"I donÂ’t want to lose this election."

You know, if I were doing this, my PS would be "I can't wait to meet you in our victory party in Chicago on Election Night."

Instead, it's...

P.S. — I don’t know what Election Night will hold, but I’d like you to be a part of the event here in Chicago. Any donation you make today automatically enters you for a chance to meet me — airfare and hotel for you and a guest are covered.

...which I translate as "It's going to be a grim affair, grim and horrible and just sad, but there'll be lots of alcohol."

Posted by: Ace at 03:18 PM | Comments (111)
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Drudge's rumor was apparently correct -- Allred is trying to get some kind of gag order lifted in a Massachusetts court so she can attack Romney.

Famed civil rights attorney Gloria Allred will be in a Boston area courtroom Wednesday in an attempt to unseal the sworn testimony given by Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, in a prior court case, RadarOnline.com is exclusively reporting.

Speculation... Is that it's about this story-- Romney, as the equivalent of a Catholic bishop in the LDS church, advised a woman to carry a baby to term despite risks to her health (and despite the fact that the anti-blood-clot medication she was on could result in the baby's mental retardation).

But, she didn't. Now, how could this end up in family & probate court? I don't know. Maybe she sued for some kind of intentional infliction of emotional distress? She later left the LDS church.

Now here's why I think maybe this speculation is correct:

1. I don't know if the woman is directly quoted in the story. There's a reference to her saying Romney told her to carry the baby to term, but I don't know if that comes from her or it's someone else relaying the quote.

So it's possible she is in fact under a gag order. Friends who know her can relate her tale, but she can't. If you assume it's about this tale, and you further assume she brought some kind of suit.

2. The story drops the cutesy term "Romnesia" -- something Obama is pushing furiously on the campaign, to no effect. But perhaps he intends to increase interest in the story by creating a "Romnesia" narrative for it.

I don't know. I still don't think there's anything here. Romney is/was pro-life. I suppose the big shock would be he's actually pro-life.

Update: On page 5, there's another possible candidate for the Allred Lottery, so long as we're making guesses.

Something about Romney urging a woman (who apparently had some problems, or at least so Mitt Romney thought) giving her kid up for adoption.

But then, she seems to speak on the record, so I don't know about a gag order there.

It could just be about unsealing Mitt Romney's testimony, though. Or maybe the woman told this story, then sued, then had everything sealed, so now she'd need a court order to discuss it further.

Election 2012
Metroactive / By Geoffrey Dunn
comments_image Comments
Mitt Romney's Heartless Advice to a Woman Whose Pregnancy Might Have Killed Her
Mormon women remember Romney's advice when he was a church leader, and there wasn't much 'moderate' about it.

Continued from previous page

Instead she was "shocked" by what she heard. According to Hayes, Romney "pressured" her to give her son up for adoption through an LDS agency. At first, she thought she had misunderstood him, but much to her horror, she hadn't.

"[Romney] told me it was really important to give the baby up," Hayes said in her original interview with Globe reporters Frank Phillips and Scot Lehigh nearly two decades ago. "He told me he was a representative of the church and by refusing I was failing to comply with the church's wishes and I could be excommunicated."

Hayes took Romney's admonition as a threat. She felt attacked, even intimidated. Moreover, it was insulting: "He was saying that because Dane [her son] didn't have a Mormon father in the home and because of the circumstances of his birth—being born to a single mother—then the expectation of the church was that I give him up for adoption to the church agency so he could be raised by a Mormon couple in good standing."

I don't know. Still seems like crap to me.

Posted by: Ace at 02:16 PM | Comments (554)
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Just kidding, it's a poll!

Romney goes out ahead of Obama, 49-48, in the WaPo/ABCNews poll, the first time he has led in this poll since August 25th.

This poll is scary-unvarying, by the way. Over the course of three months Obama has bounced between 51 and 49, and Romney has bounced from about 47 to 49. It's so unvarying that if the guy doing it didn't have a good reputation, I'd say it's evidence of shenanigans. (Every experiment, after all, has some experimental error.)

Underscoring Obama’s challenges two weeks before Election Day, his job approval rating now stands at 49 percent among likely voters, its lowest since late September (48 percent) and trouble for him to the extent that the election is a referendum on his performance. Among previous incumbents, George W. Bush dipped to 50 percent among likely voters – but not lower – in the fall of his successful re-election campaign.

Moreover, likely voters now divide by 50-45 percent, Romney-Obama, in whom they trust to do a better job handling the economy. The 5-point gap, while not statistically significant, is its widest, again, since Aug. 25.

Obama wins on empathy, 51-44. Another interesting bit is that while Democratic enthusiasm is pretty high, it's still three points below what it was in 2008 (62% now, 65% then). But Republican enthusiasm is also at 62% -- but it was at 38% in 2008.

Still, according to this poll we don't have an advantage on this count. Which means it's up to people to translate mere enthusiasm into positive action, as @benk84 advises.

Posted by: Ace at 02:06 PM | Comments (85)
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Via Instapundit, Obama's firewall may be on fire.

[E]ven if Obama loses Ohio, his campaign sees another pathway to the presidency by nailing New Hampshire, Iowa, Wisconsin, Nevada and Colorado.

The first rule of Losing Ohio Club is you don't talk about Losing Ohio Club.

By the way, it will be very hard for Obama to win three of those states (NH, IA, and CO). Colorado, especially, leans to Romney now.

The others are tossups... for now.

Why would Obama be talking about alternate routes to victory not including Ohio?

Obviously, I think, they don't think Ohio is safe. And to talk about losing it... I think they think they're behind.

I saw Sam Stein report on Twitter something I've been thinking about: Romney is pondering saving some of his ad money in order to buy a multinetwork uninterrupted 30 minute block of time for a long-form appeal, like Obama did in 2008.

I don't know. I like the idea of it. I'm just worried about the downside of it (you can't spend that money on tons and tons of ads).

There's one more bit of goofiness I can add to this: The media is already building narratives for Why Obama Lost.

Want to know why? Because, three different liberal writers claim, the media is biased against Barack Obama.

Ah, well, not against Barack Obama per se, but in love with the idea of a Dramatic Storyline, and the storyline of Obama cruising to an easy victory just wasn't exciting enough. So the liberal media made up Mile High Massacre -- just made it up! Romney didn't really shellack him! -- and has run with that story ever since.

Now, if the media loves a good Comeback story, you'd also think they'd love the Obama Comeback story. So why aren't they writing that?

Well, the writer doesn't explain, except to say the media are prisoners of their own Narrative, and their current Narrative is "Romney gaining," so they're sticking with that.

There it is again: the trajectory! We will not let it go. It doesnÂ’t matter if we have failed in achieving many of the basics of campaign coverage, like getting a candidate to cough up a critical mass of tax returns, release his bundler list, and account for his proposals and position shifts with a minimum of detail and coherence. No, we have our trajectory. And dammit, weÂ’re sticking to it.

Like I said: He doesn't explain why. Just asserts that the media, which, frankly, would have gay sex with Obama (even the women in the media would prefer the sex with Obama to be gay sex with Obama), is so in love with this Romney Gaining "trajectory" that they just can't see the real story.

And the real story is, of course, Obama Gaining.

When conservatives spend their time complaining about media bias, we're losing.

When liberals spend their time complaining about media bias, they're collapsing.

Because, seriously, this is the stupidest shit I've ever read and I've read The DaVinci Code.

The Sacred Feminine

Once a plot device, now a presidential agenda.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:39 PM | Comments (452)
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Just a claim. Romney's not touching it.

A proposal of the manÂ’s story was created and viewed by Radar. The document claims that there are multiple sources who can back up allegations that Obama used and sold cocaine in college.

The alleged pal was willing to go on the record for the story and take a polygraph test, according to the source.

A Trump adviser, by the way, denies that this is his bombshell. He says he has something else.

“Mr. Trump’s announcement is substantially more important to the American people than these allegations made against the president,” Michael Cohen, special counsel to Trump, told TheDC by phone on Tuesday.

I gotta tell ya, that sounds like Birth Certificate stuff. I was hoping he had something, even though, honestly, I don't think it matters. I think this election is about the economy, period, and Obama's failed record. But still, it would be nice to have something to put Obama further off his stride.

Legal Insurrection thinks this is a "shot across the bow" for Team Obama, to let them know they can answer any stupidity Gloria Allred might push into the spotlight.

Ouch: Someone is claiming that Trump has gotten his hands on the divorce papers Michelle Obama prepared, but assumedly did not file.

Eesh. I don't know. This is harsh stuff.

I suppose one could say it's karma, given what happened to Jack Ryan.

But then, it opens the door for whatever stupidity Gloria Allred is cooking up.

Posted by: Ace at 12:05 PM | Comments (429)
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Last night Obama thought he was being really clever with his "horses and bayonets" line. Today, Team Mitt shoves back with a new ad highlighting the importance of naval power to America's military strength.

I'm not sure where it's going to air but Virginia, Florida and New Hampshire are big Navy states. Oh and they also happen to be key battle ground states. I hope Obama enjoyed his snark while it lasted.

The "horses and bayonets" line was probably the most divisive of the night. Liberals loved it and conservatives rolled their eyes.

Obama says Romney doesn't understand the qualitative nature of today's Navy when he focuses on the quantity of ships in the fleet. Well, Obama and liberals ignore that there's as much ocean today as there was in in 1917 but we have far, far more global interests and responsibilities. For all the wonderful advancements in technology in the last century, we still haven't figure out how to get a ship in more than one place at one time.

Quality matters but so does quantity. Just ask sailors and their families who are looking at longer and more frequent deployments thanks to Obama's ship building deficit.

I'm open to listening to people who want to cut the Navy but first they must tell me what missions they will forgo and what areas of the globe they will ignore. Without that, you are simply asking the Navy to do more with less and that won't work for long.

Posted by: DrewM at 11:10 AM | Comments (305)
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Three points:

No, Rob Schneider isn't influential.

But, this is more confirmation of the cascade. If you think maybe Rob Schneider's a little bit conservative because Adam Sandler's his pal, no, Rob Schneider is a way out there left liberal. Wayyy out there. I caught him on Adam Carolla a ways back (IIRC) and he was just silly. Peace this, vegan that.

I don't know the context for his rejection of Obama but I'm guessing when he speaks of "the bureaucracy" he probably means something to do with drone strikes.

Last point: They have an important mini-conversation about race. The point they agree on is that "we're going to have crappy black presidents just like we've had crappy white presidents; we don't keep a crappy president just because he's black, just the same as we don't keep a crappy white one."

That's an important statement about race. Counterintuitively, I think it's better for race relations if Obama is judged just like any other president and thus given the boot.

The election of Barack Obama was a powerful statement about progress in racial matters of the country. So, too, would be his defeat: Race doesn't matter, or, at least, shouldn't matter, and people will in fact look beyond color to judge the content of one's character.

Or, in this case, record.

This is an interesting point that John McWhorter and Glen Loury discussed a year ago. I wrote about it at the time:

he end (starting around 26:30, but there are preludes to the idea earlier) is about these two black guys trying to figure out, intellectually and personally, what an Obama 2012 loss means. Both voted for him and were "euphoric" over the election, they both say. And the interesting thing here is that they're guessing as to the black reaction to a loss, the natural tendency to take a loss by Obama as a loss themselves (in the exact same way an Obama win was a win for themselves), and what the whole reaction to that will say about equality in the end -- what I took from it is that they're saying blacks will be equal not only when a black man can be elected president ("as Jesus," McWhorter notes) and triumph, but also when he can lose and fail.

They don't precisely say that, but that's what they're talking about.

The Triumphant Jesus part is a sort of immature Hero's Narrative, the Magic Negro thing so beloved by Hollywood, because blacks remain in that sort of narrative not fully human, but abstracted symbols of virtue or dignity in oppression or what have you. Whereas a man failing is just a man failing -- and that's human, not symbolic.

....

Anyway, fairly interesting, especially about the last question, the -- for lack of a better word -- normalization of blackness, the routinization of coloredness, such that the failure and defeat of the Great Black Hope is... well, something that just happens, just as anyone might fail. Not something pregnant with heavy symbolism or Lessons About America -- just something that happens. Something human, and not something particularly freighted with Meaning just because the human who failed was darker skinned than some.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:48 AM | Comments (139)
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John Ellis assailed Obama's small-minded "Trending on Twitter" campaign strategy a few days back:

Weirdly, the micro-marketing Obama campaign has so far failed to frame the choice to its natural advantage. Big Bird and Binders of Women trend on Twitter and off goes Chicago, chasing Wile E. Coyote. Then Morgan Freeman narrates “Morning in America,” Obama-style. Then the Romney plan is “sketchy,” perhaps chasing another Twitter trender from way back when: Etch-A-Sketch.

What they’re not doing (which is why Romney has a seven-point lead in the Gallup Poll tracking) is “getting it down there where the dogs can eat it,” as George Wallace used to say. If they keep running their “trending on Twitter” campaign, they will surely lose.

Ellis thinks that Obama will inevitably abandon that silly strategy and start talking about things that really matter, but so far, today, he's still talking about "Romnesia."

Meanwhile, over on the left, a writer at Gawker is similarly unamused by Obama's strategy of playing the fool.

One of the many little thrills of being a part of the Obama campaign four years ago was a deep and abiding sense that, finally, a political leader had come along who could live up to our highest aspirations. Yes, Obama was cool and played basketball and was conversant in ironical youth culture, but when it came down to it, he was overwhelmingly serious. The other guys were hauling unlicensed plumbers onstage and suspending their campaign at the drop of a hat, but Obama kept his eyes on the prize and played the grown-up. Now he's talking about "Romnesia."

If anything, Obama's 2008 campaign promised a president who would actively repudiate the frenetic, aggressively stupid cable-news culture that had engulfed political reporting.... His inaugural address—a deeply depressing read in light of the last four years—contained a stern admonition to those who insisted on sweating the small stuff: "On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises.... [I]n the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things."

That's the same guy who let loose last night, in the midst of a debate that was ostensibly about how many people we are going to kill over the next four years and under what circumstances, this little nugget: "The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back."

He calls the joke "middling" and says it has no business coming from a President of the United States, especially one supposedly as consequential as the Dictator of Sea Level.

I don't think it's even middling. The nineties just called, and they want their dumb played-in-three-weeks joke back.

This is a David Spade style joke for people who aren't as funny as David Spade.

Anyway, point made. Months ago Obama was proclaiming this to be the most consequential election of our lifetimes. Now he's desperately trying to distract people from that reality. He doesn't want people to treat the election as consequential anymore, perhaps because people have decided they fear the Consequences of Obama more than the Consequences of Romney.

You can win every stupid Twitter meme and daily newscycle and still lose the election. People will only be distracted by the Small Shiny Object for so long.

Posted by: Ace at 10:06 AM | Comments (284)
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Gallup's numbers were late today. When they finally posted, Obama gained a point to 46%; Romney's lead shrunk from 6 to 5. No change in registered voters from yesterday (48-47 Romney).

Here's an important finding, from @conartcritic. In a poll conducted Oct. 1st through 21st, Gallup found the party affiliation of the country very nearly evenly split:

@ConArtCritic

Gallup survey of party affiliation pref for 1-21 Oct: Dem 34.3% GOP 34.1% Ind 31.6%

CAC's conclusion: It's not D+7, or 6, or 5, or 4, or 3, or 2, or even 1 anymore. It's D+0. It's all even.

Meanwhile, ARG posted a New Hampshire poll showing Romney up by two points.

Rasmussen: Romney 50, Obama 46 (see update at post's end).

Rasmussen Swing States Only: Romney 50, Obama 45.

This is now the third time Romney has hit the 50% mark in the combined swing states in the past four days and is the biggest lead either candidate has held in nearly three weeks.

Fact Check: Romney was Pants On Fire wrong about the 47%. It's more like 45%.

Nate Silver just emailed to say Obama's odds of winning improved to 640%, which means that, in addition to winning the election, Obama now has a good shot of being crowned King of the Third French Empire and the next Celebrity Apprentice.

Posted by: Ace at 09:37 AM | Comments (236)
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He invented a new term to sneer at Romney, too: The "hard center."

See, he's on the hard right, but on foreign policy, he's moved towards "the hard center."

The extremist center, he means. more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:44 AM | Comments (370)
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