[Posted by Karl]

I’m trying to resolve some internet access issues, but the buzz is that Rick Perry will withdraw from the Republican presidential race today and endorse Newt Gingrich for the nomination on his way out.  Meanwhile, Gingrich in 1999 asked his second wife for an “open marriage” or a divorce at the same time he was giving speeches around the country on family and religious values, his former wife, Marianne, told The Washington Post on Thursday.

–Karl

[Posted by Karl]

The latest from PPP, because it’s getting buzz:

PPP’s first national poll of 2012 finds Barack Obama with his best standing against Mitt Romney since last May, right after the killing of Osama bin Laden. Obama leads Romney 49-44.

It’s not as if Obama’s suddenly become popular.  He remains under water with 47% of voters approving of him to 50% who disapprove. But Romney’s even less popular, with only 35% rating him favorably while 53% have a negative opinion of him. Over the last month Romney’s seen his negatives with independents rise from 46% to 54%, suggesting that the things he has to say and do to win the Republican nomination aren’t necessarily helping him for the general. Obama’s turned what was a 45-36 deficit with independents a month ago into a 51-41 advantage.

I would not be overly concerned about this, not least because head-to-head polling is basically meaningless at this point in the cycle.  Obama does not break 50%, despite PPP’s sample containing 41% Democrats  — a couple of points higher than Dem turnout in 2008, let alone 2004 or 2000.  Republicans are 35% of the sample, which would be about average.  And the poll wants us to believe that Obama is not popular, but surged 15% with Indies in a single month.  I would want to see that replicated in other polls before I buy it, particualrly since the only other poll this year to date with a Obama +5 result is the traditionally Obama-friendly reuters/Ispos poll.  Tom Jensen is focused on Mitt’s unfavorables, which could be the Bain issue, but may also represent a lot of conservative disgust with Romney’s increasingly-likely nomination.  It would also be interesting to know who the 7% undecided are, because Jensen previously told us it was disproportionately Republican in 2011 polls of swing states.

–Karl

[Posted by Karl]

With a ridiculous cover headline — “Why Are Obama’s Critics So Dumb?” — I get why Ann Althouse (or anyone, really) would not want to bother with the latest from Andrew Sullivan, although he is likely not responsible for that headline.  The article is not an ad hominem attack of Obama’s critics, but a centralized compilation of his various apologies for the President.  Insofar as his defenses parallel the likely narrative of Obama’s reelect campaign, it’s worth looking at his takes on criticism of Obama from the right (Sullivan also addresses criticism from the left, which won’t play much role in the campaign) on major issues:

Jobs.  Sullivan begins — as Team Obama almost certainly will — with Obama inheriting a terrible economy, writing that “[n]o fair person can blame Obama for the wreckage of the [first] 12 months, as the financial crisis cut a swath through employment.”  Yet shortly thereafter, he writes:

Since [the beginning of 2010], the U.S. has added 2.4 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s far better than what Romney would have you believe, and more than the net jobs created under the entire Bush administration.

Sullivan is comparing Obama’s gross job creation to Bush’s net job creation, ignoring that Bush also inherited a recession resulting from the collapse of the tech bubble.  By Sullivan’s own standard, this is unfair.

By the standard of net jobs created, Obama remains underwater and will be lucky to get to zero net jobs created by the end of his term.  Conversely, if we simply judge Obama by the recovery, the results are terrible when compared to past recoveries.  Nearly a million people have dropped out of the labor force, dropping the participation rate to an historic low, implying an unemployment rate close to 11%, instead of the official 8.5%. (more…)

As an unexpected Christmas gift, Aaron Worthing got me The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. on CD. I took a drive up to Big Bear with my son this weekend (a father-son “Indian Guides” trip), and on the way up and back we played the CDs. I was already well into the CDs from previous drives to work, so we heard the “I Have a Dream” speech on CD 4 near the end of our drive on Saturday. On the way back we started with King’s eulogy for 4 martyred children in Birmingham.

It was just a coincidence that we were listening to the speeches of King on this day, but it was a fitting one.

King was an expert at rhetoric, and his speeches were powerful and compelling as delivered in his voice. Nobody is without fault, but he was a tremendous force for good in this country. He stood at all times for nonviolence and noncooperation with evil. His story is a stirring one and it is good to have a day to remember him.

There is still evil in the world, and we still must fight to eradicate it. MLK reminds us to do so with dignity and peacefulness — but never to give in; always to resist evil with courage and steadfastness. Let us all follow King’s example and fight evil where we find it.

UPDATE: From the eulogy:

These children—unoffending, innocent, and beautiful—were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.

And yet they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. And so this afternoon in a real sense they have something to say to each of us in their death. They have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows. They have something to say to every politician who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. They have something to say to a federal government that has compromised with the undemocratic practices of southern Dixiecrats and the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing northern Republicans. They have something to say to every Negro who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice. They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.

It’s a case study in effective rhetoric, and it’s impossible to come away unmoved.

[Posted by Karl]

Jon Huntsman, who claimed third place in New Hampshire was a “ticket to ride” to South Carolina, has figured out we don’t care.  The former Utah governor will drop out of the GOP nomination campaign and plans to endorse frontrunner Mitt Romney later this morning.  His campaign YouTube page has been purged of anti-Romney videos.  His anti-Romney websites now redirect to Yahoo.

You know who this benefits, but the benefit has to be marginal.  Team Obama used Huntsman’s withdrawal to take a shot at Romney, which is even more marginal.

The establishment line developing on Twitter is that conservatives never forgave Huntsman for being Obama’s ambassador to China.  I’ll stick with what I wrote in December — Huntsman blew it by running as the Maverick Who Insults Conservatives when his record was arguably more conservative than Romney and Newt Gingrich.  Indeed, he was the anti-Gingrich: his substance was more conservative than his image and he insulted all the wrong targets.  And unlike Rick Perry, he insulted the wrong people intentionally.  That approach has John Weaver written all over it, but Huntsman was dumb enough to think it was smart.

Thus, Huntsman exits the stage, perhaps hoping for a cabinet post in a Romney administration, probably having to explain to the press why a “perfectly lubricated weather vane” is exactly what America needs in 2012.

–Karl

[Posted by Karl]

Consider this the flip side of the question of what the casual voter — as opposed to political junkies — might know about the presidential candidates in 2012.  The question was largely prompted by a new Pew poll showing many voters do not know basic facts about the Republican candidates.  In the poll, 69% of registered voters knew that Newt Gingrich served as speaker of the House, but only 53% could identify Massachusetts as the state where Mitt Romney served as governor and just 44% of voters could identify Ron Paul as the candidate who opposes US military involvement in Afghanistan.

The numbers are better for Republicans and their leaners: 75% knew the Gingrich question; 59% knew the Romney question; and 51% knew the Paul question.  Even so, these are numbers that suggest that the October KFF tracking poll – showing nearly three quarters of the public, including seven in ten likely Republican presidential primary voters, say they don’t know enough about Romneycare to have either a favorable or an unfavorable opinion of it — might still be fairly accurate.  More significantly, the Pew poll expressly gives the R/D/I breakdown for these questions, but only gave answers including leaners for GOPers and Dems.  A little back-of-the-envelope math confirms the stereotype of truly unaligned voters as the least informed.  The youth vote is also among the least informed, which may not be surprising, but notable given that Ron Paul’s campaign touts its support among the young and inependent.

It is also worth noting that Pew did this quiz poll during a period where over half the news was about the presidential election.

These results are not particularly depressing; the politically engaged need to remember that to everyone else, we are at the beginning of the process and that many voters will not engage themselves until their primary or the general election.  These factors, and uncertainty about the eventual nominee(s) are why head-to-head polling is basically meaningless at this point in the cycle.

However, the politically engaged should keep the early level of ignorance in mind more than we probably do on a day-to-day basis.  Given polls like those from Pew and KFF, how much importance should we put in last month’s ABC/WaPo poll question asking whether Romneycare, Gingrich’s experience and Paul’s non-interventionist foreign policy are major reasons to support or oppose them?  How much weight should we put on arguments that candidates like Romney and Paul are electable based on early head-to-head polling?  How much weight should we put on the claim that Romney’s and Paul’s negatives are priced into their stock because they ran in 2008?  Or that Gingrich’s negatives are well-known because of his relatively high name ID?  How much weight should we put on concern (or enthusiasm) that the increase in support for Paul since 2008 signals a fracturing of GOP foreign policy consensus?

The answer to all of these questions would appear to be: “Not very much.”   At least, people should not place undue weight on such arguments.  Yet the establishment media and even political junkies often talk and behave otherwise.

–Karl

[Posted by Karl]

If you are reading a political blog like this, the odds are you are a political junkie.  Conversely, if you are reading this, you are probably not a casual voter.  The discussion at political blogs is geared to the intensely interested, while campaigns ultimately want to win the casual voter. 

Accordingly, political junkies might do well to look at what the casual voter knows or wants to know about the candidates.  One easy way of looking at this is as close as your nearest auto-completing search engine.  Here is what happens if you search for current GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney:

Those results may not surprise you, but note that Bain Capital is not among them, suggesting it is not yet part of the zeitgeist.  However, the fact that Mitt Romney’s net worth is already a common topic suggests the Bain issue could enter these charts with a bullet. (more…)

And is ruthlessly lampooned by John Oliver of the Daily Show.

Absolutely brilliant.

[Posted by Karl]

The conventional wisdom is that Mitt Romney, the first GOP non-incumbent to win the Iowa caucuses and New Hamsphire primary, is thisclose to being the party’s de facto presidential nominee.  The conventional wisdom is almost certainly right.  However, one of my New Year’s resolutions has been to question straight-line projections from the current situation.

So how could Romney lose the nomination at this point?  At a minimum, he would have to lose (or eke out a squeaky Iowa-esque win) in South Carolina.  Could that happen?  The latest poll from Insider Advantage has Romney ahead of Newt Gingrich by only two points.  That’s just one poll, but PPP has its Palmetto state poll due later today that may well show a competitive Mitt vs Newt race.

If Romney stumbled in South Carolina, the questions about his candidacy would linger and perhaps grow, depending on the degree of the stumble.  People would revisit his IA and NH wins and perhaps conclude they are more the product of divided opposition than any improvement in Mitt as a candidate.  They might worry about how much worse the Bain issue might play in a general election in the hands of the left.  They might think hard about whether 2012 is the year to nominate a high financier.

Romney is well ahead of Gingrich in Florida at the moment.  But a win (or very-near-win) in South Carolina might change those numbers.  Indeed, those numbers include Rick Santorum; if he dropped out, Romney would likely find himself in a tight race with Gingrich, whose favorables even now are second only to Romney’s in the Sunshine State.  If Gingrich beat Romney in Florida, Mitt would have a severe case of The Emepror’s New Electability.

I doubt all these dominoes would fall Newt’s way.  Romney is well-organized, well-funded, and has the establishment lining up for him.  Gingrich even now is a loose cannon capable of doing himself in, with loads of his own baggage.  Romney is a better fit for South Carolina than he was four years ago.  Other NotRomneys, including Santorum will likely stay in the race through Florida, allowing Romney a win in the fashion McCain won four years ago.

The conventional wisdom is that Mitt Romney, the first GOP non-incumbent to win the Iowa caucuses and New Hamsphire primary, is thisclose to being the party’s de facto presidential nominee.  The conventional wisdom is almost certainly right.  But if Romney was going to lose, this is probably how it would happen.

–Karl

Aaron has published a novel which is available on Amazon for Kindle and Kindle apps. He has details about it here:

I actually did the principal writing of it in 2006 and 2007, and since then I have been polishing it. And of course I think some “stage fright” kept me from releasing it. But I had begun to pitch the book to different publishers and I felt that the time to finally release it was now. This is in part because as time went on, certain parts of the novel started to get incredibly ironic. You will have a hard time believing that I wrote this before certain events in my life—except for the fact that it would have been physically impossible to have written it after those events.

That was enough to get me to spend $9.99. You can get it here or by searching for “Archangel Aaron Worthing” in the search box to the right. If you’re a Prime member and a Kindle owner, you can read it for free on your Kindle — but I spent the $9.99, to help Aaron out, and also because it allows me to read it on the phone and iPad.