Via Steve M, a fascinating analysis by Noah Millman at The American Conservative.
I have only become more convinced that what has changed the dynamics of this election has been a fundamental reevaluation not merely – or even primarily – of the two candidates, but of the two parties. This election is becoming nationalized, and it is becoming nationalized in the context of an across-the-board swing in the direction of the Democrats.
The reason, I think, is a simple one. The Republicans Party – not just the Romney campaign, but the party as a whole – is running on nothing. They are running on the presumption that the country has already rejected the Democrats, and that therefore it is their turn. They are behaving as if choosing Democratic governance was some kind of “experiment†that didn’t work out, and now the American people will, of course, come back to their natural home.
By contrast, the Democrats actually made a case for their party. They explained what their party has done, and why they should be able to set the national agenda. They defended their foreign policy, their economic policy, and their social policy in strong, unapologetic terms.
Millman points out that the polls haven’t just been moving in favor of Obama; in the swing states they’ve been moving in favor of Democrats in down ticket races as well. There’s still time for that to change before the election, of course, but I think that’s exactly what’s happening in the election campaigns right now.
Jonathan Bernstein wrote,
… GOP obsession with “vetting” Barack Obama, and with a variety of ill-fated attack lines, comes from two things: the divergence of incentives between the Romney campaign and what my brother calls the “movement conservative marketplace”; and, the closed information loop that makes it difficult for insiders to have any sense of how outsiders would see these attack lines.
Bernstein suggests the mighty media infrastructure may have turned into a liability for righties, because it’s too easy to gin up some phony controversy that explodes on Fox News and Politico and Buzzfeed, and which gets the rightie bloggers all fired up, but which is simply meaningless to the general electorate. The recent outrage that there’s a several-year-old video of Barack Obama using the word “redistribution” is an example. That was supposed to counter Romney’s “47 percent” remark? On what planet?
A lot of the current generation of Republican politicians suffer from ideological inbreeding, IMO. They have absolutely no idea what anyone outside the echo chamber thinks. And the only political skill many of these clowns possess is being a loyal echo. A lot of them don’t seem to understand what government is for, and I doubt they could write sensible policy legislation if you let them copy it off a blackboard.
