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PoliGAF 2012 |OT4|: Your job is not to worry about 47% of these posts.

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SmokeMaxX

Member
I will never get this...

If you decided to answer a pollster call about voting, why the hell would you not actually vote? You had the time to answer a phone call and go through their questions but don't want to actually vote. wtf

I know when I went to go vote I had to stand in line for about 3 hours.
Three hours isn't the same as five minutes.
 

HylianTom

Banned
I will never get this...

If you decided to answer a pollster call about voting, why the hell would you not actually vote? You had the time to answer a phone call and go through their questions but don't want to actually vote. wtf
I used to work for Gallup in the early 00's (before they closed their Austin operations), and never understood it. The minimum survey length was usually five or six minutes. No one ever gave me a good answer on the topic. :/
 

Cloudy

Banned
Ohio will likely get called early as well, but when those get called for Obama, the fat lady will have sung.

I doubt it. Last time Florida was too close to call till after Obama had 270. Why lose angry GOP viewers early?
 

pigeon

Banned
Maybe, but I know he said the weekend would be good for Obama.

Well, I'd note that it's extremely difficult to conclude anything from a failure to move on a 7-day tracking poll. That could represent up to a 6-point swing in either direction, depending on the details of rounding.
 
Once again proving he is Best Tweeter.

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Romney is probably wasting time whenever he's not campaigning in Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, or Florida. That's his path. He's up in three, just needs to pull off a miracle in Ohio

In hindsight I don't see what his goal was in calling for Detroit to go bankrupt, and antagonizing the bailout to this day. Perhaps he cynically figured it was good divide/conquer politics, as Kosmo has argued in terms of Detroit being so mismanaged. But a lot of white people here depend on Detroit, it's not something that can be seperates on racial lines.

The bailout wasn't a big focus during the primary, and supporting it would not have cost him the nomination. It strikes me as another case of him putting short term goals (ie attain nom) ahead oflong term ones (ie win presidency). You can't piss on the mid west and Latinos, then pretend like you didn't a few months later

Obama is up now in Va. and within a point in Co. and the momentum nationwide is slipping away from him. The only thing that can save him is another lopsided debate or an "october surprise," both of which are very unlikely.
 

codhand

Member
Mitt Romney surrogate Ed Gillespie was batted around by the unlikely source of Chris Wallace yesterday, when discussing the Romney tax plan. The talking point the Romney team has been throwing around is that “six studies” validate the claim that you can lower tax rates by 20%, remain revenue neutral, and not lower the share of the tax burden on the rich.

Gillespie: These are very credible sources, and, you know…
Wallace: One of them is from a guy who is – is a blog from a guy who was a top advisor to George W. Bush. So these are hardly nonpartisan studies.
Gillespie: Look, Chris I think if you look at Harvard and AEI [American Enterprise Institute] and other studies are very credible sources for economic analysis

Wallace: You wouldn’t say that AEI is a conservative think tank?
Gillespie: I would say it is a right-leaning think tank. That doesn’t make it not credible.
Wallace: It doesn’t make it nonpartisan.
Gillespie: It does make it nonpartisan. It’s not a partisan organization, I can tell you, there are many instances where there have been things AEI came out with and said, I didn’t find it to be necessarily to be helpful to the Republican Party.

Wallace: Would you say Brookings Institution is nonpartisan?
Gillespie: I would say the Brookings Institution is left leaning and nonpartisan.
.
 

Effect

Member
Is there any polling on Virgil Goode? I know he's on the ballot in Virginia but is he on the ballot in other states? Florida or Colorado? Just so we have a good understanding how many votes he could potentially pull from Romney?
 

syllogism

Member
Pretty strange how these PPP state polls are on average pretty good for Obama and yet their national polls for kos have Romney ahead by a larger than average margin
 

HylianTom

Banned
Seems like PA is always such an obvious jailbait for republicans every four years yet they keep falling for it
No objections here.

Republicans should be trying to close-off Obama's "finishing" states, like Iowa or Nevada.. but if they want to continue pusuing that fools' gold, more power to 'em.
 

Forever

Banned
I'm going to violate one of the PoliGAF tenets and feed the PD:

Obama put his shoulder to the wheel, but he found many aspects of his new life frustrating, starting with the Senate itself. The glacial pace, the endless procedural wrangling, the witless posturing and pettifoggery, the geriatric cast of characters doddering around the place: all of it drove him nuts. To one friend in Chicago, Obama complained, “It’s basically the same as Springfield”—the Illinois capital where he had toiled in the state senate—“except the average age in Springfield is forty-two and in Washington it’s sixty-two. Other than that, it’s the same bullshit.” After enduring an unceasing monologue by Senator Joe Biden during a committee hearing, Obama passed a note to Gibbs that read, “Shoot me now.” Time and again after debates on the floor, he would emerge through the chamber’s double doors shaking his head, rolling his eyes, using both hands to give the universal symbol for the flapping of gums, sighing wearily, “Yak, yak, yak.”

Obama’s frustration was magnified by the fact that he was living apart from his wife and daughters. He didn’t doubt the decision that he and Michelle had made to keep their home in Chicago; his spouse had her own career in the city; her mother lived nearby; the girls were happy, grounded, in a wonderful school. But Obama missed them all terribly and questioned whether the separation was worth it when all he seemed to be doing in the Senate was nibbling around the edges.
Obama’s aides were laboring mightily to further that impression, sending him from one end of the country to the other—Virginia, New Jersey, Texas, Arizona, Tennessee—for fund-raising or political events right before and after the off-year elections of 2005. By the end of the year, Obama was exhausted and annoyed: he’d missed three weekends at home in a row, and weekends were sacrosanct to him. Michelle was even more irritated. “It’s a tough choice between, do you stay for Malia’s basketball game on Sunday or do you go to New Jersey and campaign for [then-senator Jon] Corzine?” she said to a reporter at the time, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Corzine got it this time around.”
Obama, though, was the one to blunder. After the press reported that he’d agreed to keynote the steak fry, Michelle’s phone started ringing off the hook, with people calling about her husband’s first foray into Iowa. But Michelle was totally in the dark—and now steamed at him. Obama walked into his Senate office looking sheepish.

“Next time I decide to make a big announcement,” he said to Gibbs, “would you remind me to tell Michelle?”
In Chicago, Jarrett threw Obama a book party at the home of her parents. It was pouring rain, and despite a tent in the backyard and umbrella-toting underlings, many of the attendees got soaked, their shoes ruined by the mud. Jarrett introduced Obama and spoke about Audacity’s final chapter, in which he wrote about the stress that the demands of his career put on his marriage, the disruptions to his family life. As Jarrett went on, talking about the sacrifices his wife and girls were making, she saw that Obama was crying—to the point where he couldn’t manage to speak when it came his turn. Michelle walked over, put her arm around him, and began to cry as well.
From the get-go, Michelle Obama had made it plain that she didn’t want Barack to run for president. She was wary beyond words, for a long time refusing to discuss the concept, even with her closest friends. The citation of spousal hesitation is, of course, a timeworn trope in American presidential politics. Every male candidate loftily affirms that he couldn’t possibly go ahead without his wife’s full support, but as a matter of course, Y-chromosome ambition trumps X-chromosome reluctance. Really, it’s no contest.

But with Barack and Michelle, it was. Obama adored his wife, genuinely believed she was his better half, that he’d be lost without her. He didn’t even bother to pretend that he enjoyed anyone else’s company remotely as much as he relished being with her and their daughters. As the midterms approached, he told his advisers more than once, I’m not doing this if Michelle’s not comfortable, and she’s certainly not there yet.

She had always been a gut-level skeptic about the gaga-ness around her husband. In the wake of the drooling adulation poured on him after his convention speech, she suspected that he would be treated like “the flavor of the month,” a passing fancy soon discarded by a fickle political culture. As she watched people fawning over him at his swearing-in to the Senate, she said dryly to a reporter, “Maybe one day he’ll do something to merit all this attention.”


She had no doubt that day would come. Her confidence in Barack was profound and unshakable. But in the meantime, she was perfectly miserable with him being in the Senate. The Robinson family had been close-knit: a homemaker mother, a municipal-employee father, and a basketball-star brother who ate dinner every night together with her in a one-bedroom brick bungalow on the South Side of Chicago. They were immersed in one another’s daily lives, the highs and lows, the successes and traumas of childhood and adolescence. She wanted that badly for her daughters, too, and she wasn’t getting it. She hadn’t signed up for a commuter marriage. She was laboring to make it work, but when she was being honest, she admitted that she hated it; she was lonely too much of the time. There had been strains in their marriage back in 2000, when Barack had run unsuccessfully for Congress. Now she was being asked to talk about his running for president—and it felt like the rug was about to be pulled out from under her even more violently than it had been already.

One night midway through 2006, over a four-hour dinner with Jarrett, Michelle let her frustrations pour out. “This is hard,” she said. “Really hard.” Jarrett decided not to even mention the presidential chatter. Michelle was in a bad place emotionally. No point in making it worse.

But following the midterms, Michelle had no choice but to grapple with the subject. After that first November meeting in Axelrod’s office, the Obamas, Jarrett, and Marty Nesbitt went for dinner at Coco Pazzo, an Italian joint they loved. Michelle was going on and on about her issues. She had a lot of questions—and also a lot of fears. She’d been worried about Barack’s safety since he entered the Senate. Now he would be an even bigger target, and so would she and the girls. Could the campaign keep their family safe?
Obama’s advisers had entered the room still dubious that he would run. But now it was clear that the probabilities had shifted. For one thing, Michelle’s opposition had eased; that much was obvious. At one point, when Barack went outside to have a smoke, someone brought up again the issue of his personal safety. “Well, I’ve already gone out and increased our life insurance on him,” Michelle said drolly, with a sly smile. “You just can’t be too careful!”

In Hawaii, Barack and Michelle took long walks on Waikiki Beach, hammering out the final items on her questionnaire. (He gave in on everything.)
One night close to New Year’s Eve, he called Jarrett and told her that his decision, in effect, was made. “This is pretty much done,” he said.
THE OBAMAS ATE BREAKFAST in silence at their hotel in San Antonio the morning after Ohio and Texas. Their friends Jarrett and Whitaker tried to cheer them up, but it was no use. Bad vibes suffused the table.

Michelle was especially out of sorts—which is to say, pissed off. She’d been that way the night before, too, but her mood had worsened with the new dawn. She was tired, very tired, and she missed her girls. She was no campaign strategist, but she knew her husband’s operation had poured $20 million into Texas and Ohio. And what had all that dinero yielded? Two big, fat losses. Michelle felt she was wasting her time on the road, spending countless days away from home, and yet failing to help her husband. She was unhappy with her schedule. Unhappy with her stump speech. Just unhappy. On the flight home to Chicago, she plugged her iPod headphones into her ears and spoke to no one.
 

Jackson50

Member
Seems like PA is always such an obvious jailbait for republicans every four years yet they keep falling for it
Do they? The media seems more responsible for perpetuating the notion than Republicans. Republicans have effectively ignored the state. Romney's opened only a few field offices, and he's not run any advertisements.
 

Diablos

Member
Whew.

That's quite different than the Morning Call poll, and PPP also has Casey leading Smith by 11. Wonder who's more credible here, because the difference between the PPP and MC polls are night and day. I do think that given Obama isn't looking to get as big of a win this time, it's probably realistic that he'd win PA by 4-6 points and not 10+.

And god dammit, what the hell is PI?!

Looks like the media is still having fun rubbing Romney's back. That ABC/WaPo poll spin is infuriating. Fuckers.
 

jbug617

Banned
Do they? The media seems more responsible for perpetuating the notion than Republicans. Republicans have effectively ignored the state. Romney's opened only a few field offices, and he's not run any advertisements.

Someone post that Fox picture of their projections again.
 
Do they? The media seems more responsible for perpetuating the notion than Republicans. Republicans have effectively ignored the state. Romney's opened only a few field offices, and he's not run any advertisements.

He spent a lot of time there in the summer despite polls showing him down big even then; seems like they're trying to make another move there this month. And of course most famously, McCain was trolled into wasting a lot of time and money there - even in October.
 

HylianTom

Banned
Someone post that Fox picture of their projections again.
We laugh at that map's silliness, but over the weekend I found that my older relatives (loyal viewers of Fox News) really do believe that Romney has this race in the bag, citing that map. Of course, being surrounded in everyday life by people who hate the president is also probably a great reinforcement mechanism.

They're in for a big surprise.. :p

...

I kinda wonder if the Romney camp knows that Ohio is gone, so they now need to look for EVs elsewhere. Why would they send Anne there?
 
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