The Politics Thread

[Max]

I expected criticism regarding Joe Scarborough, because he is a Republican (yet one who is very respected by many Democrats). But, Mika Brzezinski concurred with his opinion, and she is a Democrat. The BBC journalist also agreed, and I doubt her beliefs align with the Republican party.

I really don't understand how anybody can solely blame the Republicans in Congress for Obama's failure to deliver on his promise of hope and change. The Democrats had lopsided majorities in both the House and the Senate during the first two years of his administration, and that party still controls the Senate.

The following left-leaning author at Bloomberg recognizes that many Congressional Republicans wanted Obama to fail but also pointed out that the president deserves blame by not pivoting to the center the way Bill Clinton did. He also accurately points out that racism has nothing to do with swing voters' dissatisfaction with the president.

http://www.bloomberg...-to-romney.html

Obama’s Blunder Was in Ceding Political Center to Romney

The third and final presidential debate did little to change the race between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, who are tied with just two weeks to go. Even so, this week’s inconsequential contest provides a key of sorts to understanding the election.

In the first debate -- which was consequential and then some -- Romney abruptly changed from the severely conservative Republican he’d presented to voters during the primaries to the reassuringly pragmatic moderate he’d seemed as governor of Massachusetts. It was an audacious move, and one that strains credulity, in two respects: for the sheer distance in ideology he had to walk back, and for the timing, because he left this second outrageous pivot so late in the campaign.

In the last debate, focused mainly on foreign policy, he moved further toward moderation. He struck a conciliatory tone and found little in what Obama said to disagree with, making the encounter in one sense a nonevent. He was cautious to a fault, careful to avoid seeming recklessly hawkish, allaying concerns that under his leadership the U.S. might blunder into another war. This peacemaking Romney couldn’t have won the Republican nomination. But he could very well win on Nov. 6.

The cipher to understanding this election is to ask, why didn’t Obama beat Romney to it? Why didn’t he deny his Republican opponent the middle ground of U.S. politics by seizing it himself?

Class War

At the outset, he was closer to the center than Romney was. And for Obama, this was far less of a stretch. Yet he’s fought a campaign aimed less at the middle of the electorate than at the Democratic Party’s base -- playing on class war and adopting as its overriding goal, at times almost its whole purpose, a tax increase on the rich.

If Obama should lose this election, many will say it was because the economy was weak and because the president is black. Actually, it will be because he fought it as a failed progressive rather than a successful centrist.

Certainly, the economy is a negative for the incumbent, but much less than generally supposed. Most voters understand all too well that the president inherited the worst recession since the 1930s, and that the recovery was going to be a long, hard haul. To be sure, they’re asking whether his policies are helping, and they are far from convinced. They’ve noticed his silence on where his economic policies go from here. But the mere fact that the economy is weak wasn’t fatal to Obama’s prospects.

As for race, the fact that Obama is black has been more an asset than a liability and it remains so. There’s racism in America, but there’s also an immense desire to overcome it. The voters swinging back to Romney aren’t racist, or they wouldn’t have supported Obama in 2008. Remember the joyous inauguration of 2009. The political center of the country was thrilled and proud to have elected a black president: an exceptionally talented man, and the best possible salve for the nation’s unhealed racial wounds.

Every voter who chose Obama in 2008 still wants him to succeed. But not all are convinced he can, and that’s partly because he has stopped trying to be the president he said he’d be. The need to fix Washington, the need for a bridge-building, post-partisan presidency was uppermost in centrist voters’ minds when they elected Obama, and he’d made that the core of his campaign. Washington is still broken -- more so than before -- and Obama is no longer even trying to mend it.

A fair response to this would be, can you blame him? After 2008, an increasingly radical Republican Party dedicated itself to ensuring Obama’s failure. It made compromise difficult and often impossible. On health-care reform and the fiscal stimulus of 2009 -- the signature achievements of Obama’s first term -- the president was forced to give ground and got nothing in return. The pattern repeated again and again. How can it be fair to criticize Obama for failing to build bridges?

Presidential Error

The president’s error wasn’t that he refused to compromise. It was that he compromised so reluctantly, denying himself ownership of his own policies and making every accomplishment seem like a defeat.

He should have boasted about his ability to get big, important things past an unyielding Republican Party. He should have boasted about the tax cuts in the fiscal stimulus, rather than allowing them to appear as if they were ground out of him as a concession to Republican priorities. (If he had, he might have won a bigger stimulus.) He should have explained why health-care reform without the so-called public option was a great success, pushing back against the view of many in his own party that this and other compromises rendered the effort largely pointless.

Obama could have been a strong centrist, which would have aroused even louder complaints from the Democratic left. Or he could have been a weak progressive, constantly on the retreat. He chose to be the latter. Policy-wise, the result might have been much the same: a stimulus with more tax cuts and less public investment than Democrats wanted and a health-care reform resting much more heavily on the existing private-insurance model than progressives would have liked. The crucial difference is that Obama the muscular centrist could have taken credit for these achievements -- which is what they are -- in a way that Obama the battered progressive has been unable to.

He would have been able to campaign on them, rather than leaving them unloved and unsold. He would have looked in charge rather than at the mercy of intransigent Republicans. He would have seemed his own man rather than an instrument of Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats. He would have been the president who never stopped trying to fix Washington. Above all, he would have been ideologically aligned with the swing voters who decide elections.

Midterm Setback

Many in his party would have despised him for it, just as they despised Bill Clinton -- whom they now revere -- for moving to the center after his midterm setback in 1994. Obama had his 1994 moment in the Democrats’ rout in the 2010 congressional elections. He carried on as though nothing had changed. If anything, he hardened the anticapitalist line around which his campaign for re-election was forming.

The Bowles-Simpson deficit-reduction commission -- his own initiative -- gave him another chance to occupy the center and take command of public opinion. Again he was cowed by howls of protest from progressives, and meekly looked away.

None of this would have mattered if he was running against Rick Santorum or some other hardline conservative. Suddenly, though, he’s running against a moderate.

Democrats are correct to say that Republicans in Congress have moved far to the right. They are also correct that the country has taken note and doesn’t like it. Somehow they failed to notice the obvious implication. This vacating of the center gave Obama a historic opportunity to broaden the appeal of his party -- over its activists’ hysterical objections, but so what? -- and lock in a second term. He blew it, and an election he should have won easily will go down to the wire.

(Clive Crook is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Edited October 25, 2012 by Max

[juppiter]

I think you misunderstand Max. It's not that Obama hasn't governed from the center, since he has (if he is sooo socialist where is the minimum wage increase and protectionism and collective farms and vast expansion of social security and nationalization of healthcare and oil and etc.) That article is simply stating that Romney positioned himself as a centrist in the DEBATE better than Obama did.

I think Romney is to the left of the mainstream Republican party and I would not consider his presidency such a potential disaster if it weren't for the far-right Republicans in the House whose voices I fear would win out in a Romney presidency.

Also reading the past page or so I love the liberal circle jerk that is SON. My other politics msg board is city-data.com and it's mostly conservative... it is fun being the minority but only to a point.

[marceline]

Mussolini is to the left of the mainstream Republican party

[DRW50]

I don't think you can put any value in the opinion of a Democratic talking head on any cable show. Mika is Scarborough's Alan Colmes. I have no idea why that man became prominent in the first place, given that his claim to fame is being a backbencher.

Reading that article about the Obama DVDs, you have to wonder at how much money is being burnt. If even a tenth of that went toward the economy, we'd be better off. People are apparently paying millions of dollars to ship out DVDs about Obama's mother being a porn actress.

[GoldenDogs]

Amen to that! Wales rocks!!

[juppiter]

To me the election is down to three states -- WI, NH, and VA. I'm confident that IA, NV, and OH are for Obama and that NC, CO, and FL are for Romney. And I never thought there were other swing states besides those 9.

[GoldenDogs]

Thank you, thank you, thank you Juppiter! I read some really wild, extreme leftist rants here that make my eyes pop out... Then I come across a post by Wales, Q-Fan... and now you... and I appreciate it. I remember being here posting exactly four years ago and this forum was actually more moderate than it appears to be today. Oh, there were so really huge arguments and partisan rants... but some of the posts I've seen recently, particulary the last couple of days, have been some of the most extreme stuff I've ever seen here.

But I admit I'd be bored at some Conservative Circle Jerk board. I don't want to discuss things with people I agree with... I want to engage in intelligent conversation with those I don't agree with and share ideas. Some of the coolest people I've chatted with on here aren't of the same political persuasion and I'm grateful and happy to have met them... :-) They know who they are...

[juppiter]

That is why I post here and at my other website. I get the liberal circle jerk here and the fight against the conservative circle jerk there. If there is a moderate msg board I haven't found it.

[quartermainefan]

How is it moderate to not see Senator Fake Rape and Senator God Rape for what they are: republicans? Is seeing what they are, the mainstream republican in 2012 somehow not moderate? I am not suspicious of them and I take them at their word when they espouse their views, the views that are accepted by the majority of republicans in their state. How does that make me not moderate? For that matter, how does it make me liberal and not conservative? Is there an inherently liberal position on religious rape I am not aware of? I don't even see how discussing them qualifies as a circle jerk. They are who they are, they say what they think, their republican constituents accept them and their positions enough to vote for them. How is seeing this in any way something only a liberal can do? I would have thought the criteria was just having eyes and ears. Is it liberal to remember that Senator Wide Stance was against gay rights? Better yet, is it not moderate to say all these people are republicans?

[DRW50]

It mostly depends on what the definition of "liberal" now is. Is it now liberal to believe that God doesn't want a woman to be raped? If so, then yes, I'm a liberal.

That's basically what this has come down to - it's not just some guy saying that a woman should not abort a rape pregnancy (which is bad enough, IMO), he's waxing nostalgic about the whole thing.

Edited October 25, 2012 by CarlD2

[Vee]

The most terrifying thing about Joe Scarborough these days is that compared to about 75% of the current Republican legislature and government, he is a compassionate moderate. He's a sane man. A partisan, and almost relentlessly wrong, but he has some sense. Most of the actual elected Republicans today do not, or have ceded it for political expediency - something John McCain's been doing since 2000 in the hope of being president, and now does seemingly out of sheer spite against Obama.

And while McCain sold his honor for his campaigns, he still had a set of core beliefs which he deeply felt and stood by in his campaign. George W. Bush, for all his catastrophic decisions, was the same. Even though he was a wrongheaded, arrogant fool, even as he drove this country into senseless war, he cared deeply for the men and women he sent to battle and wept for them. I don't believe Mitt Romney cares about any of that, or anything else any of the most arrogant of those men cared about. He just cares about closing a deal. I've never seen anyone so utterly amoral in my admittedly-limited political lifetime. This, too, is why all the Republican candidates in the last four years, to a man, despise Romney - he has no core. For all their horror, no one could say the neoconservative lobby did not truly believe what they believed about America or the world. I think Mitt Romney only believes in himself. That is unbelievably dangerous.

Fortunately, he's not going to win. The wind is now Obama's, as are the polls. I look forward to casting Mitt forever to what The Simpsons called "the land of wind and ghosts."

Edited October 25, 2012 by Vee

[DRW50]

I was surprised to see Ellen Degeneres, who does talk about gay rights but who usually isn't overtly political, call him "dangerous." I think that is probably my biggest fear about Romney, is I just think he will do anything. He changes positions two, three times a day. People used to tear Kerry apart for the same reason but Kerry at least just changed his mind once.

[Vee]

In other news, Colin Powell will be on CBS This Morning today, and looks set to endorse Obama again.

ETA: And yes he did!

Edited October 25, 2012 by Vee

[marceline]

Cue the crazy racism. Soon they'll be claiming Powell was born in Kenya too.

[Vee]

Speaking of Joe Scarborough, this morning Joe came to terms with some of the hard math (and I think he may be wrong about Virginia and Florida, to name a few). There isn't a YT upload yet, but it's here and the discussion really starts several minutes in (around 3:30).

Oh, and I was right about Virginia - this morning's Pew poll has Obama up 5 over Romney at 51%.

Edited October 25, 2012 by Vee