Patterico's Pontifications

9/30/2011

Obama Charts a New Route to Re-election?

Filed under: 2012 Election — Karl @ 3:57 pm



[Posted by Karl]

That’s an inaccurate headline at today’s New York Times:

With his support among blue-collar white voters far weaker than among white-collar independents, President Obama is charting an alternative course to re-election should he be unable to win Ohio and other industrial states traditionally essential to Democratic presidential victories.

Without conceding ground anywhere, Mr. Obama is fighting hard for Southern and Rocky Mountain states he won in 2008, and some he did not, in calculating how to assemble the necessary 270 electoral votes. He is seeking to prove that those victories on formerly Republican turf were not flukes but the start of a trend that will make Democrats competitive there for years.

***

While Mr. Obama’s approval ratings have slid across the board as unemployment remains high, what buoys Democrats are the changing demographics of formerly Republican states like Colorado, where Democrats won a close Senate race in 2010, as well as Virginia and North Carolina.

There’s nothing new about this. The left eyed the Mountain West and Southwest as fertile ground for its Emerging Democratic Majority in 2008 (and well before that, really).

However, if you look at the latest Purple Poll (or .pdf) from the new, bi-partisan Purple Strategies, the head-to-head numbers for Obama against Romney or Perry in the “Wild West” (Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada) and “Southern Swing” states (Virginia, North Carolina and Florida) are both within the margin of error of the numbers in the “Rust Belt” of Ohio and Pennsylvania.  That’s why TNR’s William Galston does not think Obama should be focusing on the electoral map:

The last Democrat to win the White House without carrying Ohio was John F. Kennedy, who pulled off the feat with 73 electoral votes from south of the Mason-Dixon line and another 26 from the border states of West Virginia, Missouri, and Arkansas. Obama’s likely haul from that territory: zero. And as Seib points out, the president is facing an uphill climb in much of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic region—including Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, all of which went his way by larger margins than did Ohio. (For more evidence, see the latest Pennsylvania survey, which finds that 54 percent of registered voters disapprove of Obama’s performance and 51 percent don’t think he deserves reelection, while it has him running even with Romney in a state he carried by 10.3 points in 2008.) In short, the president won’t have the luxury of building his campaign on a solid-blue foundation of 242 electoral votes in 2012.

So what does this all mean? Barring unlikely circumstances, the core challenge facing the Obama campaign is not to execute a thread-the-needle Electoral College strategy. It is rather to spend the next thirteen and a half months giving the people credible reasons to believe that the economy will fare better in a second Obama term than it did in the first. (Emphasis added.)

Of course, that is why Camp Obama is spending time with the maps.

–Karl

Obama: America Has Gone Soft

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:40 am



We need a hard-bitten tough guy like Barack to pull us through, is what we need:

Granted, we don’t have the full context here, so I don’t know quite what to make of it. But it’s just so funny!

Thanks to AZBob.

Feds Were Selling Guns to Cartels?

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:34 am



That appears to be the latest Fast and Furious revelation: rather than simply having gun owners sell guns to straw buyers for the cartels, the feds were actually selling guns to them, and then losing track of the guns.

Has anyone fully looked into the Laredo office? Just curious . . .

Another Post at Dear Elena

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:32 am



I have noted the Dear Elena blog before, here and here, about a six-year-old girl who died far before her time. Her dad has a new post up today, and it’s worth your time:

We have a real hole in the kitchen ceiling. It’s about four feet across and two feet high. The drywall’s ragged edges sag a bit and the wooden slats show through. It’s right above the stove. It’s been there for seven years now. We’ve talked about patching it before, but it reminds us of Elena.

Kim was in the basement doing laundry and water started running down the walls. She ran up to the kitchen to see if something was flooding there. Water was coming down through the ceiling over the stove. So Kim ran up another flight of stairs to the bathroom.

There was Elena standing in three inches of water with the toilet overflowing. She was trying to clear out the obstruction with a toilet cleaning brush. When Kim rounded the corner, Elena looked up beaming holding the brush high with wet toilet paper clinging to the end of it. “Don’t worry mom,” she said, “I’ve got it.”

I’ll make you go to the post itself for the bittersweet punchline.

Sockpuppet Friday—the “Anti-Bullying Issues” Edition!

Filed under: General — Aaron Worthing @ 5:18 am



[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.  Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

As usual, you are positively encouraged to engage in sockpuppetry in this thread. The usual rules apply.

Please, be sure to switch back to your regular handle when commenting on other threads. I have made that mistake myself.

And remember: the worst sin you can commit on this thread is not being funny.

—————————-

And for this week’s Friday Frivolity, we have this piece at Cracked.com: “5 Bad Ideas for Dealing With Bullies You Learned in Movies.

The Cracked template for this kind of piece is to apply science to some common issue, with boob jokes and cursing, resulting in an amusing piece.  That’s their M.O. but in this case, rather than using anything resembling science the author, John Cheese, mainly draws on personal experience.  Some samples:

When my brother was in elementary school, he had a couple of kids who would regularly push him around at recess. It got to the point where…

In my experience, I’ve found that if you can manage to pull it off, ignoring works in most cases. Since the [censored] is looking for attention fuel…

Through most of middle school, my brother and I were terrorized by two brothers who lived down the block. They had pretty severe emotional problems. They came from a family of career criminals who were openly abusive to them, and in turn, they took out their anger on anyone they considered weak…

And it goes on and on like this.  There is no attempt to talk about bullying as a phenomenon, just the jerks this guy and his brother had to contend with growing up.  I mean, I’ll grant that Hollywood treats the issue of bullying about as realistically as they treat any other subject…

(Seriously, do not take legal advice from a movie.  Ever.)

…and I don’t think anyone’s experiences on the playground resemble the movies, with only a few notable exceptions.  But this article reads more like therapy for the author than the usual mix of surprising information, bad words and dirty jokes that usually makes a quality Cracked.com piece.

You know, like this one.  Seriously, that “White Death” dude is awesome!

(By the way, language warning on all of the links.)

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]


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