The Unintentional Rhetorical Side Effects of Mitt Romney’s Business Experience

by evanmcmurry

Noam Scheiber has a thorough breakdown of the polls that led the Romney camp to so believe they’d won that Romney didn’t even bother to write a concession speech—until, in Scheiber’s nice turn of phrase, “the crotchety assignment-desk known as ‘reality’ finally weighed in.” Most interesting, though, in contrast to Scheiber’s sarcasm, is Romney’s pollster’s language, which still shows the kind of spin that separates signifiers from signified:

Newhouse told me his numbers showed Romney stalling out around the time of Hurricane Sandy the week before the election, then recovering in the final few days of the race. “We thought we had in the last 72 hours of campaign … made up some ground from the challenging messaging period during the hurricane,” he said.

“Challenging messaging period” indeed. That’s one way to put a hurricane that underscored Obama’s central argument that collective action through government was kinda necessary to modern society, while Romney had to explain why he’d said FEMA should be dismantled.

Campaigns are famous for these glosses of language, but even more so is the business community, where layoffs become “eliminating redundancies” or “getting fit.” This is the world Romney comes from, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if he were especially susceptible to this kind of language, suggesting that the internal delusions of his campaign were as much rhetorical as numerical.

Dick Morris Attempts To Explain Away Dick Morris

by evanmcmurry

In case you were ever inclined to take Dick Morris seriously ever again, here’s Taegan Goddard’s bonus quote of the day:

“I think that there was a period of time when the Romney campaign was falling apart, people were not optimistic, nobody thought there was a chance of victory and I felt that it was my duty at that point to go out and say what I said.”

Part of the history-writing of this election will be whether Republicans smoked their own product and actually believed Mitt Romney was going to win, or whether an entire team of pundits tossed their credentials out the window and started yelling GO TEAM against what was happening in front of their very faces. Put Dick Morris in the category of “Pundit Who Says What He Wants To Happen and Calls It A Prediction.”

Why Obama Isn’t Doing Better Despite All The Good Economic Numbers

by evanmcmurry

A question is making the rounds of the left side of the internet: why isn’t Obama doing better now that we have honest-to-God-no-fooling proof that the economy is on the uptick, a situation that crystalized in the unemployment rate’s recent descent to under eight percent? Here’s Howard Fineman, scratching his noggin:

The Obama campaign, and the Obama presidency, haven’t done a consistent or convincing job of touting whatever good news there is — and there are increasing amounts of it — about the economy. Yes, the unemployment rate remains high; yes, the “right direction/wrong track” poll numbers remain negative (though not as negative as they once were); yes, millions of Americans remain underwater on their mortgages while big banks horde cash and pile up huge profits.

But there is another side to the story, and the Obama campaign hasn’t sold it well, beyond talking, justifiably, about the success of the auto bailout. Consumer confidence is at its highest point in five years. The stock market has come back from the late Bush-era crash. Home starts and hiring are up. Venture capital groups are lending money again. If you don’t talk about the good stuff, no one else will.

This is merely the left’s version of the question Mitt Romney has been asking his campaign chairs and his mirror for the past five months: “Why am I not winning despite 8.3% unemployment?” As the GOP caviled that Romney was doing a poor job prosecuting Obama’s performance, Dems are now wondering why Obama won’t do a better job touting it.

Readers of this blog should already know the answer: Obama’s been benefiting from the improving economy this whole time. As Jamelle Bouie argued, quite convincingly, the heuristic that says that incumbent approval rates follow unemployment rates has never actually held: incumbent approval follows GDP growth (or lack thereof), which most of the time correlates to the unemployment rate. But not always: the economic recovery we’ve been experiencing in the past year has seen an increase in GDP that’s outpaced jobs added. In other words, the economy has been growing faster than the labor market, and sure enough, Obama’s approval rating slowly but steadily increased along with it. This was why job report after job report was released this summer showing desultory gains in employment without any of them having an effect on the race: the growth of the economy was palpable to voters (see also the increase in the consumer confidence index, whatever it is), no matter how many more-in-sorrow-than-anger post-jobs-report press conferences Mitt Romney could call to claim otherwise.

The flip side is that Obama’s already benefited from the good economic numbers we’re seeing now. He wasn’t being punished for bad jobs reports, because voters were rewarding him for the growing economy—but that also meant that there was no additional reward when evidence of the growing economy presented itself in the form of the unemployment rate dipping below an arbitrary threshold. The increase in Obama’s poll numbers that liberal bloggers are looking for now has already happened; it was, if anything, a lucky break that Obama was able to benefit from the economy without having to campaign on it explicitly, as many are now advising him to do, and thus run the risk of alienating swing voters who have yet to see their situation improve.

Obama’s sudden stagnation in the polls has many explanations—his poor debate performance, the dimming of the successful DNC’s afterglow, etc. But for now, we can at least speculate that there exists a ceiling to the amount voters were willing to reward him for the economy, which is not, after all, improving to the extent that it should be, whoever’s fault that is (hi, House Republicans). Which means Obama’s 49%-ish approval rating is the highest he could attain on the economy alone. Once he hit that, he had nowhere to go but down, and Romney was able to use a strong debate performance to begin chipping away. Obama could, by all means, still mount a successful defense of his economic policies (as opposed to continue to justifiably criticize Romney’s math-is-hard-just-trust-me proposal), but it’s more likely than not to produce significantly diminishing returns.

So…………………….Where’s Romney’s Convention Bounce?

by evanmcmurry

Here’s a screenshot of NRO’s splash page on Monday, four days after the conclusion of the Republican National Convention:

Notice anything missing? As in a single article about Romney’s convention bounce in the polls? I logged onto the NRO expecting their splash page to be overflowing with bolded headlines about how Romney’s big coming out party had finally broken Obama’s small but stubborn lead. Instead, there was some humdrum article about “dinosaur conventions.” Ask yourself: if Romney/Ryan had gotten anything close to a decent post-convention bounce, would the National Review be running with a special-interest article on the long-term viability of conventions? (Tuesday’s page leads with a big feature on “689 Reasons To Defeat Obama,” which is almost more indicative of the missing bounce; you don’t run reruns when there’s big news.)

Sure enough, RealClearPolitics’ meta-poll has Obama and Romney tied nationally, which is where they were last week, and Obama actually ahead and gaining in 10 of 12 swing states. Throw this on top of the fact that Paul Ryan got the smallest VP-bounce of the past three elections, and things are looking very dire for Romney.

Nate Cohn with more.