John Cassidy's Blog, page 92

Did the Olympics Boost Obama?

In the last few days, a funny thing has happened to the opinion polls. In a race that has been virtually static for months, Barack Obama has significantly extended his lead over Mitt Romney. A Reuters/Ipsos survey released on Wednesday showed Obama ahead by seven percentage points: forty-nine to forty-two. On Thursday, CNN’s pollsters also put Obama’s lead at seven points—fifty-two to forty-five—and a survey from Fox News said that the President was leading by nine points: forty-nine to forty.

This development has some pollsters and prognosticators scratching their heads. One of the easy mantras that has acquired the status of wisdom in this election cycle is that nothing matters. Heck, I’ve even used it myself in a couple of radio interviews. Whatever happens—Navy SEALs kill Osama bin Laden, job growth accelerates, job growth slows, the Supreme Court O.K.’s Obamacare—the basic outlines of the race remain the same: Obama narrowly ahead but with a lead that falls within the margin of error. Suddenly, there’s a very different picture: Obama pulling away. What accounts for it?

As far as I can see there are three possibilities:

1. Statistical noise. All polls are subject to error, and it’s quite possible that these three are simply outliers. That’s the line that Nate Silver, the Times’ polling guru, adopted in his post on this subject. Given the lack of movement over the past few months, and the fact that the race remains much closer in some daily tracking polls—in its latest update, Gallup has the race dead-even, and Rasmussen actually has Romney ahead by four points—caution is called for, Silver warns. “Might Mr. Obama have gained half a point, or a point, based on whatever residual factors that voters are thinking about? Sure…,” he writes. “But has Mr. Obama gained three points, at a time when most ordinary Americans are watching the Olympics? Probably not.”

2. The Obama campaign’s attacks on Romney are working. Facing a sour economy and a big fund-raising gap, the boys and girls in Chicago have gambled everything on knocking out Romney early, or leaving him so bloodied that he can’t recover. Some of the internals in the new polls suggest this “swift boat” strategy is working. In the Reuters/Ipsos survey, fully two-thirds of the respondents said that they had seen television commercials criticizing Romney in the past month. And according to the CNN survey, the proportion of registered voters who view Romney unfavorably has jumped in the last month from forty-two per cent to forty-eight per cent.

3. Something else is happening. The fact that three national surveys have found basically the same finding suggests to me that it is probably real: Obama is widening his lead. But his campaign’s blitzkrieg on Romney may not be the only explanation, or even the main one. After all, the Mittster’s been under fire, first from the other G.O.P. candidates and then from the Democrats, for almost a year now. Why would the attacks suddenly have such a noticeable impact? Moreover, it’s not just a matter of Romney slipping. Obama appears to be picking up support: the Fox and CNN polls both showed his favorability ratings ticking up a bit in the past month. And a number of polls taken in swing states show independents moving into his column.

If it’s not negative advertising, what is it? Here’s a theory: it’s the Olympics.

Nate Silver is right: over the past couple of weeks, most Americans have been too busy watching the likes of Michael Phelps, Gabby Douglas, and Misty May-Treanor to pay much attention to the election. But maybe that’s precisely why Obama is doing so well. The Olympics have overshadowed the bad economic news and unleashed a wave of patriotism, the likes of which we haven’t seen in years. Watching Team U.S.A. racing to the top of the medals table, many Americans are feeling much better about their country than they were a few weeks ago, which has to be good news for the incumbent President and bad news for his challenger.

Just look at the polling numbers. Ever since Danny Boyle kicked off the London Games with his zany opening ceremony, things have been going in Obama’s direction. On July 27th, he was leading Romney in the Real Clear Politics poll of polls by 1.1 percentage points: 46.4 to 45.3. A week later, with Team U.S.A. busy winning in the pool, the gymnastics center, and elsewhere, Obama’s lead had widened to 2.7 percentage points: 47.3 to 44.6. And this Friday, August 10th, with the U.S. having established a seemingly insurmountable lead over China in the medals table, Obama’s lead had zoomed out to more than four points: 48.3 to 44.1. That’s what statisticians call a correlation. The longer the Games go on, the further behind Romney falls. If things continued at this rate, and the Games went on for another week rather than ending this coming Sunday, the chart suggests that Obama would have racked up an unassailable lead.

O.K., O.K., I’m pushing it. Correlation isn’t causation, but it’s not a totally outlandish theory. In fact, it’s kind of reasonable. I’m not arguing that people see Phelps winning his eighteenth gold medal, or the U.S. soccer team defeating Japan two-to-one, and think President Obama deserves the credit. It’s more subtle than that. All incumbent politicians live and die by what the Brits call the “feel good factor,” and the Olympics are one of the few events that are big enough to impact the national psyche.

Everyone acknowledges this is true for the host nation: think of Los Angeles, in 1984, Sydney, in 2000, and Beijing, in 2008. Did Americans, Australians, and the Chinese feel more positive thoughts about their countries after those Olympiads? Of course they did. Now, London 2012 has joined the list—just as David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, was hoping it would. Two years ago, when Cameron’s coalition government adopted economic austerity policies, it was counting on hosting the Olympics as one of the things that would help pull the U.K. out of a funk in time for the next election.

It remains to be seen how this strategy works out for the Tories and Liberals, but it wouldn’t be a bit surprising if the U.S. team’s success helps Obama. It isn’t just hosting the Games that people care about: it is how their national teams perform. Having seen the Chinese win the race for gold in 2008, many Americans are mightily relieved to see Team U.S.A. back in what they see as its rightful place at the top. And when Americans feel good about their country, they tend to feel more positively about their President—ask some surviving Reaganites. The Gipper’s “Morning in America” campaign of 1984 merrily exploited the imagery of the Los Angeles Games.

Now it’s Obama’s turn to benefit—perhaps not as much as Reagan, but significantly nonetheless. Polls show he already scores highly on foreign policy, national security, and restoring America’s place in the world. A triumphant Olympics fits perfectly with his campaign narrative that the United States, despite its current economic difficulties, remains a nation on the up.

Maybe Romney’s problems in the polls are all down to Bain Capital, undisclosed tax returns, and his own gaffes. But even if that’s the case, the Olympics played a role. After the faultless staging of the Games, who can forget the Mittster’s ungracious questioning of whether the Brits were up to the task? Most Americans watching Sunday’s closing ceremony will be celebrating a great two weeks for their country. Romney will be hoping to change the conversation back to less uplifting subjects—and quickly.

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.

From Dan Quayle to Sarah Palin to Mini-Mitt: What the Veep Choice Will Reveal

As you may have noticed, I’ve largely avoided speculating about Mitt Romney’s choice of a running mate. That’s partly because I don’t have any inside information and partly because of something I learned back in 1988, when I was a young whippersnapper covering the Presidential election for the Sunday Times of London. At the Republican convention, in New Orleans, Vice-President George H. W. Bush stunned almost everybody by picking Dan Quayle, a young senator from Indiana, as his running mate.

After a string of gaffes on Quayle’s part, following questions being raised about his résumé and lack of experience, the Bush campaign sent in the heavies to shore him up: James Baker and Roger Ailes. At the start of October, I flew with some of the Bushies from Washington to Omaha, Nebraska, where Quayle was set to debate Senator Lloyd Bentsen, twenty-six years his senior. The atmosphere on the campaign plane was light. Baker had promised we’d see a new Quayle—“steady, serious, and substantive.” I played blackjack with Richard Bond, Bush’s deputy campaign manager, and Gerry Boyd, a Times reporter who went on to become the paper’s first African-American assistant managing editor. (As I recall, I won almost fifty dollars.) When we got to Omaha, I sneaked into a debate rehearsal, where Ailes, even then an acknowledged master of television, was putting Quayle through his paces. “Roger,” Quayle said at one point. “If I decide I want to gesture over there at some point, you don’t mind that. That’s all right?”

Once the real debate started, it all went to hell. A tense Quayle garbled the English language in his inimitable fashion, and Bentsen famously remarked, “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” The next morning, the mood on the campaign plane was anything but light. “Dan Quayle is not running for President,” Bond insisted to the reporters. “The discussion in the next thirty days is going to be between George Bush and Michael Dukakis, not Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen.” One of the writers asked Bond, “Are you saying Quayle is irrelevant?” To which the G.O.P. operative replied, “I wouldn’t use those words.”

The weekend following the debate, I wrote, “Dan Quayle is quickly becoming the one thing that could lose the American election for George Bush—an election most pundits thought he had in the bag a couple of weeks ago.” (The article also included some of the details contained in the previous two paragraphs.) But Bond, who years later served as chairman of the Republican National Committee, turned out to be right. Quayle was irrelevant. Burdened by a Vice-Presidential candidate widely regarded as a dolt, Bush crushed Dukakis by almost eight percentage points and carried forty states.

In 2008, Sarah Palin reprised the role of clueless running mate, providing the press corps with even more entertainment than Quayle had done twenty years earlier. But Palin, like Quayle, didn’t have much, if any, impact on the result. By the middle of August, before John McCain announced his choice of Veep candidate, Barack Obama was already holding a steady lead in the polls, which he never relinquished.

Now there’s another veepstakes, with speculation that an announcement of the candidate’s name could come as early as today. Rather than trying to make predictions, it may be more productive to assess what Romney’s choice might mean.

If he does what most of the pundits expect and picks Rob Portman, the junior Senator from Ohio, or Tim Pawlenty, the former Governor of Minnesota, it indicates that the Mittster, despite all the polls, remains fairly confident of victory. Both Portman and Pawlenty are mini-Mitts: moderate, non-ideological technocrats who hardly set the pulses racing. Portman is justifiably the favorite, because he could conceivably help swing Ohio in Romney’s favor, which would be huge. But as Nate Silver pointed out yesterday, Portman’s popularity ratings in Ohio are unimpressive, and his impact on voting patterns there is likely to be small. Outside of the Buckeye state, Portman is practically unknown, and it’s hard to conceive of him having any impact at all. Which means it only make sense for Romney to pick him if he believes he’s already running strong nationally, and a little lift in Ohio could put him over the top.

Other names often mentioned as having a decent chance are Congressman Paul Ryan (whom Ryan Lizza wrote about in the magazine last week) and Senator Marco Rubio (whom Ken Auletta wrote about in January). If Romney picks either of them it will suggest he thinks his campaign is in trouble and he needs to shake things up. Either Ryan or Rubio would energize the G.O.P.’s conservative base. With support from the Tea Party and from socially conservative hispanics, Rubio could also help Romney carry Florida, although there’s quite a bit of debate about how much sway he really has with non-Cuban Latinos. But picking either Ryan or Rubio would be a big gamble. Rubio has résumé issues, such as the changing story of how his parents arrived in America. Ryan wants to privatize Medicare, at least partly.

Then there is a quartet of governors who could possibly be chosen—Chris Christie (New Jersey), Nikki Haley (South Carolina), Bobby Jindal (Louisiana), and Bob McDonnell (Virginia)—plus any number of others, including, I suppose, General David Petraeus, whose name Matt Drudge has been bandying around. Picking any of these lot would represent a Hail Mary pass. Christie, Haley, and McDonnell have all been in office for less than three years, and all three are untested on the national stage. When Jindal got a chance to appear on that stage, presenting the rebuttal to President Obama’s first State of the Union speech, he muffed it. Petraeus, who is currently running the C.I.A., might well turn down the offer.

If I were making the choice, since I think the Romney campaign is in serious bother, I would take a punt on Rubio or Christie, hoping that it would alter the dynamics. Both of them are good speakers who revel in attacking Democrats and geeing up Republican activists. The selection of either would add a bit of spice to the race, and by taking the media spotlight off Romney for a while it could do him a big favor. Since Florida is so important—the Electoral College math is such that it’s hard to see how Romney can be elected if he doesn’t come out on top there—I’d probably end up going with Rubio.

But my hopes would be tempered by the memory of Quayle, Palin, and all the other Veep candidates who garnered acres of newsprint and didn’t count for much on Election Day. In fact, here’s a challenge: Can anybody think of a running mate who made a substantial difference?

Lyndon Johnson in 1960, perhaps, when J.F.K. carried Texas by fewer than fifty thousand votes. But that’s a special case. To this day, many Republicans insist L.B.J.’s Democratic machine stole the election. And setting aside dear old Lyndon, it’s hard to think of anybody.

Illustration of Marco Rubio by Steve Brodner.

The Truth About “Romney Hood”

During a campaign stop in Stamford, Connecticut, on Tuesday morning, President Obama said Mitt Romney’s tax plan amounts to another big tax cut for the rich financed by tax hikes for less-wealthy Americans: “It’s like Robin Hood in reverse,” he said. “It’s Romney Hood.” It’s a good line, but what’s the truth of it? In my last post, I remarked that the Obama campaign was intent on fanning fears that Romney was planning a covert tax hike on middle-class Americans. Following Obama’s remarks, the Romney campaign quickly fired back, saying, “There’s only one candidate in this race who’s going to raise taxes on the American people—and that’s Barack Obama.”

The President wasn’t talking off the top of his head, though. In attacking Romney’s proposal to cut tax rates across the board and scale back some popular tax breaks, he and his campaign are citing a new study I also mentioned yesterday, from the Tax Policy Center, a non-partisan Washington research institute. The study clearly says that Romney’s plan would leave wealthy Americans considerably better off. According to the three economists who authored the report, those lucky folks earning a million dollars a year would end up taking home an extra eighty-seven thousand dollars in income. By contrast, taxpayers earning under two hundred thousand dollars a year would be hit with a tax increase of five hundred dollars. And those figures are calculated on the assumption that a Romney administration would eliminate many of the tax loopholes enjoyed by the rich. If that didn’t happen, the report says, a Romney Administration would have to take even more money from ordinary Americans.

As you might expect, the Romney camp has dismissed the study as a partisan attack, calling it “another biased study from a former Obama staffer that ignores critical parts of Governor Romney’s tax reform program, which will help the middle class and promote faster economic growth.” The former Obama staffer is Adam Looney, who worked on tax issues at the Council of Economic Advisers, and who previously worked at the Federal Reserve Board. In addition to contributing to Tax Policy Center studies, he is currently the policy director for the Hamilton Project, a research institute established by Robert Rubin. That marks him out as a fiscally conservative Democrat, I suppose, but it hardly invalidates the study. Another of its other authors, William Gale, once worked at the White House for a Republican President: George H. W. Bush. The third author, Samuel Brown, is another veteran of the Federal Reserve. All three are acknowledged experts on the tax system.

The Tax Policy Center report stands on its own merits, which are considerable. Perhaps the most notable thing about the criticisms from the Romney campaign is that they don’t contain any refutations of any individual figures. Conceivably, that is because Romney’s advisers don’t want to get bogged down in a debate about fairness and equity. Much more likely, it is because they couldn’t find anything in the report that can be easily refuted. It’s yet another example of the Romney campaign paying a political price for its pandering and opaqueness. Romney only proposed such huge and irresponsible tax cuts in response to criticisms from his rivals in the G.O.P. primary. Since then, he’s refused to say in any detail how he’ll pay for them, which invites others to speculate about their distributional consequences.

Essentially, the report is an accounting exercise. It takes all of the economic pledges that Romney has made and examines what he would have to do in order to meet them. For those of you who have forgotten, here’s what the Mittster has promised: An indefinite extension of the 2001-2003 Bush tax cuts; a further twenty per cent cut in income-tax rates across the board; the elimination of all taxes on investment income for families earning less than two hundred thousand dollars a year; repeal of the alternative minimum tax (A.M.T.); elimination of the estate tax; a big reduction in the corporate-tax rate; and a repeal of the tax increases included in the 2010 health-reform bill.

That’s quite a list. But Romney has also insisted that his tax reforms would be revenue neutral. In order to pay for them, he says he would scale back some popular tax deductions, such as the mortgage-interest deduction and the deduction for employer-provided health care. That’s where things get sticky. According to the Tax Policy Center study, in 2015 the proposed tax cuts would reduce federal revenues by four hundred and fifty-six billion dollars, or about an eighth of the total. In order to make up a gap that large, a Romney Administration would have to eliminate a heck of a lot of loopholes.

Despite calls from many quarters, Romney hasn’t specified which tax breaks and loopholes—for some mystifying reason, they are sometimes called “tax expenditures”—he would tackle: the details of his plan would be up for discussion with Congress, he says. Two things he has stated are that he favors a progressive tax system and that he would mainly target loopholes enjoyed by the rich. But here he runs into some internal contradictions. As his own finances demonstrate, some of the biggest tax benefits enjoyed by the rich come in the form of ultra-low tax rates on investment income—capital gains and dividends—and tax-favored savings accounts: I.R.A.s, Keogh accounts, 401(k) plans, and so on. And these goodies, Romney has no plans to eliminate.

Once these things are taken off the table, the other benefits enjoyed by the rich—deductions for mortgage interest payments, charitable giving, health insurance, and so on—simply aren’t big enough to pay for his huge tax cuts. In fact, even if Romney eliminated all of their other loopholes and benefits—by, for instance, preventing them from claiming any deductions for mortgage payments and charitable giving—then if he were serious about revenue neutrality he would still have to target the non-rich, scaling back some of their tax breaks, too. And once he started down this path, many middle-class families would end up worse off in net terms. Here is the the key passage in the report. (To make it easier to read, wherever the phrase “tax expenditures” occurs, I have substituted “tax breaks and loopholes.”)

The key intuition behind our central result is that, because the total value of the available tax breaks and loopholes (once tax breaks and loopholes for capital income are excluded) going to high-income taxpayers is smaller than the tax cuts that would accrue to high-income taxpayers, high-income taxpayers must necessarily face a lower net tax burden. As a result, maintaining revenue neutrality necessarily necessitates a shift in the tax burden of at least $86 billion away from high-income taxpayers onto lower and middle income taxpayers. This is true even under the assumption that the maximum amount of revenue possible is obtained from cutting tax breaks and loopholes for high-income households.

There’s a lot more where that came from. The authors note that their results almost certainly understate the regressive nature of Romney’s proposals, “because it would be both administratively and politically impractical to completely eliminate all tax expenditures only above a given income threshold.” They also stress-tested their findings by assuming that Romney’s tax cuts produced a higher rate of growth, as conservative economists claim they would. Things didn’t change much: “Even with implausibly large growth effects, revenue neutrality would still require reductions in tax expenditures and would likely result in a net tax increase for lower and middle income households and tax cuts for high-income households.”

As I said earlier, the G.O.P. hasn’t contested any of these individual findings. Romney’s real enemy isn’t the Tax Policy Center, the work of which his campaign has praised in other contexts: it is the laws of arithmetic. Like George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and other Republicans before him, he has proposed a set of economic policies that don’t add up. He doesn’t necessarily want to raise taxes on ordinary American households, but if you take seriously all of things he has committed to doing, that is where the logic leads.

Which raises another question that I posed a few days ago: Is Romney serious? I don’t think he is, and neither does Howard Gleckman, the editor of the Tax Policy Center’s “TaxVox” blog. In a smart comment on this whole brouhaha, Gleckman writes:

Of course, Romney doesn’t have to raise taxes on the middle-class. He could fix this problem with less ambitious rate cuts on ordinary income, or by raising taxes on capital income. He could pay for his initiative outside of the individual income tax system by increasing corporate taxes—though he says he’d cut them. He could cut spending even more deeply than he’s already promised, though that would hurt low- and middle-income households too. Or he could just add to the deficit.

Thus, the right question to ask Romney is not whether he wants to raise taxes on the middle-class. The right question to ask is which of his campaign promises he will abandon.

My guess is that it he would end up reneging on his commitment to deficit reduction. Having repeatedly promised to cut income taxes by “X”, a newly-elected President Romney could hardly turn around and say he was doing less. Big spending cuts rarely materialize, whichever party is in power. And Mitt surely isn’t about to offend his pals on Wall Street by raising the tax on capital gains. As ever in Washington, the easiest thing to do would be to borrow more money and let the deficit rip.

Photograph by Jae C. Hong/AP/Corbis.

Romney Needs More Than Money—A Lot More

After weeks of negative media, disappointing polls, and sniping from fellow Republicans, Mitt Romney got a bit of good news Monday: he’s still raising more money than his rival. In July, the Romney/G.O.P. campaign raked in $101.3 million, compared to the seventy-five million dollars that Obama and his fellow Democrats garnered. It’s the second month in a row that the Republican campaign has raised more than a hundred million dollars, and these figures don’t even include the vast sums that Karl Rove and his fellow Super PAC wranglers have been rustling up from the likes of Sheldon Adelson, Paul Singer, and Richard Mellon Scaife.

If November’s electorate were confined to millionaires and billionaires, Romney would be a shoo-in. Unfortunately for him, even the G.O.P.’s best efforts to suppress voter turnout through the introduction of voter I.D. laws and the like won’t prevent many less-wealthy Americans from ambling along to their local polling station and pulling the lever. Which means that the Mittster is also going to have to ingratiate himself with the regular folk, something he’s never been particularly adept at.

Rove and Stuart Stevens, the sometime novelist and bon vivant who is Romney’s campaign manager, may be hoping that they can spend their way to victory, burying President Obama under an avalanche of negative ads, but in their heart of hearts they know they can’t. In today’s politics, money is a necessary condition for success, but it’s by no means sufficient. From Steve Forbes in 1996 to Meg Whitman in 2010 and Rick Perry last year, the political landscape is littered with the detritus of well-funded campaigns that self-destructed because the candidate wasn’t up to it, the opposition was too strong, or the objective conditions were unfavorable.

Right now, Romney is in grave danger of joining the list of money-rich candidates who ended up as roadkill. Look at the polling data. According to the Real Clear Politics poll of polls, Obama is up about three and a half per cent in the national race, his biggest lead in quite a while. At the state level, the numbers are even more worrying for the G.O.P. Just last week, Rove himself acknowledged that Ohio and Colorado, two key swing states, had moved from “toss up” to “lean Obama,” and that Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia, three states Romney desperately needs, were still too close to call. If the Republican candidate doesn’t win Florida and at least two of three from North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia, it is very difficult to see him getting two hundred and seventy votes in the Electoral College.

Reflecting this reality, the betting markets are pointing to an Obama victory. At Ladbrokes, the British bookmaker, the President is now the prohibitive 2/5 favorite—meaning you have to bet fifty dollars to win twenty. Romney is a 2/1 outsider, suggesting that the probability of him winning is just thirty-three per cent. At Intrade, the political prediction site, the implied probability of a Romney triumph is a bit higher—about forty per cent—but I pay more attention to the bookies, where more real money gets wagered, sometimes by political insiders.

Yes, there are three months left until the election, but Romney badly needs to arrest his decline. With Harry Reid and the Democrats still pounding him about his taxes and memories of his disastrous overseas trip still fresh, he simply has to change the narrative. He still has an opportunity to do it, but it’s short one: about three and a half weeks, in fact. By the time he leaves Tampa on the morning of Friday, August 30th, he needs to have articulated a sharper message, picked a decent running mate, and established some sort of emotional connection with the American public. If he hasn’t succeeded in all of these tasks, President Obama will be heading for victory as he and his party gather in Charlotte the following week.



The messaging part shouldn’t be as difficult as Stevens and his Beantown colleagues are making it appear. Criticizing Obama’s handling of the economy and seizing upon some of his perceived gaffes is obviously the way to go. But Romney also needs to lay out a simpler more snappy economic plan of his own. As I said last week, his existing “recovery plan,” which features vague pledges of spending cuts and revenue-neutral tax reform, is too opaque to be credible and too complicated to inspire the public. It is also vulnerable to the charge, made by the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, that it would “provide large tax cuts to high-income households, and increase the tax burden on middle and/or lower income taxpayers.” If nothing else, Romney must allay fears, which the Obama campaign is sure to fan, that he is planning to introduce a covert tax increase on ordinary Americans.

On the subject of running mates, I go along with the conventional wisdom that, as long as it isn’t an ignoramus (Sarah Palin) or a former psychiatric patient (Thomas Eagleton) it doesn’t usually make much difference who is picked. Conceivably, though, this year could be an exception. In trying to amass a majority, Romney has at least two big problems: the perceived extremism of his party puts off many educated women, and, because of his business background and his own aloofness, he has difficulty generating enthusiasm among working-class men. You don’t need a degree in psephology from the Kennedy School of Government to figure out that without the female vote and the male vote it’s hard to be elected President.

By picking a successful, articulate woman, such as Condoleezza Rice or Nikki Haley, the youthful governor of South Carolina, both of whom are scheduled to speak in Tampa, Romney could address the gender gap. Similarly, going for a populist firebrand like Chris Christie, the Governor of New Jersey, would help bring on board the angry white guys. At the moment, though, most pundits expect Romney to pick Tim Pawlenty or Rob Portman, both Midwestern technocrats who have about as much personal magnetism as he does.

Whomever Romney picks, the task of rejuvenating his campaign will largely fall on his own shoulders. Somehow, he has to break through all the Democratic attacks, all the stuff about Bain Capital and offshore tax havens, and regain control of his own résumé. In his convention speech and in his other appearances, he has to show the American voters not only that he’s a highly competent businessman with a perfectly honorable record but also that he’s a decent, honest person who understands some of the challenges faced by the less fortunate. He’s never going to be the most likable soul, but if he’s going to defeat a President whose personal popularity ratings are still pretty high, he has to establish some sort of bond with the public.

Photograph by Melina Mara/The Washington Post/Getty Images.

The Jobs Mirage and the Election

After last month’s dismal jobs report, I said President Obama needed help from the Labor Department. This morning, he got some, although not enough to have much impact on the election. Payrolls expanded by a decent 163,000 in July, but the unemployment rate, which is calculated on the basis of a different survey, ticked up, going from 8.2 per cent to 8.3 per cent.

A mixed employment report that drew mixed reviews. Democrats focussed on the fact that payrolls expanded at more than twice the rate they had in June, allaying fears that the recent slowdown in G.D.P. growth could herald a double-dip recession. Noting that the economy has now added jobs for twenty-nine straight months, about 4.5 million of them in total, Alan Krueger, the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, commented on the White House blog, “While there is more work that remains to be done, today’s employment report provides further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to recover from the worst downturn since the Great Depression.”

Republicans pointed to the fact that the unemployment rate has now been above eight per cent for three and a half years. In a statement on his Web site, Mitt Romney called last month’s slight rise in the jobless rate a “hammer blow to struggling middle class families.” He added, “My plan will turn things around and bring the economy roaring back, with twelve million new jobs created by the end of my first term. President Obama doesn’t have a plan and believes that the private sector is ‘doing fine.’ ”

So far, so predictable. I had my say yesterday on why Romney’s “recovery plan” isn’t really a recovery plan at all. (In introducing big cuts in federal spending, it could even tip the economy back into a recession.) For today, though, the real news is that the economy is still sputtering along at a modest pace of growth: not high enough to bring down the unemployment rate; not low enough to be called a recession. From a political perspective, that gives ammunition to both sides. From an economic perspective, it helps resolve one of the great mysteries of our time: Where did all the jobs go? The answer appears to be that they didn’t go anywhere, because they weren’t there to begin with. For the past eight months, the employment picture, and with it the entire election campaign, has been distorted by a statistical mirage.

As you’ll recall if you’ve been following this stuff, the winter months saw rapid growth in payrolls, leading some commentators (myself included) to suggest that the economy might finally be achieving a state of self-sustaining growth. From November through February, these were the figures for job growth: 157,000, 223,000, 275,000, 259,000. That averages out at 229,000—a pretty healthy figure, and one that helped bring the unemployment rate down from 8.9 per cent in October to 8.3 per cent in February. But just as the White House and the Obama campaign were were popping the champagne corks, something changed. From March to June, the payroll figures came in like this: 143,000, 68,000, 87,000, 64,000. That’s a monthly average of just 91,000.

As the payroll figures plummeted and the fall in the unemployment rate stalled, many wondered if something terrible was happening to the economy, such as the onset of another slump. Today’s report doesn’t settle things definitively, but it suggests that such fears were exaggerated. What really happened, it seems, is that the Labor Department overestimated the number of jobs the economy created during the winter and underestimated the number of jobs it created during the spring.

As I (and others) have pointed out before, the main problem appears to have been the unusually warm winter, which plays havoc with the statistical techniques that the government’s statisticians use to smooth out seasonal variations. During the winter, employers didn’t lay off as many workers as usual, and the Labor Department interpreted this as a surge in permanent employment. During the spring, firms didn’t hire as many people as usual, and this emerged from the statistical massaging looking like a big slowdown in job growth. July was the first month that the payroll figures weren’t distorted in this way, and this helps to explain why they showed a jump in hiring.

When dealing with any numbers that fluctuate a lot—what statisticians call a “noisy” series—it pays to take a longer view and average things out. That old adage applies here. If you add together each payroll figure since November and divide by nine you will find that the average increase in payrolls over that period has been 160,000. That’s not great: previous recoveries have seen monthly increases of 250,000 or above. But it’s a decent figure, and it gives lie to the suggestion that the economy is no longer creating jobs. In the auto industry, hospitality, health care, and other industries, employers are still hiring. Construction and the government sector are depressed, but overall employment is growing.

To be sure, doomsters can find enough disappointing numbers in this report to make the argument that the sky is still falling. Principally, these figures come from the household survey. (Each month, the government carries out two surveys—one of businesses, which generates the payroll figures, and one of households, which produces the unemployment rate.) According to the household survey, employment actually fell last month—by 195,000—and it was this fall that generated the tick-up in the unemployment rate. If it hadn’t been for the fact that the labor force declined, by 153,000, the jobless rate would have risen even further.

It is a mistake, however, to put too much emphasis on the household survey. The sample size is smaller, and the month-to-month numbers tend to jump around. if you average out the employment figures from the household survey over the past nine months, you get monthly growth of 214,000—considerably higher than the 160,000 figure from the payroll survey. This, too, suggests that the big falloff in job creation from March to June was something of an illusion.

As I said, the issue hasn’t been settled for sure. The jobs data is so quirky that we’ll need another month or two of reports to know for sure what has been happening. For now, though, it looks like we—or some of us—got fooled. Things weren’t as good as they seemed six or seven months ago, and they weren’t as bad as they seemed a month or two ago.

Illustration by Christoph Niemann.

Romney’s “Recovery Plan” Could Bring On Another Recession

In today’s Wall Street Journal, the Columbia economist Glenn Hubbard, who is one of Mitt Romney’s top economic advisers, has an op-ed piece entitled “The Romney Plan for Economic Recovery.” When I saw the headline, I felt a rush of anticipation: at last, I thought, here is the big new jobs initiative that the G.O.P. campaign is relying on to turn things in its favor.

I was mistaken. The first two thirds of Hubbard’s piece is taken up with an attack on the Obama Administration’s economic record: ineffective stimulus, too much regulation, failure to tackle the housing market—all very familiar stuff. When Hubbard eventually gets to laying out Romney’s alternative, there is nothing new either, just a reiteration of the existing policy plaform: a vague promise to cut federal spending and reduce the budget deficit, an even vaguer plan to cut taxes but in a “revenue-neutral fashion,” and a commitment to repeal Obamacare and Dodd-Frank. Judging by this piece, and by recent statements from Romney himself, the G.O.P. campaign still doesn’t have a recovery program worth the name. Indeed, if we are to believe the evidence of our eyes and ears, he remains committed to immediate spending cuts that could well bring on another recession.

If this really is all there is to Romney’s economic platform, it amounts to a modest fiscal contraction accompanied by tax and regulatory changes designed to improve the economy’s long-term growth potential. We can debate the likely impact of the latter policies. I would suggest that the tax changes Romney proposes—reducing tax rates by ten per cent and eliminating some loopholes and credits—won’t make much difference to how the economy performs, and that softening regulation would be positively harmful. Conservative economists would disagree.

But the issue here isn’t the economy’s long-term growth potential. It is how to gee it up now and prevent a lost five years from turning into a lost decade. None of the policies that Hubbard mentions involve direct measures to boost demand. And yet, he invites us to believe that Romney’s plan would increase business confidence and create twelve million jobs over four years.

Is this credible? As far as the immediate future goes, Romney is promising austerity. Hubbard reiterates that he would aim to reduce federal spending from roughly twenty-four per cent of G.D.P. in fiscal 2012 to twenty per cent by 2016. Romney hasn’t spelled out how he would reach this target, but simple arithmetic suggests he would need to impose about five hundred billion dollars in annual spending cuts, which is equivalent to more than three per cent of G.D.P.

Spending cuts on this scale would be a big shock to an economy that is already sputtering badly. As we’ve seen in other developed countries over the past few years, the imposition of austerity policies can easily turn modest recoveries into renewed recessions. It has happened in the United Kingdom, Spain, and Italy. Romney is asking the American voters to believe things would be different here. The obvious question to ask is: Why? Like the U.K. and Spain, the United States economy is still suffering the after-effects of a big housing bust. Rather than going out and spending, households and businesses are husbanding their resources and rebuilding their savings. In economies such as these, there is a heavy reliance on the government to maintain demand. If fiscal policy is tightened prematurely, a recession is a very likely result. Japan in the nineteen-nineties provides another pertinent example.

One possibility is that Romney isn’t really serious about reducing federal expenditures, at least in the short term. Earlier this year, he said that cuts in spending would have to take account of the state of the economy, thereby seemingly acknowledging the Keynesian argument that austerity policies can lead to disaster. But his campaign Web site and his commercials continue to insist that upon his Inauguration he would take immediate action to tackle the deficit, including cutting discretionary spending by five per cent.

Another possibility is that Romney is hoping that his fellow Republican Ben Bernanke will bail him out. “When bolstered by sound trade, education, energy and monetary policy, the Romney reform program is expected by the governor’s economic advisers to increase GDP growth by between 0.5% and 1% per year over the next decade,” Hubbard writes. You can overlook the references to trade, education, and energy: such policies impact the long-term performance of the economy rather than what happens this year or next. Monetary policy matters now.

But with short-term interest rates already approaching zero, the Federal Reserve is almost out of ammo. Even if it introduces another round of quantitative easing, pumping, say, another trillion dollars into the financial markets via a series of bond purchases, there is no guarantee that this would be enough to offset a Romney-imposed fiscal contraction. Cuts in government spending affect the economy directly and immediately. The effects of quantitative easing are indirect and diffuse. Many economists are skeptical about whether it does much good.

A final possibility is that Romney isn’t serious about making his tax cuts revenue-neutral. In order to prevent a big fall in revenues, he would have to eliminate or scale back some very popular loopholes, such as the deductions for mortgage interest payments and employer-provided health insurance. Congress might well balk at tackling these things, but it would almost certainly go along with the tax cuts, which would offset the impact on demand of his spending cuts. If the tax cuts were big enough and the action on loopholes was small enough, Romney’s policies could even amount to a stimulus program by another name: Reaganomics redux. But that would make a mockery of his claim to be tackling the deficit.

In short, there is no easy way to square the circle. Far from putting forward a “recovery plan,” Romney remains tied to a grab bag of proposals that won’t do anything to promote spending and job creation if they are fully enacted, and which could well tip the economy into another outright slump. Is it any wonder that he is failing to capitalize on lacklustre growth and eight-per-cent unemployment?

Illustration by Tom Bachtell.

Economy Points to Dead Heat in November

With Mitt Romney back from his, let us say, eventful week abroad, the focus for the next few days will be back where his campaign should have kept it all along: on the economy. While Romney was in London, the Commerce Department reported that the gross domestic product expanded at an annual rate of just 1.6 per cent between April and June—a very measly figure for what is supposed to be an economic recovery. On Tuesday, the government reported that consumer spending, which accounts for about two thirds of overall spending in the economy, actually fell slightly in June, suggesting that the recent economic slowdown might be getting worse.

Yesterday and today, the Federal Reserve’s policymaking committee has been meeting. On Friday, the Labor Department will release its July employment report. Neither happening is likely to alter the picture of an economy stuck in the doldrums. After the Fed get-together ended on Wednesday afternoon, Ben Bernanke and his colleagues acknowledged that the economy has stumbled. But they gave no indication of when they may start a new round of quantitative easing—that is, pumping money into the financial markets via the purchase of bonds. And Wall Street expects another disappointing figure for the growth in payrolls: about a hundred thousand.

Unless something unanticipated happens, such as the economy slipping into outright recession or suddenly regaining its vigor, the economic environment going into the election appears to be set: lacklustre growth in G.D.P. and stubbornly high unemployment. It is often said that, with an economy this lifeless, Obama should be getting spanked in the polls, and the Romneys should be hiring a decorator to do over the White House living quarters. But that isn’t quite correct.

On the basis of what happened in past elections, the current economic conditions are pointing to a very close race, a virtual tie. Obviously, the slowdown in growth and the fact that the jobless rate is still above eight per cent are worrying developments for the President—very worrying. But the rock-bottom rate of inflation is helping Obama, and he still has the advantage of incumbency, which historically has proved significant.

Anybody who tries to forecast the election purely on the basis of economics is embarking on a fool’s errand. Other factors, such as the ruling party’s record on non-economic issues, the quality of the candidates, and the changing nature of the electorate, obviously play important roles. Economists and political scientists who make predictions on the basis of economics and other fundamental factors have a rather checkered record. In 1992 and 2000, most of them got the result wrong, predicting victories for George H. W. Bush and Al Gore. (Nate Silver, the author of the FiveThirtyEight blog and a forecaster himself, has recently provided an illuminating examination of past forecasts.) Still, there is clearly some relationship between the economy and election results. As evidenced in 1980, 1992, and 2008, bad economic news in the months before voters go to the polls can spell doom for the incumbent party. But how bad does the economy have to be for an incumbent President to be turfed out?

There is no simple answer to this question. At this stage in 1980, the year Jimmy Carter was defeated, things were in far worse shape than now. Consumer spending and production were falling sharply, and the inflation rate was fifteen per cent. Twelve years later, the voters showed Bush senior the door in circumstances that more resemble today: 1992 was the second year of a “jobless recovery,” the unemployment rate was high—7.7 per cent in July—and critics were accusing the President of being out of touch with reality. Despite being an incumbent, Bush lost to a rival who focussed relentlessly on the economy.

One economist who has spent a long time—about thirty-five years—studying the impact of the economy on Presidential elections is Yale’s Ray Fair, a top-notch econometrician (that’s a word economists use for statisticians) who has built his own mathematical model of the U.S. economy. Since 1978, Fair has been updating an equation that predicts the outcome of elections on the basis of a few simple variables: the growth rate of G.D.P. in the first three quarters of the election year; the number of quarters of “bumper” growth in G.D.P.—i.e., growth higher than 3.2 per cent—during the previous four years; the average inflation rate during the previous four years; and whether the sitting President is running for reëlection or not.

Fair’s forecasting record is far from perfect—he, too, got the result wrong in 1992 and 2000—but his equation, which he maintains online for all to see, does a good job of summarizing the relationships that exist in the data, going back to 1916. Late last week, after the newest G.D.P. figure was published, Fair updated his forecast for this year’s election, and his findings are worth looking at.

Until not very long ago, Fair’s model had been forecasting a comfortable victory for President Obama. This time last year, it was predicting that he would receive 53.4 per cent of the two-party vote, about the same as he received in 2008. As recently as April, the model was suggesting that Obama would scrape home ahead, with 50.2 per cent of the two-party vote. But after another disappointing quarter of growth, the Fair model now says Obama will get just 49.5 per cent of the two-party vote, which would almost certainly see him suffer a narrow defeat. (Fair’s equation doesn’t account for the electoral college, so it doesn’t generate definitive statements about who will win.)

That’s good news for the Romney camp, and it echoes the conventional wisdom that the economy’s problems over the past few months have done considerable damage to Obama’s prospects. But, as Fair noted in his update, the main message of his new forecast is that “the election is too close to call.” The difference between the predicted vote totals of the two candidates is well within the model’s margin of error, which means that statistically speaking the model is predicting a dead heat.

Again, this forecast shouldn’t be taken too literally. Economic models of this type are mechanical toys that don’t capture the influence of other factors that may prove important this year, such as race, religion, Super PAC money, and the fact that Romney keeps making gaffes. But Fair’s numbers are thought-provoking nonetheless. One thing they imply is that, although Romney is underperforming, he’s not doing quite as badly as some commentators, myself included, have suggested. There is little statistical foundation in the idea that because the economy is struggling he should be running away with the race.

Most polls still show a close race. In the Real Clear Politics poll-of-polls, Obama is leading by about two points. The Talking Points Memo poll tracker shows a virtual tie. On the basis of history, that is what you would expect. The Mittster badly needs to step it up, but he isn’t out of it yet.

Illustration by Marc Rosenthal.

From Burgoyne to Romney: Blunderers Abroad

I know, I know—it’s time to move on from Mitt Romney’s gaffe-plagued overseas trip and write about something more substantive, such as the upcoming July job figures or the kind words bestowed upon the G.O.P. candidate by one of America’s great cultural icons, Ron Jeremy. (In an interview with the Boston Herald, Jeremy—a.k.a. The Hedgehog—who is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for making the most appearances in adult movies, said that although he will be voting for Obama in November, he regards Romney as “a good man” and “an amazing father.”)

But indulge me. The touchdown of Romney’s campaign plane on American soil on Tuesday afternoon brings to a merciful end one of the most star-crossed foreign ventures since June, 1777, when General Burgoyne and his army of redcoats marched out of Quebec and headed for the Hudson Valley. Like Burgoyne’s ill-fated journey, which ended in surrender to the American colonists at the Battle of Saratoga, Romney’s trip was ill-conceived, poorly executed, scarred by miscommunication, and, ultimately, it had the effect of encouraging the enemy.

Fittingly, it ended in farce, with Team Romney being obliged to apologize for a press spokesman shouting “kiss my ass” to reporters, following a wreath-laying ceremony at one of Poland’s most revered sites, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw. Yet as Romney headed for the airport, one of his top strategists, Stuart Stevens, insisted (presumably with a straight face) that the six-day jaunt had been “a great success.” It’s amazing what people will say when they are on the sort of hefty financial retainer that political consultants receive. A three-country trip that was intended to burnish the Mittster’s Presidential credentials has reduced him to a laughing stock—the butt of tabloid headline writers and late-night comics alike.

After the roasting that Romney received at the hands of the London newspapers following his questioning of Britain’s preparedness for the Olympics, it was almost possible to feel sympathy for him. But the fact remains: he asked for it. His criticism of his British hosts wasn’t just dumb politics; it was dumb and offensive behavior all round. What sort of wedding guest spends the night before the ceremony loudly asking whether the occasionally rancorous families of the bride and groom will come together peacefully to celebrate the occasion? A guest who’s asking for a knuckle sandwich from the bride’s big brother, that’s what sort.

Small wonder that Fleet Street went for him. “It has nothing to do with insight,” Ed Luce, the Washington bureau chief of the Financial Times, Britain’s most sober newspaper, commented in his column on Monday. “The UK media are only stating bluntly what is on everyone’s minds. Headlines like ‘Mitt the Twit’ showcase how irreverent British tabloids can be. Yet they present in caricature what many Republicans are happy to volunteer in private.”

I’ve had my say on what ails Romney, most recently the other day, when I stole a line from a columnist for the Daily Mail and called him a “wazzock.” Among other things, he appears to lack the true politician’s ability to think on his feet, as well as his self-preservation instinct. His strategic thinking is also questionable. What, pray, was he doing in Warsaw? Is he planning on challenging Rahm Emanuel for the mayoralty of Chicago?

Having slipped up in Britain and Israel, he at least made through Poland without uttering any more howlers. But that was partly because he ducked the travelling press corps. These unfortunate souls, whose news organizations undoubtedly paid through the nose for the privilege of accompanying the candidate, had hardly gotten a word with him since he landed in London. Understandably frustrated at their lack of access, some reporters shouted questions as Romney walked back to his vehicle near Pilsudski Square after the wreath-laying ceremony. According to versions of what happened from Politico and other outlets, the questions included whether Romney had anything to say about his string of bloopers or any comment for the Palestinian people, whom he had infuriated in Jerusalem by appearing to lay the blame for their economic woes on their own “culture.” Romney ignored the reporters. But Ron Gorka, one of his spokesman, said to them, “Kiss my ass. This is a holy site for the Polish people. Show some respect.” Gorka also told one reporter to “shove it.”

Cue yet another wave of stories about the Romney campaign’s blunders and screwups. Also cue the desperate attempt by Stuart Stevens to put some lipstick on the pig that was this trip. According to a Washington Post story datelined Warsaw, Stevens said of his boss, “He has a tendency to speak his mind and to say what he believes, and whenever you do that, there will be those that disagree with you, and there will be those that agree with you…I think people like that. I think that this idea that you have to not speak your mind is something that’s not very appealing to people.”

A translation of that passage from campaign spin into English might run as follows: “Even in an operation like ours, which is almost wholly based on turning the election into a referendum on Obama, we have to occasionally let the candidate depart from his standard stump speech. Sometimes when we do that, he says things he shouldn’t. That’s not great, but at least it shows people that he’s human.”

Stevens also defended Romney’s fitness to be President, saying, “I think that given his background, his stature, what he’s accomplished, his age, that he is someone that people think is qualified and ready to be president.” His age? When a campaign strategist is reduced to citing how long his man has been alive—sixty-five years—as a reason to vote for him, you know something is terribly amiss.

Conspicuously absent from Stevens’s list of Romney’s attributes was the command of diplomacy and foreign policy that he displayed on this trip. Attempting to downplay the corrections and clarifications and walk-backs that his candidate had been forced into since leaving home, Stevens said, “I don’t think that will go down in history as very important.”

He may be right. At this moment, many Americans are far more interested in the problems of Michael Phelps and Jordyn Wieber than they are in Romney’s missteps. But there is a pattern here, and time is running down on Romney’s efforts to persuade the American people that he’s made of Presidential timber. The Republican Convention is just four weeks away.

At least he’s finally back home. Just as with the redcoats after Saratoga, the Romney campaign lives to fight another day. But many more “great successes” akin to this one, and the Mittster will end up meeting a similar fate to the one Burgoyne endured after he returned home to Britain following his capitulation: stripped of his command and his title, publicly disgraced, and universally blamed for a humiliating historic defeat, he lived out the rest of his life in near-anonymity.

Photograph by Charles Dharapak/AP.

Memo to Mitt: The Palestinians’ Problems Aren’t All Cultural

Earlier today, on his third and last day in Israel—he’s now in Poland—the Mittster broke new ground in two ways. He came out as an economic historian, and he finally used the word “Palestinian.” But don’t worry yourselves, Dov Hikind and Howard Kohr: Romney didn’t have anything very nice to say.

Speaking at a breakfast fundraiser attended by the likes of the casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, the hedge-fund tycoon Paul Singer, and New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, the G.O.P. candidate appeared to blame the failure of the occupied Palestinian territories to match Israel’s economic performance not on a lack of capital, the economic blockade of the Gaza Strip, or the presence in the West Bank of Israeli settlers and military forces but on the differing cultures of the two peoples.

Citing the “dramatically stark difference in economic vitality” and G.D.P. per capita between Israel and its troublesome occupied zones, Romney said he had been studying the work of David Landes, the octogenarian Harvard historian, whose 1999 tome “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations” argued that the political and economic culture of Europe played a key role in its rapid development. “Culture makes all the difference,” Romney said at the fundraiser, which took place at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, where he and his entourage were staying. “Culture makes all the difference. And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things.”

Since Romney didn’t specify what these “few other things were,” his audience, and Palestinian politicians, were left to dwell on his references to cultural factors. (There was apparently a mention of divine providence.) “All I can say is that this man needs a lot of education,” Saeb Erekat, an aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, told the Washington Post. “He doesn’t know the region, he doesn’t know Israelis, he doesn’t know Palestinians, and to talk about the Palestinians as an inferior culture is really a racist statement…. He should know that the Palestinians will never reach their economic potential under Israeli occupation, and if he doesn’t know this fact, this man has a lot to learn.”

Claiming his remarks had been misrepresented, the Romney campaign released a partial transcript to reporters. According to the Post, he also brought up the work of Jared Diamond, the author of “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” which stresses the role that climate, minerals, and other geographic factors play in economic development. “You look at Israel and you say you have a hard time suggesting that all of the natural resources on the land could account for all the accomplishment of the people here,” Romney said. “And likewise other nations that are next door to each other have very similar, in some cases, geographic elements.”

That is certainly true. But in applying Landes’s theory to occupied territories whose inhabitants have to pass through military checkpoints in getting from A to B, he was being insensitive—to say the least. Almost all outside observers have acknowledged that continued military occupation is one of the things stalling economic development in the Palestinian territories. In a lengthy report issued just last week, the World Bank said that “the removal of Israeli restrictions on access to markets and to natural resources continues to be a prerequisite for the expansion of the Palestinian private sector.” The Bank’s country director for the occupied territories, Mariam Shirman, described Israeli restrictions on economic activity as “the biggest impediment to investing” there.

To be sure, the Bank’s report also acknowledges the importance of legal structures and other things that might, broadly, be called cultural factors. It called on the Palestinian Authority to take more steps to promote growth, such as passing trade laws and developing their customs operations. But the overall tenor of the report was upbeat, and so was its assessment of the Palestinian people. It said:

Future growth of the Palestinian economy will depend upon how well it can integrate into the world economy and take advantage of its main riches: its well educated and entrepreneurial population and its location as a gateway between the Arab World and Europe. A Palestinian state could seek to emulate the outward-looking models of the East Asian countries, with trade as the main driver of future growth. High value-added services are particularly promising given the high levels of education and good infrastructure in West Bank and Gaza.

Based on the reports I’ve seen, Romney didn’t mention any of this in his remarks. He certainly didn’t describe the Palestinians as entrepreneurial. The suspicion lingers that his real intent, as in his sabre-rattling speech about Israel and Iran on Sunday (Amy Davidson wrote about that earlier), was to play to a domestic political audience. Having more or less assured his old pal Bibi and his new pal Sheldon that he wouldn’t mind if the Israelis took matters into their own hands and launched a military strike on Iran’s nuclear-research installations, what better way to whip up more support among conservative American Jews than by getting into a spat with the Palestinians?

In this way, and in others, the U.S. Presidential election is coming to resemble a local race in New York or Florida. What next? Will Romney fly back to Israel and visit a settlement? Will he persuade his wife to pull her horse Rafalca out of the Olympics dressage contest on the grounds that the International Olympic Committee refused to hold a minute of silence for the eleven Israeli athletes murdered by the Palestinian Black September group at the 1972 Munich Olympics? Will the Mittster refuse to attend the Games himself?

Oh no, he can’t do that: he’s already been there. But given how that leg of his trip turned out, he’s probably wishing the boycott idea had occurred to him this time last week.

Photograph by Uriel Sinai/Getty Images.

The Problem with “Mitt the Twit”: He’s a Wazzock

Day three of his world tour, day one of the Olympics, and things aren’t getting much better for our boy Willard. Having been monstered by Fleet Street for his criticisms of the preparations for the Games, contradicted by the Prime Minister, and ridiculed by the mayor of London, the Mittster is now facing criticism from one of his own nation’s greatest athletes, the sprinter Carl Lewis.

“Every Olympics is ready,” Lewis, who won nine gold medals at four different Olympics, told the Independent. “I don’t care whatever [Romney] said. I swear, sometimes I think some Americans shouldn’t leave the country. Are you kidding me, stay home if you don’t know what to say.”

A chastened Romney evidently agrees with Lewis about London being prepared. Retreating from his earlier remarks faster than a burglar who has stepped on a sleeping Pit Bull, he said to Brian Williams on NBC’s “Today” show: “After being here a couple days, it looks like London is ready…. I’m absolutely convinced that the people here are ready for the Games. In just a few minutes, all the things politicians say will get swept away because athletes will take the stage.”

If you think that smacks of wishful thinking, you aren’t alone. In Britain, at least, Romney’s ungracious remarks and his apparent obliviousness to how they would be taken have turned him into a laughing stock. In its Friday edition, the Sun, Britain’s best-selling newspaper, labelled him “Mitt the Twit.” It may not be entirely coincidental that the Sun is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who has recently been busy denouncing Romney on Twitter. But other British papers have been equally critical of Romney, including the conservative ones that are apt to be sympathetic to Republicans. A columnist at the Daily Telegraph—a.k.a. The Torygraph—called him a “wazzock,” a term of abuse that I hadn’t heard since my childhood in Leeds, West Yorkshire.

According to some accounts, a wazzock, in the original usage, was a bull’s penis. When I was young, it was used to describe a hapless idiot who blunders around doing and saying things he or she shouldn’t. Wazzocks don’t necessarily have bad intentions, but they tend to bring trouble to themselves and others. Romney, for all his business success and Harvard degrees, sometimes seems to fit the description. Clearly, he didn’t mean to insult his British hosts when he sat down with Brian Williams on Wednesday. But didn’t he think about how his words would be taken?

Evidently not. The whole thing is another reminder of why the Romney campaign keeps such tight reins on the candidate. Despite his four years in elected office in Massachusetts and his experience in two Presidential campaigns, he still lacks the political antennae of a lifelong politician. The true pol is a master of what game theorists refer to as “backward induction.” Before doing or saying anything, a filtering mechanism in his (or her) brain looks ahead and figures out how it is going to look in tomorrow’s newspapers. For somebody like John Boehner or Chuck Schumer, it no longer takes any conscious effort. The filtering mechanism works automatically, ensuring that the voice box serves up nothing but pablum and political attack lines.

Romney just doesn’t have this self-preservation instinct. He is still naïve or arrogant enough to think that when Brian Williams asks him a seemingly harmless question about the preparations for the Games, which have certainly encountered some problems, it is an opportunity for him to demonstrate his mastery of the subject. A regular pol would say something like: “Well, Brian, we all know that staging an Olympics is a massive task. Recently, our British friends have been encountering some issues with security and transportation arrangements, but I’m sure they’ll work things out, and that once the Games start they’ll be a resounding success.”

But that wasn’t good enough for Mitt. Instead, he said, “There are a few things that were disconcerting. The stories about the private security firm not having enough people, the supposed strike of the immigration and customs officials—that obviously is not something which is encouraging.” Adding insult to injury, he also appeared to question whether the British people were behind the Games, saying, “Do they come together and celebrate the Olympic moment? And that’s something which we only find out once the Games actually begin.”

Small wonder, then, that when Boris Johnson, London’s voluble Conservative mayor, took the stage in Hyde Park on Thursday night, at a ceremony to mark the arrival of the Olympic torch, he openly mocked the G.O.P. candidate before a crowd of more than fifty thousand:

People are coming from around the world and they’re seeing us. They are seeing the greatest city in the world! There are some people who are coming from around the world who don’t yet know about all the preprations we’ve done to get London ready in the last seven years. I hear there’s a guy called Mitt Romney who wants to know whether we’re ready—he wants to know whether we are ready. Are we ready? Yes we are! The venues are ready; the stadium is ready; the aquatic centre is ready; the velodrome is ready; the security is ready; the police are ready; the transport system is ready; and the Team G.B. athletes are ready. They are going win more gold and silver and bronze medals than you’d need to bail out Spain and Greece together.

At the end of the ceremony, Johnson led the crowd in a chant that brought to mind one of Obama’s campaign slogans from 2008.

“Can we put on the greatest Olympics games that have ever been held?”
“Yes we can!”
“Can we beat France?”
“Yes we can!”
“Can we beat Australia?
“Yes we can!”

It was just as well Romney wasn’t there. By coincidence, he was just across the park, attending a fund-raiser packed with people who are almost as unpopular in the U.K. as he is: investment bankers, hedge-fund managers, and private-equity executives. This whole trip has turned into a disaster. At this stage, about the best Romney can hope for is that something goes wrong at this evening’s opening ceremony or during the events that follow. A chaotic London Olympiad is about the only thing that could make him look more like a savant than a wazzock.

For the moment, though, a wazzock it is.

See our full coverage of the Games at The Olympic Scene.

Photograph by Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images.