Motley Moose – Archive

So seeing the writing on the wall the Romney/Ryan campaign plans to “carpet-bomb” the airwaves of just eight key states:

Romney is targeting eight states: Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, and New Hampshire. No Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania. This is surely not because Romney is husbanding scarce cash.

Jonathan Chait – Romney’s Playing Field Narrows New York 7 Sep 12

A move potentially worrisome for supporters, such as they are.  It is also strategically defensive and targeting an extremely narrow, one might say daring, margin of victory:

The eight states where Romney is competing add up to a neat 100 electoral votes, of which Romney needs 79 and Obama just 23.

Jonathan Chait – Romney’s Playing Field Narrows New York 7 Sep 12

Romney has basically spent his way through the primaries running round-the-clock broadcast offensives against all comers as the need arose.  And it seemed to work.

Given the current polling while noting that Romney lacks charisma, retail politicking ability, enthusiastic support and has chosen a mendacious opportunist for a running mate, one supposes we are about to witness the first full-scale field test of whether or not it is possible to simply purchase the presidential election.  That and voter suppression are all they’ve got left.

Well who says the Republican National Convention was lacking in entertainment value?  The convention organisers, who had been touting their “mystery guest” for a week, placed Clint Eastwood in their precious few hours of prime-time just one slot away from Mitt’s big speech.  Little did they know.

In what has now become a piece of American political legend Clint used more than double his allotted time of five minutes to have a marginally coherent dialogue with an empty chair, clearly meant to represent the incumbent President.  That this was great television had more to do, as usual, with the jaw-dropping bizarreness of the stunt rather than the actual content; though it played well enough to the live audience, as you might imagine; not to mention the reckless optics of showcasing a cranky, old, white guy having an incoherent argument with an imaginary Obama.  By all accounts the campaign never saw any sign of the train wreck headed their way.

Within minutes after this amazing presentation, even before the apparatchiks of Romney’s campaign could be reached for comment and vainly attempt to spin the whole thing away, an Internet meme #eastwooding was born and a Twitter account appeared for @invisibleobama.  “Eastwooding” involves having a conversation with an empty chair, of course, or at least a photograph of one and @invisibleobama has a satisfyingly dry wit:

I’m behind Mitt! No seriously. I’m right behind him. @invisibleobama

Needless to say the @invisibleobama account acquired twenty thousand or so followers and #eastwooding was trending exponentially within hours.  Sometimes the effort and diligence of following the daily frustrations and vicissitudes of day-to-day political baseball is amply rewarded.

The “empowerment” of the Right since the election of President Obama has brought new relevance to old arguments for xenophobia, bigotry and prejudice.  In a few short years our public discourse has declined, one might say devolved, into a number of unbelievably petty and small issues which exercise our emotions more than our reason.  As much as this reinforces “end-of-empire” theorising it has to be wondered what legislative Republicans, among others, could possibly be thinking:

The right’s singularly intelligent strategy is, I guess, to drive all of us as mad as the right is – to embroil us all in the right’s juvenile distractions, its adolescent food fights, its infantile diversions from whatever is truly important. In time, or so the strategy goes, the civilized intelligentsia will walk away in resigned disgust, as will barely interested independent and moderate voters, leaving the political arena almost entirely to the right.

P M Carpenter – To Michelle Goldberg, I tip my hat 15 May 12

Is that it?  If so one fails to see the distinction from a drunken adolescent who threatens to burn down the house because they’re denied the keys to the family car.

Recently the infamous Heartland Institute, who commissioned billboards associating climate science with the Unabomber, decided to “spin off its insurance research project effective May 31.”  The reason?  Climate change scepticism makes impossible meaningful actuarial work on insurance.  Sheesh.  Brace yourselves for another summer of diligent hammering away at the ethical and social foundations of the Republic.

The delegate math says that Romney gets a boost today; Santorum failed to qualify for delegates in some districts of Ohio and is not even on the ballot in Virginia.  But lacking the clear wins he desperately needs in Ohio and Tennessee, where polling indicates statistical ties, will Romney see his own shadow and retreat back to more weeks of interminable campaigning?  

Unless Santorum squeaks out wins in both states, probably not:

…once the Death Star got focused, Santorum’s numbers began to bleed. Tennessee would appear to be the key. If Santorum holds on there, he can argue plausibly that Romney still cannot close the deal with the voters he needs the most in the fall. A Republican candidate with a demonstrable weakness in the South is every Republican playa’s worst nightmare. But this still remains a contest between an actual campaign and three cults of personality. ‘Twas ever thus.

Charles P Pierce – How Romneybot 2.0 Built His Super Tuesday Death Star Esquire 6 Mar 12

Now this is not the end.  It is not even the beginning of the end.  But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

The delegate math says that Romney gets a boost today; Santorum failed to qualify for delegates in some districts of Ohio and is not even on the ballot in Virginia.  But lacking the clear wins he desperately needs in Ohio and Tennessee, where polling indicates statistical ties, will Romney see his own shadow and retreat back to more weeks of interminable campaigning?  

Unless Santorum squeaks out wins in both states, probably not:

…once the Death Star got focused, Santorum’s numbers began to bleed. Tennessee would appear to be the key. If Santorum holds on there, he can argue plausibly that Romney still cannot close the deal with the voters he needs the most in the fall. A Republican candidate with a demonstrable weakness in the South is every Republican playa’s worst nightmare. But this still remains a contest between an actual campaign and three cults of personality. ‘Twas ever thus.

Charles P Pierce – How Romneybot 2.0 Built His Super Tuesday Death Star Esquire 6 Mar 12

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Friday, 2 March 2012 the Iranian parliamentary elections take place, but unlike 2009 the reform movement is not taking part.  It is a contest among conservatives and this time around Ahmadinejad is taking on the Supreme Leader and the clerics:

The real competition in this election is among the so-called principalists – the various conservative forces that have fought so fiercely to control Iran’s government.

In that context, some see this election as fundamentally a fight between supporters of President Ahmadinejad and loyalists of the Supreme Leader.

“There is an attempt to rally people around the Ahmadinejad faction,” says Hashemi, the analyst at the University of Denver. “And one of the things that the Ahmadinejad faction has been doing is to try and play off of the peoples’ general antipathy toward clerical rule.”

Mike Schuster – In Iran’s Election, Not All Candidates Are Welcome NPR 1 Mar 12

Yeah, that’s right, this time Ahmadinejad is the moderate.

It seems the Republican circus has now gotten to the trapeze act with no net.  Recent polling for Arizona and Michigan suggests both are statistical ties with Michigan poised to be an all-night cliffhanger.  Romney faces a potentially disastrous defeat and Santorum, well, any momentum he wins or loses is unlikely to change his clear intention to wage electoral jihad.  

And they are both clearly doing themselves no favours:

Both Willard Romney and Rick Santorum – and have I mentioned recently what a colossal dick the latter is? – ought to thank their personal deities that they’re not racehorses. Because, if they were, and given the way they’re both limping towards the finish line in Michigan and Arizona today, we’d already have the screen up, the syringe at the ready, and the veterinary ambulance discreetly parked off to one side.

Charles P Pierce – The Michigan Primary and the GOP’s Bloody Uprising Esquire 28 Feb 12

At this point it is hard to imagine how a win or loss for either changes the fundamentals of an increasingly toxic and historically damaging nomination for the GOP.  Pass the popcorn, please, and make it the good stuff.

By the time the robo-signing scandal had spread across all fifty states their attorneys general started looking for a coordinated and comprehensive settlement with the banks:

The current settlement stems from revelations in late 2010 that banks had filed hundreds of thousands of flawed and fraudulent foreclosure documents in their rush to keep up with a tidal wave of delinquent loans wrought by the housing crisis, a practice known as “robosigning.”

Under the proposed deal, the five banks involved – Wells Fargo, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, Ally Financial and Citigroup – would agree to end those practices and overhaul the often-convoluted way they deal with borrowers trying to stay in their homes. They also would pay about $25 billion that would go toward lowering loan balances for borrowers who owe more than their houses are worth, helping others refinance at lower rates and paying up to $2,000 to hundreds of thousands of people who lost homes to foreclosure.

Brady Dennis – Proposed settlement with banks over foreclosure practices dealt a setback Washington Post 8 Feb 12

The Obama administration also sought some relief for a broad segment of affected homeowners rather than individual prosecutions of specific cases.  Sounds good?  Well, maybe not so much, as the legal ramifications of the settlement are still open to interpretation:

In effect, the White House was willing to sell blanket immunity to the originators and distributors of mortgages over the past decade. The price of this legal protection would have been low. Understandably, bankers are still keen to take the offer.

Simon Johnson – Last chance on mortgage mess Politico 22 Jan 12

Those seeking a tougher stance on bank malfeasance and a broader inquiry, potentially resulting in criminal prosecutions, into the complex mortgage retail and securitisation practices which largely precipitated the 2008 crash have been reluctant to go along with this proposal.

The Republican primary continues to lurch forward with three contests today; Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri.  None of these are binding in the allocation of delegates:

It is not a pretty image, believe you me.

Now, as the latest chapter in this drama, the Republican National Committee felt obliged to send out an e-mail reminding reporters that today’s voting in Colorado, Missouri, and Minnesota will mean sweet fk-all, despite what you may hear from John King and my man Chuck Todd.

Charles P Pierce – The RNC Clusterfk Esquire 7 Feb 12

Notwithstanding, there may be something at stake here for the Romney campaign which lit up recently with an unusual objection to the methodology of a specific poll, largely on the grounds of this little nugget:

According to ABC’s poll out this morning, by a 2 to 1 margin voters say the more they learn about Mitt Romney, the less they like him.

Josh Marshall – Taking a Toll TPM 6 Feb 12

Romney’s favourability is declining nationally as Obama’s enjoys a modest rise.  Not to mention that with Santorum leading in Missouri and competitive elsewhere the Romney juggernaut just might lose two out of three; a concern further evident by their pivot to attacking Santorum in recent days.

So, as far as delegates are concerned these events don’t amount to much but as a potential deflation of the Romney campaign with an upset or two it may be worth watching.

Polls close in a few hours and the Florida GOP primary will probably determine the course of the nomination race and possibly cement Romney’s frontrunner status.

Aggregate polling has shown a very slight tightening but the only significant variation among pollsters is the magnitude of the lead Romney enjoys although most agree he is now the expected victor.  One interesting exception has been the recent Dixie Strategies/The News-Press/First Coast News poll which predicts a dead heat:

Our poll has Gingrich leading Romney by an eyelash – 35.46 percent to 35.08.

Could our poll be right and all the others wrong? Maybe.

In polling terminology, our poll is what’s called an outlier (for a set of numerical data, any value that is markedly smaller or larger than other values).

However, there is one factor that works in our favor. The News-Press poll’s sample size (2,567 likely voters) is three to four times larger than that of other pollsters and thus our poll has a very small margin of error (1.93 percent) with a confidence level of 95 percent.

Scott Bihr – Why our poll may be right News-Press 28 Jan 12

Given the brawl that this campaign has become it will be interesting to see how the Gingrich/Romney battle in Florida influences the remaining contests.  In spite of Gingrich’s assertion that he will carry the fight all the way to the convention it is pretty hard to see how he could if he loses big to Romney tonight.  On the other hand a narrow victory or loss could derail Romney’s presumed coronation, given his immense media buy and his campaign’s apparently reckless attitude toward managing expectations in this contest.