Unemployment matters, but Romney is still an idiot

By Nicholas Wilbur

I hate when Mitt Romney... speaks.

If he's not lying about a lie he lied about not lying about, he's either making shit up or flailing around like a walrus in a triple lindy competition.

Last Friday, he blessed us with this statement: "Just this week, President Obama's closest White House adviser said that 'unemployment rates or even monthly job numbers' do not matter to the average American."

The funny thing about Romney's crazy talk is that "Obama's closest White House adviser," David Plouffe, never said "unemployment rates or even monthly job numbers" do not matter. What he said was this:

The average American does not view the economy through the prism of GDP or unemployment rates or even monthly jobs numbers. People won't vote based on the unemployment rate, they’re going to vote based on: "How do I feel about my own situation? Do I believe the president makes decisions based on me and my family?"

For the 90.8 percent of the American labor force that is employed, I think this statement is pretty accurate. And yes, it's still accurate even for the 9.2 percent who aren't. (Especially if they're Republicans, because Republicans don't believe it's the government's job to find Joe Six Pack a job.) But even Plouffe is only telling part of the story.

Everyone likes to cite facts and figures showing that no incumbent president (except for the Gipper and FDR) has ever been re-elected with an unemployment rate above 6 percent.

Unfortunately for stupid people who believe the stupid shit other stupid people say, the unemployment rate actually isn't a dominant factor in the big picture of national elections.

What matters, as the Political Animal Steve Benen pointed out a month ago, is progress. If things are improving, if unemployment is falling, statistics are irrelevant.

Unemployment peaked at 10.8 during Reagan's first term, but it fell to 7.2 by the 1984 election. Unemployment grew to 7.8, up from 5.2, when George H.W. Bush sought re-election. That's why Reagan was re-elected and H.W. wasn't. And that's why Obama will glide to victory in 2012 while Romney will be stuck in the unemployment line during the day and burning unsold copies of his shitty book to heat his home at night.

After peaking at 10.1 in October 2010, unemployment fell to 8.8 percent by March 2011. Then the GOP took over.

We were promised big changes when Republicans won majority control over the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections. For six months now they've bitched and moaned and done everything they could to overturn every bill Obama has signed. What they didn't do, and what Democrats will surely highlight throughout the 2012 campaign, is create a jobs bill – or a job. Unemployment declined consistently for a year and a half until Republicans took over the House. Now, for two consecutive months, it has risen.

The obstructionists have entered the building.

Expect mass evacuations sometime around November 2012. 

(Cross-posted at Muddy Politics.)

Huntsman the Formidable

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It is being reported that former Utah Gov. and U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman will enter the Republican race for president as early as next Tuesday.

I have described him before as an incredibly formidable figure, the Republican Obama should be worried about, or would be if it were, say, 1996 instead of 2012 and if the Republican Party hadn't become an increasingly extremist right-wing party that has essentially left the likes of Huntsman behind.

Here's what I wrote about him back in May '09:

I tend to agree with Obama campaign guru David Plouffe that Utah Governor Jon Huntsman (who makes Plouffe a "wee bit queasy") could be a formidable Republican presidential candidate in 2012. Bucking the rightward shift of his party, and avoiding its drive for ideological purification, Huntsman is actually something of an independent-minded figure, a moderate, relatively speaking (that is, by Utah standards), with potentially broad appeal beyond Dear Leader Rush and the right-wing echo chamber. (I have previously posted on his admirable support for gay civil unions and his admirable dismissal of Congressional Republicans.)

But I also wrote this:

Huntsman may make us all a little queasy, but, thankfully, Republicans are just too stupid to know what's good for them.

That's right, however formidable he may be, or could be on the national stage, he just isn't what Republicans are looking for these days, which is someone well to his right, someone rigidly ideological. As Hot Air's Allahpundit put it a while back, dismissing Huntsman altogether, "he's going to try to be an even more sensible 'sensible centrist' alternative to Romney, Daniels, and the rest of the moderates in the field." Yes, to conservatives, Huntsman, like Romney, is moderate and therefore un-Republican. And it's much worse in Huntsman's case because he actually worked for Obama. No matter that he's appealing and electable, and hardly a liberal, and working hard to show us all his conservative bona fides.

It's hard to imagine he'll make much of a dent in the current field. But you never know. Maybe there's room for him, maybe he runs a great campaign, maybe he emerges as (and surpasses Pawlenty as) the candidate who can potentially unite the party, something Romney can't do, something an extremist like Bachmann can't do. Or maybe he just has too much baggage and too much of an independent mind, and maybe his unorthodox record, his dissent from the current Republican mainstream line, proves too much to overcome -- after all, it's hard to see the right-wing Bolsheviks who run the party now forgiving him his various sins.

But, again, there's no denying he's an awfully impressive man. I might even go so far as to say he could very well be Reagan 2.0, or if not that, given how transformative Reagan was for movement conservatism, at least a leading Republican in the Reagan mold. He just seems to have it all, even the somewhat more tolerant and even liberal positions on some social issues that show him to be a man of the times, not a man against the times, a conservative who is open to progress and change while remaining committed to his fundamental beliefs. Perhaps he could be zeitgeist conservative, the forward-looking proponent of conservatism at a time of massive global change. But not likely, not in today's Republican Party, which would likely rather expel him that have him as its leader.

Yes, Republicans really are too stupid to know what's good for them. Which is good for us, but not good for Huntsman, who will have to wait until 2016, or forever, to make his mark in a party that has abandoned him and all those like him.

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No 50-state strategy for Obama in 2012

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Interesting piece up at Roll Call yesterday on Obama's likely strategy for 2012:

Democrats evaluating the 2012 map are confident President Barack Obama can win enough battleground states to earn a second term, but via a far less aggressive path than what he forged in 2008.

Party strategists, Obama aides and top Democrats see multiple routes for the president to reach the 270 Electoral College votes that he needs on Nov. 6, 2012. But some Democrats splash cold water on the big talk of outreach in all 50 states, saying it is obvious the president will focus on traditional swing territory.

*****

A Democratic official familiar with the still-forming re-election campaign told Roll Call that the focus will be on holding the 2008 pickups of Colorado, Virginia and North Carolina, winning over Latino voters in the West and flooding the traditional swing states of Ohio and Florida with resources. The Democrats feel good about winning New Mexico and Nevada, especially given the population growth among Hispanics.

Makes sense.

It won't be the all-out offence we saw from Obama in 2008, but, then, he can afford to play a bit of defence now, particularly if he's able to win independents and women, if there's significant turnout among blacks and younger voters (as in 2008), and if he's able to secure the growing Latino vote -- all of which appears likely given where things stand today. (I'm trying not to be delusionally optimistic about not just Obama's chances but the Democrats' generally, but who am I to doubt the apparent genius of David Plouffe?)

And of course if the Republicans nominate someone utterly unelectable...