Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?

The implicit question is really whether the US is better off than it was 4 years ago and that question is obviously: Yes! In the fourth quarter of 2008, the US economy shed 800,000 jobs which sent economists in a tizzy because the US hadn't seen such a downturn since the Great Depression. They felt they were staring into an abyss. Here are some of the headlines from September 2008:

Depression Coming? Boil Some Beans; Ladies Who Quilt Give Tips On Surviving Tough Times [Albuquerque Journal, September 21, 2008]

One day on the brink On Wednesday, it seemed U.S. economy might collapse [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 21, 2008]

‘Great Depression’ closer than U.S. admits, report finds [Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, September 27, 2008]

Is It Really the Next ‘Great Depression’? [NPR, September 19, 2008]

Will Bush become the new Hoover? [Politico, September 19, 2008]

Depression seen possible [Florida News-Press, September 27, 2008]

 Source: Thinkprogress.org

The main problem was that most people hadn't seen the worse yet and had the impression that things were OK if not great, even as the effects of the recession were on their way. This meant that Americans were far more positive than the situation would truly merit. And this is really why the Obama surrogates paused when asked the question of "Are we better off now than four years ago?". They knew we would all say we were better off, because we didn't know the extent of the downturn yet. Larry Summers said it best that FDR was lucky because when he took office the Great Depression had been going on for years and therefore everyone knew it was Hoover's fault. Obama inherited a huge recession at its advent that proved a lot deeper and therefore more difficult to get rid of than anyone at the time expected. Still, remarkable headway has been made. Despite what some would like to argue the Stimulus added hundreds of thousands (perhaps even millions) of jobs at a very critical time. Many economists think that the Stimulus arrested the American economy's free fall and began the tough climb toward job growth. The climb has proven arduous indeed. But the choice in November will be to return to the policies that brought us to the brink of Depression or to continue the slow, but very real climb out of Depression economics. Frankly, I know which one I support.

Why isn't Romney winning?

A few days ago, I read a post by some mathematicians from the Unversity of Colorado who had created a statistical model based on previous electoral college results showing that Romney will be the next president. Leaving aside the limited number of elections from which they based their result, I am certainly not in principle against making predictions (with a grain of salt) based on evidence. However, in this case past results of elections don't seem to have a lot of bearing on how voters think about the candidates. They are supposed to favor the challenger and yet, in spite of the shitty economy and all the anti-Obama expressions on the part of the anti-Obama folk, this favoritism has not yet come to pass. When the economy is this bad, the incumbent does not get re-elected. Ask George H. W. Bush. Ask Jimmy Carter. But neither of those candidates for re-election suffered as terrible an economy as the Obama administration. The most recent CNN poll put Obama ahead of Romney barely two months ahead of the general election by a slim margin. Given the circumstances, shouldn't Romney be way ahead? To put it as bluntly as possible: why aren't more people planning to vote for Romney?

My answer is that the GOP has been terribly negligent in the past few years. They have constantly gone for the low hanging fruit of race, class, gender resentment and have missed enormous opportunities to widen their base. Jeb Bush said basically the same thing the other day. Republicans need to think where the nation is going, not where the nation is now. Sure you might be able to win with old white working class male people today. Maybe. But not tomorrow. Honestly, President Obama has no right whatsoever to be winning by a landslide with Latino voters considering how he has increased the level of deportations over what President Bush did in his administration. Why is Romney losing these voters? Because he employs rhetoric that will galzanize the base, but the base is an ever-increasingly small group of true believers. Romney punts on every opportunity to reach out to the very voters who might consider switching allegiance to him and the Republicans.

Former Republican Senator Rick Santorum said the other day that if Republicans can make issues the center of the campaign for the presidency they win, but he was only partly right. It entirely depends on what issues they're talking about. Poll after poll says that Americans trust Obama on social issues, foreign policy, entitlements, the military and taxes over Romney. The only issues he gets more confidence in is managing the economy, the deficit and jobs. While those are big issues, the fact that Romney only so little to work with is telling. Any deviation is a problem for his campaign. Romney has isolated himself  (with considerable help from the base of the party) to the degree he's easily dislodged from the message that would appeal to the people who could elect him- independent voters. This also means that practically any October surprise that comes up will favor Obama, not Romney.

Paul Ryan was a poor choice for a running mate.

Ryan is supposed to energize the base of the Republican Party, but I don't actually know what that means. Will it mean that conservatives who were not excited about Romney and therefore weren't going to vote in Nov. are now going to vote for him? I doubt it because while conservatives may be lukewarm on Romney they are not lukewarm on Obama and would vote against Obama no matter who got the GOP nomination. So Romney is not likely to pick up a lot of votes here. Does it mean that Romney will get more donations from Conservatives as a result of picking Ryan? Maybe, but Romney is already raising a lot more money than Obama for all the good it's doing him. Will it mean more campaign volunteers? Here it may actually help him. Romney is fairly deficient when it comes to having people knock on doors and make phone calls, especially where it counts. A million volunteers in Texas wouldn't help Romney- he's already going to win Texas. He needs volunteers in places like OH, FL, MI, WI, CO, VA. Places that could go either way. But I have my doubts even on this. In polls, people already say they know enough about the candidates. No one is likely to be introduced to Romney in the August before the election unless he or she lived under a rock for the last 18 months and the subearth types are not likely voters. So Ryan energizing the base doesn't really mean a lot. Elections are won in the middle.

And here is why I think that Ryan is a poor choice.

1) Ryan doesn't help in any major state and actively hurts in one very important state. Wisconsin has ten electoral votes so even if Romney takes WI as a result of this pick he's only up 20 electoral votes (the 10 he got and the same 10 he took from Obama). The idea that other midwestern states are going to be more likely to vote for Romney is bizarre. No one in Ohio cares where Ryan is from unless Ryan is from Ohio and then only maybe. Half the people who lose local elections in Ohio are from there. Most people vote for people they agree with, not accidents of birth. However, Ryan really hurts Romney in Florida. Ryan has called Social Security a ponzi scheme, in the past supported private accounts for Social Security and wants to make serious changes to Medicare. When I heard Romney had picked Ryan one of my first thoughts was that Romney had just lost Florida's 29 electoral votes which cost him almost a sixty points in the electoral college.

2) As other commentators have noted this ticket is one for rich, white males. Romney was already going to win that group. Ryan's politics are not attractive to minority groups in general. Romney has ceded the field for the Latino vote, the Black vote, the Gay vote, and Women's vote. These groups are going to be critical in swing states- Florida for instance, but also, Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, Colorado. In a close election stealing even a few of these votes means way more than getting all the conservatives in Ohio to vote for you. They were going to anyway. When he loses Latinos and seniors in Florida, his campaign will be wondering where it went wrong. It was here: the Romney campaign had to fend off Republican challengers in the primary for so long by proving Mitt's conservativism that it forgot that that's not where general elections are won. If either party could win with its base alone, it wouldn't be much of an election.

3) Ryan is a policy wonk and most voters are not. His main credential for the job is that he wrote a budget that is highly contentious. Voters are not going to wade through the Ryan budget. They're only going to take a few things away at best. He's for fiscal responsibility; he wants to cut taxes and cut spending, (that's that the Romney camp is going to report) or that his cuts hurt seniors and the needy while helping rich people like say, Mitt Romney (which the Obama campaign will most certainly say). And who they choose to believe is largely about how to fit Ryan into the narrative that they already have in their heads about Romney. And since the Obama campaign has been extremely successful at painting Romney as an out-of-touch plutocrat, guess which version of Ryan's budget they're likely to accept?

In short, anyone who likes Ryan was probably already going to vote for Romney. Whether voters enthusiastically vote Romney or hold their noses and vote Romney, it's is the same thing mathematically. Romney needs 270 votes in the electoral college. Ryan doesn't get him there.