(Jeff Danziger’s website)
__
Mike Allen and Jim Vendehei, the chief stenographers at Politico, dutifully relay the “insider” view on “How Romney Stumbled“:
Stuart Stevens, Mitt Romney’s top strategist, knew his candidate’s convention speech needed a memorable mix of loft and grace if he was going to bound out of Tampa with an authentic chance to win the presidency. So Stevens, bypassing the speechwriting staff at the campaign’s Boston headquarters, assigned the sensitive task of drafting it to Peter Wehner, a veteran of the last three Republican White Houses and one of the party’s smarter wordsmiths.
Not a word Wehner wrote was ever spoken. Stevens junked the entire thing, setting off a chaotic, eight-day scramble that would produce an hour of prime-time problems for Romney, including Clint Eastwood’s meandering monologue to an empty chair.
Romney’s convention stumbles have provoked weeks of public griping and internal sniping about not only Romney but also his mercurial campaign muse, Stevens. Viewed warily by conservatives, known for his impulsiveness and described by a colleague as a “tortured artist,” Stevens has become the leading staff scapegoat for a campaign that suddenly is behind in a race that had been expected to stay neck and neck through Nov. 6…
Translation: The only way Willard Mitt Romney was going to “bound out of Tampa with an authentic chance to win” would have been getting someone more talented — say, Bill Clinton — to deliver “a memorable mix of loft and grace”. But in MBA-World, it’s never the CEO’s fault when the company spectacularly fails to meet its quarterly profile, as long as some sketchy district assistant manager can be assigned to take the blame.
But whatever Stevens’s shortcomings, presidential candidates get the campaigns they want. And Romney, who in an interview with POLITICO last month said his leadership style very much centers on having a variety of smart people offering advice and him being the decider, has taken a very active role running his own campaign.
In a way, that’s the problem. Romney associates are baffled that such a successful corporate leader has created a team with so few lines of authority or accountability…
Of course, everybody not drawing a paycheck from that particular CEO is going to roll their eyes and blame hime anyway, Willard.
… Stevens, a 58-year-old son of the South, is easy for conservatives to dislike. His official bio does not exactly scream “Republican ad guy from Mississippi”: “Stuart was educated at Colorado College, Middlebury College, Oxford University and the UCLA Film School, [and] is also a former Fellow of the American Film Institute.”
He is not particularly ideological, and has a big-city, Hollywood aura that grates on movement conservatives. “He’s a smart, capable guy but he sends bad signals” to the right, said a Republican operative who works closely with the campaign. “He has a lot of goofy quotes that cause everybody to shake their heads. … Stuart is one of the most insecure guys in the business. But he has become the top strategic adviser to the nominee, which is a huge accomplishment.”…
Every profile of Stevens includes the descriptor “eclectic,” which seems fair, given he has skied to the North Pole, chronicled his use of steroids to compete in an extreme race, written novels and a campaign memoir, advised clients in Albania and Congo and consulted on Hollywood projects, including the political film “The Ides of March.”…
…. written, directed, produced, and starring notorious Democrat George Clooney. Aha!
(Look for future “scoops” to establish that Stevens is suspected of stealing others’ lunches out of the break room frig, and also never contributes anything to the potlucks but a medium-sized bag of store-brand chips. Not to mention dark rumors about his hygiene practices in the communal bathroom.)
By my count, thirteen of the first twenty comments were from brave “Independent”, “N/A”, “Libertarian” and “Conservative” posters accusing Politico of being in the tank for President You-Know-Who. (There was also one self-identified Democrat, wringing their hands over “all this gleeful hand-rubbing so long before the election”.)
And it’s only mid-September!
SRW1
So Stevens is he Obama plant that is sabotaging the campaign of Boss Romney. Did I get that right?
Rita R.
I was waiting for this to start, and here it is. When the articles begin appearing this close to the election with leaks from unnamed campaign insiders trying to point fingers and cover their asses, you know even they are starting to realize it’s over. It was around this time, maybe just a bit later, in 2008 that we started hearing rumblings from inside the McCain campaign about what a disaster Palin was. My crush-that-dare-not-speak-its-name Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace saw the writing on the wall and were working hard to salvage their names and careers from that trainwreck.
hep kitty
Well, it’s Monday so I’m looking forward to another deluge of Mitt-gaffenalia.
BTW, a lotta smart peoples on here. I am trying to find the original screeplay to the film Greed (the entire 8 hours, not the truncated film), by Von Stroheim, but no luck on the Googles. Wonder where I might find it. Any suggestions?
Amazon has something but I’m not sure if it’s only for the 4 hour film as I have seen stuff on internets that says “original screenplay” but is only a screenplay for the final product, the 4 hour film.
PeakVT
Generic Congressional ballot.
With everything else going on, I didn’t realize Congress was even in session. But the House is beavering away, passing terribly useful bills like the No More Solyndras Act. /rolls eyes
Anatoliĭ Lъudьvigovich Bzyp (formerly Horrendo Slapp, Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
By all rights, Rmoney could be kicking the president’s ass. The Republicans in Congress have done a top flight job of seeing that things don’t get better too quickly, and any halfway competent Republican should have found a way to make the most of that. That Rmoney has fucked up as badly as he has, well, I guess it shows just how dumb it is to assume–as a lot of Americans do, especially in the press–that if you make a lot of money, you must be on the ball. Rmoney shows that that isn’t true. All it takes to make shitloads of money is to have no ethics and a millionaire former governor for a father.
I don’t know what’s going to happen when President Obama wins in November, as I believe he will. Conservative know-nothings seem to pretty much only believe conservative propagandists, and the propagandists have been feeding them all the line that America! Loves! Rmoney! /! Ryan! and hates the president, and There’s! No! Way! Rmoney! /! Ryan! Can! Lose! These people are going to be ready to riot by the end of election night, and it scares the hell out of me.
But back to my first point… We, Americans, like to believe that we’re decent people, and that we don’t judge people by their bank accounts, but that isn’t true. There’s an ugly streak in this country of assuming that if you have money, you’re a good person. You deserve it. You’ve earned it. And if you’re poor, well, you’re a bad person, and you should be ashamed.
I can’t believe sometimes how much we as a society have invested in seeing to it that poor people are made to feel shitty about themselves–even children, who can’t have done anything to “deserve” their plight. As if the misery of being poor weren’t bad enough by itself, we have to shame these people.
Oh, but if you have money, even if you only have it because your father was a millionaire former governor of Michigan, well, we just can’t fall all over each other fast enough to kiss your gold-plated ass. You’re a good person! You’re a Job Creator! You pay too much in taxes, even if you don’t pay anything, and can we suck you off a little more while you beat us senseless with your sock full of gold bullion?
Sometimes I hate this country…
hep kitty
Am beginning to think either the studio destroyed it or Von Stroheim may have thrown it away in his grief.
hep kitty
I just love that. Interesting that in the legal field you cannot get away with that shit. The ultimate responsibility lies with the attorney handling the case unless a subordinate is willfully trying to deceive the attorney in which case the subordinate would be subject to charges. And it has to be proven.
But when you are fucking around with other peoples’ money, jobs, livelihood, the courts look the other way.
PeakVT
@hep kitty: Did you search at the LOC?
hep kitty
@PeakVT: I don’t see it there but I’m bookmarking that cool site.
hep kitty
“True the Vote,” an Americans for Prosperity and Koch-funding organization is dispatching “citizen journalists” to harrass voters at the voting booth. I only heard this mentioned once on the radio last week or so.
Anybody else ever heard of this? If not, it certainly needs to be disseminated and I hope we will have a post on BJ about this.
Also, it appears they were quite active in the WI recall elections.
geg6
Heh. Gotta love that people are being tossed overboard even earlier than they were in Grampy’s campaign in ’08. Amazing that a campaign can go down in bigger flames than that one did.
geg6
@hep kitty:
Yeah, I read about this a week or two ago, I think at TPM. They apparently plan to film outside polling places and place challenges to voters. All I know is they don’t wanna fuck with the old ladies who keep our polling place running. Those old ladies are tough as nails and will kick their asses if they interfere with voting. I wouldn’t mess with those little old ladies. They will fuck.them.up.
tesslibrarian
@hep kitty: Rachel Maddow has been on their case for awhile.
Comrade Javamanphil
@SRW1: So
StevensRomney is the Obama plant that is sabotaging the campaign of Boss Romney.FTFY.
Narcissus
I like that if you’re cosmopolitan and educated you just don’t project enough yokel signifiers for the GOP to trust you.
Schlemizel
No when the company is successful its because the CEO is a genius, when it fails its because it has the government on its back!
Although I did love the Worldcomm/Enron cycle where CEOs took huge compensation because of their skillful management but when it turned out the books were cooked had no idea what was going on inside their company.
Look fellas either you were defrauding investors when you took all that money pretending to run the company or you were defrauding them by cooking the books. Either way you should be in jail.
Valdivia
This guy from BuzzFeed is always publishing the Mitt apologia. He was out in full defensive mode on twitter last night, so here is his report after the Politico piece
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/romneys-new-strategy-turns-right
Anonymous
To use a futbol metaphor, it seems to me that if both sides are on top of their respective games, the election would go down to PKs with Obama narrowly winning. But Romney’s racked up three or four own goals already, so it doesn’t really matter.
Narcissus
Also there’s no way in hell Mitt knows who Snooki is
bemused
Morning Joe is having fits. I lost count of how many times he said, it’s not the film, they hate us because they hate us. Joe thinks it should have been easy for the Republicans if Romney hadn’t gotten distracted from the message of trillions in debt, bank, auto bailouts, Dems can’t even tell you what’s in the health care bill, it’s been the liberal media since Ronald Reagan, get over it, yada, yada.
Joe was riveting in a way…all the Republican fantastical, wishful thinking beliefs in one long, run-on, rightwing rant.
Patricia Kayden
That was a great Politico article. Chaos on the Right is good news. The debates are all they have now.
Valdivia
@Valdivia:
note how in the piece you see the inside people complaining that the polls that show Romney behind are based on the 2008 election likely voter screens. What? Do these people not get how polls are done? That if anything the likely voter model benefits them?
I also love how they think their Unlimited Corporate Cash of ads will do their job for them.
hep kitty
@geg6: lol, they will be filming so that’d be awesome to catch on tape.
MattF
It’s the miracle of the marketplace:
Q; How do you get customers to buy your product?
A: Lie to them.
Which is what Mitt is doing. So, yeah, Mitt’s a creep and not a competent politician, but that’s not the only problem.
Pavonis
@Anatoliĭ Lъudьvigovich Bzyp (formerly Horrendo Slapp, Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.):
I’ve been thinking about this lately since I recently graduated from college and am currently looking for a permanent job/deciding whether I can start my own company. It really matters how much money you got from your parents. If person A has $100,000 in the bank and person B has $100,000 in student debt, forming a Silicon Valley start-up, for example, is only going to be an option for A. Only A doesn’t have to worry about payments on loans, can support him/herself until profits comes rolling in, and has some seed money. And A did absolutely nothing to deserve this opportunity rather than B. So you hear Romney’s stupid statement that young people should borrow money from their parents to get started and wonder how anybody can be so obtuse about their own luck. And this discrepancy in opportunity is why we need free higher education.
hep kitty
Apparently they have a nice hub where I live so if I see cameras at the voting booths, watch the fuck out. Got my AARP card this year (sigh) so maybe, in the old-lady tradition, I should carry an umbrella to beat them with.
Also, I will warn voters not to speak with the assholes, explaining that they are partisan plants and to ask for some ID and take that info down, I’ll do it myself all day long if I have to, no shittin’ I’ll take the entire day off from work – I have never had the opp’y to vote on Saturdays.
Well, only problem is, mostly white people vote in at my polling place. I could vote early and then go out and patrol low-income areas on voting day. Even further, shall I film them filming me? hmmmmmm . . .
dr. luba
@Valdivia:
With all the work they’ve put into voter suppression/disenfranchisement, they expect a better outcome. Of course they think the models are wrong–too many non-white people and dems are still being polled.
hep kitty
Well, the sensible thing to do would be to contact low-income polling areas and warn them. Still, I’d like to do some harrassment in turn.
geg6 – It is interesting to note that although most of the voters at my polling place will be upper to middle income whites (like me) but is located at a black church, so most of the poll workers are black with a nice sprinkling of older black ladies who are about as sweet and dear as it gets.
However, perhaps they can kick ass when necessary. They, of all people, would understand what it all means.
Valdivia
@dr. luba:
their likely voter model is from the 1950s
bemused
A rightwing commenter in a local paper wrote praising a must see documentary about Obama at the local Cinema 6 but didn’t mention the title. I looked up the show schedule and, OMG, it was D’Souza’s insane production. Sickening.
Pavonis
@bemused:
D’Souza’s movies is most likely going to end up like Fahrenheit 9/11, i.e. preaching to the choir.
Rita R.
@Valdivia:
They are delusional and desperate. How much more do they think they can get the GOP base to hate Obama? They are salivating to vote against him, they’ll probably line up three weeks early with their Obummer signs.
Fact is, Romney’s been running the election the base wants and claims is the only way to win. He’s never etch-a-sketched back to the center, all he does is attack Obama — most recently with race-based lies, he picked their dream boy Ryan as his running mate, and he spewed out the apology and sympathizing with Muslim militants crap at Obama in the middle of a crisis leading Rush and Laura Ingraham to practically have orgasms on the air. And he’s still losing, by more than he was before.
But you know the drill, Tea Party lunacy can never fail, it can only be failed, etc. So base election time! Maybe Obama will win by 10 points…
SiubhanDuinne
@Pavonis:
See how the Fates their gifts allot,
For A is happy — B is not.
Yet B is worthy, I dare say,
Of more prosperity than A.
[…]
If I were Fortune (which I’m not),
B should enjoy A’s happy lot,
And A should die in misery
(That is, assuming I am B).
—The Mikado
dmsilev
That description of how Romney’s speech was written is just amazing. For a man who loves to boast about his management skills, Romney doesn’t seem to be doing a good job at it to put it mildly.
TS
@Anatoliĭ Lъudьvigovich Bzyp (formerly Horrendo Slapp, Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.):
Anyone that thinks Romney should be “kicking the President’s ass, doesn’t understand this President. He has known for 2 years that Romney would be the candidate and knows anything worth knowing about his opponent. For a black man to have been elected President of the United States is either a miracle or the sign of a very intelligent focused man. I go for the later – but in either case, Romney has never had a chance – unless the GOP can really generate voter fraud, election fraud or start WWIII.
bemused
@Pavonis:
I’d like to know how many of our local tea partiers are actually flocking to this thing. The writer said people stood up and applauded when it ended. No doubt they already knew all about it.
Valdivia
@Rita R.:
I completely agree. That article is just spinning a bad situation into a strategy. The fact that the author says the dems are doing the same means he doesn’t get that Obama is actually really a moderate who can appeal to his base and the center at once, unlike Romney whose base is lunatic.
Rita R.
@Pavonis:
And if there was free higher education, the wealthy and powerful would come up with some other barrier to opportunity to keep it all for them and theirs. That’s the dirty little secret — whatever their paeans to success through hard work, they don’t really want equality of opportunity. They believe in a zero sum game of winners and losers and they know where they belong and where they think the rest of us do too.
Dennis SGMM
Wasn’t it the old rule of thumb for campaigning that you tack toward your base during the primaries then you tack toward the center for the general election?
I figure that the Republicans’ own internal polling must have revealed significant weakness in his appeal to the base so Mittens had to spend his entire campaign building up his cred with the loonies. His choice of Ryan convinced me of that.
jurassicpork
#1: Happy 1st #OWS anniversary. There’s expected to be a huge turnout in NYC and other places today. Although it’s a huge shame that we’ve gone from demanding justice and equal economic rights to begging for camping rights. I wish I could be there. If I did, I’d have a sign for the NYPD reading, “How does it feel to defend the same jackals that looted your pension fund?”
#2: As much as I hate to say it, Pottersville may be moving down south to Florida and that’s going to require some help. More details here.
Ben Franklin
@Valdivia:
buzzfeed
But last week, Romney’s stump speech — once an unchanging recitation of the campaign’s economic talking points that clocked in reliably at 18 to 20 minutes every time — was in a constant state of flux, with the candidate tailoring his remarks to elicit as many applause lines as possible from the partisans in the room.
In heavily-Evangelical Sioux County, Iowa, Romney’s introductory speakers — including conservative Rep. Steve King — sermonized at length about keeping Christian values, and vouched for his love of Jesus Christ. In Virginia Beach, he spoke to a flag-waving crowd of veterans and military families — appearing alongside televangelist Pat Robertson — and built his remarks around patriotism, defense spending, and keeping God on the national currency.
With the undecided numbers drying up, mitt is firing up the third boiler for maximum speed as the iceberg approaches. Lifeboats, anyone?
Valdivia
@Ben Franklin:
Yep. I love how every week is a new theory of the election with them.
jibeaux
@Valdivia: Anecdote from my 11 year old son, he was describing a Romney commercial he’d seen over the weekend multiple times. He gets to do kids voting, so I asked him if he thought it was persuasive, did it make him more likely to vote for Romney. He said it made him more likely to vote for Obama, because it was annoying how many times it was on.
Valdivia
@jibeaux:
I love that. And it is my sense that these guys have no idea how powerful an incentive to tune out all those ads will be to the regular person. I am pretty sure, or maybe just hopeful, that it will backfire.
Kay
I wish they had talked more about the campaign busses. They touched on it, but I need more detail to flesh out what I’ve heard.
It just sounds crazy. They send a bus with state campaign people on it to smaller cities in swing states, pull up and park, and that’s the “Romney event.”
I thought spending time and energy driving around in circles at Obama events on a bus was a waste, but this “send an empty bus” thing is worse. What can they hope to accomplish with that? Are people supposed to come out and SEE the bus?
Valdivia
@Kay:
it’s a super special bus! with the Romney brand logo on it! like being touched by greatness ;)
steveday
Mitt thinks being CEO is job prep for POTUS. It is not.
CEO’s fill their boards with cronies and pals.
POTUS has a “board”- aka Congress- filled with people who hate his guts.
Napoleon
@Valdivia:
I have not read the article, but I can guess that they are complaining not that they are using a screen, but a screen based on 08 instead of 2010, which vasily benefits the Reps over the 08 screen.
jibeaux
@Napoleon: That would be my guess too. Why compare presidential election year to presidential election year when you have this other metric that is much more favorable to them??
Kay
@Valdivia:
It’s a little insulting, and shouldn’t the state people be working instead of riding around on a bus?
We have an event at the community college today and tomorrow. It’s non-partisan, they invite both county GOP and Democrats. I was there in 08, so I’ll be able to compare/contrast.
McCain had a single paid person, man, in his thirties, wearing camouflage clothing, shaved head, went to a lot of trouble not to look over at us.
Cmm
I have been reading (Pickwick Papers) and listening to (Oliver Twist) Dickens lately, attempting to catch up on the classics I missed or slept through in college. It is depressing how much the pronouncements of the characters who represented the merciless officious types in Victorian England that Dickens hated sound like modern day conservative statements.
On the plus side, if you like Dickens or don’t know if you might like him, definitely check out Simon Vance’s audiobook of Oliver Twist, it is fantastic. I picked that one at least half because Vance is the reader. Can audiobook readers have groupies? If so, I am one for Vance, who also read the whole Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series. I have seriously picked books just because he is the reader.
Southern Beale
Why can’t Romney seal the deal???!!!
:-)
Valdivia
@Kay:
look forward to hearing your report. I think this on the ground stories tell us more than anything the campaigns try and put out.
Or something like that.Suffern Ace
@Kay: Maybe they don’t trust the state people. When those people are on the bus, they aren’t working. Maybe these are the folks who got low marks on their performance reviews.
MattF
@Kay: Sounds like they’re trying to ‘sell’ Romney– the concept (I’m guessing here) is that the next time you go to the mall and you see the ‘Romney’ outlet store, you’ll think “Gee, I saw a sign like that a couple days ago back in that parking lot, now I’ll go in there and buy one.” Sounds like a brainwave that came directly from the CEO himself, if I may say so.
jeffreyw
@Kay: It won’t take long to tour those buses, they are the short ones, ya know.
Feudalism Now!
@Kay:
It is a good trick to keep the serfs working. The lord sends his carriage out to ‘survey’ his lands. The vassals feel that their masters are watching and feel their lordly presence. This has the added benefit of keeping the actual lord from speaking to the plebs and undoing all the positive of the empty bus.
John M. Burt
Okay, so now that they’re floundering in icy water, let’s take their advice and throw them an anvil.
Re-electing the President is not nearly enough.
We have to give him a landslide victory which not even a Repub can ignore or hand-wave, a victory which brings in disgusted Republicans who are currently saying they’ll stay home, and dubious leftists who are currently saying they’ll vote for Jill Stein.
We have to give him a Congress with a solid majority of patriots who honor an oath to uphold the Constitution, not an oath to Grover Norquist.
We have to do this, and we can do it.
Kay
@MattF:
I love the craziness of it.
I heard there are “five” busses, but I have no way of knowing if that’s true.
MikeJ
@Kay: Most people don’t pay any attention to where the candidate is today, and even if he were in town, they wouldn’t have time to stop and see him. However, if they see the bus there they may assume he is in town and he really does care about the needs of East Bumfuck.
danielx
September 17…the 150th anniversary of Antietam. A bad day.
Emma
@Cmm: Can audiobook readers have groupies?
They can. I am a groupie of an Australian reader (at least I assume she is,as she’s reading an Australian detective series). I picked the first one up because the setting and the character sounded interesting, but it was the reader that sold me the whole series.
bemused
I’ve always wondered why rightwingers aren’t angry that corps get away with paying little or no taxes. This is how a rightie on Rep. Chip Cravaack facebook put it in response to a fact based poster pointing that out:
Rightie: “Most corporations don’t pay taxes because they pay dividends to the shareholders. The shareholders pay the tax. So they (corps) are doing it, just not directly”.
Fact based poster: YFOS
Mark S.
@Kay:
Why don’t they just buy a billboard? That would seem to accomplish the same thing and it would stay there for a couple of months.
Then Romney could fire those low level staffers. He’s said he likes firing people.
polyorchnid octopunch
I read the buzzfeed piece. I think it represents an opportunity, based on what the “campaign insiders” were saying. After all, what do you call someone who says one thing to one group of people (undecideds) and something else to another (the base)?
geg6
@Kay:
Seriously? I mean…well, really?
This is batshit insane and a complete waste of time and money that could be used on a real ground game. Which the Rmoney campaign apparently finds useless, based on the lack of there even being a presence on the ground in what could have been a swing state like PA. I’ve been talking about this for months, this lack of any sort of evidence of a GOTV effort other than lawn signs. They seem to believe that yard signs and annoying commercials can do the job. I don’t care how much red meat Mittens throws at the crazy base, you have to have a ground game based on more than stuff that people ignore and hoping that the base turns out and brings a friend.
kay
@Mark S.:
Oh, I agree. I think it’s nuts to send people out.
Romney does not, actually, have until November to get his shit together. Early vote starts in Ohio on October 2nd. From there on it’s basically GOTV.
rea
@SiubhanDuinne:
But is B more worthy?
I should say!
He’s worth a great deal more than A!
Svensker
@Valdivia:
The thing that interests me about that piece is that apparently they are building their new plan on motivating the base by going full on batshit, hanging out with Pat Robertson, etc. They assume that if they do that and excite their base, they’ll swamp the election because Obama voters are not excited and might stay home. Unfortunately, for them, their strategy may be exciting their base, but it’s also exciting Obama’s. I can’t tell you how many “meh, Obama” folks I know who are now determined to go out and vote simply because Romney=teh crazy. The Libya response was the last straw.
YellowJournalism
@hep kitty: I have a book on film history somewhere in my basement with an entire chapter on Greed. I’m Pretty sure the original screenplay was lost with the original footage from he director’s cut. If you get a copy of the original novel, though, you basically have the full screenplay since he was very faithful to the book, If I recall correctly.
CarolDuhart2
@TS: World War III won’t do it. Everybody knows that Obama is calm in a fight, and has probably won a few back in his organizing days. Think about him walking the streets of Chicago and doing so for a few years broke with just a crappy car. He had to have stared down a few tough guys for that.
So think fraud. But the way the base seems to feel about Romney, I can’t see them making the extra-legal effort to help him. Cheating involves risk, and they don’t think he’s really worth canvassing for, let alone doing something that might get them in trouble.
Trakker
Just read Tom Edsall’s “Is poverty a kind of robbery” in NYTimes which includes this from Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson:
“It is a supreme irony that Obama, the nation’s first African-American President, finds himself unable to advocate for truly disadvantaged blacks, or even to speak out forthrightly on racial issues. To do so is to risk alienating white conservative voters, who are more than ready to scream, “we told you so,” that Obama is for “the blacks.” But it is not just the potential white voters, but the political pundits who quickly draw attention to such actions, slanting their stories to stir up racial resentment.”
So fuckn’ sad.
hep kitty
@tesslibrarian: Missing too much Maddow, I guess. I get overwhelmed with it all sometimes. Did not watch a sliver of politics this wkd, only old movies.
hep kitty
@YellowJournalism: Oh cool, will check that out, thanks! Poor Von Stroheim.
schrodinger's cat
I made the mistake of watching, This Week, on Sunday after a really long time. I could not watch more than 5 minutes of it.
I had no idea that Jonathan Karl was a wingnut? he kept mumbling about inflation, and Bernanke, like a Paulista. Gwen Ifill was insipid as usual. Wesley Clark is an ineffective surrogate. I can’t tell you what Liz Cheney said, I had to mute the TV whenever she spoke. What are her qualifications anyway? The only person who made some sense and was somewhat interesting was George Will, go figure.
Linda Featheringill
@Anatoliĭ Lъudьvigovich Bzyp (formerly Horrendo Slapp, Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.):
I mentioned on the insomniac thread below that Rush Limbaugh is apparently talking about “when we lose this election.” He has a lot of anger [surprise!] and blames everyone but himself and his followers, but at least hes talking about it. And this is only September.
This is a good thing. Old Rush can reach a lot of people that we can’t and he is introducing the idea that the Republicans might actually lose this race. They’ll have several weeks to digest that thought. And the chances that they will resort to violence to vent their anger are less.
Motivated individuals, of course, . . .
xian
@dmsilev: it was weird. never explained why the draft by the “pro” was scrapped.
Gex
If the country can hang on long enough, the GOP will fix the realignment problem by the long march of continual purity purges.
Fine by me.
Gex
@Anatoliĭ Lъudьvigovich Bzyp (formerly Horrendo Slapp, Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.): I just wish we could get one honest conservative or libertarian to acknowledge that modern capitalism REQUIRES unemployment. You know to exert downward pressure on wages and inflation.
If we need people to be unemployed for capitalism to work, we can’t just let them FOAD, because then they don’t do that job anymore.
What do these people deserve for filling such a vital function in THE BEST SYSTEM EVER?
Americans go with “contempt.”
Elizabelle
@hep kitty:
NYTimes did big front page article on True the Vote today.
Am thinking it’s a call to arms for Democratic election protection lawyers and volunteers.
SiubhanDuinne
@rea:
But condemned to die is he:
Wretched, meritorius B.
1badbaba3
@TS: This.
Of course, understanding this President seems to elude people on both sides, so I guess it is twue; both sides do it.
Bruce S
@schrodinger’s cat:
Karl attempted to bolster his inane inflation hysterics with a patently false assertion about the mandate of the Federal Reserve. He’s either deliberately mendacious or an idiot.
BruinKid
He’s a UCLA grad…………
(facepalm)
Bruce S
Favorite line: “McConnell and Scully, drawing on their experience writing for Vice President Dick Cheney…”
Frankensteinbeck
@Anatoliĭ Lъudьvigovich Bzyp (formerly Horrendo Slapp, Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.):
Despair will set in. They’ve pulled out every stop, invested all of their emotional energy in punishing Obama for daring to become president by denying him a second term. When they fail, they’ll go through the stages of grief over the course of a couple of months. After that, things will finally quiet down.
@Kay:
They hope to spend money. Men like Romney attract grifters like a shit sandwich attracts flies. Every penny spent is an opportunity to skim a penny off the top. My model expects enormous amounts of wastage, and so far it’s looking accurate.
schrodihnger's cat
@Bruce S: Probably both, stupid and mendacious, also most likely not good at math.
schrodinger's cat
@Bruce S: Probably both.
batgirl
@hep kitty: Look here: The Complete Greed of Erich Von Stroheim You can search nearby libraries to see if it is available.
Villago Delenda Est
Stevens is becoming the scapegoat because no one wants to admit that the real problem is the candidate.
Beauzeaux
@geg6:
Same in Canada. They may be the same old ladies for all I know. You will come to grief if you fuck with them.
gvg
I want to know why the first 2 versions were scrapped.
Villago Delenda Est
@gvg:
“Not Mitt enough”.
“Needs more FAIL!”
johnny kitchitikipi
@geg6:
They are doing this to intimidate voters. And to give some poor schlub the ACORN treatment to further intimidate minority voters.
A lot of people are naturally reluctant to be filmed. It’s just a basic shyness a lot of people have to be put in front of a camera. That’s the short term effect.
They’ll set up leading questions and splice the responses O’Keefe-style to get what they want. And the hapless voter will get the flying monkey Fluke-Frost treatment.
They’ll use their footage as ‘evidence’ for even more voter suppression laws for the next election.
If Obama wins, it feeds their meme he didn’t really win and therefore his presidency is illegitimate.
All they have to do is go Sandra Fluke on a single minority voter, and the message will get across. Minorities will become even more hesitant about voting whenever one of these ‘Scare the Vote’ outfits shows up at their polling place.
And god help us if they actually find a case where a confused elderly person, a misinformed voter, or a damn fool makes an honest mistake. No matter. It will be proof, PROOF their country was stolen from them by those people.
James E. Powell
@Villago Delenda Est:
Stevens is becoming the scapegoat because no one wants to admit that the real problem is the candidate.
Bingo. I would add that right-wing Republican polices aren’t helping them either.
JR in WV
@hep kitty:
Not allowed here, no one but a voter can be within 300 feet of a polling place. Put a big dent in the “poll watchers” that used to pass out pints of whiskey and pre-marked paper ballots.
Now they’re over 100 yards away, passing out free hot dogs and pop under a picnic tent. Even reporters have to stay away from any poll they aren’t registered to vote at, and voters are technically supposed to come to vote and then leave.
We often chat with the poll volunteer staff, most of whom are familiar from years of voting activity, so we say hello, what’s new, how are you? if there’s no line waiting. Which would be a miracle, it’s a very rural precinct, I’ve never had to wait more than 4 or 5 minutes.
They determine who you are by looking at the signature on the registration book for the precinct, no one is asked for even their voter’s registration card. Them’s the rules, so far.
There have been a couple of local candidates arrested for vote fraud – they got a handful of absentee ballots and voted them, unfortunately someone noticed all the ballots with the same handwriting and now all those guys are barred from running from office as part of the plea agreement. Ruined their working careers! so sad…