Eric The Blue

Republicans speak out on rape, pregnancy: the beat goes on

I'll say one thing for Kurt Bills, the Republican party's inept and cash-strapped candidate for U.S. Senate here in Minnesota: so far, he hasn't delivered himself of any bizarre-o views on the rape-pregnancy nexus.  The Republican candidate in Missouri is most famous for having denied that rape can cause pregnancy:

Well you know, people always want to try to make that as one of those things, well how do you, how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question. First of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.

Now the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Indiana has divulged how he "slices" this dicey question:

I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God.  And I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is, uh, something that God intended to happen.

Is it funny, or discouraging, to conceive of a grown man and candidate for the Senate, after great struggles of thought, finally arriving at a conclusion that is more or less in line with the ready opinions of all the top pupils in the Sunday school?  It requires an outsider, apparently, to point out that his God appears to be the sole proprietor of a bumbling, privatized 9-1-1 service--too slow to the scene to prevent the rape but sufficiently punctual to help those little swimmers navigate upstream to their destination. Not a woman is raped without Him knowing--and yet, the woman is raped.  Her pregnancy is His way of making it up to her, and it is the work of God's senators to make sure she can't have an abortion. 

It'll be really great if these guys get to interrogate Romney's Supreme Court nominees. 

Reset

I'm dropping the I-am-Sir-Oracle tone favored by political bloggers so as to confess that I regard the presidential campaign with (almost) mute amazement.  Remember when one of Romney's TV talkers, questioned about the "severely conservative" positions the presumptive nominee was adopting, assured a watching nation there was no problem, it was only the primary season, and the Etch-A-Sketch would soon reset?  This was pilloried in the press.  What kind of farce was the Romney campaign?  You say one thing now, you intend to say the opposite later, and you admit, on TV, that that's your strategy?  Is it wise to wear your cynicism on your tongue?  Doesn't announcing such a strategy make it impossible to execute? 

Well, now it is being executed, and the story line is not the Romney farce but the artful Romney pivot.  The farce is not the Romney campaign.  It's our entire political culture, which seems to be built of nothing more than chattering chicanery.   Obama has been criticized for regarding it with disdain.  But that's the appropriate attitude.  Also, however, a losing one.  Catch-22.

I still think Obama is more likely to win.  Romney's sojourn in Nevada may be his way of admitting that Ohio is a stretch.  But why should that be?  He should cut an ad in which he declares himself a stuffed shirt, air it nonstop from Cleveland to Dayton.

 

Climate change: one thing the campaign is not about

All the endless commentary on what has happened in the two presidential debates hasn't stopped some people from noticing what hasn't happened.  Surely climate change is the single biggest issue that has  not come up.  Partly, I guess, neither Jim Lehrer nor Martha Raddatz nor Candy Crowley deemed it worthy of a direct question.  But the candidates have proven themselves adept at talking about what they want to talk about, the specific questions put to them be damned. 

Romney, I think, doesn't want to talk about climate change because his most ardent suporters think it's a hoax, and kow-towing to them would remind more moderate voters of why they regard him with suspicion.  Meanwhile, Obama doesn't want to talk about it because he hasn't done anything about it.  But the first step to doing something about it would be to begin talking about it.  I don't see why a political campaign is a bad place for that.  If Romney does not want to have to say that he is opposed to addressing the problem, then it seems it would be in Obama's interest to force him to do that.  It would fit into a story about the Republican party--its antipathy to science in general, including even evolution, which it cannot abide to be taught in school science class--that "independent voters" might believe.  (After all, it's true.)

Yet even when asked about energy policy, in a debate for which he has received generally high marks, Obama maintained his silence about climate change. Instead, he accused Romney of being insufficiently pro-coal.  On one side, it's Drill baby drill, and, on the other, evident embarrassment about making the case that we can no longer ignore the harmful effects of burning fossil fuels. 

Obama shows up, Willard sputters

I've been scrolling around on the Internet, trying to find if any of my reactions to the second debate between Obama and Romney have failed to be aired.  I don't think so.  There was, however, one rather obscure moment--more obscure than "binders of women," anyway--that, if everyone were like me, would have qualified as Romney's worst moment.  It was his response to Obama's line of attack concerning his (Romney's) "sketchy" plan to cut taxes, increase defense spending, and balance the budget.  The president suggested that the financial sharpies Romney has hung out with in his business career would never go for such a lame pitch, and neither should the American people, "because the math doesn't add up."  Romney:

Well of course they add up.  I-- I was-- I was someone who ran businesses for 25 Years, and balanced the budget.  I ran the Olympics and balanced the budget.  I ran the--the state of Massachusetts as a governor, to the extent any governor does, and balanced the budget all four years.  When we're talking about math that doesn't add up, how about $4 trillion of deficits over the last four years, $5 trillion? That's math that doesn't add up. We have -- we have a president talking about someone's plan in a way that's completely foreign to what my real plan is.

I'm Willard Mitt Romney!  I went to Harvard!  I've made 373 gazillion dollars!  So of course the numbers add up.  How dare you express skepticism about the arithmetical details!  You're lying about "my real plan" (which, however, I will not divulge).  And, by the way, it's irresponsible for the government to spend money in order to keep the national economy from tumbling into the abyss.

Pretty bad, but he probably could have done better than poor, hapless Anne on "The View."

Electoral balderdash

With the presidential election so close, the question arises: what if the electoral college result is a 269-to-269 tie?  It could happen.  Yesterday's analysis of the state of the race began by putting in Obama's column the 242 electoral votes of the eighteen states (and the District of Columbia) that have gone Democratic for five elections in a row.  Then I added New Mexico and Ohio, to put Obama at 265.  If he also won New Hampshire's four electoral votes, but lost all the others that appear close (Viginia, Iowa, Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, and Nevada), we'd have a tie.

The Twelfth Amendment covers the case:

The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President.

The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice.

Notice two things.  First, the state delegations in the House choose how to allot their state's one vote.  That is to say, after the one representative from Wyoming and the 53 representatives from California had expressed their preference, the tally that counts would be 1 to 1.  And Idaho would cancel New York.  And Vermont, Texas.  You might say, with fairness, that if the electoral college at first renders no verdict the tie-breaking solution is to attach an exponent to the original undemocratic calculations.  It would be terrible even if it wasn't the case that it would boost Romney into the White House.

Second, there is the possibility that the president and vice president would be of different parties.  That is because the House chooses the president, and the Senate chooses the vice president.  Since this year it appears likely that the Dems will retain control of the Senate, while Romney, propelled by Alabama and Alaska, would prevail in the House, we could end up with a Romney-Biden administration.  How would that work?  A bill that Romney wanted might come to grief when Biden casts a tie-breaking vote in the Senate.  Possibly some "statesmen," by means of some kind of bizarre "deal," could avert this even more bizarre outcome.  But these would be the same statesmen who have failed to abolish this wretched Rube Goldberg machine.

I'm not even going to raise the spectre of a "faithless elector." 

National Popular Vote.  If like me you do not live in Vermont, Maryland, Washington, Illinois, New Jersey, D.C., Massachusetts, California, or Hawaii (the states that have joined the ingenious pact), contact your state legislator.

State of the race

What is the state of the presidential race with less than a month to go, and more than a week since the president's miserable debate performance?

Things stand, near as I can tell, about where they did in the late summer.  Romney, that is to say, needs to draw to an inside straight.  Yet if voter sentiment were to  move at all in his direction he'd have a good chance of winning.  He's clearly in a much better place than he was before the debate, which someone has cleverly described as Obama's worst performance since he took on Clint Eastwood at the RNC.  Pre-debate, it looked like Obama was headed for well over 300 electoral votes, and that he was more likely to get 360 than 260.  That's changed, and it could change again, but, if like me you much prefer Obama and the Dems, resist the tendency to exaggerate the other team's upside. 

Calculations may begin with the fact that there are eighteen states (plus D.C.) that have voted for the Democratic presidential candidate for five elections in a row.  These states have 242 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win.  What are Romney's prospects for breaking through in any of them?  Very slight, I think.  It appears that Wisconsin, his physically fit running mate's home state, is the only one that he is still contesting.  But you have to campaign somewhere, right?  I think Romney's behind in Wisconsin and that he won't catch up unless Obama implodes, in which case of course all these calculations are moot.

The ten states not among the "blue eighteen" that Obama carried four years ago are: Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada.  You can forget about Indiana, which Romney is going to win.  And let us for the sake of argument put North Carolina and Florida in Romney's column.  (It can only be close if Romney wins both of these, and I'm guessing he will.)  His problem is that Obama is still looking pretty good in the other seven.  No one thinks Romney can win New Mexico's five electoral votes, which, added to those of the blue eighteen, puts Obama at 247.  Then there is Ohio.  It has 18 electoral votes, and it appears that Romney's recent surge has left him still trailing:  the three most recent polls of the Buckeye state show Obama with leads of one, five, and six points.  Without Ohio, Romney really needs to run the table.  But if he were in a strong enough position to run the table, he wouldn't still be behind in Ohio.  Ergo, to win, he needs more movement in his direction.

Psychologists of happiness speak of a "set point" that pretty much determines how we feel about life.  A big event, like a financial windfall or a divorce, has only a temporary effect, and we in time return to the level of contentedness that our DNA seems set to.  If the presidential campaign is like that, then Obama still looks like the winner--the electoral college "set point" is on his side of 270.  If on the other hand the forces at work in the campaign are more like those of the physical world--gravitation, inertia--then Romney will pass him and win.  I think a presidential race seems more like a "psychology thing" than a "physics thing" but time will tell.

One more observation.  All the above discussion would be irrelevant were it not for that deplorable relic of the 18th century known as the electoral college.  Discussion of scrapping it and moving to a true  national election has been resisted by conservatives who, I believe, are subliminally sheepish about what happened in 2000.  If it would have put Gore ahead of Bush, then they're against it.  But the daily tracking polls now show a small national lead for Romney, while the state polls suggest Obama may have built an electoral college firewall in Ohio.  Since the electoral college this season appears to give an edge to Obama and the Dems, might some Republicans come 'round to the side of sweetness and light, thereby permitting in some future season an actual national election to occur in our country? 

 

 

 

Travel notes

We're back from Wisconsin Dells, The Waterpark Capital of the World, where a cousin of Amanda's was married on Saturday.  The ceremony was in the Catholic church in town, and Amanda, studying what there was to study as we sat and waited for the VIPs to come down the aisle, noted that the interior was in a state of modest disrepair, thereby causing her father to speculate that the Paint Fund may have been raided for "settlements."

But that wasn't  my favorite moment of the trip.  The part of Wisconsin that you see from I-94 is nice country, and at this time of year, with the changed leaves blazing in the sun, I was wishing I could just keep looking out the window instead of having to arrive at the resort with the waterparks.  My esthetic reverie was interrupted by a billboard advertising the wares at some store near the top of an exit ramp a few miles ahead (this was my favorite moment):

DIESEL        CHEESE        LIQUOR        BAIT

Welcome to Wisconsin, second in my affection among all the thirty-some states I've seen.

 

The first debate: Romney says stupid stuff, Obama studies his notes

Who slipped Obama a mickie?  We Dems, even the most inarticulate ones, wasted 90 minutes trying to put words in his mouth.  I've spent half my life stewing and ruing, "That's what I should have said!"--but even I could have counterattacked some of The Mittster's bullet points.  For example, when talking about the deficit, and what spending he'd cut to bring things into line, I think The Mittster's Point #2 was cutting subsidies to PBS, which of course would save around a buck two eighty.  Number two on the list!  Obama, however, was mute.  All the Thursday morning quarterbacks are saying what Obama should have said, because the field is pretty much open.  My favorite belongs to Nicholas Thompson, who, live chatting the debate, said, soon as Romney mentioned firing his accountant, that Obama should retort, "You're paying 13%.  Your accountant is doing fine." 

But, no.  On social security, Obama said he and Romney basically agreed.  Can you imagine, if the Social Security Act had never been enacted, and Obama was proposing it now, what Republicans would say?  The nanny state!  Big government taking your money and redistributing it to people it has decided need it more than you!  Are your surprised to be old and without an income?  Did you think you'd be able to work forever?  How about a little personal responsibility?  That's what they'd say.  But it's been a wonderful, popular success, so they can't say what they really think, except when raising money from zillionaires at private mansion parties.  "We basically agree," Obama said.

Good grief.