Tactical Animal: Sorry Folks, Election’s Over, Donkey Out Front Shoulda Told Ya5

by ChrisSick

In which we analyze exactly how many blowjobs Bill Clinton deserves to be given, the death and resurrection of the post-convention poll bounce, and the alternative universes of the GOP.

Got-damn, Bill, you lookin’ mighty fine.

If you haven’t seen former President Clinton’s speech at the DNC yet, I would suggest that you:

A. Consider moving out from underneath that rock you’re living under.

AND

B. Pucker up your best blowjob lips, ’cause after watching that speech, you’re gonna wanna properly congratulate the man what gave it.

And — goddamn — he deserves it! Bill Clinton didn’t just make a persuasive statement for Barack Obama’s reelection, he made a powerful argument for liberalism as the solution to our current economic malaise, as well as the pathway to future prosperity in a technocratic global economy. And, in doing so, he slid a rhetorical ice pick straight into the lungs of every Republican attack raised this election cycle.

“In Tampa, the Republican argument against the President’s re-election was pretty simple: we left him a total mess, he hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough, so fire him and put us back in.”

Close your eyes. Repeat that line while doing your best Clinton imitation. Punctuate the pauses with a subtle point of your thumbnail. Turn out the lights. Take it slow. Point that thumb. And then, you try and tell me you aren’t hot in the bathing-suit area. I defy you to.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s yet another symptom of my degeneracy into Werewolf Disease. The doctors tell me it’s the most severe case they’ve seen since Glenn Beck was fired from Fox News for finding new sides of his mouth to lie out of. And, worse, they tell me that there’s no cure – but for the reelection of Barack Hussein Obama.

But there’s good news on that front. Friends, countrymen, election junkies — I give you the death and resurrection of the post-convention bounce:

“The death of the convention bounce?

“The convention bounce may not be extinct. But it’s definitely on vacation…”

— Headline and lead quote from Aaron Blake’s The Washington Times’ Fix post, 4th Sept, 2012

“An 8-point convention bounce for Obama?

“Buried in New York Times polling guru Nate Silver’s latest blog post is a chart that should have Mitt Romney ordering out for some Xanax…”

— Headline and lead quote from Robert Wright’s Atlantic story, 9th Sept, 2012

The Nate Silver post Wright refers to makes for predictably fascinating reading, but let’s cut to the back of the page, here:

That is what a post-convention bounce ought to look like. The Real Clear Politics’ average of polls that I typical cite shows a disappointing average of +1.6 for the President. But when you start to tease out the numbers, you see why that’s misleading – namely that the majority of the polls being averaged are from the middle of last week. The two best indicators — Rasmussen and Gallup’s daily tracking polls — both show a much greater amount of heat for the President, weighing in as of today (9 Sept, 2012) at +4 for the President from Rasmussen and +5 from Gallup, despite the variations of voter models and house effects for each.

Meanwhile, Silver’s indicators show a 6.7% increase in the odds of the President winning reelection, a 0.6% increase in the popular vote to his favor, and an increase of 11.4 votes in the Electoral College (for a total of 316.9). Intrade — my other handy predictor — shows a 3.5% increase in the odds of Obama winning compared to the post-RNC numbers, that settled into a +2.5% increase for a current 58.3% chance of reelection for Obama.

Now, as much fun as I’m having seeing how many times I can work the words “Bill Clinton” and “blowjob” into the same sentence, obviously, the former President wasn’t solely responsible for the success of the convention. Other highlights included:

• Julian Castro’s keynote, which reminded some of Obama’s 2004 speech that broke the then-Junior Senator onto the national scene.
• The First Lady’s speech, which made voters (the ones who aren’t racist jackasses, at least) fall in love with her all over again.
• Joe Biden, who proved that he can be at least as classy as the dude from the Dos Equis ads.
• And the President, who was, well, the President, and there.

Okay, so the President either underperformed or purposefully decided to leave his A-game at home. And we could dissect, at length, the myriad reasons why this may be true.

But, really, there’s no need to. Because it’s irrelevant.

If Romney had gotten a meager +1.5 bounce out of his convention and Obama performed roughly the same, examining why his speech was so muted in comparison to previous examples of his rhetorical abilities would be a worthwhile exercise. But it simply does not matter. The Democrats clearly had a more successful convention than the Republicans, even by completely meaningless measures.

Except in the alternative universe that so many Republicans seem to enjoy residing in.

One of the advantages to being an occasional blogger for a well-known alt-pinup site as opposed to being, say, Dick Morris, is that I don’t have to make sudden, off-the-cuff predictions that can easily be refuted within days. Also, it means I don’t have to wake up every day being Dick Morris.

“Overall, tonight left America with the impression that Obama saved GM, killed Bin Laden, and passed ObamaCare (which most of us don’t like). What a thin, thin record on which to base a plea for reelection.

“The result of these two conventions is a decided advantage for Romney.”

– Dick Morris, FoxNews.com, 7th Sept, 2012

Presumably, after writing that, Dick swallowed another pint of LSD and decided the rest of the universe simply does not exist.

The rest of the GOP decided, even before the convention, that the strongest line of attack against Obama would be to recycle the Reagan question of Carter, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

“The president can say a lot of things and he will…

“But he can’t tell you that you’re better off. Simply put, the Jimmy Carter years look like the good old days compared to where we are right now.”

_ Paul Ryan, East Carolina University, 3rd Sept, 2012
[Source: Washington Post]

For those under the didn’t-hear-about-Clinton’s-speech rock who revel in being ignorant of all salient facts, two things to be aware of:

1. While overall unemployment was less under Carter (about 7% compared to 8% under Obama), other economic indicators, such as inflation and interest rates were much, much, much higher. So high, in fact, the Misery Index became a popular reference point to better understand the pain caused by economic conditions of life during the Carter administration. Obama’s highest score on the Misery Index is still below Carter’s lowest.

2. Another relevant detail to keep in mind when considering this argument is that we’re not losing nearly one million jobs a month, like we were in early 2009.

See that giant fucking dip in the middle of January, 2009? Yeah, over that shit.

But the Republican alternate universe isn’t simply home to bizarre economic statistics or surreal interpretations of events. It’s also home to a completely different definition of “facts” than here in the regular ol’ universe:

“So here we go: If the Democrats are going to call Paul Ryan a liar for lying about running marathons (among other things!), Breitbart’s ‘Big Government’ will FACT CHECK Michelle Obama’s speech about how she loves her husband and so forth.”

– Alex Pareene, Salon, 5th Sept, 2012

There seems to be a sense among many Republicans that the lack of lies told at the DNC — as compared to the RNC — reflected by the lack of the media’s debunking and citing said lies, proves media bias. James Fallows (who, I believe, first used the phrase “post-truth” that so frighteningly describes our current discourse) sums it up nicely:

“How ‘false equivalence’ works. My mailbox is swamped with messages from Republicans asking when ‘the media’ will get on Joe Biden’s speech tonight with the same list of factual errors they/we produced after Paul Ryan’s ‘post-truth’ convention speech last week. Also, when Biden will be attacked the way Ryan has been about his marathon claims.

(…)

“The answer to the first question is: If someone comes up with illustrations of Biden mis-stating facts as grossly as Ryan did in his speech, then he will deserve and get comparable grief for them. But the expectation in most of these notes, interestingly, is that it shouldn’t matter whether there is any objective difference in who is bending the truth at any given time. If you point out problems ‘on one side,’ then you’d better find some equal and offsetting problem on the other, or else the game is rigged. Whether or not the problem is there.”

Oh, Republicans. Please, never change. Never cease to be so amazingly, mind-blowingly insane.

Except, wait.

Actually do change, since you’re killing our Democracy.

There’s 57 days, 12 hours, 35 minutes, and 12 seconds left before election day and no cure yet in sight.

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