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Now then, as I was saying, charisma is what wins Presidential elections.  The first debate proved this point quite conclusively; as Mitt Romney won it in the opinion of almost everyone simply because he seemed more energetic than the President did.  Naturally, I was shocked that Obama did so poorly, but nonetheless the general principle that charisma wins elections was upheld.

Obama returned to form, though, in the second debate and I think won it despite Romney’s best efforts to weird him out by stealing his material.  Obama is more likeable than Romney in general; so I really cannot think what happened in the first debate.  I still believe that Obama will win because of his charm, and leave the awkward, sometimes nervous looking former Governor wondering what happened.

Of course, in the matter of what they proposed to do things were very different.  Mitt Romney threw almost all conservative ideas out, and simply mimicked Obama to a great extent.  He talked about how rich people  do not need help; the middle class does, and spoke fondly of the need for government regulations.  In the second debate, he came out in favor of affirmative action, albeit awkwardly.  In the upcoming foreign policy debate, he will probably quote Howard Zinn approvingly.

Romney won the first debate, but in so doing he essentially promised to be super moderate–to out-Obama Obama, as it were.  Maybe Romney will just say whatever he thinks is likely to be popular at any given moment.  Or maybe there is a conscious and deliberate plan whereby Romney talks like the consummate “centrist” and then governs like a supply-side Republican.  But either way, the Etch-A-Sketch strategy worked like a charm.

In a way, I think these debates have been the culmination of what I talked about in this post.  There are two Rockefeller Republicans in these debates; one of them simply happens to be a Democrat.  There are differences in their personal style, in their manner, and in degrees of Rockefeller Republicanism, but that is what they both are campaigning as.

Obama is (usually) more charismatic, and so he gets the advantage among swing voters.  Of the remaining votes, I assume that most will be cast based on party loyalty.  The Democrats will vote for Obama and hope he will adhere more closely to their platform, even though he will still face opposition in Congress.  The Republicans will vote Romney because they want Obama out, and will vote automatically for the GOP candidate whoever he happens to be.

It bears repeating that Romney is probably not actually a Rockefeller Republican; he just plays one on TV.  He played a much more socially conservative kind of Republican in the primaries, and then relied on the public’s short attention span to affect his metamorphosis.   Most likely, he is a George W. Bush Republican: almost all of his policies suggest that he supports the same tax cuts and military interventionism that the last Republican did.  But saying that won’t win him any allies.

I think that Obama, meanwhile, would like to be more liberal on government spending, raising taxes, and so on.  He probably wants to be an FDR Democrat on the economy, but the political terrain is such that he can’t find a way to do that.  For one thing, I think he is more interested in achieving bipartisanship than FDR was.

Ultimately, I think Obama wins this on personal appeal.  Romney, outside of one fluky debate, seems rather arrogant and condescending.  Even in the debate he “won”, he seemed arrogant with the way he talked over the moderator.

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Okay, I wanted to try to avoid blogging about politics this weekend, but analysis of Clint Eastwood’s Absurdist one-man play is everywhere.  I guess it’s not even that political except that it happened at the Republican convention.  As eurobrat points out, the performance, unlike everything else at the convention, was not carefully stage and crafted.  It was spontaneous.

That definitely was why it was more memorable than anything  else at the convention, but I am not sure that “memorable” means “good”.  “All publicity is good publicity”, they say, but they are wrong.  Just ask Richard Nixon.  Still, I like Eastwood, and I can sort of see what he was trying to so, but it just fell flat.  That’s okay; plays often do need adjustments after opening night.

I think he should hire Roger Guenveur Smith to perform in the next version of it.  Number one because he is very good at one-man performances, and number two because there would be something delightfully ironic about a man named Roger Smith interviewing an empty chair.

Talking of which, Michael Moore has his own take on it, in which he erroneously says “a crazy old man hijacked a national party’s most important gathering so he could literally tell the president to go do something to himself”.  But Eastwood had the imaginary President–President Harvey, if you will–telling him, Eastwood, that.  The implied swearing didn’t bother me that much, although I suppose it will horrify the religious wing of the Republican party.

But, in the end, it was my favorite part of the convention.  I have to give Eastwood credit for that much.

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Republican Vice-Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan said one of his favorite bands is Rage Against The Machine.  The band’s guitarist, Tom Morello, wrote a response to him in Rolling Stone, saying that Ryan’s beliefs are antithetical to what the band believes, and what their lyrics say.  But, Morello notes, Ryan says “he likes Rage’s sound, but not the lyrics.”

I’ve never understood that.  I don’t know much about music, so I just listen to it as background to the lyrics.  If I like the lyrics, I’ll like the song.  If I don’t, I won’t.  That doesn’t mean I don’t care at all about the music, but it’s definitely a secondary element for me.

That said, it’s easy to like music that is ideologically opposite from oneself.  I like a lot of Marty Robbins‘s songs, even though he was a hardcore conservative.  I think Warren Zevon was a conservative as well, but he’s still one of my favorite singer/songwriters ever.

Anyway, Paul Ryan says he likes RATM’s “sound”.  I’ve only heard a few songs by them, and they seem like the sort of thing he would like.  Too much random loud noise and screaming of the lyrics for my taste; makes them hard to understand.  It’s too bad, because the lyrics themselves are pretty good.  If Ryan is just in it for the “sound”, I’d have to say he’s lucky he still has his hearing.

As Morello is winding down his article, he writes:

But Rage’s music affects people in different ways. Some tune out what the band stands for and concentrate on the moshing and throwing elbows in the pit. For others, Rage has changed their minds and their lives. Many activists around the world, including organizers of the global occupy movement, were radicalized by Rage Against the Machine and work tirelessly for a more humane and just planet. Perhaps Paul Ryan was moshing when he should have been listening.

I think Morello is making a mistake here, because I suspect that most of the band’s success comes from those same “moshers”.  Morello shouldn’t insult them, even if he is understandably upset that one of them is a candidate for national office despite not listening to the band’s message.

While we’re on the subject, why are so many irrelevant details of Paul Ryan’s life making the news?  First there was the thing about his clothes, now it’s his musical tastes.  People are also excited about his hobby, bow-hunting. (Ugh!) Although at least that’s tangentially related to his policy decisions, because one of his major achievements is lowering taxes on arrow makers.

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The New York Times has a bizarre fluff article about Paul Ryan’s fashion sense.  This isn’t really my area of expertise–he wears dark suits, like every other male politician–but the article does raise a lot of interesting questions about attractiveness and its relevance to politics.

I think that politicians in general are better looking now than they were before the advent of television and high-quality photographs.  You can’t go around looking like  Martin Van Buren and expect to be President anymore.

Martin Van Buren (Image via Wikipedia.)

Admittedly, not everyone in politics nowadays is pin-up material.  Actually, even people like Ryan, Obama, Palin and all the other supposedly attractive pols are just slightly above-average-looking people.  None of them would turn heads on the street.  But by the standards of the political arena, they look like movie stars.  I suspect this is because to be a major figure in politics, you usually have to be fairly old and spend a lot of time sitting around indoors.  This lifestyle isn’t conducive to getting on People magazine’s “Most Beautiful” list.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two consecutive Republican Vice-Presidential nominees have been relatively young and physically fit people.  They know how much looks matter in politics.  The NYT article referenced above makes it sound like only the Republicans do this, however.  Not true.  Why, the Democrats were perhaps the first beneficiaries of the attractiveness bias, in that it provided JFK the critical edge he needed in a close race against the haggard-looking Richard Nixon.

It’s not the same thing as the “charisma” that I write about so much–both Romney and Ryan are good-looking, but not at all charismatic–but it’s related.  And if you can’t get a charismatic politician to run for your side, getting a nice-looking one is probably the next best thing.

It’s been said that “Washington is Hollywood for ugly people”.  Well, now it’s coming to be Hollywood for slightly above-average looking people.  Eventually, political strategists will decide the best thing to do is put forth incredibly telegenic puppet candidates, and having the real nitty-gritty work of running the country done behind the scenes by people who look like Karl Rove or James Carville.  Or maybe that’s already going on.

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Romney may have gotten one good line in, but as I mentioned, his answer to NBC’s Brian Williams’ question on gun control was awful.  The only place I was able to find a full transcript was a Conservative website, but here it is:

Williams: As governor you signed an assault weapons ban in Massachusetts. And you said at the time, quote, ‘These guns are not made for recreation or self-defense. They are instruments of destruction with the sole purpose of hunting down and killing people.’ Do you still believe that?

Romney: Well, I actually signed a piece of legislation, as you described, that banned assault weapons in our state. It was a continuation of prior legislation. And it was backed both by the Second Amendment advocates like myself, and those that wanted to restrict gun rights, because it was a compromise. Both sides got some things improved in the laws as they existed. And I happen to think that with regards to the Aurora, Colorado disaster, we’re wise to continue the time of memorial and think of comforting the people affected. And political implications, legal implications are something which will be sorted out down the road. But I don’t happen to believe America needs new gun laws. A lot of what this young man did was clearly against the law. But the fact that it was against the law did not prevent it from happening.

Let’s break this down bit by evasive, mealy-mouthed bit, with my comments in red.

  1. “I actually signed a piece of legislation, as you described, that banned assault weapons in our state. It was a continuation of prior legislation.”  [He is basically trying to say: “it’s not my fault, it was like that when I got there.”]
  2. “And it was backed both by the Second Amendment advocates like myself, and those that wanted to restrict gun rights, because it was a compromise. Both sides got some things improved in the laws as they existed.” [It was an assault weapons ban–that means it restricted guns, period.  Don’t try to retcon everything so that you were more radically conservative.  He’s trying to appeal to the hardcore NRA members by lying to them, and what’s worse is that it’s not even a very good lie, as it makes him look like an incompetent governor.]
  3. “And I happen to think that with regards to the Aurora, Colorado disaster, we’re wise to continue the time of memorial and think of comforting the people affected. And political implications, legal implications are something which will be sorted out down the road.” [I said something similar on the day of the atrocity; I thought we should wait until more facts were known before talking about what to do to prevent it.  But now, more facts are known.  Romney is trying to dodge the question so that he doesn’t have to alienate any voters.]
  4. “But I don’t happen to believe America needs new gun laws.” [What happened to what you said in the previous sentence?  Do you want to talk about the political angle or not?  If America doesn’t need new gun laws, then tell us: what does it need?  Surely something can be done to prevent this kind of tragedy.]
  5. ” A lot of what this young man did was clearly against the law. But the fact that it was against the law did not prevent it from happening.”  [What? Yes, everyone knows mass murder is illegal, and yet it still occurs.  That’s true.  But the point is, you can make it harder for the crime to be committed.  What Romney said is a trivial generality; an attempt to dodge the question again.  And it succeeded, because Williams then moved on to another topic.] 

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Stop the presses!

I know you’ll think I’m crazy, but I saw it with my own two eyes, I did!  He was being interviewed by Brian Williams of NBC, who said something like “an anonymous Romney staffer said you were planning to pick a boring white guy for VP”.  And Romney chuckled and said something like “you told me you weren’t interested.”  UPDATE: The verbatim quote from Romney was: “You told me you were not available”.  Same thing, really.

Now, it’s true that minutes earlier, Williams asked him something about a gun control law he passed as governor, and Romney answered with a barrage of weasel words and non-answers the likes of which I’ve seldom seen.  And even more pathetically, Williams totally let it go without follow-up questions.  But still, you have to give Romney credit: he made a joke that wasn’t awkward or forced, which is pretty rare for him.  And after all, “likeability” is what wins elections!

Really, it happened!  I tried to get the clip, or at least a transcript for you  at NBC’s website, but I can’t get the clip to embed, or even play correctly on my computer.  It might be here.  Or that might be an interview with Kathy Griffin.  For some reason, I was having a heck of a lot of trouble with navigating their site.

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Her dress reminds me of Queen Amidala's in "Star Wars".
“The Crystal Ball” by John William Waterhouse. Via Wikipedia

About four years ago, the conservative site Townhall had a poll you could vote in for who you thought McCain would pick for Vice President.  Well, much like Ross Scott’s Gordon Freeman, if I see buttons I just have to push them, so I voted in the poll.  I picked somebody named Sarah Palin, who I had never even heard of, but I figured “McCain will pick a woman, but not the obvious one that everyone is bandying about, Kay Bailey Hutcheson.”

So, today, I saw that they’re conducting a similar poll for Romney.  For this one, though, they want your email address, no doubt so that they can send you ads, so I’m not going to actually vote.  Also, there are no buttons to push.  Where’s the fun in that?  Anyway, though, I scanned the list and let me officially go on record as picking Governor Susana Martinez.  Once again, I don’t know who she is.  But she is a woman, and she has a Hispanic surname, and Romney needs help with both demographics.

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You know that “charisma” stuff I go on about all the time on here?  The quality that is more important than any other to winning elections?

Romney doesn’t have it.

I know, that’s not news.  But it never ceases to amaze me how singularly lacking he is in this quality.

I was listening to a snippet of some speech of his on the radio.  It bored me.  That’s a bad sign for him; if he were a half-way charismatic fellow, he’d have had me outraged.  All the charismatic people on the Republican side can make do that.  But Romney is just dull.

You don’t even have to consider the content of their speeches–and Heaven knows, too many voters probably don’t–to see the difference.  Obama sounds passionate and fired up when he speaks, whereas Romney’s voice sort of cracks whenever he tries to raise his voice to a powerful crescendo.

Sure, tons of people will vote for Romney because they hate Obama.  People are either going to vote for Obama or against him, but nobody is going to vote for Mitt Romney.  He is just hoping that enough people will hate the incumbent to vote him in.  That was the strategy for the last uncharismatic guy from Massachusetts, too.

And now there are rumors that his campaign plans to “avoid John McCain’s mistake”–to wit, make a dull pick, without any charisma, the opposite of Sarah Palin.  This is also a terrible idea, though speaking as one who hopes Romney does not get elected, it pleases me greatly.

I suspect that, in the end, Palin helped McCain’s 2008 campaign.  Yes, you read that right.  It is true that she made a fool of herself in her interviews, but what of that?   The Republican base does not believe anything in the mainstream press, and consequently explained that away as “media bias”.

You say: “but she alienated the moderates”.  No, she didn’t.  The moderates were already alienated, because they were going to vote for Obama no matter what.  No one except a die-hard Republican was going to vote for John McCain, and even they didn’t like him much.  Palin served to energize the only group which would even consider voting for John McCain.  From a purely strategic point of view, she was a good pick.  A rotten candidate, but a good pick.  Curious how that can happen.

Anyway, if the Romney people do decide to double down on dullness, I think it will signify that the people running his campaign are basically counting on a massive economic disaster to make Obama unpopular.  And I suppose that could happen.  Kind of sad, though, if your entire campaign depends on something like that.

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Newt Gingrich has written an article in NewsMax about what he calls “NOT Obama Democrats”. (I am not sure why the “not” is capitalized.):

The first big signal was the 41 percent of the vote Keith Judd won in the West Virginia Democratic primary. Here was a convicted felon sitting in a Texas federal prison with a 17 1/2-year sentence for extortion. When West Virginia Democrats prefer a convicted felon to the president, they are showing they are “NOT Obama Democrats.”

This week the depth of the NOT Obama Democrats was further revealed when John Wolfe got 41 percent of the vote in the Arkansas primary. Wolfe, an attorney whose platform includes repealing Obamacare, actually won 36 counties against Obama’s 39 counties.

The same day, “uncommitted” got 42 percent in Kentucky and actually carried a majority of the counties (66 counties to 54 Obama counties).

This 42 percent is the same percentage Eugene McCarthy got against President Lyndon Johnson in New Hampshire in 1968, and at that time it was considered an earthquake to have that many Democrats repudiate their own president.

Putting that History degree to use, eh? It might be worth mentioning that McCarthy was an actual guy, and therefore somewhat more capable of sustaining his support than “uncommitted”. Obama presumably intends to continue to argue for himself, and no other Democrat is going to argue for him or her self.

I mock Gingrich, but the truth is he’s on to something here; it is an interesting development. He writes: “If the campaign continues in this direction, we may discover that the NOT Obama Democrats will evolve into Romney Democrats by Election Day.”

Doubtful. Romney is unlikely to appeal to these rural voters much more than Obama does. Yes, yes, I know my fellow Liberals are thinking it’s all motivated by “racism!”, but the fact of the matter is that Romney seems like a rich corporate elitist to these voters.I don’t think they’ll like him any more than they do Obama.

Jennifer Rubin looked at these same facts and concluded: “The reason for this, as you might imagine, is that in burnishing his credentials with the left, Obama has hurt himself in the center, even within the Democratic Party.” Yes, of course, the legendary “center”! How could I forget? She next quotes Josh Kraushaar, who gets it even more wrong:

Moderate Democratic groups and officials, meanwhile, privately fret about the party’s leftward drift and the Obama campaign’s embrace of an aggressively populist message. They’re disappointed that the administration didn’t take the lead advancing the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction proposal, they wish the administration’s focus was on growth over fairness, and they are frustrated with the persistent congressional gridlock. Third Way, the centrist Democratic think tank, has been generating analyses underscoring the need for Democrats to appeal to middle-of-the-road voters, to no avail. . . .

Yeah, I’m sure the farmers and rural folks in West Virginia and Arkansas are really torqued off that he didn’t do the Simpson-Bowles plan. Rural people hate populism, isn’t that so?

But, to her credit, Rubin does also make one useful observation in that same post. That is that “Romney is the least conservative candidate the GOP had to choose from.”

Is this true? Well, it’s hard to say, what with the flip-flopping and all. But he is certainly not as bombastic and bellicose as Newt Gingrich. And he was Governor of Massachusetts, a very liberal state, which demonstrates he possesses some ability to compromise; something Gingrich would never do.

Was he more liberal than Ron Paul? Difficult question. Ron Paul is extremely liberal on some issues–drugs, for example–but in step with the most reactionary of conservatives on others. It is almost an “apples to oranges” comparison, but I think on the whole, it is fair to say Romney is at least more “mainstream” and “safer” than Paul, whose supporters are often of a more radical bent, whatever their political leanings.

Romney was more liberal than Bachmann, but more conservative than Huntsman. But Huntsman barely even counts, because everyone, including him, knew he didn’t have a chance. So, that leaves only one other candidate for Romney’s “liberal Republican” credentials to be compared with: Santorum. This should be easy enough to prove. We all know Santorum was the conservative wing’s alternative to Romney. Surely, this fact alone proves Romney to be the most liberal of the possible nominees?

As a Congressman, Santorum, economically speaking, could pass for a caricature Democrat. He was for all sorts of government spending programs. As conservatives and liberals alike will attest, he may have been very conservative socially, but his fiscal behavior was entirely that of a Big-Government man.

I have often thought that Santorum would have been quite happy as a Democrat in the 1930s, ’40s or ’50s. He would have had massive government spending programs going, and social issues being more or less unacknowledged. He is, in other words, a Conservative Democrat from the pre-sexual revolution era.

So, Mitt Romney is more liberal on social issues than Santorum–not a difficult task–but more conservative on economic issues. Romney is far more likely to cut spending than Santorum was. So, which guy is more liberal? Well, that’s hard to say, isn’t it?

And we come round to where we started: what is the deal with all these Democrats not voting for the President from their own party? I suspect a lot of them are like Santorum; they want government spending programs, but don’t like Democratic policies on social issues.

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It’s making me uneasy how much “social issues”–lousy term, by the way–keep coming up in this campaign. I had hoped that would stop after Santorum got out, but it hasn’t.

In my opinion, this is exactly the formula for an economic disaster: voters so busy worrying about this stuff that they forget the major economic problems the country’s facing. Even if we finally do recover from the recession, as we appear to be, it will be only to revert to the major economic problem of summer, 2008: high gas prices and stagflation. While I feel they are important, I nonetheless believe that a problem like a major stagflation epidemic dwarfs issues like government-subsidized birth control or whether gays can marry.

Although at least those actually are issues. What’s worst of all is how much attention is devoted to what Mitt Romney did 45 years ago in high-school, or what Obama had for breakfast as a kid in Indonesia.