Month: September 2012

Joe Klein worries about political paralysis, but Ezra Klein points out that in "a second term, Obama would rely less on Republicans than in his first":

[T]he policies that are most important to Obama and the Democrats don’t actually require compromise with Republicans. Health care, financial regulation  and tax increases are on autopilot. If Obama wins reelection, Americans are going to see a lot of change even if Republicans don’t offer much cooperation. If he loses, much of the change he signed into law in his first term will never actually happen.

Kornacki wonders if her speech was effective:

We’ll see if the speech (and the news coverage it generates) boosts her in Massachusetts. If it doesn’t, her next best chance to shake up the race will probably be her debates with Brown. The forum is promising for Warren, conducive to the sort of unrehearsed riffing that produced her viral moment last year. She may need to come up with another one if she’s going to unseat Brown.

A reader adds to our earlier discussion:

There's another reason Warren is flagging in Massachusetts. She spent six weeks in May and June fending off questions about why she has repeatedly lied throughout her career about a Native American heritage. What's remarkable is that you haven't seized on this decades-long cynical ploy of hers to leverage identity politics into a career boost at every level. There's a reason she steered clear of meeting with Native Americans in Charlotte this week – she's not one of them, and she knows it.

Another:

I'm a lifelong MA resident. I was watching TV the other night, and ads for both candidates came on TV. Scott Brown's ad talked about local issues, including pressures that the fishing industry faces from federal regulations. Elizabeth Warren's ad was pretty much exclusively about the Republican "war on women," focusing on equal pay, access to contraception, and a woman's right to choose.  And this, in a nutshell, is why I think that she's down in this election.

She's forgotten the maxim that "all politics is local," and is desperately trying to tie Brown to the right-wing fringe, despite the fact that he was one of the first to come out against Akin and has pushed for more inclusiveness in the GOP platform. While I believe that the women's issues focused on by Warren are incredibly important, I feel like they're more abstract to the average MA voter, who knows that abortion will never be made illegal in this state absent a constitutional amendment. I think that if she'd focus more on local issues and all of the Republican filibusters that Brown has supported, she'd have a much better chance in this election.

I also feel that, outside of certain bubbles (including Cambridge, where Ms. Warren has lived for the entirety of her time in this state), MA is better classified as one of the least conservative states rather than the most liberal. The majority of residents here identify as independents rather than Democrats, and we have a long habit of electing moderate Republican governors to balance out our majority Democrat legislature. Perhaps running as a fairly liberal candidate against an extremely likable moderate isn't the best way to appeal to voters in this state?

Nate Cohn calls Clinton the "perfect surrogate":

Nearly all of the white voters without a college degree that Obama could plausibly persuade like Clinton and may have even voted for him in 1996. When you add Clinton's staggering personal popularity, it's hard to construct a better surrogate on the president's behalf: A figure of stature who retains immense credibility on the issue that endangers the president's reelection chances with the voters who may well decide his fate.

Andrew Sprung considers why the GOP's former presidents, besides Reagan, don't get mentioned:

It's not that Republicans haven't put up capable presidents. Its rather that the present party has moved so far to the right that it can only fully own one of its successes. Indeed, by contemporary standards, even Reagan was a flaming liberal, acceding to a long series of tax hikes to partially, incrementally offset the structural deficit he opened up with his original massive tax cut. That retroactive apostasy has yet to be fully absorbed, except by Democrats.

Larison argues that Republicans were wise to keep their distance from George W. Bush:

The only reason that Republicans ought to have mentioned him was to state their disagreements with what he did, but we all understand that this was never going to happen. The bigger problem for the GOP is that there is still so little in Bush’s record that they oppose. Even though they don’t mention him by name, the party still accepts most of the policies he favored.

The Romney campaign has a new ad out trying to play sleight of hand with Bill Clinton's speech last night:

Alex Burns comments:

There's no word from Boston on where this ad is actually airing, and it's a surprising choice to lean further into the narrative of Clinton-Obama tension at a moment when Clinton is hugging his successor more closely than ever.

Then there is some big battleground news, as the GOP and its outside-spending allies have pulled their ads from Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Obama is up in the polls. Laura Clawson steps back:

Romney will never pull out of Michigan—but he won't actually put much in, either. Sure, if the polls suddenly swing toward Romney, Republican billionaires and their Super PACs could dive back in with big TV ad buys. But given that nasty ads are the Republican tactic for winning, their absence these days in Michigan and Pennsylvania says a lot about what Republican strategists see happening in those supposed swing states.

But the Romney campaign is still reserving ad space in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia (but not Wisconsin). Meanwhile, a new ad from the RNC shows a young Obama supporter "breaking up" with the president over his disappointing first term:

Except, um, the woman is an RNC staffer:

[Republican National Committee Director of Hispanic Outreach Bettina] Inclan began her current RNC post in January 2012, and has worked in Republican politics since well before Obama’s 2008 election.

The Romney campaign is also pushing back on the Democrats' anti-Bain convention rhetoric with a few web videos pushing the Bain-as-savior narrative – one for Dade International and another for GST Steel. Lastly, Congressman Allen West (R-FL) is trying to tie yesterday's DNC platform disaster to his opponent:

Ad War archive here.

U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) holds the gavel as he speaks on stage during the final day of the Democratic National Convention at Time Warner Cable Arena on September 6, 2012 in Charlotte, North Carolina. Frank is retiring this year after three decades in Congress. By Alex Wong/Getty Images.

Definitely a cheater, according to the new book by one of Armstrong's teammates, Tyler Hamilton, who collaborated with nine other teammates. Christopher Keyes is convinced:

The Secret Race isn’t just a game changer for the Lance Armstrong myth. It’s the game ender. No one can read this book with an open mind and still credibly believe that Armstrong didn’t dope. It’s impossible.

And it's not just an expose of Armstrong but of an entire era of cycling:

[He] was not just another cyclist caught in the middle of an established drug culture—he was a pioneer pushing into uncharted territory.

In this sense, the book destroys another myth: that everyone was doing it, so Armstrong was, in a weird way, just competing on a level playing field. There was no level playing field. With his connections to Michele Ferrari, the best dishonest doctor in the business, Armstrong was always "two years ahead of what everybody else was doing," Hamilton writes. Even on the Postal squad there was a pecking order. Armstrong got the superior treatments.

Henry Blodget is compelled by Hamilton's story:

In 2000, Hamilton says, he and Armstrong and a third U.S. Postal rider named Kevin Livingston flew to Spain to have blood drawn before the race. This blood was later delivered to the riders' hotel rooms during the Tour and infused back into them before the crucial (and grueling) 11th Stage. In this case, Hamilton says, Armstrong was next to him when he got the transfusion. As to the risk of getting caught–and all those drug tests that Armstrong cites to prove his innocence–Hamilton has this to say:

"The tests are easy to beat. We’re way, way ahead of the tests. They’ve got their doctors and we’ve got ours, and ours are better. Better paid, for sure."

Along with Floyd Landis, another former Armstrong teammate, Hamilton was later busted for doping, stripped of victories, and given a suspension. So the dwindling number of people who still believe that Armstrong raced cleaned will likely dismiss Hamilton's book with the same obstinate explanation with which all evidence against Armstrong has been dismissed–as a vendetta launched by a proven liar. But given the amount of evidence that has been produced against Armstrong in recent years, it's no surprise that the US Anti-Doping Agency decided to go after him aggressively.

Read about that campaign and the entire Dish thread on Armstrong's legacy, in one convenient page, here.

St. John's, Newfoundland, 7.47 pm

Blake Hounshell hopes Romney is a secret moderate on foreign policy. Larison is unconvinced:

This is a common interpretation of Romney’s foreign policy views. It relies on the belief that Romney’s stated positions are so foolish that no one would ever follow through on them. This requires us to believe that Romney will suddenly cease pandering to national security hawks once he takes office despite being surrounded by them, and that he will start off his administration by backtracking on most or all of his foreign policy commitments. Romney doesn’t seem inclined to roil his hawkish supporters on purpose, and he has so far demonstrated no hint of independent thought on these issues. If Romney has campaigned for "omni-directional belligerence," I don’t see how we can assume that he doesn’t intend at least to try to carry it out on a few issues.

The latest from Boston Dynamics:

Jesus Diaz has background:

Dr. Alfred Rizzi, technical lead for the Cheetah effort and Chief Robotics Scientist at Boston Dynamics, says that "achieving 28 mph on the treadmill is quite a challenge and accomplishment, for which I commend our robotics team. But our real goal is to create a robot that moves freely outdoors while it runs fast. We are building an outdoor version that we call WildCat, that should be ready for testing early next year."

Earlier coverage of robotic biomorphism here and here.

David Wertime passes along news that Michelle Obama's convention speech was a big hit in China:

One netizen from Beijing asked rhetorically, "Who knows who the first lady of China is?" Another from Hangzhou couldn't help but notice, "The big difference with our Party Congress is: The audience [at the DNC] have expressions, they're laughing, or thinking deeply, or getting passionate. Our representatives are always without expression and applauding mechanically." 

Meanwhile, back in the US, Adrienne LaFrance covers an experiment undertaken by PBS's Newshour, which is having volunteers crowd-translate the program's political videos into as many as 52 languages:

Generally, Obama gets more attention from translators than Romney. (It’s understandable that a sitting president would draw more attention than his as-yet-unelected rival.) Some languages are more popular than others. One volunteer in Indonesia is particularly active, which means that many videos have Indonesian subtitles. "The most frequent languages besides English are Spanish, French, Indonesian, Chinese, and Korean," Joshua Barajas, a production assistant at PBS NewsHour who handles communications with the volunteer translators, told me. Arabic and Turkish aren’t too far behind.