Columnist.
It was the day before Thanksgiving, crisp and clear. I was giving the Mullmobile its quarterly treat: A professional car wash. At Andy's Car Wash in Alexandria, you drop your car off, then go inside to pay. A woman and a little girl -- about three-and-a-half -- were paying ahead of me. It was a cold day, so the little girl was bundled up in the way little girls are on a cold late-Autumn day. Ignoring the advice of The Lad, ("Dad, just because you CAN talk to everybody in the world, doesn't mean you HAVE to talk to everybody in the world.") I asked the woman what little girl's name was.
We know Romney was too conservative in the primaries and too moderate in the general. We know Romney didn't run enough ads in the Spring then ran too many ads in the Fall. We know Republicans depended too much on their turnout operation and too little on messaging. We know Republicans depended too much on messaging and too little on their turnout operation. We know the GOP and the Super PACs were too focused on fundraising and we know the Obama campaign raised more than enough money. We know ... well, you know what we know. We know Republicans lost the Presidency and did significantly worse in the U.S. Senate than anyone might have believed. But we also know that Republicans held their own in the U.S. House (losing only single-digit seats in the face of a really bad night); and actually gained a Governor to make the current total of Republican Governors a 30 out of the 50 available.
One of the great character-study movies of all time is the 1933 film Duck Soup starring the Marx Brothers. As President Rufus T. Firefly (played by Groucho) is interrogating a man named Chiolini (played by Chico) who is on trial for spying. There is this brief exchange as a General rushes in to announce that Sylvania, the country bordering Freedonia, is threatening to attack...
The United States Constitution provides for an indirect election of the President. That is, you didn't vote for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney last week; you voted for electors pledged to vote for one or the other. The 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (which superseded a large section of Article II, Section 1) suggests says that the ballots of the electors in the several states having marked their ballots for President and Vice President shall "transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate; -- the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted."
The election wasn't over for 48 hours before both sides started laying down their opening bids on dealing with what has become known as the "fiscal cliff." At its core, the "fiscal cliff" (and I'm going to stop putting it within quotes from here on) is the result of the Congress and the President (to use another phrase I wish I could excise from the political lexicon) "kicking the can down the road." Unwilling and/or unable to come to agreements on a number of issues, both sides have continued to offer really tough-sounding, but temporary solutions, which have more-or-less amounted to "We'll deal with that when we get there."
During the Q & A section of my speech to the Chamber group here last night, someone asked what I thought about the concept of a third party to counter the influence of the right wing of the Republican Party. If there were a true independent third party in the U.S. House and Senate of, say, 10 percent of the membership that would mean 43 Members in the House and 10 Senators. It is unlikely that either Republicans or Democrats would have enough votes to organize either Chamber without the buy-in of the independents.
Obama won. Not by a lot, but by more than enough. In the end it came down to the battleground states, and President Obama won most of them by slim, but decisive, margins.
The editors of the Washington Post, yesterday, published their closing editorial argument as to why people should vote for Barack Obama. Ok. That's not true. In fact, in the parlance of this campaign, "That's a *LIE!*" The editorial, titled, "Mitt Romney's Campaign Insults Voters" in the on-line version and "Contempt for Voters" in the print edition, was a 640 word essay on why Americans should *not* vote for Mitt Romney. That approach was, at a minimum, terribly defensive if not a sign of outright despair on the part of the hometown newspaper in a city that is about 92.5 percent Democrat, according to that same publication.
As we have discussed before, someone -- and I tried to find the source of the quote, but couldn't -- said that "four years ago Barack Obama was on a crusade; this year he's in a campaign." Obama won the crusade, but Mitt Romney will win this campaign. I know ... I know. The polls are close. The national polls are tied; the state polls tilt toward Barack Obama. I know all that. But, Romney will win.
For those of us of a certain age, the name "Sandy" has been connected with a comic strip character named "Little Orphan Annie." Annie, a plucky little girl who never aged much because she had been born on February 29, had a dog. The dog's name was "Sandy." All Sandy ever said was, "Arf!" With six days to go in the Longest-Election-Season-In-The-History-Of-The-World nothing gets in the way of politics. No wind, nor rain, nor flood, nor fire, nor gloom of night can stop the candidates and their staffs from looking for ways to continue campaigning even while appearing to -- no, that's not fair -- actually using the tools they have available to give help and solace to those hit hard by Hurricane Sandy.
*From Dnipropetrovsk, Ukarine* I've been here for two days preparing for, and actually observing the Ukrainian parliamentary elections. I was part of the International Observer Mission in that effort. During the day before I hopped on an airplane from Kiev to come down here we were briefed by various government and political leaders. One person in our group asked whether international observers could remain in a precinct to watch the counting process.
The answer to the question is: I'm here to be an official observer of the Ukrainian national elections on Sunday to select a new Parliament. I'll be back in the U.S. on Tuesday to unofficially observe our own elections. Speaking of our own elections ... Romney's bounce in the polls since the first debate remains stubbornly in place. According to the Real Clear Politics average of national polls, Romney has a lead of two percentage points in those polls that have been taken this week. Two percentage points, as we have been told over and over, is well with the margin of error (MoE) in every single poll. Still, as we have discussed before, given a choice you'd rather be ahead in a close race than behind.
The foreign policy debate was not given much chance of being a game changer. No one really thought that a talk about the future of US-Myanmar relations was going to move the needle very much. Incumbent Presidents are expected to know more about foreign policy than their challengers, but the challengers' challenge is to show that if they get the daily security briefing in the Oval Office they can handle the job. If that is a fair measure, then Mitt Romney won this debate.
Tonight's debate will center on foreign policy. The problem with foreign policy is that as President you just need so many of them. It's a big world. There are 193 members of the United Nations and 192 of them are not named The United States of America. Every one of those countries has problems. Some are problems with too many people earning too little money, like Haiti. Some are problems with too much money that they use to buy off their non-working population, like Saudi Arabia.
Here's what we know so far: The first debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney changed the direction of the campaign. In the two-plus weeks since that debate Obama's lead in national polls and nearly every battleground state poll has shrunk or Romney has pulled ahead. The second debate, which most observers believe Obama won on style points, has had no effect on the race whatsoever. At least so far.
Obama rebounded strongly in this debate. Romney was prepared and did as well as he did in the first one, but Obama's performance was so much better than last time, he gets the win. Mitt Romney got the first question (from a college student asking about the availability of a job after he graduates). He walked over to "Jeremy" and spoke directly to him. Barack Obama also walked to the student and used the answer to attack Romney on wanting to "bankrupt Detroit." Candy Crowley busted the rules right off the bat by asking a follow-up question -- what about short-term jobs -- which both men used as an excuse to get on each other.
This campaign feels like it has been going on since 1873. It hasn't but it feels that way and we are now down to 22 days to go; three weeks from tomorrow. For the past 12 days the political world has been marveling at the enormous impact -- however tenuous it might turn out to be -- that first debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney has had on this race.
Democrats have been stunned by the staying power of last week's debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. The other day Obama did a taped interview for the Tom Joyner radio show. In it he said he had been "too polite" toward Romney in their debate but we were not likely to see that next time. It seems like every cab in which I've ever ridden in Washington, DC had Diane Rehm on the radio. Since 1977 I've been working through the dial to find the "All Diane Rehm" station, but I've been unsuccessful.
The Twitterverse was all, well, a-twitter Monday afternoon when the Pew Research Center for The People & The Press released the result of its national poll that had been in the field post-debate. The poll showed that among likely voters, Mitt Romney was leading Barack Obama by four percentage points: 49-45. For the past 36 hours pundits, reporters, and analysts have been poring over the 39 page report, picking out the things that they have found most dramatic.
The pundiferous universe was acting as if the laws of political physics had been repealed as it tried to make sense of Barack Obama's abysmal performance in his debate with Mitt Romney Wednesday night. Why didn't Obama respond? Why didn't Obama mention the 47 percent? Or Bain Capital. Or that dog-on-the-roof-of-the-car thing? Why, at a minimum, didn't Obama challenge Romney on the facts?
