Poignant post-election pool report

From: Parsons, Christi [@latimes.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2012 01:52 PM
To
Subject: Pool 2 (potus)
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One of the people standing on the street corner in Kenwood, looking over the barricades toward the Obama house, is TyRon Turner, who traveled here from Inglewood, Calif., to attend the victory party.

First thing this morning, he said, he woke up and decided he wanted to applaud the president personally, if only as he passes by in a motorcade.

But as he stood on the sidewalk in a sweatshirt and blue knit cap, the small business owner said he couldn???t stop thinking about the challenges ahead.

The divisions in the country were so evident on television on election night, he said, as cameras panned the saddened faces of Romney supporters and the jubilant ones around him at McCormick Place.

The crowd shots at the Romney party were disproportionately white, he noticed, while the Obama party reflected the racial coalition that won the president???s reelection.

???We were all hugging each other, black and white,??? Turner said. ???I said to someone, ???Look at all the different races in this room.??? We were all together as Americans, as we should be. This is what America looks like.???

Obama could lead the country to a new conversation about the polarization, Turner said, but he can???t do it alone. Republican leaders have to be a part of it, too, he said.

???Both sides have to give up something,??? said Turner, a small business owner. ???We have to clear the slate. Start over.???

–Christi Parsons

Another Nixon and Southern Strategy reference

From The Guardian:

The tension between the projection of a modern, inclusive, tolerant party and the reality of a sizeable racially intolerant element within its base pining for the restoration of white privilege is neither new nor accidental. Indeed, it in no small part explains the trajectory of the Republican party for almost the last??half century. In his diary, Richard Nixon's chief-of-staff, Bob Haldeman, described how his boss spelled out the racial contours of a new electoral game-plan to win southern and suburban whites over to the Republican party in the wake of the civil rights era. "You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks," Nixon told him. "The key is to devise a system that recognises that while not appearing to."

This could be the final hurrah for what became known as Nixon's southern strategy in what is shaping up to be the most racially polarised election ever. Black support for the Republican party literally cannot get any lower.

Updated Electoral Map prediction

If Obama winds up winning, June will certainly be remembered as the nadir of his campaign.

But a Romney win is already being baked into the narrative. The press is already shrugging off Obama, and the public is being reminded daily that the economy still sucks.

Here’s my prediction (via 270towin.com).

Colin Powell talks sense on gay marriage … and more

I don’t agree with everything he says, but this interview is worth the watch. It certainly changed my views about Powell a bit …

On whether he plans to endorse President Obama again this year:

I’m just a private citizen. I’m under no obligation to make an endorsement just because I’m on a book tour. So, as I have always said in every election, I like to watch the candidates, but not only the candidates, I want to see what policies they’re liable to implement, what the platform’s going to be. I want to see what the whole ticket’s going to look like. So I will wike my time as a citizen to decide what I’m going to do and who I’m going to vote for.

On what he hoped Obama would do in office:

I wish he had closed Guantanamo. Once he asked congress if he could close Guantanamo, they jus tstopped it because they had to provide funding. I think he could have done it without going to congress. … Guantanamo has been a problem for us for all these years. …

Frankly, I would have like to see the unemployment rate go down much more. I think it has to go down much more by the electio nor he may be in difficulty … he has to focus on the economy and get the jobless rate down because that’s what the American people expect.

On Romney’s comments a few months ago about Russia being America’s top rival:

I think he needs to think through these issues a little more thoroughly before he makes statements like that. I know Mr. Romney. I’ve known him for many, many years, and I think he’s a very excellent individual. I’m sure he means the best for America.

On whether Romney’s religion will affect the election, given Mormonism’s historical treatment of blacks:

No, I don’t think so. The man stands on his own. he is a man of faith. His faith is somewhere different than the faith of other Americans, but I don’t see why his Mormonism should be in the least bit a problem for him.
…
The fact of the matter is, I know Mitt very well. I know what his views are with respect to African Americans, other minorities, and I think he is a person who believes in diversity and there is no discrimination in his body, in his soul.

On gay marriage:

In my view, right now, it’s a state issue. And different parts of the country have very, very different views. But my own personal view is that, after thinking about it a great deal and watching the progress we have made over the years — I know so many gay and lesbian friends who have committed relationships, who have children and who have been together for 40 and 50 years — and I don’t know why the legal basis of that relationship should not be consummated with a marriage.

It has nothing to do with religion. If a church or some other group or some denomination chooses not to provide a sacrament for that or solemnize it in a religious ceremony, that’s their choice. But to deny that opportunity for a legal relationship with two people under the laws of the state or the laws of the country, I think is no longer appropriate and gay marriage should be accepted.

Now, each state is going to have to work their way through this, and I think if you come back a generation from now, you will find that this has moved greatly and that most states will have adopted it. If you look at the attitudes of the American people, increasingly, the numbers are moving in the direction of acceptance of gay marriage.

It won’t be close

The polls and pundits say the Obama-Romney race will be close — another 2004 or 2000, with the presidency won by a few points in a few key states.

I’m not so sure. I think this election will look like a landslide in the Electoral College count.  And right now, I think Romney wins.

Why?

It’s almost June, and there’s just not a lot of great economic news for Obama. Pretty soon, it will be too late for any summer or early fall economic growth to change people’s impressions that the current administration fumbled the ball on jobs.

The mood of the country seems pretty bleak. There’s enough hatred for Obama on the right to get lots of people out to the polls, and not a lot of enthusiasm on the left for fighting for a second Obama term.

That’s just my subjective feeling. The friends I’ve talked presidential elections with over the past 15 years will write this off as my usual pessimistic view of the Democrats.

And they might be right.

I’ll update this map whenever I take a notion to. And as with this one, my picks are purely intuitive, based on nothing more than that. It’s how I pick teams for my March Madness bracket (fwiw, I won the pool in 2011 and have come in 2nd or 3rd three or four times).

(Map courtesy 270towin.com)

Political poll that I just got

I got an automated telephone poll tonight, conducted by National Opinion Surveys for an unnamed client.

Here are the questions I got:

1) Do I think the economy today is improving, about the same or getting worse?

2) Approve or disapprove of Barack Obama's performance in office?

3) Who will you vote for this fall: Obama, Romney or don't know?

4) Who will you vote for in the Senate race this fall: Cantwell, Baumgartner, or don't know?

5) Who will you vote for in the governor's race this fall: Inslee, McKenna, or don't know?

6) Who will you vote for in your local House race: Democrat, Republican, or don't know? (Generic party ID, not candidate names).

7) Who will you vote for in your local state House race: Democrat, Republican, or don't know? (Generic party ID, not candidate names).

Demographics next:

8) What is your age?

9) What is your sex?

10) What is your party ID: Democrat, Republican or independent?

11) Do you have a 4-year degree?

12) Do you have an advanced degree?

13) Are you of Hispanic descent?

14) What is your race?

15) Are you a current or retired union member?

16) Is anyone else in the household a current or retired union member?

17) How would you describe your political views: liberal, moderate or conservative?

Fascinating bit of political history…

"Rep. Zioncheck had made a decision not to run but at the last minute changed his mind and asked King County Prosecuting Attorney Warren Magnuson to drop out of the race which Magnuson refused. Later that day, Zioncheck jumped out the 5th story window of Seattle???s Arctic building to his death."

— From WA Secretary of State's Office, "Members of the U.S House of Representatives from Washington State who did not complete their terms 1889-2012."

Court-packing, understood

Now I better understand FDR's effort to pack the Supreme Court in the 1930s after the noble justices declared parts of the New Deal unconstitutional…

E.J. Dionne nails it here:

Liberals should learn from this display that there is no point in catering to today???s hard-line conservatives. The individual mandate was a conservative idea that President Obama adopted to preserve the private market in health insurance rather than move toward a government-financed, single-payer system. What he got back from conservatives was not gratitude but charges of socialism ??? for adopting their own proposal.

Fair and balanced on the campaign trail, 1972…?

A passage straight out of Jay Rosen’s “view from nowhere” thesis, spotted in Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland:

Every Watergate story was balanced by an imprecation against McGovern. The New York Times reported, “MCGOVERN DISCLOSES LARGE NEW LOANS,” about two heirs to the Eli Lilly fortune who channeled $500,000 to McGovern. Far down, after the jump, the story noted that Richard Mellon Scaife, of the Pittsburgh banking family, had given a million dollars’ worth of $3,000 checks to 330 Nixon committees to avoid the gift tax. The Lilly brothers’ contribution was a loan the McGovern campaign paid back through thousands of small donations; Scaife’s was a straight-up payout. But you had to read down to the end of the story whose headline mentioned McGovern to learn that.

For McGovern, the media’s gospel of “balance” was proving deadly. His campaign was overwhelmingly being funded by donors he labeled the “skinny cats.” They attended “people’s fund-raisers” where admission was five bucks. … They responded to direct mail with some thirty thousand envelopes a day. … After a televised speech on Vietnam … the one-day haul was $852,248. Gary Hart himself had to work the mail table to help with the backlog. You wouldn’t know it from reading the headlines in McGovernophoic organs such as the Chicago Tribune and the Wall Street Journal: “$2 Million Loaned to McGovern by Unions, Rich Contributors”; “$4.5 Million in Loans; McGovern Forces Ask Wealthy for Financing”; “Secrecy Preferred by Some McGovern Moneymen.”

He wasn’t mugging Avon ladies. Apparently, he was mugging heirs and heiresses instead.”

Nixon’s southern strategy

I have heard Republicans claim that segregation was the creation of Democrats in the South.

It’s true. The Democratic Party was completely dominant in the former Confederate states almost until the end of the 20th century.

What’s not true, however, is any notion that today’s Republicans in the South are the inheritors of Republicans in the pre-civil rights era. That’s the implicit (explicit, even) point of southern Republicans who go to great lengths to note their party allegiance and how the GOP was the party of blacks and progressives (at least on matters of race) from Reconstruction until the presidencies of FDR and LBJ.

For it’s simply true that today’s Republican Party in the former Confederate states is the inheritor of the anti-civil rights Democratic Party of decades ago.

As a young acquaintance from Alabama once said to me with a serious tone: “If you’re white, you’re Republican.”

And it dates back to Strom Thurmond and his political ally, Richard Nixon. It was taken up by the likes of Jesse Helms and Richard Shelby … and so many others.

It’s the result, partly, of Richard Nixon’s ingenious “southern strategy,” which I once had a conservative correspondent claim he’d never heard of not to long ago.

The reason for the history 101 here is that I came across another great passage in Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland today:

The president [Nixon] found succor in Dixie. The Fifth Circuit had ordered thirty-three Mississippi school districts integrated before the opening of the school year. The districts filed the court-mandated plans; HEW approved them. Then Nixon ordered HEW secretary Finch to send the judge a letter with language dictated by Mississippi senator John Stennis: the September deadline would bring “chaos, confusion, and catastrophic educational setback” for children “blacks and whites alike.” The judge moved back the deadline to December; when it would, perhaps, be moved back some more. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund took out a full-page ad in the New York Times: “On August 25, 1969, the United States Government broke its promise to the children of Mississippi. The promise was made in 1954. By the highest court in the land.” Roy Wilkins accused the administration of actively helping the South prolong segregation and said that if Nixon was serious about civil rights, he’d fire John Mitchell. HEW’s civil rights chief, Leon Panetta, a thirty-one-year-old former aide to Thomas Kuchel, did what he thought was his job: he piped up that Nixon was serious about civil rights, just as he’d said at his inauguration.

Panetta immediately got a call from Ehrlichman: “Cool it, Leon!”

Silly Leon. HEW general counsel Robert Mardian, a top operative in Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, marveled, “Doesn’t he understand Nixon promised the Southern delegates he would stop enforcing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts?”

This isn’t to say that all southern Republicans are racists. They aren’t. Just as all northern liberals aren’t colorblind.  The point here is that history is history, and there’s no white-washing the fact that today’s southern Republicans are the descendants of a political backlash against civil rights and integration.