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Ha ha. Nice try. Obama specifically ran for office in 2008 as someone opposed to the individual mandate.
When a Republican wins, they have a mandate from the people. When a Democrat wins, they don't. What an odd coincidence.
These days, it seems like any president is going to be seen as illegitimate by a huge chunk of the country. I mean, different chunks depending on who wins.
Your position is that Obama had a mandate to do the exact opposite of what he ran on vis-a-vis the individual mandate? There's a big difference between the healthcare reform he ran on and the one Obama and the Dems rammed through Congress.
This assumes that the parties are equivalent and can use the same tactics. They aren't. Republicans can use tactics that Dems can't.
Not sure what good Bush's "mandate" did him in 2004 anyway. He tried to do the Social Security reform and people weren't buying it.
Let's do the
Time WarpKehoskie again!Yes, the one he ran on was considerably further to the left.
But let's set aside healthcare. Obama won with large enough majorities that we can safely assume that multiple campaign issues were important to people.
Did Obama have a mandate for Lily Ledbetter?
What about for tougher financial legislation?
Or for climate change legislation?
Of course, there was the promise to draw down Iraq and Afghanistan, what about that?
Is there, in fact, a single issue that you'd be willing to say that Obama had a mandate from the people on, and that Republicans should have worked with Obama on? A single policy proposal?
On mandates, that's purely a political claim. It doesn't exist as some kind of external reality. If a side claims a mandate and gets that idea to stick, then it is one. If a side wins heavily but for whatever reason the claim doesn't stick, then it isn't. There's no mandate margin or mandate extra veto or anything. It's just a word.
On legitimacy, I think it's useful to think less of binaries than of a spectrum. A small portion of the population--maybe 20% spread between the two parties, perhaps not in equal amounts--will never see the other side's candidate as legitimate, no matter what. Beyond that, you get thresholds based on the width of the electoral vote margin, the alignment between electoral and popular vote margins, and the length of time it takes to establish. The tie is actually the nightmare since it takes the longest to resolve, even if the resolution would seem preordained based on Republican power in the House's state delegations. But you couldn't hope to have certainty until early January, and it could easily drag a bit beyond that. The passage of time builds up skepticism of legitimacy.
Don't forget immigration.
I believe Obama entered office with as much or more political capital than any president since Reagan, and he squandered the hell out of it. If I was a liberal — God forbid!! — I'd be apoplectic at the missed opportunities in Obama's first two years in office. The Dems had the White House, a huge majority in the House, and 58 to 60 seats in the Senate, and yet most of the liberal agenda remained in a holding pattern. Dems can blame the GOP all it wants, but the reality is, Dems bought into the "permanent majority," "the GOP is dead" nonsense and decided to take long recesses rather than take bold steps to advance the liberal agenda. By the time the unpopular Obamacare was rammed through, opportunity had passed for Obama & Co.
So, when Republicans are in power, they have a broad mandate that requires Democrats to compromise. When Democrats are in power, there is no such reciprocity, and they only have themselves to blame for obstruction and intransigence. What an odd coincidence.
The point is that Kehoskie was making some kind of meta-claim that continued intransigence would be justified by the close margin. However, it never matters what the margin is, Republicans always believe in intransigence and failing to compromise. If Romney is caught in bed with Rafalca and Obama wins 400 EC votes, there will be the exact same claims of illegitimacy on the Right.
That's a nightmare waiting to happen.
Imagine the delay when you have to have recounts in 50 states because the final popular vote was within the margin that requires one (say, 0.5%).
You need some sort of compartmentalization to stop the recount flood from overwhelming the country.
With the EC, you can limit it to one state, maybe two at most (if R wins state A OR state B, the result flips, and both are within the recall margin).
Without it, you're forced to recount at EVERY SINGLE VOTING STATION.
No argument there, and I actually kind of like the drama and the nuances of the electoral college. But you can't ignore its two major downsides, or one big positive feature of a national popular vote:
1. In practice, voters in non-swing states are disenfranchised on the national level.
2. The EC gives voters in small states far more clout than their numbers warrant, because of the two bonus points that each state receives for each Senator. It's not as blatantly absurd as our method of breaking a 269-269 tie in the EC, where Wyoming and California each get one vote, but it's still a total crock.
As for the positive advantage of a national popular vote: It would force candidates to campaign all over the country; and it would give both parties incentives to maximize their votes in the former swing states. It would almost certainly result in a bigger overall turnout.
NAG SET ME UP!!
It would, and given the vastly larger size of the national vote versus statewide votes, it would be very sensible to restrict the recount requirement to a much smaller margin, say 0.1% instead of 0.5%.
But specifically in favor of universal health care. He switched to supporting the individual mandate only because it became clear that single-payer was not going to happen. (Despite what some in the fever swamps might think, Obama's aim was to pass legislation that maximally increased the number of people with access to health coverage, not specifically to deprive voters of their precious constitutional freedom not to have health insurance. The mandate was a necessary means to that end once single-payer was off the table.)
I don't understand why some people on the left keep saying this. Obama never ran on single payer, there was never any hope that this congress would pass single payer, and his eventual admission that the mandate was good policy had nothing to do with single payer.
Obama campaigned against the mandate from the right because it was good politics to do so. He knew all along that the mandate was good policy, and he supported when he was actually in office. You know, just like Mitt Romney.
I said he ran on the concept of universal health care, which pretty much requires either a single payer system or an individual mandate.
But why the focus on compromise? When the voters give you such wide margins that you don't need a single vote from the other party, wasting time on compromise is the last thing you should be doing. The voters have not only given your party a mandate, they've essentially given you an ultra-mandate. And yet most of the liberal agenda sat, untouched, for 2009 and 2010.
To the extent the liberal agenda was stalled in 2009 and '10, it was because Democrats were victims of their own hubris, not GOP intransigence.
No, I believe both sides should always try to work together to craft solutions to the country's problems. But on some issues, doing nothing is the compromise. If the Dems want to spend $500 billion and the GOP wants to cut $500 billion, "compromise" isn't the GOP agreeing to spend $250 billion. The same is true for issues like climate change, which, frankly, was deservedly a low priority when the country was in horrendous economic times.
I think .1% would be within the margin of error for any conceivable method of vote-counting.
He ran on a health care plan that he called universal heath care, but was neither single payer nor an individual mandate (except for kids). Clinton ran on an individual mandate, which would have covered ~15 million more people than Obama's plan, and Obama attacked her for it from the right: "It forces everyone to buy insurance, even if you can't afford it, and you pay a penalty if you don't."
And actually closing Gitmo (not trying to).
The good part of a national popular election is that it would almost immediately create a crisis that would demand 1) some universal standard for voting, since otherwise there would be a race to depress turnout of opposition through tricky rules in every state and 2) a massive investment in better electoral machinery, something still not fully implemented.
Error rates of most machines are quite high, and you'd probably have to stick with .5% as the recount threshold. Most machines have error rates at 0.3%. Some at 0.6%.
A national recount would indeed be a disaster since the recount could introduce new errors. Soon you'd have to have a National Department of Elections or something because the crazy patchwork of laws would be unsustainable in that kind of pressure-filled environment.
But I am for a national department of elections since I don't think election law is a great arena for the federal compromise.
So instead of torturing just the citizens of Florida and Ohio with 24/7 political ads on their TV, the parties would have to torture the entire country, but just on a less frequent basis.
Both party structures would be against ditching the EC simply because they'd be paralyzed trying to determine where to spend their ad money if it wasn't automatically concentrated on the "important" states.
I do agree that the extra attention in all the other non-swing states would definitely help the turnout.
I'm thrilled Obama and the Dems moved slowly in 2009 and '10; all I've done is point out they did so more by choice than because of GOP obstructionism.
As for Bush and Social Security, he had a much smaller majority in the House in 2005–06 and only 55 GOP seats in the Senate. There was no ramming-through to be done.
I'll save Joe time. Blah blah blah, Nate is biased, blah blah blah, this poll clearly shows Romney has momentum blah blah blah, 3 point partisan affiliation edge clearly more indicative of the real Ohio electorate, blah blah blah.
He doesn't want to be saved time. Constant repetition of the Mittmentum mantra is key.
Both the Electoral College and the tie-breaking procedure are set forth in the Constitution, so there really isn't any debate about the validity of either process. It's what we chose and never changed despite occasional grousing. But certainly winning the EC without the popular vote does lessen the impact of a win - it certainly did for Bush, who wasn't exactly accepted in all quarters until the country came together post-9/11. However, Obama winning by the skin of his teeth would be an unlikely scenario - every President running for re-election since the end of WWII has equaled or bettered the results of his initial election or lost.
Nate said the above, but then, in the very next paragraph, reduced Obama's chances of winning Ohio from 76 percent to 73 percent on the basis of this very same poll result.
Next you'll be asking how they can campaign on extending Medicare if they're really about cutting the deficit. Hint: politicians go where the votes are.
//Wow I missed the part where Michigan is in trouble too. That Barone guy is going to be right one day, and boy will we all owe him an apology. Lucky thing for 0bummer there aren't many rich folk in Ohio (and whose fault is that, stupid union-poors?).
The New York Times has an app that might be good. One of its tabs claims it will have district-by-district results across the country. I think it'll be hard to know if it's any good until after the election, though.
Rock yourself to sleep however you'd like.
Haaaa. Is that you?
Look at that support just melting away - MELTING I tell you.
POLLS 538 WT. DATE DEM REP MARGIN
Philadelphia Inquirer 10/25 49.0 43.0 Obama +6.0
Rasmussen 10/24 51.0 46.0 Obama +5.0
Muhlenberg 10/21 50.0 45.0 Obama +5.0
Gravis Marketing 10/21 48.0 45.0 Obama +3.0
Angus Reid 10/20 48.0 39.0 Obama +9.0
Pulse Opinion Research 10/15 48.0 44.0 Obama +4.0
Quinnipiac 10/14 50.0 46.0 Obama +4.0
PPP 10/14 51.0 44.0 Obama +7.0
Muhlenberg 10/14 49.0 45.0 Obama +4.0
That one is getting blasted hard in the reviews right now because , though it's a "free" app, most of the content is only available to NYT subscribers. Maybe the actual election day coverage will be free and comprehensive but that stuff kinda turns me off to wanting to use their app. I did however enjoy the reviewer who gave it one star and uninstalled it because she thought the articles were horribly biased towards the GOP.
I meant BobM and his Guantanamo critique.
Biden went to PA twice in the final week of the 2008 campaign, including the night before the election.
Happy now?
Exactly. I don't think Benjamin Harrison was greatly affected by this, but Bush before 9/11 as you say, and certainly JQ Adams (who won in the House, but against Andrew Jackson's much larger popular plurality), started out in a bad light. So did RB Hayes, though who knows what actually should have been the outcome in 1876, and the Presidency was awarded via a crappy ad hoc procedure (shades of 2000). It's an undemocratic outcome and a flaw in the Constitution.
If France, hardly a small country, can have a popular election for President, then the US ought to be able to have one. It would require (as in France) an "instant runoff." Never happen, though, because of the different nature of the federal system here. States will not surrender their power, so the whole issue is doomed.
In 2004, William Rehnquist wrote Centennial Crisis: The Disputed Election of 1876 about the nonsense in 1876. It's quite interesting! It also has a subtext of "See? This has happened before, so lay off!"
In addition to their ongoing expenditures, the Romney-Ryan folks are now buying ad time in Minnesota and Pennsylvania. I am sure the campaign also needs $ in case Ohio or some other state gets litigated.
Yeah, that's probably a good idea. I was thinking the ideal situation is to have spent all your money right when the election ends, but I guess you do have to plan for the (probably inevitable) post-election wrangling.
And the parties.
So Jason, in your opinion, Joe Biden going to a state that every poll says is safe Dem is proof that PA is in play, but Paul Ryan stopping by GA is just standard fare?
You're in the tank, man.
Man, you guys really buy into ######## arguments like "momentum." I realize that you're just being a hack, but it seems sort of pointless to imply that Romney's competitive in states that he's going to lose by 7 points and that wouldn't matter even if he won.
Didn't you spend some effort trying to convince us that Obama did just fine in the 1st debate & and debates don't even matter? Pot meet kettle.
Romney's surge pre-dated the debates, and I remain very skeptical of the extent to which the debates mattered this cycle.
Do the debates matter at all if Romney loses by two points instead of three?
One more time, Sam: Yes, Pennsylvania may be a little too close for Chicago's comfort. As Barone points out, Romney is doing better in a blue-ish state like Pennsylvania thanks to his improved ability in connecting with suburban families. It also helps explain why he's not doing better in Ohio, which is not as suburban-centric, despite the state's propensity to be more favorable to Republicans.
And if you think both Rick Klein and Sam Stein are "in the tank," well, there is a full moon....
You're creating a narrative and then finding facts to fill the void.
To be fair, concern trolling using a Michael Barone article IS the weakest form of the ouevre.
//Right on cue - "As Barone points out" - you mean as Barone hopelessly speculates...
There's a big difference between stopping by Texas and Georgia to pick up a few million dollars in campaign contributions and holding a campaign rally in a state that one's campaign swears is safely in the bag. Ryan did the former; Biden is doing the latter.
Someone who cheerily quotes from Alternet should be the last person to criticize others.
The monkey picks his facts and builds his narrative to suit his preferred outcomes. Everyone does it.
The country didn't "come together" post-9/11, it was further polarized by the administration's massive over-reaction. The Bush presidency was never accepted as legitimate by a lot of the people who had failed to accept it to begin with. In fact, many people who had accepted it changed their minds after the over-reaction.
Bush's first-term approval ratings don't bear this out at all. His approval spiked to ~88 percent in the weeks after 9/11 and never dipped below 60 percent for the next 15 months.
"Our new Ohio poll finds Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney 51-47, up from 49-48 last week"
With a D+8 sample and only 21 percent independents, both of which they buried in the PDF. Good luck with that.
PPP = Pretty Pathetic Polling
That is just.....not true at all. Bush's handling of 9/11 was very widely praised by both sides of the aisle and it really boosted his image and made a lot of people let go of the controversy of the 2000 election. He completely squandered all that goodwill beginning with the Iraq war and continuing on through the rest of his administration but for a little while the country was pretty united behind him. Even after his reputation started going into the toilet the anger was mostly just about his policies and had little to do with lingering resentment over the election.
Washing dishes that were already clean? Posing for photo sessions that make him look like an extra from a Wham! video?
HOWEVER, Vaux, as a peace offering, I have a friend selling this book on Sebastien Brossard if any of you or yours are interested.....
True. Like the narrative of it can't be that close of a race in Pennsylvania since only Biden is going there this week*, to his hometown for only a few hours.
*I couldn't find anything saying Obama, Romney or Ryan would be in PA this week. Maybe I missed something.
That is undoubtedly why the Republicans lost the House & Senate in 2002 and Bush was defeated in 2004. Oh, wait . . .
COKES TO # 5367, 5370 & 5372!
So interesting stuff from a curiosity sense but nothing that really sheds a lot of light on the poll. One thing that you can see though is the huge advantage Obama has among early voters, 63% of them in that poll voted for him.
I really shouldn't feed the troll, but once again amateur pollster Joe Kehoskie thinks he has all the answers when he doesn't. Yes, the Dem/Rep/Ind was the 16th of 18 questions. They put that question towards the end of all of them. In their five previous polls it was the 14th of 16, 15th of 17, 23rd of 26, 10th of 13 and 10th of 12 questions. It's on the 3rd page of the PDF. Your finger must be killing you from having to scroll down so far.
It's more that the overwhelming bulk of the polling indicates that it isn't a close race.
Voter participation goes up with age, so the higher age brackets should be represented beyond their numbers, which isn't to say that particular poll necessarily got it exactly right.
Come on man, we've been over this. You can't trust the polls, they're all biased except for that one poll that usually shows favorable results for the guy you are voting for.
One has to be rather cocooned to believe that was at all typical of the post-9/11 reaction in the country as a whole.
Yikes. I wasn't talking about the order of the questions; I was talking about the fact that PPP didn't disclose the sample in the text of the blog post, press release, or tweets it posted in hyping the alleged Obama lead. Instead, people had to dig into the PDF to find this key information. The topline poll results are essentially meaningless without the context provided by the sample breakdown.
But it should have been. You could sure tell at that time who had a brain and who didn't.
Yep, which is why that stuff is really only interesting in the abstract. There are a shitload of unknowns in the breakdown of the polling sample and in the end it's still only 718 people, a small number of people who answer in ways that are contrary to the majority of people in whatever particular demographic you're looking at can throw it off by a fair amount. My main point was just that a DEM+8 sample is highly likely to give a more favorable result for Obama but just using that to dismiss the results entirely is silly because there's a hell of a lot more to it than just party affiliation. After all despite the extreme partisan divide in the country there were still 10% of Democratic respondents voting for Romney and 9% of Republican respondents voting for Obama with a percentage point or two of both parties still undecided.
[5347] I meant BobM and his Guantanamo critique.
My value judgement on closing Gitmo has nothing to do with Obama's ineffectiveness at closing Gitmo; or the 2008 campaign promises Obama made and could not keep; or the expectations he set and fell short of by signing an executive order to that effect. With good reason Bush was never awarded a Nobel Prize in economics in anticipation of his social security privatization effort, but Obama was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize early in his first term. He accepted in December 2009, saying:
Obama could not gain public support for closing Gitmo, like a lot of things he could not gain public support for. (In a lot of ways FDR did a far better job getting public support eighty years ago communicating via radio broadcast and newspapers than Obama could do with modern, targeted technologies such as the web, email, Facebook, twitter, etc.)
However, the public just loves the reprehensible drone program, with its terrorizing and killing of civilians in foreign countries. Sure makes us different from those whom we fight.
There is nothing trollish about pointing out that an Ohio poll with a D+8 sample is likely to be off the mark. Ohio was D+5 in 2008. Do folks here seriously contend that Ohio has become more Democratic since 2008? Anyone? Perhaps you missed the 2010 elections when Ohio elected Republicans to Governor, Senator, all state-wide offices, and control of both houses of the state legislature? Or perhaps folks were unaware that the Democrats normally receive about 2% less than their national vote in Ohio?
The only thing trollish about this thread is the name-calling by those on the left towards those that have the temerity to offer a different view.
Or who was full of himself.
Of course you were. Of course you were not talking about the thing you previously talked about (in this case "both of which they buried in the PDF") but instead were talking about something else that makes you kind of correct if we ignore the specifics of your original statement (which didn't say anything about not mentioning anywhere else). Keep on keeping on.
They don't put that in the first page of the press release or on their twitter feed for their other polls too. Their latest Ohio poll is standard operating procedure for them. But please continue to act like you know more about polling than professional pollsters do. It's pretty entertaining.
And what of accusing them of burying something that they didn't bury?
If you're talking about someone in particular, just say it.
The world was a little different eighty years ago than it is today, and I don't see any reason to believe that social media create a more persuadable/unifiable body politic, and I think a very strong case can be made that they probably make the public harder to unify.
And, of course, FDR had the Depression and Pearl Harbor to help him to get the country unified.
Amen. Moreover, Barone, Rick Klein (ABC), and Sam Stein (hello, Huffington Post?) must be hacks too, since they have also commented on the tightening race in Pennsylvania.
Wow. Where in this thread — or any other — have I talked about the order in which a pollster asked the questions?
It's standard practice for most pollsters to disclose the relevant sample information to provide context for the poll results being announced. PPP, however, buries this information in its PDF files rather than in the text of its blog posts, press releases, or tweets. One doesn't need to be a hardcore conspiracy theorist to understand why PPP does this.
And what of accusing them of burying something that they didn't bury?
I think in your knee jerk reaction to criticize Joe, you misunderstood his post. It seemed pretty clear he was referring to the common practice of publicizing the top-line results from a poll without discussion of the cross tabs, particularly the partisan split of the sample. Some polls don't disclose that, and where they do, it is often in a link that takes you to the detailed results. If you're reading hard copy of a newspaper, you don't even get that. The Washington Post just released a Virginia poll and touted the fact Obama was up 4%. If you followed the link to the details, it showed a D+8 sample. Virginia is not going to have a D+8 electorate this year, IMHO. I doubt anyone who knows anything about the state would disagree, unless they are spinning like mad.
And it has nothing to do with feeding the narrative of a tight race.
Because, none of those people would have anything to gain with making people on both sides frantic for even one more poll/article about the election.
However, if they simply pointed out "As Ohio, goes the nation" and then showed the overwhelming polling in Obama's favour for the past two months (31 of 38 polls, every poll ahead or tied in the last two weeks), and explained the limited EC options for Romney if he doesn't win Ohio...
...well, that's not going to keep everyone interested, is it?
Moving the goal posts.
I don't see Fox or Rasmussen or CNN doing that.
PPP did that. They have a full break down in the PDF, which is linked to in the article on their site. So what's the problem?
http://magazines.scholastic.com/election-2012/breaking-news/2012/10/Students-Pick-Obama
Except, of course, that it's not standard practice. Do you criticize Rasmussen for not giving their demographic cross tabs? Do you accuse them of bias for not doing so? No, you don't. Instead, you criticize and accuse PPP, who actually does provide cross tabs.
One doesn't need to be a hardcore conspiracy theorist to understand why Joe does this.
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