In general, my advice to the candidates as they prepare for tonight’s debate is to avoid getting all wound up in their consultants’ data about whom they need to pander to or how they need to behave. But, if I were President Obama, I would mention that Mitt Romney is a Republican a lot because the Republican brand is as popular as dog food. Only 11% of self-described moderates have a strongly-positive view of the Republican Party. Only 11% of Reagan-Democrats have a positive view of the Republican Party. If no one likes Mitt Romney, that is three-fold true for the party he represents.
When I look at just how unpopular the Republican Party has become, and I consider how strong the party is in large swaths of the country, it is no wonder that Obama is leading in the swing-states. We’re seeing this unpopularity reflected in a variety of ways. Recent polling data has shown Obama doing surprisingly well with blue-collar white women. He’s surging with Latinos. Now we see that Reagan-Democrats have turned against the GOP. Self-described moderates hate the GOP. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Romney is suffering from the fact that his support is not well distributed throughout the country. His support is strong in about 20 states, but many of those states have very small populations and, collectively, they don’t get him close to winning the Electoral College. That’s why a three-point difference in the popular vote is misleading.
This is the reverse of the normal trend in American elections. Democrats tend to be concentrated in urban centers and their inner suburbs, which makes it hard for them to win control of the House of Representatives, for example, because they have too many districts where they win 80 or 90 percent of the vote. If you allocated House seats by the overall vote in Philly and its suburbs, the Democrats would get six seats and the Republicans none. But, right now, the split is three to three. For Romney, however, it doesn’t do him much good to be rolling up big margins in Utah and Texas and Louisiana because he needs those votes in Florida, Ohio, and Virginia.
Back in the late 1980’s the Republicans made a concerted effort to turn “liberal” into a bad word. It worked so well that liberals decided to call themselves progressives instead. It’s time to turn “Republicans” into a bad word. Most people hate them already, so why not confirm their preexisting bias?
I tend to disregard this sort of kibbitzing about debates, but I’m going to make an exception in this case:
I think this is a great idea, and it fits in well with the campaign that Obama has run against Romney so far. I wouldn’t be particularly surprised to see this actually happen tonight.
LOL. As an even more bizarre twist to Washington state’s bizarre top-two primary system, candidates self-identify party and can call themselves anything; party nominations aren’t what’s listed on the ballot. So, candidates are “prefers Democratic Party,” “prefers Republican Party,” and so on.
Four years ago the R’s made a concerted effort to brand themselves as “prefers GOP Party,” because their polling showed that a) the “Republican” label was toxic, and b) an astonishing number of registered voters didn’t know that “GOP” and “Republican” were the same thing.
It didn’t work, and wasn’t repeated in 2010 or this year. Aside from ridicule over the tactic – and the idiocy of “prefers Grand Old Party Party” – it turns out that people hate “GOP,” too.
I’m flabbergasted. Low Information voters indeed!
Herbert Hoover turned “Republican” into a bad word for a generation. Unfortunately, the effect was limited to the top of the ticket. Thus the ticket-splitting of the 1950s and 1960s. And the insistence on Jesse-crats and Reagan Democrats.
Most of Obama’s work and money is concentrated on the battleground states. This is an opportunity to reach a fully attentive truly national audience for free for the first time.
He needs to bring home the message that the Republican Congress did 8 times less work than the famous “do-nothing” congress of the 1940’s. He must stress that government is a partnership of President and Congress, and that it doesn’t work well when one party doesn’t want it to work.
And he must say all that without appearing to whinge or fail to take responsibility for his own stewardship. His message should be a positive “Give me a congress I can work with” and TOGETHER we can make life better for everybody.
“We did half the job of pulling the USA out of the worst crisis since the 1930’s. Now give me a full team to do the full job properly. He needs to tie in hs own favourables with getting a more favorable congress next time.
In other words, rather that playing defense of his own leading position, he needs to play offense on what still needs to be done – starting with electing a congress that is prepared to work hard and get things done.
I suggest we call them the SAPs, the Selfish Asshole Party. They’ve done everything they possibly can to have earned that name, so let them wear it.
Obviously there’s been a lot of speculation about whether the GOP even has a future, and that’s what I’m wondering about too. The clearly have no future as the party of angry, frightened, and confused white people, but it’s not clear if there’s any way for them to broaden their appeal beyond angry, frightened, and confused white people.
Well, we are in the third party system, so it’t not like major parties haven’t collapsed before. The Republicans have lasted a lot longer than the Federalists or the Whigs, but nothing is forever.
Personally I think something like punctuated equilibrium applies in history as well as biological evolution. Like when the Soviet Union collapsed, it happened with a suddenness that took a lot of people by surprise and allowed conservatives to pretend it was all because Reagan said “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
If the GOP does collapse, I think it’s likely to be just as sudden. Or at least it will seem sudden, but of course the party has been decaying from within for several decades now. We’ll see.
I don’t think it will happen and here’s why:
The way George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988 used to say the word LLLLLiberal really seared into alot of impressionable minds who were formerly indifferent toward the word. At least it did for me. But then watching all the Liberals scurry away from the word in fear, adopting the label “Progressive,” made it even worse. By their actions, people made the logical connection that liberals are also cowards, afraid of their own shadow.
When the R’s tried to change the political lexicon to call us the “Democrat Party,” at least we stood up for ourselves and demanded they correct themselves. We’re the “Democratic Party” and they are NOT. And they can’t take that away from us.
We finally took back the word “Liberal” and at least some of us wear it with pride. It makes me cringe when I see a Dem political figure run from it now.
I really hate these games that people like Frank Luntz play with our vocabulary but isn’t it our DUTY to turn it on them and give them a taste of their own poison?
They made the words “Republican” and “Conservative” toxic by just being themselves while wearing these brands. Let’s increase their brand recognition by using the word “Republican” as an adjective to describe greed, heartlessness, insensitivity or whatever other vile trait that you could associate with the Republican creed.
Ewww, that’s so Republican.
I actually like that the wingnuts use the term “Democrat Party”. Quite frequently we encounter people on line or in person who are playing the role of centrist or moderate who use that term, not realizing that it is a “tell” that they are in fact steeped in the wingnut media.
Yes it is our duty, but I’d disagree that our side was doing it’s duty on the “Democrat Party” name calling.
My recollection is that it started to be used regularly by some hardline or cranky Rs during Reagan, then increased to be used by virtually every R making a public or media appearance in the Clinton era. It became and remained standard usage in the Repub vocabulary, and went unchallenged by Ds during most of that period and on into the first W admin.
Wasn’t until the last few years that I’ve seen Ds or cable hosts begin to correct or call out the R using that term. So, I figure about 25 years or so of Rs getting away with it while Ds politely declined to correct and confront.
And the situation with the term liberal is even worse. We’re starting to see a change online among Dems and left leaners, but not so much with our elected officials, who still consider the term toxic.
I tend to agree. Ideally Obama would tie Romney to the teavangelicals, their beliefs, and their proposed policies. If independents realize that these loons are not the fringe but in fact the core of that party then the GOP is toast.
However, the middle voters tend to treasure the pretense that every thing would be great if we all were nice to each other and compromised. So Obama has to play that role – which is good, it’s his nature. But that means he can’t go too far directly linking Romney to the teavangelicals. Mentioning his political party by name frequently is probably the best Obama can do on this front.
There’s been some retrospective lately about “who picked Romney?” or “Didn’t anybody realize what a poor candidate he was?”
I think you’ve got the answer where you say: “If no one likes Mitt Romney, that is three-fold true for the party he represents.”
They’re the ones that picked him.
WAnd wcomment by one “firsttimelasttime” the other day on the New York Magazine website. The title of the article is “Whose Idea Was It to Nominate Romney?”. Here it is:
“Mitt Romney is the caricature of what the GOP thinks the rest of the country would be willing to accept as a Republican president. The GOP has strayed so far from the mainstream that it makes it impossible for them to understand what that mainstream wants in a candidate. They know only what THEY want, which is fine, but they also know that what they want is politically unfeasible. They want someone unabashedly conservative who can pretend to be moderate. But the idea of such a thing is definitionally inauthentic. And that’s why Mitt (and McCain before him) come across as inauthentic. And why they lose.”
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/09/whose-idea-was-it-to-nominate-romney-anyway.html
I am surprised no one has discussed this bulls….
http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/10/hannity-al-gore-preacher-mode.php?ref=fpnewsfeed
Oh, there’s been plenty of discussion of it. Maybe not here, but a lot of other places.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/10/03/162213524/explosive-or-yawn-obama-video-touted-by-fox
-sparks-race-debate
If our elected Dems haven’t by now figured out that they needed to turn the words “Repub” and “conservative” into something akin to fecal matter, they never will. The word “conservative” needed to become in Braindead America what “aristocrat” was in 1790 France.
Obama seems to have decided to wage a “WH only” campaign, despite having been destroyed politically by the worthless Do-Nothing Repub Congress. We never hear much denunciation of the Do-Nothing Repub Congress, despite Rmoney having picked its most prominent monster–sorry, “leader”–as his VP. We never hear that it is the Congress that actually determines what is going to happen in this country on almost every issue, that the Founders intended it to be the real engine of gub’mint, and that when it is in the hands of demented “conservative” knuckleheads, lamebrains, christianists and corporate bagmen no progress or reform on the nation’s innumerable problems can realistially be expected.
Of course, the Pelosi Dem Congress of 2008-10 was one of the most productive in history, whatever ones attitude about the many final “products” like ACA and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms. And apparently the voters found actual reform legislation like that to be “socialist!” and “anti-american”. So who knows what most of the fine citizenry “wants”. I’m quite sure they themselves have no idea.
Anyway, KKKarl Rover will soon be turning his full attention to firewalling his latest creation, the Do Nothing Repub Congress, with his newly created constitutional “right” to throw elections under Citizens United. The small size of the districts should make his corporate bribery, propaganda and cashola machine almost unbeatable—just as the five “conservative” activists masquerading as “justices” intended….
I think you need to listen more closely. Obama’s campaign was a step by step process. First define Romney to keep his ceiling low. Second, state what he plans to do. Third, talk about what needs to happen so he can achieve what he wants, and that means getting the Republicans out of Congress. There are no definitive lines, and some bleed into the others, but he has definitely started phase three.
I think there is a very specific contest in which this makes sense. For instance, the MA senate race. Scott Brown is a Republican. He has an R next to his name. This is his party. Republican. What you need to know about Scott Brown is that he is a Republican, works with Republicans, votes with Republicans. When you vote for Scott Brown, you vote for a Republican. Let’s make that clear. If you don’t want a Republican, don’t vote for Scott Brown.
Yep. If you vote for even the best Republican, you vote for the worst.
“Wow, that Caligula was a real republican.”
“Hey, kicking the dog is a republican move, Dude.”
“Before he redeemed himself, Darth Vader was seriously republican.”
Let’s put it right up there with Nazi, as something you do not want to be called.
For a few days now the national polls have tightened again while state polls still look good for Obama. It’s that trend again from earlier. Last time it took time for the state polls to come back in line with the national (and in a way that was bad for Obama) let’s see if he can hold on so he can probably hold on.