Jonathan V. Last's Blog, page 66
October 10, 2012
Conservatives for Romney!
(1) “Romney says abortion legislation isn’t part of his agenda.”
“There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda,” the GOP presidential candidate told The Des Moines Register’s editorial board during a meeting today before his campaign rally at a Van Meter farm.
(2) “Romney’s overly optimistic tax plan.”
I asked a tax policy expert to crunch the numbers on a typical household with an individual filer and deduction amounts. Consider them an evangelical suburbanite at the $100,000 level who has a mortgage, tithes, and has some annual medical expenses. Here’s what comes back:
“If you make $100,000, have a new $300,000 mortgage @ 4 percent, tithe 15 percent, pay $5,000 in state/local taxes, and have $7,500 in qualified medical expenses, you would pay $12,100 in federal income taxes on AGI of $60,500 w/ deductions of $39,500 (assume 20 percent effective rate). Under the Romney plan, you’d pay $13,280 (new effective rate would be 16 percent on AGI of $83,000), an increase of nearly 10 percent.”
Click your heels together three times and say, “There’s always the SCOTUS.”
Dept. of Idiotic PR
I get about 200 press releases emailed to me every day. There all pretty stupid but sometimes one of them really jumps out.
Today it’s a release from Visintine & Ryan PR on behalf of some guy named Kevin Ryan who claims–well, let’s let the release do the talking:
Will Blacks Vote for Obama? Black Sphere radio host Kevin Jackson says “not so fast”
Kevin Jackson, radio host of the “Black Sphere,” author and blogger thinks Obama will struggle with this key voting block – here’s why . . .
Really? I mean, really?
What do we think the over-under is on the black vote for Obama this time around? 96.5 percent? Or 97.0 percent? What’s the absolute, total-implosion, worst percentage Obama is going to pull from black voters? 94 percent? But hey, “not so fast”! Kevin Jackson will “add an unexpected viewpoint to the debates, no matter who wins or loses. Please let us know if you would like to set something up.”
October 9, 2012
Inside Baseball
A couple weeks ago when Politico ran their big story about infighting in the Romney campaign after the GOP convention, the lede was centered around the creation of Romney’s acceptance speech and a lot of people publicly mused that speechwriter Matt Scully was behind the leak.
That suspicion seemed, at the time, a really big reach. It didn’t fit Scully’s persona or modus operandi. And Scully had no clear motive for planting the story. The most likely source seemed to clearly be someone quite close to Romney, a true believer who had a beef with Stuart Stevens.
Today, Politico has another story out which publicly credits Tagg Romney for leading a pre-debate rebellion against Stevens. Both pieces were written by the same co-authors. This has the appearance of being the denouement of the first piece, where credit is finally given to the parties leading the internal fight against Stevens so that Romney could be Romney. I wouldn’t bet $10,000 that Tagg was behind the first story, too. But in light of today’s piece it seems to me that any suspicion of Scully as the leaker should probably be put to bed.
I realize that outside of a very small world, no one much cares about this. But Scully is one of the true good guys in politics. And gossip linking him to that Politico leak is the kind of thing which inflicts real damage on someone’s career. Which he doesn’t deserve.
The case for suspecting Scully was always weak. Now it’s inoperable.
Update: I probably should be more specific. It would be honorable for Dave Weigel to revisit this item he wrote about Scully. (And the subsequent Twitterendo.)
October 8, 2012
October 5, 2012
Culture and Demography
Abe Greenwald touches on a very deep point about American culture:
There is a great and growing divide between what our political reality demands and what our culture now produces, and Bruni gets nowhere near it. Sacrifice is vanishing because the cultural institutions that promote or sanctify it—family, faith, and patriotism—are on the wane. “In 1960, two-thirds (68%) of all [American] twenty-somethings were married,” a 2010 Pew study found. “In 2008, just 26% were.” And in 2011, American births fell to a 12-year low. To previous generations the demands of family meant a life defined by self-denial, delayed gratification, and the giving of one’s time, energy, and money. Is a 42 percent drop in those who claim such an existence supposed to have no effect on the quality of our national character?
As you might imagine, I have quite a lot to say about this in What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, which, coincidentally, is now available for pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, and Books-a-Million.
(That’s a temp cover–the final cover art should be coming soon-ish.)
The Great Dylan Meconis
Friend of a Galley Friend Dylan Meconis is basically beau ideal of the hyper-literate, classics-nerd, comics artist-writer. And her ongoing graphic novel Family Man will be catnip to certain Galley Readers. (I’m looking at you, Gormogons.) Here’s a section from her intro:
. . . Amidst all this confusion, Europe is clattering into a new age. The Age of Faith and the Age of Beauty have both run their course, and now it’s Reason’s turn to try to explain the human condition. Suddenly everybody thinks the answers will be revealed by the next microscope slide, wild manuscript, or enlightened political upheaval.
Everybody, that is, except for a young scholar by the name of Luther Levy, who has an increasing stock of Questions and a diminishing supply of Answers. Caught between a rock and his own hard head, Luther has returned home from University short one doctorate in Theology and (possibly) one belief in God.
Luther does his best to find comfort in his eclectic family (and a healthy dose of self pity). Self-pity won’t pay the rent, though, and Luther has become desperate for employment, which isn’t easy to come by when your only marketable skill is scriptural exegesis.
Her writing is really, really smart and funny. And the art is positively gorgeous. Enjoy.
October 3, 2012
Immediate Debate React-Updated
1) Watching the debate while monitoring Twitter is sub-optimal. The echo-chamber effect is deafening. I closed it down after the first 40 minutes and won’t have it on again during the debates.
2) Jim Lehrer had a terrible night. He got bullied around the stage, lost control of the format, and inserted himself in needless ways in the interest of forcing explicit contrasts–even when the contrast was everywhere.
3) Romney had a good night. Vigorous. Tough. Just the right balance of backward and forward looking. His strongest moment was his aggressive final answer before they went to closing statements. Instead of looking to the moderator for help, as he’s often done in the past, he basically pushed Lehrer around the stage all night and made him his bitch.
That said, I’ll never get used to his Default Face, though. At the end of every answer. Whether he’s thundering to a vehement close or finishing with a soft joke, he immediately sets his face to default with a pursed lip smile, a shoulder sag, and this weird raised-brow puppy dog expression. It’s not the face that’s strange–it’s the fact that he puts it on after every single answer. Almost like he’s a robot returning to rest-state. Aside from that, though, he was incredibly human and lifelike.
4) Obama was halting and not particularly smooth and nearly listless. He’ll need to figure out how to handle a Romney who beats the moderator into giving him every last word.
Yet at the same time, he came across as totally reasonable and serious. Look, this is a guy who’s trying to fundamentally change the citizenry’s compact with the machinery of government. And yet, if you dropped in from Mars tonight, I suspect you’d never, ever get that from his performance tonight.
Speaking of dog whistles, his line about Romney’s secrecy was basically “MORMON MORMON MORMON”, right?
5) Winner? Probably Romney. I suspect he helped himself more than Obama did. But it’s not clear to me whether it was serious enough to translate into a tactical or strategic advantage. We’ll see in three days when there’s some tracking poll.
6) In general, this election is disheartening. America is at an important crossroads, more important than normal. We face serious structural problems with the modern state. And yet we have before us two of the worst candidates in modern times–men who are smaller than the moment in every way. Yet tonight both candidates were substantive and smart and looked bigger than they really are. So that was nice.
Updated the morning after: Look, I agree that Romney had a much better debate than Obama. I’d go so far as to call it the best Romney debate perf I’ve seen in any cycle. But Obama it strikes me that when Andrew Sullivan is hyperventilating about Obama having lost the presidency and John Hinderaker is claiming that “it’s over” it strikes me that people may be running slightly ahead of themselves in their excitement.
Now maybe Rasmussen will show Romney +3 in his tracking poll six days from now, in which case we’ll know that the debate had real consequence. And maybe it’ll prove to be an inflection point in the race. But if you strip out the echo chamber of commentary and just watch the debate itself, I think you’d be much more cautiously optimistic about the eventual effects.
