As he tours Sandy devastation with Chris Christie, swing state polls break for the president ..... With reliable polls in Ohio and Wisconsin Wednesday showing Obama with solid leads there, Romney has almost no path to victory on Tuesday. Polls today also showed him holding smaller leads in the swing states of Virginia, Florida and Nevada, and tied in North Carolina. .... White working class voters in both Ohio and Wisconsin are key to Obama’s strength there ..... Romney was going to focus on “cultural” issues – read racial issues – to court those white voters. Romney and Paul Ryan stepped away from the welfare lies after everyone from Bill Clinton to Newt Gingrich said there was no evidence for the claim. But there it is again, in ads going up in Ohio, Wisconsin, Colorado and Florida, as Romney tries to tap into traditional white taxpayer association between welfare and minorities. ...... Romney’s lies about the auto industry are arguably more brazen and baseless, and they’ve drawn unprecedented rebukes from officials at GM and Chrysler. But so far they’re not working either. Even as worried Ohio Chrysler employees sought reassurance that they’d keep their jobs, polls were showing that Ohio voters believe Obama cares more about them than Romney does. Almost half of white working class voters believe the economy is getting better, which helps account for why Obama is tied among those voters while he trails by up to 30 points with the same demographic in Florida and Virginia ...... the Obama team is sounding confident while Romney’s sounds desperate. ..... The criticism by Christie, Chrysler and GM is a welcome sign that Republicans and corporate leaders may learn to cooperate with the president so many of their colleagues disrespect and deride. It also tells me something else: those three titans think Romney is likely to lose, and they don’t need to pay him any deference or worry about working with him in January.
In a false show of confidence to dupe We The People the Romney campaign is saying it is moving now to previously blue states because, well, they claim they already have the previously swing states down. We The People are not falling for that, but that is another story.
When Mitt Romney lies about complex policy issues not everyone catches him right away. But small, concrete lies are hard to fly. And Mitt Romney has been caught. Romney lies, then when you point that out, he repeats the lies. Try apologizing, Mitt.
Apparently undeterred by the backlash over his false claim that Chrysler is shipping U.S. jobs overseas, Mitt Romney broadened his attack to include General Motors Tuesday. And General Motors was not happy about it. ...... Like the Chrysler television ad, the radio spot is extremely misleading. General Motors' U.S. employment did drop by 14,000 from 2008 to 2011, most of the losses came at the height of the recession in 2009. And those jobs were not moved to China...... Unsurprisingly, GM's reaction was swift and harsh: ..... "We've clearly entered some parallel universe during these last few days,” GM spokesman Greg Martin told the Detroit Free Press. “No amount of campaign politics at its cynical worst will diminish our record of creating jobs in the U.S. and repatriating profits back to this country.”...... Chrysler has similarly debunked Romney's claims. And both ads have been widely panned, with virtually no response from the Romney campaign.
Mitt Romney's entire gameplan of crossing 270 electoral votes goes through Ohio. And Ohio is solid Obama. I suggest Mitt Romney expand his litany of lies instead of "expanding" into deep blue states. Maybe maybe it will work. But then when you cry wolf just one more time ... you can't fool all the people all the time.
That first Obama debate performance? The poor guy was flummoxed by Mitt Romney's blatant lies. When it is night time Mitt Romney says it is day time. How do you react? You get flummoxed. You are in disbelief. There is a live audience of tens of millions.
Mitt Romney's need to "expand the map" is looking increasingly important this morning, as a new CBS/New York Times/Quinnipiac poll paints a picture that has the Republican nominee's chances there slipping away with less than a week until the election...... Romney trails President Barack Obama overall, 50-45, in the poll, continuing the president's stubborn advantage in the swing state. The set of CBS/NYT/Quinnipiac swing-state polls also finds Obama leading by 2 points in Virginia and by a single point in Florida. Though the numbers in the other two swing states have dropped in the past month, the state of the race in Ohio looks exactly the same........ an overwhelming majority of Ohio voters think the economy is improving....... By a 40-30 split, Ohio's voters believe the nation's economy is getting better. The state numbers show an even bigger gap — 52 percent of voters think the economy is getting better, compared with just 17 percent who say it is getting worse...... Forty-one percent of these Ohio voters who say their economy is improving believe that Obama deserves a lot of credit for it. That contributes to Obama's lead over Romney in trust on handling the economy...... Sixty percent of Ohio voters said Obama identifies with and cares about their problems. Only 44 percent said the same about Romney.
Drudge, a close personal friend of Mitt Romney's campaign manager Matt Rhoades, has hyped up several exclusive news stories during the 2012 campaign cycle
Chrysler even sought to clarify this in a blog post last week: ... "Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China. It’s simply reviewing the opportunities to return Jeep output to China for the world’s largest auto market. U.S. Jeep assembly lines will continue to stay in operation. A careful and unbiased reading of the Bloomberg take would have saved unnecessary fantasies and extravagant comments." ... But despite the fact that Romney's claim was demonstrably wrong, his campaign is doubling down in the new ad, which went on air this weekend in Ohio. .... "Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy, and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China," the ad says. "Mitt Romney will fight for every American job." ..... The ad appears to be a last-ditch effort to reverse Obama's key advantage in Ohio, a must-win swing state where 1 in 8 voters are employed by the auto sector. Romney, who trails by an average of 2 points in Ohio, has taken a big hit in the state for his criticism of the Obama administration's auto bailout. ...... Ken Lortz, a United Auto Workers leader in Toledo, said that Romney's ad had only upset Ohioans "who know better.” .... "We knew he wasn’t on our side when the economy and the industry was on the brink," Lortz said "But the fact that he would lie to our faces and try to deceive us is just too much."
Mitt Romney approves this message, of course he does.
President Barack Obama's lead has expanded to 8 points in a new Marquette Law School poll of swing-state Wisconsin, a 7-point swing from just two weeks ago..... He trailed in three new polls of Virginia, Florida and Ohio ..... In the Marquette poll, Obama's advantage has grown to 51-43 as the campaign hits its final week. Obama's standing improved 2 points from the school's last poll, while Romney's fell a significant 5 points. The poll gives Obama a 4-point Real Clear Politics average lead in the state in polls taken over the past two weeks. ...... In another state, Obama holds a big early-voting advantage. He wins the early vote 56-36 thus far — significant, as 10 percent of the 1,243 likely voters surveyed said they had voted....... Along with the Ohio results, the Wisconsin poll presents a dim picture for Romney's path to 270 electoral votes next week. Obama's path revolves around keeping Ohio, Wisconsin and one of Iowa or Nevada in his column. And in all of those states, Obama currently holds leads in the RCP averages of the states.
I like to meet my politicians at the center. I have compassion for Democrats who begin on the left in primary season and then move more towards the center once nominated. I am also understanding of Republicans who begin on the right and then move to the center.
But not the Romney way. The guy never moved to the center. A move to the center is the Bill Clinton way. Clinton had been presenting himself as a New Democrat long before the primaries began. He was a centrist who moved just a little bit to the left for primary season then went back to where he always had been: at the center. He knew he needed to get power to be able to help the poor. If bringing down poverty is not left, what is? So he never really abandoned the left.
Romney never restructured his party. He has never fought fights with the irrational right. He did not move to the center. He does not have a centrist platform. He is just plain lying.
I supported Obama because I judged him to have a keen analytical mind, grasping both the possibilities and the limits of activist government, and possessed of excellent communicative talents. I thought he would nudge government policy in an incrementally better direction. I consider his presidency an overwhelming success. ........ Obama’s résumé of accomplishments is broad and deep, running the gamut from economic to social to foreign policy. The general thrust of his reforms, especially in economic policy, has been a combination of politically radical and ideologically moderate. The combination has confused liberals into thinking of Obamaism as a series of sad half-measures, and conservatives to deem it socialism, but the truth is neither. Obama’s agenda has generally hewed to the consensus of mainstream economists and policy experts. What makes the agenda radical is that, historically, vast realms of policy had been shaped by special interests for their own benefit. Plans to rationalize those things, to write laws that make sense, molder on think-tank shelves for years, even generations. They are often boring. But then Obama, in a frenetic burst of activity, made many of them happen all at once. .......... It is noteworthy that four of the best decisions that Obama made during his presidency ran against the advice of much of his own administration. ....... On Libya, Obama’s staff presented him with options either to posture ineffectually or do nothing; he alone forced them to draw up an option that would prevent a massacre. And Obama overruled some cautious advisers and decided to kill Osama bin Laden. ............ The latter three decisions are all highly popular now, but all of them carried the risk of inflicting a mortal political wound, like Bill Clinton’s health-care failure and Jimmy Carter’s attempted raid into Iran. (George W. Bush, presented with a similar option, did not strike bin Laden.) In making these calls, Obama displayed judgment and nerve. ............. the pervasive disillusionment felt by Obama’s supporters. It is a sentiment that has shadowed every Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt, and even Roosevelt provoked long bouts of agony and disillusionment among his supporters. ..... Obama can boast a record of accomplishment that bests any president since Roosevelt, and has fewer demerits on his record than any of them, including Roosevelt. The only president that comes close in gross positive accomplishment is Lyndon Johnson, whose successes were overwhelmed by his failures to such a degree that he abandoned his reelection campaign. ........ September 14, 2008, when the U.S. financial system imploded. ... Obama managed to stabilize the financial system and, through the stimulus, avert a total collapse in consumer demand. ...... Voters reward or punish incumbents based on the weather or the success of local sports teams. ...... In 2004, Romney dismissed any attempt to blame George W. Bush for the decline of jobs under his watch as “poppycock.” ....... the Republicans' leadership in Congress grasped early on that its path to returning to power required Obama to fail, and that they could help bring this about by denying his initiatives any support ......... What can be said without equivocation is that Obama has proven himself morally, intellectually, temperamentally, and strategically. In my lifetime, or my parents’, he is easily the best president.
The different iterations of his career differ so wildly, yet comport so perfectly with his political ambitions of the moment, that it is simply impossible to separate his panders from his actual beliefs, the means from the ends. ....... what Romney believes in above all is himself ...... when his campaign appeared hopeless, Romney approaches politics like a business deal: “Just do and say what you need to do to get the deal done, and then when it’s done, do what you know actually needs to be done to make the company a success.” ...... Romney truly believes in his own abilities ... He is a highly intelligent, accomplished individual. ...... that, once in office, he will craft sensible and data-driven, and perhaps even bipartisan, solutions to our problems — surely accounts for his political resurrection ....... a vote for Romney is a vote for his party ..... The party has almost no capacity to respond to the conditions and problems that actually exist in the world. ...... In the face of a consensus for short-term fiscal stimulus, they have turned back to ancient Austrian doctrines and urged immediate spending cuts. In the face of rising global temperatures and a hardening scientific consensus on the role of carbon emissions, their energy plan is to dig up and burn every last molecule of coal and oil as rapidly as possible. ....... Ryan’s frequently proclaimed belief that society is divided between “makers” and “takers.” It also informed Romney’s infamous diatribe against the lazy, freeloading 47 percenters. It is a grotesque, cruel, and disqualifying ethical framework for governing. ...... Both his fealty to his party and his belief in his own abilities point in the same direction: the entitlement of the superrich to govern the country.
Obama’s lead in the electoral college is persistent, but rests on very narrow advantages. ...... the polls miss the impact both of Reid’s turnout operation and the strength of the Latino vote. (Most polls don’t ask questions in Spanish, and thus miss the Spanish-speaking vote, which is expanding in size.) ...... their leaks about internal polling and the electoral map are a cultivated plan to project a false optimism.
Romney is carefully attempting to project an atmosphere of momentum, in the hopes of winning positive media coverage and, thus, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. .... Last week, for instance, Romney’s campaign blared out the news that it was pulling resources out of North Carolina. The battleground was shifting! Romney on the offensive! On closer inspection, it turned out that Romney was shifting exactly one staffer. ....... 2000 .. Bush even spent the final days stumping in California, supposedly because he was so sure of victory he wanted an icing-on-the-cake win in a deep blue state. ........ Adding to his base of uncontested states, Nevada, Ohio, and Wisconsin would give Obama 271 electoral votes. According to the current polling averages compiled at fivethirtyeight.com, Obama leads Nevada by 3.5 percent, Ohio by 2.9 percent, and Wisconsin by 4 percent. Should any of those fail, Virginia and Colorado are nearly dead even. ....... he is leading, his lead is not declining, and the widespread perception that Romney is pulling ahead is Romney’s campaign suckering the press corps with a confidence game.
For the slave under French rule in Haiti — then Saint-Domingue — in the 17th and 18th centuries, life was brutal: hunger, extreme overwork and cruel discipline were the rule. Slaves often could not consume enough calories to allow for normal rates of reproduction; what children they did have might easily starve.
Republican Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey normally isn't effusive about President Obama. .... The two politicians will tour storm damage together on Wednesday afternoon..... Obama will join Christie to talk to New Jersey residents affected by the superstorm and to thank first responders.
