Month: September 2012

Reviewing Peter Popham's biography of Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi, Josh Kurlantzick contrasts the challenges Suu Kyi faced as a prisoner to the ones she faces as a politician:

Compared to withstanding 15 years in house arrest virtually alone, watching her husband die in another country while she remained in detention, being separated from her sons, and seeing her allies tortured and murdered, today’s compromises might seem easy. But with those other hardships, Suu Kyi herself was little to blame—the decisions were being made for her, and her courage was in standing up to them. Now, her courage will have to be revealed in the deals and compromises she makes—the type of legacy that does not lead to Nobel Peace Prizes, but might well leave Myanmar a real future.

Today on the Dish, Andrew explained the Romney campaign's Reagan delusion while exposing the GOP's implosion of integrity. He then cast Romney's FP as "Cheneyism on the cheap" and, a bit earlier, likened the candidate to a "Cheney with better hair and even fewer scruples." While calling for a Obama landslide to destroy Rove, Andrew also pointed out that Romney's numbers are in "free-fall."

Joe Klein ripped into Netanyahu, and while attacks roiled Yemen today, Obama said Egypt as neither an ally nor an enemy and Ackerman criticized the media for misrepresenting the Benghazi attack. In Sam Bacile discussion, Noah Schachtman named him a fraud, while John Herman found evidence that he might be a Coptic Christian. Then massively multi-player online roleplayers remembered Benghazi victim Sean Smith.

Then the Fed ponied up, while the blogosphere celebrated. Meanwhile, Andrew noted that Adelson is off-limits due to the anti-Semitism card, Mark Kleiman summed up Romney's brave guy act and Kerry Howley debunked the "apology tour" smear. Tomasky hoped for a return of Dem foreign policy dominance, Abby Rapaport revealed the GOP's secret and readers clarified "introvert." Meanwhile, Romney's welfare attack ads fizzled, John Sides argued that debates matter little and Ambers noticed growing Obama enthusiasm from independents.

The Chinese soon-to-be president disappeared, Iraq proved a risky investment, and while the Chart of the Day plotted the decline of newspapers, Walter Kirn chafed against journalistic groupthink. Then John Hodgman addressed doomsday fear-mongering and readers flagged some liberal pap in the hookup culture debate.

Elizabeth Blair explored the extraordinary origins of "Strange Fruit," Ed Yong marveled at nucleotide mapping and as prison love faced hurdles, Ed Gimson lamented the end of gentlemen. Tech geeks gave the iPhone 5 mixed reviews, Derek Thompson examined the social media business and Navneet Alang pondered our digital self-image. FOTD here, MHB here, VFYW here and don't forget to ask Reihan anything!

– G.G.

(Photo by Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty Images)

New research from Kantar Media's CMAG paints a dramatic picture of the unprecedented amount of ads that voters are being exposed to this cycle – as much as three to twelve times as many as in past elections:

As of early September 2008, we had seen 832,291 spots representing all political advertising on local broadcast TV for the 2008 cycle up until that point, with an ultimate total of 2.29 million by Election Night. In other words, by this point in the cycle, we were 36% of the way there.

As of early this month, we have seen 1.3 million ad occurrences for all political advertising on local spot TV. If we're 36% of the way there once again, that means we have another 2.3 million ad occurrences left to air in less than two months for an ultimate total of 3.6 million. That's about 43,000 spot occurrences per day for the rest of the election cycle, give or take a few.

They produced the following chart to show the differences between 2008 and 2012 regarding the number of battleground spots thus far seen:

They also explain how outside spending, mostly from Team GOP, is what makes this cycle so different:

The explosion of Republican groups — super PACs, 501(c)(4) organizations, trade associations with political arms — is without question the biggest development in all 2012 advertising. At the presidential level alone, between April 10 (when Romney unofficially claimed the party's nomination) and early September, these groups accounted for 55% of all presidential ads aired on the Republican side. The remaining 45% were aired by Romney and the Republican National Committee. During this same timeframe in 2008, only 3% of all Republican ads were sponsored by outside groups; 97% were aired by the McCain campaign or the RNC.

On the Democratic side, the difference between 2008 and 2012 is negligible: 91% of all presidential ads aired during the April-September period in 2012 were sponsored by either the Obama campaign or the Democratic National Committee; just 9% of the ads aired came from outside groups such as Priorities USA Action. In 2008, the breakdown was 96% to 4%.

In new ads today, we already mentioned a shameless attack ad from Crossroads GPS. The Romney campaign is also out with a new China-themed attack spot, which they likely intend to target Rust Belt workers with. It claims Obama has allowed US trade to be harmed by China's "cheating" (currency manipulation). The size and scope of the ad buy is not yet clear:

Meawhile, the Obama campaign is readying a widespread, one-month $4.7 million ad buy in Florida. They also released yet another web video hitting Romney for not releasing all his tax returns. In down-ticket outside spending news, the pro-Democrat SEIU/Majority (Super) PAC is putting up an ad attacking GOP Senate candidate Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin (ad buy size unknown):

And lastly, the wing-nut scaremonger group Let Freedom Ring, a dark-money 501(c)(4), has a new web video out trying to chastise Obama for apparently supporting the Muslim Brotherhood (ad buy size/scope unknown – it may never air):

Ad War archive here.

Herdsmen and -women wearing traditional Bavarian clothes (Dirndl and Lederhosen) accompany cattle down from alpine mountains in the annual cattle drive descent on September 13, 2012 near Oberstdorf, Germany. The herdsmen bring the cattle up to mountain meadows in the spring and stay there throughout the summer, where the animals graze on grass and the herdsmen live in a small huts called an alms, often without electricity, where many make cheese from the cows' milk. The tradition dates back through centuries, and in countries like Germany, Switzerland and Austria, the culture has a deep resonance in folk history. In September the season ends and the herdsmen return the cattle to farmers in a festive ceremony marked by the decoration of the lead cow with a garland, but only if all the cattle survived the summer. By Johannes Simon/Getty Images.

Chandra Bozelko, an inmate at York Correctional Institution in Niantic, describes inmate romances:

That female prisoners enter into liaisons with other women is a deafening, rhythm-stopping reality in prison. Correction officials discourage romantic relationships not out of homophobia or cruelty but because they have learned from their own lives that love makes people do crazy things. Some are crazy in the extreme, like killing a cheating spouse, and others only slightly crazy, like tattooing your crush’s name on the skin atop your jugular. Both types of craziness are well-represented in any correctional facility; prisons don’t need any more crazy because, especially in an overpopulation crisis, we have quite a stash.

(Hat tip: Mark Oppenheimer)

Andrew Gimson mourns it:

The idea of a gentleman was a more inclusive one than it sounds to modern ears. One of its greatest advantages was that you could define it so as to include yourself. You could behave like a gentleman, without possessing any of the social attributes which a gentleman might have: there was no need to possess a coat of arms, or a country estate, or engage in field sports, or wear evening dress. At least since Chaucer’s time, there had been a distinction between the social meaning of the word, and the moral. It was evident that well-born people, who ought to know how to behave like gentlemen, did not always do so, while others sometimes did.

Less than you'd expect, according to John Sides:

That presidential debates can be "game changers" is a belief almost universally held by political pundits and strategists. Political scientists, however, aren’t so sure. Indeed, scholars who have looked most carefully at the data have found that, when it comes to shifting enough votes to decide the outcome of the election, presidential debates have rarely, if ever, mattered.

The small or nonexistent movement in voters’ preferences is evident when comparing the polls before and after each debate or during the debate season as a whole. Political lore often glosses over or even ignores the polling data. Even those who do pay attention to polls often fail to separate real changes from random blips due to sampling error. A more careful study by political scientist James Stimson finds little evidence of game changers in the presidential campaigns between 1960 and 2000. Stimson writes, "There is no case where we can trace a substantial shift to the debates." At best, debates provide a "nudge" in very close elections like 1960,1980, or 2000. An even more comprehensive study, by political scientists Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien, which includes every publicly available poll from the presidential elections between 1952 and 2008, comes to a similar conclusion: excluding the 1976 election, which saw Carter’s lead drop steadily throughout the fall, “the best prediction from the debates is the initial verdict before the debates.” In other words, in the average election year, you can accurately predict where the race will stand after the debates by knowing the state of the race before the debates. Erikson and Wlezien conclude that evidence of debate effects is "fragile."

Regardless, Joe Klein expects Romney to do badly at the debates:

It's hard to be effective when you're biting your tongue and swallowing your pride at the same time. Romney has dumbed himself down to fit a Republican Party that has become anachronistic, hateful and foolish. He has never once stood up to the party's extremist base in this campaign–not even when asked whether he would accept a deficit deal with $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in new revenues, not even on immigration and contraception, issues that sent women and Latinos scurrying toward the exits. His has been a shameful, shameless campaign. The public will occasionally turn out an incumbent President, but only when offered a real alternative. Mitt Romney has offered them only a mirage.