Jonathan Chait at NYMag‘s Dail Intel has a cheerful perspective on “The Obama-Romney Confidence Gap“:
As the general election begins, it’s apparent that a wide gap in confidence has opened up between the two campaigns. The Obama campaign is bordering on cocky, utterly dismissive of Mitt Romney and warning against overconfidence. Obviously, campaigns always strive to convey confidence, with even the slightest hints of pessimism seen as potentially unleashing a self-defeating cycle of doom.
__
So this admission, from the director of the Karl Rove–affiliated Republican Super-PAC “American Crossroads,” is unusual and telling:Mr. Law said, Crossroads research suggests that Mr. Obama’s campaign has started to gain traction among critical swing voters by arguing that Republicans, including Mr. Romney, favor an “economic plutocracy” in which middle-class voters can no longer count on financial security, even though they work hard and play by the rules.
__
“His argument is: ‘The reason you feel bad is not because I’ve been an inadequate president but because the rules of the game are stacked against you,’ ” Mr. Law said. Calling it a “dystopian vision,” he added, “that narrative has some gravitational pull.”In other words, their research shows that Obama’s campaign to frame the economic debate is working. It’s genuinely quite rare for campaigns (or, in this case, quasi-campaigns) to make that sort of confession…
From the Buzzfeed article, “It’s ‘Game On’ in Chicago“:
… The Obama machine’s singular goal: to keep the president in his job by raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to recreate the momentum of 2008. There are now close to 700 hundred full time employees, an entire floor of office space, thousands of volunteers in well over 100 field offices across all 50 states, and the most impressive digital team a presidential campaign has ever assembled. There’s been experimentation—the tech team figured out a way to make the Obama website display perfectly on any device, a feat that wouldn’t have been possible even a year ago—and the entire office was designed to resemble a Silicon Valley start-up. The digital department is the largest in headquarters. Messina even consulted with Palo Alto execs to find the “best practices,” says an Obama official, including carpets (quieter), mixing the staffs on the floor into teams rather than departments, bouncy balls, and communicating with instant messages and Twitter. “We ensure maximum collaboration so people don’t sit with their departments, they sit in teams,” Messina told BuzzFeed…
__
These days, the campaign’s Rapid Response team has reached out to reporters covering Romney, providing a rebuttal to every speech. They’re also in full-on courtship mode with a press that complains of a lack of access to Romney and his top aides. Obama’s headquarters averaged about ten visits a week from reporters over the past month, aides said. David Axelrod, whose official title of “senior campaign advisor” understates his role as guru and decision-maker, was at the office everyday last month. (On Thursday “Axe,” as he is known among the staff, took the afternoon off to attend the Cubs opening day with Mayor Rahm Emanuel; at his seats over the dugout, he caught a foul ball.)
Too, also, there’s this in our favor:
Older_Wiser
I know who butters my bread, and it isn’t the Republicans. : )
Randy P
I don’t know why bouncy balls are best practices or what exactly they are (do you sit on them? Throw them over cubicle walls? Play trash-can basketball with them?) But I work in Dilbert-world and I’m pretty sure we don’t have them.
Now I want one. Best practices and all that.
WereBear
I shudder to think of Romney best practices: “Don’t expire of your easily treatable illness here, for God’s sake I’m running for office!”
Thymezone
Bouncy balls are what you have when you just get up in the morning and feel fired up and ready to go, pal. My balls are bouncy, right now.
Rhoda
These team Obama cocky or not stories piss me the hell off; the MSM never pulled that bullshit about Rove & his crew. Right now, the democrats are winning. Report that.
Joseph Nobles
Love this ad I just saw at the New Republic website:
http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g171/boloboffin2/Politics/baracksback.jpg
Schlemizel
@Rhoda:
I get your point but lets hope they have to write that story a few hundred times between now and November.
And, as the Dems have shown they can’t get a thing done without some super majorities lets hope the depression keeps the wingnuts at home producing huge down ticket wins for Dems. We need at least one house back here in MN & plenty of other states have to recover from the sins of 2010 too.
I like the taste of John Bonners tears, they taste like sanity returning.
Anya
@Schlemizel: Sanity will not return until “conservatism” is synonymous with regression and insanity. We need less people identifying themselves as conservatives.
Randy P
@Schlemizel:
Sanity would be nice. For me, as a Pennsylvanian, one of the craziest aspedts of this year has been the return of Zombie Rick Santorum to the political stage.
I have always said Obama is the sanest man in the room, and I still believe in his ability to get us all back out of the asylum.
WereBear
I’m reading Showdown: The Inside Story of How Obama Fought Back Against Boehner, Cantor, and the Tea Party by David Corn. I’m only in the first chapter and got a killer quote by a “White House insider:”
Ha! I feel a tad vindicated.
Let’s see all the whiners out there give him the majorities he needs. As I continually need to remind people, we don’t have a King.
different-church-lady
His frame is working because by this point it’s become too fucking true to be obfuscated by even 14 layers of conservative bullshit.
Kirbster
@WereBear: I’ve often wondered what it is like for a newly-elected and just sworn in President to find out in the first Big Briefing that conditions are far worse and more restrictive than he was led to believe and that 75% of his ideas and goals have zero chance of ever being implemented.
swordofdoom
It seems to me that simply saying, “Thirty years of tax cuts for the wealthy have brought most Americans misery. It’s time to try something else,” puts the GOP on the defensive, because that’s all they got, and the statement’s irrefutable.
Linda Featheringill
OT.
Started the day on Pandora with a song I haven’t heard in half a century or so. Wow.
I’m so much younger than I was when I first got up this morning. :-)
Linda Featheringill
The bumper sticker [Not a Republican] is cool. And it might actually be good advertising.
Rhoda
@Schlemizel: Amen, I’m hopeful the jobs number picks back up b/c then I think we take back the house. The bullshit kills me through, I’m just sick of the coded language. Arrogant, cocky, whatever….
danielx
1. Gosh, I wonder whyever this narrative might be gaining traction. Because it’s true, perhaps? Because it’s evident that the rule of law applies only to those under a certain income level or position in the Federal government, maybe?
Just to name one example, the aftermath of the savings and loan crisis twenty five years ago included over a thousand convictions for fraud and various other offenses. Today? ::crickets:: No arrests, no indictments, no convictions for equally prevalent fraud with much worse consequences for the economy, the housing market and the financial system. Steal millions and walk, but god help you if you rob a bank and get caught. And let’s don’t talk about the way government agencies and executives at the local, state and Federal levels, right up to and including occupants of the Oval Office, routinely ignore the provisions of the law and the Constitution. So yeah, there just might be something to the idea that the game is rigged. Just maybe.
2. And now, more in keeping with an open thread, I am seeking an explanation as to why the female cat of the household has formed a passion for blueberry muffins, to the point of raking one off a plate on to the floor for devouring. A piece of steak, chicken or fish I can understand – but blueberry muffins? What’s up with that?
Omnes Omnibus
@Linda Featheringill: And you aren’t going to name the song? Some of the rest of might like to feel younger as well.
Linda Featheringill
@danielx:
Your blueberry muffin fan [cat] is a silly girl. That is all.
amk
ABC’s latest poll shows +7 for obama. Other pools IBD: +8, AP: +8, Reuters: +11, CNN: +11, PEW: +12, Politico: +10, Suffolk: +10
Guess the pundtwits will start dooming & glooming mehmney’s chances like they did with obama last week.
c u n d gulag
Obama’s people channeled Silicon Valley?
I thought they were the ones behind the MiTT-4/2012 cyborg’s updates?
And how inept is AE, when AI creates a better candidate than they do?
Not that MiTT-4/2012 is a good candidate – just better than anyone or anything AE is putting out there.
WereBear
@Kirbster: Pretty sucky, I’d gather.
I’m frankly amazed that he was able to reverse the screaming power dive and we DIDN’T have another Great Depression. Most people are simply not aware of how close we came.
WereBear
My husband’s girl cat loves puff pastry. I even had one who loved mandarin oranges; and normally they hate citrus smells.
SiubhanDuinne
@Kirbster:
I’ve wondered much the same. Can’t wait to read Obama’s memoirs of his Presidency, but I guess i’ll just have to bide my time until 2017.
amk
So the previous post/next post linkys at the bottom of the thread is a goner now ? Way to go cole.
ArchTeryx
@WereBear: And that may have been the worst thing to ever happen to us.
Lots of suffering now, followed by a decent upward trajectory and the final discrediting of conservatism for a few decades?
Or more mild suffering now, which keeps them in the game, chewing on the foundations like the termites they are?
I didn’t used to be a ‘if you make the population suffer enough, things DO get better’ sort of person, but 2010 changed my outlook for all time.
Lojasmo
/wyldepirate
gene108
@swordofdoom:
How have many people, who vote Republican internalized right-wing talking points:
(a) Government is the problem, not the solution.
(b) The rich pay most of the taxes already
(c) Have you ever gotten a job from a poor person?
(d) Higher (income) taxes will result in higher prices for everyone else.
(e) All of the Above
We just have to accept that some folks are just too far gone to reason with, with regards to what would be effective economic or tax policy. No slogan is going to get through to them and I think it’s a waste of time to try.
I don’t think we can usher in a new political paradigm the way the New Deal did, with regards to what the role of government should be or what tax policy should be. There are too many people, who are very closed minded to budge.
the Conster (f/k/a Cat Lady)
@c u n d gulag:
Obama’s got a team of hackers running a subroutine on the Romneybot that when he wins anything, he says stuff like “I like to fire people!” and “I don’t care about poor people!”. Pretty damn clever for a Kenyan usurper.
Louise
For some reason, I clicked over to Morning Joe this a.m. and there was that idiot Halperin, whining at David Axelrod. Something about “you said it was supposed to be about substance but you mocked him for saying ‘marvelous’…”
:::click:::
I’ve really got to learn to have some coffee before picking up the remote. We are all so f**ked.
deep
That bumper sticker is pathetic to me. Is that all the Democrats have to offer? I read it as
“Yeah, we know we suck, but at least we aren’t Republicans!”
REALLY?
BudP
I wish I was good at photoshop…
Mittens
amk
@deep: If you want a lefty, communist gobinment, you should move to china. Oh, wait…
Dems are not repubs is all you got at this moment. Deal with it.
WereBear
But cripes, the population isn’t suffering enough now? If it gets really bad, people panic, lose ALL sense of logic and proportion, and then they have a Reichstag fire.
amk
@BudP: Very good. Tweeted.
Rhoda
@deep: Really. I read that more as: not the crazies who want to get rid of the pill and women in the workforce while sending the Latinos back across the border and destroying the middle class.
deep
Well, if that’s the case then it needs to just say “Not a Republican” without a URL to the Democrats’ website.
@amk: I’m not bitching about how the Democrats suck, I’m just bitching about the apparent message the bumper sticker seems to be sending.
BudP
@amk: Thanks
JCJ
@BudP:
Thanks! That meme has been sent to my fellow sane people here in Waukesha County (Wisconsin) – there aren’t many of us here!
xian
agh: “every day,” not “everyday”…
rikyrah
I think the Obama campaign is full of professionals who don’t underestimate the swill that will be thrown at them.
But, they believe Willard is a human cipher with no core and a hideous candidate.
lacp
I had my Romney epiphany when he made the fatuous statement “I like to go to bed with a full tummy.” That’s when I realized he wasn’t the Romneybot, he was Willard the Pooh. You can’t tell me that the following isn’t something that Pooh would say to himself on the way to Christopher Robin’s house: “I love being in Michigan. Everything seems right here. You know, I come back to Michigan; the trees are the right height. The grass is the right color for this time of year, kind of a brownish-greenish sort of thing. It just feels right.” Feel free to substitute “Hundred-Acre Wood” for “Michigan.”
Isn’t it funny
How a Mitt likes money?
Barry
@ArchTeryx: “Lots of suffering now, followed by a decent upward trajectory and the final discrediting of conservatism for a few decades?”
You’re assuming that this would happen (a political replay of the Great Depression and New Deal). The other thing which could happen is a rise of fascism.
muddy
I posted in last night’s open thread regarding bags of salted dicks:
I just wanted to tell the gardeners here that there is a variety of pepper called Peter, which looks just what you’d imagine from the name.
I used to grow and pickle them, wonderful gift. The sort of thing that makes men draw their knees together. So, not a bag of salted dicks, instead a jar of pickled Peters, probably more shelf stable.
tomvox1
Also good for the electorate to remember that if you elect Republicans, even “moderate” ones, they will fuck over the common good to score partisan points:
Report Disputes Christie’s Basis for Halting Tunnel
liberal
@WereBear:
LOL. Yeah, he absolutely had to put Larry “Fail” Summers and Timmy Geithner in his administration.
Progressive, indeed.
It’s entirely reasonable to argue that the Republicans are so out-and-out evil that reelecting Obama is an imperative. But don’t claim that Obama is a progressive or liberal. He’s at best a centrist.
Tyro
These days, the campaign’s Rapid Response team has reached out to reporters covering Romney, providing a rebuttal to every speech. They’re also in full-on courtship mode with a press that complains of a lack of access to Romney and his top aides. Obama’s headquarters averaged about ten visits a week from reporters over the past month, aides said.
This is unfair! THe Democrats are trying to steal the election by running a competent campaign!
liberal
@Barry:
Absolutely. IMHO things getting worse could easily lead to a phase change, in which the US lurches even further to the right. I don’t see how a read of world history would at all be at odds with that.
swordofdoom
@gene108: I realize all that, but my point is that Republicans have been saying the same crap since Reagan, and most people’s lives have gotten worse during that time, and at a certain level, they realize that they’re getting jobbed. We can’t change the Republican memes that have infected the discourse without attacking them head-on, and the Republicans can’t defend them (other than to restate them in different terms) because their policies have been disastrous. If we decide at the outset that those memes are intractable, we’ve allowed the Republicans to set the frame for all the issues.
mai naem
I do worry about overconfidence, not so much for Obama but that you will have people not showing up at the polls and it will affect downstream races.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@liberal:
I am a progressive. I’m also in Texas, so being a progressive a lot of the time means standing up in front of those around me yelling “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Don’t discount his being progressive.
Most successful presidents get one or two big accomplishments during each term. I’d say Obama’s doing pretty well as a progressive by that measure.
lacp
@mai naem: I think apathy is a greater reason that people don’t vote than overconfidence. Overconfidence is a sign they care, and if they care, they’ll probably vote.
Redshift
I’m also encouraged by a report about the Romney campaign’s primary operations that was on TPM (I think) a week or so ago. Apparently, they have a team that swoops into a primary state and “whips into shape” the local party people working for them (and spends a bunch of money), and then leaves to go to the next one leaving little behind.
From experience, I know two things:
1. It does not endear you to local volunteers and officials when you parachute in and instruct them on the right way to do things they’ve been doing for years, possibly since before you were born. Collaborate with them, tell them your procedures and focus, sure, but “whip them into shape”? Not good.
2. It’s beyond stupid when you have gobs of money to not use it to leave at least a skeleton of an operation for the fall, which is what the Obama campaign did in ’08 and is doing now. Romney’s “team” won’t be able to swoop in when the campaign is running in every state in the country.
Part of the reason, I’m sure, is that Democrats use volunteers and Republicans use money, so it would be more expensive for them to maintain an operation during the slack time, but it’s still the kind of campaign malpractice we’ve gotten accustomed to from Romney’s people.
SiubhanDuinne
@lacp:
Romney is a Bore of Very Little Brain
Redshift
@lacp: Confidence can cause complacency, but it can also cause excitement; everybody likes to be rooting for a winner. It’s something to keep an eye on, but it’s not automatically a negative.
One upside to being the first black president — people were lining up around the block (literally!) to vote for Obama in ’08, and I think they will again.
japa21
Let me get this straight.
Warning against overconfidence = almost cocky.
Having major campaign advisors constantly talking about how this will be a close and hard fought race = almost cocky.
Making sure there are campaign offices in any town with a population more than 2 = almost cocky.
Why didn’t they just come out and say Obama is getting uppity.
japa21
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Totally agree. Not a fan of Summers but Geithner was a good choice considering the situation at the time.
Villago Delenda Est
@WereBear:
Frankly, I think that saving us from the abyss gives the parasites some breathing room.
Most of them should have ridden tumbrels to their well deserved demise.
FDR is hated by these people because he saved their worthless vampiric asses from the annihilation they deserved 80 years ago.
They hate Obama for that, and because, well, look at Trading Places again. His competence is not an issue. His skin color most assuredly is.
Geeno
@danielx: My female cat like peanut butter, go figure.
The oils did make her coat positively luxurious, though.
Shalimar
@deep: It’s one bumper sticker. Since when is one bumper sticker ever “all X have to offer”? It sends a clear message. It doesn’t preclude other clear messages at the same time.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Geeno: Doesn’t that make the cat pretty sticky?
eemom
@lacp:
You know, I think that is the smartest thing I’ve ever read on this blog.
Niques
@danielx: I used to have to hide fig newtons from my cat . . . he’d steal them and eat the fig filling, leaving the cookie part all over the floor. My mother sent me a fig ring for Christmas that year, and his eyes lit up when he spied it. Had to keep it out of sight.
Had another cat who loved cooked broccoli.
WyldPirate
@Lojasmo:
Put this in your pipe and smoke it, fuckwit. The speaker is Jesse Jackson:
Violent crime, robberies and break-ins fuel paranoia in people. Some people move away from it, some become victims. A very few twisted fucks arm themselves and tragedies happen. But something is sure causing that paranoia and Jackson indirectly states what it is: much higher crime rates in predominantly minority areas.
This doesn’t excuse the Sanford PDs behavior in the Martin case, but day after day and year after year of seeing the higher crime rate in minority areas doesn’t leave the police unaffected by what they see either.
SiubhanDuinne
Speaking of cats, and since this is an open thread … Just exactly what is that hanging out of the left side of the search box at the top (“search me,” heh)? It looks to me like a cat’s tail waving ever so graciously, but am I missing something really obvious to everyone else?
catclub
@danielx:Re: 2) antioxidants
eemom
@Shalimar:
I see it as kind of a minimalist, deadpan statement.
For example, I currently have 3 pro-Obama stickers on my car. Adding that one would import a kind of “no shit” punchline.
catclub
@SiubhanDuinne: Looks like a small banner or pennant waving in all the balloon juice
catclub
@Niques: “Had another cat who loved cooked broccoli.”
Cat one shares my cheerios in the morning – both milk (only non-fat! I used 1 or 2% once and she did not like it) and cheerios.
Cat two likes roses and raw spinach.
Hal
The Obama campaign is bordering on cocky,What they really meant to say was that Obama doesn’t know his place. Who does he think he is, not knowing his place.
Frankensteinbeck
@Rhoda:
Can’t write those stories about Obama, because Obama’s strategy is based on trying to help people and the Republicans’ policies and message are all based on hurting people. Savvy Journalists understand that politics doesn’t have any effect on people’s LIVES. It’s all a big game!
Chyron HR
@WyldPirate:
I never thought I’d say this, but please go back to posting scheiss porn. It’s far less disgusting than your “Somebody stole this guy’s bike, so Nigvon had it coming” routine.
Gremcat
I think the democratic presidential campaign is clicking on all cylinders. I just saw one of those third party ads trashing Obama by claiming that the price of gas has doubled and that the Administration wants to have European gas prices of $9.00/gal. I was thinking this was going to be a very long campaign season, when the very next commercial was an Obama approved ad where he debunks every statement in the previous add and informing the viewer that the previous add was paid for by big Oil.
It made my day.
feebog
So Republicans can’t figure out why their guy, who was born on third base, but thinks he hit a triple, doesn’t connect with voters? rMonny has had every advantage since he was in diapers, that bleeds through every thing he does and says. While our generation was being drafted and our asses shipped off to Viet Nam, he was trying to convert people to mormonism from a villa in France.
While many of of us struggled to work our way through college after all those fun times in Viet Nam, he was receiving a fine education at Harvard courtesy of Daddy. And after he graduated, Daddy’s connections got him a nice job at Bain Investments.
The guy’s entire life story is one of privilige and wealth. He can’t escape that, and it is going to kill him in the general election.
japa21
@feebog: If the Dems go after it as hard as the Reps went after Kerry, even though Kerry’s live was not as privileged.
Rafer Janders
@tomvox1:
Christie “exaggerated”? No, he flat out lied. But way to go, New York Times, for lyin…sorry, exaggerating to your readers by giving them an actually factual description of what occurred and having to settle for euphemisms instead.
AA+ Bonds
Fuck that bullshit
AA+ Bonds
Hey boss I’m taking the afternoon off you wouldnt happen to have seats over the dugout would you? no? I’m fired?
AA+ Bonds
@WereBear:
How the fuck is he supposed to do anything if he isn’t pushed hard from the left
Martin
@AA+ Bonds:
Will pushing hard from the left make Bohner vote for it? Because Bohner is the problem, not Obama.
Geeno
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN): Only if you pressed her to the roof of your mouth. Seriously though, our vet was always asking what we did to make her coat so soft and lustrous. “Um… she eats peanut butter?”
kuvasz
I live in the state of Michigan, that has a majority Republican State Senate and House along with a Republican Governor.
I cant explain in full detail just how fucked up the legislation has become from than triumvirate of nattering nabobs.
What concerns me is that when I asked the state Democratic Party about helping out in the local elections for the local state House and Senate elections, instead I was asked to work on the Obama re-election campaign.
Frankly, I do not much care for Bararck Obama, since he is too moderate for my tastes and declined, but it seems to me that the Re-elect Obama campaign is fucking up big time if it sucks all the air out of the room and leaves local elections to chance.
Since, as Tip O’Neill once stated, “All Politics is Local,” and most issues that affect a citizen are also derived from the particular state one lives in, it seems to me that regardless of Obama sitting in the Oval Office, the aforementioned Republican triumvirate will have a profoundly bad affect on the residents of Michigan.
Barack Obama and his campaign ougth to recognize that his influence can help the down-ticket candidates and the campaign should function also to elect Democrats at all levels of government, from dog catcher to state Senator to solidify the position of the Party down to the local level.
gex
@Rhoda: You have to make sure everyone is thinking about the black man’s penis. Secure your white women!
How else are they supposed to encode their racism into mainstream media?
W. basically pointed neon signs to his crotch and he wasn’t called cocky. There’s a point to the narrative, and it hasn’t changed since the 1960’s or 1860’s.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@danielx: I’m currently watching the Perpetual Motion Machines* trying to sneak off with a slice of cinnamon bread. They’re also known for snatching tortilla chips out of the bag. Our first cat was obsessive about tomato skins and broccoli.
*aka the Kitten Horde. Now 7 months old, the two brothers were dropped off at a shelter starving and very sick with URIs. We adopted them at Christmas.
muddy
@catclub: I thought it was a tentacle, you never know what horrors you may find. I like the cat’s tail idea, but surely in that case the tail in question would be orange.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@WyldPirate: Congrats, you have gone from Jew-baiting to full-metal racist.
We’re so proud.
g
The Obama campaign is bordering on cocky, utterly dismissive of Mitt Romney
Shocking! especially when you contrast that with how respectful and humble the Romney campaign behaves!
Haydnseek
@danielx: Your blueberry muffin eating cat might be related to mine, who will take a piece of cantaloupe rind and work on it for 20 minutes, at which time she walks away once it’s completely free of moisture. I mean, it’s a husk! Wonderful creatures….
David Koch
@eemom:
Hmmmm. I’m sure all the guys at the office say, “nice bumper”.
David Koch
0
Original Lee
@lacp: ROFL. You won the humor internets today!