November 27, 2012: Letters from Vienna, Nate Silver’s Opus, No Magic Pants

Shortly before Election Day, November 6^th, I got an urgent email from my daughter in Vienna Austria in high anxiety over the possible election of one Willard Romney to the Presidency of the United States.  Everyone she met in this far away capital expressed similar anxieties and more than a bit of dismay at the prospect of this country electing such a lightweight, if not such a dim-wit to the highest office in the land.  During the week preceeding the election I sent a re-assuring message and, coming from a man who predicted the nomination of one George McGovern by the Democratic Party 18 months prior to the 1972 Democratic National Convention, hoped to help ease the anxiety clearly emanating from the foreign capital.  Here is my response in its entirety:

“Media is media, always covering the horse race and if it isn’t going to be all that close they will try, if they can, to make it close. 

Go to fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Silver’s blog.  He has been the most accurate forecaster in the last several election cycles and is now employed by the New York Times as their analyst.

He calls it a 91% chance of an Obama Win with 312 electoral votes.

I think Obama will win Virginia, Florida, Ohio, and basically run the battleground states.(1)

In Michigan we will throw out the city manager nonsense (2) probably pass the green energy initiative, not sure about the bridge. I think prop 2 will pass too (3).

If you go to Nate Silver’s website you will notice that the election has been trending day-to-day Obama since the first debate.  Romney got a spike out of that but since then there has been a steady, inexorable slope downward from roughly 50% to 48 for Romney.  No spikes downward from ensuing debates, nor from the hurricane (4) that has ripped the East coast, rather a steady decline in support.  This, it seems to me, is a product of what any challenger faces upon reaching parity with the champion.

People know Obama, he has been in our living rooms for five years now.  He is a known quantity. Recovery is never as fast as we’d like in this nation of instant gratification, and there has been enough gridlock (although the country itself voted for gridlock two years ago and has no one to blame but themselves) to have mounted a successful challenge, especially considering the lingering racism that the scums can always count on.

The problem is that Romney never sealed the deal.  He never made the sale, and that is because the country could never get a fix on who he is.

It comes down to trust and character and, unlike the primaries where you can carpet bomb your way to victory with a simple plurality , in the general election—at this level—one must establish a fixed point upon which the people can set their eyes.  Pappy Bush didn’t get it either, famously deriding the “vision thing”.

Instead of spending considerable parts of the mega millions he raised doing Bio pieces touting his business record and stewardship of the Olympics and Massachusetts, he let the President deftly define him as a vulture capitalist wholly bereft of either content or character.  He compounded the problem by refusing to discuss his record at BAIN, his governorship, his personal taxes, his religion, or anything else, leaving the nation with the choice between the known quantity in the White House or a ‘pig-in-a-poke’, and, as the old

adage goes, the devil you know is better than the angel you don’t.

Romney tried to graft a ‘soul’ by putting Ryan on the ticket but the country recoils at the prospect of defunding nursing homes and having grandmother move in with the family.  The Ryan Budget instead of serving the purpose of grafting ‘principles’(read greed) unto an otherwise empty suit, only serves to make the public more nervous about the prospect of putting a whore to the idiot wrong in the corridors of power.

Rick Perry of Texas famously called Romney a “vulture capitalist” in the primaries.  Newt Gingrich called him a ‘Liar’. Another called him a “well-oiled weather-vane”.

Clearly he is the modern equivalent of the whore of Babylon and, because he has refused to step forward from behind the curtain, will not win election.  He will not be missed either by the nation or the Rescumlican Party who, in the end, never really embraced him.

The vote will correspond roughly to the Democratic/Republican geographic split of 1860

with the parties of Lincoln and Douglas reversing positions.

Obama will win the Midwest and Northeast with the line of demarcation being roughly the Mason and Dixon Line.  The Republican vote will be not pro-Romney but Anti-Obama principally along racial lines, for the scums not being FOR anything had stood for nothing and the country is left with no options but to vote its hope or its hate.  Presently Hope Wins.

There will be no ‘magic pants’ in the White House for when the people of the United States speak brother Romney will get kicked into the dustbin of History.”  

Footnotes:

1.  Obama won all those states but failed to win North Carolina among the battlefield states.
2. Michigan Governor Rick Snyder instituted a so-called ‘reform’ by which local governments and municipalities could be taken over by the state government.  Accordingly several cities, school districts, and other units of government, mostly in black and poor areas were stripped of elective representation and taken over by so-called ‘managers’ empowered to break union contracts, sell off public assets, and otherwise rule unilaterally.  The good people of Michigan petitioned and had a measure put on the ballot to repeal this measure.  It passed.
3. The energy initiative failed, not sure about the bridge initiative, another measure which would have repealed another Republican measure committing the state to billions in expenditures to build another bridge to Canada. Prop 2, a pro-union measure making organizing labor unions easier also failed.  So much for my prognostications at the local level.  
4. Hurricane "Sandy" which devastated New York City, New Jersey and a vast swatch of the Northeast