Continuing my habit of blogging about trials taking place on the Italian mainland, let us all now have mixed feelings about yesterday’s news that former Prime Minister Silvio “Bunga Bunga” Berlusconi has been sentenced to four years in prison for tax fraud. Il Cavaliere’s sentence, handed down a year after he resigned from office, feels a bit like the tax evasion charges that ultimately felled Al Capone: a lightweight proxy punishment for a lifetime of corruption.

Berlusconi stepped down from office last November in the whirl of the Eurozone crisis, but looking back on it, the abdication feels equally wrapped up in the (ongoing) charges that he slept with the underage prostitute known as Ruby the Heart-Stealer, then illegally engineered her release from detention. Indeed, as the Financial Times’s Tony Barber notes this weekend, “over the almost 20 years that he has been an active politician, Mr. Berlusconi has stood trial on charges ranging from bribery of judges to false accounting.” Most significantly, “he has never been definitively convicted of anything.

In that sense, this conviction looks like a big step forward. Look closer, however, and you’ll notice that there’s little indication this trial will end up any different from the last few. First, because of an amnesty law, three of the four years have already been wiped from the 76 year-old’s sentence. Second, as Barber notes, “three prison terms have been imposed on him in the past…before being lifted later in the judicial process, either through acquittal or because of the statute of limitations.” Third, the latest ruling’s five-year ban on political activity is basically meaningless, since it “cannot take effect until the (endless Italian) appeals process is exhausted, and only if the ex-premier’s guilt is irreversibly upheld.”

On Wednesday, Berlusconi’s seemed to anticipate these charges, declaring that he wouldn’t run for office this spring. Given his history of dodging prison, however, it may be better to heed the words of an former Berlusconi ally quoted by the Associated Press: “For now that is just one of the many Berlusconi announcements to which he has accustomed Italians. We’ll see in a short time if it is something concrete, or only a propagandistic discovery.”

What do Washington Wizards owner Ted Leonsis, Maryland Congressman John Sarbanes, Walmart Foundation President Sylvia Mathews Burwell, and Washington Monthly Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris have in common? They’re all Greek Americans and they’re getting together today at Georgetown. Beginning around 11:30AM, Paul will moderate a discussion on “The Next Generation of Giving Back,” about public service and mentorship in the Greek American community. The conversation is part of an event that will reward student groups for community service proposals they’ve crafted.

I’ve got a feeling Paul won’t resist asking Sarbanes about his upcoming election against a bartender—and his serpentine, gerrymandered district that a Republican activist has recently challenged in court. For my part, I’d like to see the panel smack down Mitt Romney’s talk that Obama’s spending habits will turn the US into “Greece.” With his fierce austerity budget and avowal of tight monetary policy, it seems that he’s got it backwards.

Click here to catch the livestream.

Forget momentum. Forget polling averages. Heck, forget Nate Silver for a minute of your lives. (I’m asking you to do a lot of forgetting today.) Just think about odds for a minute. All things equal, says Gabriel Snyder at the Atlantic Wire, Obama has an 82.4% chance of winning the presidency.

Conceding that there are only 9 states up for grabs, Snyder found that there are 512 different ways the two candidates could split them. In 431 scenarios, Obama wins. In 76, Romney does. In 5, the two tie and the House of Representatives decides our sorry fate. Because Obama holds a marked advantage among states already decided, Romney has less to work with. As Snyder concedes, the system is imperfect. A scenario in which Obama wins nothing but Iowa is weighted the same as a more plausible outcome. Still, this latest bout of number-crunching should remind us of Romney’s problem: Only eleven of Romney’s 76 paths to victory concede Ohio to Obama, the major swing state in which the President appears strongest.

There’s a whiff of a possibility that in ten days President Obama wins the electoral college but loses the popular vote, as George W. Bush did in 2000. If he does, the conservative outcry to abolish the electoral college will likely be faint. Long-run demographics favor Democrats right now; it makes sense for Republicans to compete in a handful of states, rather than all of them. Indeed, only eight very blue states and the District of Columbia have passed the National Popular Vote amendment. Whatever happens this time around, it would make sense for Dems to keep pushing back against the electoral college.

That said, the electoral college doesn’t in fact do such a bad job of reflecting the concerns of the country at large. In Virginia, the looming sequester is getting a lot of play for what it might to do military and contracting jobs. In Ohio, the EPA’s coal regulations and Obama’s auto rescue are dominating the airwaves. New Hampshire and North Carolina don’t have much in common, but are both coveted by the Obama and Romney campaigns. Besides, as Josh McCrain pointed out at Ten Miles Square yesterday, swing states change from year-to-year, ensuring that a different set of issues and voters play pivotal roles each cycle.

Our primary system, on the other hand, remains stagnant. Like clockwork, New Hampshire and Iowa appear first on the calendar, and play an outsized role in determining the party nominees. In a 2011 column about this problem, the New York Times’ David Leonhardt cited a study that found that “an Iowa or New Hampshire voter had the same impact as five Super Tuesday voters put together.” Why is this a problem?

Because Iowa and New Hampshire don’t reflect the direction the country is moving in. From Leonhardt’s column:

Their populations are growing more slowly than the rest of the country’s. Residents of Iowa and New Hampshire are more likely to have health insurance. They are older than average. They are more likely to work in manufacturing. Above all, Iowa and New Hampshire lack a single big city, at a time when large metropolitan areas are crucial to lifting economic growth…Yet metro areas are also struggling with major problems. The quality of schools is spotty. Commutes last longer than ever. Roads, bridges, tunnels and transit systems are aging.

To some degree, the Tea Party has actually helped mitigate some of the rural/age bias baked into the NH/IA primaries. Medicare and Social Security were not sacred cows this primary cycle, and the federal ethanol subsidy expired just days before the Iowa primary. Still, Leonhardt’s idea of a rotating primary schedule could do more to diversify the range of issues prioritized by political candidates than would a National Popular Vote presidential system.

“Oh Sandy the aurora is risin’ behind us
The pier lights our carnival life on the water”

I’m knocking off a bit early today (though with the usual number of posts in the can!) to head out for a brief weekend trip, but will obviously be alert during what could be a strange weekend of developments and anticipated developments. Here’s what’s left from today:

* New CNN/ORC poll in Ohio shows Obama still up 50-46 among LVs. Obama leading among early voters so far by 59/38.

* Nate Silver’s latest forecast shows Obama with 73% probability of winning, mainly because of battleground state advantages.

* Krugman takes another swing at Romney’s “five-point plan.”

* At Ten Miles Square, Harold Pollack quantifies very small number of abortions that would fall under Romney’s “moderate” exceptions.

* At College Guide, Mark Kleiman discusses the perilous state of the University of California system, particularly if Prop 30 is defeated.

And in non-political news:

* List of the richest person in each of the 50 states.

I’m out. Simon van Zuylen-Wood will be handling Weekend Blogging duties, and he’s got quite a lot planned aside from reacting to the news.

See you Monday.

Selah.

I don’t want to obsess about Hurricane Sandy, but since its effects could become serious before I get back to blogging on Monday, just wanted to mention the ever-increasing probability that this storm will wreak political havoc as well as threatening life and property. Let me reiterate: the political effects are not as important as keeping Americans out of direct harm, but they could matter.

It’s hard, of course, to quantify the risks of Sandy’s political effects. The most obvious, of course, will be in terms of the massive distraction it will provide from political messaging and early voting activity in states ranging from Florida to Ohio to Maine—a distraction that continue right on up to Election Day in places where there is significant physical damage (or loss of life). Then there’s the possible impact, positive or negative, in perceptions of how well federal, state and local governments are performing in the emergency.

Power outages are very likely in the mid-Atlantic and Northeastern states, and could spread wider. As most people know from their own experience, such outages can last for a number of days if more pressing emergencies are present. Lost along with everything else would be tens of millions of dollars worth of political messages.

You get the idea: you can stare at polls and look at election forecasting models all you want, but this storm has just thrown a big question mark into everything we know about the cycle. As the New York Times put it in its usual understated way:

The storm is approaching in the middle of preparations for the presidential election on Nov. 6 and could disrupt plans for early voting in some areas, with unpredictable results. Mark McKinnon, a former media strategist for President George W. Bush who went on to found No Labels, a group promoting bipartisanship, said that the hurricane brought to the campaigns something they both dread: uncertainty.

“Campaigns are all about control,” he said. “So in the closing days, they fear any external events that could disrupt the game plan. Ain’t no leashes for Mother Nature.”

I doubt the Obama campaign had the weather in mind when it decided to put such an emphasis on getting people to vote as early as possible. But in some states, that might have been a smart bet. We’ll wait and see, and pray for the minimum peril.

As habitual consumers of political talk know, one of the most ancient arguments of American politics involves the relative emphasis campaigns should pay to persuasion and mobilization—to “base voters” and “swing” or more technically, “persuadable undecided” voters. Late in most competitive campaigns, of course, the ratio of voters that can be harvested via superior “mobilization” as compared to those in which “persuasion” tends to rise as voters make up their minds or simply lose interest. It’s a challenge not only for campaigns, but for observers, who often struggle to get a handle on the proportions of voters in the two categories.

That’s why two pieces in TNR today are worth reading. The first, by Bill Galston, reminds us there are indeed still undecided voters out there, and they have a tendency (though not always and not always by big margins) to break against incumbents at the end of campaigns. The second, by Nate Cohn, gets into comparisons of current candidate margins with the remaining undecided vote, which helps enormously:

In this election, the number of undecided voters is so small that there are only few states where a clear break would be sufficient to flip the outcome. In Wisconsin and Nevada, Obama already exceeds 49 percent, suggesting that undecided voters could only influence the outcome if Obama supporters turn out at lower rates than the polls anticipate. One state where Romney still retains a narrow path to victory through undecided voters is Ohio, where Obama holds a very slight lead of just 2.1 points in the RealClearPolitics average, 47.9 to 45.8. But if Romney won 55 percent of undecided voters and one percentage point vote for a third party candidate, Obama would still win Ohio by a 1.6-point margin, 50.3 to 48.7. Romney would need nearly 70 percent of undecided voters to carry the state—an exceptional performance. Colorado and Virginia are the two states close enough for undecided voters to more realistically make a difference, but, even there, turnout is a more critical question.

But there’s another reason it makes sense for Obama to focus on turnout rather than persuasion in the final days, assuming he has to make that choice, notes Cohn:

According to national polls, Obama is performing four points better among registered voters than likely voters. That’s well above the more typical 1 or 2 point gap and the main culprit appears to be strong Republican enthusiasm combined with low enthusiasm among young, Latino, and Democratic-leaning independent voters. Since Obama’s coalition is unusually dependent on low-frequency voters, Obama has more to gain from a strong turnout operation than previous candidates. Although it’s unclear whether Obama’s vaunted ground operation can rejuvenate turnout among infrequent Obama ‘08 voters, the difference between a modest and high turnout among young and minority Obama supporters could easily decide the election. And it’s not just that turnout is important, it’s that Obama’s larger advantage among registered voters makes it an open question whether Obama could actually lose if minority and youth turnout rates approach ‘08 levels, even if undecided voters broke in Romney’s direction.

The very nature of Obama’s coalition makes it hard, and essential, to turn it out. But if he does, he’s in a clear position to win no matter how many voters Moderate Mitt bamboozles.

For the candidate afflicted with “Romnesia,” you never know when you hear that he’s making his “closing argument” if that is indeed the case, or he’s got three or four more in his pocket. But that’s the label BuzzFeed’s Zeke Miller is giving to Mitt Romney’s speech in Ames, Iowa, today—a place, you may recall, that he strictly avoided when Iowa Republicans kicked off the presidential cycle with a straw poll in the summer of 2011.

But anyway: the guts of Mitt’s final pitch is that he and Paul Ryan are thinking big and bold while Barack Obama is petty and timid:

Four years ago, candidate Obama spoke to the scale of the times. Today, he shrinks from it, trying instead to distract our attention from the biggest issues to the smallest—from characters on Sesame Street and silly word games to misdirected personal attacks he knows are false.

This is pretty rich coming from the guy who has spent much of the last month relentlessly pandering to the coal industry. But at any rate, what’s interesting about the “big and bold change” stuff is that it’s true: but not in any way he’s admitting. To hear his “closing argument,” here’s a sample of what he and Paul Ryan are fighting for:

We will save and secure Medicare and Social Security, both for current and near retirees, and for the generation to come. We will restore the $716 billion President Obama has taken from Medicare to pay for his vaunted Obamacare.

We will reform healthcare to tame the growth in its cost, to provide for those with pre-existing conditions, and to assure that every American has access to healthcare. We will replace government choice with consumer choice, bringing the dynamics of the marketplace to a sector of our lives that has long been dominated by government.

I’m sure you know by now how Mitt ‘n’ Paul plan to “save” Medicare. The “save Social Security” bit presumably refers to “reform” plans they haven’t had the guts to reveal, though Ryan was an early backer of partial privatization and Romney has talked vaguely about means-testing benefits.

But it’s the “health care reform” claim that is really incredible. By repealing Obamacare, Romney and Ryan would eliminate health insurance coverage for 30 million people who would otherwise be covered beginning in 2014. The Medicaid block grant they propose would according to the most credible indeeliminate coverage for another 17-23 million people. That’s 47-53 million Americans who will have to find some other way to secure health care or simply do without. And what are the “reforms” proposed instead? The Romney campaign has already been forced to admit that its candidate’s deep concern for people with pre-existing conditions extends only so far as preserving current laws allowing people to pay both employer and employee shares of health premiums after they’ve lost their jobs, or try to buy terrible, expensive policies through state risk pools. But believe it or not, the big and bold Romney/Ryan agenda would make things worse by the “market-based” reform of interstate insurance sales, which would create a race to the bottom sure to eliminate most of the protections available to poorer and sicker people.

I won’t even get into the hypocrisy of talking about getting government out of health care while demanding that the single-payer Medicare program keep paying insurance companies and providers $716 billion in unnecessary reimbursements. But the gap between what Romney is saying on health care and other issues, and the reality of his agenda, already gigantic when this campaign began, has only grown. If you like your dishonesty big and bold, he’s your man.

On the eve of Obama’s convention speech, I was asked by NPR’s Neil Conan what the president’s most important task was. Here’s what I said:

GLASTRIS: Neal, well, the most important thing for tomorrow night is for President Obama to weave the substantial achievements of the first four years into a picture for the public so that they know what he’s done, remind them what he’s done and leverage that into a vision of what’s to come. We hear that he’s going to be more specific about a second term agenda. I’m hoping he will. It’s got to be rooted, though, in what he’s already done.

I wasn’t the only one offering this sort of advice. According to Politico, before the convention James Carville and Stan Greenberg “called upon Obama to use his acceptance speech as a mini-State of the Union address laying out a detailed agenda, as Bill Clinton did in 1996.”

Alas, that’s not what Obama did in Charlotte. He sprinkled his speech with mentions of his achievements, but not in a way that painted a coherent story, and he offered only a few goals for his second term (a million manufacturing jobs etc.) without any explanation of what he would do specifically to reach them or how they might be connect to the policies he’d already implemented.

In the first debate, Obama compounded a lethargic performance by again not making a coherent case for how the achievements of his first term laid the groundwork for job growth in the second and what he would do to build on those achievements. He failed to do so again in the second and third debates, despite being far more aggressive in taking on Romney.

Finally, in the last few days, the Obama campaign has put out a booklet that lays out in an organized way the specifics of a second term agenda, and in his speeches he’s kinda-sorta begun explaining how those specific policies relate to what he’s done in the first term. But the astonishing thing, as TNR’s Alec MacGillis notes, is that he’s articulating all this most crisply and effectively only behind closed doors. Read, for instance, the following passage from the “off the record” interview he gave to the Des Moines Register (which the White House reluctantly later released), and consider whether you think the president would be in better shape in the polls now if he’d been making the case for his candidacy this way in front of millions of voters when he had the chance to:

Obviously, I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished over the last four years. A lot of it was responding to the most severe economic emergency we’ve had since the Great Depression. And whether it was saving the auto industry, stabilizing the financial system, making sure that we got into a growth mode again and started putting people back to work, we have made real progress.

But people are obviously still hurting in a lot of parts of the country. And that’s why last night I tried to reiterate a very specific plan that we’ve put forward to make sure that the economy is growing, we’re bringing down our deficit, and we’re creating jobs.

So, number one, I’m very interested in continuing to build on the work that we did not just in the auto industry but some of the other industrial sectors, bringing manufacturing back to our shores; changing our tax code to reward companies that are investing here. There is a real sense that companies are starting to make decisions about insourcing, and some modest incentives I think can make a real difference in terms of us seeing continued manufacturing growth, which obviously has huge ramifications throughout the economy, including in the service sector of the economy.

Number two, education, which has obviously been a priority for us over the last four years — I want to build on what we’ve done with Race to the Top, but really focus on STEM education — math, science, technology, computer science. And part of that is helping states to hire teachers with the highest standards and training in these subjects so we can start making sure that our kids are catching up to some of the other industrialized world.

read more »

Not trying to rub it in to East Coasters who are staring at Sandy’s progress, but it’s a really beautiful day on the Central Coast. Almost worth the cost-of-living differential.

Here’s what I’ve got in the way of mid-day nourishment:

* TNR’s Noam Scheiber argues persuasively that Team Mitt’s spin on polls far less consequential than lies on policy.

* Bad day for Obama at the old Gallup Tracking corral: Job approval ration down to 48/47; Mitt back up to five-point lead among LVs; candidates tied among RVs.

* Another peak inside the Obama GOTV Machine, this one by New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg. Not real informative, truth be told, but that’s probably not the reporter’s fault.

* Berlusconi sentenced to four years in slammer for tax fraud.

* Without mentioning Romney, Jeep denies report (which Romney repeated in Ohio) that company is moving jobs from U.S. to China.

And in non-political news:

* More scary stuff about Sandy, including snow storms in VA, PA and OH. Now looks to be 5-7 day “weather event.”

Back in a bit after I get some pre-weekend chores done.

At The Fix, Chris Cillizza draws attention to the information in the new ABC/WaPo poll (which shows Romney up 50-47 among LVs) detailing campaign contacts with voters in battleground states:

Nearly four in 10 voters, 37 percent, in the eight swing states — Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin — say they have personally been asked for their support by a representative of the Obama campaign, either by phone, in-person or online in the past month. About as many, 35 percent, say they have heard from Romney’s side. Two weeks ago, more voters in this collection of states said they had recently heard from Obama than Romney.

Looking just at reported contacts in the past week, the campaigns are equally matched: 28 percent of all likely voters in swing states say they’ve heard from the Romney campaign, and 27 percent say so of Obama’s.

Campaign contacts are highly correlated with voter preferences. All told, about two-thirds of those who have been contacted by the Obama side support the president’s bid for reelection, and a similar proportion of those who have heard from Romney back his candidacy.

Since Republicans as a rule call voter contacts the only metric that matters in GOTV, I guess they’re happy they seem to be running even with Democrats on that score so far. But getting contacted voters to the polls—particularly early—does have value, and it may be there that the much-vaunted billion-dollar Obama GOTV machine needs to excel.

E.J. Dionne is getting a lot of attention for a provocative column suggesting that whatever happens on November 6, the Right has lost this election cycle because its presidential champion has publicly discarded any association with it. Here’s the basic argument:

Almost all of the analysis of Mr. Romney’s highly public burning of the right’s catechism focuses on such tactical issues as whether his betrayal of principle will help him win over middle-of-the-road women and carry Ohio. What should engage us more is that a movement that won the 2010 elections with a bang is trying to triumph just two years later on the basis of a whimper.

That’s true, but I have two reservations about E.J.’s argument. One is that Mitt may have “burned the catechism” in terms of rhetoric and positioning, but he hasn’t changed more than a few of the specific policies he embraced to make himself acceptable to conservatives during the primaries. So long as he’s still on record saying he’s ready to sign a reconciliation bill implementing the Ryan Budget, I don’t really care whether he’s now opposing cuts to Pell Grants.

And the second is that I don’t think conservative activists much care whether they get their way via stealth as opposed to a grand national repudiation of the New Deal and the Great Society. After all, the very core of today’s conservatives—the so-called “constitutional conservatives”—don’t much believe in democracy to begin with, unless it happens to be useful at some particular point in restoring the Eternal Verities that must be permanently enforced through public policy.

More to the immediate point, it’s just too late in the election cycle for conservatives to object to Mitt’s exhibits of “moderation,” even if it drives them nuts.

But there is one front on which the Right most definitely seems to be in the process of failing this cycle, and which is probably more important to their ideological project than how Mitt Romney’s represents himself at any particular moment: the Senate.

The whole grand strategy for conservatives this cycle was to get a Republican Congress and a president pliable enough to agree to sign the aforementioned reconciliation bill implementing the Ryan Budget (not to mention make and get confirmed the fateful fifth vote on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade). No, Romney wasn’t their dream candidate, but he made the requisite promises not to stand in the way of a Republican Congress’ will, as Grover Norquist explained earlier this year. And they didn’t even need to trust him, because the real power would be at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

I honestly don’t think it occurred to anyone in either party until fairly recently that there was a decent chance Republicans could fall short in the Senate even if Mitt Romney won the presidency. The landscape, after all, was so incredibly in their favor, with only 10 of 33 seats to protect and seven Democrats retiring, two of them in deep red states. But then Snowe retired and then Lugar lost his primary and then Akin imploded and then GOP candidates underperformed in Florida and North Dakota and New Mexico and Arizona and Hawaii, and now the Mourdock time bomb has gone off, and it’s just a friggin’ fiasco!

I’m sure in retrospect conservatives are wishing they had spent just a little less time indulging their unglued hatred of Obama and a little more time shoring up their Senate lineup. Who knows, if they’d left Lugar alone or tilted the playing field a bit in Missouri to John Brunner or Sarah Steelman or been nicer to Olympia Snowe or figured out Connie Mack was a poor candidate—maybe they’d be celebrating Mitt Romney’s relatively strong late showing and debating whether their reconciliation bill ought to be even more vicious than originally designed. Now it looks like they’ve got a problem no matter what happens at the top of the ticket.

Maybe I’m wrong and they’ll win the Senate after all, or maybe they’ll find a way to bribe or threaten a Democratic Senator into submission or at least into a half-a-loaf compromise. And perhaps Obama will win, making control of the Senate less critical. But for my money, the biggest defeat the Right has already suffered (other than the failure to recruit and/or unite behind a presidential candidate less weaselly than Romney) was to take a Senate victory for granted. They’ve got no one but themselves to blame for that mistake.

Here in California, everyone lives with the subconscious fear of The Big One, the earthquake that will finally, biblically, consume us. I’m certainly aware of it, living not that many miles from the San Andreas Fault. But people in the northeast do not spend a lot of time worrying about hurricanes. That could all change this weekend.

Here’s what I’m reading on the WaPo weather page:

With computer models locked in on the eventuality of a punishing blow for East Coast from Hurricane Sandy (with the latest model runs favoring the northern mid-Atlantic), analyses suggest this storm may be unlike anything the region has ever experienced.

Model simulations have consistently simulated minimum pressures below 950 mb, which would be the lowest on record in many areas….

You might ask yourself, aren’t hurricanes supposed to weaken as they head north? Why are these pressures so low? Or as the Weather Channel’s Bryan Norcross put it: “What the hell is going on?”

Norcross’ answer: “This is a beyond-strange situation. It’s unprecedented and bizarre.”

These historic low pressure levels simulated by the model are equivalent to a category 3 or 4 hurricane, which have peak winds over 115 mph. But Sandy’s winds will not be that high, because as it transitions into this hybrid hurricane-nor’easter, its core will unwind. So its peak winds will diminish, but strong winds will be felt over a vast area. Think of a compressed slinky expanding as you let it go.

WJLA meteorologist Ryan Miller notes 66,549,869 people live in the National Hurricane Center’s track zone for Sandy. A large percentage of these people will likely contend with tropical storm force winds - 40-60 mph, if not somewhat greater….

A very prominent and respected National Weather Service meteorologist wrote on Facebook last night,

I’ve never seen anything like this and I’m at a loss for expletives to describe what this storm could do.

Totally aside from the apprehensions of the vast number of people potentially in the path of this meta-storm, political gabbers are already beginning to speak of it as “Obama’s Katrina,” in the sense of representing a huge and ill-timed natural disaster. (That was the term conservatives used, of course, for the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but Obama eventually got little of the blame for how it happened or was handled).

If you live in the mid-Atlantic, get ready. If Sandy misses you or loses its punch, you can always have a party with the stored supplies.