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.