Month: September 2012

Over the years I have been and continue to be averse to making predictions. There simply are too many variables in play to accurately predict the outcome of close races (the uncompetitive ones are another story, obviously). We're unsure of turnout, the accuracy of polls, and the motivations of what few voters remain undecided in an election like the current presidential race. As a point of ego, I'm also hesitant about making predictions that will turn out to be wrong and make me look foolish. That said, every election I end up taking a stab at it.
buy plavix generic noprescriptionbuyonlinerxx.net over the counter

With or against my better judgment.

On the heels of the Mitt Romney Realtalk secret video hitting the news cycle on Monday evening, it is time to ask the obvious question: Is there any way that Mitt Romney can win this election? His ineptness as a candidate is almost difficult to believe, and every week he says or does something to prove that he is exactly what his critics say he is – a wildly out of touch multimillionaire pandering to whatever audience is put before him. He is a real-life Richie Rich, a guileless man of great privilege with zero charisma and to whom non-wealthy Americans (and a lot of the wealthy ones, for that matter) cannot relate in the slightest.

When the McCain campaign threw in the towel on Election Night 2008, I clearly recall their spokesperson telling reporters that the campaign was looking at the electoral map and "could no longer see a path to victory." I am beginning to feel the same way about Romney. There are scenarios in which he wins, of course, but they are looking more and more like they lie outside of the 95% confidence interval.

We have a campaign that, in all honesty, has probably been a good bet to lose for the last few months and the only thing they are accomplishing as time passes is to make more mistakes and fall farther behind. If Romney was looking like toast last week, what's he going to look like after the latest "Whoops!" in his comedy of errors?

The winning scenarios for Romney at this point rely on leaps of faith and downright implausible conditions. To conclude that he's in good shape or primed to win requires assuming that:

1. The polls are flat out wrong, even though in 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2010 the pre-election polls were damn near perfect.
2. Some improbable turnout event will take place, i.e. that millions of Democrats will suddenly decide not to vote for some reason.
3. Romney will make up substantial ground in the debates, which very few people even watch and which research shows quite conclusively rarely change any viewers' minds unless one of the candidates has a colossal meltdown.
4. Obama is far more unpopular than the data suggest. Certainly his approval rating is not high, but neither is it in the 20% range like a certain former president's was during the 2008 race.
5. Romney has enough charisma and political skills to win over any potential voters beyond the people who categorically loathe Obama and would vote for literally anyone who the GOP nominated to oppose him.

When coming up with victory scenarios for a candidate requires this kind of magical thinking and this many "I mean, I suppose it could happen!" moments, we've gone beyond playing devil's advocate; we're working overtime trying to convince ourselves that the election is competitive. Yes, there are six weeks remaining and something could happen to tilt the race in Romney's favor. But for his sake it better happen soon and it better be Earth-shattering.

Basically this is the long way of saying: Under any set of reasonable, normal assumptions about voter turnout and other moving parts in the election, it looks extremely unlikely at this point that Mitt Romney can cobble together 270 Electoral Votes. Right now your odds at a slot machine are better than his odds of winning. I want to be conservative but I just don't see it.

Whatever hope he may have had earlier this year appears to have been dashed under the sheer weight of his campaign's ineptitude.

In Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain tells a terrific anecdote about being elected union steward for the enormous restaurant at the Rockefeller Center as a young man in the 1970s. If "New York" and "1970s" was not a big enough hint, it turns out that the organization appeared to be mob-run. Bourdain is young, idealistic, and eager to raise some hell in the union, but meeting the union rep leads to his disillusionment as he realizes that his new job is of the do-nothing variety:

(The Union President) was oddly unenthusiastic. He looked up sleepily at me from behind the desk, as if I were a delivery boy bringing him a sandwich. When I asked him if I could, as shop steward, familiarize myself with The Contract, so that I might better serve our members, the president fiddled with his cufflinks and said, "I seem to have…temporarily…misplaced it." It was clear from his inflection and posture that he didn't give a fuck whether I believed him or not.

I've always loved that final line and I think of this anecdote, apocryphal or not, every time I find myself in this frustrating situation. This tone is frequently encountered when dealing with bureaucracies or one's superiors in the workplace. They don't care if you believe them because they don't have to.

This came to mind when I read Saturday's unusually frank New York Times editorial ("Mitt Romney's Confession") on the fact that the Romney/Ryan economic plan (or "plan") simply doesn't add up.

There are a couple of pitfalls here. The first is that while closing loopholes sounds good — Make those oil companies pay! — the costliest ones are cherished by most Americans. These are tax provisions that promote home ownership, charitable giving, and employer-provided health care and that allow taxpayers to deduct their state and local income taxes. Limiting or eliminating these popular "loopholes" would be extremely difficult.

The second obstacle, as shown by the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, is that Mr. Romney's plan is mathematically impossible, even if it were politically feasible. Take away every deduction from every wealthy household, the center calculated, and you still couldn’t make up the revenue the government would lose by reducing rates without raising taxes on middle-class households.

online pharmacy ivermectin no prescription

buy stendra online www.oriondentalcare.com/wp-content/themes/oriondental/inc/php/stendra.html no prescription

Not so, Mr. Romney protested recently, and cited an analysis by Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, a Romney campaign adviser. Mr. Feldstein said the math could work — if you took away every deduction from every household earning $100,000 or more.

In other words, the math might work out (although this isn't even touching the effects of the proposed Estate Tax repeal) under a set of hypothetical circumstances that is totally unrealistic and not even what the campaign is proposing. No one, least of all Mitt Romney, has proposed eliminating every single tax deduction, including the home mortgage interest deduction. But maybe if that happened his tax cuts would begin to pay for themselves. Probably not, though. It's like they're giving us the rope and begging us to hang him.

This is not, as the Times suggests with its title, a "confession" by the Romney campaign. It is evidence that the GOP has moved far beyond giving two shits whether you believe their silly supply side economics or not. They simply do not care and they're not going to waste their time trying to provide some kind of evidence that supports their theory.

Neither they nor the voters they attract are interested in even pretending like tax cuts pay for themselves – excepting a few rubes here and there who make $8/hr and think the Job Creators' wealth is going to trickle down. They just want the tax cuts, period.

It may seem like more of the same policy proposals from the GOP – more tax cuts, more magical faith that the economy will suddenly start growing faster than expected to make their lazy projections balance out – but Romney/Ryan marks an important change.

This is 2012, the Year They Stopped Trying. The effort to make the math work is so feeble and so pitifully unconvincing that the jig is up. The candidates aren't even pretending that this works, and the supporters aren't even pretending that they believe it does. Just give us more money. Who cares what it costs the rest of you.

In my mind the whole "This pays for itself!" argument was never more than a weak conscience balm for wealthy beneficiaries of Republican fiscal policy. This is typical, and I think symptomatic, of the problems with the Romney campaign that their effort to sell their economic policy (during an election, during a recession) is so superficial, so half-assed, and so clearly a case of going through the motions. It's nice to see an admission, albeit a tacit, indirect one, that Reaganomics can finally be recognized for what it is: an ideology. A belief. An article of faith. And above all, it is a placeholder. They need some way to pass off massive upper class tax cuts as "fiscally responsible" and this fairy tale does about as well as any other.

This is a guy who spends every weekend at his vacation home in an election he's losing with 7 weeks to go. No one should be surprised that he barely put any effort into maintaining his party's Grand Illusion.