do to win and what that given analyst personally prefers. As always, I’m wary of those arguments. You should argue ideological positions on the merits, not on some belief in their political expediency.
* I continue to maintain that the 2012 election was determined not by ideology but by personality. Candidates matter. Not always, and not everywhere. But when you play at the highest level you need to meet some basic threshold of political ability in order to maximize the chances of victory that circumstances allow. I’ve said it many times and I’ll say it again: In terms of political ability, Mitt Romney is not only the worst major-party nominee since World War II (at least), but his weaknesses were particularly ill-suited to this particular race.
This isn’t to say that Romney had no chance of winning. But I’d argue he had the worst chance of any of the major candidates in the 2012 field.
* To gauge how terrible Romney was, consider this: The single biggest thing to jump out at me tonight is that, if the results hold up, Romney will have succeeded in flipping only IN and NC. That’s an amazing fact. In 2008, John McCain–viewed then (and now) as a lackluster candidate–ran a mediocre campaign in an environment where his party was being held responsible for two unpopular wars and there was an ongoing financial crisis hanging over his head. He was outspent by a large margin. Fast-foward to 2012 and Romney has none of that baggage–if anything, it’s the opposite. The environment is completely oriented against the incumbent president. The money is just about even. And all Romney can do is flip IN and NC?
That’s a damning indictment of Romney as a candidate. If you were to run the VORP numbers, it would suggest that Romney was a giant net negative relative.
And none of that was especially hard to divine. Anyone who has been around politics for even a few years, and saw Romney campaigning, should have understood how catastrophically bad he was.
November 5, 2012
Put . . . that coffee . . . down.
Coffee is for closers.
One more reason Republicans are wrong to obsess over Nate Silver is that should Romney win tomorrow, huge chunks of the left will be caught totally surprised. They won’t just have to endure the horror of having Barack Obama rejected by America–it’ll be magnified by shock because they thought they were in such a strong position. Win-win, yes?
Update: Boy, this piece lays down a lot of markers.
Also, to the extent that I do any blogging today/tonight, I’ll likely just update either this thread or a new one.
2:16 pm: Great moments in law enforcement. Also, great moments in the franchise–the Truth Monkey votes!
PUPNTTM: 2012 Election Edition
Peggy Noonan on Mayor Michael Bloomberg, November 2, 2012:
New York’s mayor, Mike Bloomberg, was sterling—a solid, unruffled giver of information whose news conferences were blessedly free of theatrics save for his gifted sign-language interpreter, who wowed a city and left the young evacuees in my apartment furiously signing “Where’s the coffee?” and “I think the baby needs to be changed.”
Peggy Noonan on Mayor Michael Bloomberg, November 5, 2012:
Parts of Jersey and New York are a cold Katrina. The exact dimensions of the disaster will become clearer when the election is over. One word: infrastructure. Officials knew the storm was coming and everyone knew it would be bad, but the people of the tristate area were not aware, until now, just how vulnerable to deep damage their physical system was. The people in charge of that system are the politicians. Mayor Bloomberg wanted to have the Marathon, to show New York’s spirit. In Staten Island last week they were bitterly calling it “the race through the ruins.” There is a disconnect.
More on Nate Silver and Polls
A few notes on the polling in advance of tomorrow:
(1) So I now understand why some conservatives have it in for Nate Silver. It’s because of stuff like this, where Paul Krugman uses Silver’s work to say that anyone who disagrees with Paul Krugman is “stupid.”
Awesome.
But it isn’t quite fair to hold Silver accountable for the work of his friends. Silver is much more careful with his writing than his allies are in their use of it.
(2) If you want to criticize Silver, this is probably the way to go. But once again I’d suggest that anyone looking to use Silver’s work–or any model or poll–as an up-or-down means of predicting the future fundamentally misunderstands both the system and the tool. There are no crystal balls. When it comes to an election, the best view of the future you can hope for is something that looks like a Picasso painting where the central figure is depicted from a dozen different vantage points, and appears distorted and, often, grotesque. But even that picture is better than nothing and I’m still happy to have as many lenses to look through as possible.
(3) What do we make of Silver’s final forecast, that Obama has an 86 percent chance of Electoral College victory? It does not mean that Obama will win. It does not mean, in any meaningful way, that the election isn’t very close to being a coin-flip, where the outcome is so uncertain that it could hinge on any number of independent factors and either Obama or Romney could easily emerge victorious.
One of the aspects of the polling overlooked at this point is that we’re so close to the margin of error that it would be completely unsurprising for Romney to win any of the given toss-up states where he’s behind by a point or so. That’s why it’s called the margin of error. Where it gets dicey for Romney is that he’s within the margin of error, but still behind in so many of these state polls. He could very well sweep them. But if you’re in Boston it would be nice to see him ahead in a couple of the averages, since the margin of error could swing the other way, too.
The simplest way I’d summarize what Silver’s “86 percent chance” prediction is this: The election could go either way, but if today you could choose to be in either Romney’s position or Obama’s position–based solely on the polling data–which would you pick?
I think that most people would rather be in Obama’s position, but that they’d still be very nervous.
(4) So how do we explain Jay Cost, Michael Barone, and George Will–three incredibly smart political minds, all of whom see a large Romney win? I’d suggest that they’re looking through a different lens, and viewing the state of the election not through polls but through more fundamental facts about the environment and political history. That’s a completely valid lens, too, and through it their view of a big Romney win makes all sorts of sense.
I’d suggest that whatever the outcome tomorrow, both worldviews are useful and that to the extent that we can understand a system as complicated as a presidential election it’s worth taking in both.
JVL Elsewhere
Have you been yearning to read a (really) long, in-the-weeds in-depth story about sex-selective abortion, lowest-low fertility, and South Korea’s demographic death-spiral?
Then boy, do I have a piece for you . . .
(I promise the book is much, much more engaging and fun. This piece is just kind of depressing.)
November 2, 2012
George F’in Will
Energetic in body but indolent in mind, Barack Obama in his frenetic campaigning for a second term is promising to replicate his first term, although simply apologizing would be appropriate.
And then:
Biden, whose legal education ended well before he was full to the brim, was nominated for his current high office because Democrats believe compassion should temper the severities of meritocracy.
November 1, 2012
Random Thoughts
1) Amazingly enough, I’ve seen four (4!) movies in the last three months. One of them was Haywire, which was very good. Watching it, it occurred to me that Marvel ought to reboot Elektra with Carano. It’s a great character and she’s perfect for the role. Not just her physicality, but her ability to just stay silent onscreen and let everyone else act around her. All they need is a script.
2) After the Apple corporate shake-up announcement this week, suddenly Maps makes sense. Scott Forstall has long been suspected to be an eventual heir to Tim Cook’s throne. And Cook was widely assumed to be a transitional CEO, someone to bridge the gap and provide stability between the Jobs era and whatever APPL’s future turned out to be.
But maybe Cook doesn’t see himself as a transitional CEO. If Cook was looking to remove a threat to his regime, knowlingly pushing out a flawed Maps package with the iPhone 5, then uncharacteristically jumping on the grenade and admitting the product sucked makes more sense. Maybe it was all a trap for Forstall.
The fact that Forstall evidently refused to sign the APPL confession apology would only support this reading of events. Forstall saw himself being turned into the fall guy and decided he’d go down swinging. Cook then pivoted to take the heat himself publicly in order to build internal support against Forstall.
Seen in this light, maybe Maps wasn’t bad product design at all. Maybe it was a masterstroke of political infighting.
October 30, 2012
Help us Walt, you’re our only hope. (Updated)
If it’s true that Disney has just bought Lucasfilm, then Star Wars nerds can finally have hope for a blu-ray release of the original theatrical versions of the original trilogy.
For too long we’ve been held hostage to the personal artistic visions of George Lucas who, like Stalin airbrushing his enemies out of state photographs, carefully disappeared the original theatrical cuts so that Gredo could shoot first, CGI spectacle could muddle up Mos Eisley, and a young Hayden Christiansen could appear to Luke Skywalker and automatically make him realize that he’s his dad.
Now Disney’s corporate greed could give us the product we’ve always craved. All hail Disney corporate greed!
Unless, that is, the fine print on the agreement stipulates that Lucas maintain control over the cuts of the Star Wars movies. Which wouldn’t surprise any of us, would it.
Update: Dear God! Galley Friend Ben Domenech has done the unthinkable–he listened to the director’s commentary on Attack of the Clones!
Oh, the humanity.
Help us Walt, you’re our only hope.
If it’s true that Disney has just bought Lucasfilm, then Star Wars nerds can finally have hope for a blu-ray release of the original theatrical versions of the original trilogy.
For too long we’ve been held hostage to the personal artistic visions of George Lucas who, like Stalin airbrushing his enemies out of state photographs, carefully disappeared the original theatrical cuts so that Gredo could shoot first, CGI spectacle could muddle up Mos Eisley, and a young Hayden Christiansen could appear to Luke Skywalker and automatically make him realize that he’s his dad.
Now Disney’s corporate greed could give us the product we’ve always craved. All hail Disney corporate greed!
Unless, that is, the fine print on the agreement stipulates that Lucas maintain control over the cuts of the Star Wars movies. Which wouldn’t surprise any of us, would it.
