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Out of Boulder comes the updated U of Colorado election forecast.
An update to an election forecasting model announced by two University of Colorado professors in August continues to project that Mitt Romney will win the 2012 presidential election.
According to their updated analysis, Romney is projected to receive 330 of the total 538 Electoral College votes. President Barack Obama is expected to receive 208 votes — down five votes from their initial prediction — and short of the 270 needed to win.
The new forecast by political science professors Kenneth Bickers of CU-Boulder and Michael Berry of CU Denver is based on more recent economic data than their original Aug. 22 prediction. The model itself did not change.
“We continue to show that the economic conditions favor Romney even though many polls show the president in the lead,” Bickers said. “Other published models point to the same result, but they looked at the national popular vote, while we stress state-level economic data.”
While many election forecast models are based on the popular vote, the model developed by Bickers and Berry is based on the Electoral College and is the only one of its type to include more than one state-level measure of economic conditions. They included economic data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. …
Matthew Continetti shows how liberals eat their own kind.
As Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama debated Wednesday evening it was possible to detect, if one was alert, the ground of American politics shift beneath one’s feet. Sometime during the first 45 minutes or so, when it became clear that Romney, not moderator Jim Lehrer, was in command, the tectonic plates of Obama’s ego and of reality crashed together. The tremor that followed was pronounced. What had been to the Democrats and the media an irrevocable fact—that Romney’s campaign was in shambles and Obama’s reelection assured—crashed resoundingly. Like all earthquakes the convulsion produced panic, in this case among liberals. Their response was typical of their kind: They devoured their own.
“A liberal,” said Robert Frost, “is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” Wednesday saw poetic confirmation of his aphorism. Not only was Obama unable to take his own side against Romney; afterwards Democrats and the liberal media could defend neither their fellow partisan Obama nor their colleague Lehrer. The hysterical and self-destructive frenzy that resulted was nothing less than spectacular. Patrons of social media could watch, in real time, as the president’s most ferocious champions realized that the avatar of hope and change could not withstand a direct and withering criticism; could convey only diffidence and contempt and exhaustion when confronted by a talented opponent; and could not possibly live up to the mythological expectations that his devotees had constructed for him.
Liberals hurriedly searched for scapegoats as the edifice collapsed. They closed in on Obama and Lehrer. …
Jennifer Rubin posts on the debate.
It is not surprising that aides would be “shell-shocked,” as the Daily Beast put it, over President Obama’s horrendous performance at the debate. That no one on the left imagined that he would do so poorly tells us much about the Obama bubble and the president’s distorted self-image.
Push back on the excuse narrative just a bit, and you see how attenuated the rationale must become to preserve Obama’s image of the most brilliant man ever to hold the presidency. How can someone supposedly so rhetorically gifted, so smart and so wonkish be stumped, halting and testy? We are told, “Partly lost in the fray was Obama’s history as a good but not necessarily great debater with a style at times nonchalant and diffident.” Such a description attempts to preserves the notion he could do better if he really wanted to. But that’s bizarre, to put it mildly, a confession of arrogance in defense of incompetence.
Truth be told, he gave a rotten convention speech, and his State of the Union addresses have varied from deadly dull ( 2011) to inconsequential (2012). Maybe, he is a one-trick orator, the Meredith Willson of politics. A single speech (with variations thereon) is all he’s got. The “red states-blue states, have hope, and we’re going to reinvent the globe” got him through a 2008 campaign, but it has no place in the repertoire for a sitting president in a reelection campaign. …
Yuval Levin posts on the bizarre Dem debate reaction.
In the days since last week’s presidential debate, the Democrats have fallen into a very peculiar sort of disarray. Four days on, they are still, and apparently on purpose, sustaining the “Romney won big” story by furiously making excuses for Obama’s poor performance. He didn’t do that badly, but listening to Obama himself, his campaign, and his bewildered surrogates the last few days you would think that Obama was utterly destroyed by some kind of evil genius who was equal parts master actor, pathological liar, and bully. You should watch the debate again to see how silly this is. And it’s hard to understand why the Democrats continue to advance this story. I bet that if you polled people today about who won and lost the debate, Obama would do even worse than he did in Wednesday night’s instant polls, thanks to his and his campaign’s continuing self flagellation.
The Democrats also don’t seem to have fully considered what their excuses are communicating about Romney’s agenda. Romney advanced a series of principles and policies in the debate, and rather than argue that these are bad for the country, the Democrats are basically arguing that Romney’s ideas are too good to be true—so good, moderate, and sensible that they couldn’t really be Mitt Romney’s, and therefore that Romney is not telling the truth about his agenda. These charges of dishonesty aren’t just false (though they are false), they’re also downright strange. A Republican candidate stands before 60 million voters and commits to an agenda and his opponent responds that this isn’t really his agenda, and that voters should instead look to Democratic attack ads and liberal think-tank papers to learn what the Republican is proposing. That’s the strategy? …
Dennis Byrne says it looks like Bob Woodward was right.
… Obama’s fatal flaw is not just his policies (as bad as they are), but the fact that he isn’t and never was cut out to be president. He’s not up to it. He’s the kid who got thrown into the pool without knowing how to swim. He lacks the experience, composure and certain qualities of leadership required of a president — qualities that Romney put on display. The pro schools the neophyte.
Bob Woodward described it in his new best-seller, “The Price of Politics,” which detailed the collapse last year of the “grand bargain” on spending and debt. While Woodward found fault with both parties, he held Obama’s insufficiencies mostly responsible for leaving America heading for the fiscal cliff it now faces. Woodward’s book describes an arrogant, withdrawn, indecisive and uncompromising president. These are dispositions that would doom Obama to failure as a private sector boss. And ought to in the public sector. …
It will make your hair hurt, but have a look at Robert Samuelson trying to explain the snarl over the $5 trillion tax cut.
… On taxes, uncertainties abound. If you cut everyone’s tax rates by 20 percent, the rich — with the highest rates and the biggest tax bills — get the biggest breaks. The present top rate of 35 percent drops to 28 percent; the lowest rate falls only from 10 percent to 8 percent. (Each reduction is one-fifth, or 20 percent.) If that were all, Romney’s plan would indeed represent a windfall for the wealthy. Those with annual incomes exceeding $1 million would save an average of $175,000, estimates the Tax Policy Center (TPC), a research group. (By the TPC’s estimates, the 0.8 percent of taxpayers with incomes of more than $500,000 currently pay 28 percent of federal taxes.)
But there’s also Romney’s pledge to recoup losses by trimming tax deductions, credits and other tax breaks. The package would be “revenue neutral.” The tax system would then end up with lower rates, which would arguably spur faster economic growth. Workers and companies would keep more of any increased earnings; they’d have stronger incentives to work and invest. Although it’s contestable, that’s the theory of “tax reform.”
The trouble is that there’s a major snag, the TPC said in an August report. In practice, the tax breaks affecting the rich (generally, those with incomes exceeding $200,000) aren’t sufficient to offset all of their tax savings from lower rates. Achieving revenue neutrality would compel Romney to raise taxes on the middle class — something he has also vowed not to do.
To justify its $5 trillion figure — the estimated tax loss over a decade — the Obama campaign had to cherry-pick Romney’s proposal and the TPC analysis. It had to ignore any revenue raised by reducing tax breaks and assume that, faced with a conflict between the rich and the middle class, Romney would automatically side with the rich — as opposed to shielding the middle class from any tax increase. On Wednesday, Romney promised to protect the middle class.
The TPC report was widely interpreted as saying Romney would have to raise taxes on the middle class. It didn’t, says the TPC’s Howard Gleckman. It simply pointed out that he couldn’t keep all “his ambitious campaign promises.” He’d have to make choices and modifications. So what else is new? …
Mark McKinnon brings an interesting debate perspective.
… Running for president is brutal. It’s like running naked through a cactus patch on fire. The process is designed to crush you and see what you’re made of, for the tests to come in the Oval Office are far more cruel.
But you can never show the pain.
He may not have been in pain at the beginning of the night, but the President Obama who showed up to debate against a trailing Romney did not look as if he wanted to be there. And more than 70 million viewers noticed.
The president came across as tired, confused, and unprepared for battle. He looked older than the man 14 years his senior standing to his right. And he sometimes slouched, standing with one leg bent, either from fatigue, lack of interest or insecurity.
Though Obama spoke for four minutes longer than the challenger, he said less. Mr Hope and Mr Change never made it into the building. And whether it was the thin air of Denver’s high altitude or the president’s thin skin, his face betrayed a peevishness even as he refused to look directly at Romney when challenged.
Romney took command – of the stage, of the debate, and of the evening. He looked and acted presidential.
The former Massachusetts governor was energetic, with both feet planted firmly on the ground. He was aggressive, but always with a smile. And rather than run from criticism of his positions, Romney ran right to them, ticking off crisp, multi-point answers. …