While waiting for the first results, I saw a couple of election day items at Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish that I want to reprint. A quote from Lincoln and a story from a voter.
This is essentially a People’s contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men – to lift artificial weights from all shoulders – to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all – to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life. Yielding to partial, and temporary departures, from necessity, this is the leading object of the government for whose existence we contend,” – Abraham Lincoln, Special Message to the People of the United States, July 4, 1861.
At my precinct polling place by 7:30 a.m. Fairly long line. It turned out that all the voting machines were broken. So we all had to vote by provisional ballot. Ridiculous. The lady just behind me in line brought along her daughter, I’d say she was about 8-10, certainly an elementary school student. Mom starts to fill out the ballot and the child shrieks, “No, not him! Nooooo!” Then she takes up a chant “Ba-rack O-bam-a, Ba-rack O-bam-a, Ba-rack O-bam-a!” Mom is perplexed, hushing her, and then finally “Alright, alright.” “Ma’am can I have another ballot?” She hands back the one she started, fills out a new one, and the kid starts applauding “yeah!”
A voting booth conversion? A juvenile act of extortion? Pretty bizarre incident. In any event, I’d say it was the kid who effectively cast that ballot. But why not? It’s about her future.
Let me start by saying that I am going to vote for Obama. I would vote for Obama even if I thought he would lose but I don’t. I am an Obama guy. I am on his team and my outlook is colored by my looking through that lens. For example, I saw a clip of Obama campaigning while wearing his nifty Air Force One flight jacket. Say, eight years ago, when I saw Bush wearing his Air Force One flight jacket, I was disgusted and, when I first saw Obama wearing one, I felt pretty much the same way. But my cognitive dissonance antibodies have set in and – now – I am OK with it. It becomes him.
With all the disclaimers above, I am willing to bet that Obama is going to win this election. Maybe not $10,000 but lunch if anybody actually feels confident enough to bet that Romney is going to win. We keep hearing that it is too close to call, but I think that is really just GOP PR and the media wanting to sell coverage. Two people – three if you count Colin Powell – who are smart and probably see the writing on the wall just came out for Obama: Mayor Bloomberg and Republican governor Chris Christie. Both would have been unlikely to have been so positive towards Obama if they thought he was going to lose.
The reason Powell, Bloomberg, Christie, and I think Obama is going to win is the Electoral College favors President Obama. Let’s start with the estimates from freedomslighthouse.net. (From the name, you might guess that this is a right leaning – misusing leaning in its most benign sense – organization, and you would be right.) They say that Obama has a safe lead in states producing 238 votes and Romney has a safe lead in states producing 191 votes and that agrees with what most other people say. That doesn’t mean that Obama will win for sure, but it does mean that he is closer to winning than Romney. Just like the Giants were closer to winning when they were leading the Tigers by two runs in the 7th inning (they weren’t guaranteed to win, but they did have a better chance of it).
To win, Obama needs 32 additional Electoral Votes and Romney would need 79 Electoral Votes. Of the states that are up for grabs, Obama is leading in seven: New Hampshire – 51.2% to 47.9 according to Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight1 – Wisconsin, Ohio @ 50.8% to 47.9, Virginia slightly @ 50.2% to 49.0, Colorado @ 50.2 to 48.7, New Mexico, and Nevada @ 51.4% to 47.5. Romney is leading in two: North Carolina @ 50.9% to 48.4 and Florida @ 49.9% to 49.5. Sure, it is possible for Obama to lose, but it is unlikely. This campaign looks very much like Obama’s primary campaign against Hillary in that they were not running a popularity contest, they are basing everything around getting enough Electoral Votes to win. Yes, they are pretty close in the popular vote, but to actually win the Presidency, Romney had a very steep and unlikely climb up until Sandy.
I think that Sandy iced it for Obama. For about four or five days, last week Romney – with no official position – was invisible and Obama started wearing – very visibly – his Commander and Chief Flight Jacket.
1. The Republican hate Nate Silver because he has been projecting Obama for most of the year, but he was only one Electoral Vote off in 2008. His methodology for Virginia is typical.
When we have a disaster, we are supposed to pull together. Of course, if the disaster is bungled, the people in power say Now is not the time to play politics and if it isn’t bungled, the people out of power say Now is not the time to play politics. The reality is that everybody wants to play politics when it serves them and doesn’t want to when it doesn’t. I am starting to think that – either way – a disaster, a national disaster, is the best time to talk politics. It is the best time to examine what the government did, what it should have done, and what the other guy would have done.
I have alot of problems with the Federal Government sticking its nose into local issues – like highway landscaping – and think that a Romney Administration would be closer to my position on that. But there are too many tradeoffs to for me to seriously consider Romney (starting with the Supreme Court). Another problem is that Romney says he would localize or, even, privatize Agencies like FEMA. FEMA is exactly the kind of agency the Federal Government should be running. A huge, national, disaster like Sandy requires Federal involvement. Not only involvement, but the Feds should be the lead agency.
A couple of days ago, I heard Governor Cuomo give a very smart mini-lecture on handling a disaster. He broke it down into several phases: the actual disaster, the immediate aftermath, the digging out aftermath – I don’t remember his, much better, description – and prevention of future, similar, disasters.
Obama and the Obama Administration has done a superb job of dealing with the actual disaster of Sandy, better than Bush, et al. Of course, Obama got off to a good start because he appointed a professional rather than some political hack. The guy he appointed, William Fugate, had been the head of Jeb Bush’s Florida Division of Emergency Management, to head FEMA ( in one of many unacknowledged bipartisan acts, by the way). This is a guy who believes in actual Emergency Management so the chances of him doing a good job are already pretty good. But the actual disaster is not – usually – the biggest problem.
Like Romney, Bush the Younger didn’t believe that FEMA had a real purpose – or, at least a purpose he believed in – so he appointed Michael Brown ” Heck of a Job, Brownie” to head the Agency. Of course FEMA didn’t perform in Katrina, it was set up not to perform. (In an ironic twist, Brownie has been critical of Obama, saying that he reacted too quickly.) I see it as a very legitimate question to ask How would a Romney Administration react to a disaster like Sandy? There is no reason that he would react as well as an Obama Administration.
Where the Bush Administration failed abysmally is in the second stage of Katrina. And from everything Romney has said – up until, maybe two days ago – he would be even worse. He seems to think that it is morally wrong to borrow money to dig out of a disaster (and that is the only place the money is going to come from). The second stage is just starting now and it will be interesting to see how Obama reacts but, so far, his reaction seems to be spot on. Cut the bureaucracy and get what people out to them. This is really the kind of leadership that Obama trained for as a community organizer and – watching him – he seems to be actually having fun. I expect he will excel.
Once the power is turned back on, the subways are pumped out, people have running water again, the hard part will start. The rebuilding. Paul Ryan has already said that we shouldn’t rebuild in the danger zones and I think – in some areas – he has a good point. That has been the collective attitude in a couple of towns that were ruined by floods in the mid-west. However, it is going to be very hard to walk away from New York, New York. This is an area where I trust Romney the least: it is going to be very expensive – requiring massive loans for infrastructure – and these are not his people (and while Romney has shown that he can be very generous when his people are involved, empathy for others does not seem to be a Romney characteristic). Because of Obama – and because New York is the center of the media world – I expect that rebuilding after Sandy will be quantitatively better than New Orleans and the Gulf Coast after Katrina but I would be surprised if we see New Jersey completely restored (and, maybe, we shouldn’t).
And, then, where do we go from here (there?). For me, that is the biggest worry. Our world climate is changing and nobody seems to really be willing to address it in a serious and meaningful way. I don’t mean just Obama or Romney, I mean all of us. That just seems so scary and so human.
Of all the endorsements I have seen this year, the New Yorker seems the most thoughtful (and, as is usual for the New Yorker, the longest). They both make the case for Obama and against Romney. If you can, I suggest you check it out.
The money shot for the case for Obama is: But the reëlection of a President who has been progressive, competent, rational, decent, and, at times, visionary is a serious matter. The President has achieved a run of ambitious legislative, social, and foreign-policy successes that relieved a large measure of the human suffering and national shame inflicted by the Bush Administration. Obama has renewed the honor of the office he holds.
And the case against Romney: these words from Roosevelt’s second Inaugural Address, etched in stone: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide for those who have too little.” Romney and the leaders of the contemporary G.O.P. would consider this a call to class warfare. Their effort to disenfranchise poor, black, Hispanic, and student voters in many states deepens the impression that Romney’s remarks about the “forty-seven per cent” were a matter not of “inelegant” expression, as he later protested, but of genuine conviction.
