Dispatch: The Last

The election is over, and in this last dispatch I am pleased to report that the results did not embarrass me. Though the final official numbers are not yet in, my preferred candidate, Barack Obama, won reelection—much to my relief. Also, much to my relief, my forecasts reasonably accurately guessed the margin of victory: 50.4% for Obama; 48.1% for Romney. I overestimated Obama’s take of the popular vote by 1%, but otherwise, my short-, mid-, and long-term expectations about the unfolding of events were pretty completely fulfilled. My fundamental take on the logical drive of the election and the relevance of its rhetoric (that is to say, largely irrelevant) strikes me in retrospect as accurate and confirmed. Not bad for someone who consciously avoided paying too much attention.

At the same time, even as I rose from my seat after tapping out these rather hard-headed accounts, I felt, felt doubt and fear and anger. Which reminded me, reminds me, that human beings are first and foremost emotional creatures. We are emotional creatures capable of rationality, but we are emotional creatures first and foremost. And emotion, prompting it, playing it, and profiting from it, is what media is all about. However much reason, however much rational discourse, critical, thoughtful, and analytical, finds its way into the media—and there is plenty of it en masse—it is almost completely swamped by the emotion, the ceaseless playing on and for. Going into Tuesday night, I was genuinely worried for my preferred candidate and my country. Perhaps retaining one’s balance, even sanity, requires paying attention, but not too much.

Dobranoc, Dr. hab. Banaś

Dispatch #22 p.s.

A post-script and correction to my previous dispatch. This evening, at the dinner table of Count Alexey Kirillovitch Vronsky, Leo Tolstoy disappointed my fondest hopes: “The conversation passed to the misuse of political power in the United States, but Anna quickly brought it round to another topic.” Wisely done, Anna Arkadyevna. (Barnes & Noble, 1993, p. 570.)

Dispatch #22

Now less than a month until the election, the candidates and their parties work harder and harder, spend more and more time and money on fewer and fewer voters, the undecideds, essentially, the dimwits. That people can be undecided after this long speaks to the power of ignorance and the instability of popular political judgment, drawing as it does on the voters’ gut-level responses at any particular moment. (Perhaps the undecideds claim indecision because they like the national media attention, the sense that they hold the balance.) Obama and Romney jockey to make a good, the best, last impression. It’s hard to watch, so I’ve been reading Anna Karenina instead. Tolstoy has nothing relevant to say about democratic electioneering, a fact which notably recommends him.

After Mr. Romney’s excellent first debate with the president, in which he strongly reversed the downward, almost hopeless trend of his campaign, the lively performance of Biden in the vice-presidential debate and Obama’s own more focused second presidential debate have corrected the Democrats’ slide. The stock markets, though volatile from day to day, move up month to month; consumer confidence has risen; the housing market shows visible improvement. All of these economic trends boost Obama’s chances, which are now running about 2 to 1 in his favor, with one debate remaining. Each candidate having won a debate and shown fundamental competence in both, I don’t expect a clear-cut victor in the final debate. Both have been tested, bested once, and will be prepared. They’ll argue to a draw.

After all is said and done, then, and acknowledging both my own liberal bias and my own conservative sense that all of this campaigning hasn’t really informed or genuinely changed our minds much (though it has exercised us) I predict an Obama popular vote victory 51.5% to 48%. But then, this is why we have elections and count the votes.

Dispatch #21

Our president, who has a gift for words, for public speaking, and a reputation for “cool” performed rather miserably in the first presidential debate this past Wednesday night. Casual at the start, he struck me as ill-prepared, unfocused, disjointed, the result, I think, of being over-confident and too comfortably ahead in the polls. Earlier in the week, Republican money was reportedly shifting to races in the House of Representatives, more or less conceding that Obama would win the presidential election. When Mitt Romney presented as intelligent and spirited and agreeably moderate, addressing himself and challenging the most intelligent person in the room, the president, instead of trying to speak directly to the American people, he came off quite positively, as if there were a real live candidate in there somewhere under that perfect suit and haircut and not a walking first-class gaffebot. I had begun to wonder about Romney’s fundamental competence prior to the debate. After it, I’m reassured that he has a fundamental political competence, greater than that of George W. Bush certainly, but Romney’s competence is more gubernatorial, governmental, and less electoral. You need both to become president. On Wednesday night, for the first time, the American people got the sense that Mr. Romney might have enough of what it takes of the latter.

That said, it’s too late. Wednesday night will be the high point of the Romney campaign. If the unemployment numbers reported this morning had been terrible, he might have been able to build on his success last night, but the jobless rate fell below 8% for the first time in four years, to 7.8%. Not a great number, of course, but moving, now visibly to the electorate, in the right direction. The stock market (the Dow) rose above 13,500, and consumer confidence has similarly been on the rise.  So that, Romney’s excellent impression will help close the gap, make the contest as close as it should be and should have been from the outset, but it won’t be enough. The Obama campaign will make the necessary rhetorical “adjustments” to their message, and in the end, these debates will be part of the normal Tocquevillian “froth and stir” of the electoral process.

Dispatch #20

Unless the American economy collapses owing to some heretofore unknown instability in the capitalist system, Barack Obama will be re-elected president of the United States next month, reasonably comfortably, by four or five percentage points. While he has presided over an economy of long historic lows, the general sense is that we have bottomed out and will, however slowly, begin a more sustained economic recovery. Obama has indeed disappointed his supporters’ dreams of hope and change, but he has managed an accomplishment or two that prevented worse times. He has not been blamed for the depression, but he cannot take any credit for a successful exit. If, along with his re-election, the Democrats retain the Senate, as well as gain some ground in the House of Representatives—both real possibilities at the moment—Obama may be able to enact policies that can genuinely foster recovery. These political shifts are now the more important developments of this election.

Obama has been blessed with a deeply divided Republican Party and a candidate, Mitt Romney, who simply hasn’t the political gifts to placate, deceive, and exploit his lunatic right wing while he goes aggressively moderate and takes, and even shares, positions with Obama. Instead of lying to his right wing, Romney lies to himself, as well as misrepresenting himself to the American people. In the last two weeks, every time Mitt opens his mouth, he must later confess to speaking “inarticulately,” providing Democrats with further arguments to make him seem a great deal worse than he probably is or might be if he didn’t have to seem “conservative.” The general consensus is that his campaign is in big trouble; with a significant minority consensus in his own party. He may become the Republican version of Michael Dukakis, likewise a former governor of Massachusetts, who lost handily to the senior President Bush, H.W.

Three presidential debates are on tap for the month of October, but the electorate is already firming up. Fewer and fewer undecided voters remain, and some absentee balloting in important states begins next week. Romney basically has one chance in the first debate to stop the slide, then hope for a miracle. He’ll need both.