cleduc
cleduc's JournalI suspect what we're seeing in Iowa:
http://news.yahoo.com/democrats-far-outnumber-gop-iowa-ballot-requests-102632378--politics.html?_esi=1With absentee and early voting set to begin next week in Iowa, a battleground state in the presidential race, Democrats have a 6-1 edge in ballot requests so far, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Democrats requested roughly 100,000 ballots, compared with 16,073 ballots requested by Republicans, the newspaper said. Absentee voting and in-person early voting begins on Sept. 27.
"I see the early vote numbers, and I grimace a little bit," said Craig Robinson, a former political director of the Iowa Republican Party and the editor of a popular blog, told The Journal. "It feels like an Obama state…. The president has been more accessible to voters than [Mitt] Romney and [Paul] Ryan."
Probably has something to do with the organization Obama set up there in 2008 and on. That has to be a chilling result to those at the GOP hoping Iowa is in play as there were only about 1.5 million votes cast in 2008. 100,000 Dem early voting ballots requested out the gate is daunting for the GOP.
The other thing that Obama did was invest in these offices last fall. My sister tells me that a few offices were never closed since 2008 though she was vague on how many or where they were.
As a community organizer who ran get out the vote campaigns in Chicago, this president would know this game as well as any candidate for that office we've ever seen.
Charles Cook on the 2012 Ground Game +
http://cookpolitical.com/story/4805If you buy the theory that anyone in a swing state who is still undecided is pretty unlikely to vote, that means that this election becomes pretty much a ground game, coming down to who can get their folks out. It is absolutely impossible to gauge at this point the relative effectiveness of the Obama and Romney campaign operations and their respective party apparatus. At the suggestion of Cook Political Report House Editor David Wasserman, I counted up the state headquarters and field offices for the two campaigns, with the RNC Victory offices counted in the Romney totals. Clearly this is a crude instrument of estimating effort, but in those 11 swing states, the Obama campaign has 526 offices while the Romney campaign and RNC Victory offices total 251. In Colorado, Obama has 55 and Romney 14; it’s Obama 80 and Romney 47 in Florida. In Iowa it’s 65 for Obama and 14 for Romney. Michigan is the one state where there are more Romney than Obama offices (23 to 20). In Nevada, it’s 25 for Obama and 11 for Romney. Obama also holds the edge in New Hampshire (22 to eight), North Carolina (49 to 24), and Ohio (79 to 37). Pennsylvania has 39 Obama and 19 Romney outposts, Virginia has 40 for Obama and 30 for Romney, while in Wisconsin the advantage is for Obama is 52 to 24. This may or may not be a fair way to measure field activity, but I certainly can’t think of any other way to quantify it at this stage.
That article struck me as a fair and worthy read of the election at this point in time. There's plenty more than the above quote.
So the number of offices for the ground game looks good for Obama but it doesn't consider:
Koch Group Kicks Off Massive Voter Mobilization Effort
http://www.thenation.com/blog/170103/koch-group-kicks-massive-voter-mobilization-effort
With Voter ID laws, election hours, intimidation, questionable voting machines and various GOP shenanigans and the big money behind them, this thing is far from over and will never be in the bag until Nov 7th.
If you can help out at any of those 526 Obama offices or elsewhere, I'm sure it would be appreciated. Now wouldn't be too soon to start.
I live in Canada and can attest that what she says is true
My family has used both heath care systems (US & Canada) since the early 1970s.
The thing that blew me away was watching Obama's town halls in the 2008 campaign. The stories coming out from people who lacked health care were absolutely heartbreaking.
Then Alan Grayson hammered home the point on the floor of congress referencing Harvard's report that 44,000 Americans were dying every year due to a lack of health care. He mentioned a young man who passed on cancer treatment and went home to die so that his care wouldn't put his wife and kids into bankruptcy. Words cannot adequately describe my horrible feelings about that.
And that's where the GOP logic was completely lost for me. The GOP would spend trillions fighting wars in the Middle East but wouldn't spend a fraction of that to save the lives of their own citizens. I will never ever understand or accept that position from the richest country on earth. And Mitt Romney wants to go back to that. On that issue alone, I could never support him because on Day 1, he effectively wants 44,000 Americans people to resume dying without heath care each year. It makes no sense.
The US spends dramatically more on health care per capita than any other nation on earth. Yet US life expectancy is way down the list. For what the US spends, they should be at the top of the list or very close to it.
Part of the trouble for US jobs is the global competition. Whether a US company pays or an individual pays, that drives the cost of a US job for a company up. And therefore, that costs the US jobs.
If the US went to single payer, they could enjoy Canadian health care service levels & Canadian life expectancy (top 10 in the world) for very roughly about 60% of the cost the US is paying now and the entire country would be covered = 44,000 fewer deaths per year. That would also put a big dent into the US deficit AND bring a bunch of jobs home to the US. So even if those hard hearted don't care about US people dying without health care, it would help the US economy and the US deficit. The big losers would be the insurance companies who like Romney, probably stash a bunch of their cash overseas to avoid taxes.
If I were making an ad against Romney, I'd show the Harvard report (and others like it) and then show Romney heartlessly directing a death sentence to those people on Day 1 of his administration.
Sorry for the rant but this issue upsets me because it's so needless. There is a better way. Obamacare is far from perfect but you at least have a framework to get there. Romney offers nothing but a return to what doesn't work beyond continuing to make the rich richer.
These folks haven't updated their article stats for a week or more
http://www.nationaljournal.com/hotline/ad-spending-in-presidential-battleground-states-20120620But the strange thing there was that Super PAC spending for Romney dried up for the most recent two weeks they reported (they didn't report on this week's spending). If Romney was running into money trouble, and he must have been because Romney borrowed $20 mil, you would think the Super PACs we've heard so much about would be right there to come to the rescue.
I looked at Rove's EV map for last April and compared it with what it would look like today. With OH, VA & WI all going over +4 Obama yesterday in the Real Clear poll of polls for those states, the EV map today is quite similar to last April. In other words, they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars since April and been unable to materially move the needle. What is worse today is that the undecideds are now much smaller on the same map - almost record lows for this point in time of the election. It's harder to change someone's mind than it is to swing an undecided your way.
They would know the real situation long before we would. Maybe two weeks ago, they saw this coming and effectively threw in the towel on Romney financially. They'll probably try to shore him up some where they can to try to help down the ticket but Romney's money troubles may be the result of the Super PACs and the GOP largely giving up on him.
Maddow reported last night that Romney has "strangely" only been doing an event a day and often that hasn't been in battleground states - he's not been out campaigning. He's been raising money that the media figured he didn't need and it puzzled the media. So that's more evidence of his money troubles.
It would be quite ironic if the $250 million dollar man and supposed turnaround artist ran out of dough in his failure to turn around the biggest quest of his career. But the lesson might be that this was one deal he couldn't leverage past the public and media with a slight of hand like he did throughout his career at Bain.
If we can get updated figures on the ad spending and the Super PACs have dropped out/pulled back, I don't know how else we could conclude reasons for their actions with less than 50 days to go
I have family members who could have been in photos like that as well
For example, my grandfather provided 14 years of military service. It ended when he was wounded by shrapnel in an exchange of mortar fire. The Germans bombed the hospital he was sent to (at the time, they targeted hospitals), collapsing a wall on him and breaking his back. He was discharged with acute breathing problems from chemical weapon attacks (mainly phosgene & chlorine gas) and unable to walk 100 yards without resting due to back problems. He spent much of the balance of his life in agony in hospitals.
He "mooched" 20 cents per day disability until he wheezed to death as a proud member of the 47%.
The photo touched off my memory of him because my mother has no picture of him and I've been searching various war photo archives trying to find one of him for her.
Insert smilie here
Government Spends More on Corporate Welfare Subsidies than Social Welfare Programshttp://thinkbynumbers.org/government-spending/corporate-welfare/corporate-welfare-statistics-vs-social-welfare-statistics/
About $59 billion is spent on traditional social welfare programs. $92 billion is spent on corporate subsidies. So, the government spent 50% more on corporate welfare than it did on food stamps and housing assistance in 2006.
I don't know that site above so I won't swear by their results. But the thread raises a good question.
Three Pinocchios for Romney's First Behind Closed Doors Tape
And maybe the most stunning:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/mitt-romney-caught-on-video-tape/2012/09/17/38578a5e-012f-11e2-b257-e1c2b3548a4a_blog.html
Some 44 percent of those who do not pay income taxes are because they benefit from tax benefits aimed at the elderly, while another 30 percent benefit from tax credits for children or for the working poor, according to a paper published by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
But not all of these people are automatically Obama supporters. In fact, according to a map published by the Tax Foundation, eight of the top ten states with the lowest income-tax liability are the heart of Romney country — the deep south. The only exceptions are Florida, a battleground state, and New Mexico, which leans toward Obama. Meanwhile, most of the states with the lowest level of nonpayers are Obama states.
is that Mitt doesn't even understand the profile of those who support him.
What isn't a surprise is confirmation that he lies behind closed doors just as much as he does on the campaign trail.
Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair "Obama's Way"
It's one of the best articles I can recall reading on President Obama
Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair "Obama's Way"
I did two searches to see if it had already been posted and didn't find it. Apologies if I missed it.
I won't try to break it down as it's nine long pages and I don't want to compromise what Lewis was trying to say. Obama's decision process on Libya was gone into in depth for example - and might be of additional interest with the embassy attack. Lewis spent several months with President Obama, following him around and grabbing a few minutes here and there, when time allowed.
My reaction was "Now that's the guy I thought got elected in 2008 and he's obviously been there the whole time but up to now, a bunch of the media has missed out."
Two other related links:
Michael Lewis on Barack Obama’s Long Game, Secret Wish List, and His “Lust for Normalcy”
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/09/michael-lewis-obama-lust-for-normalcy
Obama to Lewis on a Presidential Loss of Freedom: “You Don’t Get Used to It—At Least, I Don’t”
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/09/barack-obama-michael-lewis#slide=1
He's the best president I've ever experienced.
I go back to the Eisenhower years.
From that, I could give many of the reasons mentioned above.
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