Presidential Campaign

North Carolina?

We all know Mitt Romney is behind in the key battlegrounds, with every recent poll showing President Obama leading where it takes to win and even some national surveys putting his approval at the key 50 percent mark. But a new NBC-Marist poll, released Thursday evening, shows Romney is behind not only in New Hampshire and Nevada, but in North Carolina as well. Sure, it is only by 2 points, but behind in North Carolina — a state Obama won by 14,000 in a historic wave?

National presidential election campaigns perforce are oceanic, not nuanced events that turn slowly, and sometimes waste more time on irrelevant issues — Quemoy and Matsu, a candidate’s tears (Muskie) or innocent comment (Romney, the elders, brainwash).

But campaigns all evolve in two parts: I. Inspiration and II. Perspiration. The former prevails in the primaries; the latter in the candidates’ campaigns themselves.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, explains in better terms than I can muster why Obama’s campaign claim that his budget plan would pay down the debt is 10 Pinocchios false.
 
Here’s what Sessions said recently in the weekly Republican address:

The NFL replacement refs are to the real refs what Mitt Romney is to real conservatives. Romney is no Reagan. Romney is no Ryan. Romney is no Rubio. The Romney problem with voters is the same as the replacement-ref problem with football fans: They ain't the real deal. Good story in The Hill about Paul Ryan's unhappiness with the replacement refs. Ryan and I agree about the refs and the Packers. However, I suspect, deep down, while he can't say it, Paul Ryan secretly agrees with me (don't tell anyone) that the replacement refs are really like:

Mitt Romney.

Then again, Romney and Ryan will not be compared to Vince Lombardi and Aaron Rodgers, either (wink)!

This morning “The Diane Rehm Show” on NPR devoted the first hour to “Wooing Women Voters.” Since they didn’t include IWF on the panel, I thought I’d offer a few insights here.
 
First I’d like to call into question the whole premise of the show. It suggests that all women are “in play” this election — a notion that doesn’t make any sense when you consider that women make up 52 percent of the electorate and are hardly a homogenous voting bloc: married-single, urban-rural, young-old, mothers-childless. Read more...

Mitt Romney has begun to state which parts of ObamaCare he applauds. Good. That is a start. Now Romney is saying that if elected he will journey to Capitol Hill and seek agreements with Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Democratic leaders. Good. I doubt Romney will be elected, but if he is, he should. Romney is now telling voters he will govern as he did in Massachusetts when he had to deal with Democrats (and joined Ted Kennedy enacting RomneyCare). Good.

Republicans are getting depressed under an avalanche of polling suggesting that an Obama victory is in the offing. Those surveys, in fact, suggest no such thing! Here’s why:

1. All of the polling out there uses some variant of the 2008 election turnout as its model for weighting respondents, and this overstates the Democratic vote by a huge margin.

In English, this means that when you do a poll you ask people if they are likely to vote. But any telephone survey always has too few blacks, Latinos and young people and too many elderly in its sample. That’s because some don’t have landlines or are rarely at home or don’t speak English well enough to be interviewed or don’t have time to talk. Elderly are overstated because they tend to be home and to have time. So you need to increase the weight given to interviews with young people, blacks and Latinos and count those with seniors a bit less.

Well, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) is having its annual legislative week in Washington, D.C., this week, opining about members’ favorite subject, "racism.” They can't seem to stop reminding their audience that President Obama and his Democratic machine continue to champion their causes and if Romney is elected, we will return to the days of the great plantations.

They have taken Romney's covertly videotaped comments about the 47 percent and are creating a new political industry and campaign. However, the president's record on fighting crime, closing the education gap, reducing unprecedented poverty in minority communities and creating an entrepreneur class during his tenure has taken a massive nosedive. Why is it that conservatives — white and black alike — are always the biggest impediment to the progress of many blacks in this country, according to the high-pitch rhetoric of the CBC and Democratic machine?

In his convention speech, America’s President for Life, Bill Clinton, talked eloquently about the “arithmetic” of the Romney/Obama economic plans.
 
I am switching to the arithmetic of the votes, the states in play and the Electoral College.
 
But indulge me first to opine from 30,000 feet.

Gotta love these Republicans. They are the party of those millionaires and billionaires who claim to be America's wealthiest victims while their nominee demeans half the nation, and when Harry Reid says America needs a president for ALL of the people, Republicans claim Give-’em-Hell Harry is breaking the Senate rules! After the outburst against Reid, let me add to my latest column about Mitt Romney's Antoinette problem that the Antoinette wing of Senate and House Republicans should feel free to disagree with Reid and claim America does not need a president for all of the people.