Tag Archives: Barack Obama

It needed to be said

Politics, , , , , , , ,

The New York Times went there last night:

Most Americans have never heard of the National Response Coordination Center, but they’re lucky it exists on days of lethal winds and flood tides. The center is the war room of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where officials gather to decide where rescuers should go, where drinking water should be shipped, and how to assist hospitals that have to evacuate.

Disaster coordination is one of the most vital functions of “big government,” which is why Mitt Romney wants to eliminate it. At a Republican primary debate last year, Mr. Romney was asked whether emergency management was a function that should be returned to the states. He not only agreed, he went further.

“Absolutely,” he said. “Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.” Mr. Romney not only believes that states acting independently can handle the response to a vast East Coast storm better than Washington, but that profit-making companies can do an even better job. He said it was “immoral” for the federal government to do all these things if it means increasing the debt.

It’s an absurd notion, but it’s fully in line with decades of Republican resistance to federal emergency planning. FEMA, created by President Jimmy Carter, was elevated to cabinet rank in the Bill Clinton administration, but was then demoted by President George W. Bush, who neglected it, subsumed it into the Department of Homeland Security, and placed it in the control of political hacks. The disaster of Hurricane Katrina was just waiting to happen.

The agency was put back in working order by President Obama, but ideology still blinds Republicans to its value. Many don’t like the idea of free aid for poor people, or they think people should pay for their bad decisions, which this week includes living on the East Coast.

The Washington Post went more in-depth to compare the two presidential candidates’ differing views on FEMA:

“Governor Romney believes that states should be in charge of emergency management in responding to storms and other natural disasters in their jurisdictions,” said campaign spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg. “As the first responders, states are in the best position to aid affected individuals and communities and to direct resources and assistance to where they are needed most. This includes help from the federal government and FEMA.”

But this is exactly how the system currently works: Local and state officials respond to disasters and make requests of the federal government for additional supplies or money only when needed. Reforms enacted since Hurricane Katrina permit governors to make requests in advance to ensure that federal officials are on the ground to assist with initial damage assessments and more quickly report back to Washington for help.

For example, Obama has signed at least nine federal emergency disaster declarations in the past 24 hours at the request of state governors, directing FEMA to deploy more resources in anticipation of significant recovery efforts. He canceled campaign stops for Monday and Tuesday to return to the White House to oversee the federal government’s evolving storm response…

Jim Mullen, director of the Washington State Emergency Management Division and president of the National Emergency Management Association, said Obama’s legacy at FEMA has been restoring “strong professional emergency managers who can attract other emergency management professionals and support the ones already there and make certain that on this, at least, we should all be willing to put everything else aside and do what’s necessary for our country.”

Nate Silver vs. the Mittmentum Mountaineers

Media, Politics, , , , , , , ,

As Election Day approaches and the nation continues to whip itself into a collective frenzy, there sometimes seems to be only one guy in all of our national media who hasn’t succumbed to the wild swing of emotions that has captured everyone else.

Nate Silver, of the New York Times‘ FiveThirtyEight blog, has been posting daily with updates from swing-state polls. And even while most of the media have gleefully jumped aboard the “momentum is shifting to Mitt Romney” train, Silver has calmly continued to insist on using real data, instead of relying on phantasmic predilections of victory based on rally turnouts in random Ohio towns. This latter course is essentially what national campaign reporters, always desperate for a more sensational story, have been doing, and it’s quite possible that the collective content of their coverage actually will help make the race closer. But if that happens, it will be due, ironically enough, to their own misreading (or woeful ignorance) of existing polls, not because they were right in the first place.

According to Silver, as of yesterday Barack Obama was leading in Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, was leading in Florida and North Carolina. If the races end up exactly that way in the end (see interactive map here), Obama will win with 303 electoral votes to Mitt Romney’s 235, easily surpassing the requisite 270 to win reelection. In fact, Obama could even lose the three additional states in which Nate Silver’s model gives him the smallest leads: Colorado (58% probability of winning), Virginia (60%), and New Hampshire (70%). (Remember, these figures represent the likelihood that Obama will win these states, not the percentage he’s receiving in head-to-head polls. Example: Obama is expected to win 58% of the actual vote in Massachusetts, but Silver estimates his probability of winning the state at 100% because there is virtually no possibility that the polls will shift significantly enough before the election to cause him to lose there.) In other words, even if Romney took those three states — Colorado, Virginia, and New Hampshire — as well as Florida and North Carolina, the final electoral vote count would nevertheless give 277 to Obama and 261 to Romney, thereby granting the president a second term. The media may be intent on creating a wild photo-finish, but Silver’s analysis suggests Obama’s still in a fairly good spot.

Related articles

Mittmentum’s got it backwards

Media, Politics, , , , , , ,

Brendan Nyhan at the Columbia Journalism Review gets it right where most of the presidential campaign reporters have not:

The notion that Romney still had “momentum” weeks after his early October gains in the polls has now been debunkedbynumerouscommentatorsandacademics. And while that pushback is increasingly reflected in campaign-trail accounts, it is worth taking a closer look at why coverage of Romney’s “momentum” went wrong and what it tells us about the weaknesses of campaign journalism.

First, few reporters are knowledgeable about statistics or quantitative analysis. It is admittedly difficult to parse all the polls that are released at the national and state levels, but that’s why reporters should draw on the high-quality polling aggregation models being updated daily by Stanford’s Simon Jackman at HuffPost Pollster and Emory’s Drew Linzer at Votamatic. Relying on the best polling averages is especially important given the human tendency to find patterns consistent with our expectations, which may lead journalists to pay attention to—and cover—those survey results that are consistent with the Romney “momentum” narrative.

Likewise, journalists may be misled by the analogy to momentum during primary campaigns. As we saw during the Republican nomination contest, preferences among candidates can swing dramatically as voters seek to avoid wasting their vote by shifting to the candidate who seems most competitive. But the logic of strategic voting is not relevant to general elections that are dominated by the two major parties. In these cases, “momentum” is a largely meaningless term. Events like conventions and debates can cause brief movements in the polls, but the public’s preferences tend to stabilize relatively quickly after such shifts, which may even fade over time rather than growing in the sense that “momentum” implies.

A third factor is the role of incentives. The New Republic’s Alec MacGillis antagonizedseveral of his colleagues in the political press with a column attributing what he considered the exaggerated coverage of Romney’s “trajectory” (i.e., momentum) to the media’s desire for a compelling narrative. The media bias debate has taught us that arguments over journalists’ conscious intentions are unproductive, but professional and commercial incentives do exist for journalists to emphasize the drama of a race. By whatever conscious or unconscious means, these may increase journalists’ susceptibility to a “momentum” narrative despite its tenuous basis in fact.

Finally, there’s the way that journalists cover the horse race. Traditionally, campaign reporters attend campaign events and seek to infer which campaign is winning, which is losing, and why. (Dickerson’s case that “Romney is peaking at the right time,” which acknowledges the tie in the polls, is based on enthusiastic crowds at his rallies.) Even though Obama remains in a stronger position in the Electoral College, his post-Oct. 3 strategy looks to journalists like the approach of a losing campaign, whereas Romney and his campaign aides are not just trying to convince reporters that they are surging but acting like it. When these campaign optics seem not to line up with the publicly available numbers, journalists too often discount the data, assuming that the campaigns must know something from their private polling that the media doesn’t.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the alert.

In a shocker, the New York Times shows its hand: Obama for President

Media, Politics, , , , ,

This endorsement couldn’t be less surprising:

Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, has gotten this far with a guile that allows him to say whatever he thinks an audience wants to hear. But he has tied himself to the ultraconservative forces that control the Republican Party and embraced their policies, including reckless budget cuts and 30-year-old, discredited trickle-down ideas. Voters may still be confused about Mr. Romney’s true identity, but they know the Republican Party, and a Romney administration would reflect its agenda. Mr. Romney’s choice of Representative Paul Ryan as his running mate says volumes about that.

We have criticized individual policy choices that Mr. Obama has made over the last four years, and have been impatient with his unwillingness to throw himself into the political fight. But he has shaken off the hesitancy that cost him the first debate, and he approaches the election clearly ready for the partisan battles that would follow his victory.

We are confident he would challenge the Republicans in the “fiscal cliff” battle even if it meant calling their bluff, letting the Bush tax cuts expire and forcing them to confront the budget sequester they created. Electing Mr. Romney would eliminate any hope of deficit reduction that included increased revenues.

In the poisonous atmosphere of this campaign, it may be easy to overlook Mr. Obama’s many important achievements, including carrying out the economic stimulus, saving the auto industry, improving fuel efficiency standards, and making two very fine Supreme Court appointments.

An election nightmare approacheth?

Politics, , , , ,

John Heilemann thinks there’s a decent chance we may be headed for some major turbulence after November 6th. He presents four possible situations in which the closing of the polls does not end the election. His fourth (and one that has been gaining traction, mostly by media types who seem to be secretly wishing it):

4. The Tie-Goes-to-the-Romney Scenario

Now we come to the most nightmarish possibility of all: Obama ekes out a popular-vote victory but he and Romney are deadlocked, 269-269, in terms of electoral votes. Sounds crazy, right? Yeah, of course, but all it would require is the following (entirely credible) chain of results: Romney wins the southern battleground trio and Ohio, Obama holds on to Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, and Wisconsin but loses in New Hampshire. What would happen then? The election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, where the Constitution ordains that every state receive one vote as determined by the party makeup of its congressional delegation. Today, that would likely mean 32 Republican votes and 18 Democratic ones, a composition unlikely to change on November 6—and hence, voilà, President Romney.

To be crystalline, this would not be a nightmare because Romney would prevail. It would be a nightmare because he’d prevail in opposition to the popular vote and outside of the Electoral College—through an unprecedented process in which Idaho and Wyoming would have a weight equal to New York and California. For millions of Americans, and not just partisan extremists, it would call into question our entire system of selecting the dude in charge, and make the U.S. look like a superrich banana republic around the world. To be honest, though, it would only be barely worse than Scenarios 1, 2, and 3 in terms of rending the nation asunder. Which is why, on Election Night, you won’t find me rooting for either candidate but for clarity: a solid, sustainable victory for Obama or Romney in the popular and electoral votes—52-48, say, and north of 300 EVs to … whomever.

Which I know is probably a fantasy, but, hey, a boy can dream.

The most bizarre part of this possibility is the fact that Joe Biden would then be selected by the (almost certainly) Democratic-majority Senate to the vice presidency, creating a split executive branch. Even stranger still, unless I’m misreading the Twelfth Amendment, the appointment of both the president and the vice president must take place with a “quorum” of two-thirds of the states present and voting (but only a simple majority vote by those present is required for the election to become official). But if the state of the nation, following such a polarizing Election Day result, is truly as explosive as Heilemann fears, doesn’t that mean there would be a significant danger that the representatives of Democratic states would all refuse to show up en masse, thus just barely denying the likely 32 Republican states from establishing a quorum and, therefore, electing a president? What then?

The Obama I remember

Media, Politics, , , , , ,

It’s the same one Andrew Sullivan remembers (in response to a Peggy Noonan column blaming the president for the rabid partisanship that characterizes Washington today):

Funny how the first group of non-pols that Obama sat down with were leading conservative writers, like Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer (the liberals came second); that he asked Rick Warren to give the invocation at his Inauguration; that his stimulus was a third tax cuts (the only big tax cuts Republicans have ever voted against in my memory); that his healthcare reform was not single-payer, but one modeled on Mitt Romney’s moderate version in Massachusetts; that he has given Israel more military and technological support than any previous president; that his foreign policy is now praised by his opponent; that he killed bin Laden; and gave a speech urging freedom in the Arab world in his first few months, and that popular democratic revolutions broke out in Iran, Egypt, Tunisia and Libya on his watch. Funny also how one of the first things Obama did was to extend the Bush tax cuts – such an obvious partisan move designed to shut Republican ideas out of his agenda…

More to the point, the set of actions I have outlined above could quite easily have been George W. Bush’s agenda (or David Cameron’s, if he were on the right of his own party). There was plenty of compromise by Obama from the beginning, both symbolically and substantively. But a Republican decision was made that, even in the worst recession since the 1930s (whose impact on unemployment was devastating) not a single Republican House vote would go for the stimulus. It shocked me at the time, coming so soon after such a big election. I was naive enough to think that an emergency action that prevented a second Great Depression was something the opposition party might have supported, after losing an election badly to a newly elected president in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. I naively believed that just as a group of Democrats had supported Ronald Reagan’s massive tax cut because they thought he had a mandate for one, a group of House Republicans might put country before party and give the man who ran on bipartisanship a chance.

Instead, they set out from Day One to destroy him, because they knew that if his moderation and modern cultural identity succeeded, their reactionary radicalism would be sidelined for good. And Rove’s method is always to see what your party’s own worst flaw is among the public and, with a straight face, accuse your opponent of it.

You know what we’re fighting in this election? That cumulative, snow-balling, post-modern, cynical faction of deceit and partisan amnesia. If we are to get past the Cold Civil War we are in, the defeat of the rigidly ideological and theiological GOP is vital.

Amen, brother. Obama’s greatest mistake was to harbor any illusions whatsoever that the Republican Party was even remotely interested in governing the country like a responsible group of elected representatives.

The Onion gets inside Obama’s head

Humor, Politics, , ,

On how he’ll react if he loses the election:

The question is: Do I even deserve to live if I can’t beat Mitt Romney? And I don’t think I do, really. That’s why I’ll more than likely be packing a little gun with me on election night. Because the sooner I can end it all, the less pain I’ll feel.

I mean, wouldn’t you kill yourself if the U.S. population felt that Mitt Romney—a man who basically wrote off half the American population as entitled victims incapable of taking care of themselves—was a more viable leader than you? Wouldn’t you take your own life if a massive segment of the citizenry basically said, “You know what, you ended the war in Iraq, you passed health care reform, you saved the auto industry, you repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, you had 32 straight months of job creation, and you killed Osama bin Laden, but sorry, I’m going with Romney”?

Of course you would. Just reading that sentence makes me want to reach for my pen right now and jab myself in the throat over and over and over again. Hell, I considered killing myself last week when Colorado and Virginia suddenly became a toss up. The first African-American president in the history of the United States loses his reelection bid to none other than…Mitt Romney. Mitt fucking Romney. The only way I could look at myself in the mirror if that happened would be if there were a cocked shotgun lodged in my mouth.

I hope you don’t think I’m overreacting. In fact, I think my attitude is just about right. Mitt Romney spent the past year blaming me for setting a withdrawal date for our troops to leave Afghanistan, but then in our last debate he not only set a withdrawal date himself, but picked one that was identical to mine—2014. Nobody seems to give a fuck about that. And that must mean nobody really gives a fuck about me. It’s like I’m living in the goddamn Twilight Zone and nothing I’ve done matters at all. Look, a world in which people believe Mitt Romney is a better communicator than me is a world I don’t want to live in. So that’s why I’ll either hang myself in the Lincoln Bedroom or slit my wrists right there in the middle of the Oval Office. I haven’t decided which yet.

Related articles

Welcome to the National Review. Please check your sense of irony at the door.

Humor, Media, Politics, , , , , , , ,

How this piece ever made its way to publication is a question for which there is no possible good answer. Now, brought to you by the “You Completely, Deliberately, and Entirely Unconvincingly Missed the Point” Department:

President Obama might want to drop his attacks on Mitt Romney’s “Romnesia.” During Monday’s foreign-policy debate, Obama sarcastically informed the governor about “these things called aircraft carriers” and “ships that go underwater.” For one, voters in Norfolk, Va., and Groton, Conn., might tell the president that ships that “go underwater” are sunk, but boats that go underwater are called submarines.

But the president’s condescending dismissal of criticism about defense budget cuts — noting that today’s military has “fewer horses and bayonets” — also was a gaffe. Land combat soldiers and Marines train with bayonets and still use them in battle when other weapons fail. What’s more, perhaps it was a case of “Obamnesia” that accounts for the president’s failure to remember the indispensible role that horses played in the early days of war in Afghanistan.

Somehow President Obama forgot that on November 11, 2011, Vice President Joe Biden was present at the unveiling of the magnificent 16-foot Horse Soldier Memorial in New York City. During the 2011 Veterans Day parade, members of the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) marched down New York’s Fifth Avenue toward a dedication ceremony that was made possible by donors who had raised $750,000.

Oh, it goes on. And on.

Efraim Halevy: The GOP is no friend to Israel

Politics, , , , ,

In the pages of the New York Times, the former director of the Mossad and national security adviser writes:

Despite the Republican Party’s shrill campaign rhetoric on Israel, no Democratic president has ever strong-armed Israel on any key national security issue. In the 1956 Suez Crisis, it was a Republican, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who joined the Soviet Union in forcing Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion, to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula after a joint Israeli-British-French attack on Egypt.

In 1991, when Iraqi Scud missiles rained down on Tel Aviv, the administration of the first President Bush urged Israel not to strike back so as to preserve the coalition of Arab states fighting Iraq. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir resisted his security chiefs’ recommendation to retaliate and bowed to American demands as his citizens reached for their gas masks.

After the war, Mr. Shamir agreed to go to Madrid for a Middle East peace conference set up by Secretary of State James A. Baker III. Fearful that Mr. Shamir would be intransigent at the negotiating table, the White House pressured him by withholding $10 billion in loan guarantees to Israel, causing us serious economic problems. The eventual result was Mr. Shamir’s political downfall. The man who had saved Mr. Bush’s grand coalition against Saddam Hussein in 1991 was “thrown under the bus.”

In all of these instances, a Republican White House acted in a cold and determined manner, with no regard for Israel’s national pride, strategic interests or sensitivities. That’s food for thought in October 2012.

On a related note, Monday’s debate section on Israel was an embarrassment to both candidates and the United States. No one’s best interests are served by repeating Likud Party propaganda for 15 minutes.