Glee and Panic and Invisible Polls

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Something really odd going on this morning about an alleged new poll that allegedly shows Romney roaring ahead of President Obama among independent voters. National Review posted this four days ago:

According to a new poll conducted by Democracy Corps (the James Carville/Stan Greenberg-founded firm), Mitt Romney is leading by 16 points among independents, 54 percent to Barack Obama’s 38 percent. Twenty-six percent of independents think the country is going in the right direction; 68 percent think it is going on the wrong track. Forty percent of independents approve of Obama, while 56 percent disapprove.

The overall poll isn’t a terrific win for Romney — he’s at 47 percent to Obama’s 49 percent — but if he’s opened up a gap anywhere near this large among independent voters, that’s certainly a hopeful trend for him.

This morning, in a delayed reaction, a number of rightie blogs are reporting this information and predicting a growing tidal wave of support for Romney that will sweep him into the White House, and Dems are panicked.

Now, these numbers about independents might be true, but I can’t confirm them. Some of the rightie blogs provide links that allegedly go to the source data, but if you follow the links you either get to a “page not found” or “404” page or to the home page of Carville and Greenburg’s Democracy Corp, with a note near the bottom saying that the page you are looking for can’t be found, but maybe you’d like to look at something else?

I haven’t been able to find any national polls that break out independent voters separately, just state polls, and those are all over the map. However, Nate Silver’s trend lines for November 6 show Obama pulling further ahead of Romney.

The Democracy Corps site does have an article on results of a poll, dated four days ago, but it doesn’t say anything about independents.

What might have happened:

  • There really was such a poll, but Carville & Greenberg yanked it off the Web.
  • A hacker planted fake polling data on the Democracy Corps page and then alerted National Review.
  • The Right is hallucinating.

All three of the above bulleted items are equally plausible, IMO. If someone does find the source data somewhere, do let me know. I’d like to see it.

Elsewhere — there are several commentaries out today on the theme that Democrats are really, really worried, and possibly panicked, about their convention, for one reason or another. One such story is that they are worried that Bill Clinton will end up sandbagging the President to help his wife win in 2016. Steve M. takes that one apart pretty deftly. And, seriously, it doesn’t even make sense. President Obama isn’t running in 2016; how would it help Hillary Clinton politically to undermine him now? That’s just weird.

La Douleur de la Mitaine

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Nate Silver says Mittens may have gotten a teenie little bounce of maybe two or three percentage points — more of a bouncette — out of the GOP convention. He really needed better than that to change momentum in his favor.

And on to Charlotte.

Via Digby — GLoria Borger actually said this —

“In 1968, France was a dangerous place to be for a 21-year-old American, but Mitt Romney was right in the middle of it.”

I immediately envisioned a comic book cover showing Young Mitten (“La Mitaine Jeune”) running through the streets of Paris, dodging a barrage of stale croissants and irate taunts, armed with nothing but the Book of Mormon. I so wish I could draw. This would be perfect for Mad Magazine.

The quote comes from Tommy Christopher at Mediaite, and you should just read the whole thing. La Mitaine Jeune was in France avoiding military service the same year 16,592 Americans died in Vietnam. La Mitaine got four deferments, no doubt made possible by money and family connections.

Borger says the French were très désagréable to La Mitaine because of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. French attitudes toward the U.S. war were complicated, as I remember. Vietnam had been part of French Indochina, and there was a lingering attitude that if France had gotten some help from the U.S. they might not have lost at Dien Bien Phu. So, yeah, he may have gotten some attitude. Poor baby.

One More Thing …

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Did you know there was a contingent of Occupy protesters in Tampa last week? No, I didn’t either. Thank goodness.

Just imagine if the protesters had acted up enough to draw attention away from the goings on in the convention center. It would have helped the Republicans by distracting the public from GOP weirdness and made Republicans look more sympathetic.

I say again, when the opposition is voluntarily making a fool of himself in public, stay out of the bleeping way.

Mittens: The Government Won’t Be Here to Help (So Call 211)

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There’s some joke with the punchline “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help!” Righties love that one. They’re big on self-reliance, except when they need help themselves. Then they scream bloody murder if the government isn’t there pronto, even though rightie politicians keep cutting funds for whatever it is that is needed. Somehow, the connection between gutting the budget of the National Forest Service and the NFS not putting out forest fires right away doesn’t click together in their brains.

Yesterday the freshly nominated Mitt Romney and his buddy Bobby Jindal toured a town flooded by Hurricane Isaac. Since Mittens doesn’t think the government should do anything to help anybody who doesn’t already hold an investment portfolio worth something in the six figures, I wondered why the hell he bothered. What would he say to the people he met?

Now we know —

Romney shook hands with National Guardsmen outside the U.S. Post Office and talked with a local resident, Jodie Chiarello, 42, who lost her home in Isaac’s flooding.

“He just told me to, um, there’s assistance out there,” Chiarello said of her conversation with Romney. “He said, go home and call 211.” That’s a public service number offered in many states.

Would the government at least provide her with goggles and a snorkel so she can find her submerged phone? Probably not.

Did Mittens say anything else? This is all I could find —

Romney, who chatted with a handful of storm victims and shook hands with first responders, didn’t have too much to say. “I’m here to learn and obviously to draw some attention to what’s going on here,” Romney told Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who he accompanied to the Jean Lafitte town hall to meet with emergency workers. “So that people around the country know that people down here need help.”

That snippet of conversation represented the bulk of Romney’s public remarks in Louisiana on Friday.

Jindal may be a doofus, but he’s a doofus who probably wants to run for public office again someday.

His host, Jindal, is now calling on the federal government to expand the rebuilt flood protection system that prevented serious flooding in New Orleans during this week’s storm. That system, built after flooding from Katrina devastated much of New Orleans, cost the Army Corps of Engineers $14.5 billion. It doesn’t extend as far as Jean Lafitte, which is situated in Jefferson Parish, and has been affected by a series of hurricanes, including Katrina, Rita, Cindy and now Isaac.

“It is absolutely critical that the Corps, and certainly our delegation working them, but that the Corps and the federal government look at those other levees,” Jindal said Thursday. Lafitte is included in a proposed ring levee that the state hopes to build, but there are no concrete plans to build yet.

Romney was silent on whether, as president, he would support paying for such an expansion. Romney’s running mate, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, has proposed eliminating $10 billion a year in disaster spending and requiring Congress to pay for emergencies by cutting from elsewhere in the budget. That proposal was blocked by GOP leaders.

You know that deep inside, Mitt Romney feels much tender pity for those people who lost everything in the flood, and he hopes they can build shelters for themselves from scrap lumber and perhaps get a few hot meals from the local church ladies. But in Mitt’s World it’s not government’s job to help people who are sitting around whining because they just lost everything they own to a storm. Tax money spent on moochers like Jodie Chiarello may threaten his tax cuts. And if people need money to rebuild, they can always borrow from their parents, right, Mitt?

Death by Politeness

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The article that really got my attention this morning — and not in a good way — is “How MSNBC Became Fox’s Liberal Evil Twin” by Alessandra Stanley. Clueless Wonder Stanley slams MSNBC’s coverage of the convention for its bias, preferring much more polite and even-tempered “coverage” by cardboard cutouts on NBC —

NBC and the other broadcast networks cut their live convention coverage to an hour during prime time this year, which leaves barely time to show the main speeches, let alone analyze them. Yet NBC’s chief anchor, Brian Williams, has conspicuously avoided the most fractious MSNBC discussion panels. Those anchors who do make dutiful appearances, like David Gregory and Tom Brokaw, are badly needed but don’t stay long or join the fray — like piano players in a brothel, they don’t go upstairs.

This is a democracy, sweetheart. We need to know what’s going on upstairs.

And that leaves fewer choices for viewers who like their election coverage with informed commentary without a twist of bias.

Telling the truth isn’t “bias,” dear. Politely refraining from saying that someone running for the presidency is basing his entire campaign on lies is not “impartiality”; it’s journalistic malpractice.

For years, as the Republican Party became more and more extreme, mainstream media have attempted to even things out by filming Republicans with softer and softer focus, and with plenty of gauze on the lenses to make the wrinkles disappear. On the other hand, Democrats are placed under a Kleig light without filters and not allowed to wear makeup. And then the narrative accompanying this is “both parties are just as bad.” The polite political commentators dear Ms. Stanley prefers congratulate themselves for being unbiased, when they are nothing of the sort. They are enablers. They are making excuses for the alcoholic uncle by telling people he’s just been under a lot of stress lately. And this kind of enabling does neither the uncle nor the family a bit of good; it’s just socially expedient.

I can agree that Al Sharpton and Ed Schultz come across as Dem Party cheerleaders sometimes, but Chris Matthews has done more than his share of enabling of Republicans over the years. Ms. Stanley tears into Matthews for his recent “bruising harangue against Reince Priebus” — how impolite to point out that Republicans are dog-whistling racists — and finishes the column with this —

Virginia’s governor, Bob McDonnell, who backed, then rescinded, a state bill that would require women seeking an abortion to first have an invasive ultrasound, is a favorite target. After his convention speech, the MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry said sarcastically that Republicans might be nervous “standing next to a governor who represents a vision of small government that is small enough to put on the end of a transvaginal probe.”

No wonder Brian Williams stays away.

Oh, how crude to bring up Bob McDonnell’s actual record. What do you want to bet that Ms. Stanley really misses David Broder?

Back at the Roach Motel

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Best post-convention analysis I’ve seen so far (via) — “Stuck in a Room With Mitt Romney” by Paul Constant. Just a taste —

So the messaging sounded inoffensive, but when you really think about what is being said at this convention, you realize that all the red, white, and blue bunting and clothing and video imagery is a put-on. All the talk about patriotism, about supporting the troops, is just lip service. This is the most unpatriotic crowd I have ever been a part of. What they are against is community. Every sentence is devoid of empathy. Every finger-wag is aimed directly at an American who can’t afford health insurance, who hasn’t had a raise on their minimum-wage job in four years. Even as they rail against a statement that the president never really made, they are talking about tearing America down and leaving something meaner and greedier in its place. They’re radicals—radicals who’ve gone over the edge and are trying to make their radicalism mainstream.

Do read the whole piece. You won’t be sorry.

Is It Over?

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The most significant fact about last night’s GOP convention finale may be that Here Comes Honey Boo Boo got better ratings. Of these two prime time programs, one was a reality show about a tribe of clueless rednecks, and the other starred a mouthy little girl with a pet pig.

Everybody’s talking today about Clint Eastwood’s bizarre stand-up act. I believe it must have been bizarre, because I did a news google for “Eastwood bizarre” and got more than 14,000 hits. I take it the crowd in Tampa ate it up, but it sounds even more cringe-inducing that Honey Boo Boo.

My impression overall is that the whole convention was weirdly unfocused. And IMO this is in large part because Republicans can’t decide who they are running against. Steve Kornacki writes that Romney thinks he is running against Jimmy Carter, for example. His acceptance speech was supposed to cast himself as Reagan versus the bumbling peanut farmer Reagan ran against in 1980. I personally don’t think Jimmy Carter himself was that Jimmy Carter, although it’s a debatable point. But Barack Obama is way not that Jimmy Carter. Not even close.

David Firestone writes that in his speech, Romney addressed the President as if he were a wayward child whose behavior had been disappointing. I can’t imagine that’s going to work on anyone, frankly.

Other parts of the Republican Party, of course, are opposing Barack “Saul Alinsky” Obama, subversive radical. And some are opposing Barack “Stepin Fetchit” Obama, affirmative action hire. Meanwhile, the real Barack Obama probably is feeling pretty good about his chances right now.

Nate Silver says we won’t know how big a bounce Mittens got from the convention until early next week, so just ignore any headlines about a bounce until then. Mittens needs at least a four-point bounce if he’s got a shot at overtaking the President, Nate says. Nate’s graphs currently have the President’s chance of winning getting larger, and Mitt’s smaller.

And then there will be the Dem convention, and the debates. Heh.

Paul Ryan’s Theme Song: Lying Eyes

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Some of the reviews of Paul Ryan’s speech last night —

Joan Walsh, “Paul Ryan’s Brazen Lies”

Steve Kornacki, “How Paul Ryan Gets Away With BS”

Brian Beutler, “Top 5 Fibs In Paul Ryan’s Convention Speech”

James Downie, “Paul Ryan’s breathtakingly dishonest speech”

Adele Stan, “Paul Ryan Obscures His Koch-Backed Agenda With a Pack of Lies in Convention Speech”

John Nichols, “They Love the Lies Paul Ryan Tells”

Greg Sargent, “Paul Ryan Fails — the Truth”

Robert Schlesinger, “Paul Ryan Repeats Auto Bailout, Medicare Lies”

Marty Kaplan, “Romney/Ryan and the Lullaby of Lying”

Jonathan Chait, “Paul Ryan’s Large Lies and One Big Truth”

Juan Cole, “Top Ten Repeated Paul Ryan Lies”

Jonathan Cohn, “The Most Dishonest Convention Speech … Ever?”

I detect a theme here —

That’s not even all the headlines I found that declared Paul Ryan a liar. And we haven’t heard from Charles Pierce yet. I could go on and on, but I’ve got other things to do today.

On the other hand, this is how the speech was covered on CNN:

Blitzer: So there he is, the republican vice presidential nominee and his beautiful family there. His mom is up there. This is exactly what this crowd of republicans here certainly republicans all across the country were hoping for. He delivered a powerful speech. Erin, a powerful speech. Although I marked at least seven or eight points I’m sure the fact checkers will have some opportunities to dispute if they want to go forward, I’m sure they will. As far as mitt romney’s campaign is concerned, paul ryan on this night delivered.

Burnett: That’s right. Certainly so. We were jotting down points. There will be issues with some of the facts. But it motivated people. He’s a man who says I care deeply about every single word. I want to do a good job. And he delivered on that. Precise, clear, and passionate.

Issues with some of the facts, yes. Many issues. But isn’t he pretty?

Here’s another potential theme song —