After yesterday's brilliant online ad from the Obama campaign, we get this:
Pro-Obama Super PAC Priorities USA is behind it. It will air on TV and across the web as part of a previously announced $30 million six-state buy. I don't think it's as effective as voters' own voices. But they are right to focus on Romney's accusation that almost half of Americans think of themselves as "victims".
One reason the Democrats' Senate prospects are looking up:
Josh Marshall comments:
The key to this race is that voters in the state like both candidates. Warren is +16 favorability, Brown is a massive +28. My guess is that the nationalization of all races at this point in the cycle is buoying Warren — with an assist of unknown dimensions from her convention speech.
Earlier Warren-blogging here, here and here. I'd vote for Brown.
"The logic of Romney’s fundraising has seemed, for some time, slightly crazy. He’s raising money so he can pile it in at the end, with ads. But at the end will they make much difference? Obama is said to have used a lot of his money early on, to paint a portrait of Romney as Thurston Howell III, as David Brooks put it. That was a gamble on Obama’s part: spend it now, pull ahead in the battlegrounds, once we pull ahead more money will come in because money follows winners, not losers.
If I’m seeing things right, that strategy is paying off. Romney’s staff used to brag they had a lower burn rate, they were saving it up. For what? For the moment when Americans would rather poke out their eyeballs and stomp on the goo than listen to another ad?" – Peggy Noonan.
Douthat heaps scorn on how both campaigns play to dystopian visions in their pandering to elites (for Republicans, this, of course, means "Atlas Shrugged," while for Dems, it's "one part 'Turner Diaries,' one part 'Handmaid's Tale'"):
What does it say that our politicians, in settings where they’re at least pretending to open up and reveal their true perspective, feel comfortable embracing the most self-serving elite stereotypes about ordinary citizens who vote for the other party? Nothing good, I think. The current American story is one of polarization, with the two major parties sealed into their respective ideological bunkers, and stratification, with an elite that’s more isolated from the common life of the country it rules than at any time in recent history.
However, there's a small difference, he notes:
The way Obama and Romney employed these stereotypes are not actually equivalent. Both behind-closed-door comments were profoundly condescending, but only Romney explicitly wrote off the people he’s describing.
It's not a small one, it's a huge one. Obama was telling his rich San Francisco Democrats that Republican dominance in the red states was understandable given their recent economic past. He was empathizing, not condemning – a huge distinction. And there was no cynicism, unlike Romney. Public cynicism is political death in America. Dreher merely sighs:
These excellent questions get to the heart of why I am so deeply alienated from both parties. We need a Christopher Lasch party. I keep trying to imagine what the source for this kind of political renewal would be, and I keep coming up blank.
Harry J Enten reviews polling on 2012 marriage equality initiatives:
Overall, the picture is rosy for same-sex marriage proponents. It looks likely that same-sex marriage is going to be approved at the ballot box for the first time, on a state-by-state basis. The only cautionary note I would add is that same-sex marriage opposition has performed 7 percentage points better at the ballot box in past years than polls have estimated. But this opposition "bonus" has been waning in recent years. In any case, same-sex marriage approval is ahead by enough points in Maine, Maryland and Washington that the bans would pass even if there is hidden opposition.
Given the context and the polling numbers, Enten seems to mean "wouldn't" rather than "would" in that last sentence.
Expect this sort of ugly rhetoric to grow:
Millman is confident “Romney writing off half the country as incorrigible parasites is not going to hurt his electoral prospects”:
Half of Americans think we spend more than 10% of the budget on foreign aid, and more than 5% of the budget on public broadcasting. Half of Americans think more than one-in-five Americans is gay. Most people have absolutely no idea how numbers work, or what numbers are plausible as an answer to a whole host of questions. And, by the way, while more-educated people do better on these kinds of quizzes than less-educated people, they don’t do nearly as well as you’d expect.
Nobody inclined to vote Republican thinks Romney is talking about white retirees or families of six making $50k/year when he talks about people who won’t “take responsibility” for their lives. Romney is running on saving Medicare from Obama’s “raid,” increasing defense spending, and exempting more unearned income from taxation altogether. So his voters know he’s not talking about them. He’s talking about moochers and parasites.
Matt Steinglass, on the other hand, argues that criticism from elites will cost Romney support:
[W]hat’s striking about Mr Romney’s flailing on-camera mess this week is that he has lost a major chunk of his elite, particularly in that part of the conservative commentariat that still has lines of communication open to liberals.
The bars in the above chart represent each earning brackets' share of total income (in blue) and share of total tax, and not merely income tax, contributions (in red). Matthew O'Brien explains why the system is only slightly progressive, despite 47% not paying federal income tax:
[T]here are lots of other taxes, and they're mostly regressive. The payroll tax and state and local taxes all hit poorer households harder than they hit richer households. Once you add up the progressive federal income tax and the regressive federal payroll tax – which raise roughly the same amount of revenue – with regressive state and local taxes, you only just get a progressive system overall.
Previous Dish on payroll taxes here.
Silver compares Gallup and Rasmussen polls – which show the bounce fading – to an NBC News/WSJ poll that gave Obama a five-point advantage:
These polls almost seem to inhabit different universes. As I’ll describe in a separate article, the methodological choices made by pollsters may have something to do with it; Mr. Obama’s bounce has been much more noticeable in polls that use live interviewers and that call cellphones. But it does not do any good to pretend there is a consensus in the polls when there isn’t. Sometimes there is simply no alternative to remaining patient until one emerges. The downward trend for Mr. Obama in the Gallup and Rasmussen trackers is closest thing we have to a theme in the polls for the time being.
Nate Cohn also reviews the polls. Earlier Dish on the enthusiasm gap here.
Jay Rosen flags a recent on-air exchange between CNN's Soledad O'Brien and GOP Congressman Peter King during which she challenges the factual basis of King's "apology tour" rhetoric:
Rosen thinks O'Brien is setting an example for how the press can help counter the "post-truth" political era:
If you interview people on television for a living, you and your team over-prepare. You anticipate points where a Peter King may feel entitled to his own facts. You know your material (and his) cold, so you aren’t worried about the interview spinning out of control. You smile more as the struggle heightens. You interrupt when a dubious claim is first introduced, and each time is it re-asserted. The tone you maintain is a plea for evidence. You have your mark-up of the documents with you. You have your pen. You wave them, which is theatrical. But you also read from them, and send through the lens an evidentiary calm.
… Peter King didn’t back down or change his mind. But he shifted modes. From: what planet are you and your so-called fact checkers on? It’s obvious to anyone who can read that Obama apologized for America. To a point closer to… Okay, he didn’t say I apologize or I’m sorry. There was no apology in the diplomatic sense. But I read those speeches differently; to me and to my party they sound like an apology.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ excellent piece in the current Atlantic, “Fear of a Black President,” begins:
The irony of President Barack Obama is best captured in his comments on the death of Trayvon Martin, and the ensuing fray. Obama has pitched his presidency as a monument to moderation. He peppers his speeches with nods to ideas originally held by conservatives. He routinely cites Ronald Reagan. He effusively praises the enduring wisdom of the American people, and believes that the height of insight lies in the town square. Despite his sloganeering for change and progress, Obama is a conservative revolutionary, and nowhere is his conservative character revealed more than in the very sphere where he holds singular gravity—race.
TNC’s take on Romney’s 47% and the end of whiteness here. “Ask Anything” archive here.
The Dish 