The Republicans are smelling blood. Finally, after four years of a scandal free Obama first term, they seem to say, we got him!
And they can’t help themselves, comparing Obama to Nixon, who resigned in disgrace over the Watergate scandal – now that was a real scandal! – and suggesting that Obama should be impeached…
The Washington Post main editorial today is right on the money:
•The Benghazi talking points scandal is “no scandal whatsoever,” but there was “no cover up” and “no conspiracy” to deceive the American people.
•The broad search of telephone records among AP’s reporters went way too far, but there is no record that Obama knew anything about this.
•The IRS targeting of Tea party groups is “horrifying and inexcusable,” but there is no evidence of White House knowledge or instigation of this practice.
Second term presidents often seem to get into trouble…must be something in the water in the White House. But this is not Watergate nor is it Iran-contra. They were real scandals.
Still, of course, this won’t go away. The Republicans want to get the president, but in their desperate eagerness, they are overreaching, “making a political circus” of the tragedy in Benghazi, as Philadelphia Inquirer’s Trudy Rubin recently wrote. The real scandal, she continued, is how the Republicans are “dishonoring” the memory of the four dead Americans in Benghazi.
I have to head up to New York soon to check out two exhibits opening today at MoMa, the Museum of Modern Art, with works by Claes Oldenburg, the”pop patriarch,” and a “pop master,” according to two recent articles in the New York Times.
Oldenburg, now 84 years old, has made New York his home since 1956, but he was born in Stockholm, Sweden and grew up in Chicago. Today, he is one of the most prominent living Swedish-Americans, and I love his work.
The two exhibits, ”The Street and the Store” and ”Mouse Museum/Ray Gun Wing,” are described under the headline, ”Window Shopping With a Pop Patriarch” and in an interview with the artist under the headline “Dark Roots of a Pop Master’s Sunshine,” Oldenburg says:
“It all sort of coalesced as the ’60s came. It was magical, when you think about it, because everything seemed to start all of a sudden.” With the election of John F. Kennedy “there was a feeling that the country was going to come to life.”
As to Oldenburg’s art and longevity, the paper writes:
“He’s not seeing America’s popular culture through the eyes of someone born deep inside it, the way Andy Warhol did as a poor kid from Pittsburgh. Rather, Mr. Oldenburg came at that culture as a bit of an outsider, with a European’s eyes, and always saw it as bigger than it was and more full of magic than such ordinary subjects had a right to be.”
This weekend a group of art lovers and gun control activists gathered in the First Congregational United Church of Christ in the middle of Washington, DC for an exhibition called “The Newtown Project: ART TARGETS GUNS.”
The exhibit with 33 artists has been assembled by veteran journalist Charles Krause Reporting Fine Arts Gallery in memory of the murdered 26 students and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in December last year.
It takes place as Congress returns to Washington to continue negotiations on new gun laws that President Obama has demanded and for which he has energetically pleaded in speeches around the country, on Monday in a passionate address to a huge crowd in Hartford, CT.
He seems to have support among the American public: 90 per cent support background on people who want to buy guns; 59 percent want ban on military-style automatic weapons (assault weapons) and a majority support other laws on guns and ammunition.
Yet… a victory in Congress is far from certain. The lobby group the National Rifle Association (NRA) has, at least so far, succeeded in preventing any new gun laws.
A depressing article in this weekend’s Washington Post described NRA’s hitherto successful lobbying, both in Congress in Washington and in the state legislatures. It is now clear that there will be no nationwide ban on assault weapons — the votes are just not there. But also other, less controversial proposals, have so far been stopped by NRA and its supporters, who all argue that such laws would violate Americans’ individual freedoms and right to bear arms according to the Second Amendment in the Constitution. And Republican Senators are preparing to filibuster any new proposal on gun control.
Still, the battle after Newtown has not been entirely without success for Obama and those who urge stricter gun laws. The success has mainly come in states where the Democrats are in control, like in New York State, where Governor Andrew Cuomo, but, especially, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have pushed hard for stricter gun control. And in Maryland, Governor Martin O’Malley has pushed through a number of new gun laws, including a ban on assault weapons.
Said O’Malley:
“There is a sickness in this country and that sickness is gun violence.”…”These tragedies must end, and to end them we must change.”
And last week,in Connecticut, new gun laws were approved, but the victory did not come easily,according to the New York Times, in spite of Newtown and in spite of a Democratic governor and Democratic majorities in the state legislature. But perhaps NRA’s biggest defeat, and its opponents’ biggest victory, came recently in Colorado, where one in three households own guns but where also tragedies such as in Aurora and Columbine have taken place. In the end, Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper pushed through several new laws. Maybe, after all, the fight is not hopeless...
“If you can do it here (in Colorado), you can do it any place,” was one of the comments afterwards.
Ja, det är faktiskt ganska cool det som sparkas igång ikväll med en premiärkonsert med Kungliga Filharmonikerna under ledning av finländaren Sakari Oramo och med danska sopranon Inger Dam-Jensen, som uppför nordisk musik av Sibelius, Alfvén, Grieg, Leifs och Nielsen. Och det pågår en hel månad.
Aldrig förr, vare sig i USA eller i Europa har en sådan nordisk kultursatsning ägt rum, och i detta fall har det skett på Kennedy Centrets initiativ och så med hjälp av nordiska (5 miljoner danska kronor) och svenska (2 miljoner svenska kronor) kulturanslag.
- Ja, det är verkligen spännande och en stor chans för Norden att visa upp det bästa inom nordisk kultur, sade svenska kulturministern Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth på en pressträff på svenska ambassaden, House of Sweden, här i Washington, DC idag.
Alla de nordiska länderna ställer upp mangrant med v ad de har att bjuda på inom musik, teater, film, mat, dans, arkitektur, konst och design. Från Sverige, förutom Philharmonikerna, kommer Gustaf Sjökvists Kammarkör, Backateatern, Kungliga Dramatens uppsättning av ”Fanny och Alexander”, GöteborgsOperans Danskompani mm. Anne Solfie von Otter framträder flera gånger, seminarier om nordisk litteratur, inte minst detektivromaner finns också på programet liksom filmer som Jan Troells film ”Dom över död man”.
De fyra andra nordiska länderna plus Grönland och Färöarna satsar lika stort och brett, och det ska bli spännande att se hur denna nordiska storsatsning tas emot av den amerikanska publiken, som bjuds på mycket helt gratis i Kennedycentret. Ja, det är inte mycket annat som pågår där den närmaste månaden.
Och den som inte får nog med vad som bjuds på Kennedycentret kan gå till House of Sweden, där årets tema ”Globalization & Migration” invigdes igår kväll med utställningar om bland annat Josef Franks design, svenska kläder ”From Hazelius to Salander” och Åsa Nyléns konst ”Memories of Stone”.
President Barack Obama’s State of the Union last night was tough and progressive. He forcefully laid out his vision of America, and his followers loved it while his opponents hated it.
For Ezra Klein the speech was “extraordinarily ambitious,” as he writes on his Wonkblog in The Washington Post:
“Imagine, for a moment, that President Obama managed to pass every policy he proposed tonight. Within a couple of years, every four-year-old would have access to preschool. The federal minimum wage would be at $9 — higher than it’s been, after adjusting for inflation, since 1981. There’d be a cap-and-trade program limiting our carbon emissions and a vast infrastructure investment to upgrade our roads and bridges. Taxes would be higher, guns would be harder to come by, and undocumented immigrants would have a path to citizenship. America would be a noticeably different country.”
That is unlikely to happen, but if Obama meets some of his goals, as Los Angeles Times’ Doyle McManus writes, like “immigration reform, even modest steps on gun control, an end to the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan, a free-trade agreement with Europe and, oh yes, implementation of Obamacare — and manages to keep the economy growing, even if slowly, that’s not a bad list. Plenty of two-term presidents have done worse.”
“Long gone,” writes The New Yorker’s John Cassidy on his blog Rational Irrationality “is the era when he (Obama) treated Republicans as reasonable men and women with whom he could do business. Nowadays, he is in permanent campaign mode.”
Yes, it seems so with his re-election. We are seeing a new and more self-confident President, one who has given up on his previous themes of bipartisanship. He spoke his peace about how he sees America and where he wants to take the country in his remaining four years in the White House. And it is an unabashedly liberal vision.
Still, Obama’s fifth State of the Union never seemed to really take off until the end when the subject was guns and gun control. “They deserve a vote,” Obama repeated time and again, urging Congress to bring the new proposals for gun control to a vote:
“Gabby Giffords deserves a vote; the families of Newtown deserve a vote; the families of Aurora deserve a vote; the families of Oak Creek, and Tucson, and Blacksburg, and the countless other communities ripped open by gun violence – they deserve a simple vote.”
“Our actions will not prevent every senseless act of violence in this country. Indeed, no laws, no initiatives, no administrative acts will perfectly solve all the challenges I’ve outlined tonight. But we were never sent here to be perfect…The American people don’t expect government to solve every problem. They don’t expect those of us in this chamber to agree on every issue. But they do expect us to put the nation’s interests before party. They do expect us to forge reasonable compromise where we can.”
We are likely to see little of this in the coming years as the Republicans in their response showed no indication to meet the President half way. We are in for continued confrontation and political paralysis in Washington. And that’s depressing.
President Barack Obama’s second inaugural address today was all about ”we,” and ”we, the people,” about ”equality” and ”together.” It was a clear and straight forward statement by the re-elected president about his view of America, a liberal/progressive view of an inclusive America – a country for everyone.
The speech was elegant, inspiring, and passionate, given by someone who looked forward to his second term in the White House with renewed strength and great self-confidence, and it was the highlight of a most festive day in Washington, DC, where the crowds were not as large as four years ago, when almost two million people jammed The National Mall in spite of very chilly weather. But they were just as enthusiastic, clearly cherishing the moment that America’s first black president had been re-elected and handed the nation’s trust for another four years.
The president talked about America’s “never-ending journey” and that so much is remains to be done.
”Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation, and one people…This is our generation’s ask – to make these words, these rights, these values – of Life and Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness – real for every American.
The speech was an unabashed re-affirmation of Obama’s basic liberal political philosophy, saying that ”preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.”
He was full of hope and faith in America, if the nation stuck together:
“America’s possibilities are limitless, for we possess all the qualities that this world without boundaries demands: youth and drive; diversity and openness; an endless capacity for risk and a gift for reinvention. My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment, and we will seize it—so long as we seize it together.”
He talked about equal pay for women, equal treatment for gays, right to vote for everyone, about the importance of social security, Medicare and Medicaid, that a lasting peace does not require perpetual war, and about gun control, without mentioning the word but referring to the ”quite lanes of Newtown” and keeping the nation’s children ”safe from harm.”
“We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit; but we reject the belief that America must choose between the caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.”
Obama’s second inaugural address was free of political attacks and party politics. It contained no direct attacks on the Republicans, but, on the other hand, one could interpret the whole speech as Obama putting down his marker, that this is what he believes in, this is his America, and this is what he is going to fight for during his second term.
The details in his political program will come in his State of the Union address to Congress on February 12. That will also likely mark the continuation of Washington’s political battle. Will that fight be as merciless as before today’s inauguration? Probably, and maybe even more so… But, at least it is now totally clear where Barack Obama stands, and that feels liberating.
Yes, the financial cliff was avoided, not in the last hour before midnight on December 31, but on overtime. Still, that was good. America, and the world, avoided the likely scenario of economic recession, a deep plunge of the markets, and higher unemployment.
But at what price?
President Obama and the Democrats can take joy in that this doomsday scenario was avoided and they can take joy in that the fact that they forced the Republicans in Congress to break their pledge and, for the first time since 1993, vote for higher taxes. But the deal did nothing to resolve the country’s major economic problems, the debt, budget deficit, unemployment. And the settlement contained no new stimulus money to invest in the woefully neglected infrastructure or to create new jobs.
To reach a deal, President Obama also had to give up on his campaign pledge to raise taxes for everyone earning more than 250,000 dollars per year. Instead, the limit was set at 450,000 dollars, meaning than less than one percent of American tax payers will see their taxes increase. All others will now be exempt from paying their fair share when more revenues are needed and when Americans are paying less in income tax than the populations of other developed countries.
“In all the other countries that come to mind, protecting such levels of income is the sole preserve of conservative parties. In the United States, it is a matter of bipartisan consensus,” wrote Stephan Richter in The Globalist.
Yes, America is different from Europe. Here, taxes are toxic in a way they don’t seem to be in Europe, maybe because Europeans feel that they get something for their taxes, like universal health care, good public transportation, and affordable education all the way through college?
But the fact that Washington failed to reach a broader deal--the balanced deal that Obama was seeking to come to grips with America’s debt and deficit problems--also makes it similar to Brussels, if you believe The Economist, which wrote that “Washington’s pattern of dysfunction is disturbingly similar to the euro zone’s.”
This “dysfunction” is likely to come to a head in only a couple of months, in connection with the deadlines for the debt ceiling and the automatic spending cuts. The Republicans seem intent on revenge after the cliff deal, so the upcoming negotiations will likely seem like child’s play in comparison to what we just went through.
I den amerikanska huvudstaden är det tomt så här inför julafton.Det är Washington visserligen alltid när kongressen stängt och alla de 535 ledamöterna farit hem. Men nu har också president Obama farit på semester, hem till Hawaii, så just nu känns stan lite extra tom. Och det är skönt, faktiskt.
Veckan före jul var minst sagt frenetisk i politiken i kombination med stor sorg efter tragedin i Newtown, som verkligen skakat om hela landet. Men tragedian har också lett till till första uppmuntrande tecknen på många år att något, kanske, kan var på gång för att få stopp på vapenepidemin i Amerika.
Detta är ju en fråga som Obama smått skandalöst försummat under sina första fyra år i Vita huset eftersom han aldrig hade en chans att vinna den striden — ett kallt politiskt beslut alltså. Men nu, efter Newtown, tycks något på gång med en majoritet av befolkningen som säger sig stödja nya och mer restriktiva vapenlagar. Nu får det räcka, tycks de säga, äntligen!
Det blir en hård politisk strid. Vapenlobbyn under ledning av National Rifle Association visar inga tecken på att ge upp, trots att förslaget att införa beväpnade vakter i landets alla skolor och dess chef Wayne LaPierres uttalande att ”the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” både obarmhärtigt nedsablats och beskrivits som ett dåligt skämt. Det talas visserligen om att NRA är alltmer isolerat ute på yttersta högern, men dess stöd i kongressen är fortfarande massivt. Så vad än Obama föreslår i januari finns inga vinstgarantier – tyvärr.
Men dessförinnan väntar budgetstupet på årets sista dag. Kongressen kommer tillbaka i mellandagarna. Varför, kan man undra. Washingtons politiker lyckades ju inte med att sy ihop en budgetuppgörelse innan de for, så varför ska de lyckas denna vecka särskilt då förra veckans totala fiasco ytterligare underströk hur politiskt förlamat Washington är. Talman John Boehners nederlag i sin egen partgrupp kom som en chock, både för honom själv och hela det republikanska partiet, som i representanthuset nu framstår som splittrat, försvagat och ledarlöst — frågan är om Boehner omväljs till talman när den nya kongressen samlas efter nyår.
Så utsikterna till en uppgörelse under årets sista dagar är små och det ser alltmer ut som att Amerika störtar utför stupet på nyårsafton med allt negativt det medför – recession och ökad arbetslöshet — för landets ekonomi, ja, för Europas och världens ekonomi. Är Washingtons politiker verkligen beredda att låta detta ske? Ja, det verkar inte bättre.
Det är för sorgerligt. Orosmoln stör onekligen julfriden i Amerika detta år.
Dave Brubeck, legendary jazz musician and pianist, died today, 91 years old.
For many young people, Brubeck probably does not mean a lot, or even nothing at all. But take a little time and listen to his classic “Take Five” with Paul Desmond on alto sax, and you might understand what we heard and felt back then, in 1961, before rock and roll and pop, and all the new music. It was really something…
And so, America did the right thing and chose the future.
The historic election of 2008, when the American voters made Barack Obama the nation’s first African-American president and bade farewell to the old America, was re-enforced yesterday when Barack Obama got enough support for another four years in the White House.
His victory was not quite as overwhelming as four years ago, when Obama beat John McCain by ten million votes and won 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 173, but it was a solid, even sweeping, victory. The coalition that Obama built up with the young, women, blacks, Hispanics and white union members in the Rust Belt, lost only two states, Indiana, traditionally Republican, and North Carolina, both of which Obama had surprisingly won in 2008.
Yesterday, he won the rest of the battleground states: Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia and Florida, although his victory in Florida is not yet official. If his lead there is confirmed he will win 332 electoral votes against Romney’s 206.
When Obama gave his victory speech in Chicago, the joy and jubilation from the Obama coalition of whites, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, young, old, knew no bounds. They belonged to the new, and oce again victorous, America, and they represented the country’s new politics. Over 90 percent of the country’s black voters chose Obama; over 70 percent of the Hispanics voted for the president, as did the Asian voters; over half of the women gave him their support; and the trade unions members in the Rust Belt also voted for the man who had saved the auto industry early in his first four years in the White House.
They did not want to retreat and turn back to a time that had led to two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and to the deepest U.S. economic crisis since the ’30s depression, to return to the old America, dominated a white electorates, like that overwhelmingly white crowd in Boston who had voted for Mitt Romney but who now somberly, almost in shock, listened to their candidate’s concession speech.
That old America was not enough yesterday, as it had not been in 2008, to win a presidential election. The conclusion must be that it is no longer possible for the Republicans to win a U.S. presidential election only with the support of the country’s white voters. There are simply no longer enough white voters – 72 percent of all voters yesterday were white – to win. That trend will continue and even strengthen in the coming years because of the continued demographic changes in America’s population. America will be less and less white. Republicans need to think about and change, but if they are able to do so is an entirely different matter.
As Barack Obama and Mitt Romney continue to stump frenetically to utilize every last hour of the remaining presidential election campaign, their most important message is about the importance of voting. And tomorrow, we will see how good the two campaign organizations really are in getting people to actually go to vote.
There is optimism in both camps, especially from the Obama campaign while the Romney’s campaign is “cautiously hopeful,” as Carl Cannon writes in RealClearPolitics today.
From the media, apart from Fox News, there is a steady message that Obama will win. Larry Sabato, the highly respected professor at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, joined this chorus today on his Crystal Ball blog. He predicted 290 electoral votes for Obama against 248 for Romney in that Obama would win in six of the nine swing states: Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio and Wisconsin. So even if Romney would win in the other three, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida, it will not enough to capture the necessary 270 electoral votes and win the election. Sabato also predicted continued Democratic majority in the Senate and continued Republican rule in the House of Representatives.
So if you believe all the polls and most of the pundits, president Obama will be reelected — if they are not all wrong, which is unlikely, but, perhaps, still possible.
Howard Kurtz, media critic at the Daily Beast:
“If Obama somehow manages to lose, it will be a stunning defeat for the nation’s first African-American president. But it will be overpriced a crushing blow for the punditocracy that headed into Election Day filled with confidence that Obama had it in the bag. And Fox News will not let the mainstream media hear the end of it.”
But let me remind you that not only the polls are on Obama’s side. History is also on his side, for it has proven extremely difficult to defeat a sitting president. That has only happened four times since 1912, when Woodrow Wilson defeated William Howard Taft, 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt beat Herbert Hoover, 1980, when Ronald Reagan won over Jimmy Carter and 1992 when Bill Clinton defeated George HW Bush. Should Romney win tomorrow it will be something of a historical sensation.
The last week of campaigning has gone well for Barack Obama. He was strengthened politically in the wake of the tragedy of Hurricane Sandy, not least because Romney was forced to the sidelines, with no role, unable to conduct his election campaign. But Obama was also strengthened by the words of praise from Republicans like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as from the country perhaps leading independent voice, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The campaign somehow took a new direction and Obama got new wind in his sails. It may prove to be decisive tomorrow.
Here, where I live in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside Washington, DC, Hurricane Sandy hit hard, all day yesterday and almost all night. It was stormy, really stormy, but we were lucky - dodged a bullet -- not even a power outage, which we otherwise always suffer when big storms move across the Washington area. The large trees in our front yard still stand although they swayed alarmingly during hard rain and violent winds.
So we were lucky, while north of us there is tragedy and utter devastation -- upwards of 40 deaths, eight million without power, and billions and billions in damages.
Today I was on Swedish Radio’s “Studio Ett” to discuss Sandy’s implications, if any, on the presidential election campaign together with Professor Erik Åsard and the radio’s Washington Correspondent Ginna Lindberg. It’s hard to gage the effects but my inclination is that Obama might profit politically from Sandy, if he does not make any serious mistakes or gaffes.
Both Obama and Romney have suspended their campaigns, at least until tomorrow, which has put Obama in the center of this huge news story while it has forced Romney to the sidelines, without any role at all, away from the center of attention. And it happened just as Romney was reported to gain fresh momentum.
How will this affect the very last days of this campaign? We don‘t know, at least not yet, but this has not prevented "a perfect storm of political speculation," as one of Washington Post columnists writes today.
So far, President Obama seems to have done well and praise such as from Republican New Jersey governor Chris Christie, cannot hurt:
"President Obama called me last night around midnight ... to ask what else could be done [and] offered any other assets that we need ... I'll have to say the administration, the president himself and FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate have been outstanding with us so far . We have a great partnership with them, and I want to thank the president personally for his personal attention to this. "
Tomorrow, when the president visits the devastated New Jersey
shores together with Christie, this message will be re-enforced. And Romney can only stand by and watch.
But there are also possible negatives for the Obama campaign in that Sandy has put an end to early voting in many states. So far, 15 million voters have already voted, of which over a million in the key state of Ohio. Another nearly 20 million are expected to vote early, the majority of them being Obama voters. If they are now prevented from voting early because of Sandy, and if they then don’t have time or are able to vote on Election Day, it could have negative consequences for the Obama campaign.
Two weeks to go before America chooses a new president.
Last night’s final TV-debate between president Obama and Mitt Romney was probably not decisive, although the fact that Obama won certainly will not hurt him in the final stretch run of the campaign. But how much will it help as the campaign intensifies before the verdict on November 6? We don’t know that yet.
Actually, the final debate was fairly even. Neither candidate made any major mistake. In fact, you could argue that there was no real debate, for Romney had decided to hold back, be cautious – presidential! His earlier criticism of Obama’s foreign policy was replaced by a broad consensus between the two candidates about America’s role in the world and president Obama’s foreign policy.
Romney had clearly made a decision not to seem like a war hawk, not to seem like someone seeking new conflicts and new wars for America in the Middle East. America is tired of war. By doing so, he moved towards the political center, towards a more moderate policy, just like he had done in the first debate on economic policy and taxes.
It proved difficult for Obama to land a punch on this “kinder, gentler Romney,” wrote Los Angeles Times’ columnist Doyle McManus.
In fact, Obama seemed a bit startled at Romney’s transformation, although the president kept up his attacks, calling Romney’s foreign policy “all over the map” and charging him for trying to “air brush history.”
Why the subdued, cautious Romney? Was he playing it safe in a race that now seemed more even than ever? Maybe. But as a result, he seemed cautious and hesitant and he came to stand in stark contrast to a firm, straight talking, decisive president, who said he had done what he promised to do when he became president, and that he was the best one to lead America in the next four years and end the war in Afghanistan and concentrate on nation building at home.
Foreign policy is not, and has not been, the main theme in this campaign. That makes it harder to predict the impact of this debate on the voters, especially since they largely have made up their minds by now. It’s now time to build up the enthusiasm among the supporters for each candidate and then get them to vote. Turnout could decide this election.
The first quick polls after the debate Tuesday night pointed to a victory for of Barack Obama against Mitt Romney, 46 per cent to 39 in the CNN survey, 37 per cent to 30 of CBS’s survey and 48 per cent to 31 in the Google Consumer Surveys among registered voters.
It was a new Obama that showed up, compared to the Denver debate two weeks ago: tough, aggressive, committed, concentrated, eloquent. Unlike in Denver, Obama did not give way on a single point, constantly counterattacking and repeatedly stating that what Romney said was not true.
You could almost hear the sigh of relief among Democrats. It was a new ball game. The strangely absent president in Denver was a distant memory — “Obama was back!”
Romney was also clearly not as strong as in the first debate, forced on the defensive by Obama’s unwillingness to budge an inch. Several of his answers, on tax policy and women’s issues, but especially on Libya, were weak. On Libya, Romney had to stand corrected by the moderator as to what the president said after the deadly attack on the American consulate.
In addition to these first positive poll numbers for Obama, the fact that the media almost unanimously pointed to Obama’s strong debate will greatly influence public opinion in the next days.
Conclusion: Obama seems to have regained the initiative in the election campaign after the Denver debacle. The question now is will it last?
In view of the many ups and downs in the U.S. presidential election campaign lately, a disastrous performance by president Obama in his first debate with Mitt Romney followed by an offensive rescue mission by vice president Biden in his debate with Paul Ryan, Tuesday evening’s second debate between Obama and Romney could be decisive.
Helped by Biden, who said everything to Ryan that Obama did not say but should have said to Romney, and who instilled new hope among despondent Democrats, Obama needs to step up and do well and, thereby, re-take the initiative and the lead in the polls that he lost after his debacle.
All indications are that the race has tightened and that Obama’s poor performance let Romney back in the race. But the polls also show that although the race is even nationally, it has not changed that much in the battleground states, particularly the key state of Ohio, where Obama still leads, although less so, by 2,2 percentage points according to the web site RealClearPolitics. No Republican presidential candidate has ever won without winning in Ohio, so much depends on the Buckeye State and its 18 electoral votes.
The winner on November 6 needs a minimum of 270 electoral votes. In 36 of the 50 States, the outcome is already decided – Romney will win in 22 and Obama in 14. But since Obama's victories will come in the more populous state, he is ahead in the battle for electoral votes.
The outcome of the election will be decided primarily in nine states with a total of 110 electoral votes. According to FiveThirtyEight.com, the New York Times blog, the situation in these nine states are the following:
Colorado (9) even; Florida (29) even; Iowa (6) leaning toward Obama; Nevada (6) leaning toward Obama; New Hampshire (4) probably Obama; North Carolina (15) probably Romney; Ohio (18) leaning toward Obama, Virginia (13) even; and Wisconsin (10) probably Obama.
On the betting site Intrade, 62.8 percent predict an Obama victory. Let’s see what they say after Tuesday’s debate!
I recently wrote on this blog that something had happened after the two party conventions but that I did not want to call it a turning point in the campaign. Since then, the situation for Mitt Romney through a series of mistakes, especially his talk about America’s “47 percent,” has steadily weakened. And now the conclusion is inescapable: we have reached a turning point. Barack Obama has strengthened his position on a wide front and time is running out for Romney.
To reverse this trend, Romney needed to do something drastic in his election campaign. He needed a major breakthrough, plus a major mistake, a gaffe, by Obama.
Romney got neither in last night’s TV-debate, although he did very well and was, unanimously, declared victor. The first quick polls by CNN and CBS confirm what all of the 50 million TV-viewers could see and experience -- an energetic and aggressive Romney won, and won handily, the debate against a dull and listless Obama.
The question on the day after the first debate is whether Romney’s new success will have a lasting effect on the rest of the election campaign. We won’t know until new polls are published in the coming days.
The prominent political analyst, University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato, wrote on his “Sabato’s Crystal Ball:"
“Just because Romney won handily – and the press will report it that way – that does not mean voter preferences will necessarily change all that much. Often, voters can judge one candidate to have won a Debate, but not change their ballot choice as a consequence….History cautions us not to over-state the importance of any debate, if this one really does move the numbers in a significant way for Romney, it will be more exception than rule in the relatively short history of televised American presidential debates.”
Something has happened after the Republican and Democratic conventions. There’s talk of a turning point, but I am not sure about that.
It is clear, however, that President Obama has expanded his lead over Mitt Romney in all the polls. In the latest Gallup, for example, Obama has increased his lead from 47 to 46 percent before the conventions to 50 to 44 percent now.
We don’t know if this new trend will hold, but a new concern seems to have arisen among Republicans. Conservative columnist Michael Gerson in the Washington Post:
“With less than two months until the election, Romney is left with dwindling opportunities to reshape the dynamic of the race.”
No reason to worry, pleads conservative National Review in an editorial, in which it admits that Obama and the Democrats had a better convention:
“Romney is nonetheless in the hunt, and he may even enjoy the great advantage, in politics as in life, of being underestimated.”
And in today’s Washington Post, Dana Milbank describes a press conference with Republican leaders in the House of Representatives, to which the party’s vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan belong, where Romney’s name never even came up. Not once. Symptomatic of Romney’s problems?
Even wise, independent political observer Charlie Cook at the National Journal points to a number of problems in the Romney campaign, which have resulted in a campaign that should not be this close with such a weak national economy.
So something has happened. Is it permanent? Probably not. There is too much left of the campaign and too much, like now in Libya, can happen. Meanwhile, all eyes are on October 3 and the first of three televised debates between Obama and Romney.
So the two political conventions are over, and the question is: who won?
In all, the democratic convention in Charlotte had the better speeches and the greater enthusiasm. It had the unforgettable testimony about her husband by Michelle Obama, and it had the equally unforgettable, masterly lecture by Bill Clinton on how things really stand and how important it is to support Barack Obama in the fall.
And it had, of course, Barack Obama himself, although he did not deliver another glorious, mesmerizing speech that we have so often been treated to. It was good, more than ok, solid and, at times, eloquent, but there was also somehow something missing.
John Cassidy in The New Yorker wrote that the president was playing it safe, knowing he was head in the polls and not wanting to give the Republicans new ammunition. And Joe Klein in Time Magazine said that the president did not close the deal and it left him wondering what Obama will do in his second term, if he is re-elected.
I don’t know, maybe our expectations were set too high, maybe we failed to take into account the fact that, this time, it was the President speaking, not a young State Senator like in 2004, or a presidential candidate like in 2008.
Here was a battle-hardened leader of the country, who had been dealt a really difficult hand and who realized that things were not improving as fast as he, or the country, would like. Yet, he said that the country was better off today than four years ago and that the choice in November was one between going forward and turning back to the failed policies of the Bush years, policies that got us in this terrible economic fix in the first place.
We will know in a week or two who won. The Republicans, with a bland speech by Mitt Romney, a speech by Paul Ryan that drove the fact-checkers crazy, and with Clint Eastwood…they did not have a good convention. It seems that they received only the smallest of bounces in the polls, but the verdict is not in yet, for either party. I would be surprised, though, if the Democrats do not come out ahead, thanks to the cumulative effect of the past three days in Charlotte.
Mitt Romneys stora tal på det republikanska konventets sista kväll var inget stort tal, inget tal som kommer att åberopas och citeras, inget tal som kommer att bli klassiskt.
Det var gediget, solitt, men inte mycket mer. Helt utan retoriska höjdpunkter. Ja, det var ovanligt självbiografiskt -- vi fick veta lite mer om denna man som nu officiellt är det republikanska partiets presidentkandidat. Men han levererade inga nyheter, presenterade inga nya förslag om hur Romney och hans vice presidentkandidat Paul Ryan ska leda USA om de vinner i höst.
Där fanns några nyckelfraser som att ”you cannot tell us that we are better off today. America has been patient, but today it’s time to turn the page.” Och han spelade på de besvikna förhoppningar som många amerikaner känner gentemot Obama och jämförde honom med förre presidenten Jimmy Carter:
“You know there’s something wrong with the kind of job he’s done as president when the best feeling you had was the time you voted for him.”
“Today, four years from the excitement of the last election, for the first time, the majority of Americans now doubt that our children will have a better future…I wish president Obama had succeeded because I want America to succeed. But his promises gave way to disappointment and division. This isn’t something we have to accept. Now is the moment when we CAN do something. With your help we will do something.”
Mitt Romney slåss ur underläge, även om underläget är knappt, och han hade behövt slå ett ”home run” i går kväll. Det gjorde han inte. Det återstår att se i de kommande opinionsmätningarna hur Romneys tal tas emot av de amerikanska väljarna. Frågan är om de nu har en ny och mer positiv bild av den man som Dagens Nyheter på ledarplats kallade ”vindflöjel” och om vilken Expressen också i mycket avmätta ordalag skrev, ”Obama har varit en långtifrån perfekt president. Men alternativet i höstens val är betydligt värre”.
Nästa vecka, i Charlotte, North Carolina, är det demokraternas tur.
Those were the two main messages on the first day of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, delivered by Ann Romney, the Republican nominee's wife, and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, respectively.
A bit confusing. Which is it? Love? Or tough love? Ann Romney gave a splendid speech about her love for husband of over 40 years without really revealing anything new about this man. She clearly outshone Christie, the keynote speaker, and his harsh message of tough love, respect, and telling the truth to the American people. In fact, she outshone her husband. Mitt Romney never gave a speech like that.
The two speeches underlined the confusion of the day during which the strategy was supposed to be to talk up the party’s presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, and his running mate Paul Ryan, and to sell them to the American people. Instead, the day was full of speeches, from Christie to Rick Santorum, Scott Walker, John Kasich, and others, about themselves and how well they were doing in their home states, and only, towards the end, a bit about Mitt Romney.
So, the general American TV-viewer probably does not know more about Mitt Romney after the first convention day than he/she did before. The stakes for the rest of the convention are now even higher, and Mitt Romney needs to hit a home run in his big convention speech on Thursday.
A Swede's view from D.C.
Internationally renowned journalist Klas Bergman will on a continuous basis cover the 2012 U.S. election process from a Swedish American perspective. Born in Stockholm, Bergman spent most of his adult life outside Sweden, reporting from western and eastern Europe, the Middle East and the U.S., based in Washington, DC and working mainly for the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter and the Christian Science Monitor.
His primary domicile has been America, ever since his early student days in California in the 1960s. He now lives in the Washington, DC area.
Klas Bergman's second book, "Drömmarnas Land" is released in Sweden on Sept. 20. isbn 978 91 7331 515 9. 278 pages, hard cover, in Swedish.
Carlsson Bokförlag.