Debate Post-Mortem: It’s the Cheesecake, Stupid

Spinning as hard as he could after the debate ended, Obama senior advisor David Plouffe told a gaggle of visibly perplexed MSNBC talking heads that “Our strategy was not zingers.” No shit. Nor was it engagement, apparently. The prevailing reaction among the commentariat that it had been a good night for Mitt Romney and a weak one for Barack Obama took hold quickly and reasonably. Romney did pretty well, but the collective verdict was propelled more by Obama’s weakness than Romney’s strength. As James Carville summed it up, “The president didn’t bring his A game.”

To be sure, some heaped effusive praise on Romney for strategic and rhetorical brilliance (“head and shoulders above anything we’ve seen him do before,” declared David Gergen on CNN). But the Romney on display wasn’t really markedly different from the Romney we’ve seen all along: a prepared, lucid and congenial politician right out of central casting who will look into a camera and say whatever he thinks he needs to say to get past a question, facts and prior positions be damned. Romney owns that role, and it showed.

The disappointment articulated by Obama supporters seemed to focus on the things he didn’t talk about: job creation numbers, Bain, Detroit, foreign bank accounts, obstructionism in Congress, women, and of course that 47 percent business, to name a few. All true, but some of the biggest missed opportunities weren’t things not said, but rather things that were said — by Romney. Two in particular stand out as big openings for Obama to draw a broad and compelling contrast between their big-picture governing philosophies.

The first came in an exchange on entitlements. Pointing out that his approach to Medicare wouldn’t kick in big changes for several years, Romney said if you are 60 years old or over “you don’t need to listen any further.” Intended perhaps as a throw-away line aimed at reassuring seniors edgy about Paul Ryan’s Medicare-killing wet dreams, the remark spoke volumes about Romney’s view of the role of self-interest vs. collective responsibility — or would have spoken volumes if Obama has noticed it. Only someone who views society through a lens of selfishness and greed (the sort of person who parks their money in the Cayman Islands to avoid taxes) believes that seniors could care less about the intergenerational future of Medicare as long as they get theirs, Obama should have shot back. Since the convention the Obama campaign has been cultivating an “all in it together” theme as a counternarrative to the GOP’s righteous devotion to individualism; Romney’s remark opened up a set of double doors for Obama to stroll right through.

The second was on the role of government generally. “Government is not effective about bringing down the cost of anything,” Romney intoned during the health care segment, adding that “the private market and individual responsibility always work best.” Rather than letting Romney drag him into the weeds on the similarities and differences between Obamacare and Romney’s Massachusetts reform, Obama should have seen this as a golden opportunity to pivot into painting Romney as an anti-government extremist. He should have reminded viewers of the many critical things that only government can do, from public safety and public health to transportation, education and poverty alleviation, and then bridged to threats to these core public functions posed by Romney’s and the Republican party’s approach to government.

Painting Romney as beholden to the far right instincts of his party is a key piece of the president’s re-election campaign strategy in battleground states, yet a disengaged Obama in Denver failed to identify and seize on opportunities to do just that. Some observers after the debate chalked it up to being out of practice, or to running an administration where he is rarely if ever challenged in the way that Romney did on stage. Others said Romney came with a plan and Obama didn’t. All of that could be right, but the biggest impression I came away with was that Obama just wasn’t dialed in.

Shortly before the debate began the networks reported that Mitt Romney came to the hall for the debate after finishing a Cheesecake Factory dinner. I was all ready with my snarky elitist quip about how that kind of culinary decision making surely disqualifies one’s candidacy for Leader of the Free World. Memo to Axelrod: Apparently there’s some secret sauce in that cheesecake.

Funny how news cycles come and go. The far right’s effort over the last couple of days to foist an angry-black-man video of a 2007 Obama speech on us now fades into oblivion, replaced by a 90-minute disengaged-black-president video that has Mitt Romney enjoying the next couple of news cycles a whole lot more than the last several.

A version of this post appears on the Nashville Scene‘s Pith in the Wind blog.

How Romney Reboots the Race

Much of the chatter in the run-up to Wednesday’s first debate is about how Mitt Romney seizes the opportunity to reverse the blue momentum that opinion polls have been documenting over the last few weeks. The obvious answer is lurking deep in the internals of this morning’s new Washington Post/ABC News poll.

Near the bottom of that survey pollsters assess the all-important likability factor, but not in a direct way, like asking respondents how much they like each candidate. Instead, they pose a set of comparative hypotheticals of the “who would you rather do ___ with” sort. Here’s the full set of questions and the overall result for registered voters in the sample who responded to each question:

On a ship in a storm, who would you rather have as the captain? (Obama +12%)

Who would you rather invite to dinner at your home? (Obama +22%)

Who would you rather go on an overnight camping trip with? (Obama +14%)

Who would you rather have babysit your children? (Obama 41%, Romney 41%)

Whose music playlist would you rather listen to? (Obama +16%)

Who would you rather see as a contestant on Dancing with the Stars? (Obama +25%)

On most of these questions demographic breakdowns favor Obama regardless of age, gender, income, or education. Even those over 50 would rather listen to Obama’s playlist by 10 percentage points. Only those who self-identify as Republicans or conservatives are more apt to invite Romney to dinner, go on a camping trip with him, or groove on his tunes.

But how about that babysitting thing? Men prefer Romney as babysitter by 15 percentage points, as do folks who make more than $50K/year. Those with a college degree would rather have Romney looking after the kids by 8 points, while those without prefer Obama by 7 points.

And — to come to the heart of the matter — what about those all-important independents? It turns out they favor Romney by 2 points as babysitter, but prefer Obama by 14 points as dinner guest (and for dinner music prefer Obama’s playlist by 13 points). Bottom line: independents want Romney to keep an eye on the kids while they spend quality time making goo-goo eyes at the incumbent president.

So Romney’s strategy for Wednesday is now abundantly clear. To win the debate and move the needle, forget jobs, forget the taxes, forget the Middle East. Just look voters straight in the eye and make us a poll-tested promise: “Vote for me and I will come over and babysit.” Game change!

By the way, personally I would much rather see Romney dance than Obama.

A version of this post appears on the Nashville Scene‘s Pith in the Wind blog.

Tennessee Headed in a Blue Direction?

Is Tennessee headed toward battleground status? Ok, perhaps not, but we do know from polling that Tennessee voters are less hostile to the Democratic presidential ticket than they were four years ago, and our red-blue gap is shrinking faster than most other deeply red states. At least that’s a plausible conclusion one can draw from data compiled by Nate Silver at the The New York Times‘ FiveThirtyEight blog. Silver compared the final presidential election result in 2008 with a weighted average of current election polling in each of 18 solidly red states:

Source: FiveThirtyEight at The New York Times

In 10 of 18 states the red grows redder — a polling lead for Mitt Romney that exceeds John McCain’s 2008 margin of victory. In the other seven, all still with Romney ahead, the redness has paled — a smaller Romney edge in polling now compared with McCain’s margin four years ago. The two states with the biggest shift blueward are South Carolina followed by Tennessee — the latter showing the red margin of advantage cut in half. And the polling data is pretty good in extent and quality: Silver’s weighted number for Tennessee relies mainly on two surveys: a YouGov poll earlier this month (finding Romney +8 among registered voters) and a Vanderbilt poll in May (Romney +7 among registered voters).

Extrapolating optimistically (if impulsively), Tennessee should be a battleground state by 2016. Not holding breath.

A version of this post appears on the Nashville Scene‘s Pith in the Wind blog.

Ground Game

We keep hearing that the presidential election this year may come down to who has the better ground game, and perhaps it will if Mitt Romney can manage to go a week or two without another self-inflicted verbal catastrophe.

But what kind of effective ground game can the Romney campaign possibly be cultivating if they are sending a fund-raising letter to someone like me?

Public election records that campaigns mine to target contributors and voters show that I’ve been registered in the same county for over 20 years, vote in essentially every election, and have never voted in a Republican contest in our open primary system.

Granted, I’m just one schmoe in a state that doesn’t matter at all strategically. But if the Romney folks are dropping mail pieces on people like me, then supporters who actually give money to his campaign should be seriously concerned about how their dollars are being spent.