A few observations about the campaign, and it is entirely coincidental that I am linking to a couple of stories from the Globe written by an excellent young reporter who shares my last name and half my genes.
And it really is coincidental, sort of.
First, a lot has been written about Romney’s lack of…how shall I put it? Charisma? Star power? Resemblance to an actual human being?
But it turns out that Romney has just as much charisma, just as much ability to inspire almost cult like devotion as Obama. It just turns out that it is extremely concentrated:
Jim Wilson, who can make a reasonable claim to be Mitt Romney’s most ardent fan, is back.
Three months after a mysterious fire destroyed the truck covered with Romney signs and American flags that Wilson had driven across the nation, the 70-year-old Army veteran pulled into a Paul Ryan rally in northwest Ohio on Monday, showing off the new wheels.
“It’s kind of like steering a sailboat in a gale. It has fins and wings but no rudder,” he said of the vehicle. Counting both trucks, Wilson estimates he has now driven 140,000 miles and been to 42 states to support Romney.
Now, I suppose it’s possible, were you a Republican, to make a case that you should vote for Romney, though the evidence for that proposition is pretty thin on the ground, but until today, I had been unaware that there was anyone who actually wanted to vote for Romney. I’m not too surprised, however. I represent disabled people, and I’ve long since learned that there are all different kinds of mental illness. Wilson’s variety is probably fairly harmless, since it doesn’t appear to be infectious.
Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, the Republicans have taken to bashing China. It’s not something new to politics, but I would hazard a guess that never in American history has a party had to hide its agenda so much that it was forced to lie about its positions on almost every issue. If we were to believe their protestations, where would the Medicare hating, outsource loving, immigrant loathing cretins on the right turn for solace? Of course, they know very well that it’s all for show, so they have no trouble sticking with their guys. In the case of China we’ve got Paul Ryan decrying the loss of manufacturing jobs to China (course he doesn’t mention that his Number 1 man sent a lot of them there all by himself). But the tell comes at the end of the story, when someone in the crowd had the temerity (or, if a true fan, cluelessness) to ask if Ryan would actually do something substantive should he and Willard get in:
When one woman mentioned her employer had closed, and asked if it would be possible to penalize companies that transferred jobs to China, Ryan sidestepped the question.
Finally, I pointed out a while back that the Republicans have long since realized that you don’t need to fool all of the people all of the time, you only have to fool most of the people at election time. But what happens when you can’t even pull that off? Well, apparently the solution is to fool yourselves. Republicans are taking denialism to a new level. They deny science in order to fool most of the people, but apparently you can’t make a habit of denying the facts without needing to believe in a fantasy world yourself:
There are really only three ways to deal with all the evidence that Obama is ahead with time beginning to run out: (1) blame it on a bad Romney campaign; (2) argue some 1980-style “big shift” to Romney is inevitable and perhaps already baked into the cake; or (3) just deny it all on grounds most of the pollsters are wrong, biased or both.
Unsurprisingly, this last approach is wildly popular at the moment (Kirsanow mentions it as a possibility). It even has its own Prophet, a man named Dean Chambers who spends his time recalculating everybody’s horse-race polls and approval/disapproval numbers based on what they’d look like if they used Rasmussen’s Party ID weighting.
In other words: if you don’t like what the current electorate seems poised to do, create yourselves another one more to your suiting that’s older, whiter and more conservative just by putting your thumb on the scale (which is exactly what “Party ID weighting” amounts to, with varying degrees of semi-justification).
I for one, encourage the Republicans to continue to deny this little bit of reality. The more they believe the pollsters are lying, the less chance they’ll do anything to turn those polls around. But I do think they’re making a bit of an error here. There will come a discernible point at which the chickens will have come home to roost on this one. Global warming happens slowly, but elections happen all on one day. Will they be able to convince themselves that Romney actually won after Election Day? Stay tuned. If anyone can do it, the Republicans can. Having done all they could to steal this election by disenfranchising Democrats, they will have no trouble claiming that Obama and his Kenyan (or is it communist) co-conspirators somehow stole the election.
