There are several things I would have hoped to have swung the election Obama’s way, on principle:
Romney’s failure to release his tax returns. I would thought have some Pubbies felt that this was important information.
voter suppression–GOP officials restricting voting hours, access, etc. selectively in Democratic districts and the new poll tax (photo ID) issues, again, are things I would have thought offended more fair-minded GOP voters in general
Romney’s vagueness: usually voters demand some degree of specificity regarding a challenger’s plans (the incumbent gets more of a pass, since you have his track record to examine.)
Romney’s flip-flops: again, some degree of flipflopping is inevitable, but Romney seems to have lapped John Kerry, for example, several times over, yet to have been damaged by his policy switches far less than Kerry was.
Religion: I’m a little surprised that so many evangelical Christians are fine with Romney’s cult while continuing to revile Obama for his mainstream Xian beliefs.
Ideology trumps values, I suppose, so this was a little naive of me to expect otherwise.
There’s more , but these are the biggest surprises. Given these facts, I would have predicted an electoral blowout for Obama.
So the eletion is close exclusively because GOP voters won’t decide to not vote for Romney; it has nothing to do with voters not being happy with Obama’s performance.
Because how could anybody not have wet drams about Obama?
The tax thing is simple: Romney ran out the clock on it. It was an issue all the way back in January and nothing stays “important” to the public for that long. The Democratic thought was that Romney would eventually have to crack and then the released forms could provide another couple weeks of fodder.
Romney didn’t crack and we all decided to worry about contraceptives and Big Bird and bungled Olympics visits instead.
The other side of the argument is that the economy is still pretty weak, so Obama shouldn’t win re-election by that standard at all (Carter, GHW Bush) and it’s only because of the factors I cited that he is able to pull out a close election.
But those five things are pretty widely agreed to be important to ALL voters–consistency, understanding their positions, religious values, equal access to the polls, and access to candidates’ personal finances. It’s a little surprising how little they actually matter to Republicans when push comes to shove.
His point is that Romney is a lousy candidate. He wonders, quite rightly, why such a lousy candidate would possibly get so much support. It’s a fair question.
Yet the polling this year says that the results may very well mirror 2004 where the incumbent who is less popular than Obama won 286-251 and carried the popular vote by less than 2.5%.
This isn’t at least a little surprising to anyone?
The most simple explanation is that while Romney himself has a record of flip-flops, the GOP platform more closely represents the positions of Romney voters.
GOP voters are not going to automatically vote for Obama because they find things distasteful about Romney.
I wish they would do the honorable thing, and vote for a 3rd party.
Grrrr, stupid internets ate my first reponse. As usual, the second try is never as good as the first:
It’s not surprising to me, because in the eyes of the independent (read: politically and generically uninformed) the economy/unemployment aren’t improved over Obamas’s tenure. Their view is probaby that it’s the other guy’s turn.
They should be, and I wish they were, but empirically a large portion of the American electorate seem to have ‘Teflon brains’ and these things just don’t stick. I’d have thought just re-running Mitt’s differing pronouncements on his positions, with a brief image of hands shaking an Etch-A-Sketch between each quote, would have been more than enough.
Well, “all” voters overstates it, I admit. But take the personal finances thing, which is at the least potentially embarrassing and intrusive to candidates generally. If it were thought to be as easy as it is for Romney to tell voters “Shove my tax returns up your fucking asses, people, they’re none of your goddamned business and they never will be” and get away with it, I’d have supposed that a lot more candidates would have tried that ploy.
Likewise, religion. Many voters don’t care about it, true, but those who do are rigidly insistent that the candidate they support will affirm religious views akin to their own. Obama, a mainstream Christian, does, and Romney, a prominent official in a loopy quasi-Christian cult, does not–yet this hasn’t hurt one tiny bit as far as I can tell.
And so on. These are supposedly important to American voters, if not “all” American voters, but in point of fact, not so much.
I am very disturbed it is this close too. I wonder if we can’t trace this trend to bad policies which combined to create the perfect storm of grossly uninformed/misinformed voter population: Starting back in the 1980s when they discarded fairness doctrine, on into the 90s and 2000s when we quit enforcing monopolies and handed media monopolies over to a handful of Corps. Then the SCOTUS opinions that declare Corporations people and unlimited, undisclosed corporate $ into federal campaigns. All very discouraging since our side contributed to this instead of making it a public war against plutocracy. I have seen my formerly rational business owner sibling transformed into a vapid spewer of Fox Soundbites who voted for Sharron Angle. Sorry for rambling. Yes, disappointed is an under-statement.
That Romney’s faith is the dog that didn’t bark is a good thing for America, and nothing to be disappointed about.
For one, it reveals once again that the number of true fundamentalists just isn’t that high. Most people’s religion does not occupy the place in their lives that the fundamentalists would prefer, which is healthy.
And it also says that either political operatives thought religious attacks were wrong, or that they thought the public would think they’re wrong, and either way, that’s a good thing too. You may disagree with keeping such things off limits since they are relevant to governance, but the fact that *some *perceived limits still exist is an unqualified good.
You’ll note that except for the fever swamps of the National Review, there wasn’t much talk of Biden and Obama’s faith either, notwithstanding the various tensions between their political beliefs and the beliefs of their respective churches.