Almost ten full polls of the presidential race in the last two days. Obama +3.2 in popular vote. Obama 332, Romney 191 in the electoral vote. Trend chart after the jump. Read More
I’m sitting here watching Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity discuss the intonations of African-American speech patterns and decry Barack Obama’s invocations of race hatred, presumably because I have some yearning to watch performance art. I don’t know. I also wonder, what happened to Tucker Carlson?
In any case, here’s the big picture I see here.
You don’t imagine you’ve got a big shocker story like this unless you really think you’ve got something big. And that tells me that there’s a big chunk of rightwing America living in a cocoon in which black people even talking about racism or race at all is ipso facto shocking.
I think Americans know Barack Obama is black.
As the Presidential candidates were prepping for tomorrow’s debate, Paul Ryan hit the trail:
Drudge has been going bonkers all afternoon about a game-changing “race” video of President Obama which Hannity is going to debut. Welp, here it is after the jump … Read More
President Obama now has leads of at least 5 percentage points in states totaling 288 electoral votes. He has leads of between 2 and 5 percentage points in states totaling an additional 44 electoral votes. But it’s that 288 number that stands out to me.
There’s a new poll out tonight of North Carolina from SurveyUSA. The topline shows President Obama with a 2 point lead over Mitt Romney, which is near where most recent polls have been. But among those voters who plan to cast early ballots, Obama has a 20 point lead.
Paul Ryan implied today that the key to solving the problem of the 47% is to get them jobs. Only the vast majority of those people either do have jobs or are retired. Video after the jump … Read More
Romney’s Health Care Plan would leave 72 million uninsured.
For years, I was a big reader of Drudge. Was never a fan of Drudge, though I recognized his entrepreneurial acumen. In fact, I despised most everything that he stood for, from rancid politics to integrity free journalism, the endless lying. But I visited the site ALL THE TIME. And the reason was simple. Before social media and (for me) before the TPM “talk” email account gave me a steady traffic of pointers to important stories from everywhere it was just a great way to know what was happening — both in the most basic sense of what was happening and also what was being talked about.
And then maybe half a dozen years ago I just lost interest. Read More
The White House and the Obama campaign get a lot of guff for resting their second-term hopes on the idea that the GOP will self-moderate after another disappointing loss. I get that this seems absurdly naive on its face. Romney’s the squish who, if Obama wins, will have lost along with Tommy Thompson and Scott Brown (most likely) in what Republicans could construe as the failure of moderation as a political strategy.
But I think one post-election event will force Republicans to grapple with the moderation question.
If the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of the year, it’ll give President Obama about $4 trillion in revenue over the coming 10 years. That’s way, way more than he’s asked for, more than he presumably wants, and more than the economy can easily bear — so everyone will have a big incentive to negotiate backwards from it. Read More